Amerant Bancorp Inc.

Good day, and thank you for standing by. Welcome to the Ameren Bank Corp Third Quarter 2021 Results Conference Call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. After the speaker presentation, there will be a question and answer session. To ask a question during the session, you will need to press star 1 on your telephone. Please be advised that today's conference is being recorded, and if you require any further assistance, please press star 0. I would now like to hand the conference over to your speaker today, Laura Rossi, Head of Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Thank you, Victor. Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining us to review Ameran Bancorp's third quarter 2021 results. Also on today's call are Jerry Plush, our Vice Chairman, President, and Chief Executive Officer, and Carlos Yafiliola, our Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer. As we begin today's Please note that the company's press release, our discussion on today's call, and our responses to your questions contain forward-looking statements. Ameren's business and operations are subject to a variety of risks and uncertainties, many of which are beyond its control, and consequently, actual results may differ materially from those expressed or implied. Please refer to the cautionary notices regarding forward-looking statements in the company's earnings release and presentation. For a more complete description of these and other possible risks, please refer to the company's annual report on Form 10-K for the year ended December 31st, 2020, in our quarterly report on Form 10-Q for the quarter ended June 30th, 2021, and in our other filings with the SEC. You can access these filings on the SEC's website. Amerint has no obligation and makes no commitment to update or publicly release any revisions to forward-looking statements in order to reflect new information or subsequent events, circumstances, or changes in expectations, except as required by law. Please also note that the company's press release, earnings presentation, and today's call include references to certain adjusted financial measures, also known as non-GAAP financial measures. Exhibit 2 and Appendix 1 of the company's press release and earnings presentation, respectively, contain a reconciliation of each non-GAAP financial measure to its most comparable GAAP financial measure. I will now turn it over to our CEO, Jerry Plush.

Thank you, Laura, and good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining Ameren's third quarter 2021 earnings call. I am pleased to be here today to report on our results for the quarter and and the progress our team has made focusing on the key priorities we set out during our first quarter 2021 earnings call. I will also comment later on this morning on some significant issues that we have underway to further improve our future results and set the company up for growth in the coming years. But before going to the results, I want to first thank all of my Ameren colleagues for their dedication and effort again this quarter and for their continued support in the pursuit of even better results in the future. So, I will now provide a brief overview of our performance in the third quarter, and then Carlos will go over the details. So, let's turn to slide three. So, here you can see a summary of our third quarter highlights. We're pleased to report further improvement in our results compared to the second quarter. Of note, net income attributable to the company of $17 million is up 6.7 percent quarter over quarter. primarily driven by higher net interest income and lower non-interest expense. Our total loans were $5.5 billion, and total deposits were $5.6 billion. They're both down slightly from last quarter. Nonetheless, we're happy to report continued improvement in the deposit mix. As core deposits increased, we had solid growth in non-interest-bearing deposits this quarter. Our capital levels continue to remain very strong. We recently announced our intention to effect a cleanup merger in order to have one class of common stock going forward. And we are looking forward to having our shareholders approve this in mid-November. In addition, our board has approved a new repurchase program for up to $50 million, which we expect will commence here in the fourth quarter. So let's move to the core PPNR slide number four. We're pleased to show continued growth in core PPNR of 18.3 million, an 8% increase compared to the 16.9 million reported last quarter. We believe this reconciliation is essential to show the true net revenue growth of the company. We want all of our investors to easily see our results, excluding any one-time gains or losses or severance or other restructuring charges, so they can see what is really happening regarding core earnings power. If we turn now to slide five, our key actions, here we list them out for what has taken place during the third quarter. You'll note that a number of these strategic measures were focused on driving lower future funding costs and operating expenses, as well as set the stage for future growth. So first, our non-performing classified and special mention loans decreased 31.7%, 31.3%, and 16.4%. compared to last quarter, respectively. We are diligently working on further reductions here in the fourth quarter. We have instituted weekly sessions of key personnel to focus on driving to resolution on as many credits as possible to get the non-earning assets off of our books and the proceeds reinvested into earning assets. We continued downward repricing of customer time deposits, further lowering the cost of such funding by approximately seven basis points which translates into annualized savings of approximately $2.2 million, and we prioritized core deposit growth, which totaled $141.7 million in the quarter. We closed one branch located in Wellington, Florida, as of October 15, 2021, and we've announced a new downtown Miami branch that we anticipate opening late in 2022. The comment period regarding this branch expires next week. We also significantly reduced our future space needs, as illustrated by our announcement regarding our new 56,000 square foot operations center in Miramar, Florida, that will take occupancy in the fourth quarter of 2022. This will reduce our operations center by over 40,000 square feet and our annual rental expense by nearly $1 million. We continue to build out our treasury management team and have completed adding team members to both sales and service in Florida as well as in Texas. We recently completed the business transformation initiative with a well-known third party to improve customer experience and drive additional efficiency. We're finalizing the next steps, and we expect to announce this outcome in the very near future. As we continue on our digital transformation and efficiency efforts, We're excited about our recent announcements regarding leading technology platforms Alloy and ClickSwitch. Alloy's leading identity decision platform will allow us to automate the identity verification process when onboarding deposit accounts for both business and individual customers. ClickSwitch, on the other hand, will improve the customer experience by simplifying the conversion of consumer and small business accounts as they transition direct deposits and automatic payments to Emirates. We're confident that these new platforms can help improve our customer experience overall and grow stronger banking relationships. We also launched our new brand awareness campaign based on the tagline, Imagine a Bank, via billboard and social media, and also announced a new branding partnership with the Florida Panthers and the NHL for the 2021-2022 season. And our soon-to-be-released investor deck this quarter will provide examples of the brand and marketing campaigns for your information. And then lastly, we recently appointed our Chief Diversity and Inclusion Officer in September as just one more step in demonstrating our commitment to ESG. I'll have some more comments on this initiative in a few minutes. So if we turn to slide six, here we've outlined our key performance metrics, which show improvement across the board this quarter. These results are reflective of our continued focus on core deposit growth and improving the net interest margin which helps drive higher operating profitability. We also maintained a robust capital position and very strong credit coverage, which, while it's lower than prior quarter, is at a very healthy 1.59% of total loans. Slide 7 is new this quarter. We wanted to add this to focus solely on Amerit Mortgage, outlining the growth in people, applications, and show the increasing revenue quarter over quarter. As a reminder, we started taking applications in late May of this year, and we've recently been focused on adding additional sales personnel to the team. And we are currently in the process of onboarding an even greater number of experienced personnel this quarter to drive future results. So with all that said, I'll now turn it over to Carlos, who will walk through the results for the quarter in more detail.