Amerant Bancorp Inc.

Good day, and thank you for standing by. Welcome to the Amaranth Bancorp fourth quarter 2021 earnings 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 a session, you will need to press the telephone. Please be advised that today's conference is being recorded, and if you require any further assistance, please press star zero. I want 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 Amer and Bancorp's fourth quarter 2021 results. Also on today's call are Jerry Plosh, our Vice Chairman, President, and Chief Executive Officer. and Carlos Yafiliola, our Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer. As we begin, please note that the company's press release, our discussion and 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 31, 2020, in our quarterly report on Form 10-Q for the quarter ended June 30th, 2021, and in other filings with the SEC. You can access these filings on the SEC's website. Ameren 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. Thank you for joining Ameren's fourth quarter 2021 earnings call. I'm pleased to be here today to report on our results for the quarter and the year and to talk about the continued progress that occurred in the fourth quarter to best position the company for success now and in future periods. We have maintained our focus on the key priorities we set earlier this year, Yes, earlier this year, excuse me, and the results reflect the good things that are coming to fruition. While we have much more work to do in 2022, we remain committed to continue to execute on our strategy throughout next year. We're also pleased to report that our Board of Directors voted yesterday to approve a $0.09 per share dividend. At this time, the intention is to consider the declaration of payment of dividends on a quarterly basis, and of course, it's subject to company results. As part of our quest to provide greater value to our shareholders, we believe this demonstrates our commitment to do so. I do want to take a minute here and thank all of my Amerit colleagues for their dedication and effort again this quarter. We have a great team, and we're excited about the strong additions to the Amerit family that happened this past quarter. They will play an essential role in our growth in 2022 and beyond. So I will now provide a brief overview of our performance in the fourth quarter and year, and then Carlos will go over the details. So turning to slide three, you can see a summary of our fourth quarter highlights. We're pleased to report record results for this quarter. Of note, net income attributable to the company was $65.5 million. That's up 284% quarter over quarter. This was primarily driven by a one-time gain on the sale of our headquarters buildings. higher average yields and balances on loans, and lower average balances on customer CDs and broker time deposits also contributed to improved core results. Our total gross loans were $5.6 billion, up from $5.5 billion last quarter, even with $337 million received in loan prepayments and the sale of $49.4 million from New York City loans classified as available for sale. Our total deposits were $5.6 billion flat to last quarter, though core deposits increased by $109.4 million this quarter compared to the third quarter. The company's capital continued to be strong and well in excess of the minimum regulatory requirements to be considered well capitalized at December 31, 2021. As previously announced, we completed the cleanup merger, which eliminated the shares of Class B common stock and simplified our capital structure. We also declared and have paid our first cash dividend of $0.06 per share, which was paid out here in the first quarter of 2022. As a result of these actions, there was an increase of 12% in tangible book value over the same period. Additionally, we're pleased to announce that we repurchased $27.9 million of the $50 million share buyback program that was approved in the third quarter of 2021. In total, 893,394 shares of Class A common stock were repurchased as of December 31st, 2021. We intend to continue to be opportunistic and repurchase shares dependent, of course, on availability and pricing. So now we'll move to slide four. We thought it would be helpful to provide you with a reconciliation of shares as of year end after having completed the cleanup merger and the share repurchases I just mentioned. Here you can see the impact each of these had in reducing the number of shares issued in outstanding, which as of December 31, 2021, totaled 35,883,320 shares of Class A common stock. Turning now to slide five, our core PPNR increased to 18.9 million, or 3.4% compared to the 18.3 million we reported in the previous quarter. As we previously stated, we believe it is essential to show the net revenue growth of the company, excluding any one-time gains or losses or other non-recurring items, in order to show Amarant's core earnings power. We'll go over key actions on slide six now. Here's a number of key actions taken during the fourth quarter. We are continuing to focus on driving efficiency as well as set the stage for future growth. So our non-performing loans decreased to 0.89% of total loans, a substantial decline compared to 3Q21. As part of our stated commitment to reduce the level of non-earning assets on our balance sheet, we are diligently working to further reduce this level of non-performers here in the first quarter of 2022. We closed our Wellington branch in the fourth quarter of 2021 and announced a new branch in downtown Miami, which we expect to open in the fourth quarter of this year. The new location will be within Metz Square. It's in the heart of Miami and one of the nation's fastest-growing urban centers. The new banking center will deliver full banking services, so consumer, business banking, private banking, commercial, and wealth management will all have a presence here. Amerit Mortgage continues to expand. This quarter, we added 20 FTEs focused on wholesale business. We also hired a terrific South Florida-based domestic private banking team. to focus on large private banking relationships, including professionals, law practitioners, and medical offices, among others. We also hired a new head of procurement as part of our ongoing efforts to look for additional cost savings, as well as a new head of loan syndication to enable us to onboard large business opportunities in the markets we serve and to effectively manage risk. We executed an agreement with Jamfintop to become a strategic investor in their blockchain fund, We, like the folks at Jamfintop, and I'm sure this is true at a lot of well-known banks across the country that also committed to invest, we believe blockchain will eventually become the dominant operating infrastructure of the financial system. We're excited about the potential here to potentially become an early adopter of this transformational technology. As we previously announced, we entered into a multi-year outsourcing agreement with financial technology leader FIS, to assume full responsibility over a significant number of the bank's support functions and staff, including certain back office operations. Effective January 1st, 80 full-time equivalents were transferred, reducing our total full-time equivalents to 683, inclusive of Amerit Mortgage. We have an estimated annual savings of approximately $12 million from this partnership, while achieving greater operational efficiencies and delivering advanced solutions and services to our customers. Our new Imagine a Bank campaign was launched during the fourth quarter of 2021, and a significant expansion to it went live on January 3, 2022. There are now over 20 billboards throughout South Florida, including two high-impact boards in the Miami downtown area that are delivering more than 125 million impressions in the South Florida market. We also continue to leverage our partnership with the Atlantic Division-leading Florida Panthers to drive brand awareness. Please note the front cover of this earnings deck is a great example of the Imagine a Bank branding we are now using. We'll now turn to slide seven. Here we've outlined our key performance metrics, which continue to show improvement with the exception of the slight decrease in non-interest-bearing deposits over total deposits. Please note that the large improvements in efficiency ratio, ROA, and ROE in the charts include the one-time gain on the sale of the headquarters building. For ease of reference, we show the same three core metrics excluding this one-time gain and other one-timers in the footnotes to this slide. Here you can see the efficiency ratio was relatively flat, quarter to quarter, given the investment we are making in revenue producers. Regarding the efficiency ratio, please know we will continue our focus on rationalizing our cost structure to improve profitability as well as offset our reinvesting in the business. I'll comment more on this later in the call. So if we turn to slide E, as we did last quarter, this focuses solely on Amerit Mortgage. Since we started taking applications in May of 2021, AMTM has received 299 applications and closed on 109 loans, totaling $52.6 million. Sixty-one of those loans were funded in the fourth quarter, totaling $32.04 million. As we mentioned earlier, AMTM added additional experienced personnel this quarter to focus solely on its wholesale business. So with that said, I'll now turn things over to Carlos, who will walk through our results for the quarter and year in more detail.