17) Shareholders’ Equity and Earnings Per Share

Authorized Shares of Common Stock — At a Special Meeting of Shareholders on August 27, 2019, the Company’s shareholders approved an amendment to the Company’s articles of incorporation to increase the number of authorized shares of common stock from 60,000,000 to 100,000,000 shares of common stock.

Earnings Per Share — Basic earnings per common share is computed by dividing net income, less dividends and discount accretion on preferred stock, by the weighted average common shares outstanding. Diluted earnings per share reflect potential dilution from outstanding stock options using the treasury stock method. There were 789,065, 534,106, and 346,500 stock options for the years ended December 31, 2019, 2018 and 2017, respectively, considered to be antidilutive and excluded from the computation of diluted earnings per share. A reconciliation of these factors used in computing basic and diluted earnings per common share is as follows:



	Year Ended December 31,
	2019		2018		2017
	(Dollars in thousands, except per share amounts)
Net income	$	40,461	$	35,331	$	$ 23,828

Weighted average common shares outstanding for basic
earnings per common share		46,684,384		41,469,211		38,095,250
Dilutive potential common shares		1,221,845		713,728		515,565
Shares used in computing diluted earnings per common share		47,906,229		42,182,939		38,610,815

Basic earnings per share	$	0.87	$	0.85	$	0.63
Diluted earnings per share	$	0.84	$	0.84	$	0.62