ServisFirst Bancshares, Inc. (SFBS)’s Fourth Quarter 2014 Earnings Conference Call Transcript

Thomas Broughton – President & CEO
Yes, we think our sweet spot’s probably between $3 million and $20 million, that’s a pretty big range. But somewhere in there and probably you know, most of our deals are going to be south of 10 million dollars. You think $1 million loans not very big until it becomes non-performing and then it’s a really big loan. $1 million is a lot of money when you could look at writing up a loan. So will you like to stay on the conservative side of our, and there are also better yields at that level than the big loans. So we look at those big loans sort of big banks.

Q: Great. And then last question this has to do with sort of your general fee kind of trends. Do you see any changes coming in terms of fees and what customers are demanding what they are kind of a variable charge?

Thomas Broughton – President & CEO
Now we always I guess, Bud, we could, we try to stay about 20% under on some of our competitors on fee. So we try to be an attractive. We give our customers a reason to move their banking to us and we could always you know, there’s always two things we can do to boost margin and net income and that’s to increase fees and reduce deposit cost. And I always like having a couple of silver bullets in the holster and probably shooting one up and then [inaudible] have it any more. So it’s nice to have those in the holster if we ever needed to which we would use. If it became obvious to all of us to that rates will stay down forever, I don’t know how we’d ever know that but we certainly would reduce, would incur to reduce deposit cost. If you are so wise and you have done it already as we won’t be very competitive in the market. I am kind of, I am not answering your question now Chris, I guess I needed a quire.

Q: No that’s perfectly fine. I appreciate the feedback, Tom. Thanks a lot.

Thomas Broughton – President & CEO
Yes sir.

Operator
And ladies and gentlemen, that will conclude our question and answer session. I would like to turn the conference back over to Tom Broughton for his closing remarks.

Thomas Broughton – President & CEO
Thank you for joining in this morning. I had one thing I meant to address and that is last quarter people asked us where were the new bankers coming from and so for the year, we added two in Birmingham, four in Montgomery, two in Mobile, two in Nashville and three in Charleston. So in all the three in Charleston, came on in the last two weeks of the year and we expect to add more production people than that in this calendar year of 2015.

So we appreciate your participation and we would love any feedback from any of you on what you would like us to do differently and we would be glad to. And thank you again and appreciate you joining in this morning.

Operator
Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, the conference has now concluded. We thank you for attending today’s presentation. You may now disconnect.