All right. Everyone has joined?
Well, thank you. I believe everybody is on the call now and can see me. I am Ed Nigro, the Executive Chairman of GBank Financial Holdings and GBank. And with me today, I have Ryan Sullivan, who is the CEO and President of both. And the two of us will be leading you through the presentation this afternoon. And we'll be first right now, I would like to call to order the annual shareholders' meeting for May 19, 2024. How's that? 2024 to order. And I will begin with some introductions, as we always do. And I would like to show you first our directors of GBank Financial Holdings on the screen. And I know that you have seen these before.
But as I look at the page now, you will see one of the most interesting things that I wish to point out to many of the shareholders are that we truly have an independent board. From the very first time we started the bank board at Bank of George, when we had 12 directors, 10 directors were independent. Some of you may be old enough with me to remember when the Sarbanes-Oxley law came into effect back in around 2002, 2002, and 2003, where many companies and banks had boards consisting primarily of officers of the company. But we never did, and we never have.
The Board of Directors that you see in front of us at the holding company level are different, although there's some overlap, to the bank board members because the holding company members are really looking at the oversight from the standpoint on a national level because we do business in 40 states, from transactions with our shareholders and transactions with our institutional investors, and overall guidance at a very high-level corporate level, if you will, because we really intend to be a sophisticated financial institution. When you look at the board, you'll see some quite amazing directors. Lee Finley, who founded a very important fiberglass truck body business and became a shareholder and really stepped up to assist us back in 2012 and 2013 going through the Great Recession.
Chuck Griege, who's a managing partner of Blue Lion Capital, who is a bank investment expert with his own fund. We really rely on input when we have discussions with our institutional investors. Bill Hornbuckle, William Hornbuckle. I've known Bill for some 25, 30 years. You know we are very big in the hotel business in our SBA portfolio. Well, I often chuckle because Bill is very active on our board and is head of our compensation committee for our Board and our holding company. We had about 160 employees. Bill only has about 60,000 employees, but he does that very well for us. We are so gifted to have the talents of these directors. You look at Katie Lever, who's the General Counsel in gaming. Great Canadian Gaming runs the Canadian gaming across the country. She's their General Counsel.
Also, very important input from her as our chairman of our Audit Committee. Todd Nigro, yeah, he's my son. And he is President of Nigro Development. And their own hotel company and their own tavern companies and gaming companies are very, very involved. Jim Sims, well, we're in technology. And Jim is our technology guru. He has an amazing background in technology. Alan Sklar, our Counsel who has helped guide us in our organizational structure for many years. He's a transactional attorney in Las Vegas and very important to our board. Ryan, I'll skip. But Mike Voinovich, now Mike was originally with an investment company called Boenning & Scattergood, helped us do our raise back in the day. But he is now and we're in payments business. And ECHO Health is one of the largest healthcare private payments companies in the United States.
So you see, the talent of this board is very directly related to the structure of our company. I want to go over once more to the next page to see the bank directors. Now, the bank directors, while the holding company meets four times a year, the bank directors meet every month. They're doing the heavy lifting with us to help develop our business relationships in our core banking area. There are four directors here that are focused primarily and really on the bank. Dana Dwiggins, who you'll see, she's the Managing Partner of her law firm and also very much involved in trust asset management in her law firm. When I say management of the trust, their firm very much deals in estate matters.
She has become a very, very important element of our bank and helping us grow our bank on the asset side. Tim Herbst. God, I've known the Herbst family for forever in Las Vegas. They have over 140 service stations in our state. He's in gaming. He's in development. Tim's very much involved in the community and very much involved as our bank director. Shelli Lowe, who was Director of Client Services for Integra Realty, she's an appraiser. She really helped us during the Great Recession when she came on board as an appraiser and helped guide us through those very slippery slopes that we did in 2013 and 2014. Troy Nelson, again, president of Mojave Electric. I've known his dad and his family forever. They are one of the largest electrical contractors in the state of Nevada. They have been in Nevada.
All of these people that I'm introducing you to have been in Nevada for 50 years or plus. Their families are very active. That's why we have a bank that is so fundamentally strong because the board supports us. When I talk about both boards and so we can move on. There's one important thing that we do. There are a lot of regulatory matters that a board member must attend to that are required by the FDIC and at the holding company by the FRB. But one of the things we try to do is make sure we put our regulatory matters that we must address in an agenda item where the directors can accomplish that while they're preparing for the meeting.
So we have a consent agenda to do the matters that we must do and must sign and must read so that we can also pass in our consent agenda those matters so that we can discuss as a board the business of the bank and the critical businesses that we're in and get input from them because you can see the kind of talent. I wanted to take the time to spend on our board at this annual meeting, again, because we are a management. When we talk about management of our bank, we talk about the management Ryan's going to introduce, but we talk about our board members because they are very, very active in what we do. So with that, Ryan, I'd like to turn it to you to introduce the leadership team of our EVPs.
Yeah. Thank you, Ed. Good afternoon, everybody. It's great to have you on the call. Ed and I have always been in alignment in terms of really the key to our current and future success is predicated on the quality of people that are involved with the company. I consider myself fortunate to work with both of our Boards of Directors. I think that that comment continues as we talk about our executive management team. You've seen those of you that have been shareholders with GBank for many years now that we've built a comprehensive management team really designed to achieve our growth and strategic goals.
As we grow our EMT to include areas such as government-guaranteed lending, operations and payments, now credit card, credit, technology and information, and obviously finance and accounting, we continue to build that team with the key focus of meeting our key strategic objectives. To that front, happy to introduce for the very first time our EVP, Chief Risk Officer, Scot Levine. Scot, I believe, is also on the call. You'll hear more about him as we have a press release queued up in the next couple of days. Scot joining us as our new CRO. He actually started in the position in late April. So he's very new on the job.
Brings an incredible wealth of knowledge and experience in the areas of compliance and risk management and performing those roles at a high level, both inside financial institutions and also as a consultant with firms such as KPMG and RSM. Most recently, it's pretty interesting. Scot has been directly involved with the Capital One and Discover merger. And as we grow our business strategies to focus on credit card and payments, Scot brings just a wealth of knowledge. And we're excited to announce him and have him join us as part of the executive management team. Welcome, Scot.
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No, you're still there, Ed. I'll turn it back over to Ed to talk a little bit about where we are today as a company and some of our key profile.
I wanted to start by saying that 2023, which is the year we're reviewing today, was a really challenging one for banks because of the failure of several large financial institutions at the beginning of the year. It also impacted many other financial institutions that had or were perceived to have the same business platform of the banks that ultimately were closed. It was at that time that Ryan and I reached out to our shareholders. We reached out to our clients because so many of our clients are shareholders. Our board assisted us. We had to give the message that, "Look, we are different than the institutions and the problems that those institutions have. We are fundamentally strong. We have a very strong business model." Our business model and our investment portfolio are not structured at all the same as some of these other institutions.
But yet, there was, as you will recall, a lot of stress placed on financial institutions in the second quarter of last year. And we felt some of them as well. But yet, we had a mission in 2023 to grow our bank. And when we looked introspectively, saw that we are indeed unique in many ways. We have a nationally ranked SBA program. We're in the very large 7(a). We're one of the top 10 SBA lenders in the country in total volume. We've done over $1.5 billion in originations in the SBA business. That's a little different than a lot of banks.
We also have a very solid core commercial lending division in our core region, aided by many of the directors that I just introduced you to, bringing clients and customers to us, solid commercial borrowers in a vast array of businesses in Las Vegas and our region that are doing quite well economically. We're in the gaming FinTech business, which has gotten us in the prepaid card business and into this new Pool Player Accounts and bank-controlled accounts giving FDIC insurance to many of these payments companies, individuals who use their platforms from everything from payments to sports wagering. We're finding that to be a continually growing business, even though some of the prepaid debit cards we had are declining. We'll talk about that a little bit earlier because the other side of the business is growing. We find ourselves with a strong client base.
We find ourselves in lending platforms. We find ourselves in payments business. We make them all work really well together. We believe that it's going to be very profound in our future. With that, we're going to start to get into some of the details of 2023. I'm going to turn it back to Ryan. You'll hear from me again in a few minutes.
Yeah. Thank you, Ed. So going back to sharing the presentation on slide eight, there's a lot of things that we've evolved as a company as we reflect upon when we first started as Bank of George in 2007. Really, one core and central part of our business that hasn't changed dramatically - it certainly has evolved - is our core commercial banking. Our core commercial banking really is the center of our strength, headquartered out of Nevada and now growing in the adjacent states of California, Utah, and Arizona. This is the part of the business that we've maintained true to, meeting the needs of small and medium-sized businesses. And we see that market share and growth that we experience bankwide really centered out of this core piece of the business that we've been in since we first opened up the bank.
As we look forward in core commercial banking, we see it as a key part of our depository strength, how we fund our balance sheet, as Ed mentioned, also key commercial lending activities. As we think about growing this line of business and increasing our market share in our home state of Nevada and beyond, we're growing into some specialty banking lines that are worth mentioning specifically. Trust services, in other words, banking independent trust companies, is an area of focus. We have a lot of high expectations in our ability to grow that line of business and also professional banking. As we think about 2023 and our accomplishments on the next slide, one of the things that has been quite gratifying as we've continued to operate the bank in what we could call a changing environment is our continued performance really across all the key areas.
When you think about a bank or banking in general and the issues that we face, the changes that we face in terms of a rapidly increasing rate environment, doubts and concerns about the credit markets, liquidity tightening, what I'm pleased to report as we reflect upon our 2023 is that GBank continues to perform really in all the functional areas that matter for banks. As we think about capitalization, earnings, our margins, our growth, we perform in the top quartile in all of these key areas. And how do we do that? Well, a couple of highlights. In a year that was marked by challenges in deposits and liquidity, we grew our deposits by over $190 million. The key benefit of that is we're able to generate the greatest impact for ourselves and for our customers by continuing to originate new loans.
Net loans as a product of that activity increased $278 million for the single year. That's a one year increase of 70%. So if you take a look at all of the 1,271 peer banks in our group, which is less than $1 billion in total asset size, GBank ranked at the very top. We also generated a record level of new loan origination or new production volume, both in SBA and commercial, up from $384 million to just shy of $394 million. As a shareholder, obviously, we're interested in creating value and seeing that equity line continue to go up. Equity increased by $11.6 million for the year entirely from operating earnings. And at the same time, we maintain a very strong asset quality performance level with non-performing assets well below 1% of the total balance sheet.
So the fruit of part of it of all of these efforts is we certainly are happy to see that we are recognized on a national landscape for some of these accomplishments over the course of the year that are really based off of strategic activities that we started many, many years ago. Moving on to the next slide on page 10, you can see from a safety and soundness, from a safety of the bank consideration, DepositAccounts.com, CB Resources Top 10 report, and Bauer Financial all rate us continually in the top ranking in terms of the safest bank, the best capital ratios, the best ability to manage our growth. As you also might remember, we started for the first time with our listing of the company stock under the ticker GBFH in early 2021. We've had great success within that market, which is the Premier OTC exchange.
Very pleased to report, for back-to-back years 2023 and 2022, GBFH was acknowledged among the Best 50 of top-performing companies on that exchange, which measures our return to shareholders and overall volume of stock trades. We are, in fact, the only banking company to earn back-to-back annual recognition within this category. As Ed mentioned, 2023 was overall a pretty difficult year for bank stocks. Another important milestone in January of this year, 2024, we actually got our first analyst for the company stock, Tim Coffey, at Janney Montgomery Scott, who we have a great relationship with that firm, initiated analyst coverage for GBFH shares in January with a buy rating and a target of $19 a share. We're very excited on that.
As we move on to the next slide, obviously, a key component of our success both today and in the future is our SBA and government-guaranteed lending activity. 2023 marked a very important shift that you can see highlighted on these slides and tables in front of you. First of all, you'll note that on the bar graph, historically, we have sold a large portion of guaranteed loans. That has generated meaningful revenues, particularly from 2019 through 2021 in particular. The shift that I'm talking about is starting in 2023, we started retaining a larger portion of those new loans on our balance sheet. For the first time ever, we actually retained 55% of those loans, totaling $318 million in new loans for the entire year. Now, all of those activities have rapidly moved GBank among our peer lenders for SBA 7(a).
As Ed mentioned, we are now in the 10th position of banks of any size or loan volume within the SBA 7(a) program. Now, one of the reasons in terms of our adaptability that we made the decision to retain a higher portion of these newly originated loans is market conditions suggested quite strongly that it would be beneficial to start doing that. As you can see the migration in the lower left, the GAAP gain on sale, in other words, the price that we're able to get on selling guaranteed loans came down from an all-time high in 2021 of nearly 10% all the way down into 2023 of 3.88%. The cost in terms of lost revenue potential that we give up on retaining these loans is an all-time low. In fact, that 3.88 is for the entire year.
It continued to progress downward in the second half of the year. It was actually 3.18% as of Q4. Now, we don't think that these prices are going to stay where they're at. In fact, we've seen some early progress early in Q2. In part, that may be because the market is coming to grips with the reality of higher for longer. We do expect to see some improvements in secondary pricing there. It's also had another effect in terms of increasing the percentage of our balance sheet that is guaranteed. That lower right chart is quite astounding in that we've historically averaged about 10% of our loans at any point in time are SBA and USDA guaranteed.
Through all of our combined efforts in 2023, including retaining a larger portion of newly originated guaranteed loans, that number is now all the way up to 30% or $205 million. In fact, if you were to carry this out to the end of the first quarter, USDA and SBA guaranteed loans now comprise a third of our loan portfolio. Moving on to the next slide, you've heard us talk about how important the hospitality business is for our overall strategy and certainly is an important part of our SBA strategic success. For the past four years, now working on the fifth, GBank has been the number one national SBA 7(a) hotel motel lender in the country. This is an area of business that we really like. We're very experienced in this business.
And we also have strong connections within the community of borrowers that we work with in terms of the Asian-American hotel community. One of the reasons we like it is it represents asset quality metrics that are not only strong in relation to other government-guaranteed lenders, they actually stack up quite well to non-SBA commercial portfolios. And some of those metrics you can see on this slide. We have weighted average loan-to-values of less than 70%. We have global debt service coverage ratios of over 2 x. We like the cap rate structure. We see cap rates consistently between 9% and 10% or above in these new projects and a break-even occupancy of 37%.
As Ed mentioned, we have recently crossed some meaningful milestones in terms of when we think back to when we launched the SBA division all the way back in mid-2015, the SBA division for GBank has originated over $1.6 billion in small business credit. The largest portion of that is SBA 7(a). That's really the keystone for our government-guaranteed efforts. That total of the $1.6 billion is approximately $1.4 million. Because of all of these areas combined and our discipline focused on how we do government-guaranteed lending, our portfolio is held up much stronger than the peer average. And in fact, if you think back on a five year basis, our SBA 7(a) five year default rate is less than 1/2 of 1%. Our cumulative five year loss rate is less than 10 basis points. In other words, less than 0.10%. And I think that there's a lot of reasons of why that is.
With that, I'll turn it back over to Ed.
Well, I think that in discussing this chart on this page, there's an element that I mentioned about being in the business. And I showed you our Board members. And I was in the hotel and gaming business for 17 years, both gaming hotels and non-gaming hotels for Del Webb. But one of the things that we learned very early was the departmental profit of the rooms division was always the greatest earner of the hotel that we had. Even today, that's true. Even in Las Vegas, that's so true. But when we look at this portfolio, we have 28,200 rooms in our portfolio now in some 40 states. And when you look at that base and you say that there has been an increase, some of them, from 5.5% interest rate to 9.5% or 10% or over 10%. So we did a study.
I did some numbers at one of our last meetings for our Board that we discussed of why is our SBA division doing so well and why, when we see some other SBA-concentrated banks are reducing their participation or having some experience issues with respect to some loans, and we are not. Well, I looked at the analytics of ours, and we did a couple of things. First, we have been always proactive with our borrowers. Back when the pandemic hit, before anyone at a federal level, for any bills were passed or relief was passed, we reached out to all of our borrowers, 100% of them, and offered them loan mitigation and payments of interest for what? I think it was three months initially or up to six months. But having said that, it's what we do. We're proactive.
So this last year, we reached out to 73 of our SBA hotel division borrowers. And we were able to restructure some of their loans to get their rates from 10.5% to 8.75% or 8.5%. But we always have done that. And so that when you look at our overall portfolio performance, we take care of our borrowers. And when we look at 28,200 rooms and an increase in interest rates from 5.5% to 9.5%, we measure the average daily rate it takes to pay for that interest increase, which interest rates went from $5 million a month to $10 million a month in our overall portfolio. But it really amounted to, based on their size and their number of rooms and their average daily rates, to about a $7 a day rate increase over three years.
Now, to get to $7 a day, and obviously, because of inflation, it wasn't difficult for them to do. As a matter of fact, even today, as a matter of fact, as recently as last month, our debt coverage ratio in this entire portfolio was over 2.3 x the debt. So it's strong, healthy business. It's diversified in many states. And when we do have an issue, we find that we're able to take the hotel and resell it with our network. And it's been working very well. But I wanted to add that little anecdote to it. And now I'll move on to the Gaming FinTech overview on the next slide. This has been a very good division for us. Jim Sims, who I mentioned earlier on our holding company board, is the Chairman of our Gaming FinTech division.
We really became substantively involved in this program with Sightline Payments in the state of Nevada when they launched in 2015. Matter of fact, I think our first customer was PlayMGM. It was before they became BetMGM. And it was even before PASPA, which was overruled in the Senate back in late 2018 that allowed sports betting to go in all the states. So we were involved with it before there was any sports betting back east. And Sightline grew. And our prepaid cards grew to where we had issued almost 1 million cards and had 700,000 active accounts. Well, those active accounts have declined in recent years because there are many ways to load your funds onto these apps. And the prepaid debit card has lost some market share.
But the one thing that we, again, just as you saw, we pivoted in terms of our SBA business and the amount of loans we sold versus the amount of loans we've retained now. We also brought in through BankCard Services our new Pool Player Account and pool consumer account businesses. These are really important because what they do is if the client or the corporation, instead of having a corporate account, has a bank-controlled account for its players at GBank, each one of those players' funds is FDIC insured. And we manage the transactions inside the bank so that the money is not offloaded unless the customer takes the funds back or unless the gaming operator has won. But the bank pays everyone.
Now, this payments process, which was patented by BCS and which GBank is the only bank using it at this point or allowed to use it as part of our contract with BCS, we see that growing. As you can see in the chart, our PPA clients, and it says 14 versus the decline of accounts up above on the prepaid card business, which we think is leveling around 250,000. But you see, that's 14 companies. That's not individuals. So these companies, many of them are startups. Many of them are existing companies. And some of them, when I say existing companies with platforms they're developing, we see the strongest growth in that area. Now, we also have seen that one of the biggest declines that you see back in 2022, when you look above, we started to see the peak of the prepaid card business.
And that's because many of the credit card companies started declining credit card loads onto these various gaming apps as they actually classified it as a gaming transaction instead of a financial transaction. And as a gaming transaction, many of the issuing banks that issue these cards would decline a gaming transaction for their credit card, their issued card. That's when we came up with the concept of creating our card for our customers because we understand and know that that gaming transaction is indeed a very qualified transaction. It's not the foundation of fraud. We manage those cards very carefully. We manage the individual players very carefully in our bank. And we felt we could manage the credit card customer as well. And we started. And not only do we issue Visa, Mastercard, and Discover Card prepaid cards, but we're now an issuer of a Visa Signature credit card.
A signature is a level that you must have a very good credit score in order to get this initial $11,000 credit with a Visa card. So it's not a subprime market. Already now, I think you'll see in some other charts that we're achieving $1 million a month in payments on our credit card. We see that our objective is to get that to $10 million a month by the end of the year. We believe that that's going to be very achievable. Of course, we have the interchange fees from that because we own the card. We don't hire anyone else to issue it or do it. We've launched our own credit card division.
We see that as a payments process that builds this entire platform that we are building, both in the PPA business and the pool consumer account business that deals with other payments businesses. So we also entered into an agreement to acquire BCS. Now, that agreement is before the FDIC. And the FDIC has submitted to us a considerable amount of additional information they want because of the nature of a bank buying a non-bank entity. And we're dealing with that. We're going to have more on that in the not-too-distant future to discuss. But at the same time, we'll say, "Well, we're not going to close that deal in 2024, but we'll close a deal maybe in this third quarter." And we'll be discussing that with you when we say we'll close a deal. Let us just say that we're working on various aspects of this transaction.
I think the ultimate outcome is going to be a good one. But we'll leave it there for now. And once we have more information on the process, we'll have a special release and discuss it in detail. But having said all that, we are really excited about our Gaming FinTech division. We really believe that you're going to see some between the credit card, which is launched and working. We're really looking at developing some applications for the credit card with some of our companies who are already using the credit card. I mean, the consumers are using the credit card to load these accounts you see at the bottom. Our credit card works with all of them. And that's the beauty of the credit card that we have. So having said that, we think that it's going to continue to grow our deposits as well.
I think today, it was about $38 million, $39 million in deposits from this division. But we look to that to grow to about $100 million by the end of the year. So we really feel that this Gaming FinTech division is an important part of our bank, that the relationship with BCS is important, and that we will continue to grow because of it. Ryan, turn it back to you.
Thank you, Ed. So yeah, my favorite part is going through some numbers, those of you that know me. So moving on to slide 14, high-level balance sheet.
I think the big takeaway from shareholders here, and particularly as we compare our performance when stacked up to some of the challenges that we see elsewhere within the industry, is one of the reasons we've been able to outperform is really maintaining over a long period of time our balance sheet discipline. These are decisions that are not new for us. We've had balance sheet discipline ever since we opened the bank. A lot of the decisions in banking that you make five years earlier can have a dramatic impact on your ability to execute on your strategic goals. Now, in that balance sheet discipline, there's really two key components. The first one is maintain key levels of safety and soundness. You can see maintaining liquidity in terms of $100 million in on-balance sheet cash.
We'll talk a little bit in a moment about our off-balance sheet liquidity resources, maintaining a low-risk securities portfolio that supports our overall efforts. Once we're able to do that, then we can focus our energy activities and growth in areas that make the greatest impact for our customers and for our borrowers. That's that highlighted net loan growth line. That's the 70% annualized growth, $399 million all the way up to $677 million, total assets end of the year at just above $918 million. We are very close to crossing the billion-dollar threshold and might, in fact, do that during the current quarter. In terms of our ability to adapt to market conditions, and we talked about this before, you can see the $190 million in year-over-year growth in deposits.
The largest portion of that growth, you can see in the interest-bearing line, $250 million in growth in interest-bearing. Because we maintain our balance sheet discipline, we're able to do that, pay competitive market rates, and still maintain a net interest margin in the 98th percentile for our peers. Altogether, that contributes to our success in earnings and equity growth. You can see that we ended up the year at just at $98.5 million and a $11.6 million increase or 13.4% increase in equity over the course of the year. Another important milestone is $100 million in consolidated equity. For those of you that saw our Q1 earnings release, saw that we actually crossed that threshold as a 331.
Moving on to the next slide, the income statement is obviously a key component of our success and the story that unfolded over the course of 2023. You can see total net revenue increased by nearly $4 million to $45.8 million. As we think about that in banking, that's really our top line. That's sales. And there's some interesting measures and thoughts about that that we'll get into in just a moment. So increased our total sales by total revenue by 10%. And in an environment that banks were greatly challenged, we're able to maintain well above-peer-average earnings. And that income was generally flat on a consolidated basis year-over-year. Now, the next slide on slide 16, this is a slide that we've continually updated as we focused our strategic effort.
We talked about this all the way back at our shareholder meeting in 2015 in terms of a couple of our key initiatives. Number one, grow our non-interest revenue. Then what's born out of that and what we found has been very successful in creating a truly resilient earnings model is we diversify our revenue and our earnings. And 2023 was an outsized example of that. I'll draw your attention to the reduction in non-interest income 2023 compared to the prior year, 2022. This is driven primarily by the gain on sale of loans. So year-over-year, our non-interest income was reduced by $8.8 million. In other words, we've been able to generate continued net revenue growth even though we saw net interest income increase by nearly $9 million, which is 21% of our prior year top revenue.
There are not many companies that could boast revenue growth and start the year, essentially, with a $9 million hole. So we've been very encouraged with the resiliency of both our revenue, our earnings model, and what we find in 2023 is the most recent example of that is as we have challenges in one part of our revenue performance, we have the ability to manage the other portion up to an extent where we can continue to move forward and grow our revenues. The next slide on slide 17, you've heard me talk about the organizational focus that we maintain, our commitment to being a high-growth company. You can see by all measures of the balance sheet, since 2016, we have generated compounded annual growth rate in the 28% range. And we see no reason why that should slow down.
The loan-to-deposit ratio, as we've seen a lot of growth and a lot of changes in the balance sheet, at 92% at year-end. The great thing about our balance sheet because of two reasons, because of how simple our balance sheet is, and because of our large off-balance sheet funding resources, we can manage a loan-to-deposit ratio at and actually above the 92%. To give you a comparison of what is happening elsewhere in the industry, these balance sheet growth numbers slow down. This probably would not come as a surprise if we look at the entire banking industry. An average growth rate for our peer group is now below 5%. By comparison, we're talking in 28%.
Now, one of our key strengths moving on to the next slide on slide 18, and this ties into some of the challenges that Ed was talking about that were experienced in the industry in March and April of last year, is our very strong and stable core deposit base. Our core deposits still represent 84% of the total deposit portfolio. And one of the reasons that is is we have a depositor base, particularly if you look at the top 20 depositors, that entire list is comprised of directors, shareholders, as well as Gaming FinTech and payment partners that are invested in our combined success. And that has been the base by which we've been able to successfully grow the bank. So the next slide, we talked a little bit about net interest margin. That is a key measure for the bank.
So as we've seen that challenged industry-wide, we saw over the three-year period overall net interest margin expansion because of what is called asset sensitivity of our balance sheet. And now that we have a forward look of potentially lowering interest rates as time goes on, we've been able to rebalance the balance sheet to better prepare us in a potential downrate scenario. But altogether, you can see net interest margin in Q4 compared to the prior year's Q4s had dramatic improvement all the way from 340 in 2021 to the most recent Q4 at 516. Now, one of the reasons we've been able to do that, and I alluded to this just a moment ago, is we make long-term decisions on our balance sheet that give us the biggest potential for success and also the biggest flexibility. So our balance sheet is generally short-duration.
We've been very disciplined in the creation of our approximately $100 million investment portfolio, which is where others have had some struggles. One of the things that is very interesting in terms of our balance sheet—and this came up and was talked quite a bit about in the context of investments—is we have a balance sheet fair value premium all across the balance sheet. As we've talked about, we have a very low fair value adjustment on the securities portfolio because nearly 90% of that is both short-term treasuries and full faith and credit, Ginnie Mae, floaters. In addition to that, because of how we build the loan portfolio, we have net gains there. Because we have significant amounts of core deposits, we have net gains there.
That compared to what is happening elsewhere in banking is really an important part of our story as we can continue to grow. Moving on to the next slide, capital and liquidity, certainly, are key focus areas. Liquidity, very much so over the course of 2023. Now that there's been some stabilization in the liquidity markets, we think that there's going to be a greater focus on capital as time goes on. We continue to outperform and be well above our peers in both of these categories. As I referenced just a moment ago, it's key for us to maintain strong levels of on-balance sheet liquidity, which we have.
But I think one of the things that's pretty extraordinary is what you don't see on the balance sheet, and that's the fact that we have between the Federal Reserve Bank, the Federal Home Loan Bank, and our various Fed funds lines, we have over $440 million in borrowing capacity. Our CFO likes to say that we could replace 70% of the deposits if we had to, although I'm quite happy we've never had the opportunity to test that. So in terms of our use of these lines, you can see at year-end, we had a small borrowing from the Federal Reserve Bank at 30 . Q1, we reduced that down to 10 . Fast forward to today, we actually have zero outstanding with the Federal Reserve. And then a little bit just on the Q1 highlights, moving on to the next slide.
Hopefully, you were all able to see the Q1 earnings release. A couple of key things that I'd highlight here, and this is a continuation of our focus on growing revenues, and just a couple of income statement lines to key in on. Year-over-year, we increased our net interest income by 15%. Our net revenue, again, our top line revenue line, increased year-over-year by nearly 8%. Then compare that to the non-interest expense, which was flat year-over-year. And those of you that were hearing from us 18 months ago and a little bit before that heard us talking about building our capacity to grow the bank. And we were doing that through investing in technology and investing in people. And then the second part of that equation is executing on that growth strategy while maintaining stringent cost discipline.
Well, this is what is called in the industry operating leverage, where we've been able to grow our revenue significantly and keep our non-interest expenses in check. So altogether, 12% increase year-over-year on net income. This first quarter was the first quarter that we actually had analyst expectations. So we were very pleased that we were able to beat those analyst expectations, commonly known as beating the street, by $0.02. We reported fully diluted earnings per share of $0.28 compared to both the analyst expectation forecast and the prior year period of $0.26 per share. Net interest margin, you can see at 485. We're still in the 98th percentile for peers. Just to give you some context on that, the peer average has come down significantly after the past six to eight quarters. The peer average, just to give you a context, is 3.35%.
As we've seen the increases in growth and balance sheet growth, we've seen some of the capital ratios come down slightly from 16% on the bank-level Tier 1 leverage down to 13%. But again, as comparison to the peers, our peer average is 10.5. Still well in the upper quartile for capital, liquidity, and well above that in terms of our earnings and margin performance. Overall, a really great quarter and one that really creates a base of strength as we think about the rest of the year and what we plan what we expect on full. With that, I'll turn it back to you, Ed.
Well, thank you, Ryan. Well, I'm going to close the presentation with a little look at our first quarter of 2024 and a little bit about the year ahead.
Interestingly, there are those who have projected that banks are going to be slow in lending this year because of the high interest rates. Our first quarter, we did $137 million in new loan originations in the first quarter of 2024, a record by any standards for us, the largest quarter ever in loan production, $137 million in new loans in the first quarter alone. Now, stepping back a minute from a macro basis, we can manage these interest rates today. We can manage our lending portfolio with these interest rates today as long as the economy remains reasonable, meaning no recession. I look back, and I sometimes laugh. I'm old enough to look back to 1980. I was putting together a very big deal. It was a $100 million hotel acquisition.
The headlines on the day our deal was announced also had a byline down below, a financial headline that said, "Prime rate lowered to 19.5%." Now, we were putting together a $100 million deal, and the prime rate was 19.5%. Of course, the mortgage rate on the loans we were doing at that time was 11%. We were getting, in essence, prime - 8.5. I also recall I was purchasing a house, and we were desperately hoping we'd get an 11% mortgage rate. We've been so used to zero interest rates that all of a sudden, we have and these rates and loan rates running from 8.5%-10% are not inexpensive. With the economy working the way it is, we find markets that can afford these rates and do reasonably and very well, as we've shown and demonstrated.
But we've also prepared ourselves for these rates to decline because they are high relative to the zero cost of money that we've had for many, many years. And we do see some reduction in rates coming, but we don't see the massive reduction in rates that some in the marketplace were foreseeing. So we know that, and if you realize that we can grow $137 million in one quarter at these interest rates that we found a way to manage them in some of our businesses that we lend to can meet our debt coverage ratios and our equity requirements. And in some cases, it takes a little larger equity requirement than it did before, but deals are being done, and loans are being made. Our lending pipelines are strong and consistent with the expansion projections we have.
We have exciting news. We have about nine new companies we're trying to bet right now for our Pool Player Account businesses. We see deposits in that arena growing. We also, in that arena, are looking very interestingly in a new real-time payment solution that we are working on diligently right now with a new client that may possibly bring real-time payments to the gaming apps, which would be interesting, very interesting. So we have a strategic growth focus on growing our core deposits and generating a lot of non-interest-bearing deposits, which is what we believe our payments industry will do for us, and especially as we grow our credit card as well. So we think our outlook for 2024, and certainly our first quarter, was remarkable. And our outlook for the rest of the year, we believe, is strong.
With that, before I get to the final business of the voting and counting the votes of the shareholders, we'd like to open it up to any questions that you might have. And we'll do that. Shauna, if you can tell us if there are any questions out there.
I do not have any questions.
Okay. Well, I think that I had now would want to move on to the director election, the RSM, as our accountants in any other business. And I have the results in front of me, which I shall read at this time. For the directors, Edward M. Nigro voted 8,436,308 shares for, or 95.78% of the votes that were counted, and 371,829 against. For Mike Voinovich, 8,414,273 shares for and 355,804 against, with 38,000 abstaining. For Jim Sims, 8,414,273 shares for and 355,804 against.
So the three directors are elected with 95.53% of the cast votes in favor. For our auditors, we have, again, 10,162,555 for and 387,412 against, for a total of 95.32% of the cast votes. And also, the votes for adjournment are the same, 8,000,372 for and 429,000 against adjournment. That's interesting. We have some against that just file against everything there is. But having said that, the auditors, RSM, are reappointed, and myself, Mike Voinovich, and Jim Sims are elected to new terms as directors of GBank Financial Holdings. And I think there is no other business to conduct. So with that, we shall move to end the 2019 and I said 2019 again, the 2024 shareholders' meeting of GBank Financial Holdings. And we look forward to next year, the 2025 meeting, because we think we'll have continued exciting news for your holding company and your bank.
Thank you all so very much for attending. Thank you, Ryan. Thank you to our EMTs and our directors at both the holding company and the bank. You're awesome. We'll see you next year.