FVCBankcorp, Inc. (FVCB) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Hello, and welcome to the Annual Meeting of Shareholders of FVCBankcorp, Inc. Please note that today's meeting is being recorded. Following each motion and after the business portion of the meeting, we will have a question-and-answer session. [Operator Instructions] It is now my pleasure to turn today's meeting over to David Pijor, Chairman and CEO of FVCBankcorp, Inc. Mr. Pijor, the floor is yours.

Thank you. Good afternoon. My name is David Pijor. I am the Chairman and CEO of FVCBankcorp. It is my honor and privilege to welcome each of you to the Annual Meeting of FVCBankcorp. I will serve as Chair of the annual meeting. Since it is after 4:30 p.m., I would like to call the meeting to order. Jeff Mathias of the company's independent registered public accounting firm of Yount, Hyde & Barbour is attending the meeting today. Also present is Scott Richter, the company's legal counsel, from the law firm of Williams Mullen. Before proceeding to the business of this meeting, I'd like to thank each of you for attending this virtual annual meeting. In addition, I'd like to introduce your bank's executive management team. Patricia Ferrick, President; Alissa Curry Briggs, Executive Vice President and Chief Lending Officer; Jennifer Deacon, Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer; Todd Dempsey, Executive Vice President and Chief Operating Officer; Sharon Jackson, Executive Vice President and Chief Banking Officer; Michael Nassy, Executive Vice President and Chief Credit Officer. Jennifer Deacon will act as the inspector of elections for this meeting. The agenda of this meeting consists of, first, the formal determination of a quorum; and second, the consideration of 4 separate items: one, the election of directors; two, approval of a nonbinding resolution, that the shareholders of FVCBankcorp approve the compensation of the named executive officers as disclosed in the proxy statement pursuant to the rules of the Securities and Exchange Commission; three, to determine in an advisory nonbinding vote, whether an advisory vote on the executive compensation should be held every 1, 2 or 3 years; and the fourth item, the ratification of Yount, Hyde & Barbour as the company's independent registered public accounting firm to audit the 2024 financial statements of the company. In a few moments, I'll ask Ms. Deacon to report on the number of shares present in person or by proxy at this meeting. As we proceed with the business of the meeting, your votes will be computed, and Ms. Deacon will report the votes to me. Thank you for voting early. This has been a great help to us. Let me point out that if you have already voted by proxy, it will simplify the vote count if you would allow your proxy to remain in effect since it has already been tabulated. Accordingly, shareholders who have already mailed or electronically submitted a proxy are requested not to vote again unless they wish to change their vote from the way they marked their proxies. If any shareholder in attendance today intends to vote during the meeting and has not already done so, you may do so electronically in a few minutes, as shown on your screen. The poll for voting on each of these 4 items are now open to the electronic web portal. Ms. Deacon will now report on the mailing of the Notice of this Meeting and the presence of a quorum.

Thank you, David. This meeting is held pursuant to the printed notice mailed out on April 5, 2024, to each shareholder of record on March 25, 2024, who is entitled to vote. A list of shareholders entitled to vote at this meeting is available on the web portal to shareholders who have logged into the meeting with an authenticated control number. All documents concerning the call and Notice of the Meeting, including the Secretary's affidavit concerning mailing, will be filed with the records of the meeting. The count of holders of shares of the company's common stock, immediately prior to the commencement of this meeting, indicated that the holders of 14,834,223 shares of the company common stock were in attendance at the meeting or represented by proxy. This represents 83% and the majority of the total votes eligible to be voted at this meeting and a quorum.

I hereby declare a quorum present at the meeting. This meeting is duly constituted and officially convened. I would now like to proceed with the business of this annual meeting. There are 4 items for consideration. The first item is the election of directors. The shareholders have received proxy statements regarding the proposed directors. The following directors of FVCBankcorp have been nominated to serve until the 2025 Annual Meeting of Shareholders or their successors have been elected and qualified: Marc N. Duber, Patricia A. Ferrick, L. Burwell Gunn, Meena Krishnan, Scott Laughlin, David W. Pijor, Devin Satz, Lawrence W. Schwartz, Sidney G. Simmonds, Daniel M. Testa; Philip Wills III, Steven M. Wiltse. At this time, I will entertain a motion to elect these directors to a 1-year term to the Board of Directors. I have a motion made by Patricia Ferrick and a second by Jennifer Deacon. There were no other nominations made in accordance with the bylaws. Therefore, I declare that nominations for directors are closed. Are there any questions concerning this first item? [Operator Instructions] Seeing no questions, we will turn to the second matter, to approve the nonbinding resolution that the shareholders of FVCBankcorp approve the compensation of the named executive officers as disclosed in the proxy statement pursuant to the rules of the Securities and Exchange Commission. At this time, I will entertain a motion to approve the resolution just mentioned. I have a motion made by Patricia Ferrick and a second by Jennifer Deacon. Are there any questions related to this item? As there are no questions, we turn to the third matter, to approve in an advisory nonbinding vote, whether an advisory vote on the executive compensation should be held every 1, 2 or 3 years. At this time, I will entertain a motion, whether the advisory vote on executive compensation should be held every 1 year. I have a motion made by Patricia Ferrick and a second by Jennifer Deacon. Are there any questions relating to this item? As there are no questions, we turn to the fourth and final matter. The fourth item for consideration is the ratification of the appointment of Yount, Hyde & Barbour as the company's independent registered public accounting firm to audit the financial statements of the company for the year ending December 31, 2024. The proxy materials contain information regarding Yount, Hyde & Barbour. At this time, I will entertain a motion to ratify the appointment of Yount, Hyde & Barbour as the company's independent registered public accounting firm for 2024. I have a motion made by Patricia Ferrick and a second by Jennifer Deacon. Are there any questions related to this item? I received no questions on this matter. I hereby declare the polls are closed. Will the Inspector of Election, please report the preliminary results of the voting?

The ballots and proxies have been counted. The nominees for director have each been elected by the vote of at least 94.5% of the shares voted. The nonbinding resolution that the shareholders of FVCBankcorp, Inc. approve the compensation of the named executive officers as disclosed in the proxy statement pursuant to the rules of the Securities and Exchange Commission has been approved by the affirmative vote of approximately 95.4% of the shares voted. The advisory nonbinding vote that an advisory vote on the executive compensation should be held every year has been approved by the affirmative vote of approximately 92.6% of the shares voted. The appointment of Yount, Hyde & Barbour, P.C. has been ratified by the affirmative vote of approximately 99.5% of the shares voted.

Thank you, Jennifer. I hereby declare that each of the director nominees has been duly elected; that the nonbinding resolution that the shareholders of FVCBankcorp approve the compensation of the named executive officers has been ratified; that is an advisory nonbinding vote on the executive compensation should be held every year; and that the appointment of Yount, Hyde & Barbour has been ratified. I would like to briefly report on the financial performance of our bank during 2023. As we are all aware, 2023 was a challenging year for the banking industry. Our industry as a whole was faced with an unprecedented increase in interest rates and the longest period of an inverted yield curve in our country's history. These conditions have exerted significant pressures on all banks, including community banks. FVCbank responded to the challenges of 2023 by focusing on the fundamental strengths which have characterized our banks since our founding almost 17 years ago, the relationship nature of our bank and our use of technology to provide the best banking products and services. We also took prudent steps to reposition our balance sheet and reconfigure our internal infrastructure to create a more efficient and profitable organization. As a community bank, we have always understood that our most valuable assets are the relationships we have created and nurtured with our clients. As a relationship bank, we have never lost sight of the importance of strong connections with our loyal customers. That is why when many of our peer banks stopped or curtailed lending, we continued to serve the credit needs of our clients and continued to cultivate new client relationships. During 2023, FVCbank originated loans of over $300 million for our clients. Approximately 3/4 of the commercial loan clients of FVCbank maintained a positive relationship with the bank. During 2023, we strengthened our communication and engagement with our clients and prospective clients to enhance our deposit portfolio. During the year, we grew deposits by approximately $15 million. Notably, we experienced strong core deposit inflows in the third and fourth quarters of 2023 of approximately $200 million and $116 million, respectively. This enables FVCbank to substantially reduce our wholesale funding and wholesale deposits. In addition to strengthening our engagement with our clients and prospective clients, we took important and significant steps to enhance our use of technology to create further internal efficiencies and to offer our clients better tools and more functionality to improve their banking experience with FVCbank. We believe that continuing emphasis on technology must be a strong component of how community banks thrive today and in the future. FVCbank's significant investment in financial technology not only improves our clients' experiences but also permits our calling officers to spend more time with their clients, helping them navigate their own financial challenges and thus create a stronger partnership with our clients. I can confidently state that FVCbank is at the forefront of modern banking technology. In 2023, we introduced unique technologies among our local community bank peers. Its focus on banking technology inspired us to change the tagline of our bank to "One Bank. Unlimited Possibilities." The technology initiatives of FVCbank include numerous items and cover a range of banking functions. I would like to highlight a few of these. We acquired and implemented an advanced single-platform banking solution called Q2. Previously, we employed different systems and management consoles for online voice and mobile banking. Q2 digital platform combines everything into a single core integration for our commercial account holders and soon for our consumer clients. It also provides our clients with options and functionality they did not have before. We rolled out Lightning Lending, the FVCbank's branded name for a digital loan origination system. The system was developed by a partner, the fintech called Numerated. Lighting Lending is designed to assist smaller businesses with loans of up to $500,000. The online loan application and digital underwriting process takes minutes. An FVCbank account must be opened, and successful applicants usually receive funds into their accounts within 48 hours after loan approval. FVCbank increased its use of robotic process automation, RPA, in 2023 to improve employee satisfaction, engagement and productivity by removing mundane tasks from their workdays. RPA is a software technology that makes it easy to build, deploy and manage software robots that mimic human action, interacting with digital systems and software. Robotic process automation has reduced errors and shortened processing time for many processes from hours to minutes. Collectively, hundreds of hours have been saved on daily, weekly, monthly and periodic repetitive manual processes. The last example of the commitment of FVCbank to employ the latest technology is our partnership with KlariVis. KlariVis is a continually evolving data analytics platform which pulls facts and figures from the bank's various systems to enable our officers to obtain customer data quickly in order to improve decision-making, obtain customer insights and enhance our risk management. KlariVis provides daily updated dashboards for all areas of our bank. During 2023, FVCbank executed 2 balance sheet repositioning by selling a portion of our investment portfolios in the first quarter of the year and in the fourth quarter, totaling approximately $1.2 million in securities. These securities generated a weighted average book yield of only 1.69%. The proceeds of these sales were redeployed with the projected earn-back of the after-tax loss on the sale of $12.2 million in under 3 years. Further, in the first quarter of 2024, we also redeployed $48 million of our bank-owned life insurance policy. This resulted in a onetime increase of $2.4 million to our tax provision but will be earned back in approximately 1 year by the redeploying of these proceeds to fund new loan growth and pay down high cost funding during 2024. During the year, all of FVCbank's regulatory capital components and ratios remained well in excess of threshold required to be considered well capitalized. Risk-based capital increased to 13.83% at December 31, 2003 from 13.38% at the previous year-end. We also took significant actions to improve our operating efficiencies and improve profitability. For example, salary and benefit expenses for the first quarter of 2024 decreased by approximately $484,000 compared to the fourth quarter of 2023. The savings was a result of reduced staff and process improvement through the use of technology. Full-time equivalent employees have decreased from 134 at March 31, 2023, to 118 at December 31, 2023. We have also consolidated and reduced office space costs. These and other steps have well positioned FVCbank for further growth and profitability in 2024 and beyond. The first quarter results we reported in April this year reflected both an increase in net interest income and a 10 basis point or 4% increase in our net interest margin from the fourth quarter of 2023 to the first quarter of 2024. This increase measured 2.47% for the first quarter compared to 2.37% for the fourth quarter of 2023. We are pleased to see that the hard work of the management team of FVCbank has already shown measurable improvement in our profitability. We expect further improvement in following quarters as the benefits of the balance sheet repositioning and internal efficiencies continue to be recognized. In conclusion, we are well positioned to create shareholder value to our shareholders, stakeholders and will remain focused on client service, quality core growth and profitability. Community banks, such as FVCbank, play essential roles in serving small- and medium-sized businesses and the communities in which these businesses operate. FVCbank is committed to these important roles and remaining a source of strength and stability no matter what the economic outlook may be. In closing, I would like to thank our directors, officers and staff for their support. Most significantly, I thank our shareholders and clients for their trust in FVCbank. We value these relationships and are enthusiastic about our prosperous future. The last item is the presentation of the 2024 Burwell Gunn Citizenship Award. Each year, FVCbank identifies one or more nonprofit organizations to award funds from the L. Burwell Gunn Citizenship Award to support these organizations' ongoing effort to help the communities we serve. This year's recipient is Organization for Autism Research. OAR's mission is to strive to use science to address the social, educational and treatment concerns of autistic people, parents, autism professionals and caregivers. The mission of applying research to answer questions of daily concern to autistic people and those around them defines their goals and program objectives and shapes their budget. We appreciate the work that OAR does as they serve their communities. As there is no business to be conducted, this concludes the formal business of our meeting. At this time, I would welcome any questions. [Operator Instructions] I would like to again express my sincere appreciation to those shareholders who have joined us today as well as to those who submitted their proxies but were not able to attend. The continued success of our bank is attributable, in large part, by the continued support of our shareholders. At this time, I would like to entertain a motion for adjournment. Patricia Ferrick has made a motion and this was seconded by Jennifer Deacon. I declare the motion carried and the meeting adjourned. Thank you all.

This concludes the meeting. You may now disconnect.