Richard Marotta
Analyst · Piper Sandler. Please go ahead
Thanks, Dave. Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining us today for our second quarter earnings call. With me this morning is Sean Gray, our President and Chief Operating Officer; Jamie Moses, our CFO; along with other members of our executive team. With many of our customers, employees and communities we serve and live confronting the devastation of the corona's pandemic, Berkshire is doubling down on our commitment and values. We are investing to make our services and capital more accessible and more relevant to our customers. And ultimately, we are building long-term value for all of our stakeholders. In fact, I believe our actions so far this year are accelerating our transformation into a new kind of 21st century community bank that provides an authentic banking experience and in doing so build wealth in our community and long-term valuable banking relationships. This can be seen across the bank as we respond to these challenges, including how we've approached protecting the safety of our customers and employees during the pandemic, while ensuring we continue to serve our customers, support our staff and advance the transformation of the bank. When the pandemic first struck, we quickly shifted to remote work for most non-branch employees and set careful procedures to mitigate risks for our customer-facing staff, closing branches to in-store traffic while maintaining drive-through services. For those employees whose hours were reduced as a result of these actions, we maintained full pay, and in fact, added benefits to help address hardships resulting from the pandemic. But this situation has also presented an opportunity to leverage our online and phone channels, as well as our MyBanker concierge services, migrate retail traffic, and build deeper relationships with our customers. As infection rates have declined throughout our service area, we have been able to reopen most branches to retail traffic as a result of our team's diligent work, but I'm optimistic we have also gained minable increases in customers using our digital and MyBanker channel, which is a critical part of Berkshire's transformation into an addressable and relevant 21st century community bank. Second, Berkshire's principles can be seen in our effort to ensure funds from the Paycheck Protection Program were accessible to small businesses across all of our communities. The majority of our PPP loans were under $50,000, were made available through all of our channels as our teams reached out across all of our markets. Third, last quarter, we continued to advance our innovation strategy with Reevx Labs, our vision of 21st Century banking brand that is built around community co-working spaces and socially responsible banking. Accelerated the launch of reevxlabs.com, the brand's online manifestation in response to social distancing mandate. Reevxlabs.com is an online hub that brings together a welcoming, inclusive space to make new connections, explore collaboration opportunities, and access resources to help entrepreneurs, small businesses, and nonprofit organizations to succeed. Marking a launch, we also announced an inaugural partnership with the Boston Public Library's Christian Business Library and Innovation Center, which will provide access to the library's expert staff and business resources. Now let me turn to our results. In second quarter, Berkshire generated solid core PPNR and positive cash earnings despite the challenging environment. We continue to strengthen our regulatory capital ratios and liquidity while growing our loans and deposits. The strategy has been to reduce our leverage and renew our focus on end market relationship businesses to support long-term profitability improvement. As we noted in the earnings release, we subject our capital and liquidity stress test, including severely adverse scenario and our analysis indicate that we're well margined in all scenarios to maintain strong metrics, including the well-capitalized regulatory designation. As a result of the pandemic, we recorded a noncash loss due to goodwill impairment and the provision for credit losses unrelated to the bank's activity during the quarter. Under previous strategy over the last decade, the bank did a number of bank acquisitions. These are stock deals carried on our balance sheet based on market valuations at the time in excess of tangible book value. The market for bank stock is now trading well below tangible book value due to the pandemic macroeconomic factors. The necessary accounting consequence was to write off goodwill with no impact to tangible equity, regulatory capital, liquidity or cash flows. As you know, we've been focused on our core return on tangible common equity, which excludes goodwill and is therefore unaffected by this action. The loan loss provision is our current estimate of future loan losses. We recorded a large provision in the first quarter due to the pandemic. The incremental provision in the second quarter reflects the further downturn forecasted economic conditions. We believe we are properly reserved for losses based on the current estimates. Shifting the focus on credit, our loan performance metrics remain within normal historical ranges. This includes the benefit of federal relief measures, including the PPP loans as well as loan modifications within regulatory guidance. We're working closely with our borrowers as the economy in the Northeast moved into a recovery from the rapid drop during the second quarter shutdown. Any request for additional modifications are carefully underwritten. We expect the total balance of PPP and modified loans to decrease significantly from here on out as borrower cash flows improve. We have strong – we have built strong lending, credit and workout teams since I joined the company as Chief Risk Officer about a decade ago. I have confidence that these teams will effectively manage our weight through its pandemic while we work with borrowers to respond to these extraordinary conditions. Our investor material includes further details on our borrower support program than the more sensitive industries that we lend to. Turning to overall operations. We recorded strong loan originations and deposit growth in the second quarter. Loan originations were driven by the PPP loans, which are included in commercial and industrial loans. These loans helped maintain employment during the shutdown throughout our market. We expect that most of these borrowers will apply for forgiveness under the program guidelines during the second half of the year, and we're geared up to service those requests and receive payment from the government as they come through. Deposit growth was concentrated in checking account balances, both retail and commercial accounts accumulated liquidity during the shutdown and this included amounts from the PPP loans. Before I turn it over to Jamie, I'd like to take a minute to comment on our investor deck, which is at our website. This deck summarizes some of the quarter's highlights, and it also includes additional information about our loan portfolio. We provided information on Slide 9 about the commercial loans to industries that we initially identified as potentially more sensitive to social distancing in the pandemic. Excluding PPP loans, these balances have not changed materially since last quarter. We note that most of our retail outstandings are either owner-occupied or to properties anchored by stores which have performed comparatively well during the pandemic, including groceries, pharmacies, home improvement and wholesale. We also note that our construction loans have generally continued with build-out and are mostly for properties not viewed as having elevated pandemic sensitivity. Turning to Slide 10. We note that our total Phase I modifications were $1.5 billion, and reflected our outreach to support customer liquidity as shutdowns were spreading through our market. These 90-day modifications are currently expiring, and the information from the field causes us to expect 60% to 70% of them to return scheduled payments based on current conditions. Any customer requests for another round of 90-day modification in Phase II are being underwritten and approved on a case-to-case basis. With that, I'll turn the call over to our CFO, Jamie Moses, to discuss some of the financial details for the quarter. Jamie?