Raj Singh
Analyst · Wells Fargo Securities. Your line is now open
Thank you, Susan. Welcoming to you in strange times. This is the first call that we’ve ever done where the management team is not together in one location. So Leslie and Tom are in Miami. I’m in New York and we’re doing this virtually. Also I’ve never done a conference call that I’ve had more than one or two pieces of paper in front of me with some bullet points on them and today Leslie has put in front of me, a 27-page deck and talking points that are several pages long. So forgive me for all the shuffling that you might here on the call. Let’s do this. Instead of jumping straight into the earnings for the quarter I would like to take five minutes of your time to talk about exactly give you state of the union for BankUnited. What is that we’ve been doing over the last six or seven weeks as the situation has evolved? What are we prioritizing and give you just the lay of the land and then we’ll get into the numbers and discuss in detail, what the first quarter look like? So let me start by first and foremost giving a big shout out to the BankUnited team. Every person who comes here calls this home and works hard. Crisis reveals character of people. I think that is true not just for people that also reveal the true character of an organization. I’m very proud to say that what I’ve seen over the last six or seven weeks. It really fills me with great pride that I’m leading this organization. People have come together, help each other, worked ungodly hours while they were under immense amount of personal stress. So there are too many examples to get into, but I just want to give a big one shout out to everyone in the company not just people working in PPP or the branches or keeping our call centers up, but everyone. Right down to the person who’s making the sandwiches in the cafeteria all the way to the last day when we shut down the cafeteria. So big shout out and thank you, a big thank you. We have as you can imagine going through this early in March. We made our employee’s wellbeing and safety our number one priority. We enabled 97% as of now. 97% of our employees are working from home and this is 97% of our non-branch employees of course. We have extended our paid time off policy. We have increased our health benefits to cover any expense associated with COVID. We have not furloughed any employees. I’m a very superstitious person so I say this very carefully. We’ve recently awarded by South Florida Business Journal award for being One of the Healthiest Employers in South Florida and I hope that we can claim this again next year. So far, we’ve had only one confirmed COVID case in the employee base. We do think there are couple others who could never get tested, but have overcome COVID as well. It sounds like it, but only one confirmed COVID case which is pretty good given to what is going on. When you take care of your employees, they in turn then take care of your customers and if you take care of your customers, that takes cares of the company. That’s sort of the chain that I follow. So quickly let me tell you what we’ve been doing to support our customers. The most obvious thing is, offering the operational resilience that is needed in the time like this. We activated our Business Continuity Plan. We’ve beefed up all the back office, IT infrastructure that is needed to run the company from afar with no really any significant operational issues or customer service disruptions. And if you’re asking me this, how I felt about our ability to do this in the first week of March when we’re preparing to do this. I was pretty nervous. But I’m happy to say that everything has gone without a glitch and the bank is working fine from an operational perspective. Our employees several hundred of them have worked tirelessly now for about three weeks to deliver the PPP program. We - I think as of last night are close to 700 or maybe over $700 million in loans that we’ve done through the PPP program. Our estimates are that we’ve helped retain about 85,000 or 86,000 jobs in our footprint through this program and we’re not done. There’s more going through as we speak, the team is been working around the clock and we will help few hundred more small businesses before eventually the money runs out in the PPP. We have approved deferrals for many borrowers who have contacted us and asked for assistance because of pandemic. And equally importantly we have honored all our commitments whether they were lines to be passed [ph] or business that was in the pipeline where we’ve made a commitment to closing a loan, we did not back away anyone and that is equally important. We have grade [indiscernible] and we have also temporarily halted new residential foreclosure actions. By the way while all this is happening, I just want to clarify when I say 97% of our non-branch employees are working remotely, 76% of our branches are still open. They are open on a limited basis of course, drive-thrus and appointment only method. But they are open and we’re serving clients. The traffic as you can imagine has gone down substantially. Also we have from somewhere in second week of March or mid-March we have made sure that we had enough liquidity to take care of any client needs in case somebody would need it. We continue to hold an excess amount of liquidity. But we now feel the time is right to start taking it down and I think beginning next week, we’ll take down this excess liquidity that we’ve been sitting on to, to serve our clients. Now turning back internally. As you can imagine we’re prioritizing risk management and credit quality and credit quality risk management. We’ve identified portfolio and borrowers that we believe will be under an increased stressed environment. I call these sort of you’re in direct line of fire type of portfolios. We have reached out to every single borrowers in these segments and we’ll talk in detail about what these segments are and how big they are. But we have reached out to all borrowers in these segments and in other segments, we’ve reached out to everyone over $5 million in exposure to understand exactly what the impact will be to our balance sheet while we always do stress testing sort of a routine business for us. In this environment, we’ve significantly enhanced these processes you would expect us to. But through all of this, it’s important while we’re managing a crisis and not to forget what the long-term plan is and to keep those long-term objectives in mind. And we’re doing that, while we’re fighting the immediate economic crisis. I think the biggest question here that you probably have is, what does it mean for our balance sheet? Right. I will start by saying our balance sheet is strong. I feel very good about our balance sheet, our capital levels, our liquidity levels and you see at March 31, our regulatory ratios no matter which you look at bank, holding company. They’re all in significantly in excess of well capitalized threshold. We’re committed to our dividend which we very recently increased by 10%. I think it was in middle of February. We did however stop our share buyback program. We had an authorization from – I think it was fourth quarter, it was authorized $150 million, we executed about $101 million and we stopped that and we’re going to put it aside at least until the dust settles on the economy. Questions that we have seen a lot of other banks seemed to have been asked to presented earnings in the last week or so, anticipating the same questions we did some analysis for you. By the way there is a slide deck like I said this time around. We never had a slide deck in our calls. But this time we have provided lot more disclosure and it’s a 27-Page slide deck so from time-to-time I’ll make references to certain slides. I’m not going to flip every page, but I’m make the references. So for example right now I’m talking about Page 4 on this slide deck. Which takes the DFAST severely adverse scenario for 2018 and 2020 and runs that on the March 31, 2020 portfolio to see what the losses would be and by the way not just nine quarters of losses, but lifetime losses? DFAST is a nine quarter exercise. But for this, we actually used lifetime losses and we’ve used those which we don’t think are really relevant. But nevertheless these are questions we’ll probably be asked. We did that analyses anyway. We’ve used both 2018 and 2020 DFAST severely adverse scenario. And that’s okay. It’s one of the losses that are generated and you can see them on Slide 4 and if those were to be used now. Would we feel the well capitalized in our capital ratio is hold up and the answer is yes, they do? So quickly one question so I don’t forget again about liquidity which is the next slide. We have tons of liquidity. We currently have over $8 billion. I think it’s $8.5 billion of liquidity. Liquidity available. A lot of it is in cash. We will take some of the cash position down as we think things are settling down in the marketplace. With that let me switch over quickly and talk about the quarter. We’ve reported a net loss of $31 million, $0.33 a share not surprising. This is driven in the large part to the large provision that we took. The provision for the quarter was $125 million. This increased our credit losses to $251 million which is 1.08%. So we used [indiscernible] at December 31, we were in $109 million or 47 basis points. On January 1, under CECL that number bumped up to $136 million or 59 basis points and now at the end of March we’re 1.08% or $251 million and that obviously were the biggest driver in the $31 million loss that we’re posting this quarter. I will ask Leslie to give you some more detail around CECL and the assumptions that went into calculating that provision. But I will say before I hand it over to her. Is that we believe this, on March 31 our reserve estimate is based on both data that is current and conservative at that quarter end and it reflects our best estimate of lifetime incurred losses in the portfolio. In second quarter, we will go through the same exercise. There are big areas which will impact our CECL estimate, but for the next quarter which was going to be an update on the macroeconomic outlook and update of our portfolio especially our high risk sectors. And also the assessment of impact of government stimulus because we’ve seen more stimulus this time around then we’ve ever seen in the history of the republic. So $2.5 trillion counting in fiscal stimulus and god knows how much in monetary side. But let me turn it over to Leslie, who can do a much better job of describing the underlying CECL that I can’t.