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

William Foshee – CFO
Yes, good morning. From a non-interest expense standpoint, we are now seeing external pay from increased expense standpoint, we made the year end incentive adjustment, we decreased our accrual by 1.1 million in the fourth quarter. From an accrual standpoint, we are always going to have an adjustment in the fourth quarter. We are going to accrue based on anybody gaining the maximum, and we will adjust that in the fourth quarter of each year.

Going forward, from a tax rate standpoint, everybody knows the rate going forward should be 31%. We feel like that’s a good number based on our current tax position and tax credits.

Managed income decreased and fourth quarter, well that had to do with our fed funds, balance increased by about 100 million which had a minimal impact of 6 basis points per quarter. It’s really hard to predict our excess funds each quarter. So, we feel like 365 is probably a normal net interest margin range. Again, it’s a little hard to predict just based on our excess funds like Tom talked about.

We had a good loan growth in the fourth quarter, a lot of that came towards end of the quarter. So that definitely had an impact on our margin per quarter. And that’s the highlights from my side, and let’s go to questions.

Operator
Very good. We will now begin the question and answer session. To ask a question you may press * then 1 in your telephone keypad. If you are using a speaker phone, please pick up the handset before pressing the keys. If your question has been addressed and you would like to withdrawal from the queue, you may press * then 2. And our first question will come from Michael Rose of Raymond James. Please go ahead.

Q: Hey, good morning guys, how are you?

Thomas Broughton – President & CEO
Morning.

William Foshee – CFO
Hey Mike.

Q: A couple of questions here. Just, obviously you guys had good loan growth. Looks like it was very backend weighted. As we move into 2015, can you give a little color around your pipelines and then maybe what you might expect from Charleston, you know overtime obviously I can look at the demographic trends but can we get a sense for the size of the book that individually get hired that you ran at the institution and [inaudible]? Thanks.