Mark McCollom
Analyst · Piper Sandler. Please go ahead
Thanks Curt and good morning to everyone on the call. COVID-19 has certainly impacted the content of this call and as you’ve already seen our slide deck was enhanced with several new disclosures in an attempt to address these items of focus. While comparisons to prior periods are not as meaningful today due to the rapid change in outlook unless I note otherwise the quarterly comparisons, I will discuss over the fourth quarter of 2019.Starting on Slide 7, earnings per diluted share this quarter were $0.16 on net income of $26 million. First quarter earnings in comparison to the fourth quarter were impacted by a higher provision for credit losses driven by our application of the CECL methodology and the outlook for COVID-19 on our credit.Moving to Slide 8, our net interest income was $161 million an increase of $2 million linked quarter despite one less business day in the quarter. Earning asset growth both in loans and investment securities drove this NII growth. Our net interest margin for the quarter was 3.21% versus 3.22% in the fourth quarter. The 1 basis point of linked quarter compression in our net interest margin was ahead of our internal projections and we consider this to be a solid start to our year.The stability in our net interest margin over the past quarter was driven by our ability to reprice our deposits. Deposit cost declined 15 basis points from 77 bps to 62 bps from the fourth quarter to the first quarter and our earning asset yields declined only 10 basis points during this period from 4.07% to 3.97%. Going forward we will be impacted by the recent severe reductions in interest rates. We believe we still have the ability to lower our deposit cost more over the next quarter and we intend to do that.Turning to credit on Slide 9, we adopted CECL or the Current Expected Credit Loss standard on January 1, 2020. As a result of this adoption, our allowance for credit loss increased by $58.4 million. Slide 9 provides a rollforward of our allowance for credit loss balance from December 31 to March 31 and breakout specific components of the changes. It also provides you with more detail on some of the material assumptions that formed the basis for our first quarter provision for credit losses under CECL.We utilize Moody’s for some of the macroeconomic assumptions that populate our models and for CECL; we employ the Moody’s baseline forecast which assumes a critical pandemic set of economic assumptions. I also want to point out that under CECL it’s not appropriate to assume that our first quarter of 2020 provision for credit loss is indicative of provision levels for the balance of the year. The intent of CECL is to capture an estimate of expected future losses that exist on our books today.Moving to Slide 10, for the first quarter of 2020. Net charge offs on an annualized basis were 26 basis points as compared to 65 basis points in the fourth quarter. The majority of our net charge offs for the quarter related to borrowers were specific reserve allocations that were established in prior periods. In the fourth quarter of 2019, net charge offs were elevated by discrete $20 million charge-off with 48 basis points related to a specific commercial relationship.Non-performing loans at March 31 decreased $1.2 million or about 1% in comparison to year end 2019. Non-performing loans as a percentage of total loans decreased to 82 basis points as compared to 84 basis points at the end of last year. The allowance for credit loss related to loans at March 31 was 1.4% as a percentage of total loan balances up 43 basis points from December 31. Our adoption to CECL increased this ratio by 27 basis points and our provision for the quarter which includes the impact of COVID-19 accounted for the remaining increase. The allowance for credit loss coverage ratio as a percentage of non-performing loans was 170% at March 31.Moving to Slide 11, non-interest income excluding securities gains was $55 million relatively unchanged from the fourth quarter and seasonally very strong up over 17% from the same quarter a year ago. Our strong performance was driven by mortgage banking revenues, wealth management revenues and capital markets revenues offset by decreases in consumer card income, merchant and commercial card income.Mortgage banking revenues were up $1 million from the prior quarter despite recognized $1 million mortgage servicing rights impairment charge during the quarter as interest rates rapidly decline and expectations for pre-payments increased. Moving to Slide 12, our non-interest expenses were $143 million in the first quarter up about $4 million from the fourth quarter. Expenses were up 3.4% compared to the first quarter a year ago with roughly one-third of this increase driven by a differing day count since 2020 is a leap year.The linked quarter expense increase included a $3.5 million or 4% increase in salaries and employee benefits largely due to seasonal increases in payroll taxes and higher incentive compensation. Other expense categories in total were consistent with the fourth quarter. Income tax expense decreased $5 million linked quarter. Our effective tax rate was 10% for the quarter as compared to 13% in the fourth quarter of 2019. We will provide guidance on certain numbers for the second quarter including our effective tax rate in a moment.Slide 13 is a new slide which focuses on our liquidity. Since early March we’ve been very intentional in maintaining excess liquidity incase market conditions would cause any of our liquidity sources to contract. Since mid-March, we’ve maintained excess cash of between $200 million to $300 million per day. While this impacts our net interest margin moderately, in our view this is prudent planning and we’ll continue to do so until we see more stabilization in the markets.Our committed liquidity has maintained in the mid $6 billion over the past 30 days and our overall liquidity including uncommitted sources such as fed funds lines and broker deposits has remained in excess of $10.5 billion. We’re fully prepared to handle the influx of PPP loans which Curt referenced earlier. Slide 14 gives you more detail on our capital ratio.During the first quarter we raised $375 million of Tier 2 qualifying subordinated debt. This additional capital came at very opportune time as we now, are entering the downturn with an estimated total risk based capital of 13.8%. We have evaluated our capital and liquidity under a variety of stress scenarios including going back to loss levels by product type experienced during the financial recession.In these scenarios, both the bank and holding company maintain sufficient regulatory capital and liquidity. While our regulatory capital ratios will not be impacted by the influx of PPP loans in the second quarter. Those loans will cause our tangible common equity ratio to decline somewhat due to the rapid balance sheet growth. Based on our approved applications of approximately $1.7 billion in loan balances we believe our TCE ratio will be around 7.4% at the end of the second quarter. Absent changes to our outlook will then expected to increase in the back half of 2020.While we’re comfortable with our capital levels at the current time, we did take some steps to conserve capital during this period of uncertainty. We suspended our share repurchases in March and we’ll continue to do so until we have better economic clarity. During the quarter, we had repurchased $40 million under our current $100 million authorization reducing our share count by 2.9 million shares. We also elected to hold our quarterly dividend at 13% instead of our recent practice of increasing it with our first quarter dividend announcement. Our goal is to maintain this dividend going forward.Lastly, we would like to provide our thoughts about forward guidance for 2020. We are pulling all of the previous guidance for 2020 we have provided last quarter as our outlook has obviously changed. At this time, we’ll be providing select guidance on certain numbers for the second quarter of 2020. Those numbers are as follows: loans, for the second quarter we expect our PPP loan growth to be approximately $1.7 billion. For other loan categories, we expect growth on an annualized basis to be in the low single-digit range overall with residential growth leading the way.Deposits, thus far we’ve not seen run off as significant as we had expected as a result of meaningful price reductions we adopted soon after the fed had shocked [ph] rates downward in March. At this point, we’re assuming deposits that experience somewhere between modest run off to slight growth in the second quarter excluding the impact of PPP. The timing of stimulus checks, the use of proceeds by our PPP customers, unemployment levels and other economic factors all play into this estimate.We expect our net interest income to be in the range of $150 million to $160 million for the second quarter of 2020. Material factors impacting this estimate include the final level and mix of the PPP loans and the relationship between fed funds and other funding points such as one-month LIBOR. We expect our non-interest income to decrease from first quarter levels. While management revenues, capital markets and all consumer driven revenues merchant, debit and credit card are expected to declined.Mortgage banking should continue to be a bright spot as our pipeline is very strong and we’re now just entering the seasonally busy time of the year. Cash management fees should also hold up okay during this time. But overall, we would expect to see non-interest income decline 5% to 15% from first quarter levels. Overall, we expect our operating expenses to be in the range of $140 million to $144 million. We expect our effective tax rate to be between 11.5% and 12.5% for the second quarter.We will hopefully know a lot more about the breadth and depth of the economic downturn caused by COVID-19 over the next few months. If the situation moderates, we may be in a position next quarter to provide more clarity on the second half of the year at that time. With that, we’ll now turn the call over to the operator for questions. Cherie [ph].