South Plains Financial Inc. (NASDAQ:SPFI) Q4 2022 Earnings Conference Call January 26, 2023 5:00 PM ET

Company Participants

Steve Crockett – Chief Financial Officer and Treasurer

Curtis Griffith – Chairman and Chief Executive Officer

Cory Newsom – President

Conference Call Participants

Brad Milsaps – Piper Sandler

Brady Gailey – KBW

Operator

Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the South Plains Financial Inc. Fourth Quarter 2022 Earnings Conference Call. During today's presentation, all parties will be in a listen-only mode. Following the presentation, the conference will be opened for questions with instructions to follow at that time. As a reminder, this conference call is being recorded.

I would now like to turn the call over to Mr. Steve Crockett, Chief Financial Officer and Treasurer of South Plains Financial. Please go ahead, sir.

Steve Crockett

Thank you, operator, and good afternoon everyone. We appreciate your participation in our fourth quarter 2022 earnings conference call. With me here today are Curtis Griffith, our Chairman and Chief Executive Officer; and Cory Newsom, our President. A replay of this call will be available on our website within two hours of the conclusion of the call until February 2nd, 2023. Additionally, a slide deck presentation to complement today's discussion is available on the News and Events section of our website.

Before we begin, let me remind everyone that this call may contain forward-looking statements and are subject to a variety of risks, uncertainties and other factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from those anticipated future results. Please see our safe harbor statement in our earnings press release that was issued this afternoon and on Slide 2 of the slide deck presentation available on our website. All comments made during today’s call are subject to those safe harbor statements. Any forward-looking statements presented herein are made only as of today’s date, and we do not undertake any duty to update such forward-looking statements, except as required by law.

Additionally, during today’s call, we may discuss certain non-GAAP measures, which we believe are useful in evaluating our performance. A reconciliation of these non-GAAP measures to the most comparable GAAP measures can also be found in our earnings release and on Slide 22 of the slide deck presentation.

At this point, I’ll turn the call over to Curtis.

Curtis Griffith

Thank you, Steve, and good afternoon. On today's call, I will briefly review the highlights of our fourth quarter and full year 2022 results, as well as our outlook for the year ahead. Cory will discuss our loan growth and the credit profile of our loan portfolio in more detail as well as review our strategic initiatives for 2023. Steve will then conclude with a more detailed review of our Q4 results. To start I am very proud of our execution over the last year as we successfully navigated a challenging economic environment and while the economic outlook remains uncertain, we believe we have positioned South Plains for continued success in the future. Central to our success has been the expansion of our commercial lending platform, which has driven the acceleration in our organic loan growth and contributed to an improvement to our run rate net interest income.