ServisFirst Bancshares, Inc.

Greetings and welcome to Service First Bank Shares fourth quarter and year end 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 is being recorded. I would now like to turn the call over to Jim Harper. Thank you. You may begin.

Good afternoon and welcome to our year-end earnings call. Today's speakers will cover some highlights from the quarter and then take your questions. We'll have Tom Broughton, our CEO, Jim Harper, our Chief Credit Officer, and David Sparacio, 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 projections shared today due to factors described in the most recent 10-K and 10-Q file. Forward-looking statements speak only as of the date they are made. Service first assumes no duty to update. With that, I'll turn the call over to Tom.

Thank you very much, Dose, and good afternoon, and thank you for joining our fourth quarter earnings call. I'll give you a few highlights, and then Jim Harper will give a credit update, and then David Sprescia will give a financial update. So let's start with loans in the quarter. Loan growth was really in line with our pipeline projection with annualized growth of 12% for the quarter. Our pipeline quarter over quarter increased by 11%, but net of projected payoffs had increased by 80%. I believe that projected payoffs are most likely understated, but it does appear that payoff headwind is diminishing to some extent. A loan pipeline is inexact, but we have found it's indicative of a trend over several quarters. We're pleased with the quarterly loan growth and a little bit optimistic that things will improve a bit as we go forward. On the deposit side, we did continue to manage down our high-cost deposits, primarily municipal deposits, for both the quarter and the year. Given that if we have some robust loan demand, we'll find that we can attract some of those type deposits back if they are needed. In talking about new markets, we are excited, very excited about our new Texas banking team based in Houston. They joined us in early December and some during the course of December as we went on. They're in the process of opening an office, though they have been productive in temporary office space already. This group has worked together in the past, so they have hit the ground running. So we have nine members on the Houston team today and anticipate hiring more in the first and second quarters of the year. This is a much larger team than we have hired in the recent past since opening the bank in 2005. In addition, the Texas team, our correspondent Texas Correspondent Division has 35 active correspondent banking relationships and two correspondent bankers based in Texas. Speaking of correspondent banks, we do have 388 correspondent banks today, including 145 for which we settle at the Federal Reserve Bank. Our Asian Credit Card Program is also not only endorsed by the American Bankers Association, but by 12 state banking associations. We have 150 agent credit card banks and a robust pipeline of new clients and banks in 27 states. In the past year, we added Ohio and Maryland state banking associations that endorse our agent program. So we're very pleased with the correspondent growth and outlook. I'll now turn it over to Jim Harper for a credit update.