ServisFirst Bancshares, Inc.

Greetings and welcome to the Service First Bank Shares Second Quarter Earnings Call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. A brief 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 is being recorded. It is now my pleasure to introduce your host, Davis Mange, IR Director. Thank you, David. You may begin.

Good afternoon, and welcome to our second quarter earnings call. We'll 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 projections shared today, to the factors described in the most recent 10-K and 10-Q filing. 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. Good afternoon. Thank you for joining us as we review the quarter. We really were generally very pleased with the quarterly results, and of course we have a saying that we're pleased but never satisfied. with the results of the year or the quarter, and that's always true. We're never satisfied, and we think we can do much better going forward. I'll give a few overview of a few of the things we're going to talk about. One of them is credit quality. Henry Abbott's going to give a review in a minute. We continue to have industry-leading credit quality, as he will discuss in a few minutes. We really don't see any Issues with all the commercial real estate that you read about in the headlines, we don't see any issues with our commercial real estate book at this point. Our strong balance sheet does provide us with a lot of opportunities, and we're seeing a lot of opportunities to grow relationships and core deposits. We don't have any broker deposits or federal home loan bank advances on our balance sheet. Very few banks can make that claim. If you include our correspondent Fed funds in our loan-to-deposit ratio, the adjusted loan-to-deposit ratio is 85% today, as the correspondent Fed funds flows back and forth between the nine-inch bearing and the Fed funds account based on the level of interest rates. So we're very pleased with a decline in our loan-to-deposit ratio to 85%. We did see very good deposit growth in the second quarter with good growth in core banking relationships. It was a good number. We are seeing the results of our deposit focused over the past year. Again, we focus on service and growing core deposits, not on the rate of which we pay as a primary driver. The deposit pipeline continues to be very robust today. We are pleased with where our liquidity ended up. We got our cash in short term. Treasury has now exceeded a billion dollars, which is a good level. We're proud of that. On the loan demand side, we are seeing some slowdown, I guess, over the last few months as bars assess the economy. And again, we've kind of been a little bit more cautious than normal as we assess the effect of recent events. on the economy, so I think the whole banking industry has been a little bit more cautious and the borrowers have been more cautious. But I think we're starting to see normalization and we'll see normalization in credit demand in the next few months. Our main focus has been on loan repricing efforts, as Bud Foshee will discuss in more detail in a few minutes. We are focused on addressing the efficiency of our banking team. We are proud of our efficiency ratio. industry-leading efficiency ratio, and we've reduced 11 producers on a year-to-date basis. Again, Buzz is going to talk more about loan repricing, but we'll see improvement in our margin over the next few quarters as the loan repricing continues. I'm going to turn it over to Rodney Rushing now to give a corresponding update.