Below is transcript of the ServisFirst Bancshares, Inc. (NASDAQ:SFBS)’s Fourth Quarter 2014 Earnings Conference Call, held on Wednesday, January 21, 2015 at 9:30 a.m. EST.
ServisFirst Bancshares, Inc. (NASDAQ:SFBS) is a bank holding company. The Company’s wholly owned subsidiary, ServisFirst Bank, an Alabama banking corporation, provides commercial banking services through 12 full-service banking offices located in Alabama and the panhandle of Florida, as well as a loan production office in Nashville, Tennessee.
Company Representatives:
Davis Mange, Investor Relations Manager
Thomas Broughton, President & CEO
William Foshee, CFO
Analysts:
Michael Rose, Raymond James
Kevin Fitzsimmons, Hovde Group
Brad Milsaps, Sandler O’Neill
Christopher Marinac, FIG Partners.
Operator
Good morning and welcome to the ServisFirst Bancshares Fourth Quarter 2014 Earnings Conference Call. All participants will be in listen-only mode, should you need assistance, please signal a conference specialist by pressing the * key, followed by 0. After today’s presentation, there will be an opportunity to ask questions. To ask a question, you may press * then 1 on your telephone keypad. To withdrawal your question, please press * then 2. Please note, this event is being recorded.
Some of the discussion in today’s earnings call may include forward-looking statements within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995 giving our expectations or predictions of future financial or business performance or conditions. These forward-looking statements are subject to numerous assumptions, risks and uncertainties, which change over time. Actual results may differ materially from any projections shared today. So please refer to our most recent 10-K and 10-Q filings for a more complete description of factors which could influence such projections. Forward-looking statements speak only as of the date they are made, and ServisFirst assumes no duty to update forward-looking statements. I would now like to turn the conference over to Davis Mange, Director of Investor Relations. Please go ahead sir.
Davis Mange – Investor Relations Manager
Thank you, Denise. Good morning and welcome to the ServisFirst Bancshares fourth quarter earnings call. I am Davis Mange, Investor Relations Manager. Leading today’s call will be Tom Broughton, CEO; and Bud Foshee, CFO who will begin with a brief overview and then take questions. I will now turn the call over to Tom Broughton.
Thomas Broughton – President & CEO
Good morning to all out again. This is our second conference call. And if you are new to our conference call we are not going to read the press release to you. We know you can all read and we assume you’ve read everything that you wanted to read in it.
I will give a brief overview of a few high points and then Bud can do a few numbers and then you can ask your questions and go about your day.
First of all the loan growth, loan growth was good for the quarter, 25% annualized. One question last quarter was, where was the loan growth? And I will also cover, when was the loan growth? The when was about, over half of our loan growth in the… our loan growth was about $200 million for the quarter, $110 million of that came in December and much of that came in the second half of December.
I’ve had various people ask me why we have such great loan growth in the fourth quarter and that’s the best of the year and I have given different theories about people worried about changes in text policy or whatever. And finally yesterday one of our people said, Tom, we pay all our production people year after year in and they don’t get a close by year-end, it’s the next year. So they have to wait another year to get their incentive pay. So that’s probably a better reason why we have good loan growth than I have ever given you before. That’s probably the real reason. So that did impact, loan kind of impacts our margin for the quarter because the loan growth was late in the quarter but where it came from, about half the loan growth came from Birmingham; Birmingham continues to be our flagship operation.
