Primis Financial Corp. (NASDAQ:FRST) Q1 2024 Earnings Conference Call April 26, 2024 10:00 AM ET

Company Participants

Matt Switzer - Chief Financial Officer
Dennis Zember - President and Chief Executive Officer

Conference Call Participants

Casey Whitman - Piper Sandler
Christopher Marinac - Janney Montgomery Scott
Russell Gunther - Stephens

Operator

Thank you for standing by. My name is John, and I will be your conference operator for today. At this time, I would like to welcome everyone to the Primis Financial Corp. First Quarter Earnings Conference Call. All lines have been placed on mute prevent any background noise. After the speakers' remarks, there will be a question-and-answer session. [Operator Instructions]

I would now like to turn the call over to Matt Switzer, Chief Financial Officer. Please go ahead.

Matt Switzer

Good morning, and thank you for joining us for Primis Financial Corp's 2024 first quarter webcast and conference call.

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 site, 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. How a non-GAAP measure relates to the most comparable GAAP measure will be discussed when the non-GAAP measure is used if not readily apparent.

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

Dennis Zember

Thank you, Matt, I appreciate that. And I appreciate everyone that's joined our call today. I want to start by just saying that we've ploughed a lot of changes through our company over the last year. And I think it's very satisfying to see how all of those changes have added up to such material improvement. When I add back the cost of the consulting services that were a unique expense this quarter, I'm showing that we improved pre-tax pre-provision by about $3.2 million compared to a year ago. That's substantial improvement given just how serious the industry's headwinds have been. I want to give a little more color on where this improvement's come from.