ServisFirst Bancshares, Inc. (NYSE:SFBS) Earnings Conference Call July 15, 2024 5:15 PM ET

Company Participants

Davis Mange - Director of IR
Tom Broughton - CEO
Henry Abbott - CCO
Kirk Pressley - CFO
Rodney Rushing - EVP & COO

Conference Call Participants

Steven Moss - Raymond James
David Bishop - Hovde Group
Stephen Scouten - Piper Sandler

Operator

Greetings and welcome to the ServisFirst Bancshares Second 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 reminder, this conference is being recorded.

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

Davis Mange

Good afternoon, and welcome to our second quarter earnings call. Today's speakers will cover some highlights from the quarter and then take your questions. We will have Tom Broughton, our CEO; Henry Abbott, our Chief Credit Officer; and Kirk Pressley, our CFO.

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, Davis, and good afternoon. Thank you for joining our second quarter earnings call. We think we'll have a really nice report that will please our investors today, and I'll start by discussing deposits. We did see a strong deposit growth of 16% annualized for the quarter. This is a bit unusual, as we normally see flat deposits in the quarter due to April tax payments. We did see the usual decline in deposits in April due to tax payments, but we did see solid deposit growth in the last two months of the quarter. Our deposit pipeline is still really solid, though many deposits never make it onto the pipeline, they just show up. So they're not as -- is not as typically as accurate as a loan pipeline would be.

So the growth is broad based throughout our footprint. We also continue to add new correspondent banking relationships with 377 current correspondent bank relationships. The loan growth was very strong for the quarter at 15% annualized. We were pleased with both the level of loan demand and the profile of credit quality. We think many of our customers delayed projects last year after rates had risen a great deal in a short period of time or they decided to make capital expenditures from cash. We are seeing them borrow again, which led to an increase in our C&I loans. And we still see the loan pipeline is very strong. And it's increased 10% over last quarter.