Richard Marotta
Analyst · FIG Partners. Please go ahead with your question
Thank you, Erin. Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining us today for our first quarter call. With me this morning are Jamie Moses, our CFO; Sean Gray, our President; Georgia Melas, our Chief Credit Officer; and George Bacigalupo, our Commercial Leader. We’ll break the call into two parts; our first quarter results and second, our strategic review and future outlook. Starting with the first quarter: We consolidated six branches in Q1. With early deployment of MyBankers, we’ve actually seen a slight increase in the deposit balances that were affected by the closing. We moved forward with our acquisition of Savings Institute, which is targeted for completion in the second quarter. We continue to work cohesively with their team as we make decisions for the integrated company. We are also exploring new delivery channels with storefront locations that are having nontraditional footprint and historically under bank communities that will be supported by MyBankers. In the first quarter we’ve taken steps to affirm our commitment to corporate responsibly and culture. We’ve heard me talk previously about my passion to ensure that diversity, inclusion and belonging are a focal point for the company. In March, the Board officially established a Board level of Corporate Responsibility and Culture Committee led by Ms. Laurie Norton Moffatt. This committee will work closely with senior leadership as we expand and deepen our commitment to corporate social responsibility, diversity, inclusion and belonging across all aspects of our company. We also published our first annual corporate social responsibility report, which can be found at our Investor Relations website. In this report we summarized the many ways Berkshire delivers on being a good corporate citizen by conducting business in a social responsible manner, being a caring neighbor and employer, and being transparent in our governance practices. At the end of the quarter we said goodbye to three of our esteemed colleagues and members of the leadership team. Linda Johnston, Mike Carroll as they begin their retirements and Ali O’Rourke, as she pursues new opportunities outside of the company. Linda spent 41 years with the bank and led our human resource function. Mike Carroll was pivotal in the build out of our specialty lending operations and spent many years leading our commercial teams in the New York region. Many of you on this call have worked closely with Ali over the last six years as she led our Investor Relations efforts and helped communicate our strategic vision. We wish all of them well in their future endeavors. As far as the first quarter results go, we delivered $0.60 in core EPS and $0.51 in GAAP EPS due to the impact of non-core charges that are detailed in the earnings release tables. Our NIM came in at 3.17% and included 5 basis points of purchase loan accretion. Measured before accretion, the NIM was up 1 basis point quarter-over-quarter to 3.12%. The provision was $4.1 million and exceeded net charge-offs. Our allowance increased to 69 points of total loans and our credit quality metrics remained strong and improved quarter-over-quarter. Now we’ll turn to our strategic review. We’ll be referring to slides as we walk through that deck, which is posted at our website. Turning to slide three; as I discussed on our last call, we initiated a full strategic review shortly after year-end. The review moved us towards improved profitability and the development of higher quality, sustainable earnings, while focusing on customer relationship strategies within our footprint. As you recall, the review was initiated to offset a reduction of approximately $50 million in purchase loan accretion and our acquired portfolios, in addition to achieving our profitability, liquidity and efficiency goals. My focus as CEO is on the disciplined deployment of capital and liquidity and driving core deposit growth, while staying true to our core values of inclusion and belonging in our company and the communities that we serve. The results of the review led us to the actions that: one, improve the size and composition of the balance sheet; two, focus on energies on strategically compelling profitable lines; three, rationalize our organizations expenses; four, deploy capital to its highest and best use; and finally, allow us to deliver on our short and longer term performance goals. I’m going to turn the call over to Jamie at this time so he can walk through the financial impacts of that review. Jamie?