Good day, and thank you for standing by. Welcome to the Great Southern Bancorp third quarter 2021 earnings call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. After the speaker presentation, there will be a question and answer session. To ask a question during that session, you will need to press star one on your telephone. Please be advised that today's conference is being recorded. If you require assistance during the conference, please press star zero. I would now like to hand the conference over to Kelly Polonus, investor relations. Please go ahead. Good afternoon, and welcome. The purpose of this call is to discuss the company's results for the quarter ending September 30th, 2021. Before we begin, I need to remind you that during this call, we may make forward-looking statements about future events and financial performance. Please do not place undue reliance on any forward-looking statements which speak only as of the date they are made. Please see our forward-looking statements disclosure in our third quarter 2021 earnings release for more information. President and CEO, Joe Turner, and Chief Financial Officer, Rex Copeland, are on the call with me today. I'll now turn the call over to Joe Turner. All right. Thanks, Kelly. Well, good afternoon, and we certainly appreciate you joining us today. We are very pleased with our third quarter earnings and continued strong financial position. I think both of which reflect our associates' ongoing commitment to take care of our customers in a very difficult operating environment. As is typical, I'll provide some brief remarks about the company's performance and turn the call over to Rex Copeland, our CFO, who will get into more detail on our financial results. We'll open it up for questions. For the third quarter of 2021, we earned $20.4 million, or $1.49 per diluted common share, compared to $13.5 million, or $0.96 per share for the same period in 2020. Our increased earnings were primarily driven by a negative credit loss provision, which is indicative of continued strong credit quality, an improving economic situation, and a lower loan portfolio balance. We had higher net interest income, primarily driven by reduced deposit costs as well as PPP deferred fee income recognition. We had increased non-interest income, mainly related to debit card and ATM fees. Importantly, our pre-provision revenue continues to be strong, with 2021 levels exceeding those achieved in 2020. Our earnings performance ratios were solid, with an annualized return on average assets of 1.47%, a return on equity of 12.82%, and an efficiency ratio of 57.2%. Thus far in 2021, loan production activity in our markets has been quite vigorous. The loan repayments, including customer refinancing, project sales, have been very high as well, historically high. In fact, I looked at a report yesterday where we compared 2021 origination through 9/30 to 2019 and 2020 loan origination, both of which were very good years from a loan origination standpoint. We're on track to equal or exceed those two years in 2021. Our outstanding loans have decreased to $271 million compared to the end of 2020. About $90 million of that is a decrease in the PPP loans. Our pipeline of loan commitments and unfunded loans remains strong. That pipeline increased about $100 million from the end of the second quarter. Certainly, this type of lending environment can be dangerous for banks. Like credit cycles in the past, we recognize the current short-term growth challenges. Our commitment to our shareholders is that we will not stretch our credit culture discipline for the sake of loan growth. We manage for the long term and understand that we will have periodic ebbs and flows in our loan portfolio. As far as Paycheck Protection Program, about 100% of the round one Paycheck Protection loans, about $121 million, have been forgiven, maybe just a very small portion have not. We don't expect to have problems with those. Second round, which began in January, we did about $58 million in loans, and I think we've had $26 million of those forgiven. We have total deferred fees in the second round of $3.7 million. We recognized $1.6 million of that in the first quarter, and we have $2.1 million remains pretty steady at 1.56% of loans. From a capital standpoint, our capital remains extremely strong, $624 million. That's down about $5 million from the end of the year and down about $5 million or $6 million, I think, from the end of the second quarter as well. Basically, we made $20 million, a little over, in the third quarter. We paid a dividend of between $4 million and $5 million. We probably spent about $15 million buying back stock. That equaled about our earnings. The reduction in our capital is from a reduction in the market value of our securities portfolio and our interest rate swap. I'll also remind you that during the quarter, we redeemed $75 million of subordinated notes, and that occurred in August. We had about a half a quarter of the benefit from that redemption. That concludes my prepared remarks. I'll turn the call over to Rex Copeland at this time. All right. Thank you, Joe. I'm going to start by talking a little bit about net interest income and margin. Our net interest income in the third quarter of 2021 increased about $755,000, or about 1.7%, compared to the third quarter in 2020. This quarter, we were $44.9 million in net interest income, $44.2 million in the third quarter last year, and then we were at $44.7 million in the second quarter of 2021. Those values didn't change a whole lot between those three periods, but they've been fairly consistent as far as the dollars go. This quarter, as I think Joe mentioned, we did have some accretion income from the PPP loans. The net deferred fees that went to income was about $1.6 million in the third quarter this year, and we had about $1.1 million that went to income from PPP deferred fees in the second quarter of 2021. Joe said we have about $2.1 million left in net deferred PPP fees, and we think a large portion of that is going to go to income in the fourth quarter. We do expect our customers are probably going to continue to avail themselves of getting those loans forgiven and repaid. We expect most of that will occur yet in the fourth quarter. The net interest margin was 3.36% in both the third quarter of this year and last year. For the three months ended September 30th this year, our net interest margin increased one basis point compared to 3.35% in the three months ended June 30 of this year. If you compare back this quarter to the previous year quarter, the average yield on loans decreased about 11 basis points, while the average rate on interest-bearing deposits declined by about 46 basis points. The margin compression really resulted from changes in our asset mix, with our average cash equivalents increasing by about $333 million this quarter period versus a year ago quarter period, and average loans in that same time frame were down by about $266 million. Significant shift from loans into cash and cash equivalent type assets. Without that additional liquidity, if you had the same kind of level of liquidity that we had a year ago, our net interest margin would have been about 23 basis points higher. In addition, this year, we also had lower accretion income from our FDIC-acquired portfolios. That played into it from this quarter of this year versus the previous year quarter. The core net interest margin, which excludes that yield accretion, was 334 and 327 for the three months ended September 30, 2021 and 2020. Our kind of core margin was up a bit from where it was a year ago. Overall, our funding costs continued to decline in the third quarter as our time deposits continued to reprice lower at maturity. We should be able to see that continue here in the fourth quarter and probably into the first half of next year. I think at the end of September, our cost of time deposits was about 66 basis points, and most recently, we've been originating overall sort of an average new CD rate of around 35-40 basis points. Also while our net interest margin percentage has been impacted by the increased deposits and changes in asset mix, in terms of dollars for the nine-month period this year versus last, our net interest income was $133.7 million in the first nine months this year, up from $132.6 million in the same nine-month period a year ago. Some of the factors in that also are, in addition, comparing those nine-month periods, we had $3.2 million less in FDIC-acquired loan accretion income, as I mentioned earlier, and $1.4 million more in interest expense on subordinated notes as we issued some additional notes in June of 2020. We did have a reduction for the half of the quarter of the sub-debt that we did redeem, but overall, the expenses were higher in the quarter than they were a year ago. Partially offsetting these items, we also did recognize $2.9 million more in deferred PPP loan fees this year, first nine months, versus the first ninemonths of last year. Non-interest income was up by about $332,000 to $9.8 million compared to the year ago third quarter. As Joe mentioned, point of sale and ATM fees were higher. That was an increase of about $657,000 in comparing the two quarters. We just had more activity, more debit card usage, and that's been going on for the most part since the pandemic began, maybe not right off the bat, but certainly more recently, and that level has just continued to kind of stay fairly steady at a higher level than it was pre-pandemic. Overdraft and insufficient fund fees were up about $200,000 compared to the previous year quarter. Really, we're sort of at a normal, I think a more normal level now. In 2020, we had waived a lot of fees as the pandemic had shut down different retail establishments. There were some stay-at-home orders and things like that. We had gone through early on and determined to be pretty lenient with waiving on overdraft and insufficient. The last thing in non-interest income is net gains on loan sales. This third quarter versus previous year third quarter, the net gain on loan sales actually decreased by about $537,000. The decrease really was just a little bit less origination this year versus last. In the third quarter last year, we had pretty significant refinance activity going on. Rates were very low. Also a lot of purchase activity. I would say now the purchase activity is still going fairly strongly, but refinance in the third quarter had dropped back quite a bit from where it was a year ago, maybe to a more normal level. Non-interest expense, I'll talk about that for just a moment. For the quarter ended September 30 this year, our non-interest expense decreased about $649,000 to $31.3 million when you compare it to the year ago quarter. This was primarily driven by an $867,000 decrease in salary and employee benefits compared to the prior year quarter. In the 2020 period, we did have a special bonus that we paid to our employees in response to some of the ongoing impacts with COVID-19. There was $1.1 million of bonus and related costs that occurred in 2020's period that did not reoccur in 2021. The efficiency ratio for the third quarter of this year was 57.27%. That compared to 59.64% for the same quarter in 2020. Income taxes, I'll kind of wrap up with that. The tax rate was just under 21% this third quarter of this year, a little bit less than 21.5% in the third quarter last year. The effective rate is probably, we expect, is going to be somewhere around that 20%-21% as we move through the rest of this year and probably into the beginning of next year. It is impacted a lot by the tax credit activities that we have. Some of our municipal and loan activities that are tax exempt, the income from those are tax exempt. Then also just the level of income in a variety of states that we operate in, where each state obviously has different tax rates, and so the mix plays into some of that with our overall tax rate that we have. That concludes the remarks that I have. At this time, we'll entertain questions, and let me ask our operator to once again remind the attendees on how to queue in for questions. As a reminder, to ask a question, you will need to press star one on your telephone. To withdraw your question, press the pound key. Please stand by while we compile the Q&A roster. Our first question comes from the line of Damon DelMonte with KBW. Your line is open. Hey, good afternoon, guys. Hope everybody's doing well today. Hi, Damon. I wanted to start off with loan growth. Joe, in your opening comments, you talked about the strength of the origination activity that you guys have been seeing, and that's kind of been muted by payoffs and whatnot. If we look back over the last three or four quarters, net loan growth has been pretty hard to come by. What are you seeing today, and kind of how are you feeling going forward about being able to post some positive net growth in the coming quarters? I see basically the same factors at play that have been at play over the last year. I think what's driving the high levels of refinance and that sort of activity, Damon, is just all the cash in the system. There's just so much competition. The risk-free rate of return right now for mortgage-backed, agency mortgage-backed, five-year, seven-year duration, whatever, is 1.5%. If somebody can refi a loan at 3%, 3.25%, and it's typically not banks, it would be more life companies or agencies or those sorts of lenders. I mean, they're pretty quick to do it. I don't see anything today really that's any different than what we've seen over the past year. I think that will continue to be a headwind probably until we see those rates come up a little bit. If people were able to go out and get 2.25% or 2.5% mortgage-backed, they probably aren't going to be so quick to refi those projects. Really, I think what we're seeing is that those projects that we're doing, we've told you they're high quality, they are extremely high quality, I think. The longer-term lenders are willing to jump into them more quickly. Whereas before, they were wanting to wait for stabilization. Now maybe they're willing to jump in at construction completion. We just have to continue to be diligent. I think we've mentioned on previous calls that we're exploring new LPO sites, and so we're actively engaged in that. We're just going to manage through this process. Got it. Okay. All right, it sounds like at least another quarter, maybe two, before we start to see some positive momentum in the portfolio? Yeah, it's just hard to say. I will say, $90 million of the repayment thus far this year was PPP loans. Obviously, that's not going to repeat. Right? $35 million roughly is pay down in the consumer portfolio, which I'm sure is primarily indirect. That's not going to repeat. That's $125 of the pay down in our portfolio that likely won't repeat in future quarters. Like I said earlier, there's still factors at play which I'm sure are going to make repayments higher than typical. Got it. Okay. That's helpful. I appreciate the color. Then with regards to expenses, there was kind of an uptick in the occupancy and equipment expense. Were there any one-time charges in there, Rex? Yeah, Rex can cover that. It wasn't all of it, but there were some things. There was an adjustment that we made to some asset lives that may have been a couple of $100,000 or so that we included to catch up in some expense there that shouldn't go back to normal in the fourth quarter. When you have a banking center network like we've got and offices, in the summer months, we had some parking lot repairs and things like that. There's just things like that go on that don't necessarily occur. Likewise, in the winter months, we're going to have snow removal probably in some places. Some of that, yes, was, I would say, not going to recur, there's some things that probably are in there. Okay. When we kind of look at the overall expense base, like next quarter, do you think we kind of keep it flat to this level and kind of back out a couple of those one-time items and then get a little bit of normal growth in there? Yeah, the two challenges that are present, I think, not just for Great Southern, but generally in the banking business, is all this cash in the system is compressing rates and making the margin business more difficult. It's compressing margins, and it's making it tougher to grow assets. That's one issue. I think that's a temporary thing. I don't know if that's going to last six months, one year, 18 months, but I think it's going to be temporary. The other thing that's interesting, though, is the employment situation in the country. It's tough. I would assume that employee costs are going to come up some as we try to hire new people and keep the people we have. It's a very tough employment market right now. Some of that's actually been occurring already. Yeah. We're actually seeing some of that already this year. Right. have had to adjust some salaries and trying to hire people and things of that nature. It's been harder. Right to locate staff and potential employees. Right. We always have open positions. We have 1,200 employees. I would think kind of steady state is 40 or so open positions, but I think we have close to 100 right now. It's hard to find folks. Obviously, we all read the paper, that's not Great Southern specific, that's pretty much economy-wide. Okay. Great. Just lastly on credit trends, obviously, it remained very strong. You had a negative provision this quarter for the third quarter in a row. With the outlook for loan growth being subdued for the next couple of quarters and credit trends remaining good, is it fair to expect another negative provision in the fourth quarter? At least very, very low, like zero? If we were to have another quarter with no charge-off, and if we had declining loan balances, it's possible certainly that the allowance could go down. We feel like we have a well-funded allowance based on the level of our loan portfolio right now. If all other things being equal, if the loan portfolio were to go down a little bit, yeah, I guess the allowance could go down a little bit as well. Okay. All right. That's all that I had. Thank you very much, guys. Appreciate it. Okay. Thanks, Damon. Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Andrew Liesch with Piper Sandler. Hey everyone. Good afternoon. Hey, Andrew Liesch. How are you? Hi. Good, thanks. Just wanted to touch on the margin here a little bit, and some of the factors at play there. How much room do you think is still left on the deposit side? I know you referenced some CDs that are still set to mature, but are these maturities and the funding cost improvement, should that be enough to offset yield pressures? I don't know. I'll take a shot and then let Rex. If you look at our second to last page of our release, I think it's the second to last page, we show the level of time deposits, Andrew, and that's really probably where most of the repricing will come. We show the rate on our time deposits is 66 basis points. Right. We're probably paying about half that right now. There could certainly be some additional relief there. As far as the maturities go, just to give you an idea, within three months, about $270 million of that CD portfolio will mature within six months, cumulatively about $438 million, within the next year, about $795 million. Most of that portfolio within the next 12 months is going to have a chance to reprice at maturity. Yeah. Got it. That was actually going to be my follow-up on that side, thank you for that. Obviously there's been some very good loan production, also elevated payoffs. The loans that you've been adding, I guess, what's been the blended rate on those? I don't have that number. We may try to put something like that in the 10-Q maybe, Andrew. Got it. Yeah, I'll look out for that. The ones that pay off, certainly appreciate you guys sticking to your knitting with pricing and underwriting. I'm just kind of curious, what are the yields that you guys are losing? What are competitors offering that's making it uneconomical for you? I think what we see, as we've said, most of the deals that we do, especially multifamily or senior care, industrial, whatever, we have 30%-40% equity in. When those longer term lenders come in, they're cutting our rates some, but they're also probably giving the borrowers back some of their equity. We have guarantees and typically those long-term loans do not have guarantees or at least have very limited guarantees. It's at an amount, at a guarantee structure, and at a rate that we just wouldn't want to do. Got it. Yeah, that makes it tough to compete there. Thank you for taking the questions. I will step back. All right, thanks, Andrew. Thank you. As a reminder, to ask a question, please press star one on your telephone. Our next question comes from John Rodis with Janney. Your line is open. Hey, good afternoon, guys. Hi, John. Hey, John. Hey. Joe, just back to loans in a second. I guess you said in the press release that it's mostly multifamily. Are the payoffs in any particular market, or is it pretty much across the whole footprint? I think it's across the board, John. One thing that's interesting, I don't know if any of you look at our loan presentation that we file every quarter. Rex and I were talking about this earlier. I looked at that. We have a page in there that shows the multifamily portfolio and sort of stratifies it by LTV. Page 11. Page 11. Yeah, page 11. If you look at that, you'll note that as of June 30, 2021, we had about $70 million of a billion-dollar multifamily portfolio that was over 76% LTV. At the end of September, we only had $20 million that was over that LTV. Obviously, $50 million of what paid off in the quarter was higher LTV deals. Now, I'm sure they weren't bad deals. I'm sure they were good deals. It's across geographies. It's probably higher LTV, lower LTV. I think there's a lot of demand for that product out there right now. Yeah, that's interesting. Thanks, Rex, just a question on the securities portfolio. It's trended down again this quarter. If net loan growth remains sort of challenging in the near term, would you expect to grow the securities portfolio some, or is it still flattish to down? Our portfolio is kind of structured. We put most of this portfolio on back maybe two to three years ago, and it's fixed rate, agency, commercial-type projects. We've been able to maintain our yield so far at around 260+. That's been helpful, and it probably pays down on average, $4 million or $5 million a month, just normal payment, because there's some lockout structure on this and prepayment structure on it, so we don't get a normal single-family portfolio with no prepayment stuff on it. We don't get these wild swings coming in with big prepayments generally on that portfolio, at least not yet, for a while anyway. We did add some in that portfolio back in, I think, March of this year. I think at that time, the 10-year Treasury yield had gotten back up to around 175 or something like that, and then the yields had gone back down through the second and a lot of the third quarter. Their yields are coming back up again a little bit now. Long-winded answer, but yeah, we're going to look at that. I don't know for sure what we're going to do yet, but that is something that we need to consider is it time to maybe add some more securities in the portfolio again with the extra cash that we have? One of the things that we're doing, too, is we've got, on the funding side, we've got some internet-based CD deposits. Those, as they come due, we've basically dropped our rate to almost zero, and the majority of those, as they mature, are just going away. We're trying to eat up some of our liquidity with just letting those deposits roll off and not replace them at any cost, really. What's rolling off there is probably going to be, I don't know, $70 million or so coming up in the next few months. That will not get replaced. That, it should eat into some of that extra liquidity that we have as well. Yeah, John, we're going to look at some different avenues to see if there's some things that we might want to try to do with the liquidity that we have sitting there now. Okay, thanks, Rex. Rex, maybe just one final question on, just back to expenses. It looks like advertising was up about $400,000 last quarter to almost $1 million. Was that more timing, or does that maybe pull back some going forward? Yeah, we'll tell Kelly she has to pull that back a lot. It was timing. It was timing. We had a few sponsorships and some things in there that happened in the third quarter. We also, in the second quarter, had a little bit of a credit that we got some marketing dollars back from another entity that we have a partnership with. There was a little bit, maybe less expense in the second quarter and some extra expense in the third, and it's probably going to kind of even back out, I'd say, in the fourth quarter and moving forward. Okay. Well, I think the sponsorships were high by maybe $100,000 or so. Some of it's really was timing. Yeah. For sure. Okay. Just for overall expenses, again, just back to the earlier question, it sounds like expenses are probably relatively stable, maybe some modest growth, but it doesn't sound like there's a big pullback from the current level going forward. I don't think so. No, obviously going into the fourth quarter, there'll be some things going on. The first quarter, a lot of our. The exempt people get raises. Exempt people get raises typically at the beginning of the next year. We're going to have a lot of that. Non-exempt people get raises at their anniversary throughout the year. That goes on all year long. There usually is a little bit of an uptick for the first quarter for that because of the exempt annual increases and that kind of thing. There was some extra stuff in the quarter, maybe on expenses, but I wouldn't say it was huge amounts. Okay. Rex, just final question, just PPP loans, looks like they were, what, about $30 million at the end of September? 35, I think. Okay. Yep. Remaining. Okay. Okay, thanks, guys. All right. Thanks, John. I am showing no further questions at this time. I would like to turn the conference back to Joe Turner. Okay, thank you very much. Well, as I said, we really appreciate everybody being on the call today, and we look forward to talking to you in January. Thank you. This concludes today's conference call. Thank you for participating. You may now disconnect.