Hello all, and welcome to the SmartFinancial Third Quarter 2021 Earnings Call. My name is Lydia, and I'll be your operator today. You'll have the opportunity to ask a question at the end of the presentation, and you may do so by pressing star point star one on your telephone keypad. It's my pleasure to now hand you over to our host, Miller Welborn. Please go ahead, Miller. Thank you, Lydia. Good morning, thanks for joining us this morning for our Q3 2021 earnings call. We always love visiting with this great group each quarter to talk about our progress and our company. Joining me today on the call are Billy Carroll, our President and CEO, Ron Gorczynski, our CFO, Rhett Jordan, our Chief Credit Officer, and Nate Strall, our Director of Corporate Strategy. To get started, I'd like each of you to please refer to page two of our deck that we filed this morning for the normal and customary disclaimers and forward-looking statements comments. Please take a minute to review these. A fantastic quarter by our team here at the Bank. I challenge anyone to find a bank with more energy, drive, and commitment than our team here at SmartBank. We demonstrated again our ability to outwork the competition and execute our strategic plan. Our organic pace of growth has been impressive, and we see nothing slowing that down in the months ahead. Between very strong markets and the addition of several new sales team members that Billy will talk about shortly, we feel we're well positioned to continue on our current pace. As we march toward the end of 2021, we're excited about what we have accomplished this year to date. With that, I'm going to hand it over to Carroll. Thanks, Miller, and good morning, everyone. This was another extremely solid quarter for our company. This year has been a very busy one. From this final round of PPP to an acquisition, to the lift-outs, to several new expansion markets, 2021 has been a transformative year. I'll provide some high-level thoughts on our recent accomplishments and then turn it over to Ron for financials and then to Rhett for credit. First, we have some great highlights for the quarter. We'll go into page three of our slide deck, starting with earnings and tangible book value, a very nice income quarter with operating earnings coming in at $9.9 million or $0.63 per share. Tangible book value has increased to $19.03, 7% quarter-over-quarter increase. Returns were solid as well with 13% return on tangible common, and credit remains pristine with loss performance at 0.14% to assets. In addition to our financial performance, you'll see we've eclipsed the $4 billion asset mark, continuing to add size in a relatively small peer set. Getting into this $4 billion-$6 billion range has been a focus where we now have the size and the earnings momentum for better leverage opportunities. We also had outstanding growth this quarter. Net organic loan growth excluding PPP was over $52 million or approximately 9% annualized. Our lending teams continue to do a great job, and we're seeing great balance throughout all of our markets. If we were surprised by anything, it continues to be the growth on the deposit side of the balance sheet. We've not been surprised that our bankers continue to do a great job in growing their core deposit base, but that volume coupled with the existing clients continuing to hold and grow their balances has us in an extremely large liquidity position. Deposit balances grew 29% annualized during the quarter, and we are currently in a cash position of approximately $1 billion. Ron will go into greater detail on this, but it does have an impact on them and returns in the near term, but I really believe puts us in a position of strength strategically over the long term. We completed our acquisition of Sevier County Bank in September and will be converting and rebranding this coming weekend. We also made the decision to sell the Richmond piece of this deal. This was simply a play to keep our focus in the Southeast. With the expansion opportunities that were presented to us over the last couple of years to build density in our current zones, it made a lot of sense to spin this piece out. That now done, we're excited to get this one integrated. The process has gone very well, and we are on target, if not ahead of target, with our 60%+ cost save estimates. Segueing into some of our recent opportunities, the next couple of slides highlight some of the things we've been working on over the last few months. Looking at the map on slide four, you'll visually see the recent expansions for our company. We've taken advantage of this unusual opportunity to bring on a number of outstanding bankers in some great southeastern markets. Building on the lift-out of the banking team in our Gulf Coast region earlier in the year, we've now added teams in Montgomery, Dothan, and Auburn, Alabama, as well as Tallahassee, Florida, during the last few months. While we've always had solid organic growth, this recent lift-out focus represents a pivot for us and our company as we move more strongly to an organic model with a stronger focus on density building in zones where we operate. Flipping to slides five and six, you will see some detail on these new markets that we've entered, as well as some of our other 2021 achievements. I spoke previously about our Fountain Equipment Finance acquisition, and that team is performing well. We've also started to leverage our footprint to expand our prospecting efforts with that group. We're very pleased so far with this new line of business and very bullish on the outlook. Also of note, we have a new dealer floor plan group that will lift out that will be based in Birmingham. I'm going to let Rhett speak to this a little more in a moment, but a nice niche lending area that will yield some great opportunities. These are all big investments for us, and while we know we'll have some modest EPS drag over the next few quarters, we feel this is the right investment to make to deliver for shareholder value. Let me hand it over to Ron now to jump into financials. Thanks, Billy. Good morning, everyone. Let's start with slide seven, balance sheet. Since 2017, we have continued to realize consistent balance sheet expansion. As Billy indicated, for the current quarter, we grew loans, excluding PPP loans from our SCB acquisition, over $52 million or 8.6% annualized, and had year-to-date loan growth of 12.4% annualized. In addition, we had over $91 million of PPP loans forgiven and acquired $219 million of loans from SCB out of the $931 million sale. Our average loan yield for the current quarter was 4.95%, an increase of 33 basis points from the prior quarter, which was attributable to an additional $1.7 million of accretion income. On the right side of the slide, you see that our deposits continue their positive trend upward. During the current quarter, excluding $436 million from the SCB acquisition, our core deposits increased over $325 million or almost 29% annualized. Between this growth and our focus on controlling funding costs, we've lowered our total cost of deposits to 25 basis points, up four basis points year to point from the previous quarter. Had a loan-to-deposit ratio of 70%. On slide eight, you see trending information on our loan composition along with our current quarter activity, which Rhett will be going over shortly. On slide nine, our deposit composition remained relatively stable with our current quarter growth and SCB acquisition. We remain focused on managing time deposits downward while growing our non-interest bearing deposits, which currently make up over 26% of total deposits. Looking ahead, we do not expect any significant changes in our deposit costs or composition, although we do expect continued repurposing of some of our higher cost SCB time deposits in the coming months. Moving on to slide 10, liquidity utilization. We began the quarter with our cash position of over $1 billion. Deposit growth, increased forgiveness, and excess cash from the SCB acquisition all contributed to an increase of over $400 million in cash and cash equivalents from the prior quarter. Previously, we've been patient with the deployment of excess cash. However, as we move into Q4 and into Q1 of 2022, we will be taking a prudent and systematic approach to deploying approximately $40 million into our bond portfolio, which will generate a significantly higher yield versus our current cash yield. Our investment strategy will consist of a laddered approach where these purchases of cash flows will come back within a three to five-year period, thus limiting excessive duration risk. As shown on the right-hand side of the slide, our margin for the current quarter was 3.25%, which includes $1.7 million of discount loan accretion and $2.9 million of PPP accretion. We also benefited from a 5 basis point increase in interest-bearing deposits. Offsetting these positive impacts is our excess liquidity position, which has negatively impacted our margin by 28 basis points. We are forecasting a third quarter margin around 5%. We're estimating to have loan accretion of 10 basis points or $634,000, an estimated PPP loan fee accretion of 22 basis points, up to $2.1 million. Before we leave this slide, let's touch base on operating revenue. Operating revenue continued its upward trajectory to $36.6 million, an increase of over 14% as compared to the prior linked quarter. We had another strong quarter of non-interest income, which contributed $6.3 million, or approximately 17% of total operating revenue. Diving deeper into non-interest income, let's move on to slide 11. We are encouraged by the positive momentum across all of our non-interest income categories, particularly service charges and interchange income, which totaled approximately $2.3 million for the quarter. Additionally, other income is elevated as we were fully operational with our capital markets initiative, having almost $470,000 in swap fee income. We also remain very optimistic regarding the strong opportunities for fee generation within our family of revenue generators. As opposed to the prior quarter, our non-interest income increased almost 22%, and more impressively, increased over 50% from the prior year quarter. Our forecast for the third quarter is having non-interest income of $6.12 million. Moving on to slide 12, operating expenses. As we continue to execute on our current opportunities, we will see some short-term expense headwinds that will bring us long-term value over the next 18 months. During the current quarter, operating expense increases were from, one, three months of expenses from the Fountain acquisition, two, one month of expenses from the SCB acquisition, three, expenses associated with our lift-out strategy. For the fourth quarter, we expect expenses to be slightly elevated with total expenses around $25.2 million and salary and benefits costs approaching $15.5 million. This elevation is primarily from the SCB acquisition, however, we will realize a partial reduction to those expenses as we finish executing on our cost-saving measures during the quarter. Looking forward into 2022, we believe our expense run rate will be lower than the fourth quarter, more in the $24.5 million-$25 million range, and with salary and benefits around the $14 million-$14.5 million range. Built into this 2022 run rate are some technology initiatives that Billy will touch base on at page 14. Billy? Billy? Thanks, Ronnie. Yeah, we think it's important to share with this group some of the information that we've been working on related to technologies. We've talked around it on previous calls that we've been doing some real work in moving our company forward in tech. On slide 13, you'll see some of these initiatives that Ron said are built into our expense guide. I believe banks not putting significant focus in this area are going to be behind, and we will not be in that position. One of our biggest initiatives is moving to the nCino platform. This will begin next quarter, and I am confident it will be a game changer in the way that we handle our entire commercial process of prospecting to closing deals. We're very excited about this work and know that it can be critical to our future success. With that, Rhett, I'll flip it over to you and let you talk about lending and credit. Thank you, Billy. As noted earlier in the deck on slide eight, our loan portfolio continues to show good diversification across the loan segments with 4% annualized loan growth quarter-over-quarter of approximately $278 million. This is inclusive of the Sevier County Bank loan acquisition, but excluding PPP loans. Net organic loan growth for the quarter was $52 million, an annualized increase of 18.6% over prior quarter. The SCB acquisition did not impact our overall portfolio mix significantly, with the post-close profile being very similar to previous quarters and same period prior year. As mentioned, our portfolio has seen consistent growth year-to-date spread across all geographic areas of our footprint. Our CRE portfolio has seen the most growth year-to-date, moving to approximately 40% of our portfolio outstandings as compared to 35% at year-end 2020, primarily due to the impact of the Sevier County acquisition. As Ron noted earlier, we've also seen good unit growth in our owner-occupied commercial real estate segment as well. We continue to see strong housing demand in our market area, with core markets still seeing historically low supply levels and strong price performance speak to this demand. Our overall loan portfolio yield continues to reflect solid positioning at 4.21%, including the SCB portfolio, but excluding accretion and PPP loan impacts, which is above both quarter one and quarter two levels. All in all, a very solid quarter with strong organic loan growth in the portfolio and a positive outlook for the remainder of the year. Slide 14 shows our overall asset quality metrics, which continue to trend very positively and generate consistent excellent results. Our NPA ratio continued to improve throughout 2021, dropping consistently each quarter to a low of 0.14% in the third quarter. Net charge-offs for the quarter were 0.03%, and our over 30-day past due ratio was consistent to second quarter at 0.29%. Classified loans of 0.36%, up slightly from second quarter due to the SCB portfolio acquisition but were still well below legacy SmartBank ratio positions for first quarter 2021 and year-end 2020. Overall, our asset quality continues to demonstrate solid metrics resulting from continued strong economic performance in our marketplaces and staying in line with best-in-class levels. Our outlook is positive for the balance of the year, and we expect these strong portfolio metrics to continue in upcoming periods. As for the PPP loan note, we've seen considerable forgiveness activity through third quarter in our round one loans. As noted on slide 15, we received forgiveness payoffs on 2,952 applications, or roughly 99% of the round one originations, with over $299 million in balances. We ended the quarter with about $6 million in balances remaining from the first round. This could be roughly 55 loans totaling over $2 million in balances that Sevier County originated but were not yet forgiven prior to the acquisition date. For these remaining few loans, we're actively working with borrowers to complete the forgiveness phases and/or finalize repayment structures on any unforgiven residual balances. We're also proactively reaching out to Round two clients to continue the process post-forgiveness applications as soon as covered periods expire and clients are ready to submit. Through third quarter period end, we had already processed 715 Round 2 PPP forgiveness apps for $55 million in balances, or roughly 40% of the generated loans in Round 2. Overall, the PPP project proved to be a very successful venture for our company, generating $17 million in fees for the bank while creating considerable prospects opportunities for our teams. We anticipate the PPP balance position to continue to decline steadily through fourth quarter and early 2022. As Billy mentioned, we're very excited about the addition of our dealer finance specialist team to help expand our lending platform into the floor plan component of the segment. These team members bring a combined 60+ years of experience in the industry and have worked together as a team for nearly 20 years in the space. They provide administrative, underwriting, and relationship management support to a nearly a $2 billion platform that has strong performance with solid credit quality measures and strong, long sustained relationships with their clientele. Dealer floor plan is a multibillion-dollar segment of the banking industry in which SmartBank has historically held very little exposure and has tremendous opportunities within our total footprint to take advantage of existing business relationships and client familiarity. Furthermore, the longtime relationships that our new team has in the marketplace also brings new future growth opportunities for SmartBank to pursue as well. The chance to bring this admired and highly recommended team to SmartBank provides us the needed bridge to support the floor plan component of these valued relationships. Clearly, we're very excited about this addition and the opportunity it creates for us to continue to grow and diversify our lending portfolio. Now I'll turn it back over to Ron to walk you through our allowance position for the quarter. Well, thanks, Rhett, for all the detail. Let's move forward to slide 16, our loan loss reserve. We continue to have great stats to our credit quality, we did require a $1.1 million provision for the quarter, which was needed for the reallocation of loan discounts associated with the SCB loan sale and to a lesser extent, facilitate loan growth. At quarter end, our allowance for originated loans less PPP loans was up to 1.45%, and our total reserves of total loans and leases less PPP loans was at 1.26%. On to slide 17, capital. Our capital ratios remain strong with a slight uptick from the prior linked quarter. The current quarter's acquisition of SCB had minimal effects on our capital. Our change in the common equity times our assets was down slightly, directly related to our excess liquidity position and our acquisition. Our current leverage is right up, adjusting at this time. And to wrap up the side, our entire SMBK team is focused on consistently building shareholder value. By quarter end, our tangible book value per share was over $19, an increase of 7.3% link quarter annualized and over 10% increase year-over-year. With that said, I'll turn it back over to Billy. Thanks, Ron. To close, our markets are all performing extremely well. The Southeast is poised for great continued growth, and it's one of the reasons you're seeing us pivot a bit as we look at more commercial banking lift-out opportunities. Our loan pipelines continue to be robust and are equally distributed across all of our markets. The excess liquidity in the system, like most others, we're battling some headwinds and some low loan utilization and pay downs. With that said, we're very bullish on where we stand, and once these new teams get up and going, we anticipate our loan growth will tick up into the mid-teens on an annualized basis. We're seeing this company transform and operate on a different level, continuing to drive revenue, moving toward being a top-tier performer on the line, focusing on how we get there. I'm very excited to be part of this company right now. It's very exciting to be an associate and an investor, and I think we're very well-positioned to be opportunistic moving forward. I'll stop there, and we'll open it up for questions. Thank you. If you'd like to ask a question, please press star followed by one on your telephone keypad now. If you change your mind and withdraw your question, please press star followed by two. When preparing to ask your question, please ensure that your phone is unmuted virtually. Our first question today comes from Brett Benton of Hovde Group. Yo ur line is open. Please go ahead. Good morning, guys. This is actually Ben Gerlinger. How's it going? Good morning. Hey, congrats on crossing [four JD C]. I was curious if we can kind of start with the growth trajectory. I understand that you guys have had a very busy year, to say the least. The guidance was for kind of that low double digit, if I heard that correctly, including growth as a kind of core rate. I'm curious on how you guys think about with the larger balance sheet lift-out opportunities. I'm sure that there's going to be some sort of lumpiness to growth as you add more lenders. When you think about the strategy from growth, is it an area of lending or geography of lending that you see as the lowest hanging fruit or areas where you might want to expand? Kind of juxtaposed against that, the expense guidance for $24-ish million, does that include any additional lift-outs for next year? Or is that kind of a core rate as if you were running out of static picks? I'll start with that. I'll take the last part of that question first. Ron, I think I'm saying this correctly, but the expense guidance we're giving is kind of what we've got today. We're not looking if we would adjust that if we came up with any more lift-out opportunities. That is correct. Yes, expense guidance is what we've got going today, Ben. The first part of the question, I do think that obviously the growth on the loan side and the deposit side is something that we're really focused on with this, again, this organic pivot. Kind of as we talked about earlier in previous calls this year, I think we've been kind of targeting, even though we've been above that, we've been, I think, eight months of the year, I think we're only about 12% of growth, which has been a little higher than we've called. We were guiding this quarter. With the lift-outs, as we look into 2022, we do think that number is going to edge up from what we had discussed as mid to high singles now into mid-teens. We feel pretty confident about that. The expense guidance that we've built in incorporates not only the lift-out and compensation occupancy in, but also the technology that Ron talked about. We're trying to lay out what we believe is a fairly well-laid expense line and go after these teams set up and going. As you know, it might take a quarter or two to get these folks up and running, but once they do, we're very excited about the growth trajectory that they'll bring to you. Got you. That's very helpful. I think with the kind of the internal lift of one time with lift-outs is it makes sense that you have more control over the growth and the credits that you're adding, but it also frees up capital a bit to some degree if you're not looking to do major acquisitions. I'm curious on how you now approach any excess capital and how you feel the deploying, if you could do the rank order of the priorities? I'll take a stab at that. Ron, you guys feel free to chime in. On the capital, I think we've always been good believers in appropriate leverage of capital. We've never really felt like we have an overabundance of that. When we've had it, I think we've used it in a smart way. I think for us right now, I think our thoughts around excess capital is growth. Obviously, share buybacks could come into place if we think that that is appropriate at the right time. That would be a great utilization of that. Dividend increases. We're weighing all of these different pieces today. I think for us, right now we're at a good spot relating to capital. We don't have a lot of excess, but I think we're very comfortable with where we sit today. Yeah. I think that's something that we address kind of weekly, daily, hourly around here. We talk about it often, allocation of capital, best use of capital. Going back to the expense run rate, I will say that there are certainly will be additional lift-out opportunities. We believe additional adding of sales teams will protect that a little bit on the upside if we have to on the run rate side. You talked about M&A a little bit or lack of. We certainly continue to look at opportunities as they're presented to us. We invest, as we said, but there are ton of time in building relationships. We've stated over the last quarter or two that our top priority is organic growth and lift-outs. I'm not saying we're not going to do a deal, but I will say that if we do a deal, you can rest assured it'll be a good one. It'll be very special if we do one. Balancing capital right now, really we're prioritizing, but we continue to juggle that and look at that and assess every opportunity. Okay, that's great. I really appreciate the time with you guys, and congrats on crossing the floor. Thanks. Thanks. Thank you. Next question comes from Stephen Scouten of Piper Sandler. Stephen, your line is open. Great. Thanks. Good morning, everyone. Good morning. I just wanted to think about operating leverage for a second into 2022, just given the puts and takes of when these new hires will be able to contribute. Do you think you can see positive operating leverage year-over-year? Is this more like a 2023 event, given the need to earn back those initial upfront costs? Yeah, this is Ron. Yes, we are seeing the positive effects going into 2023. 2022, we will, again, as we build a portfolio, as we build an asset base, 2023 will be the year that will be positive for us. Okay, that's helpful. As we think about, just trying to circle back on the loan growth commentary. I know, Billy, you said mid-teens once these guys are up and running. Is this more mid-single digits in the next couple of quarters until that time, or am I misconstruing that? No, I don't think so. I think we can get there fairly quick. I think just from the pipelines that we're seeing right now, Stephen. It's not just the new teams. We've had existing teams, too. Their pipeline's still really good. I think what we've looked at is, it takes a quarter or so. Some of these banks have been on a quarter now, so it ebbs and flows a little bit. I think we're looking at double digits here relatively soon. It might take us a quarter or two to get up to that full pace. We should be growing into the double digits here within the next quarter. We haven't been mid-single digits in a while. Yeah. We're a little bit softer at 9% this quarter. I think you'll see that double-digit pace moving up to mid-teens here over the next couple of quarters. Okay, great. Maybe just one last thing from me here, that 3% NIM guidance, is that a core margin kind of ex-accretion and ex-PPP, or is that relative to the 3.35% GAAP NIM? I know you gave some of those numbers on expected accretion and PPP accretion, but what would be the big driver quarter-over-quarter? Is that more some of the securities investments that may be pulling that down either way? Yeah, I think 3% is, I kind of answered the two questions. Yes to both. The fourth quarter, we will wind down the PPP process and see that last tranche of fees get recognized through the NIM. As we go into 2022, deploying more excess liquidity, which really hampers our NIM to get more positive results off of that. We are seeing flipping one side to the other, but we do see that 3% as a baseline going forward. Unless we get loan accretion, different loan accretion, the unusual pops along the way from loan activity. Other than that, we're seeing solid 3%, one way or the other. Okay, great. Thanks, everyone, for the color. I appreciate it. Thanks, Stephen. The next question comes from Thomas Wendler of Stephens Inc. Thomas, your line is open. Thank you, good morning, guys. I've got two questions here. Do you have any idea what kind of loan yields you're seeing on new production, and then how the new hires are playing into that? Yeah. Rhett, I know you got I think some data, probably the best data on new production yields. Do you want to run through some of that? Yeah. If you look at just most recent quarter, we're still averaging around 4% on new yields for production, new activity going on the book. Overall, it's maintained relatively steady. Yeah, I'll add, Thomas. I think, some of the new teams, as we're bringing in some larger C&I type clients, some of that is probably coming on board a little bit lower, but typically, you're going to see that on a lower flow basis. You might not be looking at somewhere in the lower 3s on some of that new production, but it's a variable rate product that comes with some nice fee side as well. We still think we're getting decent pricing. Everything's too low, obviously, in this environment. I think comparatively speaking, we should get pretty decent pricing on new production. No, that's great color. Thank you. One final one from me. With the new teams, are they focused on gathering deposits at all, since you guys have so much excess liquidity? Once you finish shifting to gathering deposits, can you give any idea of what kind of impact it's going to have? Yeah, they are. Because the bankers that we're bringing over have been just really strong core relationship bankers. We're not just going out chasing loan transactions, even though Ron's sitting on a billion dollar in cash. We are still looking to bring in these core deposit relationships with treasury. That really has continued to go really well from what we've seen. The pipeline of loans also should lead to more deposits as well. Those loans should be in corporate checking type balances primarily with that lower interest rate. We'll continue to take those even though we're in a pretty heavy cash position. We think that's going to be a great long-term benefit for us. All right. Sounds good. Thanks for answering my questions, and I think we're good. Thank you. The next questioner in the queue is Catherine Mealor of KBW. Catherine, please proceed with your question. Hey, good morning. I just have a follow-up on the balance sheet size conversation and thinking about that $400 million of securities deployment. What's the timing that you plan on for that $400 million? Catherine, this is Ron. We've already started our deployment. We're probably looking at $75 million- $80 million a month. That'll bring us into the first quarter of 2022. Really right after the 10-year bumped up is when we started doing our purchases. Timing was in our favor at this point. We've already started. Just so I know this will change depending on how rates move. Today, what are kind of average new yields for those investments? Right now we're looking at, since we already purchased some, around $1.5, $1.45, $1.50 range. Oh, great. Then my second question is on the margin, thinking about next quarter. You said 3% for the reported margin, which is implying some further compression in the core NIM if we back out PPP and accretable yield. Are there any significant changes to liquidity or the size of the balance sheet for next quarter? I guess that does include some of this liquidity will go into securities. Even within that, I guess I'm trying to think about we're still seeing more NIM compression even though part of these securities are going to be redeployed from cash into securities next quarter. Maybe the way to think about it is we bottom next quarter and then it's a slow grind up as you move through 2022. Yeah, exactly that. It's not only our core NIM, but again, it's fully loaded for Q4 to 3% because, again, we still have that excess PPP fee recognition. Then we kind of convert over going through one with our deploying into the bond portfolio, and then that reduces to negative carry. We'll kind of get a natural lift back to that 3% range. That includes as our loan production slowly dwindles downward. It's not significant, but a little bit of a depression. Still that 3%, we're looking at that pretty much pretty flat throughout the next four quarters with all the balance and investment ports we have with our activity. Okay, great. One thing on expenses, and this is a challenging question. I know there are moving parts within the margin as well, but I'll just throw it out there to see how you're thinking about it. Is there an efficiency ratio target that we should think about maybe longer term as we kind of feel the full impact of the cost savings from the deal and then the benefit from all these recent hires? Yeah. Catherine, this is Billy. I'll take that and Ron, feel free to chime in. For us, I think our longer-term goal is to be sub-60. That's where we want to be. That's where I know we need to be. I think that is the longer-term goal. I think right now, we've drifted in the low 60s. I think you'll see that as that will probably tick up here in the near term, probably maybe up a couple of percentage points as we kind of realize this expense load from the new group. We think that will kind of withholding out to 2023. We think we see that number edging back down in our long-term target, and it's really not that long-term, I think. I always kind of look at this as a marathon, not a sprint. I think in a reasonable tone, we should be able to get that back down into the lower 60s. Our goal is to be sub-60 as a company. Great. That makes perfect sense. All right, thank you so much. Thanks, Cathy. Thank you. The next question comes from Feddie Strickland of Janney Montgomery Scott. Thanks. Good morning, guys. Good morning. Morning, Feddie. I saw you guys had some really strong non-interest income overall, but I saw mortgage came in a little lower than I was expecting. Is it safe to say mortgage is kind of starting to cool off at this point? I guess the growth in the other fee income lines offsets that going forward? Yeah. That's probably a fair statement. I think our mortgage has stabilized. I think it's really stable period. I think that was the biggest issue in talking to our mortgage teams in our various markets. They're very bullish on the zones, and we're seeing the population growth. A lot of it's supply is where we're running into the issues. Home inventories, it just seems to be slowing, just kind of because of that is the primary driver. We're still very bullish on what we've got and continuing to look to add some mortgage producing team members into these new teams. We're still recruiting. I think it's stabilized is probably the best word. Ron, any d epending on any of our markets. Yeah. Where we're leading was we're excited to see that some of our other non-interest income categories are starting to take over. The mortgage has been number one for us for a long time. Even as, again, relatively stable income going forward, that our other categories will overtake that as more of a leader in that group, which is part of our emphasis going forward. Got it. Is there any particular line, whether it's the wealth management or equipment finance, or is there any particular line that you guys see kind of being the star going forward? Ron, you want to jump in on that? I think we have the greatest opportunity in our customer service fee line with the lift- outs and Billy had mentioned about the treasury. Our treasury service is our platform. We are making some hires to support that group, and I think we have the most opportunity in that line item in the near future. We'll see that growth a decent amount. We're excited to see that. Yeah. Feddie, I'll just add, we're really focusing on all of them. Ron had alluded to some of the fee side on swaps we've got. We've got the investment side where we're really putting some real deliberate focus, especially with the teams that we've added and some of the private bankers on there that are really doing a nice job bringing in wealth management clients. It really is all kind of playing together. We've been focusing on all those zones. Like Ron said, we're probably looking at the fee side maybe being a little bit more of a shining star here near-term. We see lift in really all those lines. Got it. Just one more question from me. Just given the Richmond closure, it sounds like it's safe to say you guys are going to be focused on the South and the East. Is there any consideration for expansion, and this can be longer term too, but into the Carolinas, or is North Georgia probably a more likely next step to go through lift out acquisitions? Yeah. You want to shine? Tennessee and the markets we're in, we love the Tennessee, Alabama, and Florida Panhandle. We would certainly look at contiguous markets if the timing was just really nice. I don't know that I would prioritize the Carolinas over Georgia or Georgia over the Carolinas. It's all going to be a numbers and opportunity game. Yeah. I'll just add to that. From us, as Miller said it, I think we would definitely look for continued growth in contiguous geographies. I think all of those would be on board, but again, primary focus is on what we've got. Got it. That makes sense. Thanks for answering all my questions, and congrats on a great quarter. Thanks, Feddie. Have a great day. Thank you. The next question comes from William Wallace of Raymond James. William, your line is open. Thanks. Good morning, guys. Good morning. Ron, in your prepared remarks, it sounded like you said that the provision expense had to do with, I think you said like repositioning or something around the pending loan sale of the Richmond assets. Did I hear that correctly, and if so, can you explain that a little bit more? Yeah. The Richmond loan sale was considered a day two event. There's a lot of discounts associated with that. When we took a look at the accruals of the loans, because we do the accrual based on the call codes, we kind of had to reallocate, do another valuation assessment on the remaining portfolio, and we had to replace what was taken out from the loan sale. It was just a timing issue. It was not a day one issue. It was strictly around the fair value. We're adjusting the fair value marks, I guess, so to speak. Usually, you see that on day one, and you never see it again. I had to revalue it once again at 9/30. Okay. Okay. That didn't run through the net interest income line as an interest adjustment? Okay. It did not. Okay. Moving forward, how should we be thinking about the provision expense line with the mid-teens anticipated loan growth rate and assuming that we don't get any back up in the current economic situation, COVID, and everything, that we're continuing to improve, not get worse? Yeah. I think we're probably going to maintain our percentages at this point of time. We have seen the variant cases have dwindled down with all kind of factors. I think there's probably a little bit opportunity for us to keep lower, but I think we'll keep that 75 basis point level for the time being. Again, every quarter is a different strategy or different calculation. Probably flat. With our loan growth, we'll just try to, at this point, the calculation's saying we'll try to stay in that 75 basis point range for the originated book. Okay. All right. Thank you. That's helpful. Sorry to do this, I'd like to circle back to the NIM commentary. The guidance for the fourth quarter is around 3%, and that includes about $2 million, I think you said $2.1 million of accretion related to PPP loan fees. It seems kind of like you said, moving forward, that you'll still be around 3% even when that'll be the last of the PPP accretion. Is that correct? Well, we'll still have a little bit of a sliver, $1 million+ through Q1. At that point, the big mover is we're going to eliminate the liquidity drag, which in Q3 was 28 basis points. Additionally, which we're not taking into account is, we're still retiring a lot of 1% loans other than the PPP fees recognized. We still have that base of 1% SBA loans that are on the books that will be forgiven. There's a lot of moving pieces. Yeah, we're still expecting that 3% to hold going forward, the lower margin today. Okay. In 2022, what is the kind of anticipated run rate on the purchase accounting accretion, excluding what might come if you have loans pay off, acquired loans pay off, or anything like that? I think the fourth quarter was $642,000. That was kind of the ballpark. I don't have that in front of me. It's probably like $500,000 It's probably like $500,000 a quarter. This acquisition didn't bring a lot of discount accretion to it. As always, we do have a lot of loans in the portfolio that's loaded with marks. With the pay downs and payoffs and such, we will probably have one unique event happen quarter-over-quarter as we've seen, just of that accelerated accretion coming through the books on the discount accretion. Okay. Yeah. Okay. Then if you just, y ou guys have done a lot, right? With team lift-outs and acquisition. I don't know if you track this or not, but if you do, if you were to look at your core originators and the growth that they're adding to the portfolio, is the run rate of this business, is it really kind of a high single-digit run rate that'll be boosted with all the team lift-outs, et cetera? Or do you think you could settle out low double digits once we get past the initial boost that will come from all the new hires? I think near term, I think your earlier comment is right. I think we're still running kind of that, I call it mid to highs with the new team members coming on board. I think that pushes it up into the double digits, into the mid-teens. I do think we're a double-digit grower, William, moving forward. I really do. The way we're structuring this team and kind of what we're looking at with the markets we're in, with the group that we've got, I think we could be on average a double-digit grower or even past this initial spike that we anticipate. Okay. That's very helpful. I really appreciate the time, guys. That's all I have. Yeah. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Our next question comes from Kevin Fitzsimmons of D.A. Davidson. Kevin, please go ahead. Hey guys, good morning. Good morning. Good morning. Most of my questions have been asked and answered. Apologize if I'm being redundant here, but just given your answers a few questions ago about expanding into other states and the fact that the moves you're doing in Richmond, it's fair to say that the focus is on these existing markets, as you pointed out before, Miller. Given the new teams that you've hired, is it safe to say you have a flag planted in the markets you want to be in, and now it's just a matter of adding density in those existing markets? Are there other metro markets in Alabama or the Florida Panhandle that are not flagging yet, that you would jump on if teams became available? Kevin, I'll start and then the guys can jump in. Yeah, I think we've got most of our flag planted. I think that, as we have said previously, we continue to like that Nashville zone. We believe Nashville, we need to continue to go there. We're in the MSA in Murfreesboro, but that's an area where we think we've got the size now and the ability to be impactful in that market. That's a priority. We're in that zone, but we would like to get a little bit bigger in that zone. Same thing, state of Alabama. Now we're in both the MSAs. We did a release a few weeks back letting the Dothan folks know that we're looking to grow in Birmingham. That's an area where we'd love to grow. Our floor planning group's going to be based there, and we've already planted some leadership in that market and very excited about opportunities there. In Florida, I think Florida is an area where I think we could see some expansion, maybe a little bit further east. We've added some scale in Tallahassee. I think as you look through that I-10 corridor, there could be some other opportunity there, but I think it's contiguous to right where we are. Miller, you may want to dive into that. I think really hit on Birmingham and building out that market. Obviously, a really good city in the state of Alabama. I just think success breeds success. Good bankers want to be part of a good team and a good bank. If we build out some of these markets that we've just gone into and expand on some of our mature markets, I think we are able to have discussions on a regular basis with good bankers that we would be able to bring under our tent. That focus, that pivot that you talked about before, is that more based on the willingness of these loan officers to move, like there's an increased willingness, or is it more about, and I think you've discussed this before, about just not having to bulk up in size? That's not as much of an urgency where before, arguably, maybe it was a little more like, "Hey, let's do a deal and we'll optimize, we'll figure it out later." Not figure it out later, but there was an urgency to getting to a certain size, where now it's more of a real rifle shot approach to getting the right people, getting in the right markets. It is. If you're even at $2 billion in assets, your size, your lending limits, your earnings momentum to invest in new teams is just limited. I think that's the reason we've taken the approach of getting the foundation built through acquisitions and organic over the last several years. Now if all the earnings momentum that we have, the sophistication that we've built around treasury and credit and all of these other ancillary pieces, we can go out and do a much better job in recruiting. These bankers that are looking to move to us from these larger regionals, they know we can handle their books of business. That's tougher to do than the $2 billion or even $3 billion. I think for us, we felt like we needed to get to this size. Now I think we're a very attractive alternative for some of these really good regional bankers that are maybe looking to go somewhere that's got a little more numbers. I think that's what's appealing to us now, and I think that's what's attracting these really good teams to us. Okay, great. Thanks, guys. Thank you. Thanks. Thank you very much. As a reminder, if you'd like to ask a question, please press star zero one on your telephone keypad now. We currently have no further questions, so I'll hand back over to Miller Welborn for closing remarks. Thanks, Lydia. Thanks for all y'all for joining us today on the call. We appreciate your support of our company, and we hope you have a great rest of your week. Have a good day.