Mike Price
Analyst · Piper Sandler. Please go ahead
Thank you, Ryan. The COVID-19 pandemic has significantly disrupted the health and well-being of our communities. Our banking teams at First Commonwealth are engaged on a variety of fronts. We’ve adopted emerging best practices and followed direction from health and government leaders around COVID-19 to protect our employees, customers and communities. Our bankers were proactive early on, in reaching out to customers and offering forbearance to consumers and businesses, who we’re pressing forward in the wake of this pandemic. At quarter end, we had modified over 2,200 loans for our borrowers, impacting $145 million in loans. Rolling forward to last Friday, April 24, payment relief had been extended to over 5,800 consumers and businesses on $1.1 billion in total loans. However, the number of modifications had trailed off to a trickle. Then third, the team was all in on the first wave of the Paycheck Protection Program, funding and helping 1,500 customers secure $426 million in government loans. Approximately 85% of those loans were less than $350,000. We are a preferred SBA lender, in 2019 ranked as the number two SBA lender in Pittsburgh, and the number three SBA lender in Cleveland. We are now eagerly engaged in securing a second wave of PPP loans for our customers, as government funding has resumed. We expect the typical loan amount to be lower than Wave 1. Then fourth, the volumes through our operations areas have been unprecedented, from loan modifications to PPP loan processing and stimulus checks, from call center volumes to mobile chats, from online mobile deposit account openings to logins on our digital platforms. The team has shifted a significant portion of our workforce from our branch and select areas to call centers, underwriting, documentation, and loan processing, while training them to meet the new operational reality of the week or month. As we work through opportunities with our customers every day, the COVID-19 pandemic is accelerating the change in the banking landscape. We expect ongoing change, and are evaluating additional near and long-term opportunities, surrounding growth, efficiency, expense in net interest margin as we reshape our business. We are not waiting for business to return to normal. Our business is undergoing rapid, longer-term structural change, that we must and will anticipate. As we reflect on the first quarter, it’s important to note that we have been preparing for a downturn for years. The team has added new growth engines to include mortgage and SBA. We’ve built a geographic based Regional President model, led by local presidents accountable for their markets and delivering the bank cross-functionally to our customers and prospects. We’ve moved to a universal business model in our branches several years ago, which enabled flexibility in staffing and broader talent development. We have significantly expanded our digital capabilities, and most recently, our call center capabilities as well. We’ve sought better balance between our commercial and consumer businesses, as well as between our variable and fixed rate lending. The team has built a strong, low-cost core funding franchise, where roughly one half of our deposits are non-interest bearing, and now, transaction accounts, split evenly between consumer and business customers. Our acquisition strategy has been accretive to our low-cost core funding and profitability. Similarly, we have expanded our footprint to adjacent markets that we know well, in both Ohio and Central Pennsylvania, and executed flawlessly on a series of smaller, lower risk acquisitions. These newer markets account for the majority of brisk loan and deposit growth in the first quarter. We have paid down our borrowing significantly, to give us flexibility for times like these, we have fortified our capital position organically, and also with the issuance of $100 million in sub-debt roughly two years ago, which leaves us ready to withstand the current crisis. And from a credit perspective, we have improved the granularity of our loan portfolio and cut the number of the larger credits by two-thirds, while actively managing the segment in concentration limits. In the first quarter, our net income fell to $4.7 million or $0.05 per share as our provision expense increased to $31 million, despite only $3.5 million or 23 basis points of net charge-offs. Using the incurred allowance for loan loss methodology, the reserve build was some 42 basis points to 1.25% of total loans in the first quarter. Jim will speak the spread income, non-interest income and expenses and a number of other things, however, our pre-tax pre-provision first quarter earnings were good. The company is well capitalized with ample liquidity. Our reserve build this quarter is appropriate, given the specter of COVID-19 and what may lie ahead. Our continued focus on building low-cost core funding and leveraging our regional business model for growth, make us optimistic about the future of our company. I would now like to turn it over to Jim Reske our CFO, followed by Brian Karrip, our Chief Credit Officer, to provide more color commentary on the first quarter, capital credit. I’ve also asked Jane Grebenc, our Bank President, to join us as well for the question-and-answer session. Jim?