R. Smith
Analyst · FBR Capital Markets
Thanks, Laura, and good morning. It's nice to have you with us today. As has been our practice in the past, after Phil, Charlie and I conclude our prepared remarks, we will be happy to respond to your individual questions. We're up to a good start. In 2011, we reported diluted net income per share of $0.17 for the first quarter, a 6.3% increase over the $0.16 we recorded in the fourth quarter of 2010. As you know, our performance over the last several years has been impacted by our asset quality challenges. During this period, we focused on positioning the company for the future, realizing that these headwinds would eventually subside as the economy improves. This quarter, our credit challenges are certainly not behind us, but we were encouraged to see the reductions in four key metrics: Nonperforming loans, charge-offs, overall delinquency and in the provision. If the economy continues to expand at a reasonable pace, we believe we will continue to see reductions in our overall credit costs. We were also pleased to see the gross on an average basis in the CNI and Commercial Real Estate portfolios although those increases were offset by decreases in our Construction and Consumer portfolios, making overall loan growth difficult. Phil will provide you with details in credit in a few minutes. Our solid performance this quarter reflects the basics of low core cost funding, improved interest margin, good expense control and improved operating efficiency. It is important to note that our $0.17 was achieved despite a significant link quarter reduction in residential mortgage activity and a generally unfriendly regulatory environment that seems intent on reducing our non-interest income, while simultaneously laying on an ever-increasing compliance cost. The people in this company have always responded effectively to past challenges and I know they will do so in the future. As a team, we believe we can continue to improve our earnings performance as we get some help from the economy and as the overall confidence levels improve. However, since confidence levels have a tendency to fluctuate based on national and world events, we will be ready for any eventuality. From a funding standpoint, our continued core deposit growth and strong liquidity enabled us to reduce our reliance on wholesale funding. We worked to achieve an optimal deposit mix that deemphasizes higher cost time deposits and that rewards customers as they expand their core banking relationship with us. These initiatives enabled us to expand our net interest margin this quarter, and we feel we can further reduce funding costs through certificate of deposit repricing in this rate of environment, but not at a pace we've seen over the last several quarters. A segment on which we recently focused our marketing and promotional efforts has been small business. We do not disclose actual commercial growth numbers for competitive reasons. However, last month's was one of the best months we've seen for small business account growth in several years. Today, we are offering a special small business line of credit in an attractive rate to help us increase our loan growth. Our non-interest income is up in total year-over-year but down link quarter due to several factors: The normal seasonal trend we see in overdraft revenue and the line item most significantly impacted in this category was our mortgage sale gains. After a strong fourth quarter last year, residential mortgage activity and related sale gains declined sharply. We expect that pending regulations to put additional pressure on non-interest income and we have developed responses to help offset that revenue impact of these regulations through deposit account-related fees in increases and reductions in account-related expenses. Our investment management and trust services division, Fulton Financial Advisors, produced strong results this quarter due to an ongoing emphasis on reoccurring revenue and increased sales and client retention in our wealth management and retirement services area. We expect total other expenses to drop -- We expected total other expenses to drop significantly linked quarter and they did. As you may recall, marketing expenses were up last quarter due to a number of opportunities we saw in the marketplace. This quarter, we returned to more normal levels. Expense management has been and remains a top priority for the corporation. Knowing how important dividends are to our shareholders, we were pleased to increase our quarterly dividend from $0.03 to $0.04, while we realized it's a modest increase in line of our past dividend payment history, it reflects our progress and our confidence in the future. The board is keenly aware of the role dividends play in investor decisions and we will be monitoring our progress closely for additional increases as opportunities in our financial performance enables us to do so. In closing, even though we're very liquid and have never stopped lending to credit-worthy households and businesses, we need to get more traction under our loan growth. There are continued signs of an improving economy in many of our markets and we are hopeful that our focus on customer service and our gains in market share will all result in loan growth to the second half of the year. While we operate in a slow-growth environment, we will continue to carefully control our funding costs and expenses, while continuing to work diligently to further reduce our credit costs and the growth in our balance sheet with quality assets. Thanks for your attention, and Phil Wenger will now review details on credit and talk more specifically about business conditions in our market. Phil?