SmartFinancial, Inc.

Hello, everyone, and welcome to the Smart Financial second quarter 2025 earnings release and conference call. My name is Ezra, and I will be your coordinator today. If you would like to ask a question, please press star followed by one on your telephone keypad. And if you change your mind, please press star followed by two. We will be taking questions after the prepared remarks. I will now hand you over to the host, Nate Stroll, Director of Investor Relations, to begin. Please go ahead.

Thanks, Ezra. Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining us for Smart Financial's second quarter 2025 earnings conference call. During today's call, we will reference the slides and press release that are available in the investor relations section on our website, smartbank.com. Billy Carroll, our president and chief executive officer, will begin our call, followed by Ron Gorzinski, our chief financial officer, who will provide some additional commentary. We will be available to answer your questions at the end of the call. Our comments include forward-looking statements. These statements are subject to risks and uncertainties, and the actual results could vary materially. We list these factors that might cause the results to differ materially in our press release and in our SEC filings, which are available on our website. We do not assume any obligation to update any forward-looking statements because of new information, early developments, or otherwise, except as may be required by law. During the call, we will reference non-GAAP financial measures related to the company's performance. You may see the reconciliation of these measures and the appendices of the earnings relief and investor presentations filed on July 21st, 2025 with the FDC. And now I'll turn it over to Billy Carroll to open our call.

Thanks, Nate, and good morning, everyone. Great to be with you, and thank you for joining us today and for your interest in SMBK. I'll open our call today with some commentary and hand it over to Ron to walk through the numbers in some greater detail. After our prepared comments, we'll open it up with Ron, Nate, Rhett, Miller, and myself available for Q&A. So let's jump in. Another very nice quarter for us as we execute on what we've been messaging. You've heard us talk about execution over the last several quarters, and that's what we're doing. Our team has a keen focus on hitting the targets we've set out for our company this year in regard to revenue, returns, and prudent expense growth. As you'll hear on this call, our company is performing very well and we're remaining bullish on where we're headed. For the quarter, we posted net income gap and operating of $11.7 million or 69 cents per diluted share. I continue to be proud of our performance and I'm excited to watch us gain operating leverage. This is five consecutive quarters of positive leverage. Jumping into the highlights, I'll be referring to the first few pages in our deck First, and in my opinion, one of the most important metrics, we continue to increase the tangible book value of our company, moving up to $24.42 per share, including the impacts of AOCI, and $25.43, including that impact. That's growth of over 13% annualized quarter over quarter. Our balance sheet growth was strong. On the loan side, we grew at a 13% annualized pace for Q2, a little ahead of our expectations as our market teams are continuing to add outstanding new relationships. On the deposit side, growth was sound at 5% quarter over quarter annualized. I continue to be very pleased with the deposit side of our balance sheet as we add outstanding new relationships there as well. We also continue to hold our non-interest bearing percentage. The second quarter is usually a little softer with some seasonality, but we held up well, and Ron will provide more details on that in a moment. Our history of strong credit continues with the metric at just 19 basis points in NPAs. Credit is always a focus for our company and I'm pleased to see these numbers continue at exceptionally low levels. Total revenue came in at $49.2 million as net interest income continued to expand as we had anticipated. We also had another very nice non-interest income quarter. Non-interest expenses also came in on target again at $32.6 million. Looking at the charts on pages four and five, you'll see nice trends. We're building on our return metrics, and most importantly, growing total revenue, EPS, and as I mentioned earlier, tangible book value. All of those charts are great graphics to illustrate our execution, and I'm looking forward to and expecting these trends to continue. So a couple of additional high level comments for me on growth. Our growth was a direct result of the focus of our sales teams. We've hired well over the last several years, and we've also built an outstanding foundational process that includes aggressively going after new client relationships, growing existing ones, along with a diligent prospecting process. As I stated, we grew our loan book at 13% annualized for the quarter. as sales momentum stayed strong and balanced across all of our regions. Our average portfolio yield, including fees and accretion, was up to 6.07%, and our new loan production continues to come onto the books accretive to our total portfolio yield levels. In regard to deposits, I mentioned a moment ago that I'm very proud of what we've done on the deposit front. Our loan-to-deposit ratio is 85%, which is still a nice spot for us, This strong position gives us continued flexibility to leverage our strong balance sheet. Our balance sheet pipelines continue to feel good. I'll discuss this a little more in my closing comments, but all in all, a really nice way to wrap up the first half of 2025. I'm going to stop there and hand it over to Ron to let him dive into some details for us. Ron?