James R. Reske
Analyst · Daniel Tamayo with Raymond James
Thanks, Mike. As Mike mentioned, the second quarter of 2025 was a strong quarter for us. Our earnings performance was driven by an expanding margin and strong fee income, so I'll focus on those 2 areas and wrap up with some brief thoughts on expenses and capital. The net interest margin or NIM, expanded 21 basis points to 3.83%. We closed our acquisition of CenterBank during the quarter, so the natural question is how much of that NIM improvement comes from the acquisition? Center's impact prior to marks was actually fairly neutral, which is not that surprising, considering that its first quarter NIM was almost the same as ours, just 3 basis points less and it was a relatively small acquisition for us. The marks on their loan portfolio, however, added 4 basis points to our NIM in the second quarter. Of that 4 basis points, 2 were related to the acceleration of marks related to loan prepayments, but the other 2 should continue. All of that means that most of our NIM expansion was due to our organic banking business. We did have the benefit of a maturity of $150 million in macro swaps for 2/3 of the quarter which added about 3 basis points to NIM in the second quarter and should add another 2 basis points next quarter. The rest of the NIM expansion was split between assets and liabilities with 9 basis points of the increase coming from assets and 5 from liabilities. New organic loan growth was strong at 8% annualized, and those loans came on to the book at rates that were 42 basis points higher than the ones that ran off. The cost of deposits fell by 8 basis points but we had increased borrowings by the end of the quarter, so the total drop in the cost of funds was only 5 basis points. Our forward NIM guidance this quarter is based on a revised baseline forecast that now contemplates 2 Fed cuts by year-end, down from 3 in last quarter's forecast. And in that case, we'd expect our NIM to expand for the low to mid 3.90s by the end of the year, give or take a few basis points as always. If there are no cuts at all, the NIM would expand another 5 basis points on top of that by the end of 2025. That guidance includes an additional 2 basis points in the third quarter of '25 from the macro swaps that matured last quarter, plus macro swap maturities of $25 million on August 25, $25 million on October 10, and $50 million on November 5. It also reflects expected pressure on loan spreads and the need to price deposits to fund our loan growth. All told, with the loan growth, the acquired Center portfolio and the improved margin, we believe that our net interest income should be between $110 million to $115 million per quarter for the remainder of 2025. Turning now to fee income. Our noninterest income increased by $2.2 million over the last quarter. There are about $600,000 of items here woth mentioning. First, we had about $375,000 in gains on the sale of OREO properties in the quarter. There's only about $1 million of OREO left in our books, so I wouldn't count on outsized OREO gains again anytime soon. Second, the $436,000 increase in BOLI income included $166,000 from a debt claim, while the rest of the increase comes from higher crediting rates on the BOLI portfolio. Other than that, our fee income improvements in the quarter were broad-based, and as Mike mentioned, included improved performance in fee income businesses like mortgage, SBA and wealth. Turning now to expenses. Operating expense, which excludes merger expense, was up by about $1.1 million from last quarter. Increased salary expense associated with the newly acquired Center employees was offset by lower incentive expense compared to last quarter, leaving the salary and benefits line item relatively unchanged. Some of the increased expense that shows up in other this quarter was associated with increased loan volume in areas like SBA. Finally, with regard to capital, capital ratio has improved due to retained earnings, along with a reduction in AOCI. Our tangible book value per share grew by 7.3% annualized from the previous quarter. There's very little buyback activity in the second quarter, but we ended the quarter with $6.2 million of share repurchase authority and just obtained an additional $25 million in share repurchase authority from our board yesterday. With that, we'll take any questions you may have.