SmartFinancial, Inc.

Hello and welcome to today's Smart Financial fourth quarter 2021 earnings call. My name is Bailey. I'll be your moderator for today's call. All lines will be muted during the moderation for today's call. If you would like to ask a question, please press star followed by one on your telephone keypad. I would now like to pass the conference over to our host, Miller Wilburn. Miller, please go ahead.

Thanks, Bailey. Good morning and thanks for joining us this morning for our Q4 2021 earnings call. We always enjoy visiting with this group each quarter to talk about our progress in our company. Joining me on the call today are Billy Carroll, our President and CEO, Ron Gorczynski, our CFO, Rhett Jordan, our Chief Credit Officer, and Nathan Strall, our Director of Corporate Strategy. 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 and comments. Please take a moment to review these. What a fantastic quarter by our team here at SmartBank and a great end to a really strong year for our company. We've demonstrated, again, our ability to outwork the competition and execute our strategic plan. Our organic pace of growth has been impressive, and we've seen nothing Thanks, Miller. And good morning, everyone. As Miller said, this has been one heck of a year for Smart Financial.

We wrapped up another solid quarter to close out 2021, and I believe this last year was probably as transformative as any we've had. The evolution our company has made in the last 12 months has been incredible, and our position for the future is very exciting. First, let me touch on some slides shown in our deck. I'll reference page three. First, we wrapped up our severe county bank acquisition. achieving our targeted cost saves of over 63%. We've also done a nice job there retaining assets and the necessary sales team pieces while picking up a great long-term core deposit base. This was a great transaction for us. Our Fountain Equipment Finance Group that was acquired mid-year has had a solid production quarter. We remain very bullish on this line of business in 2022 as we now look to leverage the bank's footprint and sales network. Organically, our investment in several new sales teams in the second half of 2021 is progressing well. We've added over 25 bankers during this expansion, adding several great new markets to our franchise. During Q4, our new dealer floor plan team has put the needed operational pieces in place, and we're excited to see this group go to market in 2022. We also made an exciting addition to our wealth management team by bringing on an experienced group in our Gulf Coast region that had previously managed over $350 million in AUM. This team is now fully integrated and having some great early success. Let me touch on our organic growth expansion now since that has been a major pivot for us. Page 4 provides a nice map. Those familiar with our story know we took advantage of some great opportunities during 2021 to add talent and deepen our presence and our existing footprint. This has been a large investment for us and one that will and quite frankly already has dramatically changed our company in a great way. To update where we are on what we have added just in the last couple of quarters, new branch offices are now open in Montgomery, Dothan, Mobile, and Auburn, Alabama. We've opened our Birmingham, Alabama LPO and added our market leadership there. We've expanded our sales team in Tallahassee, Florida, and we've expanded our national presence with the addition of several outstanding bankers in one of the country's most dynamic markets. As we've communicated, these investments will take a few quarters to start moving the EPS line, but I'm extremely confident that we will create strong revenue growth as we move into the latter part of 2022. Page 5 details these new markets, and as you can see, we're rounding out our footprint to include some of the best growth markets in the country. Before I turn it over to Rhett and Ron to dive into the details, allow me to touch on a few numbers referenced on page 6 of the deck. For the quarter, $8.7 million in operating net income, or 52 cents per share, 12% annualized organic loan growth in Q4, right on top of where we thought we would be, 23% annualized deposit growth for the quarter, as we continue to build liquidity. Our deposit mix transition over the last year does not need to go unnoticed. We're building a really strong core funding base. 11 basis points on non-performing assets as credit quality remains very strong. Double-digit return on tangible common equity and footings now at $4.6 billion in assets, rounding out a really, really nice quarter for us. So let me hand it over to Rhett to dive into the balance sheet and the credit metrics a little bit. Rhett?