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 screen pad. As a reminder, this conference is being recorded. It is now my pleasure to introduce your host, David Smith, Director of Investor Relations. Thank you, Davis. You may begin.

Good afternoon and welcome to our second quarter earnings call. Today's speakers will cover some highlights from the quarter and then take your questions. We will have Tom Broughton, our CEO, Henry Abbott, our chief credit officer, and Kirk Presley, our CFO. 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. Thank you for joining our second quarter earnings call. We think we'll have a really nice report that will please our investors today, and I'll start by discussing deposits. We did see A strong deposit growth of 16% annualized for the quarter. This is a bit unusual as we normally see flat deposits in the quarter due to April tax payments. We did see the usual decline in deposits in April due to tax payments, but we did see solid deposit growth in the last two months of the quarter. Our deposit pipeline is still really solid. Though many deposits never make it onto the pipeline, they just show up. So it's not as typically as accurate as a loan pipeline would be. So the growth is broad-based throughout our footprint. We also continue to add new correspondent banking relationships with 377 current correspondent bank relationships. The loan growth was very strong for the quarter at 15% annualized. We were pleased with both the level of loan demand and the profile of credit quality. We think many of our customers delayed projects last year after rates had risen a great deal in a short period of time, or they decided to make capital expenditures from cash. We are seeing them borrow again, which led to an increase in our C&I loans, and we still see the loan pipelines very strong. and it's increased 10% over last quarter. We added 14 new bankers in the quarter. We added five in Florida, four in the new Auburn Opelika market, and the rest spread throughout the footprint. We are pleased with a new team in Auburn Opelika. That is a $4.5 billion deposit market that's pretty well fagmented, so we think it's a great opportunity for us. The Memphis team in Tennessee is all in place. They were all there in the first quarter. They're all, you know, some of them at the end of the first quarter. They're all on board during the second quarter. They're beginning to show results, and we are optimistic for the balance of the year. With our strong liquidity, we are seeing opportunities to acquire new customers, and we are optimistic about the balance of the year. So with that, I will stop. I'm going to turn it over to Henry Abbott, our chief credit officer.