Peter Ho
Analyst · Bank of America. Your line is now open
Thank you, Cindy. Aloha everyone, mahalo for joining us today. We hope this call finds you, your family and your colleagues in good health and in good stead. Given the depth and breadth of the COVID-19 crisis, we thought we'd break from the long standing format of our earnings call. We will still cover Q1 results, but we'll bridge that commentary somewhat and place it subsequent to some commentary around the COVID-19 supplement, which you received as part of our press release today. The supplement is intended to share with you how Hawaii has been impacted, how Bank of Hawaii is prepared for the COVID-19 crisis, how we're operating and performing through the crisis, and how our liquidity, credit and capital positions stack up to the challenge at hand. I'll begin by giving a broader overview, Dean will follow to discuss liquidity, Mary will discuss our credit metrics, and Dean will conclude with some thoughts on capital. We'll then spend a brief amount of time on Q1, and then we'd be happy to answer whatever questions you might have. So I'm going to begin on the supplemental packet beginning on Page 2, with the overview. And basically fundamentally, we view COVID-19 as a multifaceted crisis. Of course, it's a health crisis, and it is certainly an economic crisis, but it is also a social crisis and even an ethical crisis. Given this, we believe long-term value will accrue to firms committed to balancing the needs of all stakeholders, customers, employees, shareholders, vendors, and the community at large through this crisis. Without question Hawaii faces substantive short-term and mid-term challenges. However, the long-term attractiveness of Hawaii, as a place to live, as a place to visit and as a strategic military vantage point remains unchanged and intact. Our liquidity, credit posture and capital base positioned us well. Our 123 year history serving our island community has prepared us well to deal with major setbacks, as we have many times, and to support our communities in their time of need. Now, let me turn to Page 3 of the deck. This will give you a sense for the infection activity here in the Hawaii market. And I think the bottom line is we've been relatively fortunate compared to some less fortunate parts of the country and the world. As of yesterday, we had six additional cases reported bringing our total to-date to 580 cases reported here in the state of Hawaii. Unfortunately, we've had 10 deaths as a result of COVID-19. If you look at the upper left chart on Page 3, you'll see that the actions taken by the Governor's office and the Mayor's office in the third week of March, seemed to have done the trick in terms of flattening the curve. And you'll see by looking at the chart on the bottom right that the number of new cases by day seems to be coming down, at least for now. If you go to Slide 4, this gives you a sense for our response timeline. And for whatever reason, we just identified this situation as something that we really needed to wrap our arms around, to determine whether there was, in fact a clear and present danger, represented by this virus at the time coming out of China. By February 3, we convinced ourselves that indeed there was, and that set off a pretty large purchase on our part of both PPE and sanitation products. Through this early mid-March period we were in active discussions with our Board of Directors and our Committee Chairs, talking about scenarios, talking about options that we might take in the event that this -- at the time coronavirus situation, later to be called the COVID-19 situation accelerated. By March 10, we had a strategic implementation plan in place and we're ready to roll that out. By 3/18 or a week prior to the stay at home order by the city, we made the decision to transition Bank of Hawaii in all areas where we could do a work from home format. And then you see on March 25, two days after the work from home order went into place we took down our branches in a pretty meaningful way. If you go to Slide 5, just to give you a sense for the primary objectives of our strategic implementation plan for COVID-19, really three pronged headline, of course, by the safety of our employees being absolute paramount to all of our activities. Clearly, we're committed to providing for the essential needs of our customers and our community. And then thirdly, we recognize as an essential provider, that we are providing services to other essential providers as well, and we need to be able to be solutioning a robust plan on their behalf, as they continue to do their good work within our community. On the Slide 6, operationally, we as I mentioned, brought the branch structure down from 68 branches through our entire Hawaii and West Pacific network, down to 31 branches. This is still providing us coverage in all our markets, even our smallest markets. Here at the headquarters building, we brought our personnel count down from 1,300 people in the headquarters to about 250. So that's an 80% reduction did that mid-March. We also set up a number of teams and location sites to perform certain forms of operational functions. The reason to do that, obviously to create some redundancy in the event that we had a situation subsequent. So to give you an overview of how the workforce is conformed right now for Bank of Hawaii, approximately 60% of our workforce is working from home, quite effectively I might add, 25% of our workforce is working on site and 15% of our workforce is awaiting activation. From an employee standpoint, on Slide 7, a number of programs implemented as a result of this crisis. Our unsigned employees, the 250 employees that I mentioned to you earlier, sorry the 500 employees, I'm sorry that I mentioned to you earlier, each received a monthly stipend of $500 to help support incidentals, part-time employees earn $250 per month. We have a very tight process around COVID-19 incident management, really do that in conjunction with a terrific team of medical industrial cleaning professionals, that we've retained on an advisory basis. Just today, we launched a web-based employee morale and engagement tool to give us a better sense for how our team is doing out there, dispersed throughout our marketplaces. And I'm excited to get the feedback on that and see how that might help us improve engagement even further. For our on-site employees, we made sure that we had surplus sick leave available to ensure that people were not being incentive to come to work if they didn't feel anything other than 100% ready-to-go physically and emotionally. And finally, our executive team is participating in a twice daily video conference one early in the morning and one later in the afternoon, just to ensure that we're all on the same page as we step through the situation. Stepping to Slide 8, talk a little bit about our commitment to our customers. Fundamentally, we're committed to providing full service banking capabilities via our albeit revised physical layout, our work from home workforce, and bringing the full force of our digital capabilities forward. We've invested a good amount of time and effort and money into our digital offerings over the past several years. And I'm pleased to say that we're beginning to see the real benefits of that in a situation like this. Payment relief is being provided to both consumer and commercial customers who are asking for it. I'm proud to say we processed over 2,100 PPP loans, totaling in excess of $525 million. We had upwards of 10% of our total workforce supporting this effort. Last week on the 15th, we electronically distributed 65,000 stimulus payments totaling $112 million to our customers. As you can imagine, that caused quite a ripple effect through many of our operations. And then finally, we're committed to exploring emerging loan products like the Federal Reserve's Main Street loan program, as well as potentially our own emerging consumer products. On Page 9, just to give you a sense for modifications. A total of 5,200 modifications made to-date, that's both commercial as well as consumer totaling 9.8% of our loan outstandings. On Page 10, just a sense for what we're doing in the community. I think headlined by, Bank of Hawaii Foundations, $3 million donation to the Hawaii Community Foundation to support Hawaii COVID-19 activities. We also fairly early on donated 1,200 N95 respirators, which we had ordered early on and then realized that those respirators were probably better placed elsewhere. And then in addition, we provided an additional $100,000 in financial support for additional PPE. We waived ATM fees at least through June, as we brought down the branch structure, and we've also divided line staff with broader authority to waive account level fees. So as for an economic impact on Page 11, I think we all would accept that this is an unprecedented situation. And really what is fascinating to me is this is indeed, I think, historic and that this is the first time the country has in effect, pushed itself into a recession. In this case, to stave off a novel virus and to try to protect and save as many people as possible, which I think is exactly the right thing to do. But that's come with obviously its economic consequences. But it's also the first time that our country has implemented massive fiscal and monetary stimulus on the front end of a recession. So we're very interesting to see how this plays out. As for Hawaii, we are in fact impacted like every other state in the country by the shelter in place, work from home, stay at home, policies in place, that's impacting our local economy greatly. A little bit differently from some other places is that as a visitor destination, we're also being impacted by the self-imposed 14-day quarantine rule, which has brought tourism here in the state to virtually a standstill. So if you turn to Page 12, this is a snapshot of the Hawaiian economy. This is per UHERO 2019 data. And you see that the leisure and hospitality industry is a big player in Hawaii. They represent 19% of total jobs in our marketplace. If we go to the GDP proportionality, leisure and hospitality dips a bit to 10%, but still a meaningful element. And then down into the personal income line, dips again to 11%, but still a meaningful component of our marketplace. Fortunately, government and Defense spending is equally in some instances a larger proportion of our economy, and for now those pieces feel pretty stable. Turning to Page 13. Here you see the economic forecast by UHERO, this came out at the end of March, so March 31, 2020. And what you see is a call for unemployment spikes for the year 2020 of 13.7%. What I think is embedded in there is likely an unemployment rate for this second quarter of an excess of 25%, and then a feathering down from there over the course of the year. Turning to Page 14. You'll see just other forecast data. On the left side, you see in the dark blue real GDP estimates down 7.7% for the year 2020 forecast, and personal income levels down a little bit more muted than minus 2.6%. On Slide 15, we've tabled for you the anticipated Federal relief spend to our marketplace $6 billion, upwards of $60 billion headlined by that Paycheck Protection program, which I’m proud to say the Hawaii Bank I think did a terrific job in delivering just over $2 billion to our marketplace through this program. So, I’ll finish off my piece by I think state in the obvious, COVID-19 is substantial, its unprecedented, but we believe Bank of Hawaii is in fact well-positioned. We have a season management team, I can tell you the four of us represented in this room have worked together for more than 20 years, and we’re veterans of 09/11, we’re veterans of the financial crisis, and now we’re working through this viral situation. That great liquidity, conservative loan portfolio, strong capital levels and perhaps most importantly, a preeminent market position. So, now let me turn the call over to Dean, who will talk about liquidity. Dean?