ServisFirst Bancshares, Inc. (NYSE:SFBS) Q4 2022 Earnings Conference Call January 23, 2022 5:15 PM ET

Company Participants

David Mange - Director of Investor Relations

Tom Broughton - CEO

Bud Foshee - CFO

Henry Abbott - Chief Credit Officer

Rodney Rushing - Executive VP & COO

Conference Call Participants

Brad Milsaps - Piper Sandler

David Bishop - Hovde Group

Operator

Greetings and welcome to ServisFirst Bancshares Fourth Quarter Earnings Call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. A brief question-and-answer session will follow the formal presentation. [Operator Instructions] As a As a reminder, this conference is being recorded.

It is now my pleasure to introduce your host, David Mange, Director of Investor Relations. Thank you, David. You may begin.

David Mange

Good afternoon, and welcome to our fourth quarter earnings call. We will have Tom Broughton, our CEO; Bud Foshee, our CFO; and Henry Abbott, our Chief Credit Officer, covering some highlights from the quarter, and then we'll take your questions.

I'll now cover our forward-looking statements disclosure. Some of the discussion in today's earnings call may include forward-looking statements. Actual results may differ from any projections shared today due to factors described in our most recent 10-K and 10-Q filings. Forward-looking statements speak only as of the date they are made and ServisFirst assumes no duty to update them.

With that, I'll turn the call over to Tom.

Tom Broughton

Thank you, David. Good afternoon, and welcome to our fourth quarter conference call. I do want to make a few comments on the year, I think, in order before we move on to the 2023 outlook. We certainly are pleased with the results of the year. It's a second straight year that our earnings per share growth exceeded 20%.

Also, our return on equity exceeded 21% and our efficiency ratio was 29%. And I must say this trifecta of 20s was due to the hard work of the best bankers in the industry. They actually do a pretty good job of making an average bank CEO look better than average, so I appreciate what they do to make us successful and thank them for everything they've done for our company and for our shareholders.

However though, there is little time to celebrate success as our shareholders do want to know what we plan to do in 2023, so we'll move on and talking about -- little bit about the year and going forward. And talking about liquidity, our bankers have focused on building deposits since the middle of 2022. We have seen a steady increase in the deposit pipeline over the last four months. We're certainly pleased with the process and we're consistently seeing the deposit pipeline at 150% of the loan pipeline, this Bud will cover, we did grow liquidity in the fourth quarter and we're very pleased with our progress there. Fortunately, we've built our bank with core deposits, which are primarily commercial, not any brokered CDs and Federal Home Loan Bank Advances, our clean balance sheet is a tremendous asset in the current environment.