Ameris Bancorp

Good morning or good afternoon all and welcome to the Ameris Bank Third Quarter Earnings Conference Call. My name is Adam and I'll be your operator today. If you'd like to ask a question during the Q&A portion of today's call, you may do so by pressing star 1 on your telephone keypad. I will now hand you over to Nicole Stokes, Chief Financial Officer, to begin. So, Nicole, please go ahead when you are ready.

Great. Thank you, Adam. 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 detail of our financial results before we open 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 list some of the factors that might cause results to differ in our press release and in our SEC filing, 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 our GAAP financial measures in the appendix to our presentation. and with that I'll turn it over to Palmer for opening comments.

Thank you Nicole and good morning everyone. I want to thank you all for taking time to join us this morning for our third quarter 2021 earnings call. We were very pleased with the third quarter and the momentum that we have with the loan production, the growth and the financial results. Nicole's going to update you on some of the detailed results in a few minutes but I did want to hit a few highlights for the quarter as well as a few other successes which positively impact our outlook as we go forward. For the quarter, we earned $83.9 million or $1.20 per diluted share on an adjusted basis, and this represented a 151 return on average assets and a 17.65 return on tangible equity. For the year-to-date period, we earned $287.2 million or $4.12 per diluted share on an adjusted basis, which is a significant increase from the 2.86 reported in the same period last year. The 2021 results represent a year-to-date ROA of 179 and the year-to-date return on average tangible equity of 21.38. Our adjusted efficiency ratio this quarter was 56.56%, an increase from the 54.07% last quarter due to certain non-recurring expenses during the quarter. And that said, our year-to-date efficiency ratio is 55.05%. and should return below 55% by the end of the year. We remain very encouraged by our organic growth both on the loan and deposit side and exclusive of PPP runoff loans grew over $250 million or 7% annualized during the quarter and that leaves our year-to-date annualized loan growth at 8.7% and excluding PPP runoff and 3.2% including PPP runoff. We still expect to see mid-to-upper single-digit loan growth for the year based on our pipelines and opportunities within our growth markets. On the deposit side, we continue to see a lot of success there in growing non-interest-bearing deposits, which now account for over 40% of our total deposits. Nicole is going to discuss our excess liquidity and the impact, obviously, it has on the margin in more detail in a few minutes. But I did want to mention the continued success we have there on the deposit front. On the capital side of the balance sheet, our capital position remains strong. We've consistently said that we're very focused on tangible book value growth, and this quarter was no different. I'm happy to report we grew tangible book value by over $1 per share, or 3.8% during the third quarter alone. And we've grown tangible book value by $3.77, or almost 16% for the year so far. And this equates to over a 20% annualized growth rate in tangible book value, which is very meaningful. Our TCE ratio increased to 8.8%, very close to our 9% goal. And if you exclude the $3 billion of excess liquidity on our balance sheet, the TCE ratio would have been well over 10%. So clearly we have ample capital to support our growth initiatives and consider opportunistic transactions. While we remain focused on capital preservation, we did announce, as many of you may have seen in our release, that our board approved extending our share repurchase program. through October 31st of next year. We did repurchase $6.5 million during the third quarter, and that leaves approximately $79 million left on that program. And while we don't anticipate executing on this during the remainder of 2021, we do like having the optionality that the right opportunity presents itself. As for our dividend, we still remain very comfortable with where our dividends are today. 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 wanted to hit a few highlights in terms of credit. For the quarter we had net recoveries of $127,000 so zero charge off ratio compared to 2.6 million of net charge offs last quarter of seven basis points. Our non-performing assets as a percentage of total assets was consistent with last quarter 32 basis points The loans that remain on deferral at the end of the quarter were approximately 0.6% of total loans, which is down from approximately 4.3% of total loans this same time last year. Our allowance coverage ratio excluding unfunded commitments was 1.18% net of our PPP loans at the end of the quarter. And I'll tell you, you know, despite the uncertainty that's still in the economy out there, we continue to see very strong asset quality and solid growth opportunities in our markets for the remainder of this year and the investments that we made last year and over the last 18 months in both technology and talent continue to propel our incremental growth and really helps us to further leverage our platform and that certainly has helped us eliminate any dependency on recent hires or future hires to deliver our growth targets and that's a meaningful distinction for our company. but I'll stop there and now turn over to Nicole to discuss our financial results in more detail.