SouthState Bank Corporation

Thank you for standing by. My name is Eric and I will be your conference operator today. At this time, I would like to welcome everyone to the South State Corporation Q2 2025 earnings conference call. All lines have been placed on mute to prevent any background noise. After the speakers remarks, there will be a question and answer session. If you would like to ask a question during this time, simply press star followed by the number one on your telephone keypad. If you would like to withdraw your question, press star one again. I would now like to turn the call over to Will Matthews. Please go ahead.

Good morning and welcome to South State's second quarter 2025 earnings call. This is Will Matthews and I'm here with John Corbett, Steve Young and Jeremy Lucas. We'll follow our typical pattern of brief remarks followed by Q&A. I'll refer you to the earnings release and investor presentation under the investor relations tab of our website. Before we begin our remarks, I want to remind you that the comments we make may include forward-looking statements within the meaning of the federal securities laws and regulations. Any such forward-looking statements we may make are subject to the Safe Harbor rules. Please review the forward-looking disclaimer and Safe Harbor language in the press release and presentation for more information about our forward-looking statements and risks and uncertainties which may affect us. Now I'll turn the call over to you, John.

Thank you, Will. Good morning, everybody. As always, thank you for joining us. In January, we closed the independent financial transaction, a deal that we projected to be 27% accretive to our earnings per share. In the first quarter, the bank's earnings accelerated just as we forecast, but loan growth stalled with all the economic uncertainty. Remember, though, we mentioned in April that our loan pipelines were growing significantly in the spring. As you can see in the deck, the pipeline growth in the first quarter led to a 57% increase in loan production from around $2 billion a quarter to over $3 billion in the second quarter, and that led to solid loan growth. In Texas and Colorado specifically, loan production increased 35% and non-PCD loans grew by about $200 million. The loan momentum in Texas and Colorado occurred in the same quarter that we successfully completed the conversion of the computer systems. I'd be remiss if I didn't recognize and thank our Texas and Colorado team for their great work navigating through the conversion. It was tremendous teamwork all around, including 400 people who left the Southeast for three weeks to serve as ambassadors to help with the transition. And a special thank you to all the operations, IT, risk, finance, and HR teams that numbered over 1,000 people who made this conversion one of the best we've ever done. Now that the independent financial integration is complete, we've had some time to reflect on the progress that we've made. Our goal has always been to build a company in the best geography in the country, with the best scale, and to build the best business model. We believe that those three priorities will ultimately yield the best shareholder value. By adding Texas and Colorado to the franchise, we're now firmly established in the fastest growing markets in the country. And at $66 billion in assets, we've achieved a scale that's enabled us to make the necessary investments in technology and risk management, while simultaneously producing top quartile financial returns. Just look at the second quarter. Adjusted for merger costs, South State's return on assets was 1.45%. And our return on tangible common equity was nearly 20%. And finally, our entrepreneurial business model is producing a superior customer experience and a superior employee experience. Our retail bank ranks in the top quartile of JD Power's Net Promoter Score, and the scores are improving every year. Our commercial and middle market bank collectively ranked in the top 5% for award recognition in 2025 of the 600 banks tracked by Coalition Greenwich. And our level of employee engagement ranks in the top 10% of financial institutions in America, according to this year's employee surveys. So we built a team of professionals that is talented and engaged with a heart for serving each other and serving our clients. And it's a team that's delivering top financial returns for shareholders. We've now put the financial conversion in the rearview mirror. And as we look ahead to the prospects of an improving yield curve, we're in a great position to focus on and accelerate the bank's organic growth. Given the strength of our earnings growth and our capital levels, the board of directors felt comfortable this week to increase our dividend by 11%. Will, I'll turn it back to you to walk through the moving parts on the balance sheet and income statement.