ServisFirst Bancshares, Inc.

Greetings. Welcome to Service First Bank Share's third quarter earnings call. At this time, all participants are in the 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 Davis Maint, Investor Relations Director. Thank you. You may begin.

Good afternoon, and welcome to our third quarter earnings call. We'll 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 due to 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 welcome to our third quarter conference call. I'm going to review a few highlights of the quarter before I turn it over to Bud to go over the numbers in a little bit more detail. Our loan growth was continuing to be very strong in the quarter, and the payoffs that we had expected were pushed back to later quarters. We are seeing lower pipelines in loans because we certainly can't keep growing at the tarred pace that we've been growing the last two quarters. And we also have been more selective in what we're looking at in terms of the loan pipeline. So we expect the loan growth to moderate in coming quarters, more at our historical growth rates. We did see some runoff in the deposits and correspondent area in the third quarter while the general bank was stable. Our correspondents are making loans again. They're buying securities, so that was to be expected to some extent, probably a little bit more than we thought. We do expect to get back to deposit growth in the general bank in the fourth quarter. We have consistently grown deposits, and we are putting more focus on it as we did prior to the pandemic. Incentive plans have been heavily weighted to loan growth in 2021 and 2022, and we will put normal emphasis on deposit growth in 2023. Our general bank had year-over-year deposit growth, even though we did not focus on deposit growth until this past quarter. On the loan quality side, Henry Abbott will certainly discuss it in more detail, but we continue to seek strong credit metrics in our loan portfolio. I think we had one credit that was a problem in the past quarter, and that was most of what we had on the charge-off list. We just recently completed a credit card conversion, and we're very pleased to get that done. One reason we're pleased is that we have a moratorium on adding new banks for over six months, so we can start adding agents banks again in the card area, so that's certainly welcome news from an income, fee income standpoint. We did add 13 new bankers in the quarter. After 15 bankers last quarter, with growth in the Piedmont, Northwest Florida, and Nashville regions, we continue to see opportunities that are being very selective, but we are seeing better quality bankers than we've seen in a long time. In fact, we got a call from this morning about a team of community bankers in a very nice market. We are seeing potential growth still coming in the door. I'm going to turn it over to Bud to go over the financials.