Good morning and welcome to the Veritex Holdings first quarter 2024 earnings conference call and webcast. All participants will be in a listen-only mode. Please note, this event will be recorded. I will now turn the conference over to Will Holford with Veritex. Thank you. Before we get started, I'd like to remind you that this presentation may include forward-looking statements, and those statements are subject to risk and uncertainties that could cause actual and anticipated results to differ. The company undertakes no obligation to publicly revise any forward-looking statement. If you are logged into our webcast, please refer to our slide presentation, including our Safe Harbor Statement, beginning on slide two. For those on the phone, please note that the Safe Harbor Statement and presentation are available on our website, veritexbank.com. All comments made today are subject to the Safe Harbor Statement. Some financial metrics discussed will be on a non-GAAP basis, which management believes better reflects the underlying core operating performance of the business. Please see the reconciliation of all discussed non-GAAP measures in our filed 8-K earnings release. Joining me today are Malcolm Holland, our Chairman and CEO, and Terry Earley, our Chief Financial Officer. I will now turn the call over to Malcolm. Thank you, Will. Good morning, everyone, and welcome to our first quarter earnings call. For the first quarter, we reported earnings of $29.1 million or $0.53 per share. Pre-tax, pre-provision return was 1.42% or $43.7 million. We continue our strategic plan in improving our balance sheet and our liquidity profile, while at the same time adding to tangible book value, increasing our loan loss reserves, and decreasing concentrations. Additionally, during the quarter, we announced a securities loss trade transaction that is anticipated to add $0.05 annually to EPS and a $50 million stock repurchase program. From a growth standpoint, we continue at a very cautious rate while we focus on our balance sheet transformation. For the quarter, loans were up $114.7 million or around 1%, while deposits were up $316 million or 12% annualized. Interesting to note that over the last 12 months, our loan growth is virtually flat, while deposits are up 18% or $1.6 billion. Progress is being made. Our primary focus, in addition to continued deposit generation, is a more advantageous mix of deposits that will continue to bring down our funding costs. Looking into the rest of the year, we believe loan growth will be in the low single digits, while deposits should be in the high single to low double digits with an improved mix. As we navigate the current rate outlook, uncertainty appears to be the name of the game. With that said, we remain focused on credit surveillance and monitoring of our loan portfolio. Staying with credit, metrics remain fairly stable over the previous quarter, with progress made on many specific credits. Our NPAs increased $6 million or, from 0.77% to 0.82%, of total assets. The increase in NPAs was a result of a downgraded acquired specialty medical facility. During the quarter, we also foreclosed on a student loan, resulting in a $15.1 million increase in ORE, which represents 61% of the loan balance. Charge-offs for the quarter were down 44% from the previous quarter to $5.3 million across four relationships, the most significant of which relates to a Houston office property totaling $4.3 million, which we wrote down to the discounted land value. Our loan loss reserve grew marginally during the quarter to $1.15. Past dues, excluding non-accruals, were down 63% from the previous quarter. We continue to see reduction in our office exposure, which is down $117 million over the past 12 months. I'll now turn the call over to Terry. Thank you. Malcolm has covered the progress we've made in strengthening our balance sheet. I'm encouraged by the progress, but there's more work to do, especially on the deposit and credit side. Starting on page 7, the allowance coverage now sits at 115 basis points, up meaningfully in the last four quarters as we have increased the reserve by over $13 million. Excluding our mortgage warehouse portfolio, the allowance coverage sits at 121 basis points. Our general reserves comprise 90% of the total allowance, a much stronger position than we've been in a year ago. We continue to shift economic assumptions to a more conservative approach, which seems appropriate in the higher-for-longer rate scenario coupled with significant geopolitical risk. We've included a breakdown of the reserve level by loan portfolio at the bottom of the page. This reflects a significant build in non-owner occupied and the owner occupied categories. Moving to page eight, over the last four quarters, total capital grew approximately $45 million. The CET1 ratio has expanded by 8 bps during the quarter and by 105 basis points year over year, and now stands at 10.37%, a significant contributor to the expansion in the capital ratios. There's been a $624 million decline in risk-weighted assets year over year. Tangible book value per share increased to $20.33, which is a 9.1% increase on a year-over-year basis, including shareholder dividends. It's worth noting that since Veritex went public in 2014, it has compounded tangible book value per share at the rate of 11.5%, including the dividends that have been paid to shareholders. On to page nine. Our strong deposit growth and low loan growth allowed Veritex to reduce its loan-to-deposit ratio from 107.7% at 3/31/2023 to 91.7% at 3/31/2024. The loan-to-deposit ratio is 86.9% if you exclude mortgage warehouse. The deposit growth also allowed a reduction in our wholesale funding reliance to 19.5% from 32.1% a year ago. As you can see in the bottom left graph, we've kept the time deposit portfolio short and have $2.7 billion in CD maturities over the remainder of 2024 at a rate between 5.1%-5.15%. On the bottom right, we show the monthly cost of total deposits. This was on a pretty steep rise through September 2023. Since then, it has largely leveled out, and our March cost of total deposits is below the rate in December. On slide 10, annualized loan growth was approximately 1.9%, driven by increases in multifamily CRE and mortgage warehouse. We continue to make progress on reducing our CRE concentrations. Over the last year, we've reduced CRE to total risk-based capital from 334%-319%. This has been driven by the significant decrease in ADC to total risk-based capital from 129% to 108%. We remain committed to getting our CRE concentrations under 300% of total risk base and our ADC concentrations under 100% and think we should be there in the third quarter of 2024. Finally, please see the bottom right for our commercial real estate maturities through the end of 2025. As you can see, fixed-rate maturities do not represent undue risk to the bank at approximately $200 million for the balance of 2024 and approximately $325 million for all of 2025. Slide 11 provides the detail in the commercial real estate and ADC portfolios by asset class, including one is out of state. As Malcolm mentioned, the office portfolio continues to decline and is down $117 million or 18% in the last year and now comprises less than 5.5% of total loans. Slide 12 illustrates a breakdown of our out-of-state portfolio, including the significant impact of our national businesses and mortgage. The true percentage of our out-of-state portfolio is only 11.3%, and this is predominantly where we have followed Texas real estate clients to other geographies. On slide 13, net interest income decreased by $2.7 million to almost $93 million during the first quarter. The biggest drivers of the decrease were higher deposit yields, lower day count, and an unfavorable asset mix shift resulting from a lower loan-to-deposit ratio. This was offset by an increase in volume from a little bit of growth. The net interest margin decreased seven basis points from Q4 to 3.24%. The NIM is going to continue to feel pressure as we look to achieve a loan-deposit ratio of below 90% and push excess funding into the investment portfolio. Slide 14, loan yields are relatively flat. Investment yields are up 15 basis points, and deposit costs for the quarter only increased 5 basis points. This is a welcome change from the average of 38 basis points a quarter over the previous three quarters. Slide 15. This shows certain metrics on our investment portfolio. Key takeaways are the portfolio's only 10.6% of assets. The duration remains about 4 years, and 87% of the portfolio is held in AFS. As previously noted, we completed a loss trade in Q1 in which we sold investments earning 3.11% average yield and reinvested the proceeds at 6.26% average yield. This is expected to have a 1.8-year loss earned back and be 3 points accrued to the net interest margin and $0.05 to EPS. Finally, on this slide, you see a snapshot of our cash and borrowing capacity, which totals $6.4 billion. This represents 1.8 times the level of uninsured or uncollateralized deposits. This available liquidity is up over 50% since March 31 of last year. On slide 16, the first quarter of 2024 was a disappointing quarter in fee income. The USDA business had no production but some trailing revenue from the sale of a loan closed in a prior quarter. The lack of production is a function of government funding surplus and a challenging environment to get USDA loans approved. The bright spot for the quarter was our SBA business. Production was up almost 30% over Q4, and the gain on sale premiums are close to 9%. Operating non-interest expenses were up for the quarter, which include normal beginning-of-the-year costs. While higher than Q4 2023 levels, they were very much in line with management expectations. Finally, the effective tax rate was higher for the quarter than in previous periods due to tax treatment of equity awards vesting below the fair value award price. The effective tax rate is expected to return to approximately 21.75% for the remainder of the year. With that, I'd like to turn the call over to Malcolm for concluding comments. Thank you, Terry. We continue to improve and reposition our balance sheet to a stronger position while continuing to focus on earnings and TBV growth. Our credit teams under the leadership of our acting Chief Credit Officer, Curtis Anderson, have increased their surveillance activities and oversight that has already provided positive results. Our teams remain focused. Operator, we'll now take any questions. Thank you. As a reminder, to ask a question, please press star 11 on your telephone and wait for your name to be announced. To withdraw your question, please press star 11 again. One moment for questions. Our first question comes from Catherine Mealor with KBW. You may proceed. Hi. Good morning. Morning, Catherine. I wanted to start with just one credit question. On your slide where you show the change in classified assets, it looks like substandard came down, but special mention came up a little bit. Can you just talk a little bit about some of the moves in and out of those two portfolios this quarter? Yeah. We had a couple of what we call good guys, a couple of payoffs, actually. I'm flipping to the sheet that has the exact names on that. And then we had a couple that moved in. And so one of the things that we found ourselves in a place where we weren't moving stuff off quick enough, and so we weren't creating shelf space. And so we've started to do just that. We had a, let's see. Substandard, we had one, two, three payoffs: one office, one C&I, and then one was a judgment sale that had the real estate behind it. So about $23 million. And then we moved a couple in there on the substandard side. We had some upgrades out of substandard and a C&I deal and a pretty large office deal that we moved to it went to a land-only deal, but we reunderwrote it as a land deal, and it turned to a pass credit with some strong people behind it. I think we're going to continue to see movement there both in and out each quarter, but I do hope that the trends are starting to move downward where they start shrinking. Okay. Great. Any trends with some of the credits that moved into substandard? Because I'm just wondering what type of on what type of credits or just to kind of give us a flavor of what's in that. I don't think there's any trend or there's anything systemic. There's a few C&Is or a few real estates, but there was nothing that I would get concerned about in terms of a specific asset category. Okay. All right. And then on the buyback and just your capital position, you talked about how you want to lower your CRE to capital ratios and think you'll get there by third quarter, but you've also initiated the buyback. So how do we kind of balance those two with hitting your CRE concentration levels but then also being active on the buyback? And maybe how aggressive should we expect you to be with that new authorization? Catherine, it's Terry. What I would say on it is a balancing act. You phrased that very well. Our view is, given the uncertainty around rates higher for longer and credit, it's not time to become overly aggressive on the buyback, which helps on the commercial real estate side, obviously. I expect usage this quarter, but I don't expect us to be underweight, if you will. You think about a one-year life on this buyback, I wouldn't expect equal weight or overweight. I would expect underweight usage. So we want to. We think it's undervalued. You will see us use it over the course of the next four quarters. But right now, I think patience is called for as we see what rates do and how that impacts credit given higher for longer. Great. That makes sense. All right. Thank you very much. Thank you, Catherine. Thank you. One moment for questions. Our next question comes from Stephen Scouten with Piper Sandler. You may proceed. Hey. Good morning, everyone. Hey, Steve. I guess I was curious around the new CD pricing. I think, Terry, you laid out some of the CDs that'll roll off between 5.10 and 5.15. Just kind of wondering where you think you might be able to put new production on. Well, that's a great question. I would say it's been going very well until the last post-quarter end, actually. I think with rates ticking back up in the market and looking at the two-year treasury and what's been going on there. Teasing 5%. We've seen wholesale borrowing costs pick up 10 basis points or so here in the last few days. And so I think I wouldn't be surprised to see in the past, we've been able to roll our CD portfolio, new CD production. It's been so flat. It's been amazing. But I'm a little bit worried, and I think that's one of the headwinds to a very stable NIM is where does funding cost go? Because I would say competitiveness or irrationality for pricing has come down over the past several quarters, but it is still competitive out there. I worry that with what's going on in the general markets and the fixed income markets that it's going to put a little bit of upward pressure like we're seeing. So maybe up 10. I think the downside case would be up 10 right now based on what we have. You mentioned just the retention rates that we've had on those CDs. I mean, it's been remarkably consistent month after month, 90% retention rate. Yeah. It has been very good. The other thing, one of the things that helped us achieve this very flat total cost of deposit profile is we actually went in early in the quarter, and we've lowered rates on some accounts, some as much as 50, 55 basis points, and we haven't lost anything. It's actually grown in a money market that we lowered. So we're just trying, we're taking a total portfolio approach, Stephen. I'm a little worried about the CDs. We're having great retention, though. It's kind of hand-to-hand combat right now every day on that. Yeah. And that may answer my next question, I mean, in terms of continuing to improve the deposit mix and grow in deposits, it's been really nice progress over the last 12 months. Are there any significant kind of structural changes, or is it really just more, "Hey, blocking and tackling, incentivizing the right things, and letting this play out over time"? It is definitely blocking and tackling. It's definitely incentives. But it's also just an effort for the last, I guess, now 5 quarters when we hired a fellow at the beginning of last year to really focus on customer acquisition, new customer acquisition. We call it new logos. And you're starting to see some of it. It's being incredibly helpful. The problem with it, by design, it's very small and granular. That's what we want. And so when it's very small and granular, it takes a while to see some movement. But you're seeing some movement. I mean, it's slow, but it is an accountability that we haven't an accountability discipline we haven't had here for a long time that I think you're seeing some of the success of that. Two additional comments. What Malcolm's talking about is franchise-enhancing deposit growth, which is not something we've seen around here in a long time. Some of it is structural. We've made a concerted effort to hire in the small business space and focus on revenues well, companies with revenues under $10 million. That is structural. It's showing great progress. It takes time, and you're going to continue to see us. That's where we're going to push our investment dollars on the front end of the business. Got it. Got it. That's very helpful. And then maybe just last thing for me on the USDA business. I mean, do you have any visibility through the rest of the year in terms of funding for that program and kind of how you think about that? Maybe not so much on a quarter-over-quarter basis, but more so year-over-year, what's possible? Yeah. Here's what I would say. Internally, we've taken our government-guaranteed loan forecast down 15%-20%. Our SBA business is doing exceptionally well. In the USDA, it's harder to get loans approved. We need to move up market in credit and down market in loan size. And so as you think about all of that, you just got to believe the revenue that's what's led us to lowering our internal forecast. But I do think it's above what we did this quarter. I mean, I mean, as I said, it's the most disappointing thing of the quarter. But I think the rest of the year looks pretty good. So, Stephen, that's the best way I know to answer it right now. Okay. Great. Well, I will hop out, but thanks for taking the time. Thank you, Stephen. Thank you. One moment for questions. Our next question comes from Ahmad Hasan with D.A. Davidson. You may proceed. Good morning, guys. This is Ahmad Hasan on for Gary Tenner. Good morning. Thank you. Can you talk about Slide 9? You mentioned term funding. You have around $2 billion maturing at a little over 5%. Would you reduce balance sheet liquidity there or any thoughts on just replacing the funding and the relative costs or impacts on the NIM there? Well, I think as I was just saying earlier, I think to the wholesale market's clearly ticking up in terms of pricing there. But the cost to the NIM over the course of four quarters is 1-2 bps. It's not, that's about what 10 bps on the wholesale portfolio cost. It's going to be between 1 and 2 and probably closer to 1-2 in terms of the impact there. The more retail market, we've got to just see how that market evolves. And we're more relationship pricing there anyway. So, I mean, I think it's a headwind. I don't think it's an insurmountable headwind to the NIM by any stretch of the imagination. It's just one we've got to be aware of. It's still our goal to stay relatively short because if rates come down, we want to be able to reprice down on this deposit portfolio. I mean, as you see there, I mean, you got over $3 billion, and we want to reprice down as quick as we can. I'm not going to get enticed by the inverted curve to go long. Great. That's helpful. And then maybe on the loan growth side, this quarter had pretty nice loan growth. So anything you're seeing there, any specific sectors that you guys are excited about moving forward in the pipeline, or is it coming from even geographically high-growth markets, or? Yeah. I would say almost all of it's coming from our markets. There might be a few outside, but it's predominantly in our markets. Our pipelines, candidly, are as strong as they've been in some time, but they're pipelines. A lot of it is in the early stage of that pipeline. We're seeing as Terry mentioned, we have a concerted effort to focus on small business, on the commercial C&I space. That's where we're seeing some pipeline growth. The real estate market, there are some deals that are starting to come back as the industry kind of level sets with the new rate environment. Things do catch up over time, but I would not predict or suggest that we're going to be super active on the real estate side. Now, we may replace if we lose, but our goal our number one goal one of our goals is to get our concentrations down, and we will do that by the third quarter. So we're not going to go load up a bunch of real estate loans on there. But we do see pipelines stronger than they have been, but I'm not predicting loan growth greater than low, mid, single digits at best. And that's assuming that we have the payoffs come through that we have some visibility into right now. Right. That makes sense. Thank you for taking my questions. Thank you. One moment for questions. Our next question comes from Joe Yanchunis with Raymond James. You may proceed. Good morning. Good morning. I just have to follow up on that last question. Are you able to quantify the visibility that you have into payoffs in the near term? Yeah. I mean, payoffs are, it's a little bit of a dartboard game, but we get what I think clearer and clearer visibility. But at the end of the day, things may not refinance. Things may not sell that some of our bankers think would happen. But if you look back into 2023, we had about $1 billion worth of real estate loans pay off. I don't believe we're going to get $1 billion in 2024, but we hope to get something close to that. So, our folks, the only way to tell you is our folks stay really close to our people, our borrowers. But things change with borrowers quickly. And so, the first quarter was not. It was the first quarter we kind of missed on what we thought our payoffs were as we looked forward back in the fourth quarter. So we missed. The previous four quarters, we hit it pretty good. We think we'll go back to fourth-quarter levels in the second quarter. I can tell you that 90 days from now whether we're successful. We forecast every month from the ground up, loan by loan, on payoffs. And we backtest it. And so, I mean, is it perfect? No, but we've got really good visibility of what we think's going to happen over the next three quarters. Our bankers are optimistic about the year-on payoffs. But the higher-for-longer rate scenario certainly adds an element to how you have to haircut that a little bit, as Malcolm mentioned. Got it. Appreciate that. Kind of shifting over to expenses, I guess, how should we think about out-quarter non-interest expenses? Can you remind us when your annual merit increases occur? Annual merit increases in April 1. Yep. That's right. Yeah. And look, I chose my words carefully that they were in line with management expectations. I know they're above consensus, but if we're going to fix this balance sheet and we're going to create franchise value in our deposits, we've got to invest in the C&I small business space. We're going to certainly try to be as thoughtful as we can and look for other ways to save money. But that's what's going to drive value here for us over the long haul. So, I mean, yes, I can't see. A lot of it depends on performance over the course of the year and how variable comp goes. But certainly, the FDIC insurance premiums aren't going down at all. And so we're just trying to watch it all we can. I think the other thing that's going on that's not helping is we're in a transition year on internal audit. We're in the process of building as you do when you go over 10; you have to build out a full internal audit staff. We have started that process. But yet, we're still having to co-source a lot of this business. So there's a little bit of a double load on expenses when you start this process, if you will. And clearly, I mean, we've enhanced our financial stress testing. We've enhanced our information security staff. We've enhanced our vendor management, our third-party risk management, our model risk management, our stress testing. So look, don't look for expenses to go lower. And you notice most of those positions were non-production revenue-type people. And so I would just echo what Terry said. I think the management felt pretty good about our first-quarter expense levels. Appreciate that. Last one from me here. I want to beat the NIM horse again. So kind of given the compression this quarter in conjunction with the benefits from your recently completed securities portfolio restructuring, how should we think about the NIM and NII trending in the near term? And do you have a sense for when the NIM will trough? I think it's largely troughed right now. I think it should be pretty stable over the balance of the year. But I've got to note I think there's three things that I'm watching really closely in regard to that current belief: wholesale funding cost, interest reversals on credit with a higher-for-longer rate environment, and deposit mix. And if those things don't go the way we think, then the NIM could feel that. What we pick up, the benefits we get from the securities trade could be sacrificed and then some. So that's the best way. Interest reversals have been pretty painful for us for the last several quarters from loans going into non-accrual. I don't see more right now, but higher for longer, you just don't know. Understood. I appreciate you taking my questions. Thank you. Here's the other thing I would say on that is we're currently planning 2 rate cuts. And so when I talk about the NIM from here, that's what we're internally forecasting and modeling. Thank you. One moment for questions. Our next question comes from Matt Olney. He's with Stephens. You may proceed. Hey. Thanks. Good morning, everybody. Hi, Matt. Hey, Matt. I guess kind of on that last question around the margin, Terry, you mentioned interest reversals. I appreciate why the loan yields went down this quarter versus fourth quarter. I'm guessing it's related to reversals, but just any color there? Yeah. I mean, there's always a lot of things at play. I mean, interest reversals is certainly one of them. And so other than that, I mean, it's not anything too significant. I would say just some relationship pricing on some of our mortgage warehouse loans and deposits is also playing a factor there too, especially with the seasonal. I mean, you saw the warehouse loan balances go up. Deposit balances went up. And so that's all playing into that too. Okay. Okay. Appreciate that. And then going back to the liquidity build that we've been talking about at the bank now for a few quarters, if I look at just the securities portfolio and the build we saw there, any color on where you think this balance could be by the end of the year? And then by the end of the year, do you think that liquidity build would be complete by then? I mean, I would expect you'll see us continue to invest $100 million or so a quarter into the securities side, assuming deposits and loans behave as forecast. So something along those lines, I would say, between $1.6 billion-$1.75 billion ending the year is probably, and so that's one of the reasons I talk about this. I didn't say it well, but the balance sheet remake is going to have an impact on the NIM. I talked a lot about that in the January earnings call. I think we've gotten a lot of—we've been able to offset a good bit of that with the loss trade, but still, it's going to weigh a little bit. It was the second part of your question too. I've already. Just that we would be done by the end of the year. And listen, that's the goal. The goal is for us to be sub-90 on the loan-to-deposit ratio, concentrations within limits, wholesale borrowings, which are already within limits but lower. And if we can get there I don't think we ever say, "Job well done. Move on. Go to another topic." We're always going to be in that fight. But I do think I would say at the end of the year, our goal would be that we've kind of passed our first big test. Okay. Appreciate the color there. And I guess just kind of following up on that same topic on the securities side, any more color on what some of the more recent purchases look like? I think you disclosed on the restructure back in March, new yields were north of 6%. Is that still where we're at as far as the yields? And just any color on kind of the products out there. Thanks. Well, it's very much of a barbell strategy in the fixed income space. If you want to protect for down rates, one, you can't find the product; two, you don't like the yields. So it's a combination of you get paid to be short. So if this stuff had a duration of the loss trade was like 2.3 years. So we're buying capital-efficient, shorter-duration securities where we can get paid and enhance yield. And that probably risk-weighted assets I don't have the exact count, but it's probably somewhere in the 25% or something, 25%-30%. It's not high-risk stuff by any stretch of the imagination. And even just the normal MBS carries about 20%. So anyway, Matt, I would expect us to continue to do that. Our focus on how we think about the portfolio and how we think about its usage or impact on risk-weighted assets is not going to change. We're going to do things that are very capital-efficient in that space. Okay, guys. Sounds great. Thank you, Matt. Thank you, buddy. Thank you. This concludes the conference. Thank you for your participation. You may now disconnect.