Pinnacle Financial Partners, Inc. Barclays 24th Annual Global Financial Services Conference

Well, look, Jared, I go back to the questions that we received post-deal announcement, and whether that was in July of last year or whether that was on January 1st this year, there was a great deal of skepticism around three things. Number one, will we be able to continue to grow at an elevated pace? Number two, will you be able to attract and retain top talent? Number three, will the clients like this merger? Look, the skeptics are not wrong. When you look at other MOEs that have occurred in recent years, there's been a lot of challenges. What gets me super excited is I think we've answered those levels of skepticism with real data points that say, yes, we not only can do it, we've actually accelerated some of the performance in those areas. Number one, we've grown loans 12% year to date.

We've grown deposits 6% year to date. Both of those ahead of our internal projections. We've grown earnings per share 26%. The merger itself is a distraction, but it has not slowed down our frontline team members. It has not slowed down their ability to generate growth. Number two, people were concerned about the ability to attract talent. We have added 124 revenue producers through June. We said we had another 34 in July. Those numbers are up 13% year over year versus what the combined companies would have done last year. It's showing that this model is so attractive that even with a little uncertainty around a merger, we're able to attract talent. And two, voluntary turnover, we look back at legacy company history, and last year it was about 7%. This year we're running 6%.

We're attracting at a faster pace, and we're retaining at even a better clip than we would in previous years. I would tell you that should silence the skeptics. The third was on clients. We look at our Net Promoter Scores, and we just look at the Coalition Greenwich data on the commercial side. We have the number one Net Promoter Score in the Southeast. We got the first quarter results back, and our Net Promoter Score declined about three points, which is as expected. Coalition Greenwich has told us any company that's going through a merger generally sees a 15%-20% decline in their Net Promoter Scores. We saw a three-point decline. It still puts us as number one. It shows us that our clients are still dealing with the same people every day, which gives them confidence.

What has been more difficult, it's what you guys want to talk about. It's bringing two companies together and unifying an operating model and a culture. That's not easy, but we've been very successful at being able to do that. It requires paying attention to the little things that people talk about when no one's around, how you hire, how you talk about things, how you decision. All of the leadership team, all of our leadership team has spent a disproportionate amount of their time dealing with that so that we can unify our culture and then build upon it. What's been most surprising, I would just say it's been the momentum. It's been the ability to maintain the growth, to have the legacy Synovus team begin to hire at a pace that's similar to the legacy Pinnacle team.

What's been exciting is when you look at the growth of the firm, it's been so diversified across all of our geographies and all of our specialties. I think we're out of the gates. I give ourself an A, but if Terry Turner were here today, what he would say is his high school basketball coach told him there were no trophies handed out at halftime. We're not giving ourselves any trophies yet.

Yeah. It's the number one question we get, and when I talk with Terry, he says it's the number one question he got for 26 years. Everybody kept saying, "Well, will you be able to do it next year? Will you be able to do it next year?" I think the track record has been pretty successful at being able to do it each and every year. To me, it's the hiring model itself, right? Our hiring model is very specific, where we're looking for high-performing team members that have a great deal of experience, 10 plus years of experience. It's an invitation-only type hiring model, where we are selectively looking for individuals that fit that, but you have to be validated by someone that has worked with you in the past.

I think that's the incredible important part of the hiring model is that we want people to fit not only from a skillset perspective but from a cultural perspective. When you hire someone from a firm and they're able to identify that there are others that look like them that should join our firm, it makes it a whole lot easier. Number two, this decentralized model. A lot of banks run a decentralized model. It's not the hierarchy of decentralization, it's the war on bureaucracy, and it's the desire to want to take out all of those administrative tasks that make our job less fun than it needs to be.

We spend a lot of time and energy, even as we're bringing our companies together, looking at every process, whether it's a loan approval process or how to get a wire executed, all the way down to understanding how can we take out steps that make people's lives easier. We ensure that we're putting resources as close to the action as possible. The servicing platform is all local. The credit people are all local. That's really the collaborative nature of the model that people love because you're in a team that's winning together and losing together. Your third point was on the incentive plan. The incentive plan at the end of the day is an incentive plan where it's all for one and one for all. The company hits its targets, everyone gets paid.

I think if you haven't lived in that model, you would underestimate the power of that incentive plan to make people work together and to not point the finger on the other side, and that you get in the boat, you're rowing in the same direction, focused on a shared ambition, a common goal. That helps back office to front office. It helps between our specialty units. That at the end of the day is the secret sauce that brings these teams together and makes it a fun place to work. When you have the level of team member engagement that we have, we just did a survey again in the middle of the merger, and we have an 85% team member engagement number. Most companies would like that outside of a merger. It makes people give you discretionary effort.

When people love what they do, it's kind of like raving client fans. This is a raving team member fan that goes out and tells others, this is the model you want to work in. Your last question, and I'll stop answering them in 12 minutes.