Call Start: 10:00 January 1, 0000 10:52 AM ET

SmartFinancial, Inc. (NASDAQ:SMBK)

Q1 2022 Earnings Conference Call

April 26, 2022, 10:00 AM ET

Company Participants

Billy Carroll – President and Chief Executive Officer

Miller Welborn – Chairman

Ron Gorczynski – Chief Financial Officer

Rhett Jordan – Chief Credit Officer

Conference Call Participants

Brett Rabatin – Hovde Group

Stephen Scouten – Piper Sandler

Kevin Fitzsimmons – D.A. Davidson

Matt Olney – Stephens

Feddie Strickland – Janney Montgomery Scott

Catherine Mealor – KBW

William Wallace – Raymond James

Operator

Hello and welcome to the SmartFinancial First Quarter 2022 Earnings Call. My name is Lauren and I'll be coordinating your call today. [Operator Instructions]. I'll now hand you over to our host, Miller Welborn, to begin. Miller, please go ahead.

Miller Welborn

Thanks Lauren. Good morning and thanks for joining us this morning for our Q1 2022 earnings call. It's great to be on the call this morning and share an update on our company. We appreciate the interest you each have in our progress and it's incredibly important for us to hear your questions, comments, and your feedbacks. Joining me on the call today are Billy Carroll, our President and CEO, Ron Gorczynski, our CFO, Rhett Jordan, CCO, and Nate Strall, our Director of Corporate Strategy. Before we get started, I'd like to ask each of you to please refer to Page 2 of our deck that we filed yesterday evening for the normal and customary disclaimers and forward-looking statements, comments, please take a minute to review these.

What a strong quarter by our team here at SmartBank on many fronts. Our year has started well just as we anticipated and had projected. We've demonstrated again our ability to outwork the competition and execute our strategic plan. Our organic pace of loan and deposit growth has been impressive. I'm extremely proud of the team for the focus and execution as our metrics continue to improve faster than forecasted in our 2022 strategic plan. With that, I'm going to hand it up to Billy.

Billy Carroll

Thanks, Miller, and good morning, everyone. As Miller said, this has been a nice start to 2022 for SmartFinancial. We're going to change the format a bit this quarter and condense some of the commentary since our strategic shift to more organic growth leads to a little bit less noise. So, I'll briefly touch on some highlights and then hand it over to Rhett to provide some color on balance sheet, lending, pipelines, and credit, and Ron will spend some time on financials, margins, and guidance. First, let's run through some highlights shown on page 3 of our deck. Not to bury the lead, we had a very nice growth quarter. Loans excluding PPP grew at 21% annualized and total deposits grew at 17% annualized, 23% if you look at just the non-time deposits. On the loan side, growth was well distributed throughout all of our regions, but the new lift-out groups in Alabama and Middle Tennessee were big contributors here. Rhett's going to add some more color on that shortly.