SmartFinancial, Inc.

Good day and welcome to the Smart Financial second quarter 2021 earnings conference call. All participants will be in a listen-only mode. Should you need assistance, please signal a conference specialist by pressing star then zero. After today's presentation, there will be an opportunity to ask questions. To ask a question, press star then one on your touchtone phone. To withdraw your question, press star then two. Please note this event is being recorded. I would now like to turn the conference over to Miller Welburn. Please go ahead.

Thanks, Tom, and good morning, and thanks for joining us this morning for our Q221 earnings call. We always love visiting with this group each quarter to talk about our progress and our company. Joining me on the call today are Billy Carroll, our President and CEO, Ron Gorczynski, our CFO, Rhett Jordan, our CCO, and Nate Strall, our Corporate Strategy Director. Before we get started, I'd like to ask each of you to please refer to page two of our deck that we filed this morning for the normal and customary disclaimers and forward-looking statements, comments. Please take a minute to review these. Folks, it's another great quarter by our team here at the bank. The passion and the energy and execution by all our team this year has been phenomenal. We've always challenged the strength and energy of the smart bank team, and hopefully folks will begin to recognize we are serious. Our organic pace of growth has been impressive, and we see nothing slowing that down in the months ahead. Between very strong markets and the addition of several new sales team members and a new market lift-out, we feel we're positioned perfectly to continue on our current pace. We talk often about how excited we are of where we are as a company, but I can't stress enough about how we feel this company is positioned today. With that, I'm going to turn it over to Billy.

Thanks, Miller, and good morning, everyone. Great group on the call today. As Miller said, another extremely solid quarter for our company. The first half of 2021 has been very exciting, and we demonstrated again this quarter just how our company is becoming one of the Southeast's best banks while building value for our shareholders. I'm going to hit on a couple of highlights, and then I'm going to turn it over to Ron to dive into financials and Rhett to touch on credit. We did have some great highlights for the quarter, starting with earnings and tangible book value. A very nice income quarter with operating earnings coming in at $9.1 million, or $0.60 a share, and TBD has increased to $18.69, a 10% increase year over year. We also had outstanding growth, which is, to me, one of our strongest highlights. Net organic growth on the loan side, excluding PPP numbers, was over 87%. and many, many more. Thank you. Thank you. We received a fifth consecutive regional top workplace award this quarter. We talk a lot about our numbers, which are very important, but it's also important to recognize the culture we are building in this company. We're a great place to work, and I really believe that separates us from the pack. Moving to slide five, this is a great slide to show just where some of our efforts have been focusing this year. If you'll note first, on the left side of this page, we are very excited to announce today the addition in our Alabama market with an expansion into Auburn. We've lifted out a great group of commercial bankers from a large regional bank there and are very thrilled to be in one of Alabama's fastest growing communities and another great southeastern college town. On the right side of the slide, you'll see some of our initiatives. The Sevier County Bank acquisition is moving along nicely and on track for closing this quarter, along with an October systems conversion and rebrand. Their bank has continued to perform well ahead of budget numbers through the first half, and we're excited to get them integrated soon. Air Fountain Equipment finance acquisition closed in early May and was integrated in Q2. This company is a great addition to our franchise and specializes primarily in the financing of heavy equipment, tractors, and trailers. All of the company's principals are staying with us and look forward to leveraging our larger balance sheet to scale an already very successful business. Ron's going to speak to Fountain's financial impacts in a moment. The lift out of the banking team in our Gulf Coast region during Q1 has seen early success. We expect them to be accreted faster than we had originally planned. And I'll speak more of the lift outs in my closing comments. But before I hand it to Rod, let me touch on finally on slide six. Our revenue diversification efforts are continuing to gain strength as seen on this slide. These business lines and subsidiaries We're already contributing nicely to our revenue line and will play an even more important role as we scale. As you can tell, we've got some great things going on, some great things happening in our company right now. So let me hand it over to Ron to dive into financials in greater detail. Ron?