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

Thomas Broughton – President & CEO
I will do second half of that. Answer’s a little harder probably on the Charleston question. We have four bankers on the ground there and I guess I will come back. The first quarter is usually the slowest in terms of loan growth because again they’ve crossed to get enclosed, they came in the fourth quarter. So they can get incentive banquets. And so we typically bail through the year but Michael the loan pipelines are always good. I mean they are always good so I am not going to tell you that they won’t tolerate when they have a big loan pipeline like our producers do. So they always have a big pipeline and they are always wrong about when they are going to close and let’s say it’s going to close in 30 days and it drags into 120 days. So the pipelines are good and I feel good about,  what I really feel good about is we’re having a lot of accounts. As long as we are opening accounts I feel good and I’ll look at that on a weekly basis and I get a sense of where we are. But with Charleston numbers we conservatively project those starting at , so we had to cover what we do on a projection basis on a new region.

William Foshee – CFO
Yes, talking on a new region from a growth standpoint, we don’t hire a banker less than growth of 300 million in five year. I mean that’s an overall goal when we hire somebody from the region. But first year you don’t look at a net loss of 1.5 million to 2 million is what we normally project and I think that’s a reasonable number from Charleston based on the staff that’s going to hire and just gear up and give everybody a place to produce.

And you know the monthly growth rate starts at, just for a region starts at 4 million a month in loans and deposits and ramps up to 8 million a month in loans and deposits on a conservative basis Michael, that’s what we project. So it won’t be a meaningful contribution to 2015, the real contribution will come in ’16, ’17.

Q: Okay. And then maybe as a follow-up. I appreciate the commentary on the accrual expense and how that works. But as it relates to the hires in South Carolina, how much of that expense base was in the fourth quarter run rate?

Thomas Broughton – President & CEO
It’s not much at all. There was none.

William Foshee – CFO
Yes, we forecast that into 2015 as we hire people there is usually upfront incentives, that’s really a 2015 expense base

Q: Any sense for kind of magnitude of what you might expect in terms of incremental from here?

Thomas Broughton – President & CEO
Incremental incentive?

Q: Incremental expenses from the Charleston market once they get kind of ramped up and then fully staffed up?