Randy Chesler
Analyst · Michael Young with SunTrust. Your line is open
Alright, thank you Wanda. Good morning and thank you for joining us today. With me here in Kalispell this morning is Ron Copher, our Chief Financial Officer; Don Chery, our Chief Administrative Officer; Angela Dose, our Chief Accounting Officer; Byron Pollan, our Treasurer and Tom Dolan our Chief Credit Administrator. Yesterday we released our second quarter 2020 earnings and today we're ready to review the state of the company and the financial results. The second quarter was very solid and highlights the strong core of the company and the strength of our team and our business model, despite the stiff headwinds caused by the global COVID-19 pandemic. We continue to navigate through the pandemic extremely well and I'm exceptionally proud of the Glacier team, their commitment and leadership and their service to their communities. As I noted in our last earnings call, the Glacier franchise covers almost 1,500 miles from Montana to Arizona and the impact of the pandemic is different across that franchise. Our unique business model with 16 different divisions serving over 140 communities provides us with the unique capability to respond to our employees, customers and communities in a way that best suits that local market. We continue to take advantage of our model today to respond to the quickly changing conditions. At this time most of our locations had moved back to drive through service with in-lobby meetings by appointment. This is in response to a resurgence of the virus in many of our markets. Most of our eight states have active cases and mortality rates well below the national average, but are still seeing increase in cases with more testing. Despite the pandemic, we are amazed at how well customers have adjusted to the circumstances and are carrying on with business. Our mortgage volume is at record levels with the refinancing and new home purchases, our commercial lending business is beginning to pick up and many of our business customers report solid increased activity. As expected, tourism in our western markets has generally rebounded very well due to a lot of pent-up desire to get out of the house and travel. Our markets were strong before the pandemic, driven by high quality of life, business friendly environments and low cost of living, and we're seeing some signs that the natural social distancing that comes with our more rural markets will add to the attractiveness of our markets. And now on to our results for the second quarter. Once again the second quarter results really highlighted the consistent strength of our core business. We reported earnings per share of $0.66, an 8% or $0.05 increase from the prior year second quarter. Net income was $63.4 million, which is an increase of $11.1 million or 21% from the prior year second quarter. And highlighting the company's core earnings strength pre-tax, pre-provision net revenue for the quarter was $91.3 million, which was up 41% from the prior year second quarter. Core deposits increased $1.8 billion or 16% over the prior quarter, with non-interest bearing deposit growth of $1.2 billion or 30%. Non-interest bearing deposits were 38% of total core deposits at the end of this quarter compared to 34% at the end of the quarter a year ago. Deposits continue to flow into the balance sheet, so we significantly reduced our federal and home loan bank borrowings by $475 million during the quarter to about $40 million and put an additional focus on reducing the cost of deposits given the drop in interest rates. We were pleased to see our cost of core deposits decline to 14 basis points from 20 in the prior quarter and the total cost of funding dropped to 21 basis points from 29 in the prior quarter. The loan portfolio organically increased $1.4 billion or 14% in the quarter and increased $1.5 billion or 17% from the prior year quarter. All the loan growth in the current quarter and most of the deposit growth was due to our paycheck protection program or PPP loans. We have approved and closed over 15,000 PPP loans for about $1.4 billion with most of these funds deposited in accounts with us. We expect to earn about $55 million in fee income from these loans. So as part of this effort, we also acquired over 3,000 new customers who received PPP loans from us totaling close to $298 million in loans. This was due to a number of our competitors that were struggling with offering the PPP program. Total debt securities of $3.7 billion increased $104 million or 3% during the quarter and increased $1 billion or 37% from the prior year second quarter. Net interest margin was tough to hold as we saw it drop from 4.36% last quarter to 4.12% today, dragged down by the 150 basis point reduction of short term rates by the Federal Reserve in late March. Pricing on new production during the quarter was around 440 verses our portfolio rate of about 485. Last quarter's new production yields averaged 480. The core margin looked better ending the quarter at 421 versus 430 in the prior quarter and 427 a year ago. The pace of PPP loans forgiveness could help the margin in the next few quarters, as fee income will be accelerated upon forgiveness. Now last night the SBA issued some direction on how and when to submit the forgiveness applications and we look forward to getting started with the process, which according to the SBA will most likely started in mid-August. Longer term though, we still expect lower rates will continue to put downward pressure on our margin. The return on our debt securities held up well, ending the quarter at 3.16% up 6 basis points from the prior quarter. Debt security income was $26 million, which was an increase of $5 million or 23% over the prior quarter and 18% over the prior year quarter. This shows the effectiveness of the actions we have taken to maintain our investment portfolio returns. Non-interest income was driven by a record mortgage production. We booked gain on sale of loans of $26 million, which was $14 million over the prior quarter on increase of 118% and $18 million or 233% over the quarter a year ago. Mortgage purchase and refinance business continues to be very strong and we've seen an uptick in a number of our out-of-state buyers in addition to strong local demand. Credit performance was better than expected with net charge-offs at $1.2 million or 2 basis points of total loans, about the same as the prior quarter. Delinquent loans were 22 basis points of loans versus 41 last quarter and 43 a year ago. Non-performing assets increased $7 million, but were 27 basis points of assets, which was up 1 basis points from the prior quarter and was 14 basis points less than the level a year ago. For the quarter, excluding PPP loans, our NPA's would have been 30 basis points of assets. We've also made over 3,000 loan modifications on loans totaling over $1.5 billion, representing about 15% of the portfolio, excluding PPP loans. We have received regulatory flexibility to make these modifications and there are a good way to help customers get through severe, but hopefully short term business disruption like we're now seeing. Both the triple PPP loans and the modification help customers maintain and build their balance sheets, while they get back to business. We’ve also made in excess of $200 million in PPP loans to the modification customers that will provide additional support. We finalized closing many of these modified loans a bit later in the second quarter, as we were very busy with handling the record number of loan requests for PPP loans. While most of the modifications are for three months, we'll begin to see the majority of them come up for renewal in a few more weeks. We expect to see a good number of these customers go back to paying as agreed. It's important to note that all of these loans that receive the modification were performing as agreed before we gave them the modification. In addition to relying on the substantial inherent strength of the loan portfolio, we've implemented enhanced monitoring of industries that we think pose higher risk due to the pandemic. The total amount of loans under enhanced monitoring is $630 million or 6.29% of our portfolio. This includes loans in the following industries, Hotel/motel, restaurants, travel, tourism, gaming and oil and gas. The largest industry with increased risk in our portfolio is our Hotel/motel loans totaling $422 million or 4.2% of the portfolio. Most of these hotel loans are smaller loans less than $1.5 million and have an LTV under 60%. Most of you know that we have not materially increased our position in hotels for over three years, so many of these loans have a good amount of equity, which generally translates into a lower debt burden. The next largest exposure in the higher risk group is restaurants, totaling $151 million or 1.5% of the loan portfolio. Similar to our hotel portfolio, these are smaller loans with an average loan size of 175,000 and comprised of a solid group of operators. Many of these owners have already started to adapt to a new operating model by shifting to take out while they wait for the ability to reopen fully. We plan to continue with our enhanced monitoring process of these industries for the foreseeable future. Credit loss expense of $13.6 million for the quarter brings us up to $36.3 million for the year and 1.42% of loans, 1.62% of loans not including the PPP loans which are a 100% guaranteed. This is a 13 basis point increase over the last quarter. This increase is primarily driven by the impact of COVID-19 on the economic forecast, and not deterioration in the underlying credit portfolio. Our allowance for credit loss stands at $162.5 million, which we believe is a very adequate and prudent amount given the uncertain circumstances. Total non-interest expense was $98.1 million, which increased $6.2 million or 7% over the prior quarter, and increased $12 million or 13% over the quarter a year ago. For the quarter the efficiency ratio was 49.29%, an improvement compared to the prior quarter efficiency ratio of 52.55%. On the year-to-date basis the company's efficiency ratio was 50.81%, improving from the 54.93% efficiency ratio for the first half of last year. The company's capital levels remained very strong with CET1 ending the quarter at 12.35% up compared to 12.14% at the end of the prior quarter and up from 12.19% from the quarter a year ago. Tangible book value per share was $17.08 at the end of the second quarter and increase from $16.35 at the end of the prior quarter, and increased from $15.03 from the prior year's second quarter. Our access to liquidity remains robust with growth due to an increase in core deposits and borrowing capacity. At the end of the second quarter the company had access to over $11 billion in liquidity. This includes $5.6 billion of unused borrowing capacity with $2.6 billion at the Federal Home Loan Bank, $2.6 billion in borrowing capacity at the Federal Reserve discount window and PPP liquidity facility and $400 million of capacity at correspondent banks, in addition to $1.6 billion in un-pledged and marketable securities and cash, of $547 million. An additional $3.5 billion in liquidity is available from other sources, including broker deposits, over pledged securities and loans eligible for pledging at the Federal Home Loan Bank. So, in March we declared our 141st consecutive dividend. With our robust capital and liquidity position, we don't see any change in our dividend strategy at this time. Dividends have been and remain one of our preferred excess capital management strategies. And a few important items before I end my comments. We completed the operational conversion of Heritage Bank in Reno, and I'm pleased to report that the conversion went very smoothly, and it will be good to have the Heritage Bank on the company's core platform. My thanks to the Glacier and Heritage teams for an excellent conversion. S&P selected Glacier to become part of a MidCap 400, moving up from a Small-Cap 600. And finally, bank director just this week published the 2020 Bank Director Scorecard and we moved up in the rankings quite a bit. For banks with assets between $5 billion and $50 billion nationally, we are in the Top 5, number 4, that's up from number 16 last year. So overall, an outstanding performance from the team. That ends my formal remarks. And I’d not ask Wanda to open the line for any questions that you may have.