Chairman’s Comments for the Annual Shareholder Meeting June 27, 2023

Fort Lauderdale, FL, June 28, 2023 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- OptimumBank Holdings, Inc. (NASDAQ: OPHC) Similar to my comments at last year’s Annual Shareholder meeting, I want to focus today on our past year’s results and discuss our expectations for the remainder of 2023. 2022 was a great year for us, as we had a full year of normalized results. There was barely any income from any one-time events, and we saw our net income pre-tax and pre-allowance jump over 74%. We will discuss earnings later, but our story today is still all about growth. The growth in 2023 is a slower growth as we have managed to hold our loan pricing to a spread over SOFR which brings us to over a 3.5% NIM on current deposit pricing. I, for one, am in favor of slowing growth during this strange time in the world with interest rates being as high as they are. For years, the Company was constrained as to what we were allowed to do because of circumstances that preceded any of our current management or board members. Today I feel we are doing great and now we begin the next phase in the evolution of our bank. I am fortunate to have an excellent team with me on the board of directors and I take seriously the responsibility of being their chairman.

Our singular goal is to provide shareholder returns and we are poised to continue in 2023 the way we ended 2022. As we have evolved over the last few years, we have seen our near-term goals come into focus. We expect that by the end of 2024, meaning over the next 18 months, we will open two new branches in the Miami area. Those two branches will solidify our foothold with smaller businesses, and we anticipate many of our current borrowers will transfer the rest of their banking relationships to us. In the past six months, we have seen the market lose faith in a few banking institutions, but our customers have shown their support and helped grow our deposits 74% from year end 2021 to year end 2022. So far in 2023 we have grown deposits by an additional 3.8%. Fortunately for our customers, at the of 2022, the Bank added ICS, which provides unlimited insurance for our deposits over $250K at our cost. I would also note that our securities portfolio is completely marked to market, and we have no securities with built in losses sitting inside a held to maturity figure.