Morning, everybody. This is Andrew Sagliocca.
Good morning.
We're ging to kick off our annual meeting of stockholders. I want to welcome everybody to the annual meeting for Esquire Financial. The annual meeting will come to order. Again, my name's Andrew Sagliocca. I'm the CEO and president of Esquire Financial Holdings and Esquire Bank. I'm going to serve as chairman of the annual meeting. I wanna thank everybody for taking time from their busy day to join us this morning. I'd like you to meet Eric Bader, our COO and EVP. Eric also doubles as our treasurer and corporate secretary of the company. He'll be acting as secretary of the meeting. I know there's several directors on the line. Since we're not in person, I won't go through introductions.
I have several directors here in the conference room with me too. For anybody with questions, there'll be time during the meeting to address those questions. The board of directors has appointed Joe Simon and Colin Dyckman to be the inspector of elections at the annual meeting. Any adjournments and to count and examine the votes. The inspector's report is attached to the minutes of the annual meeting, and we have delivered to the inspector a list of stockholders of the company at the annual meeting, as of the close of business March 31st 2022.
I'm gonna turn the majority of the meeting and the formal part of the meeting over to Eric Bader, and I will jump back in to give everybody an update on the year and how the bank performed and a little update on the verticals that we operate in. Eric?
Great. Thank you, Andrew. Good morning, everybody. The records of the company show that there were 8,076,320 shares of common stock issued, outstanding and entitled to vote at this annual meeting, of which 4,038,161 represent a majority. We have previously received confirmation that the notice of the annual meeting and a 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 all proxies that have been received. A majority of the total outstanding shares entitled to vote at the annual meeting are present in proxy or by person. The inspector is making an exact count and will submit a formal report of the number of shares present or represented during the course of the annual meeting.
A quorum is declared present subject to the confirmation of that fact by the inspector of election. The business to be acted on at this year's annual meeting, as stated in the notice of the meeting, is to consider and act upon, one, the election of two directors to serve for a term of three years and the election of one director to serve for a term of one year. Second, the ratification of the appointment of Crowe as our independent registered public accounting firm for the year ending December 31st 2022. Because no stockholder proposals were properly filed with the company secretary, which is me, in advance of this annual meeting as provided in the bylaws, the business of this meeting is limited to the foregoing two matters in accordance with the bylaws. We will consider the proposals in order presented in the notice of the 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 Todd Deutsch and Selig Zises as directors of the company, each to serve for a three-year term, and the election of Marc Grossman as a director of the company to serve for a one-year term, all as described in the proxy statement. All nominees are currently members of the board of directors. Certified biographical information regarding the three nominees is included in the proxy material, and all nominees are prepared to serve if elected. Are there any questions regarding the election of directors? Okay.
The final 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 December thirty-first, 2022. Are there any questions regarding the ratification of the appointment of Crowe? Okay, great. Thank you. This concludes the discussion on all matters. I will now turn it over to Andrew Sagliocca to take a few minutes to give a report on the company's operations.
Great, Eric. Thank you. Yeah, I'll keep it brief. I'll give you kind of a high-level update on the company and our focus and performance. You know, the goal here is simple. We wanna continue to create a technology-focused institution that's disruptive and valuable in the markets we serve and for our shareholders, and really create value well beyond the financial sector that we're measured against in that peer group. To that end, some performance numbers. For the third year running, we wound up in Raymond James' top banks, they call it their top-performing community bank report. We wound up in the last three years in the top three banks in the country based on performance metrics.
We also wound up in Piper Sandler's top investment ideas for 2021. Those are just indications of the fact that the company performs well above the majority if not the lion's share of companies in what is defined as the community bank sector. For the year, just some high-level thoughts with some compounded annual growth rates coupled with that to show you that it's really not just a one or two-year performance. These growth rates are over basically the last six or seven years to demonstrate that. Diluted earnings per share ended up at $2.26. More importantly, that's a compounded annual growth rate of 44%. With industry leading returns on assets of 1.80% and equity of about 14%.
We had exceptional revenue growth. It's up to $65 million. Couple that with a compounded annual growth rate of 28%. Demonstrates clearly that we continue to grow our revenue and we see it not tailing off or stopping in the future. Strong margin at 4.49%. We are asset sensitive, so we anticipate the benefits of rising rates as we've seen in the beginning of the year from the Fed. Our fee income represents about 33% of our revenue. It's stable fee income on 65,000 small business clients and $24 billion in annual payments in the, what they call the merchant space, which we call the payment processing space. We continue to diversify our loan portfolio. We continue to grow it significantly. Again, about a 23% compounded annual growth rate.
About half the portfolio is variable rate loans that reprice immediately, the following month after rates rise. Solid credit metrics and reserves. Low cost deposits at 10 basis points. We're about $1 billion. Growth rates on the deposit side of 23%. Really strong, what we call off-balance sheet, commercial litigation funds totaling about $538 million at year-end. I think Michael, we reported closer to $700 million in the Q1 , somewhere around that number. You know, how does the bank do this? We're in two national markets. One's a litigation market, the other is a payment processing market. The litigation market is arguably about $ 500 million , $500 billion, $ half a trillion, and it grows along with GDP at about 1.5%-2%.
We live and breathe this market every day. While we understand the nature of these contingent fee inventories, where we focus on plaintiff litigation firms, we have clients in 23 states, and for every dollar we lend to those clients, we get $1.86 in low cost operating and escrow funds. It's really banking on its head. It's rare if ever that a bank lends a dollar and gets more than a dollar in deposits, especially low cost core operating and escrow. A good ratio is 20 or 30 cents or %, however you wanna look at it. That does not include the $538 million in off-balance sheet deposits that we manage that are mainly mass torts and class actions.
On the payment processing side, another national vertical, in all 50 states for about 65,000 small businesses or merchants. The market size is arguably $7.5 trillion and grows 3% or more each year. These are normal debit and credit card processing transactions. How we all as consumers, I believe, transact today. I don't think anybody does it without a debit card or a credit card, other than maybe dinosaurs like me that still do it with cash once in a while. How do we do this? We have some great people in the merchant area. We have a leader in the merchant area who's been there four+ decades. We've hired over the last 10 years some really strong talent out of major either card brands and/or platforms.
Platforms being the first beta-type platform that's now owned by Fiserv. We process. You know, it's nice to say that we process $2 billion a month or close to $24 billion a year. But I think more importantly, we process about 37 million transactions a month. So by definition, the platform is technology-based, technology-enabled. The only way we do that is through technology. The only way we manage risk and compliance is through technology, which is specifically tailored to what we do. All these factors converge into fee income, which is about $21 million or 33% of our total revenue. Again, has a compounded annual growth rate since 2017, where we really started to ramp this platform up of 58%, which is a remarkable growth rate from my vantage point.
How are we gonna continue to grow these markets in the future or these verticals? Well, both markets are extremely large, $ 1.5 trillion, $ 17.5 trillion. We are a fraction of a fraction of both markets. There is a lot of runway for growth, and the only way to do it that we see as board members and management is to continue to adopt more technology to accelerate that growth. We have, but we need to continue to focus on that. We don't necessarily have to build it, which we will if we need to, but we can partner with technology vendors that are out there that have done a great job in the marketplace, building what I'll call technology stacks for specific items.
For instance, one of the verticals or items we're looking at in the technology space, currently is really a what I'll call a payment platform in the litigation space. We're basically adopting what we know in the merchant processing space, and what we've learned there and applying it over to the litigation space. Really what we wanna do is connect our institution right into the back office of law firms. Just an example of what I think that and other technology arrangements, call it banking as a service, call it partnering with technology vendors, developing it. We're indifferent to how we get there. We'll get there in the most efficient and effective manner.
We all believe from the board down through management that the only way to continue to grow these verticals at the rates we're growing or better, and the only way to do it without branches, which we don't have any, is to continue to adopt technology. There's a tremendous potential in both verticals. There's a limited number of players. They're both fragmented and inefficient. We see all that coupling in with technology as a huge opportunity, not as a detriment or as an obstacle. It's the exact opposite. I will stop there because I could go on much longer than I have and see if anyone has any questions. You guys are gonna make this another record shareholder meeting. There's no question.
Hey, Andrew.
Yes, sir.
Andrew, can you hear me? Hi. Sorry. Yeah, I'm just, you know, very impressed by your company. I love being an owner. Just wondering about, you know, what do you see as the risks or barriers or, you know, challenges that could come up over the next few years, you know, to get in the way of, you know, all this growth and success?
Excellent question. What keeps me up at night other than a recession that I can't control and the Fed is fueling the fire with rising interest rates, but we'll put that aside. What keeps me up at night is credit and compliance. Obviously credit on the lending side, where it's mostly concentrated because there is credit risk in the merchant platform that's being charged back and return risk. But I believe we do a great job in managing that and controlling that through the merchants we select and the verticals we operate in. But credit risk is always a concern. You know, we saw it there during the pandemic. We saw excellent cash flowing, multi-family apartment complexes stop cash flowing. We had our hit list of deferrals, which is now zero, just like every other bank.
You know, that's a good example of tried and true lending in the New York metro area that through the pandemic froze. Our law firms really did a nice job. If anything, maybe they're a little tight on cash now because the courts were closed two years ago, but we don't see any major concerns there at all. I would say generally speaking, maybe they're a little tighter than they were during the pandemic, just because the duration of their inventories are so long. Roy, I'd say compliance risk. For the exact reason that I said in my overview, which is we're dealing with 37 million transactions a month in the merchant space, you know, and everybody else knows there's not a way in hell to check every transaction.
There's only technology that crawls those transactions and crawls those websites and analyzes them after the fact, with the levers that we've set up and pull on with that technology to analyze risk and compliance. You know, you're only gonna get the exceptions, you're not gonna get the non-exceptions. Staying compliant with the card brands, which is extensive, and compliant with the regulators is, you know, the second hour I don't sleep.
Great. Thank you.
Great. Thank you for the question. Anybody else before I turn it back to Eric? All right, Eric.
All right. Thank you, Andrew. The report confirms that a quorum is and has been in attendance at the annual meeting for all purposes. The report also shows that each director nominee received the affirmative vote of at least 85.75% of the shares voted, and 99.59% of the shares voted were cast for the ratification and the appointment of Crowe LLP as the company's independent registered public accounting firm for the year ending December 31, 2022. Accordingly, each director nominee has been elected as a director of the company, and the proposal to ratify the appointment of Crowe LLP has been approved. The certificate and report of effective election has been accepted and approved and will be attached to the minutes of the annual meeting.
If there's no further business to come before the annual meeting, I make a motion to adjourn this year's meeting.
I make a motion.
Second.
All in favor.
Aye.
Aye.
Excellent. All right. Thank you, everybody. We appreciate everybody's time and attendance and support throughout the year.
Have a good time.
Thank you, everybody.
Thank you.
Thanks.
Keep up the good work.
Good luck.
Thanks, everybody. Bye-bye.
Thank you.