ServisFirst Bancshares, Inc.

Greetings. Welcome to the Service First Bank Shares first quarter earnings call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. A question and answer session will follow the formal presentation. If anyone should require operator assistance during the conference, please press star zero on your telephone keypad. Please note, this conference is being recorded. I will now turn the conference over to your host, Davis Mange, IR Director. You may begin.

Good afternoon, and welcome to our first quarter earnings call. We will have Tom Broughton, our CEO, Bud Foshee, our CFO, and Henry Abbott, our Chief Credit Officer, covering some highlights from the quarter, and then we'll take your questions. I'll now cover our forward-looking statements disclosure. Some of the discussion in today's earnings call may include forward-looking statements. Actual results may differ from any projection shared today through the factors described in our most recent 10-K and 10-Q filings. Forward-looking statements speak only as of the date they are made and Service First assumes no duty to update them. With that, I'll turn the call over to Tom.

Thank you, Davis, and good afternoon, and thank you for joining our call today. I'm going to cover a few highlights of the quarter, and then I'll turn it over to Bud Foshew for a more detailed financial report. Our report today is fairly, it's always brief. We don't read to you, but it'll be a little more brief than normal because we don't really It was primarily good news. I don't have a lot of problems to explain away, so I'll first cover our loan growth. We had just under $500 million in loan growth for the quarter, and that exceeded our goal of $100 million per month in net loan growth. Of course, this excludes Triple P loans when I use that number. The growth was very solid in all regions during the quarter. that we really know it was broad-based growth in our southeastern footprint. We were pleased to finally see some CNI loan growth during the quarter. So this was a first quarterly improvement in CNI line utilization, albeit modest, that we've had since the pandemic started. On our loan pipeline, it's back up. from year end. It dropped a bit at year end. It's up 35% and it's back at what I would say would be record high levels that we've had in the last fall. We're pleased with our loan pipeline. We're seeing a lot of activity today. We're having a lot of phone calls every day on credits. Our loan growth for the quarter, I really like the way we didn't have any Luckily, the last two quarters we've had no payoffs, so that's certainly been helpful. But it was not a lot of big loans this quarter. It was all small, broad-based loan growth, which is certainly our preference. On the deposit side, deposits were pretty flat for the quarter. We did see a little decline in correspondent balances plus corporate tax payments. Our correspondent banks are beginning to deploy their liquidity in both loans and securities just as we are. Really, my guess is we'll see modest deposit growth this year as a result of the stimulus withdrawal and other factors such as the correspondence making loans and buying securities. We did add some new bankers in the quarter and we've made some announcements. We have more to make and we're very pleased with the the group we picked up. We have more than usual in the queue today in the hiring process and interviewing process. So we continue to have the same goal as always, recruiting only the best bankers and having the best people and have the best efficiency ratio in the industry. So we're very pleased with the upgrade in our team over the last two years. We've been very successful. The pandemic has has had the effect of highlighting the best places for bankers to work, and we think we are the best place to work. In addition, the merger activity continues to work in our favor. Consolidation certainly helps us. So I'm going to turn it over to Bud Fossey now, our Chief Financial Officer, to give a financial update for the quarter.