Rex Copeland
Analyst · KBW. Your line is open
All right. Thank you, Joe. I’ll start by just talking about a few things that we highlighted in the first page of our earnings release related to COVID-19 expenses and things of that nature. We kind of talked about some of these things in Kelly’s comments earlier. But we did have a one-time special employee bonus that we paid, and that was about $1.1 million. We also had the contributions that we mentioned, which was about almost $300,000 in the first quarter. And then we also had some other expenses just the kind of normal things you would expect with cleaning services and supplies and equipment and different costs and things like that, which was about $103,000. So all that added up to, we think, expenses of roughly about $0.08 per share of kind of COVID-related items that were in our non-interest expense categories. We also mentioned that we delayed the adoption of CECL in the first quarter. We expect that obviously, under the CARES Act and the guidance from the accounting, professionals and standard setters that we will enact or adopt CECL later in this year, either at the end of the year, retroactive back to January 1, or after the state of emergency has been lifted. Some possible impacts going forward. We also mentioned in our earnings release, I won’t go over the details of those here, but just refer you back to the items that we mentioned maybe on Page 4. Obviously, all companies and certainly all banks are being impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic, and we expect in future periods that there may be some additional non-interest expenses related, perhaps some effect on our fee income, depending on activity and usage of some of the items, point-of-sale and things like that. So there’s various things that we did mention regarding this. I’ll talk for a minute about net interest margin. It held up pretty well actually in the first quarter. We had a net interest margin, as Joe mentioned, the 3.84%, compared to 4.06% in the first quarter of 2019, and that also compared pretty consistently with our fourth quarter 2019 margin of 3.82%. The decrease from the prior year first quarter was really primarily a result of decreases in the average yield on loans and other interest-earning assets, as we, during March, had significant market rate cuts than in interest products. As we mentioned also in our earnings release and we’ve talked a little bit about our balance sheet swap that we had in the past, we mentioned it in our 10-K filing as a subsequent event. But we did terminate the $400 million notional balance sheet swap that we had in effect. We received a payment of almost $46 million as the value on that, that has – net of deferred taxes, that has gone into our equity section as kind of the unrealized gain section. It actually is now basically realized, but it sits in the AOCI section of equity, that is going to be accretive to income and to interest income on loans in future periods. And we expect that, that will be approximately $2 million to interest income per quarter through the original termination date, which is in 2025. The core margin, which excludes the impact of additional yield accretion from our FDIC acquired loans for the three months ended March 31, 2020 decreased by 25 basis points compared to the first quarter of 2019. Really, again, mainly due to the much lower market interest rates from a year ago, which caused lower LIBOR interest rates and generally resulted in just lower yields on loans and lower yields on our other interest-earning assets. The net interest income dollars, however, were basically unchanged from the most recent quarter and up a bit from a year-ago quarter, they increased about $333,000 in Q1 2020 versus Q1 2019. A few items in non-interest income that we pointed out. Non-interest income was really not that much changed overall from the previous year quarter. We did have – we did recognize $407,000 decrease in the net fair value of our back-to-back interest rate swaps, that has nothing to do with the balance sheet swap that we terminated, but relates to the back-to-back swaps that we have with some of our loan customers. And so with falling interest rates, the net fair value of that position dropped by about $400,000 in the quarter. Service charges and ATM fees decreased about $200,000, mainly related to the expenses that are related or netted in with our ATM fee income and the conversion to a new debit card processing system, which we completed in the first quarter of 2020. Net gains on loan sales increased from the prior year. We did have more origination and sale of fixed rate single-family loans in the current year period versus a year ago. And then other income overall increased about $226,000, compared to the year-ago quarter. We did have some fairly significant income recognized in this year’s quarter related to some swap – origination fees on swaps with our loan customers and also some termination or exit fees on some certain tax credit partnership investments that we’ve added over several years. And that was somewhat offset by some gains and recoveries that we had in the first quarter last year related to some FDIC acquired items. And the next thing, non-interest expense, I’ll talk about briefly. We’re still tracking well on our core expense containment, I think, and our efficiency. Non-interest expense did increase $2.3 million to $30.8 million compared to the year-ago quarter. A lot of it we talked about related to COVID-19 items in this quarter that were recognized. We also had a little bit higher expenses in this year’s period related to depreciation of some new ATM/ITM machines and operating software that we had to upgrade and implement during the fourth quarter last year, which is now being written-off and depreciated in 2020. The efficiency ratio, I think, Joe mentioned before was at 58.91%. That’s a little bit higher than it was in the first quarter last year at 54.74%. The higher efficiency ratio this year was really primarily due to the increase in non-interest expense that we talked about. The company’s ratio of non-interest expense to average assets was 2.48% for the period this year versus 2.41% for the three-month period in 2019. I mentioned a little bit about allowance and provision. As we said earlier, we had a provision for loan losses in the quarter this year of $3.9 million. That is related only to $237,000 of actual net charge-offs in the first quarter. So that resulted in an increase in our allowance for loan losses of $3.6 million in the first quarter this year. One last thing I’ll mention is liquidity. We did have a good strong liquidity position at the end of March. We had cash and unpledged securities of about $400 million total. In addition to that, we had about $1 billion available on our secured line at the Home Loan Bank. So we had that much capacity that we could borrow there and we also have capacity to add broker deposits, if needed. In the first quarter, our deposits increased about a little over $200 million, $125 million of that or so was various brokered deposit products, checking was up $62 million and retail CDs up $32 million. So we have seen in the last month or two, some customers withdraw relatively minor amounts from their accounts. But since the end of March, our deposit totals have increased in total. Some of the increase is related to the stimulus funds that were deposited a week ago into customers’ accounts. And so we do expect that some of these and – the increases in deposits will roll out these accounts over time. That concludes our prepared remarks. At this time, we’ll open it up for questions, and let me ask our operator once again to remind our attendees how to queue in for questions.