Primis Financial Corp. (NASDAQ:FRST) Q2 2023 Earnings Conference Call July 28, 2023 10:00 AM ET

Company Participants

Matthew Switzer - CFO

Dennis Zember - President & CEO

Conference Call Participants

Casey Whitman - Piper Sandler

Russell Gunther - Stephens

Christopher Marinac - Janney Montgomery Scott

Operator

Good morning. My name is David, and I'll be your conference operator today. At this time, I'd like to welcome everyone to the Primis Financial Corp. Second Quarter Earnings Call. Today's conference is being recorded. All lines have been placed on mute to prevent any background noise. After the speaker’s remarks, there will be a question-and-answer session. [Operator Instructions]

Thank you, Matthew Switzer, Chief Financial Officer, you may begin your conference.

Matthew Switzer

Good morning, and thank you for joining us. Before we begin, please note that many of our comments during this call will be forward-looking statements, which involve risk and uncertainty. There are many factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from the anticipated results or other expectations expressed in the forward-looking statements.

Further discussion of the company's risk factors and other important information regarding our forward-looking statements are part of our recent filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, including our recently filed earnings release, which has also been posted to the Investor Relations section of our corporate website primisbank.com. We undertake no obligation to update or revise forward-looking statements to reflect changed assumptions, the occurrence of unanticipated events or changes to future operating results over time.

In addition, some of the financial measures that we may discuss this morning are non-GAAP financial measures. A reconciliation of the non-GAAP measures to the most comparable GAAP measures can be found in our earnings release.

I will now turn the call over to our President and Chief Executive Officer, Dennis Zember.

Dennis Zember

Thank you, Matt, and thank you to all of you that have joined our second quarter conference call. I know this is a noisy quarter, but I really want to stress how excited I am for how we position the bank going forward. The cost savings initiative is pretty hard, but will make us much leaner and more profitable right away. The credit charge to move NPAs position us to have best-in-class credit quality with tiny concentrations in office or retail CRE.

Our digital platform has gone from 50 basis points over wholesale money to about 50 basis points below wholesale money in just six months. And lastly, while a lot of the industry is implementing the needed cost saves and branch reductions to offset revenue headwinds, I think we can offset all of ours with our move to the gain-on-sale strategy.