Brian Vance
Analyst · D.A. Davidson. Please go ahead
Yeah, I have some overall comments on capital management as well as some outlook statements for 2016. First of all, starting with capital management, we've continued our $0.11 quarterly dividend which represents a 34% pay-out ratio and is slightly under the range of our previously stated guidance of 35% to 40% pay-out ratio. Our TCE remains at a healthy 9.7% and our strong TCE levels continue to give us flexibility for a variety of growth opportunities as well as other capital management strategies. Our outlook for 2016 despite the recent market volatility in most sectors, we continue to be optimistic about the overall economy of the Puget Sound region. Real estate values across all sectors continue to appreciate and most of all economic indicators continue to show measurable improvement. Commercial real estate construction growth is robust in the region and construction activity seems to match demand at this point, but we are careful to constantly monitor and limit loan concentrations in highly active sectors. This has caused us to turn away certain loan origination consistent with establishing and maintaining discipline over our loan concentrations. Earlier in this call, Bryan McDonald shared some good detail on our production and lending activities, while Q4 did not end as strongly as we had hoped, it was still a good quarter of originations. I think it is important to reiterate a few points. Total commercial loan production was up 20% year-over-year. SBA production was up 15% year-over-year. Consumer loan production was up 30% year-over-year. Mortgage production was up 59% year-over-year. Commercial loan pipeline at the end of Q4 was up 10% over Q3. Additionally, we reduced problem assets by $56 million during 2015, generally due to a strategy of anticipating more challenging economic conditions in the future and taking advantage of the opportunity to upgrade our total portfolio. Our credit quality as measured by the total of nonperforming assets, restructured performing loans and potential problem loans decreased 27% in 2015 over '14. Overall credit quality remains an important focus of ours in both new originations and managing poor quality loans out of the bank. At year-end 2015, our Seattle growth strategy was substantially ahead of our internal goals, for both commitments, booked and loan balances outstanding, exceeding our expectations. We continue to be quite optimistic about not only our Seattle strategy but our continuing commitment to our core three counties, King County, Seattle, Bellevue; Snohomish County, Everett; and Pierce County, Tacoma. We continue to hire lenders in these three markets. Some of these new lenders are replacements for retirements and some are new additions to our team. Our overall lender total in the Company remains static as we are constantly redistributing our resources. In all other markets we do business in, except for the core three counties, we are seeing slower growth. We continue to be optimistic our net loan growth for 2016 will be in the 6% to 8% guidance that we've been giving. I believe it is important to reiterate our 2015 return on average assets was 1.06%, a significant improvement over 0.74% ROA for 2014. Our continuing focus on growing non-maturity deposits was successful during 2015 with total non-maturity accounts deposits improving to 86.5%, while our CD balances dropped only 13.5% of total deposits. We will continue to focus on growing non-maturity account deposits in the 8% to 10% range. Our overhead ratio for 2015 was 3.01%, a significant improvement over 2014's overhead ratio of 3.49%, as well as our efficiency ratio improving to 65.6% for 2015 from 75.4% in 2014. We believe our overhead ratio will continue to improve in 2016. That completes our prepared remarks and we will open the call for any questions that you may have and again would ask you and remind you to refer to our forward-looking statements as we answer your question. Tony, please open the call for questions.