Good afternoon. Welcome to the Triumph Bancorp Incorporated annual meeting of stockholders. I would now like to turn the conference over to Carlos Sepulveda, Chairman of the Board of Directors. Please go ahead.
Okay. Good afternoon. Welcome to the shareholders' meeting of Triumph Bancorp. My name is Carlos Sepulveda, and I serve as Chairman of the Board. I'd like to welcome everyone here in attendance and also welcome those that are joining us via the webcast. I'd like to start off by introducing my fellow board members that are here today, Robert Dobrient, Chuck Anderson, Justin Trail, Aaron Graft, Doug Kratz, Maribess Miller, Michael Rafferty, and I think that's all we have in attendance. Also present are various executive officers of the company, and I'd like to introduce them as well. We have Bryce Fowler. Bryce is Executive VP and CFO and President of TBK Bank, as well as a director of TBK Bank. Gail Lehmann. Gail is EVP and Secretary and President, Retail Banking, and Chief Operating Officer of TBK. Todd Ritterbusch. Todd is our Chief Lending Officer of the bank.
Geoff Brenner. Hello, Geoff . Geoff is our CEO of Triumph Business Capital. Adam Nelson. Adam Nelson is EVP and General Counsel. Jordan Graft. Jordan is EVP of TriumphPay. Also present is Miss Gina Green of Crowe, our independent registered public accounting firm, who will be available to answer questions that you might have. Gail Lehmann, our EVP and Secretary, will act as Secretary of today's meeting, and Adam Nelson, our EVP and General Counsel, will act as the Inspector of Elections. At this point, I'll turn the meeting over to Aaron Graft.
It's on now. Okay. Good afternoon. There's going to be two parts to this meeting. We're going to go through the formal part of the process, at the end, we're going to have a Q&A session that I hope everyone finds valuable. Although I do recognize most of you, hopefully it won't all be news to you. I'm Aaron Graft, President and Chief Executive Officer of the company, and I will serve as Chairman of this meeting. I now officially call the meeting to order. The business items on the agenda today were outlined in the company's notice and proxy provided to all stockholders.
The matters to be voted on at this meeting consist of the re-election of 4 Class II directors of our board of directors for a term to expire at the next annual meeting of stockholders, approval of a non-binding advisory resolution regarding the compensation of the company's Named Executive Officers as disclosed in the proxy statement, approval of a non-binding advisory resolution regarding the frequency of future say-on-pay votes, approval of the first amendment to the company's 2014 Omnibus Incentive Plan, approval of the company's employee stock purchase plan, and ratification of the appointment of Crowe LLP as our independent registered public accounting firm for our current fiscal year. At this time, could those stockholders who hold proxies please deliver them to the Inspector of Elections and those stockholders who desire to vote in person please give their names to the Inspector of Elections.
The Inspector of Elections will give you a ballot for matters to be voted upon today. While we are waiting for the Inspector of Elections to determine if a quorum is present, let me ask the Secretary whether proper notice was given for this meeting.
I have available a certified list of the holders of the common stock of the company at the close of business on March 18th, 2019, the date fixed by the board of directors for determining the stockholders entitled to notice and to vote at this meeting. I also have available the notice of meeting, proxy statement and proxy, and affidavits of the company's representatives as to the dual mailing thereof.
Thank you. I would ask that those documents be filed with the records of the company. This now brings us to the determination of a quorum. Our bylaws provide that the presence in person or by proxy of a majority of the votes entitled to be cast on a matter constitutes a quorum. May I now have the report on whether a quorum is present?
There are present in person or represented by proxy the holders of 23,842,944 shares of common stock, or 89.27% of all shares authorized to vote at this meeting. Consequently, a quorum is duly present and authorized to transact business on the matters that were submitted to the stockholders for approval.
Will the Secretary please introduce each order of business for the meeting?
The first order of business is the re-election of the four Class 2 directors of the company for a term to last until the next annual meeting of stockholders. A summary of the proposal begins on page five of the proxy statement.
I move to approve the re-election of such directors. Our bylaws require stockholders to provide advanced notice of their intent to nominate candidates for directors. No stockholder has provided notice. I therefore declare the nominations for director closed.
The next order of business is the approval of the non-binding advisory resolution regarding the compensation of the company's named executive officers as disclosed in the proxy statement. A summary of the proposal begins on page 41 of the proxy statement.
I move to approve such non-binding advisory resolution.
I second the motion.
The next order of business is the approval of the non-binding advisory resolution regarding the frequency of future say-on-pay votes. A summary of the proposal begins on page 42 of the proxy statement.
I move to approve the one-year alternative for the frequency of future say-on-pay votes.
I second the motion.
The next order of business is the approval of the first amendment to the company's 2014 Omnibus Incentive Plan. A summary of the proposal begins on page 43 of the proxy statement.
I move to approve the first amendment to the company's 2014 Omnibus Incentive Plan.
I second the motion.
The next order of business is the approval of the company's Employee Stock Purchase Plan. A summary of the proposal begins on page 49 of the proxy statement.
I move to approve the company's Employee Stock Purchase Plan.
I second the motion.
The next order of business is the ratification of the appointment of Crowe LLP as our independent registered public accounting firm for our current fiscal year. A summary of the proposal begins on page 52 of the proxy statement.
I now move to ratify such appointment.
I second the motion.
At this time, we ask each stockholder voting in person to mark your ballot and to deliver your completed ballot to the Inspector of Elections. Seeing no one voting in person, all stockholders present in person or by proxy have had an opportunity to vote. I will now declare the polls closed at 1:14 P.M. on May 16, 2019. The Inspector of Elections will examine the proxies and the ballots submitted to Mr. Nelson. Would you please provide the results of the vote?
With respect to the election of the Class II directors, 19,924,827 shares were voted in favor of Mr. Kratz, with 375,885 shares voting against, 3,794 shares withheld or abstaining, and 3,538,438 broker non-votes. 19,588,152 shares were voted in favor of Mr. Davis, with 712,681 shares voted against, 3,673 shares withheld or abstaining, and 3,538,438 broker non-votes. 19,951,753 shares were voted in favor of Mr. Rafferty, with 349,080 shares voted against, 3,673 shares withheld or abstaining, and 3,538,438 broker non-votes. 19,951,031 shares were voted in favor of Mr. Sparks, with 349,802 shares voting against, 3,673 shares withheld or abstaining, and 3,538,438 broker non-votes. Consequently, each of the Class II directors nominated to stand for re-election as set forth in our proxy statement have hereby been re-elected for a term to last until our next annual meeting of stockholders.
With respect to the proposal to approve the non-binding advisory resolution regarding the compensation of the company's Named Executive Officers as disclosed in the proxy statement, 19,968,594 shares were voted in favor of such proposal, with 288,784 shares opposed, 47,128 abstentions, and 3,538,438 broker non-votes. Consequently, such proposal is hereby adopted. With respect to the proposal to approve the frequency of future say-on-pay votes, 18,690,063 shares were voted in favor of the one-year alternative, 41,081 shares were voted in favor of the two-year alternative, and 1,359,465 shares were voted in favor of the three-year alternative, with 3,752,335 broker non-votes. Consequently, the one-year alternative is hereby adopted. With respect to the proposal to approve the first amendment to the company's 2014 Omnibus Incentive Plan, 19,894,701 shares were voted in favor of such proposal, with 390,864 opposed, 18,941 abstentions, and 3,538,438 broker non-votes. Consequently, such proposal is hereby adopted.
With respect to the proposal to approve the company's employee stock purchase plan, 20,236,220 shares were voted in favor of such proposal, with 49,345 opposed, 18,941 abstentions, and 3,538,438 broker non-votes. Consequently, such proposal is hereby adopted. With respect to the proposal to ratify the appointment of Crowe LLP as our independent registered accounting firm for our current fiscal year, 23,738,545 shares were voted in favor of such proposal, with 104,132 opposed and 267 abstentions. Consequently, such proposal is hereby adopted.
Thank you, Adam. With no further business, I hereby make a motion that this meeting be adjourned.
I second the motion.
As previously noted in Carlos' remarks to start the meeting, we would now like to take a few minutes to update our stockholders on Triumph's previous fiscal year and its activities to date this year. Before I begin, let me remind you that we may make comments that might be characterized as forward-looking statements under the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Generally speaking, comments regarding the company's or management's beliefs, expectations, intentions, goals, plans, outlooks, or predictions of the future are forward-looking statements. These statements involve a number of risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to vary materially from the anticipated results implied by these forward-looking statements. These risks and uncertainties are detailed in the company's filings with the SEC, which are publicly available on the SEC's website. With that, I would like to invite to the stage my co-participants this year.
We're going to do this a little differently than we have in years past because I think you all are tired of hearing from me, or that's what people tell me. As they're coming up, our theme this year is Rethink Vanilla. On your way out, there will be ice cream. There are instructions until Am I on? Am I good? What's that? Hello? Good? Can you hear me? Great. We're going to do this in a short presentation style, and then open it up for questions. Obviously, it's a good thing at a shareholder meeting to see people you know, and for things to go matter, of course, that's a good thing for us. Just so you know who I have on the stage, I've got Todd Ritterbusch, our Chief Lending Officer, who's been with us-
Two weeks.
Two weeks. Congratulations. Geoff Brenner, our CEO of Triumph Business Capital, who's been with us
56 days.
Not the new guy anymore. Congratulations. Jordan Graft, who's been with us
A little over a year.
Wow. All right. We're getting some tenure now. Jordan is the leader of TriumphPay. Gail Lehmann, who's been with me in this from the very beginning. With that, see if this works. Our theme this year is Rethink Vanilla, and some of you have already seen this, heard this, kind of the thinking behind our thesis for 2019. To talk about that, it's most helpful to talk about 2018. First of all, we got to talk about this. You've all heard me talk about that before. 2018, for those of you team members and directors who were here, 2018 was a transformative year for TBK. We've used two analogies as we've gone on the road and talked to our team.
One of the race car being on fire, just the incredibly rapid growth, and then our colleagues at Triumph Business Capital used this other graphic of what they felt like they were going through as they completed an acquisition and serviced trucking in probably 2018 will go down as a record year in transportation. Many of you in the room know what 2018 was like. Just for the numbers, our total assets increased in one year by 30%, which is very transformative. I would say even more transformative is one out of every three of our team members is new in 2018. You just met a few of them. Across the enterprise, we have grown dramatically and now have over 1,200 team members, which is exciting, but also presents a challenge of how we indoctrinate them into our culture.
You can't continue to grow people, team members, at that pace and maintain the culture that we have worked so hard to build. I don't anticipate that growth this year, but just so you have some perspective, that's a pretty radical growth year. Last year, not only did we have organic growth, but we completed three bank deals and the acquisition of a factoring company. Many of our team members worked on that. It took us into new states, new systems, new team members, new processes. While we were doing that, we launched 72 strategic initiatives, which are all aimed at taking Triumph from this, what has gone from a specialty purpose bank to a community bank to what I think now we're on the cusp of approaching a regional bank.
That's a whole different mindset of the way you run your business, the processes that are required, the talent that is required. It has been an exhausting process for our team to do acquisitions, deliver an extremely profitable 2018, our most profitable year ever, and to do that while we're in flight with all these changes. For 2019, as a relief to some of our team members in the room, I don't think it's going to be quite as hectic as 2018. There are still many things to do. We have a lot of upgrades that we're in the process of rolling out. You know what's interesting, we sit here today.
For those of you who were in the room last year, I think our stock was trading 25% higher a year ago than it does today. I can tell you as I sit here, the company is at least 25% better today than it was a year ago. When I think about the talent that we have attracted, the processes we've built, the systems that we've green lighted, the growth, the new markets, this is a far superior company to where it was a year ago.
While it's frustrating as a public company to deal with what the market perceives your value is on any given day, I can tell you from management's perspective, and you're going to hear from a few of our team members about some of these changes, that there is some really exciting stuff that is going on and gives us a lot of optimism for the future. My goals for 2019 that touch a bunch of broad areas, which I'll just cover briefly and then have folks talk about their independent initiatives. Number one is ROA. You all have heard us talk about return on average asset targets. Our goal has been to run at a 1.8% ROA or better, which would put us in about the top 1% of all banks.
Right now, we're in about the top 20% of all banks, which most people would find to be satisfactory. That's never been our MO here. We're pursuing excellence. Out of 6,500 banks, there's less than 50 that can consistently deliver a 1.8 ROA. We think that on an annualized basis in 2021, we can be there. We think we'll actually hit it a few quarters along the way. It depends on market, trade wars, China, all sorts of things that are out of our control. What you need to understand is the play we have called for ourselves, very few other banks in this country are running or will ever run. That would be number one. To get that, we need to improve our efficiency ratio, which that for us means efficient growth, that we grow assets, we grow earnings faster than expenses.
I think a lot of that groundwork has already been laid. There will be expense growth for us. We're a growth company. The fact is our annual expense for 2019 that we told the street, it's $202 million. For those of you who were around in 2010, the entire bank was $240 million in assets that year. As I tell our team members, it costs us about $700,000 a day to operate, and 65% of that cost is on people. That is our biggest investment. That is our biggest asset. The talent upgrade to senior positions. I've fulfilled most of that goal this year. These aren't the only folks that we've added, but we've added some really talented team members as we've grown to fill some gaps for us that make me really excited about where we're going.
Our credit process, we want to continue to get better. I can tell you at year end and at last quarter end, our credit has never been better. That's partially the economy, but that's partially really good execution by our team. We want to continue to improve that. The last two, we want to launch our Dallas retail operation. We are in flight in the construction of our branch in Preston Center, which we hope will be done towards the end of this year. We believe that branch is well positioned with our relationships to be by far the largest branch out of the 64 branches we currently operate, which we're excited about that. Lastly, if we're going to be a regional bank, we have to deliver a retail experience equivalent of a regional bank.
Before I go on that, there are people that deserve some mention for last year. What the equipment finance team did, what the national CRE team did, what the Midwestern division did in 2018, outperformed their targets by a long ways and were really critical in helping us get to where we are. Those are some people, and then Triumph Business Capital, of course, had a record year. There are a lot of people who deserve credit for 2018 that I want to make sure get the notice they deserve, and we're so appreciative for that. With that, we're just going to have each of these team members talk for about a minute or so on what their focus is, and then we're going to open it up for questions, and then there's ice cream. What's not to love in the next 10 minutes?
Todd, why don't you talk about your lending focus for 2019?
Thanks, Aaron. At the top of the screen, you see the reference to relationship banking, that really is our top priority for the foreseeable future. When we talk about relationship banking, what does that really mean? In any presentation, you'll see relationship banking go right alongside the term cross-selling. To be honest, I don't really think cross-selling is a great term. It talks about what selling additional products and services does for us. It doesn't really talk to what it does for our clients. The rethink vanilla version of cross-selling I think is cross-serving. We're going to think about our clients' needs.
We're going to think about them holistically, we're going to leverage the deep relationships that we have in each of our commercial finance specialty businesses and each of our communities across the country to look for ways to serve our clients more fully. A lot of that has already happened. I was just in a meeting with Dirk Copple, who runs our equipment finance business, earlier today. He was taking me through the relationships that are largest within his business. Most of them already have other aspects or facets to the relationship today. That's not to say we can't do more, particularly given the new capabilities that we have. With the new treasury services platform, we have the ability to go out there and leverage the deep relationships we have to provide more services to our clients.
That makes their relationship with financial services providers simpler. When we bundle our products and services, we provide added simplicity in the way they operate their business, the potential for savings by bundling the pricing as well, and all in all, much higher customer satisfaction and net retention scores. That's big for us. We've got a lot of work to do there. We all know that. It's exciting to know that even without any other acquisitions, we have tremendous growth potential residing right within this business today that we can go out and attack. Loan growth. We've bumped our heads a couple of times with respect to specific credits and specific areas of the bank. ABL was one of those.
I've learned in the last couple of weeks after diving pretty deep with the team that this business has really demonstrated its commitment to tight controls, processes, and managing the business the way it needs to be managed to be effective in asset-based lending. They've earned the right to grow again, and candidly, we need that business. It's important to our clients and it's important to our overall enterprise. Diversification into industries with less cyclicality. We do have some cyclical exposure in this business due to the very nature of the products that we provide. We have the opportunity to leverage our new capabilities, though, to expand into areas that are less cyclical and take away some of the economic cycle risk that we face.
Going along with that, we have the ability to maintain a high ROA, the 1.8% level that Aaron refers to all the time, by looking at our clients from a holistic perspective rather than just an individual product perspective. It may be difficult for us to achieve 1.8 on any individual product, but if we think about the relationship as a whole, 1.8 becomes much more achievable. Finally, on credit quality, Aaron already addressed this. We have terrific stable credit quality measures. I've had the opportunity to sit in meetings with our regulators. The relationship there is strong and collaborative. There's nothing to worry about from the standpoint of looking at our credit quality based on recent history.
We all know that things can change, we have to also look forward into where there may be sources of stress that could make things difficult for us down the road. That's for our shareholders, but it's also for our clients. If we're sure we're in a strong position when things are good, we'll know that we can stand by our clients when things are bad. That's the most important reason why we focus on credit quality. Those are the high-level priorities, and look forward to sharing a lot more with you over the coming months.
Great. Thank you, Todd. Geoff , who is 50 days into his role at Triumph Business Capital, taking over for Steve, who's retired, and getting to work alongside George, who is the subject matter expert, who's here today and has been a very valuable team member for us for a lot of years. Geoff , oh, it went the wrong way. Tell us about what TBC is going to do this year in face of this. Market's a little different than it was in 2018, but what are your swing keys for creating value?
Sure. We have to optimize everything that can be optimizable within the production environment. If I showed you a schematic of all the steps required to factor an invoice, you would look at it and you would say, "This looks a lot like a manufacturing production line," the handoffs, the steps, it's a very linear process. Just like the manufacturing industry, this process will be aided considerably by investment in artificial intelligence, machine learning, things to automate the process. That's a key area for us this year. What comes out on the other side of that is you have world-class speed, which is what the clients want to getting their working capital, but you don't have to sacrifice industry-leading rigor and risk management. That's a big focus for us. We, I'm sorry, we process 20,000 invoices a day. If you think about that's a lot.
We capture a tremendous amount of information about our clients. This year, there will be a focus to get better about understanding our clients, segmenting them differently, being smarter about the unique needs.
Can you put your mic up?
Sorry. Being smarter about the unique needs that they demand and require, and moving into a position to cross-serve from within the enterprise. A small trucker that's just starting off has a different need than a 50-truck fleet, and that has a different need than an invoice client who's in oil and gas. We can be smarter, better, and faster about how we customize our offerings, leverage the enterprise, and cross-serve those organizations. Lastly, when you grow as quickly as we have in such a short amount of time, it's really hard to maintain accountability and alignment within the organization. A lot of new people through an acquisition who have never met each other.
We're in the process of implementing an organization-wide operating philosophy that will ensure every employee, from the receptionist to the CEO, has visibility and understands the strategy, three-year, one-year, quarterly, what the metrics we're going to use to measure success, and most importantly, what each of us are accountable to do to ensure that we get there.
In that business, we have, what, 400 team members today in total?
Yeah, just shy of 400.
About a third of all our team members work in TBC. Awesome. Thank you, Geoff . Jordan, people have heard a lot about TriumphPay. Tell us what TriumphPay is going to do in 2019.
In 2019, we have three areas that we're focused on. The first is driving platform volume, the second is leveraging our partnerships and integrations in the industry, and the third is completing the payment cycle for carriers. In the driving platform volume, TriumphPay has benefits from a network effect. As much the volume as we can bring onto the platform, the more valuable this platform becomes. Our goal this year is to onboard 40 freight brokers, including four of the top 3PLs in the industry. The way we're going to do that is we've added four full-time salespeople onto TriumphPay over the last year, several of which with decades of industry experience. One specifically started working for J.B. Hunt in 1985 covering loads. He reminds me that he's been covering loads since before I was born very often.
He knows everyone, so he's a very good asset for our team. The second area, leveraging partnerships and integrations. As we've gotten deeper into the industry, we've learned for the larger brokers, publicly traded companies, some of them product of roll-ups, require a very complex integration pattern that we have to meet. Our ability to solve that for these large brokers helps accelerate the time in which we can bring them onto the platform. That's an area that we are going to continue to build out this year, but have already made significant improvement thus far. In this area also includes integrations with transportation management systems, TMS, or accounting systems for these freight brokers. This has been an incredibly painful, long process. It's a multi-year process to get involved and integrated with these systems.
Now that we have it, we're able to start pushing harder to get these brokers onto the platform. It's definitely a moat for people that would try and come behind us and do what we've done, and it's a credit to this organization to be willing to invest into that, into building those integrations. The last part is completing the payment cycle. For a carrier, the carriers we've surveyed, the 20,000 carriers that are registered on TriumphPay, what they want from TriumphPay, the two most requested features, the ability to capture images on a mobile app and the ability to see all the TriumphPay brokers and their loads. That'll be rolling out in Q3 in a mobile app. It's very exciting, especially for the brokers who see carriers preferring to be paid by TriumphPay.
In fact, four out of five carriers prefer to be paid by TriumphPay instead of by a broker direct. That's something that we're very proud of the payment experience we create for our carriers. We're going to continue to invest in that so that they'll help us pull more volume onto the platform.
Great. Several of you have heard me use this analogy, I think it bears repeating. If you've got four of the top 20 freight brokers, and as Jordan would tell you, there's probably 1,000 freight brokers that really, out of the 8,000, that move most freight. If you think about your digital shopping experience, for any one of you, who I'm assuming all of you, when you don't buy things on Amazon, when you actually go to other sites, if you're anything like me, I now use PayPal to pay on every site. Why? Because I don't want to enter in my credit card information, and my billing address, and all this information onto five, six different sites. When they give me the option to pay the merchant via PayPal, there's a network effect.
The more I use PayPal, the more merchants want PayPal, it's sort of a virtuous cycle. I believe, it's not just me, but our team, and since this was dreamed up three and four years ago and is being invested in, eventually, we believe we're building the PayPal for the brokered freight market that could also extend into the shipping market, which the brokered freight market's $160 billion of annual spend. It's exciting to see how the strength of Triumph Business Capital, the strength of our equipment finance group, who blazed the trail for us in transportation, is now having come alongside it, this technology opportunity that could truly be transformative to our organization and to the industry as a whole. Thank you, Jordan. For all this loan growth that we just talked about, we actually do need a few deposits to support that.
With this growth, we've taken a bunch of small community banks and kind of jammed them together and put our flag over the door. We've learned when you do that, you don't get a consistent brand experience. If you think about going to McDonald's here or a McDonald's in Kentucky, you should have the same brand experience. In retail, I think we have a long way to go, and had a long way to go. We've made some ground in creating a user experience for our brand, which is now, from a branch perspective, we're in five states, and I suspect that will grow. Gail has agreed to serve as president of retail operations and has a lot of things in flight, and we'd love for you to tell people about a couple of them.
Sure. As Aaron said, since 2013, we have merged eight banks into one. With that came 62 branches that all operated on different platforms and all operated in different ways. My goal in 2019 is to design, develop, and deploy the TBK way. Having said that, we operate in six states, Texas, right?
My apologies.
You forget this lady.
You know in our relationship who the detailed one is, right?
We have 61 branches. Let's talk about operational excellence. Let me actually run through all three of those. I have three goals this year. One is to design, develop, and deploy operational excellence. The second is retail deposit growth, the third, and probably the most important, is to build customer care. Operational excellence. One of the things that I think is most important is to be removing the silos. We're taking what have traditionally been back office operations, support operations, and moving them into the front line, moving them into retail to provide our customers with appropriate services, appropriate information, fraud prevention, card services, deposit operation services in compliance inside of our retail operations. We are introducing a certified banker training program. We want our employees to be the best of the best.
We want them to be armed with knowledge and skill to serve our customers. Staffing and efficiency, we are doing quite a bit of analysis of what our customer behavior is, what is our competitor behavior, what is appropriate staffing to provide the best experience, what are the appropriate hours in our operations to provide the best customer experience. Retail deposit growth. I think it's a little more than retail deposit growth. It's being the best corporate citizen we can be in the markets we serve. When I say retail deposit growth, we are forging forward with a sales team. Sales, as Todd said, often gets sort of a bad rap. When I say sales, it's not just about selling our products or gathering deposits, it's also deploying our philosophy, our philanthropy, and entering activities that support CRA in our communities.
Our sales team is providing outreach into our communities to develop those services. We launched this spring a new treasury management suite in support of our commercial customers. That brings a host of products that hopefully will allow us to compete, as Aaron said, with those regionals. Finally, customer care. This is probably the one I'm most excited about, is that's where the TBK way is going to show. Early in the third quarter, July, if not sooner, we'll be launching a call center. As I said, we acquired eight banks. Eight banks means 800 phone numbers, right, and 62 branches where customers don't get dedicated support. We're going to be launching a call center that will have team members dedicated to product lines, the online banking specialists, treasury management specialists, new account specialists, that will be able to serve our customers and their inquiries.
one other thing we are building a support team around, Aaron, you might want to talk about this just a little bit, is the concept of the introduction of concierge banking.
Our goal in the Dallas market, if you think about, is the opportunity, the number of investors who are connected with us in Dallas, who invested with us in the early days, who our board has relationships with. Our goal is to deliver a product that's equivalent to a JP Morgan private banking experience or a U.S. Trust experience, but to do it in a more entrepreneurial way. Between the branch and the team that we built, I think we're doing that and have some very well-regarded customers who are in the process of transitioning to us, and I think it's very exciting. With that, the last thing I would say is that, again, I don't know where the market's going to go. It's been really interesting.
Bryce Fowler, who all of you know and should know, Bryce and I are out on the road, and he's been with me on the road for five years, and we've seen all the investors, and we've watched them go from exuberant to scared and unknowing. What I would say to the primary audience of team members here is our stock price today matters, but it's not the most important thing. We're building something, and we are staying on mission with that. We have a plan. I think you've heard just facets of the plan. Our plan is not to just exist as a community bank.
If you look around, most organizations are comfortable to satisfactorily underperform, just earn the right to exist, and that has never been in our DNA and never will be as long as the leadership team and the board we have are in place. I don't know where we'll be a year from now. If a year from now I can sit at you and say, "We're 25% better as a company than we were last year," I know the stock price follows. Stock price is just one piece of our business. We have to deliver value to our stockholders because we want them to vote yes, which you notice most people did because I think we have credibility with investors. We have to deliver value to customers and to our team members and to our regulators.
We have to balance all that, and I think that for 2018, we did that well, and I think we're well set up for 2019. At this point, are there any questions? Yeah.
If anyone came to Aaron with an idea, concept, or thought for the next move, and you were on a deserted island and you had no resources, and you had to get online, what are the two or three metrics that you would choose to look at? Technical or direct?
I think it'd be the two or three metrics that are primary drivers of compensation for the NEOs. That would be return on assets. How profitable are we? Asset quality, and that's predictive. In other words, what is our non-performing asset ratio and our charge-offs? Those are the three things I think for any bank you look at first. Being an insider, what I would be most interested to know is how are we doing in retail? I think we've demonstrated to the market that we are as good of asset generating company as exists in banking. The yields we get, the growth we get. The question mark that we intend to answer, both organically and through M&A, would be how do we keep the right-hand side of the balance sheet staying up with the left-hand side without just paying top of market rates?
That would be the fourth piece that I would really focus on. Great question. Any more? Going once, going twice. Let's have ice. It's right outside. Thank you all for being here. We appreciate it. We'll see you, some of you, very soon. The rest of you, I'll see you next year.