Ameris Bancorp

Good day and welcome to the NRA's Bank Second Quarter Earnings Conference Call. All participants will be in a listen-only mode. Should you need assistance, please signal a conference specialist by pressing star 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 a touch-tone phone. To withdraw a 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. Please go ahead.

Great. Thank you, Vaish. 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 will discuss the details of our financial results before we open it up for Q&A. But before we begin, I'll remind you that our comments may include forward-looking statements. These statements are subject to risks and uncertainties. The actual results could vary materially. We will 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 statements 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 our appendix to our presentation. And with that, I'll turn it over to Palmer for opening comments.

Thank you, Nicole, and thank you to everyone who's joined our call today. I'm excited to share with you our second quarter results. In fact, I was actually more impressed with our team's results this quarter than the record earnings we posted in the first quarter, and here's why. One of the big questions and a very legitimate question for many of our ABCD stockholders and stakeholders was what happens when mortgage revenue normalizes for the bank. And this quarter shows you exactly what happens when mortgage revenue moderates. This quarter reflects the purposeful and deliberate actions the mayor's teammates have taken to reduce expenses associated with the decline in mortgage revenue. It's also very reflective of the investments we made in top talent in many of our other core lending areas of the company and also reflects the meaningful pipeline and relationships we continue to build which results in really strong second quarter results as we're reporting net income of $88 million or $1.25 per diluted share on an adjusted basis and this represents a 163 return on average assets and a 19.46 return on tangible equity. Our adjusted efficiency ratio actually improved from the first quarter to 54.62%, reporting the first quarter to this quarter 54.07%. As you may recall, we reversed $28.6 million of provision for loan loss expense last quarter. In this quarter, we had just a minimal provision expense due to the positive loan growth we'll talk about. Speaking of loan growth, it was an incredible quarter that we had. When you look at our annualized net loan growth, it was right at 5% for the quarter, net of PPP and our indirect runoff. We still expect to deliver on mid to upper single digit loan growth for the year as we look at our pipelines and the opportunities in all of our growth markets. The area I was most excited about was the $100 million of growth we had in CNI. You'll be able to see this on our slide deck on page 16. and Nicole is going to discuss the excess liquidity and the impact to our margin in more details in a few minutes. But I did want to mention the continued deposit growth for this quarter too. Our growth in non-interest-bearing deposits continued to outpace the growth of total deposits and they're now approaching 40% of total deposits, which is very impressive. And I emphasize this because when rates start moving back up and some of the excess liquidity runs off, I think that's the time you're going to find out from the real leaders or who the real leaders are in our industry in terms of who took the opportunity to grow core funding during this time. And we'll certainly be a standout there. On the capital side of the balance sheet, our capital position remains strong. We've consistently said we're focused on growing tangible book and that's exactly what we did this quarter. We saw growth in both TCE and tangible book value. We grew tangible book value by $1.18 per share or 4.7% during the second quarter. We've also grown tangible book value by $2.76, or over 11% for the year so far. And this equates to over 20% annualized growth for tangible book value. Our TCE ratio increased to 8.83%, which is very close to our 9% goal. And if you exclude the $2.5 billion of excess liquidity on our balance sheet, the TCE ratio would have been over 10%. We clearly have the capital to support our growth initiatives and to consider opportunistic transactions as we go forward. John Edwards, our Chief Credit Officer, is with us today and he's available to take any questions after our prepared remarks, but I did want to hit a few highlights in terms of credit. Our non-performing assets as a percent of total assets improved to 32 basis points compared to 40 basis points last quarter and 59 basis points last year. Loans that remain on deferral at the end of the quarter were approximately 1.2% of total loans, which is down from approximately 19% of total loans this time last year. Our allowance coverage ratio of excluding unfunded commitments was 1.23% net of our PPP loans at the end of the quarter. In terms of COVID, quick update here. July 6th was our official back-to-the-office date. All of our branches are open and all of our staff, including support administrative staff, are back to the office. Some of that's in a new hybrid approach, but we're adapting well and our teams are really excited to have a new sense of normalcy. As I mentioned last quarter, most businesses are back open. Traffic jams are back to normal and restaurants and wait times and new restaurants are actually opening. So things are definitely getting back to normal in the southeast and we certainly expect to benefit and capitalize from that. A quick update on PPP. We continue to see forgiveness in Round 1 during the quarter, and we started receiving forgiveness funds on Round 2 in June. We've got approximately $126 million left of the $1.1 billion that we loaned out in Round 1, and we have about $362 million left of the $409 million from Round 2. There's about $22 million of deferred revenue remaining on PPP for us. and one last comment I wanted to make. I'm very proud to announce that we published our first corporate social responsibility report in May, which was in accordance with the Sustainability Accounting Standards Board and the Task Force on Climate-Related Financial Disclosures. And a shout out to our entire team. There's a lot of thought and a lot of actions and hard work that went into this report, and I'm really pleased and proud of the way it came out, and I hope you'll all take a minute to look at it. But I'll stop there now and turn it over to Nicole to discuss our financial results in more detail.

Great, thank you, Palmer. As you stated, for the second quarter, we're reporting net income of $88.3 million, or $1.27 per diluted share. On an adjusted basis, we earned $87.5 million, or $1.25 per diluted share, and that's really excluding the small recovery on the servicing asset impairment and a gain on sale of premises this quarter. We're pleased with our operating ratios. Our adjusted ROA in the second quarter was 163, and for the year, it's 194. Our adjusted return on tangible common equity was $19.46 for the quarter and $23.41 for the year to date. As Palmer mentioned, our tangible book value increased by $1.18 or 4.7% from $25.27 to $26.45 during the quarter. For the year over year, tangible book value has increased $5.55 or 26.6% from $20.90 this time last year. In addition, our tangible common equity ratio increased 21 basis points this quarter to 883 from 862 at the end of the first quarter. And it's increased 113 basis points over the past year from 770 this time last year. The approximate $2.5 billion of excess liquidity in our balance sheet negatively impacted this ratio by 120 basis points. So excluding that cash from total assets, our TCE ratio would have been approximately 10.03 at quarter end, which is well above our stated target of 9%. So we continue to be well capitalized, and we feel comfortable with our capital and our dividend levels. Talking a little bit on margin, our net interest margin declined 23 basis points from 357 to 334 during the quarter. Our yield on earning assets declined by 27 basis points, while our total funding cost decreased four basis points. We did a description of this on slide 8. You can see the 27 basis point decline was attributable to several unusual factors. We had 8 basis points of compression from the $4 million decline in PPP income. We had 5 basis points from the almost $2 million or $1.7 million of decretion income decline. We had 5 basis points, kind of a bump last quarter, that was a non-recurring revenue related to the sale of that consumer portfolio. We had four basis points due to the continued growth in excess liquidity. And then we really came down to five final basis points due to true loan yield compression. That was two basis points in mortgage, one basis point in health for sale, and two basis points of true commercial bank loan yield compression. So my point here is that true loan yield compression was really five basis points, and we had four basis points of funding cost during the quarter. Also added to slide eight, You can see the impact that that $2.5 billion of excess liquidity had on our margin and how it accounts for 36 basis points of the total negative margin compression from one year ago. We're focused on our deposit costs and we continue to grind them down. We still have some room for improvement in CD portfolio, but the real driver to an improving margin going forward is putting that excess liquidity to work, which we anticipate occurring over the next three quarters. As Palmer mentioned as well, we had a small provision for loan loss expense of about $142,000 compared to that $28.6 million reversal last quarter. The continued economic conditions, specifically unemployment, GDP, and CRE index, and our own improved credit quality this quarter helped offset the need for additional provisions on our loan growth. Our ending allowance for loan loss was $175.1 million compared to just $178.6 at the end of last quarter. and $208.8 million at the end of second quarter last year, which was in the middle of the pandemic and our heightened deferrals. So including the unfunded commitment reserve and allowance for other credit losses, our total allowance was $197.8 million at quarter end compared with $200.2 at the end of last quarter.

Moving on to non-interest income.

So as expected, our non-interest income declined this quarter and it really was due to the decreases in mortgage banking. Excluding the $9.7 million recovery last quarter and the $749,000 recovery this quarter, our mortgage income declined about $19.3 million. And there's really two factors contributing to the decline in revenue. It was both production and gain on sale margins. As you can see, we put in a new slide 11, which really has some information on mortgage. But as you can see on that slide, production in the retail mortgage group declined 9%. to $2.4 billion this quarter from $2.6 last quarter. And it's important to note here that total non-interest expense also declined 9% or $5.6 million in the retail mortgage division. In addition to that production that's going to drive those reductions in variable costs, we also saw the average gain on sale decrease back to normal levels. It decreased to 2.77% compared to elevated 3.95 last quarter. We really don't anticipate further decline in the gain on sale margins. The open pipeline at the end of the second quarter was $1.7 billion compared to $2.3 billion at the end of last quarter, and we do believe that there's further reductions in non-interest expense if production continues to decline. As we previously stated, we have a large amount of our expenses, our variable costs, and we designed that in our mortgage group. Total non-interest expense for the company declined by $13 million from $148.8 million last quarter to $135.8 million this quarter. As I just mentioned, mortgage expenses declined almost $6 million during the quarter and an additional $6.5 million reduction was seen in the banking division, which includes the enterprise-wide service and support staff. We continue to look for ways to become more efficient and we continuously monitor the efficiency ratio by division. On that note, our adjusted efficiency ratio improved slightly this quarter to 54.07 from 54.62 last quarter. I previously guided for the efficiency ratio to stabilize in the 53 to 55% range because we did not anticipate that previous level of mortgage revenue and efficiency to be sustainable. So I think a 54.07 is right in the middle of that range as we saw mortgage stabilize. and then also a reminder this quarter we saw the gain on sale margin which doesn't affect the variable cost sell back to normal levels and we still saw that improvement in our efficiency ratio. On the balance sheet side we ended the quarter with assets of $21.9 billion compared to $21.4 billion at the end of last quarter. We were pleased with our organic loan growth of $181 million or 5% annualized for the second quarter. As you can see on slide 16 we had $473 million of headwinds against a $655 million growth in CRE, CNI, premium finance, and residential. PPP loans declined $304 million, and indirect loans declined $85 million. We have approximately $488 million of PPP loans left, and we have $397 million of indirect loans left. We anticipate the headwinds from runoff in both of these portfolios to really subside early next year. And a few extra details on PPP. We've received payments and forgiveness of approximately $975 million on round one, leaving the outstanding balance at $126 million. And we now have the new round two balance at $362 million. The average balance of PPP loans in the second quarter was $708.5 million, compared to an average balance in the first quarter of $764.9 million. We have about $22.3 million left of deferred income on the PPP loans, That's $2.2 million on round one and $20.1 million on round two. And again, we anticipate amortizing that into income over the next year, if not sooner. We already discussed the excess liquidity you can see in other earning assets on the balance sheet due to our tremendous deposit growth that we've seen over the past few quarters. But again, this quarter, we grew $382 million this quarter in deposits, and 46% of that growth was in non-interest bearing. I sound like a broken record, but we really do anticipate some deposit runoff as life gets back to normal post-pandemic and as rates potentially rise. We continue to anticipate net loan growth, net PPP activity for the year in the mid single digits, which is about a billion dollars of loan growth. That leaves about 1.5 billion of excess cash to prepare for deposit runoff if rates start to increase and to begin buying investments in the bond portfolio. We did purchase $100 million of BOLI during the second quarter with a non-taxable yield of approximately 3.5%, and we are considering other investment purchases, although we would like the curve to steepen just a little bit before we really start doing that. And with that, I will wrap it up. I appreciate everyone's time today, and I'll turn the call over to Vaish for any questions from the group.

We will now begin the question and answer session. To ask a question, you may press star then 1 on your touchtone phone. If you're using a speakerphone, please pick up your handset before pressing the keys. If at any time your question has been addressed and you would like to withdraw your question, please press star then 2. At this time, we will pause momentarily to assemble our rosters. The first question comes from Brady Daly with KVW. Please go ahead.

Hey, thanks. Good morning, guys.

Good morning, Brady.

So when I look at what happened on the expense side, basically your ability to reduce expenses to help offset the pressure of down revenue and mostly down mortgage rate, that was pretty impressive in the second quarter. I mean, should that dynamic continue to play out like it did in 2Q going forward as mortgage continues to normalize?

So, Brady, I'm going to take that question and split it into two, if that's okay, and then talk about the mortgage side and then talk about the banking side because I think there's two different dynamics there. On the mortgage side, we do anticipate, and again, kind of looking at mortgage revenue, there's two components. One is driven by gain on sales. and the other component is production. And the gain on sale margin really doesn't affect those variable costs. And we feel like we've absorbed all of that into the second quarter. Then when you turn to the production side, the production side is where the variable costs really are affected. We have about an 80% structure there. So as production comes down, we expect additional cost saves on the expense side. That's mostly in salaries, benefits, basically commissions, incentives. and then also on the IT side because as production comes down, your data processing per account comes down. So those are the two main categories that build that kind of 80% decline in expenses as the production revenue comes down. So I do anticipate on the mortgage side. On the banking side, part of the decrease this quarter had to do with deferred costs because of our very strong production. So I think some of that could come back. I don't think that we'll go back to the 83, 85 that we were running, but I think the 76 could easily bump up a little bit as production, again, we have very robust, and you think about third, fourth quarters, if it's not quite as robust production, those deferred fees could impact that. So I think the 76 could easily go up closer to the 79 to 80s. but I don't anticipate it going as high as it was in that 85 range a few quarters ago.

Okay. When I look at your capital base, Nicole, you mentioned that adjusted TCE is 10%. That's 100 basis points above your 9% target. Your stock has pulled back a little bit here. It's at 11 times earnings and only 1.7 times tangible, which is pretty attractive. Any thoughts on reengaging in the share buyback

Yeah, Brady, this is Palmer. As you know, we've got the plan out there and authorized and we've got opportunities to do that. And if we continue to see the pullback that we're seeing now because the stock is at a very attractive price, that's certainly a consideration we'll take into consideration.

Okay. And then finally for me, maybe just an update on M&A. We saw South State enter your market in a big way this morning with the acquisition of Atlantic Capital. Would a target like that possibly have been of interest to you? And then just generally speaking, maybe an update on how you guys are thinking about M&A now, Palmer.

Yeah, no, I think that's a nice transaction for South State. I think it's a good bolt-on for them. I think that it's, you know, whenever you can garner market share in a market like Atlanta, I think it's a good opportunity. And I think that the The opportunity for a lot of folks looking in Atlanta is they realize the opportunity here in terms of the growth prospects, and that's what we'll continue to capitalize on. When you look at where we stand in the market in terms of market share and the existing platform we have in place, we'll be able to lever that in a meaningful way. In terms of our outlook, we're pretty consistent in terms of what we're looking for. We're very disciplined and obviously very principled and what we want to do. So we take a lot of the social considerations into account in addition to the pricing. And, you know, so we're going to remain opportunistic, which is where we are, and it's nice to be in a position to be able to think that way. But aside from M&A, as you know, we've got incredible growth, organic growth opportunities, and we'll continue to pursue those either way. Okay, great. Thanks for the call, guys. You bet.

Thanks, Brady.

The next question comes from Casey Whitman with Piper Sandler. Please go ahead.

Good morning. Good morning, Casey. Nicole, maybe can you walk us through how you were thinking about your core margin over the back half of the year without PPP and accretion and obviously how liquidity is going to play into that?

Absolutely. So I was going to excluding just assuming flat PPP, flat accretion, and flat liquidity. We're guiding for another quarter of mid-single-digit compression. That's a couple basis points on the asset side. Offset, we do think we have a couple more basis points to squeeze out on the deposit side, mostly in that CD portfolio. Again, mid-single-digit compression for the next quarter until we start to stabilize Again, we have that $2.5 billion of excess liquidity. So as we can start deploying that, every $100 million is about two basis points on our margin. So as soon as we start deploying that, we will definitely see the pickup and have that added back in. But assuming the liquidity stays flat, accretion and PPP stay flat, we're mid-single-digit compression for one more quarter.

Okay, makes sense. That's all I had. Nice quarter. Great. Thank you, Casey.

The next question comes from Jennifer Danball with Truist Securities. Please go ahead. Jennifer, is the line muted? We can't hear you. Hi. Can you hear me now? Yes. Good morning, Jennifer.

Hi. How are you? My question is on the mortgage business. Can you just talk about what kind of production trends you think you're going to see over the next couple of quarters and how much of an issue is the inventory shortage right now?

Yeah, I'll take that. I think when you look at our current production and you saw it this quarter, it's still very meaningful. Obviously, we're impacted by the margin. But in terms of the impact from a supply situation, what we're finding is that while supply is in short order, the demand is still there and typically in this business you've got a lot of seasonality for the second half of the year and I don't think you're going to see that so I think what's going to happen is it's actually going to be when you look at the run rate going forward over the next probably two to four quarters I think it's going to be actually much more stable than what we've historically seen just because that constant demand for inventory and for absorption which we normally see a pullback as we get into later into the year. So I'm kind of contrarian in that view and think that in certain markets, as we all know, there is a very high shortage of supply, but the absorption is there. And so I think it's going to continue to be a steady performer for those that are heavily focused on purchase type activity, which we are with builder and realtors. I think that's going to serve us well. We certainly also a little pickup in the refi activity. just due to the drop in rates over the last quarter. But going forward, I think it's going to be a much more stable type of environment for mortgage, quite frankly, for those that are heavy purchase oriented.

Okay. And back on the merger interest topic, Palmer, could you just give us a little more detail on what types of transactions Ameris might be interested in, if they make sense?

Yeah, I would tell you those are the kind of transactions we're looking at, anything that makes sense to us. We're big on culture, as you know here, so there's got to be a very good cultural fit and alignment there, and it's got to be accretive. We're very disciplined in our pricing. We're not going to do anything that's overly diluted to this company or to our shareholders. But first and foremost, it's got to be a good cultural fit. And so we will remain, like I said, opportunistic, and open to other opportunities that are out there, both bank and non-bank type of transactions.

Okay, thank you.

You bet.

The next question comes from Brody Preston with Stephen James. Please go ahead.

Hey, good morning, everyone. Good morning, Brody. Hey, Nicole, could you just help me around the core expenses? I hear you that you know you think you can bump back up to 79 or 80 with the production but just when I look at the year-over-year sort of decline you know understanding that one cue is a seasonally high a seasonal high for you guys because of the payroll but you you know you're down from 83 year-over-year to 76 right so you was you know effectively taking out seven million out of the quarterly run rate on a year-over-year basis and so just help me understand how you've What specifically has driven that level of a decline in the core bank expenses over the last year while you've been actively hiring people?

Sure. That's a great question. I appreciate it. And so this really comes back to what we've been saying for several quarters is that we feel like we've been ahead of the curve on a few things. We did our branch rationalization and then Closed branches there. We were looking at lease opportunities as leases were expiring to move out of those. It's been exactly what we had planned. And we have been able to do hiring. I will say that we have certainly used, and I know people are telling me saying there's reallocation of resources, but finding ways to pay for things. And so even though we have had new hires, we've also had some attrition or some retirements. and maybe we've reallocated those funds to be able to move into some other growth markets and not fill those positions in some of our other markets. And then we've also started using technology to help as well. And so when you look at the expense down the line, it's just about every bucket. I mean you'll see data processing and telecommunications is about the only one that's been flat there. but some of the expenses that we've spent there have been able to help us in some of the other non-interest expenses that are down. Occupancy is down as well as salaries and employee benefits and you're exactly right. We had about a million to two million dollar payroll tax in the first quarter that we didn't have again and then we also had those deferred costs that could come back up into that salary category.

But Bernie, this is Palmer. One thing in all companies, obviously the largest expense item is the and the teammates in the overhead. And I think what I've been very pleased with with the Ameris team here is the discipline in terms of accountability and expectations and being realistic about it, obviously. But what you'll find a good example is even in our commercial banking group, year to date we've hired 11 new individuals. But net, that way we were only up three FTEs. And I think what that's reflective of is just holding people accountable for for their roles and their performance. And if you can do that throughout an entire company, whether it's on the operational side or on the production side, what you end up with is a very meaningful group of high-performing individuals instead of just layering in additional expense to mask a deficiency. And so I think that's one of the things that we've been very consequential about this year and last year, and it's certainly paid dividends for us currently and going forward.

Gaudi, do you have any more questions? We can't hear you.

Oh, yeah. Sorry about that. So I guess on the mortgage side, Nicole, just one last question there. If 80% of the expense there is tied to variable comp, if production were down, say, 5% again next quarter, does that mean expenses in that business line should be down 4%? Is that how I should be thinking about that?

Exactly, yes.

OK, great. Great, thanks for that. And I guess maybe just on that, for the mortgage banking, Is that tied to total production or are those expenses tied to sold production?

Total production.

Okay. All right, great. Thanks for that clarification. Maybe just switching to core loan yields. I think backing out PPP and sort of calculating your core loan yield right around 425 this quarter. which is down about 10 basis points from last quarter. Just given that new production yields continue to head down by 5 to 6 pips per quarter here, should we expect a similar kind of decrease in that core loan yield over the next couple of quarters or I guess when do you sort of expect that to subside?

No, you're exactly right. So with our current come on rate, it is – pushing our loan yields down. And so we really need about a 50 basis point upswing for that to stabilize. So if rates stay where they are for a long period, we could continue to see some of that compression. Again, we have the deposit side to help some of that for sure. But again, we kind of need a 50 basis point swing to really stop that margin decline. And anything above that would start to be a credo.

Okay. and in the HFS portfolio, is this 277 yield? Is that a good normalized yield to use them for? I know it can be pretty variable.

It is pretty variable. I hate to say this, but I don't anticipate it going down. So I think you could probably use that and that would be conservative.

Okay. And on that HFS portfolio, Nicole, with the pipelines being being down this quarter and NBA forecast being what they are. I guess we should expect this HFS portfolio to continue to leg down from here. And so would you kind of expect it to get back to that 800 million range by some point next year?

I would say that we've kind of got it to 900 to a billion is kind of what we think will be the new norm. So it still has a couple hundred million to come down. Yes.

Okay. And then just on the mortgage banking division again, just could you understand some of the variability that you see on a quarter to quarter basis in the provision line item there? You know, sort of what drives that? Is it related to the average loans that you like are in the HFS portfolio or what are the specific components there that drive that?

some of that is related to how we allocate the provision and so when we start looking at some internal credit metrics similar to such as deferrals or delinquencies and then also just when we look at overall general economic factors we could have some shift between buckets and so you'll see I think what you're looking at is a And again, look at last quarter, that $4.5 million, we had a $28 million relief for the whole company. So some of that was allocated to mortgage. And then this quarter, you'll see kind of the banking division got the credit and then retail mortgage had the expense, but it all kind of net out. So some of the modeling and economic factors as well as some individual internal credit metrics.

Okay. Okay. And then just on the CNI portfolio, it was nice to see some strength there in the core CNI portfolio. I think it was up about 12.5% linked quarter. Could you maybe help me understand, is that new kind of commitment? Is that increased line utilization? Is that some of the folks that you hire over the last year starting to hit their stride? Just help me kind of understand what happened there.

It's a bit of all of the above, which is exciting to see. And a lot of it has already come out of some of our investments we've made in many of the growth markets, including the Charlotte area. North Florida had a great quarter, as did Atlantis. It's been very consistent, and the pipelines remain full. And most of this was incremental new business. And the other part of it is that some of it's incremental from new markets, which I like seeing. The investments we made last year are paying off, and we are very excited about the outlook there.

Okay, great. And then just one last one, if I may. Nicole, do you happen to know what the servicing income was this quarter? I think it was $10.1 million last quarter for the mortgage.

Yep, it was pretty consistent with that. All right, great.

Thank you very much.

and you know that's a good point you bring up there and for everybody listening today when you look at mortgage and you look at potential volatility in mortgage one thing that's not as volatile in mortgage is servicing income and we've got a meaningful servicing asset there and I think it's important for people to remember that in terms of it's certainly helpful for us in terms of our forecasting and budgeting in the income coming from mortgage because it's a nice stabilizer for what can sometimes be a volatile A lot of business. Great. Thank you all for taking my questions.

I really appreciate it.

Great. Thanks, Brody.

As a reminder, if you have a question, please press star, then want to be joined into the queue. The next question comes from Christopher Maranek with Jannie Montgomery Scott. Please go ahead.

Thanks. Good morning. Palmer and Nicole, you've been able to gain business from other bank mergers for a long, long time. So today's news locally is not any surprise. I'm just curious kind of what makes customers move or existing customers do more business with Ameris and kind of how that gets applied as the sort of deck chairs get shuffled once again.

Well, I think it's fairly typical of all disruption. Some of it is when an account officer leaves their bank and moves to another bank. Obviously, A lot of people bank with people. But then there's the execution side, too, and the commitment to the market. I do think that we've benefited from that because we've got a lot of meaningful presence in a lot of key growth markets. But when you start having changes in reporting lines, you start having changes in credit approvals, that can be disruptive to the lenders, and it can also be disruptive as an end result to the customers. which is what we're all about. So I think with all the movement out there in terms of M&A and furthermore just changes in reporting lines, that's presented a lot of disruption that we've been able to capitalize on. I think we'll continue to going forward.

Is it fair to say, Palmer, that there's more hires coming just from your core lenders on all sides of the bank?

There are new opportunities. We've got several folks right now, and I'm excited to say a lot of them are coming from some of our new initiatives and new markets, especially in the Carolinas and in Florida. But that being said, the thing that gives me comfort in terms of our projections for growth, we have all the folks we need to deliver on the forecast that we have set out for the reindeer this year. So anything beyond that will be an incremental lift for us. which we'll continue to capitalize on as we move forward.

Okay, great. And this last question for me is just about how FinTech is evolving for you at Ameris and what are the priorities and new initiatives there that we should expect the next couple of quarters?

Yeah, I think for us we'd like to stay not on the bleeding edge but on the cutting edge of that. We're obviously heavily involved in a lot of the FinTech initiatives that are out there between Canopy and FinTop and Just staying on the forefront of that, but at the same time, it gives us an opportunity to be exposed to that new technology. We've embraced a lot of it. As we've talked about before, the robotics continue to be a major focus for us in some of our higher volume areas like mortgage, and then we'll continue to roll that out into areas like premium finance, and you garner a lot of efficiencies there. We have an aggressive sales force initiative underway right now throughout the entire company. We were utilizing Salesforce and Antino in many of the areas of the company. But going forward, we've got an active role out of Salesforce over the next two or three quarters. And I think the important thing, there's so many things that you want to do, but you've got to prioritize in terms of where you're going to see the largest gain in efficiencies. And so right now, we see that on the robotics front and on the Salesforce front. And a lot of that has to do with workflow, not just managing pipelines. And that's where we will continue to make meaningful investments and then obviously down the road as we all talk about is what opportunities we might have in terms of our core processors going forward and getting into more open architecture type of environment which is really exciting to me and I don't think for the industry we're quite there yet we've certainly got some prototypes or experimental activity going on but until that's a little bit more secure and we've got the comfort of our regulators and everyone else I think that's probably a couple years out but in the meantime there's a lot that banks can be doing now to position themselves to become more efficient that's what we've prided ourselves on over the last year.

Great and that ties all back to the core expense improvements that Nicole was elaborating on earlier so there's more there in general.

Absolutely yeah you know we've always talked about mortgages and how scalable business the question is do you execute on that and With the robotics that we had in place, that allowed us, quite frankly, to make some expense reductions immediately without creating havoc or some sort of concern in a back office environment. And so that's where you start really appreciating the efficiency garnered from technology.

Great. Thanks for the background.

Thank you.

This concludes the question and answer session. I would like to turn the conference back over to Palmer Proctor for enclosing remarks.

Thank you very much. And once again, I'd like to thank everyone for listening to our second quarter 2021 earnings result call. We're excited about the momentum, as you can tell, throughout the entire footprint, and we feel like we're extremely well positioned for the second half of 2021 and into the future. and as I've always said before, we're going to continue to deliver on top quartile financial results and remain focused on our discipline growth and our operating efficiencies and growing our franchise value. But thank you all again for your time and your interest in Ameris Bank.

The conference is now concluded. Thank you for attending today's presentation. You may now disconnect this call.