MVB Financial Corp. (MVBF) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Hello, and welcome to the 2023 Annual Meeting of Shareholders of MVB Financial Corp. Please note that today's meeting is being recorded. It is my pleasure to turn today's meeting over to Marty Becker, Chairman of the Board of Directors. Chairman Becker, you may begin.

Good morning, everyone, and thank you so much for joining us today. It's my pleasure on behalf of the Board of Directors of MVB Financial Corp to welcome you to the 2023 Annual Shareholders Meeting. As Chairman of MVB Financial Corp., I'm pleased to be presiding at today's meeting. Members of our Board of Directors and management team are attending the meeting virtually today. If you are a registered shareholder and have logged into this meeting with a valid control number, you will be able to vote and ask questions about the proposals during the meeting. You may submit questions by entering your question into the designated field on the web portal. I will address questions, if any, about the proposals after they are presented. I have a copy of the notice of this annual meeting and an affidavit of Computershare, the registrar and transfer agent for our common stock, as to the notice of the meeting, which states that on March 27, 2023, a notice of this meeting and notice of Internet availability of proxy materials was mailed to all shareholders of record as of the close of business on March 20, 2023, the record date for this annual meeting. This affidavit is available if any shareholder wishes to examine it, and it will be filed with the minutes of the annual meeting. Unless there is a request we will dispense with the reading of the notice of this meeting. There being no request, the reading of the notice of meeting is dispensed with. Lisa McCormick, the company's Corporate Secretary, has been appointed to serve as the Inspector of Election for this meeting. She has signed an oath to act as the inspector of election, and this oath will be filed with the minutes of this meeting. The inspector has the alphabetical list of registered shareholders of the company as of March 20, 2023, the record date for the meeting, which shows the registered shareholders, their respective addresses and the number of shares held by each shareholder. This list was available prior to and will remain available via the virtual meeting web portal during this annual meeting for inspection by shareholders. Secretary McCormick advised me shortly before this meeting began that a quorum is present. So I declare the meeting duly and lawfully convened. I direct the Secretary to file copies of the notice of this meeting, together with the proxy statement, form of proxy and affidavit of Computershare with the minutes of this annual meeting. I'll now call this annual meeting to order. The meeting will be conducted in accordance with the agenda and the rules of conduct, which you can find on the virtual meeting portal. You can also find a link to the annual proxy statement prospectus on the portal. You will have an opportunity to vote when the polls are open later in the meeting. Although if you have already submitted your vote via proxy, you need not vote again. Today, we are considering 3 proposals. Our Board of Directors has unanimously recommended that the shareholders approve each of the 3 proposals being presented. The first item, the first proposal to be voted on today is the election of 4 director nominees. The proxy statement made available to you earlier listed the company's nominees for director. A plurality of the votes cast is required for the election of directors. The 3 directors whose terms expire in 2023 have been nominated for a 3-year term expiring in 2026. They are: W. Marston Becker; Cheryl D. Spielman; and Larry F. Mazza. There is one new director, Jan Owen, who is also up for election by shareholders this year for a 1-year term. The second proposal to be voted on at today's meeting is the approval on a nonbinding advisory basis of the compensation of our named executive officers. The company's executive compensation is discussed in the proxy statement that was made available to you earlier. Approval of this proposal requires that the number of votes cast favoring the proposal exceed the votes cast opposing the proposal. The final proposal to be voted on at today's meeting is to ratify the appointment of FORVIS, LLP as the independent registered public accounting firm for 2023. The appointment of FORVIS, LLP is discussed in the proxy statement that was previously made available. Approval of this proposal requires that the number of votes cast favoring the proposal exceed the votes cast opposing the proposal. Adam Thomas, with FORVIS, LLP is in attendance at today's meeting and would be pleased to respond to appropriate questions submitted by shareholders, which may be submitted at this time through the online portal. The meeting is now open for any questions that may have been submitted by our shareholders through the web portal. Do we have any questions? Seeing we have not received any questions related to the proposals and having presented all matters to be voted on by shareholders. I declare the polls now open for voting on the proposals. We will take a few minutes to ensure all of the online ballots have been properly submitted for the proposals being voted on today. So let's pause. [Voting]

It appears the voting has been completed. So I hereby declare the polls for voting are now closed at this time, 10:07 a.m. Eastern Time on May 9, 2023. While we finish tabulating the votes, I want to take a minute and express my sincere thank you to all of our shareholders who have taken the time to attend this annual meeting virtually and vote their shares. So let's pause for a second while the tabulation is completed. I have been advised by Secretary McCormick that each of the proposals presented today has been preliminarily approved by MVB shareholders with the directors standing for election having been duly elected for the respective terms as described in the proxy statement. The final results of the meeting will appear in a current report on Form 8-K that the company will file within 4 business states from this meeting. Having concluded the business as set forth in the annual proxy statement, I hereby adjourn the formal portion of the Annual Meeting of Shareholders. And I'd now like to introduce our CEO, Larry Mazza, who will deliver a CEO presentation. Larry?

Mr. Chairman, thank you very much. And like you, I'd like to also send my gratitude to our shareholders who have been extremely supportive through all the years in good and challenging times. A gratitude to our Board of Directors, who are supportive and are challenging to us to make us better and accountable to all our shareholders and to make sure that we deliver. So our teammates to work extremely hard to make sure that MVB is the best that it can be for our communities and clients, and shareholders and directors. And lastly, I would like to thank our communities and especially our clients that we serve who make us or what we are today. When I look at our first page of the presentation, when we look at what we call our SOAP, our strategy on a page, That, to us, is our foundation. The strategy on a page covers what we have is our purpose, which is to be trusted partners on the financial frontier committed to your success. We tied 5 values, and these things are not changing these 5 values. We call the first 3 love trust and commitment, which we tied to our trusted partnership. To be a trusted partner, you have to live those 3 values to your core. And then the financial frontier, which we believe we're on, a lot of it is through technology, et cetera, we believe adaptivity. And I can tell you, our value of adaptivity has been extremely important and valuable through these past 2 years of how we had to adapt pivot and proceed in different areas. And lastly, teamwork to be committed to our shareholders, our teammates, our communities and our client success, it takes a team and our team has really pulled together always, but it's specifically in these last few years to make things come together. Lastly, on this page, before I go to the next slide, are, what we call our growth vehicles. And this is a pure example of adaptivity. We started 2022 with 14 growth vehicles. And as the economy and what we went from transient inflation to permanent inflation change in interest rates rose at a very fast rate. We had to adapt and pivot on several of our vehicles. You can see the highlighted vehicles that are on the track today or where our focus is, 5 on the fast track 4 on the qualifying track. And we continue to even evaluate those vehicles as things have changed from the event of March 12, 2023, we continue to evaluate how we move forward with these vehicles with best for all concerned. On the next slide, it gives a highlight what I'll call, highlights and lowlights of 2022. When we look at the -- what I'll call the lower lights to 2022, we really had an impact on our mortgage income with the increase of interest rates going up at an unprecedented level, we had a reduction in mortgage fee income of over $16 million. Additionally, because of our positive in quality loan growth, we had an increase -- a onetime increase in our provision expense for loan losses, which was over $20 million. Those 2 had a dramatic impact to our earnings in 2022. But we started to create momentum through the year as we -- through the year 2022 as we looked at other ways to grow income. And one was our net interest income. We have a run rate of an increase of $34.6 million. When you look at the first quarter, we're up 50% on -- or net interest income from the previous year. So our growth rate still continues to move positively there. Our increase in 2022 in our card services business by $4 million, and our increase in our consulting income by nearly $6 million were all positives and carry that momentum into 2023. Lastly, we went through a cost reduction program, a decrease in noninterest expense of approximately $14 million. We continue to run that into 2023. Pretty much all of those have been recognized. Some will continue to be recognized in 2023 as well what we start in 2022. You can see on the next slide, our track record loan growth. One thing that MVB has done through the years we've had quality lenders who in quality credit team that has done a great job with loan growth. You can see our compound annual growth rate is 16% and to our net loans. Net loan growth, and you can see the '21 to '22 loan growth was very robust and has been very positive into the new year 2023. Going to the next slide of loan diversity, and I think that's critical as we go into 2023, a possible recession, what does our loan portfolio look like. It's a very diverse portfolio, no major concentrations in areas and historically a strong record of loan quality. So we feel comfortable with our quality of our loan portfolio as we move forward into what we'll call choppy times in our economy. The next slide, we get into or low-cost deposits. This has been our crown jewel. And you'll see when the slide comes up on the screen, we've been able to grow key areas of noninterest-bearing deposits as well as interest-bearing deposits and one new category that we highlight in 2022 is what we call our off-balance sheet deposits. These are deposits that we have access to, if we wanted to grow our deposit base. I want to call it a war chest, so to speak, in excess deposits has been very positive for MVB. And I think as we continue to grow those types of deposits, it's very capital efficient. It has a noninterest-bearing component as well as noninterest income component, excuse me, that is very positive for us, as we move forward into 2023. The next slide we get into our fintech performance trends. Our core bank has performed very well over the years. We have pivoted more focus into our fintech, which is about 42% of our deposit base when we look forward into the new year. You can see the deposit trends in the fintech area are on balance sheet, off balance sheet, very similar to the previous slide, but this being Fintech deposits. You can see what I noted on our noninterest fee income has grown from '21 to '22, it doubled. We're very, very encouraged by the trend as it starts out in 2023 as well. But 2022 was an excellent year in growth of noninterest income. With that, I'll go to the last slide. In the last slide, I think, really speaks to our team and some of the accolades and award of our culture. We really value culture. We really value our teammates, and we know that as our teammates do well to serve our clients, shareholders, our communities and each other, I think, to the highest degree. And these are some of the awards and accolades that our teams received in 2022. With that, Mr. Chairman, I'll turn it back over to you.

Thank you very much, Larry, and Directors appreciate so much the work of you and your leadership team during these challenging times in bank, unfortunately, MVB should come out the other side very strong. This concludes the presentation part of our meeting. We just checked and there's no questions on file. So we will go ahead and move towards an adjournment, and I would encourage each of you to reach out to Secretary Becker, our Corporate Secretary and Investor Relations or Marcie Lipscomb with Investor Relations if you do have any other follow-up questions, and we will be sure to get back to you. Thank you once again for all of your support and your investment in MVB Financial Corp. We are adjourned.

This concludes the meeting. You may now disconnect.