Gregory Garrabrants
Analyst · KBW
Thank you, Johnny. Good afternoon, everyone, and thank you for joining us. I'd like to welcome everyone to BofI Holding's conference call for the first quarter of fiscal 2015 ended September 30, 2014. I thank you for your interest in BofI Holding and BofI Federal Bank. BofI announced record net income for its first quarter ended 2015 of $17,841,000, up 46.5% when compared to the $12,182,000 earned in the first quarter ended September 30, 2013, and up 11.4% when compared to the $16,010,000 earned last quarter. Earnings attributable to BofI's common stockholders were $17,764,000 or $1.20 per diluted share for the quarter ended September 30, 2014 compared to $0.85 per diluted share for the quarter ended September 30, 2013, and $1.09 per diluted share for the quarter ended June 30, 2014. Excluding the after tax impact of net gains related to investment securities, core earnings for the first quarter ended September 30, 2014, increased $6,460,000 or 53.7% compared to the quarter ended September 30, 2013. Other highlights for the first quarter include total assets reached $4,825,000,000 at September 30, 2014 up $422 million compared to June 30, 2014, and up $1.5 billion from the first quarter in 2014. Total deposits reached $3,262,000,000 up $220,000,000 compared to June 30, 2014. Return on equity reached 18.61% for the first quarter. Our net interest margin was 3.98% for the quarter ended September 30, 2014, a 4-basis-point decrease over the quarter ended June 30, 2014, and a 12-basis-point improvement over the quarter ended September 30, 2013. The efficiency ratio was 34.81% for the first quarter of fiscal 2015, down from 41.37% for the first quarter of fiscal 2014 and 34.87% in the fourth quarter of 2014. Our loan units had another great quarter, with $1,005,000,000 in gross loans originated in the first quarter. As a result, the bank achieved good quarterly loan growth, with loan balances growing 12.1% linked quarter at an 84.4% annualized rate. The excellent performance of our lending group is reflected in $426.3 million of net loan growth this quarter, a 62.7% increase over the first quarter of 2014. The $1,005,000,000 of production consisted of : $88 million of single family agency eligible, gain on sale production; $17 million of single family non-agency eligible gain on sale production; $452 million of single family jumbo portfolio production; $149 million of multifamily portfolio production; $300 million of C&I and specialty asset production. Additionally, our warehouse lending division originated $387 million of single family production in the first quarter. Taken together, the bank originated $790 million of loans in single family, multifamily and C&I lending, an increase of $119 million over the prior quarter. Our C&I lending business continues to show strong results with production of $190 million. Our outlook for loan growth remains positive, with record pipelines of approximately $939 million at October 31, 2014, consisting of $481 million in jumbo loans, $156 million of multifamily loans and $217 million of C&I loans. We've seen our single family agency and warehouse lending pipelines increase so far in October and November. Our centralized mortgage operations allows us to efficiently deploy resources between single family agency and single family jumbo lending quickly, to take advantage of shifts in the marketplace. We are pleased with the risk-adjusted returns we are earning on our jumbo mortgage production, and demand remains strong. We also remain committed to growing our single family agency mortgage production. The diversity of our asset generation model continues to serve us well. We have infrastructure and expertise to sell our portfolio of our single family and jumbo mortgages, multifamily and specialty finance production as well as our C&I loan originations. The flexibility allows us to maintain a high return on equity, through various competitive and market cycles, without taking any outside interest rate or credit risks. Additionally, we continue to invest in resources to expand our expertise and production capabilities, across a broader range of lending categories, in preparation for future opportunities that may emerge. We continue to be pleased with the credit quality of the bank. Our nonperforming assets, as a percent of total assets, were down slightly from 55 basis points at the end of September 2013 quarter to 52 basis points at the end of the quarter ended September 2014. We are often seeing gains on the sale of our REOs versus our portfolio marks and the relatively few nonperforming assets we have, given the significant recovery in the housing market. We continue to have an unwavering focus on credit quality of the bank, and have not sacrificed credit quality to increase originations. For the first fiscal quarter's originations, the average cycle per single family agency eligible production was 7 62, with an average loan-to-value ratio of 64%. The average FICO for the single family jumbo production was 7 to 16, with an average loan-to-value ratio of 62%. The average loan-to-value ratio of the originated multifamily loans was 62% and a debt service coverage ratio was 1.38%. Our strong credit discipline and low loan-to-value ratio portfolio have resulted in consistently low credit losses and servicing costs. At September 30, 2014, the weighted average loan-to-value ratio of our entire portfolio of real estate loans was 55%. Turning to the liability side of our balance sheet. I am pleased with the progress we have made in growing and enhancing our deposit franchise, our goals to increase our share transaction accounts and develop deeper customer relationships. Over the past 2 years, we have successfully shifted our deposit mix to become more transaction-focused. We grew our checking and savings deposits by over $1.1 billion from September 30, 2013, representing growth of 91.1%. Transaction accounts now make up 77.7% of our deposit base, up from only 44.6% from a year ago. The diversity and quality of our deposit base position us well to fund our future growth in a variety of interest rate environment. Our Business Banking group had another solid quarter growing deposits by almost $300 million, linked quarter, to $1.7 billion in September 30, 2014. The business bank has over 3,000 accounts, where 75% of the balance is comprised of checking accounts. Our core value proposition of saving businesses 30% or more in their monthly fees and providing good customer service, is resonating with a growing base of clients who are very comfortable working with a branchless bank. Through our internal research group, we continue to identify businesses, nationwide, with a high propensity towards utilization of our treasury and cash management services. We are also investing in our infrastructure to upgrade systems and services to compete for larger accounts. All these factors combined, make us optimistic about our opportunities to continue to grow our business deposits. I'm equally excited about our consumer deposit franchise, given the strong value proposition we offer. Our structural cost advantage allows us to offer a value proposition that's not economical to our higher-cost competitors. We have been aggressively improving our organizational capabilities to grow our consumer deposits, adding senior talent in data analytics, digital marketing and customer experience management. We are building customized software that will allow us to further optimize our application funnel and deliver better real-time targeted cross-sell offers to our customers. We recently separated our direct banker customer service function, from our outbound sales functions and expanded the outbound sales function to allow us to better -- to get better consumer deposit penetration, from the customer contacts, generated throughout the organization and from third parties. On the loan side, I believe we will be able to sustain our loan yields. Our jumbo pipeline are at or near record and pricing remains consistent with levels we have seen over the past quarters. As we continue to expand the size and quality of our distribution network and enhance our inside sales capabilities, we continue to see opportunities to make low loan-to-value jumbo mortgages nationwide and strong markets to credit-worthy borrowers. While the multifamily market has been more competitive, we are not seeing meaningful degradation in our loan yields. Our focus on smaller dollar multifamily loans, that larger competitors have less interest in, has allowed us to grow our multifamily loan book opportunistically without compromising on credit structure returns. Lastly, I feel good about our C&I lending capability. Our C&I lending group has extensive experience across a variety of loan types, including lender finance, factoring, leveraged lending, equipment finance and leasing. We have deliberately chosen to focus the majority of our attention on lender finance, because it provides the best risk-adjusted returns today, providing yields that are accretive to our overall loan yield. However, we have the infrastructure and expertise to enter C&I lending categories, if and when the credit markets firm and provide more attractive risk-adjusted returns. Because we have a robust asset-generation engine and a diverse high-quality deposit base, I believe we will be able to maintain our net interest margin in the 3.80% to 4% range. We continue to invest in our marketing and data analytics infrastructure to further enhance our ability to grow deposits through our low-cost channel. We recently signed an extension of exclusivity for our transaction with H&R Block. Several weeks ago, we announced a regulatory approval of our purchase and assumption agreement of certain deposits from H&R Block Bank, will not be completed in time for the 2015 tax season. Our expected relationship with H&R Block consists of 2 components, only one of which requires regulatory approval. The first, which requires regulatory approval, is the assumption of deposit liabilities of H&R Block Bank. These deposit liabilities consist of individual retirement accounts and continuing Emerald prepaid card deposits, from cards issued prior to BofI becoming the custodial bank, under the terms and conditions of the Emerald card deposit agreement. The second is, a program management agreement under which we'll provide H&R Block-branded financial services products, specifically Emerald prepaid cards, refund transfers and Emerald Advance lines of credit through H&R Block's retail and digital channels. This agreement does not require regulatory approval, and the bank and H&R Block are free to enter this agreement at their discretion. These exact products have been offered under an OTS or OCC charter for the last 7 years and we are not changing any aspects of these products, under the program management agreement. The program management agreement has 3 primary components: first, the bank will be serving as the sole issuer and depository institution for H&R Block's Emerald cards, one of the largest prepaid card programs in the country with approximately 3 million active cards; second, the bank will act as sole processing bank for H&R Block's refund transfers; third, we will originate all Emerald Advance loans and retain a percentage of the Emerald Advance loans, that we originate through H&R Block each year. Although this bank and H&R Block are free to enter into the program management agreement at any time, independently as assumption of the deposit, we expect that we would execute the program management agreement concurrently with the closing of the deposit assumption transaction. The benefit of the concurrent execution, from BofI's perspective, was to provide regulators an opportunity to comment and gain a deeper understanding of the program management agreement. Unfortunately, I do not have further specific updates on timing of the approval of the deposit assumption transaction. I'm proud of our 34.81% efficiency ratio we attained this quarter, a 34.81% efficiency ratio, despite our investment in our management team, data analytics capabilities and our technology and compliance infrastructure as a testament to our culture of continuous improvement and ongoing efficiency initiatives. The majority of the incremental expense associated with the pending H&R Block transaction has been incurred and should stay relatively flat for the next few quarters. As I mentioned previously, we had expected these additional expenses to push our efficiency ratio closer to 37% to 38% in the short term. We will continue to work hard to become more efficient across our entire bank, while making the appropriate investments in future growth initiatives. Now I'll turn the call over to Andy, who will provide additional details on our financial results.