Ameris Bancorp

Good morning and welcome to the Ameris Bank first quarter conference call. All participants will be in listen-only mode. Should you need assistance, please signal a conference specialist by pressing the star key followed by zero. After today's presentation, there will be an opportunity to ask questions. To ask a question, you may press star then one on your telephone keypad. To withdraw your question, please press star then two. Please note this event is being recorded. I would now like to turn the conference over to Nicole Stokes, Chief Financial Officer. Please go ahead.

Great. Thank you, Andrea. And thank you to all who have joined our call today. During the call, we will be referencing the press release and the financial highlights that are available on the investor relations section of our website at AmerisBank.com. I'm joined today by Palmer Proctor, our CEO, and John Edwards, our Chief Credit Officer. Palmer will begin with some opening general comments, and then I'm going to discuss the details of our financial results before we open it up for Q&A. Before we begin, I'll remind you that our comments may include forward-looking statements. These statements are subject to risks and uncertainties, and the actual results could vary materially. We list some of the factors that might cause results to differ in our press release and in our SEC filings, which are available on our website. We do not assume any obligation to update any forward-looking statement as a result of new information, early developments, or otherwise, except as required by law. Also, during the call, we will discuss certain non-GAAP financial measures in reference to the company's performance. You can see our reconciliation of these measures and GAAP financial measures in the appendix to our presentation. And with that, I'll turn it over to you, Palmer, for opening comments.

Thank you, Nicole, and good morning to everyone who's joined our call today. It's hard to believe that this time last year we sat on this call with a lot of uncertainty about the pandemic and the economy. But one thing I was certain about at that time was the ability of our team to survive really whatever the pandemic threw at us. And here we sit a year later and I'm proud to say not only did we survive, but we actually thrived. We've said consistently that we are focused on tangible book value growth to grow shareholder value. On the past year from March 2020, to March 2021, we increased our tangible book value by over 23.6%. We increased our TTE ratio by 4%, while assets grew over 17.5%, and we increased our allowance for loan losses by over 19%. In addition, we increased our diluted earnings per share 29% year-over-year from core operating results, and that's exclusive of provision noise. That's just pure core operating results. This type of success is due to the disciplined culture we've cultivated here at Ameris Bank. And having said that, in my preview, I'm really excited to share with you a few highlights of the quarter and an update on our outlook for the future. For the quarter, we earned $115.7 million, or $1.66 per diluted share on an adjusted basis, which is up almost 200% from this time last year. This represents of 226 return on average assets and a 27.66% return on tangible equity. Our adjusted efficiency ratio improved from 59.87% reported first quarter last year to 54.62% this quarter. Due to improved economic conditions, we did reverse $28.6 million of provision for loan loss expense this quarter, and we realized a recovery of $10.6 million of previous service asset impairments. Exclusive of these positive events, our adjusted diluted EPS still exceeded expectations at $1.34 per share for the quarter. Nicole is going to get into more of the financial details in just a few minutes. On the balance sheet side of things, I was really pleased with our loan growth for the first quarter. Our annualized net loan growth was just over 3%, and that's after the PPP and our indirect runoff headwinds. We still expect to see mid to upper single-digit loan growth for the year as we look at our pipelines and opportunities within our markets. We continue to see strong deposit growth this quarter, and our non-interest-bearing deposits are now over 38% of total deposits. I already touched on capital from a year-over-year perspective, but just for the quarter, we saw great growth in TCE and tangible book value. During the first quarter, we grew tangible book value by $1.58 per share. for 6.7%, which is very strong. Our TCE ratio increased to 8.62%, which is getting very close to our 9% goal. Our capital position remains strong and is going to continue to support our future growth in opportunistic transactions. And while we do have a share repurchase program in place, we didn't buy anything back in the first quarter, and we really don't anticipate executing on this in the near future, but certainly like having the option to repurchase our shares at the right opportunity John Edwards, our Chief Credit Officer, is with us today and he's certainly available to take any credit questions after our prepared remarks, but I did want to hit a few high points in terms of credit. Our annualized net charge-off ratio decreased to 12 basis points of total loans compared to 70 basis points last quarter. Our non-performing assets as a percent of total assets improved to 40 basis points compared to 48 basis points last quarter. loans that remain on deferral at the end of the quarter for approximately 2% of total loans. And that's down from approximately 19% of total loans at the end of the second quarter of 2020. As you know, we have no exposure to oil and gas, and we've included additional details on our hotel exposure in the loan slides in our investor presentation, as well as the diversification that you'll see across all our loan types in the loan portfolio. and our allowance coverage ratio, excluding unfunded commitments, was 1.29% net of our PPP loans at the end of the quarter. Just a quick update on COVID and PPP. During the first quarter, we opened all of our retail branches and lobbies and business and traffic, I might add, is really picking up, especially in the southeast. Vaccines are available to everyone over the age of 16 and they're easy to get. Most of the businesses that we're seeing are back open, and we're even seeing new restaurants, for instance, coming in and taking over locations that were shuttered last year in the pandemic. So things definitely seem incrementally moving back to business around the southeast, and we're just really fortunate to have a strong presence in many of these top growth markets. As far as PPP, we received payments and forgiveness of approximately $638 million on PPP Round 1 loans. leading the outstanding balance of the 2020 rounds at $463 million. And we have the new round three outstanding balance at $329 million as of March 31st with about another $42 million funded so far this month in April. We anticipate opening the forgiveness portal for the new round three in the next few weeks. So far we've received over 5,600 applications. Our average loan size request has been around $73,000, with the second request averaging around $103,000. And new participants, our first time request averaging around $21,000. So this is a much smaller average balance than we saw in round one, but it's helped increase the overall return. And that's a great lead in into the last thing I wanted to touch on, and that's ESG. During the PPP process, Ameris had a specific outreach to our certain underserved communities and it was a great success and that's just one example of how we've been working diligently on our ESG initiatives. In March of 2020 we established our first chief governance officer role and then shortly thereafter announced our first diversity officer, Carlene Gordon. We have a management level ESG committee and that meets regularly and we report to the We're actually preparing our first Corporate Social Responsibility Report, or CSR, as they call it. We hope to have that out in public at the near end of the second quarter so we can share that with all our investors to show them everything we're doing on that front. But I'll stop there now and turn it over to Nicole to discuss our financial results.