Zach Wasserman
Analyst · David Long with Raymond James. Please proceed with your question
Thanks, Steve, and good morning everybody. It's a pleasure to be with you here on my first earnings call with Huntington. Slides four and five provide highlights of our full-year 2019 and fourth quarter 2019 results respectively, many of which Steve already touched on. Fourth quarter results include approximately $47 million of pre-tax impact, or approximately $0.03 per share after-tax from previously announced actions that were taken to better position the bank for 2020, including the securities repositioning, workforce actions, and the pending in-store branch closures.Let's turn to slide six to discuss the key fundamental drivers behind the financial performance for the quarter. Average earning assets increased $2.3 billion, or 2%, compared to the year ago quarter. Average loans and leases increased $1.3 billion, or 2% year-over-year with balanced consumer and commercial loan growth. Average commercial and industrial loans increased 3% from the year ago quarter, and reflected the largest component of our year-over-year loan growth. C&I loan growth has been well-diversified over the past year with notable growth in specialty banking, asset finance, and corporate banking. Our fourth quarter commercial loan growth was below our expectations. As a portion of yields we expected to close at the end of the year were pushed into 2020 and seasonal declines in line utilization at year-end were larger than normal. Overall commercial activity continues to be restrained by economic uncertainty.We continue to actively manage our commercial real estate portfolio around current levels with average CRE loans reflecting a 2% year-over-year decrease, driven by pay downs and refinancing activity. Consumer loan growth remained focused in the residential mortgage portfolio, reflecting robust origination in the second-half of 2019. Average residential mortgage loans increased 7% year-over-year. As we typically do, we sold the agency-qualified mortgage production in the quarter and retain jumbo mortgages and specialty mortgage products.Now, turning to slide seven, average total deposits decreased less than 1% year-over-year, while average core deposits increased 1% year-over-year. Note that both of these growth rates were negatively impacted by the June 2019 sale of the Wisconsin Retail Branch Network, including approximately $725 million or almost 1% of core deposits. We continue to see a migration in deposit balances from CDs and savings into money market accounts, reflecting shifting customer preferences, and where we are focused on promotional pricing. Average money market deposits increased 9% year-over-year, while savings decreased 9%, and core CDs decreased 16%. We expect this dynamic to continue in 2020. Average non-interest bearing and interest bearing DDA accounts, each increased 1% year-over-year. As shown on slide 32 in the appendix, we're very pleased that our commercial non-interest bearing deposit increased 5% year-over-year on the quarter. This growth highlights our continued focus on growing our low cost deposit base through new customer acquisition and relationship deepening.Moving now to slide eight, FTE net interest income decreased $55 million or 7% versus a year ago quarter, primarily driven by the 29 basis point decline in net interest margin partially offset by 2% increase in average earning assets. Net interest margin was 3.12% for the quarter, down 29 basis points from the year ago quarter, down eight basis points link quarter. And in line with the guidance we provided the Goldman Sachs conference in December.Moving to slide nine, our core net interest margin for the fourth quarter was 3.08%, down 26 basis points from the year ago quarter. Purchase accounting accretion have contributed four basis points to the net interest margin in the current quarter, compared to seven basis points in the year ago quarter. Slide 28 in the appendix provides information regarding the actual and scheduled impact of first merit purchase accounting for 2019 and 2020. Please note that this quarter is the last quarter we intend to write core NIM and PAA breakouts, as the PAA is expected to have a relatively immaterial impact in 2020.Turning to asset to earning asset yield, our commercial loan yields decreased 52 basis points year-over-year, consumer loan yields decreased eight basis points and security yields decreased 16 basis points. The decrease in our earning asset yields can be primarily attributed to lower interest rates following the three Federal Reserve rate reductions that occurred during 2019. On the funding side of the balance sheet, our deposit costs continue to move lower. As CDs and money market promotional rates re-price lower, and we actively manage commercial deposit costs. Total interest bearing deposit costs of 87 basis points for the quarter were up 3% year-over-year. So down 11 basis points sequentially.Slide 10 summarizes the actions we've taken to reduce the unfavorable impacts of interest rate volatility and the lower interest rate environment. Our hedging strategies reduced the downside risk for lower interest rates and have significantly narrowed the band of modeled outcomes for net interest income. Our current interest rate risk modeling suggests little changed in interest income from either a 25 basis point increase, or 25 basis points decrease in 2020. We continuously monitor and will continue to prudently refine our interest rate risk management as the interest rate environment, balance sheet mix and other factors necessitate.The graphs on the bottom left of the slide detail the mix of our loan portfolio, as well as the significant consumer deposit balances with re-pricing events in the first-half of 2020. These re-pricing events provide an opportunity for the bank to reduce the cost of deposit, as these higher price CDs and promotional money market accounts re-price lower. Through December, the consumer deposit re-pricing activity is on track with our expectations. The success of our consumer depository pricing and retention has provided us the ability to remain more disciplined in our commercial deposit pricing, particularly among the highest cost deposits. The graph on the bottom right of the slide displays the impact of our actions. You can see the downward trajectory of our total interest bearing deposit costs by month since July. We expect this trend to continue given the significant deposit re-pricing opportunities that remain in the first-half of 2020.Turning to slide 11, you can see it provides the detail on our non-interest income, which increased 13% from the year ago quarter. The growth was highlighted by mortgage banking income, which increased 152%, primarily reflecting higher saleable origination volume and secondary market spreads, as well as a $12 million increase in the gain on net mortgage servicing rights risk management. We also continue to see steady growth in card and payment processing income, trust and investment management and insurance. In the 2019 fourth quarter, we repositioned $2 billion of securities picking up approximately 70 basis points of yield on those securities prospectively at a cost of $22 million in Q4, while negatively impacting four quarter results, the prospective earnings pick up and the earn back on the positioning losses are very attractive and consistent with our active management of the securities portfolio. The year ago quarter in 2018 included $19 million of securities losses from similar repositioning.Slide 12 provides the components of the 1% year-over-year decrease in non-interest expense. The 2019 fourth quarter included $25 million of expense related to the actions, which Steve discussed earlier, while the year ago quarter included $35 million of similar branch and facility consolidation-related expense. Adjusting for these items, non-interest expenses were essentially flat. We continue to drive efficiency in our core expense base to ensure robust and growing investment capacity to fuel our investments in digital, mobile and cyber technology enhance products and services and distribution capabilities. This disciplined expense management allowed us to achieve positive operating leverage on an adjusted basis for the seventh consecutive year.Slide 13 illustrates the continued strength in our capital ratios. The tangible common equity ratio or TCE ended the quarter at 7.88% up 67 basis points from year-ago and common equity Tier 1 ratio or CET-1 ended the quarter at 9.88% or 23 basis points year-over-year. We continue to manage CET-1 to the high-end of our 9% to 10% operating guidelines. During the fourth quarter of 2019, we repurchased 13.1 million common shares at an average cost of $14.96 per share or total of $196 million. We plan to use the share repurchased to manage our capital following the CECL implementation back to a CET-1 level near 10% by the end of 2020, excluding the benefit of the CECL transition provision provided by the federal reserve, we feel managing internally to a CET-1 level excluding the three year transition, reinforces our commitment to maintaining strong capital ratios which we see as a position of strength for the organization. As a result, we are currently planning to repurchase less than a third of the remaining $249 million of share repurchase capacity on our 2019 capital plan in the first-half of 2020.Now, let me turn it over to Rich to cover credit including CECL. Rich?