Good morning, and welcome to the Esquire Financial Holdings, Inc. Annual Meeting for Shareholders. I will now turn the call over to the bank's CEO, Andrew. Please go ahead.
Thank you, Brian. Good morning, everybody. My name is Andrew Sagliocca. I'm the Vice Chairman, CEO, and President of Esquire Financial and Holdings and Esquire Bank. I want to welcome everybody to our annual meeting. We appreciate you joining. I'd also like to introduce Eric Bader, our Chief Operating Officer, EVP, and Corporate Secretary.
Eric will be the secretary of the annual meeting. There are board members and management on the phone. I'd like to welcome them and thank them for joining, and thank them for all their support over the year. For those of you who have questions, there'll be a Q&A period later on when I give you the financial update. The board has appointed Joe Simon of Cullen and Dykman as the Inspector of Elections for the annual meeting.
The inspector's report is attached to the minutes of the annual meeting. We have delivered the inspector a list of stockholders of the company entitled to vote, as of the close, March 31st, 2023. For now, I'm going to hand the meeting over to Eric Bader, who will walk you through the formalities of the meeting and the items to vote on and the like.
Thank you, Andrew. Welcome, everybody. The records of the company show that there were 8,190,758 shares of common stock issued, outstanding, and entitled to vote at this year's annual meeting, of which 4,095,380 shares represent a majority. We have received confirmation that the notice of annual meeting, the proxy statement, and proxy card were mailed to each stockholder of record as of the close of business on the record date.
I have previously delivered to the inspector, the list of stockholders and proxies that have been received. A majority of the total outstanding shares entitled to be voted are present in person or by proxy. The inspector is making an exact count and will submit a formal report on the number of shares represented.
A quorum is declared present, subject to the confirmation by the inspector in his report. The business to be acted upon at the annual meeting is to consider and act upon: one, the election of three directors to serve for a term of three years. two, the ratification of the appointment of Crowe LLP as our independent registered public accounting firm for the year ending December 31st, 2023. three, an advisory vote on executive compensation.
four, an advisory vote on the frequency of future Say on Pay votes. No stockholder proposals were filed with the company's secretary in advance of this annual meeting. We will consider the proposals in the order presented in the notice of annual meeting. The polls are now open. At the conclusion of the discussion and voting on all matters, I will announce the closing of the polls.
The first item of business to be voted upon is the election of Joseph Malone, Robert Mitzman, and Kevin Waterhouse as directors of the company, each to serve for a three-year term, all as described in the proxy statement. All nominees are currently members of the board of directors. Certain biographical information regarding the three nominees is included in the proxy materials. All nominees are prepared to serve if elected.
Are there any questions regarding the election of directors? The second item of business to be voted upon is the proposal to ratify the appointment of Crowe LLP as our independent registered public accounting firm for the year ending 2023. Are there any questions regarding the ratification of the appointment of Crowe? The third item of business to be voted upon is the proposal to approve an advisory vote on executive compensation.
Are there any questions regarding the proposal to approve an advisory vote on executive compensation? The final item of business to be voted upon is the proposal to approve an advisory vote on the frequency of future Say on Pay votes. Are there any questions regarding the proposal to approve an advisory vote on the frequency of future Say on Pay votes?
This concludes the discussions on all matters. If there are no further ballots or proxies, I declare the polls closed. All ballots and proxies are now in the custody of the Inspector of Elections. I would like to now turn the meeting over to Andrew Sagliocca, who will give a brief update on the company's operations.
Thanks, Eric. I'm going to focus on where we are today in the first quarter, not so much for the year end, and I think a lot has happened in the markets, between the failure of SVB and Signature and the acquisition of Credit Suisse and the like. I'll be happy to talk about the year end if anyone wants me to, but I don't think it's as relevant as where we are today. As we noted in our earnings release and in our first quarter Q, we, the board and senior management, have wholeheartedly believed that our balance sheet management and relationship banking were key to the future success of the company.
By that I mean a focus on the balance sheet first, and credit, and interest rate risk, and capital, and the like, before we focused on earnings, and relationship banking. What I mean by that is having clientele that on the lending and depository side are clients of ours, by having clientele on the merchant
processing side, that deposit with us, by doing custodial banking that we specialize in, and ensuring that the clients we serve, are not only receiving a high level of service, but more importantly, we humbly believe they cannot get what they get at other banks here because of our experience over a decade and a half.
With that, at the end of the day, the core commercial banking clients in these two national verticals, that being payment processing and litigation, represent about 90% of our deposits. I know today in this world, everybody's core deposit focused on relationship banking, focused on what we in the industry call hot money. This is all vetted out at the end of the day, once again, with Raymond James, naming us a top-performing bank in the country.
This is five years running now. This year, we were a number one bank again, which I think we were three out of the five years, certainly in the top three over those five years. Really, at the end of the day, it's a credit to the board and to management and to the balance sheet management that we put forth first and the relationship banking. At the end of the day, the bank's got very solid credit metrics. We have no non-performing assets.
We have what we consider a pretty robust Allowance for Loan and Lease Losses at about 135 basis points of loans. Really, there's no past losses, there's no current problems, but just the discussion of recession has made us look more conservatively at our credit metrics and our reserve coverage. As I've already said, our deposits primarily are in the litigation and payment processing verticals. Our uninsured deposits are right around 30%.
I think it was 27 in the 4th quarter and 33 in the 1st quarter, so right around 30%. Out of that 30%, 90-plus percent of it represents the same customers that we do relationship banking with. The majority, 90-plus percent of these uninsured deposits are law firm operating accounts, law firm escrow accounts, merchant reserve accounts, ISO reserve accounts, custodial accounts.
They're all core customers or what we consider core customers. Our liquidity position is, to me, wildly robust. We're sitting on liquidity that represents almost 50% of the deposit base, and we are not leveraged today. By definition, we don't borrow money to put securities on the book and make earnings, nor have we been leveraged over 16 years. We like to keep the powder dry on liquidity, and, during this crisis, it's obviously paid off.
The interest rate risk that Eric and Michael, our CFO, employ with the rest of the group is also very strong. About 60% of our loans are tied to Prime. Those loans float up as rates float up. Our core deposits that are mostly escrow and non-interest-bearing demand deposits don't and aren't rate sensitive, and these loans also come with floors to protect us on the downside.
Capital, to me, is robust and wildly strong, whether you look at it traditionally, the way the regulators look at it, or you look at it the way the world looks at it today, pulling out marks or fair values on available-for-sale and held to maturity securities. Either way, our CET1 ratio, equity to tier one capital and common equity to tangible assets are well in excess of 10%, either way you look at it. All this is driving industry-leading returns.
Our Return on Assets in the last 2 quarters has been right on top of 2.80%, and our Return on Equity the last 2 quarters have been right on top of about 23%. We've done this while we continue to invest in the future. We continue to invest in technology, we continue to invest in digital marketing, and now, as we've hinted and indicated in our 1st quarter earnings release, we're going to make a significant investment for our company in our future by hiring sales and business development officers and support staff here in Jericho and around the country.
We're still confident with those additional expenses that we'll continue to perform the way we have in the past and the way that the analysts have indicated, primarily KBW right now has indicated we'll perform over the next two years. That's really my update in a nutshell. I don't know if anyone has any questions?
If anyone does have a question over the phone, you may press star one now. There are no questions over the phone at this time.
Okay, I hand it back to Eric.
Back to me. All right, thank you, Andrew. Thanks for the update. The report confirms that a quorum is and has been in attendance at the annual meeting. The report also shows that 1, each director nominee received the affirmative vote of at least 81.58% of the shares voted. 2, 99.83% of the shares voted were cast for the ratification of the appointment of Crowe as the company's independent registered public accounting firm for the year ending December 31, 2023. 3, 54.58% of the shares voted were cast for approval of the executive compensation.
Four, the frequency of the Say on Pay votes received 94.01% for the one-year option, 0.52% for the two-year, 3.78% for the three-year option, and 1.69% abstaining. Accordingly, each director nominee has been elected as a director of the company. The proposal to ratify the appointment of Crowe has been approved.
The advisory vote on the executive compensation has been approved. The one-year option for the frequency of Say on Pay votes has been approved. The certificate and report of Inspector of Elections has been accepted and approved and will be attached to the minutes of the annual meeting. There being no further business to come before the annual meeting, I make a motion to adjourn the meeting.
I second.
All in favor?
Yes.
All right, so moved. All right. Thank you, everybody, for attending this annual meeting. We appreciate it, and as always, we're always available for calls, and discussions at any time. Please feel free to reach out and have a great day.
Thank you.
This concludes today's meeting. You may now disconnect.