SmartFinancial, Inc.

Hello and welcome to the Smart Financial First Quarter 2022 Earnings Call. My name is Lauren and I'll be coordinating your call today. If you would like to ask a question during the presentation, you may do so by pressing star followed by one on your telephone keypad. I will now hand you over to your host, Miller Wellborn, to begin. Miller, please go ahead.

Thanks, Lauren. Good morning and thanks for joining us this morning for our Q1 2022 earnings call. It's a treat to be on the call this morning and share an update on our company. We appreciate the interest you each have in our progress, and it's incredibly important for us to hear your questions, comments, and your feedback. Joining me on the call today are Billy Carroll, our President and CEO, Ron Gorczynski, our CFO, Rhett Jordan, CCO, and Nate 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 yesterday evening for the normal and customary disclaimers and forward-looking statements, comments. Please take a minute to review these. What a strong quarter by our team here at SmartBank on many fronts. Our year has started well, just as we anticipated and have projected. We demonstrated again our ability to outwork the competition and execute our strategic plan. Our organic pace of loan and deposit growth has been impressive. I'm extremely proud of the team for the focus and execution as our metrics continue to improve faster than forecasted in our 2022 strategic plan. With that, I'm going to hand it off to Billy.

Thanks, Miller, and good morning, everyone. As Miller said, this has been a nice start to 2022 for Smart Financial. We're going to change the format a bit this quarter and condense some of the commentary since our strategic shift to more organic growth leads to a little bit less noise. So I'll briefly touch on some highlights and then hand it over to Rhett to provide some color on balance sheet, lending, pipelines, and credit. And Ron will spend some time on financials, margins, and guidance. First, let's run through some highlights shown on page three of our deck. Not to bury the lead, we had a very nice growth quarter. Loans, excluding PPP, grew at 21% annualized, and deposits, total deposits, grew at 17% annualized, 23% if you look at just the non-time deposits. On the loan side, growth was well distributed throughout all of our regions, but the new lift-out groups in Alabama and Middle Tennessee were big contributors here. Rhett's going to add some more color on that shortly. Deposits continue to be very strong coming in on the upper end of our expectations with great growth in existing accounts coupled with some great new clients courtesy of the lift-out groups. Earnings were right on target with $8.6 million in operating net income coming in at $0.51 per share. Our diversification in revenue mix is also progressing well. Our wealth management platform posted nice revenue gains as our new financial advisors continued to move over assets. Our insurance subsidiary had a very solid income quarter, and our Fountain Equipment Finance subsidiary posted our best quarter of growth since acquiring it, and it continues to build a very solid pipeline. It's great to see these ancillary business lines beginning as we had anticipated. Also, as a reminder on page four, this is a great map of our franchise. It's a nice graphical representation of the footprint we're building out, a much stronger, denser zone than what we had just a couple of years back. As we stated on our last call, 2022 is a year to execute and capitalize on the investments we've made in 2021 as we move forward to get to stronger core earnings metrics. Continued positive trending of our ROA, ROE, and efficiency ratio are what we expect to see as these new investments start to continue to grow revenue. We've started the year off very well in that regard, and that is the goal. So, Rhett, let me hand it over to you now to jump into balance sheet trends and credit.