SmartFinancial, Inc.

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the Smart Financial, Inc. Earnings Release and Conference Call. My name is Glenn, and I will be the moderator for today's call. If you'd like to ask a question during the presentation, you may do so by pressing star 1 on a telephone keypad. I will now hand you over to your host, Miller Wilburn, to begin. Miller, please go ahead.

Thanks, Glenn. Good morning to all of you, and we appreciate you joining us today for our Q4 2022 Earnings Call. We're excited to be on the call this morning to visit with each of you about our bank. We continue to make great progress on all fronts, execute better every quarter, and deliver quality shareholder returns. We thank you for the interest that you all 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 Gorchinsky, our CFO, Rhett Jordan, our CCO, and Nate Strahl, 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. Q4 was a fantastic quarter for our company, and we're very proud of what we were able to accomplish for the quarter and for the entire year. Our year-over-year increase in earnings for the bank was strong, and I also believe we executed much better than most of our competition for the quarter. I'm proud of the team for the focus and continued improvements we made during 2022. With that, I'm going to turn it over to Billy.

Thanks, Miller. Good morning, everyone. This quarter was a great way to close out the year. As you'll see from the results, we continue to focus on growing both revenue and earnings per share. We had discussed our plan for 2022 on prior calls, and these results show how we are executing on transitioning this company into one that has a very solid core foundation and earning strength. I'll open my comments referencing our 2022 year in review slide on page three of the deck. This slide details the results of the work our team has been doing. Looking at the compound annual growth rate of these key areas, shows why we have been and believe will continue to be a great company to invest in. Looking at our fourth quarter performance on slide four, you will see very nice trends in our areas of key performance. We had great operating EPS for the quarter of 76 cents, and Ron's going to dive into those details more in a minute. We had nice expense control coupled with another record revenue quarter. Our loan growth continued to be outstanding, coming in at 17% annualized for Q4. There was a slight contraction in deposits as we let some rate-sensitive non-core balances roll out of the bank, as some competitors pushed rates higher than we wanted. We felt like there was no real spread advantage in keeping those deposits, but we did, however, defend our rate-sensitive core balances. Ron will discuss our betas in more detail, but we felt good where we entered the quarter on funding and related costs. Holding our loan-to-deposit ratio at 79% has allowed us to be selective on where we're increasing those funding costs. Our efficiency ratio trends are again positive, coming in at 61%, and I would also like to note the momentum in our non-interest income, especially given the drop in mortgage revenue. We're excited to see growth in many areas of these lines, including treasury fees, wealth, insurance, and capital markets. Credit remains outstanding, with NPAs holding steady quarter-to-quarter at 10 basis points, and their ROA and ROE were solid at 1.10%, and 16.5% respectively. The next couple of slides detail our markets. I'm not going to spend a lot of time here other than to say we were able to open our Franklin Brentwood, Tennessee office, allowing us to continue our expansion into the Nashville MSA. All of our markets continue to show steadiness. Our company, like others, continues to watch the economy closely as rising rates will slow some areas, but we continue to be cautiously optimistic even with elevated rates. I'll speak more to our outlook in my closing comments, but now let me flip it over to Rhett and let him go into a little bit more detail on lending and credit.