ServisFirst Bancshares, Inc.

Greetings, and welcome to the Service First Bank Show's first quarter earnings conference call. At this time, all participants are in listen-only mode. If anyone should require operator assistance, please press star zero on your telephone keypad. A question and answer session will follow the formal presentation, and you may press star one to be placed into question queue. It's now my pleasure to turn the call over to Davis Mains, Director of Investor Relations. Davis, please go ahead.

Good afternoon. and welcome to our first quarter earnings call. We'll have Tom Broughton, our CEO, Jim Harper, our Chief Credit Officer, and David Sparacio, our CFO, covering some highlights from the quarter and then 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 Service First assumes no duty to update them.

With that, I'll turn the call over to Tom. David, thank you. Good afternoon and thank you for joining our first quarter conference call. We're really pleased with our start to the year and I'm going to highlight a few things before I turn it over to Jim Harper to give credit update. On the loan side, we had pretty solid loan growth for the quarter. Loan growth is usually not very robust in the first quarter, but we did see some Pretty good loan growth. We are seeing loan payoffs begin to diminish compared to the last two years. It's certainly a great thing. I don't know what kind of trend we'll see in the second quarter, but on a quarter-to-date basis, we've seen some very nice growth in the first 20 days or so of the quarter. On the forward loan pipeline, over 90 plus days, this is the strongest we've ever had. in our history. And of course, on a 90-day loan pipeline, the closing rate is much lower than on a 30-day loan pipeline, for example. But it is great to see a long list of new relationships across all of our markets and a variety of industries on that list. On the deposit side, they grew by 8%. percent annualized in the first quarter, which exceeded our expectations as we typically see our deposit growth in the second half of the year. We continue to try to manage our deposit costs to improve margins. We continue to attract new clients with our strong financial condition, our profitability, and our personal service that we provide to commercial clients and correspondent banks. David will elaborate in a few minutes, but our net interest margin continues to improve. Our efficiency ratio continues to be the best in class as we dropped below 30% in the first quarter. We do have 161 producers at quarter end. We've hired, over the last 12 months, 32 new FTEs, and 75% of those FTEs are frontline employees, so we should see, you know, obviously some improved productivity over time and profitable growth there. Our Houston team has found an office they've leased that they're not ready to move into yet, but they've got 26,000 square feet to build out. We do have 18 bankers on board there today, and their pipelines are building quite nicely. We actually closed our first loan in Texas, which is a large supply chain company with long-term contracts in March. So we're pleased with the start there. And now I'm going to turn it over to Jim Harper for a credit update.