Hello, and welcome to the Virtual Investor Conference. I am Tom Keys, Executive Vice President of Alliance Advisors. On behalf of the OTC Markets Group and Alliance Advisors, we are very pleased you have joined us for our 14th Annual Banking Conference. The next presentation is from MVB Financial. Please note you may submit questions for the presenter in the box to the left of the slides. You can also view a company availability for one-on-one meetings by clicking Book a Meeting. At this point, I'm very pleased to welcome Larry Mazza, President and Chief Executive Officer, and Mike Sumbs, Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer of MVB Financial, which trades on the Nasdaq under the symbol MVBF. Please welcome Larry and Mike.
Tom, thank you very much. Again, as Tom said, Larry Mazza, CEO of MVB Bank. We're excited to be part of this presentation. Thank you very much for joining us. The way we're gonna do this is I'm gonna present an overview of the MVB for the first 10 minutes. Michael Sumbs will come on for the next 10 minutes, and then we'll take Q&A for the last 10 minutes. A quick background on myself, a CPA out of the Big Four. From there was into Truist for a number of years, and then from Truist recruited to MVB in 2005. Been with MVB for a little over 20 years. Let me give you a quick summary, an overview of who we are. We're about $3.3 billion in assets.
Total loans, $2.3 billion. Our total deposits, $2.8 billion. $48 billion in payment processing and growing. $168 million in revenues and 10% revenue growth a year. A key thing about us, we are a fintech bank. We focus a large portion of our business on payment services and banking as a service, as well as we have a specialty in digital gaming. We also have a core bank, where we are in West Virginia and Virginia, where we get a number of our deposits and loans still there in that core banking. We get deposits nationally. We lend basically regionally and go from there.
When you look at our asset size, think of us as a Durbin bank, where we are trying to manage under $10 billion, so we do have plenty of runway there to continue to grow. We do keep that in mind for our profitability and our clients' profitability being a specialty bank with Durbin background. When you look at our investment highlights, one, what differentiates us is we are one of probably about 35 fintech banks, and we are at an inflection point. What I mean by inflection point is, as you probably know, as a bank investor, or awareness of bank investments, in the past several years, the fintech space has been very challenging as far as regulation.
That regulation has changed dramatically, which has given us an excellent runway to grow, and that's why we say we're an inflection point. You're gonna see excellent growth from MVB over the next several years. We have multiple growth catalysts that you'll see in our presentation here in a second. We have a scalable business model coming out of those regulatory challenges, which were definitely headwinds for us. We now have turned those into tailwinds. We've built AI models as well as our processes and systems well improved to build upon and scale to a nice level. We have proven innovation. When I talk about AI, we are building AI, and I'll give you a slide on that separately because I think it's very important for our continued growth.
We have just recently incubated a business called Victor. Victor was for the payments business. We developed it ourselves. It's API. It was compliance and ledger-driven. We built it for about four and a half years, and then we were approached by Jack Henry, of course, one of the biggest processors in the country, a large cap company who really was interested in Victor. They made us an offer we couldn't refuse. We sold Victor to them. The good news is we still utilize Victor a ton, and we also have a continued partnership with revenue share with Jack Henry and Victor, and we continue to cross-sell that into our client base, which has been a wonderful innovation for us and a great product for our clients. We have a best-in-class core funding profile.
40% of our deposits are non-interest bearing. We have a strong capital and liquidity base for us to continue to grow on. A continuing core profitability. You'll see coming out of those three years, there were challenging times. Our growth was restricted because we were building a new compliance and growth and onboarding platform. Now that's behind us, and we have the ability to continue to grow. You're gonna see that profitability continue from this fourth quarter that we're talking about onto 2026 in a very positive way. Lastly, we're definitely selling at a discount. We're selling below book at this point, and some would say it's a screaming buy. When I look at our strategy on a page, this is everything in a snapshot.
We talk about our why, which is one, we wanna impact people's life or their financial life positively. Our purpose is to be trusted partners on the financial frontier committed to your success, and that purpose has three pieces to it. One, trusted partnerships. To have trusted partnerships, you have to live three values, and these are the three values that we tie into our organization. We call it love, trust, and commitment. You see that as the first three values at the top of the page there, and that's how you become a trusted partner. Do you care? Can we trust you? Are you committed? That question to us is the same. We look at our financial frontier, which is fintech. We're always developing and growing on that financial frontier, and that's the value of adaptivity.
You have to be adaptive when you're on the financial frontier. Charles Darwin said it best, "It's not the smartest or the strongest of a species that survive, it's the most adaptive one." I think in banking today with AI and fintech, et cetera, you must adapt or die. Lastly, commitment to your success. We're talking about our teamwork to make that constituency successful. We're talking about our clients, our investors, our teammates, and our communities. You look at us, we have four lanes. We have our banking that's tech forward, which is our legacy lane I talked about earlier. That's our seven branches in Virginia and West Virginia. The bankers, a choice of fintech. This is our fintech side, where we have banking as a service. We have gaming.
We have clients like that, and I'll show you in a second. We have builders of fintech, which is Victor. We talked about that. We continue to build, and we're looking at other options now of building with AI that we can help sell into the market. Then lastly is backers of fintech. We make investments in fintech. Our big five growth vehicles we talk about that are our catalyst. One, it's our Banking as a Service. We have six million clients in our Banking as a Service with our largest client, Credit Karma, having that number of accounts. We have fintech sponsorship lending. This is our fintech lending vertical. We have gaming. This is our digital gaming vertical where we have DraftKings, FanDuel, BetMGM, as well as payments where we work with Worldpay and Fiserv and PayPal.
Then we have our core lending and deposits where we make other loans and gather other deposits in our core markets in our traditional way. This is our team. I think we have one of the best teams pound for pound in the country. We have a great BSA risk CIO, as well as sales and financials. Really strong team for our size. When you look at our evolution, we were a $1.5 billion bank in 2017. We more than doubled that since that to 2025. We have a 10% organic growth rate, and think we can continue to do that at an even better pace.
You can see where we have scaled up to now where we have a scaled fintech platform. We have the sponsorship lending. We have robust payments. We have core banking engine, as well as AI and automation. When you look at our community bank and where we've come from, again, that $1.3 billion, you can see how we have scaled where we were all core lending in branches. We got our deposits from branches. Now you can see it's 42% is fintech with $2.8 billion. We have 40% of our deposits are non-interest bearing. We have almost $1 billion off balance sheet as well that we sell into the secondary market. These are some of the payment clients that we have on the far left. This is our payments vertical.
Like I said, Fiserv, PayPal, Worldpay. In our banking as a service, we have Credit Karma. We have six million relationships there. Our gaming vertical. We have the biggest of the big. We have FanDuel, DraftKings, as well as BetMGM. There's 43 digital gaming clients. It's a great specialty for us. We're now getting into predictive markets. When you look at our pipeline, we have 55 clients in our pipeline, and that is continuing to grow. When we look at it, we're showing what's closing most, you know, in the near future. We have testing and implementation. There are 10 clients that we'll close here in the near future to continue to add revenue and deposits for us in that space. Our technology side, this is where we've come with AI.
We started, we had to have a clean database in 2024, so we implemented a software called Snowflake, which gave us that clean database. From there, we implemented riskCanvas. riskCanvas has helped us start in AI. From riskCanvas, we brought on our AI team. We have six AI engineers. We call it operational excellence. They're evaluating the entire bank. You'll see in Michael's presentation that we have gone from 160 people in our risk and compliance area down to 111, and we're about to go in second quarter, end of the second quarter, down to 90. We now have WorkFusion that we work with in the lab, as well as we've implemented Claude.
150 of our employees use Claude nearly every day. Now we're continuing to expand to build out that vertical. Very similar to what we did with Victor, we're doing with AI. We're starting to build that next phase of technology for our use and hopefully others' use as well. With that, I'll turn it over to our CFO, Mike Sumbs.
[inaudible]Good morning, everyone. I'll talk a little bit about our strategic capital allocation framework to start with and then some of our financials. How we think about allocating-
Hey, Michael, I am getting static on your line. I don't know if it's just me or there's an issue there. Okay, Michael.
Let's give that a shot. Is that any better?
Excellent. Thank you.
Very good. In terms of strategic capital allocation, we think about it in four buckets. The first being organic growth and platform investment and things like technology and AI. Continuing to support the growth that we're seeing in our payment processing and developing new products and data analytic capabilities in that segment of the business. We think about the balance sheet. We are a bank, about $3.5 billion in assets, as Larry mentioned. We're focused on optimizing both the funding mix and the asset side of the balance sheet, as well as liquidity management. Strategic M&A has been a historical focus for us with the sale of Victor being the most recent M&A activity where we sold that business to Jack Henry and generated a substantial gain for shareholders.
We look at both offensive and acquisitions as well as monetizing assets both within the bank focus, which we look at specialty niche banks as complementary services or offerings to our existing business and also non-bank technology acquisitions and strategic partnerships. From a shareholder return standpoint, we have share repurchase plan in place, which I'll touch on in a slide. We do pay a common dividend of $0.17 per share per quarter. We look to return capital to shareholders through those two methods. In terms of our capital position, very well capitalized, Tangible Common Equity just over 10%. Our Community Bank Leverage Ratio slightly over 11%. We are in the Community Bank Leverage framework.
We have a 9% target, nice excess capital to support continued growth. In terms of tangible book value per share, you can see we're at $26.17 as of the end of 2025. That represents a 9.5% compounded annual growth rate since 2019. We've paid out $3.85 in common dividends over that time period. Touching on the share repurchase, we purchased 10.2 million shares in 2025, which is roughly 4% of our outstanding shares. We do have a $10 million authorization in place today to continue to buy back shares. I'll touch on insider involvement. There's a heavy ownership from insiders in our stock.
Larry recently made a significant purchase through exercising options and continues to be one of our larger shareholders. Q4 was a strong quarter for us. We had 16 basis points of net interest margin expansion, bringing it to 3.71%. That's underpinned by a really strong funding base of 40% non-interest-bearing deposits. Payment card and service charge income was up over 19% in the quarter. You know, we're focused on continuing to grow the loan portfolio as well as manage expenses, which were both strong points for us in the fourth quarter.
In terms of our payment-focused revenue, you can see really nice growth in that vertical over the last five years, with over 100% compounded annual growth in the payments revenue as well as deposits growing at 46% CAGR over the last five years, driven by our fintech focus. In terms of the deposits, I think this is one of the really unique highlights of MVB, given our dual strategy of both fintech and core banking. We're a pretty even split between fintech deposits and core deposits. Then you can see within that deposit on balance sheet deposit profile, it's really diversified across a number of verticals. No major concentrations when you think about verticals of deposits.
Payments and BaaS tend to represent the fastest-growing segment, although we do have strong core deposits supported by a treasury team that we brought on in 2025 to continue to support the core deposit growth. In terms of remixing the deposits on the balance sheet, we've really focused on reducing the overall CD portfolio. You can see that evolution over the last year with CDs coming down, as well as an opportunity going forward to continue to remix and reduce the cost of funds with approximately $350 million of CDs repricing over the course of 2026 with a weighted average rate of 4.32%. Represents a really good opportunity for us to continue to improve the funding base and funding cost.
Flipping over to loan growth, you can see the loan growth story here in 2025 was a strong one, with approximately 12% loan growth, taking total loans from $2.1 billion to just about $2.35 billion. In terms of the loan composition, a well-diversified portfolio, with approximately 39% commercial real estate, 25% residential, and then 20% in commercial small business. Within that, no major concentrations from an industry standpoint, and we have just under 3% in office. Feel good about the diversity of the loan portfolio. Flipping over to asset quality, we've had historically very strong asset quality, and that continues to be the case.
I feel really good about non-performing loans and asset quality as a whole. This slide is on our risk management strength and capabilities. A couple of things I would call out here is, you know, we run a complex risk forward model, very focused on compliance and risk oversight. What this slide lays out is the number of personnel focused on risk and compliance in the organization. You can see that number peaked in Q2 of 2024 at 160. That's comprised of both FTE internal to MVB as well as certain outsourced co-sourced FTEs that support our BSA/AML practice.
We brought that number down to 111, and that's largely been a function of leveraging AI and automation tools to more efficiently manage our risk and compliance framework. We'll continue to rationalize and shift down the number of FTE that we have in that space while providing enhanced quality, and that's leveraging AI solutions and capabilities. With that, I will open it up to Q&A. I see we've got a number of questions here in the queue, so I will start to go through those. The first question here is: How has the competitive landscape in fintech banking changed over the past year since the change in administration, and what advantages do you still have versus peers?
You wanna take that one, Larry?
I'd love to. Hey, Catherine, that's a great question. I think the landscape is still very competitive, so to speak. As I said, there's probably about 35 banks in the space. The issue is you have to do it right. I mean, the previous three years where we were building our infrastructure, the issue became being in compliance. There's a question in here about our expenses. We spent $22 million in three years to build it, to build this AI compliance regulatory system. It's paying its dividends, and you'll see in that last slide Michael had, we went from 160 people down to 111 and soon to be 90. So it's paying off that way.
The bottom line is, if you wanna get into this business, there's a moat, and that moat is probably about $10+ million in infrastructure you have to build before you can even get started. I believe that there is a good moat for us to continue in this business. Some are getting out because they don't want the regulatory challenge and they're not being successful, and they're not willing to build infrastructure to make it happen. Michael, I'll turn it back to you.
Yeah. Next question, and this one is for you, Larry. Question is you mentioned trading at a discount to both bank and fintech peers. What do you think investors are missing about your story, and what catalysts could close the valuation gap?
Yeah. I think, one, what you're missing about the story is they're looking historically. If your grading is on past performance, which was this three-year regulatory environment, which was very, very challenging for all fintech, I would say we were all in a kind of a penalty box so to speak and trying to grow out of it. We never got a consent order. We've been very clean when it comes to the regulatory. We have some of the highest scores that you can get. But as a CPA, I honor compliance, I honor risk, and as a banker, of course, that's what we do.
The bottom line is we did not have the earnings growth, asset growth as we had prior to that in 2021, 2022, and I think we paid the price for that in our share price. What's happened is those headwinds have now turned into tailwinds. I think you'll see excellent growth, very similar to what you saw in, you know, 2021, 2022 for MVB, which were very positive times. I think those catalysts are payments. You're gonna see a good come through there. It's our lending growth. You'll see both fintech lending and our core lending come through very strongly. It's our continued AI catalyst. What I mean by that is you're gonna see our core expenses, our non-interest expense stay flat, but you're gonna see growth in this bank.
It's a great model where we now have operating leverage and AI is playing a big part of that. Back to you, Michael.
Next question here is: As sports betting expands into new states, how much growth potential do you see in this vertical over the next couple of years?
Sports betting is right now in approximately 48 states. What's happened is it's been turned on its side or its head, whatever it's been turned, with predictive markets. What some of our best clients have done, like for example, in those big states that have not legalized gaming, California, Texas, some in Florida, what they have done with the predictive markets, which is legal nationally and don't have to worry about state rights like the traditional gaming companies have done, they have gone into those states. They're now in predictive markets. DraftKings, FanDuel has gone into California, have gone into Texas, have gone into what I'll call the illegal states for sports betting with predictive markets, which are legal. They're not making bets.
There's a lot of stuff going on with that right now, and that is up to the states to define it. There's national legislation where they'll make predictive markets stop sports betting so that states are back in control. That's a little bit of a crazy time. Not only do we have the nuts and bolts and the picks and shovels of sports betting. For example, we have a portfolio company called Interchecks where we process payments. So we have that growth engine. We have other things like Victor still that process payments as well for the gaming industry.
The bottom line is there's continued very positive growth with both predictive markets, which we're a part of, which we do payment processing with Worldpay, with Visa, PayPal, for gaming markets. We still see positive growth. Even if predictive markets has a step back, the gaming industry is in its infancy. It started in 2018, still has a nice runway ahead of it, and we're still a major part of that business line. Thank you, Michael.
Yeah, I would just add that the gaming deposits come from essentially all the states where gaming is legal, so it's not concentrated in one or two states. It's a national-
Yes
Business line for us.
Correct.
Okay, next question. Why does a fintech choose to partner with MVB over some of the other players in the market?
Thank you, Mike. The major reason for that is our one, we've been in the business since 2017, we have a good runway. Two is the difference is we have senior management very much involved. When you're dealing with MVB, you'll see me on calls, you'll see Michael Sumbs on call, you'll see our chief risk officer on calls, you'll see that development. We stay very close to our client base. We also have unique technology like Victor, like Interchecks. We have different availabilities to give us a moat, I think, better than other fintech banking organizations that make the difference for us. Now we're building out AI, which I think is very helpful as well. Thank you, Mike.
Next question here. With capital ratios moving higher and those high costs now, higher cost investments now gone, do you see more room to lean into balance sheet growth or further capital returns in 2026?
I'll-
Yeah, I'll take that one. Yeah, so I think we're really well-positioned with the capital base we have to continue to grow the balance sheet. We've got, you know, fairly strong growth goals for 2026 with the balance sheet. We will certainly continue to grow the balance sheet. As Larry mentioned, you know, we do think about the $10 billion cap with regard to Durbin. We've got a lot of opportunity given where we're at today in the $3.5 billion range to continue to grow the balance sheet. I think we're in a really good position from a capital standpoint to continue to leverage that capital down slightly and support continued balance sheet growth.
Part of that question was around capital returns. You know, we pay the dividend, which we've held flat for a number of quarters. Given where we're trading today, we think about share repurchases as an attractive deployment of capital. The answer is yes to continuing to lean into balance sheet growth over 2026 and then beyond. Next question. What are the key milestones that investors should watch in 2026 to see the fintech story continue to play out?
What I would say, Michael, the key milestones, one, non-interest income growth. I think you'll see that continue to move. I think you'll see margin growth because of the loan growth and our repricing of deposits. You'll see that as a second benchmark to look out for. I think non-interest expense staying flat. I think if you look at those three benchmarks on MVB, you'll see success, which really goes to the EPS, our earnings per share, which is our North Star. You'll see the three most important numbers going into EPS all having very good trajectories into 2026 and beyond.
I've gotten the notice that we have about a minute left. I think we were able to address most of the questions in our time. Larry, I don't know if there's any concluding remarks you wanna make in the last 60 seconds or so that we have.
Yeah. Thank you for the questions. There are a number of questions. We will respond to all questions back to you directly in writing. You'll have those. I think as I said earlier, I do believe, and of course, this is not objectively, but it is coming from one of the largest individual shareholders, I do think we're screaming buy. I think 2026, as far as earnings growth, you're gonna be very happy as shareholders. You're gonna see excellent balance sheet growth in both loans and deposits, and you're gonna see expenses stay flat. It's a nice recipe for, I think, excellent success for MVB and our shareholders. Thanks again for joining us and being a part of the presentation. We'll get back to you with the rest of the questions.
Feel free to reach out to us, we'd love to talk to you. That concludes it. Thank you, Michael.