SmartFinancial, Inc.

Good morning and welcome to the Smart Financial second quarter 2022 earnings call. My name is Brika and I'll be your event specialist operating today's call. During the presentation, you'll have the opportunity to ask a question by pressing star followed by one on your telephone keypad. If you change your mind, please press star two. And for operator assistance, please press star zero. I now have the pleasure of handing the call over to Miller Welburn. So Miller, please go ahead when you're ready.

Thanks, Brica. Good morning to all of you, and we appreciate you joining us today for our Q2 2022 earnings call. We're excited to be on the call this morning and share an update on our company. We thank you for the interest all of you have in our progress, and it's important for us to hear your questions, comments, and feedback. Joining me on the call today are Billy Carroll, our President and CEO, Ron Gorczynski, our CFO, Rhett Jordan, our Chief Credit Officer, 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 this morning for the normal and customary disclaimers and forward-looking statements and comments. Please take a minute to review these. Q2 was a great quarter for our company, and we're very proud of what we've been able to accomplish in the first half of the year. Despite what the news media outlets will lead you to believe, our economy in the Southeast U.S., and in particular our Tennessee, Alabama, Florida markets, have been very busy this and exceptionally strong. I'm proud of the team for the focus, execution and continued improvements we have made to date. With that, I'm going to turn it over to Billy.

Thanks, Miller. And good morning, everyone. I'll jump right into some highlights to what we believe was an outstanding quarter. As we've communicated on prior calls, this year our main goal has been the integration of our new teams, executing our organic growth strategy and gaining operating leverage. and we're pretty much right where we thought we'd be, if not a little ahead of schedule. Again, it was a nice quarter. We reported $10.3 million in operating earnings, or 61 cents per share, strong organic growth on both sides of the balance sheet. For the quarter, 30% annualized growth on loans and 9% annualized on deposits, highlighted by a 14% annualized number on our non-maturity deposits. This was a result of great momentum from our recent liftouts, as well as solid performance from our legacy markets. We had nice growth in our non-interest income lines as well. Even with secondary market mortgage fee facing headwinds, it was still a great quarter on that front. We also started gaining operating leverage from our recent expansions as the efficiency ratio ticked down to 64%. and credit quality remain strong with no movement in our NPA ratio holding at 11 basis points. These highlights show how we are executing our plan. I'm going to let Rhett and Ron provide some details in a moment. But as I mentioned, the expansion of the bank through our recent lift outs have been a strong catalyst for growth. The new markets in Alabama and our expansion in Nashville are working as planned. But it's important to note that our legacy markets have performed very well, too. There's a great energy throughout our company right now. And it's not just the loan and deposit growth. The continued refinement of some of our ancillary business lines are leading to enhanced profitability. Our wealth and insurance platforms are both having very nice years, and our fountain equipment finance team had an outstanding quarter. We've grown balances in that group over 40% year-to-date while holding yields relatively well. We really like that line of business and are looking for ways to continue to expand it. Expense controls have been a continued focus as we gain leverage, and we believe this trend will continue as our expectations for the second half include fairly modest expense growth. So let me go ahead and hand it over to Rhett to walk through the balance sheet and credit, and then Ron will provide some more detail on the income and expense side.