Equity Bancshares Inc. (NYSE:EQBK) Q4 2022 Earnings Conference Call January 26, 2023 10:00 AM ET

Company Participants

Chris Navratil - Investor Relations

Brad Elliott - Founder, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer

Eric Newell - Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer

John Creech - Chief Credit Officer

Craig Anderson - Executive Vice President and President-Equity Bank

Conference Call Participants

Jeff Rulis - D.A. Davidson

Andrew Liesch - Piper Sandler

Damon DelMonte - KBW

Terry McEvoy - Stephens

Operator

Good day and thank you for standing by. And welcome to the Fourth Quarter 2022 Equity Bancshares, Inc. Earnings Conference Call. [Operator Instructions] Please be advised that today's conference is being recorded.

I would now like to hand the conference over to your speaker today, Chris Navratil with Equity Bancshares. Please go ahead.

Chris Navratil

Good morning. And thank you for joining Equity Bancshares conference call, which will include discussion and presentation of our fourth quarter 2022 results. Presentation slides to accompany our call are available via PDF for download at investor.equitybank.com by clicking the presentation deck. You may also click the event icon for today's call posted at investor.equitybank.com to view the webcast player. If you are viewing this call on our webcast player, please note that slides will not automatically advance.

Please refer Slide 2, including important information regarding forward-looking statements. From time to time, we may make forward-looking statements within today's call and actual results may vary. Following the presentation, we will allow time for questions and further discussion. Thank you all for joining us.

With that, I'd like to turn it over to our Chairman and CEO, Brad Elliot.

Brad Elliott

Thank you, Chris. Good morning. Welcome to our fourth quarter earnings call, and thank you for your interest in Equity Bancshares. With me on the call today are CFO, Eric Newell; COO, Greg Kossover; President, Craig Anderson; and Chief Credit Officer, John Creech.

I want to start by celebrating two accomplishments. First, net income for 2022 was a company record totaling $57.7 million. Second, we had a record revenue totaling $197.8 million. Both achievements show the strength of our franchise, our success in serving our customers and showcase our talented group of employees. A year ago, we had expectations of rising interest rates, but no one was forecasting 400 basis points of increases from the Federal Reserve.

Our team’s work to prepare for this inevitable rising rate environment in 2020 and 2021 by keeping our loan pricing short. The results speak for themselves. Loan yields in the fourth quarter of this year were 123 basis points higher than last year, anticipating a challenging environment for raising and maintaining deposits. I mobilized the teams to refine our sales approach to find incremental ways we could do better.