ServisFirst Bancshares, Inc.

Greetings, and 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. As a reminder, this conference call is being recorded. I would now like to turn the conference over to your host, Davis Mange, Director of Investor Relations.

Good afternoon, and welcome to our first quarter earnings call. We will have Tom Broughton, our CEO, Rodney Rushing, our Chief Operating Officer, Henry Abbott, our Chief Credit Officer, and Bud Foshee, our CFO, 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, Davidson. Good afternoon, everybody. Thank you for joining us on the call. The year is off to a great start with the first quarter, as we'll review for you over the next few minutes. We have various reports from our various management people You know, we've always done well in times of stress in the banking industry. We did after the 08-09 recession, and we certainly did during the pandemic. The bank has experienced significant growth during those periods of time. And we do expect significant opportunities, again, during this time of a little bit of dislocation in the industry. So you ask, you know, why do we do well during times like this? For one thing, there's several reasons. First is our business model had changed in over 18 years since we opened 18 years ago. We are well capitalized. We're financially stable. We retain 75% of our net income to fund our growth and increase in capital. We do have an industry-leading efficiency ratio. We're highly profitable. We have very strong credit quality. Henry's going to talk about this in more detail in a few minutes. We don't have any broker deposits for federal home loan bank advances like many of our competitors. So in summary, our bank is built for times like this. And we'll demonstrate that to you during the course of the call this afternoon. I was going to talk a few minutes about our most recent expansions in our community banking offices, which are in, our newest ones were in Asheville, North Carolina, and Panama City in Tallahassee, Florida. All are doing quite well. They're off to a great start. We're also in the process of opening a new office in the Lake Norman area of the Piedmont in North Carolina, which will be another community banking office. And we are very pleased that the start these are off to. We're building it the right way with core customers that our bankers have had a relationship with for many years. Rodney's going to talk in a few minutes about our new corresponding office in Houston. that we opened last month, so that's certainly a plus. It became apparent to us in mid-2022 that the Fed tightening cycle would lead to a focus on deposit rather than the lending side of the bank. We do anticipate some economic slowdown based on recent events. Rodney Rushin is going to give a quick review of our deposit franchise. Rodney?