Kenneth Mahon
Analyst · Piper Sandler
Thank you, operator, and thank you, everyone, for joining us this morning. Good morning. On the call with me today are; our Chief Banking Officer, Stu Lubow; CFO, Avi Reddy; and our Chief Accounting Officer, Leslie Veluswamy. In my prepared remarks, I'll make some enterprise-wide comments about the current pandemic and then pick up some of the broad things that underlie, the earnings release this quarter.This is my 40th year with Dime and my fourth year as CEO, throughout most of my career done with a monoline multifamily script. Multi-families were a much maligned asset class in the years leading up to my induction as CEO, especially with regard to concentrations.So in order to diversify our assets and our revenue streams, in 2017, we began to transition toward the commercial bank model. The positive impact of that transformation is taking hold now and is most apparent in this quarter's earnings release.However, I do find some irony in the fact that in times of crisis like this, we once again fall back on the stability of the New York City multifamily asset class for comfort. Dime is no longer is dependent on multifamily housing as it was four years ago, but it still represents almost 2/3 of our loan portfolio.Multifamily loans have served Dime exceptionally well in times of economic crisis. New York City multi-families were by far the best-performing credits during the financial crisis that began in 2008. Year after year, Dime had one of the lowest loss rates in the nation based on the performance of New York City multi-families.In fact, for the six years between 2007 and 2013, our cumulative net charge-offs were only 130 basis points of loan balances at the start of the crisis, which was approximately five times lower than the overall bank index. Given the low LTV nature of our multifamily portfolio, which was 52% at March 31, 2020, we anticipate our stellar track record to continue even though conditions are now much different.Due to the city's limited geography, multifamily apartment buildings are in the primary form of housing. A large percentage of our borrowers have remained refund through intergenerational family ownership across various economic cycles. And these owners will know how to manage through this crisis. We view this as a liquidity event for building owners, having nothing to do with vacancy levels or credit deterioration.It's important to remember that prior to the lockdown in every regard, economic conditions in New York were outstanding. Going into lockdown, vacancy levels were near all-time lows. As we saw after 9/11 when real estate values tumbled, but then took off at the start of 2002, we don't want to try to mind read the market, but rather focus on the facts.The only material abandonment of New York City multifamily housing that I can recall occurred in the 1970s during the city's financial crisis. That was doing and after the [John Lindsey Adera]. In order to believe that the current housing situation ends badly, you'd have to believe that New York City jobs and economy will not recover.It was a time when housing sporting were mainly dependent on the financial sector in New York. Today, we've had significant investment in what's known as the TAMI sector, technology, advertising, media and information companies. As mentioned in our press release, the best thing we can do for our loyal borrowers right now is to help them get through their liquidity crunch.Our owners were current on their payments before the government locked down economic activity, and they will manage their properties back to health active and lockdown. So for now, we see our attack for the benefit of both landlords and tenants is to be supported.As of April 21, we had approved forbearance request on $559 million of loans across all of our portfolios, which represents 11% of the total loan portfolio. The weighted average LTV on loans granted for banks was 55%. You see more detail in the press release.In our press release, we've also outlined certain affected areas in our commercial loan portfolio that we are monitoring very proactively, mainly hotels of $173 million and restaurant loans of $27 million. I've asked, Stu Lubow, our Chief Banking Officer, to join us on the call today to help answer any questions -- on any of your loan questions in a more granular fashion.In summary, given the low LTV nature of our multifamily loan portfolio and the long-term demand for housing stock in New York City, we remain optimistic that our credit performance will again outperform the peer group averages. Right now, in terms of the mix of our portfolio, we have a solid blend of safety and yield, slightly less than two-thirds are brokerage driven multifamily loans and one-third are multi-family relationship loans that came with the business banking build-out. The earnings and balance sheet advantages of the relationship loans continue to drive our improvement in asset yields, deposit costs and non-spread revenue, as you'll see when I'll be discussing this quarter's earnings release in detail.We also believe that we have built a balance sheet with significant capital strength, and we are entering this uncertain economic period with an extremely strong capital base. The strength of our capital base can't be emphasized enough. Our tangible equity ratio grew by 80 points on a linked-quarter basis and is currently 9.4%. Our consolidated Tier one risk-based capital ratio is in excess of 12%. And our consolidated total risk-based capital ratio, which is in excess of 15%, ranks among the highest of our peer groups.Of note, management began preparations for bolstering our capital base back in December of 2019, which led to the successful issuance of $75 million of preferred stock in February of 2020. It looks like the pressure move today, it was simply the continuation of our focus on building a safe and sound institution for the long term.Next, I would like to talk about Dime's involvement in the SBA's Paycheck Protection Program, more commonly referred to as PPP. SBA should get a lot of kudos for the work that they've done, I mean, for an organization that not used to originating this level of loan base so, really, our experience has been very good with them.The pandemic has made it clear to everyone just how important small businesses are to ensure full employment and to support a well-functioning economy. Over the past several years, we have taken numerous steps, including hiring personnel and adding new processes and systems that put us in a superb position to help our business customers.In short span of time, Dime has now one of the most productive SBA operations in the New York area. And prior to the PPP rollout, we ranked among the top 10 SBA lenders by dollars of origination in the New York District. We're deeply committed to being a source of capital to businesses in our footprint. This initiative has been a bankwide priority. Many of our staff worked around the clock and over weekend to ensure we kept credit flowing to businesses.As of April 21, we registered $163 million of loans with SBA. Total fee income from processing these PP loans is expected to be around $5 million. Of the applications we registered with the FDA, 32% were existing Dime clients and 68% were new clients. Successfully onboarding these new clients after PPP will accelerate the growth of our business deposits with many of these new clients remembering that they were first introduced to Dime as a source of help to them in a time of need.As you'll see from our results this quarter, we're on a path of creating structurally higher net interest margin, plus other improved profitability metrics. Our pre-tax pre-provision for the first quarter was -- 2020 was $18.7 million, representing a 20% year-over-year growth.As I've mentioned in the past, Dime's strategic plan is built upon improving five fundamental metrics: one, growing our total checking account balances, two, increasing low-cost business deposits; three, growing relationship-based commercial loans; four, reducing our CRE concentration ratio; and five, growing sources of and the contribution of non-spread revenue.Now a quick update on each of those, starting first with the growth in our checking account balances. On a year-over-year basis, average noninterest-bearing and interest-bearing checking accounts increased by 22% to $626 million. Every dollar of well course deposits raise -- that we raise increases the franchise value of the company.Second metric is increasing low-cost business deposits. Total commercial bank deposits from our business banking division, plus our legacy multi-family division increased by almost 24% from approximately $109 million on a year-over-year basis. Commercial deposits now comprise 13.4% of total deposits as compared to approximately 10.4% of total deposits a year ago.Our next financial objective is growing relationship-based commercial loans. The business banking division currently stands at approximately $1.4 billion. This business continues to be significantly accretive to our overall NIM and has contributed to six consecutive quarters of core NIM expansion.Our fourth targeted metric is the lowering of the commercial real estate concentration ratio. We've now reduced that ratio to 50% -- to 589% at March 31, 2020. And as many of you may remember, Dime was well over 900% only a few years ago. Lastly, non-spread revenue, we grew annual non-spread revenue, excluding security gains and losses and a onetime BOLI claim by approximately 65% on a year-over-year basis.In summary, we continue to make quantifiable progress on overall strategic objectives. Most satisfying to me and the purpose of our business model transformation is the significant progress that's come on the deposit side of the balance sheet. Deposits to loans for the business banking division are running at 27% of the loan portfolio compared to approximately 5% for the legacy multifamily business. We are making tangible progress on improving the quality of our deposit base, which was perhaps deguiding tenant of our business model transformation.Looking at the fourth quarter of 2016, just prior to the build-out of the commercial Bank division, Dime was almost the highest of our peers from a course of deposit perspective. Now our course of deposits is lower than many of those senior competitors, with the decline in cost of deposits witnessed in the first quarter of 2020, and we expect to be at the meeting once we -- once everyone finishes reporting.At this point, I'd like to turn the conference call over to our Chief Financial Officer, Avi Reddy, who will provide some additional color on our first quarter results.