SmartFinancial, Inc.

Hello everyone and welcome to the Smart Financial third 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, press star followed by two. We will be taking questions at the end of the presentation. I will now hand you over to Nate Stroll, Director of Investor Relations to begin. Please go ahead.

Thanks, Deza. Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining us for Smart Financial's third 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 comments and 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 the factors that might cause these results to differ materially in our press release and in our SAC 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 acceptance 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 in the appendices of the earnings release and investor presentation filed on October 21st, 2025 with the SEC. And now, I'll turn it over to Billy Carroll to open our call.

Billy? 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, then 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. It's been a busy quarter for us, and we've had a number of very positive things happening with our company. The focus on execution that's going on right now is outstanding. Our team continues to have a keen focus on hitting targets we've set for this year in regard to revenue, returns, and prudent expense growth, and I remain very bullish on our outlook. So let me jump right into some of our highlights. 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 $26 per share, including the impacts of AOCI, and $26.63 excluding that impact. That's growth of over 26% annualized quarter over quarter. For the quarter, we posted operating earnings of $14.5 million, or 86 cents per diluted share. This is our sixth consecutive quarter of positive operating leverage, and we hit our $50 million quarterly revenue target in Q3, which we had set for our team this year. We actually hit it a few months early, and I look forward to seeing that number continue to grow. We had outstanding growth on both sides of the balance sheet, posting 10% annualized growth in loans, and 15% annualized growth in deposits. Our history of strong credit continues with only 22 basis points in non-performing assets. I'm pleased to see these numbers continue at exceptionally low levels. Total operating revenue came in at $50.8 million as net interest income continued to expand and non-interest income was solid again. And our operating non-interest expenses also came in on target at $32.6 million. Looking at the charts on page four and five, you'll see very nice trends. We're building our return metrics and most importantly growing our total revenue, EPS, and as I mentioned earlier, tangible book value. All those charts are great graphics to illustrate our execution. I'm looking forward to and expecting these trends to continue. So just a couple of additional high-level comments for me on growth. Our continued balance sheet expansion is a direct result of the focus of our sales teams. I've enjoyed watching this company transform into a very good organic grower. As we have hired well over the last several years, we've also built an outstanding foundational process that includes aggressively going after new client relationships, growing existing ones, along with a very diligent prospecting process. As I stated, we drew our loan book at a 10% annualized rate quarter over quarter, as sales momentum stays strong and balanced across all of our regions. Our average portfolio yield, including fees and accretion, was up to 6.14%, and our new loan production continues to come onto the books accretive to our total portfolio yield levels. Regarding deposits, Again, deposits were up 15% annualized or $179 million for the quarter, inclusive of reducing some of our brokered CD positions. It's important to recognize how we're building this bank with core relationships, as we have an intense focus on both sides of the balance sheet. We've made investments in our treasury management team over the last several quarters, and it's nice to see this line of business gain outstanding momentum. Our loan to deposit ratio is at 84%, which is actually down quarter over quarter, even with 10% loan growth. This strong position gives us continued flexibility to leverage a great balance sheet. Our pipelines continue to look good, and I'll discuss these a little bit more in my closing comments. But also, when you look at the highlight bullets in our earnings release, we've had a lot going on this quarter. All of it tied back to building the foundation of a bank that is on track to becoming one of the Southeast's strongest regional community banks. Everything accomplished this quarter is part of our focus on efficiency and growth. A well-executed subnet issuance, a sale with a subsequent minority reinvestment on our insurance platform, a repositioning trade with our bond portfolio that did not impact our book value as we leveraged the gain off the insurance deal, in continued contract evaluations and renegotiations, including our core data processing vendor, interchange payment rails, and some new tech-focused initiatives looking into 2026. So all in all, a very nice third quarter for our company. And I'm going to stop there, hand it over to Ron to let him dive into some greater detail.