Susan Blair
Management
Good morning. I’m Susan Blair, Executive Vice President in charge of Investor Relations for Bank of the Ozarks. The purpose of this call is to discuss the company’s results for the third quarter of 2009, and our outlook for upcoming quarters. Our goal is to make this call as useful as possible in understanding our recent operating results and future plans, goals, expectations and outlook. To that end we will make certain forward-looking statements about our plans, goals, expectations, beliefs, estimates and outlook for the future, including statements about economic, real estate market, competitive credit market, unemployment and interest-rate conditions, including recent changes in U.S. government monetary and fiscal policy; revenue growth; net income and earnings per share; net interest margin, including our expectation of maintaining net interest margin in the next few quarters at a level slightly above or slightly below the level achieved in the past two quarters Net interest income; non-interest income including service charge, mortgage lending and trust income; non-interest expense; our efficiency ratio, including our long-term goal of reaching and sustaining a sub 40% efficiency ratio; asset quality in our various asset quality ratios; our expectations for provision expense for loan and lease losses and net charge-offs in the next few quarters; our allowance for loan and lease losses. Loan, lease and deposit growth; changes in the volume of our securities portfolio; potential savings from repayment of certain FHLB advances; the opening of new banking offices and the closing of the conditional sales contracts for certain nonperforming assets. You should understand that our actual results may differ materially from those projected in any forward-looking statements due to a number of risks and uncertainties, some of which we’ll point out during the course of this call. For a list of certain risks associated with our business, you should also refer to the forward-looking information caption of the Management’s Discussion and Analysis section of our periodic public reports, the forward-looking statements caption of our most recent earnings release and the description of certain risk factors contained in our most recent annual report on Form 10-K, all as filed with the SEC. Forward-looking statements made by the company and its management are based on estimates, projections, beliefs and assumptions of management at the time of such statements and are not guarantees of future performance. The company disclaims any obligation to update or revise any forward-looking statement based on the occurrence of future events, the receipt of new information or otherwise. Now, let me turn the call over to our Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, George Gleason.