SouthState Corporation (NASDAQ:SSB) Q1 2023 Earnings Conference Call April 28, 2023 9:00 AM ET

Company Participants

Will Matthews – Chief Financial Officer

John Corbett – Chief Executive Officer

Steve Young – Chief Strategy Officer

Conference Call Participants

Catherine Mealor – KBW

Kevin Fitzsimmons – D.A. Davidson

Stephen Scouten – Piper Sandler

Michael Rose – Raymond James

Brody Preston – UBS

Brandon King – Truist Securities

David Bishop – Hovde Group

Operator

Hello, everyone, and welcome to the SouthState Corporation Q1 2023 Earnings Conference Call. My name is Charlie and I'll be coordinating the call today. You will have the opportunity to ask a question at the end of the presentation. [Operator Instructions]

I will now hand over to our host, Will Matthews, CFO, to begin. Will, please go ahead.

Will Matthews

Good morning. Welcome to SouthState's first quarter 2023 earnings call. This is Will Matthews. I'm here with John Corbett, Steve Young and Jeremy Lucas. John and I will make a few brief prepared remarks before we open it up for questions. As always, a copy of our earnings release and our investor deck are located on our Investor Relations website.

Before we begin our remarks, let me remind you that 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 let me turn the call over to John Corbett, our CEO.

John Corbett

All right. Thank you, Will. Good morning, everybody. Thank you for making time to join us. In March, we passed the third anniversary of the pandemic shutdown of the economy. It also marked the third anniversary of the Fed's massive quantitative easing response. Last year, however, the Fed made a hard pivot from fighting the pandemic economy to fighting the inflation economy and intuitively we've all been worried that the speed and scale of that pivot would result in casualties. Well those casualties showed up in the banking system on March 8. In spite of the recent turmoil, the SouthState team delivered results that were right in line with our previous guidance. During the quarter, we produced growth in loans, deposits, liquidity and our capital ratios. Earnings per share of $1.83 increased 32% from the same period last year, and that yielded a return on tangible common equity of about 19%.