Huntley Garriott
Analyst · SunTrust. Your line is now open
Thanks Chip. To follow up on his comments in times of stress thanking fundamentals always seem to come back to liquidity, capital and credit quality. And we believe we've always run a conservative balance sheet. But as the quarter unfolded, we took some cautionary steps to strengthen that even further. As Chip mentioned, $1 billion of liquidity on our balance sheet that increased by almost 25% over the quarter. We also saw an incremental about $50 million of 7(a) loans to show up a little more capital here at the end of the quarter. Our risk capital stands at a healthy almost 15%. And times like this it's also nice to have $1.7 billion worth or nearly half of our loan portfolio guaranteed by the government. You might have seen in March, we authorized the small share repurchase program to better position ourselves when we get to the other side of this. We have not repurchased any shares and we don't anticipate doing so until the world settles down. Our dividend is reasonably small, just $0.03 a share and we plan to maintain that unless things get really rough. Chip talked about credit quality, I’ll cover in more detail. We always follow the guiding principle, the safety and soundness comes first. And we believe we've been prudent in our credit decisioning. But you only can really tell that prudence in time of stress when you see how well your customers with the help of their bank are able to navigate a crisis. As a small business bank, we find ourselves in the last few months squarely in the eye of the storm. From the time the pandemic started, we’ve been in touch with 100% of our over 4,000 borrowing customers. As Chip, mentioned we processed deferrals for over a quarter of them and we are able to secure payroll loans for all of them who needed it. Once we secured SBA authorizations for our existing customers, we reached out into our community and the industry verticals we serve. And as Chip mentioned, we originated nearly 5,000 loans and nearly $1 billion of payroll loans. We're also proud to report as Chip mentioned that as of this morning a 100% of those customers have loan docs in their hand and we funded over 97% of them which is as Chip mentioned over 115,000 jobs. When you turn to the results of the quarter though admittedly there's a lot going on in the numbers. Our lending franchise started the year off strong. The deposit franchise was operating extremely efficiently and we were continuing to build recurring revenue. Secondary markets for 7(a) loans were robust and our loan pipeline with at an all-time high. All of that feels like a lifetime ago. As the virus spread and the nationwide lockdown set in, our deal pipeline slowed dramatically. And while we continue to see some activity in selected areas like renewable energy and agriculture primarily most of the new business activity has been put on hold. Small businesses across the country were facing significant revenue challenges seemingly overnight. After we mobilized the deferrals on our portfolio, we turned 100% of our attention to these payroll protection loans. Now as we close the books on Q1, the obvious item that was most impacted was our loan loss provision and as luck would have it, the industry also faced the implementation of CECL this quarter. And we elected to adopt the new standards starting July 1. Also of note in conjunction with implementing CECL we reclassified a portion of our loan loss reserve into a fair value adjustment for loans accounted for at fair value in accordance with the disclosure requirements for those loans. A bit of balance sheet geography shift that I'll talk about in a minute that add to a bit of the noise. But all-in-all we increased our total allowance by about $13 million largely as a result of the deteriorating macro environment. Given the significant sell off of risk assets across pretty much all markets into the end of the first quarter we also saw some volatility in our mark-to-market assets under balance sheet. Despite the work we've done over the past 18 months to reduce those impacts. Secondary markets for SBA loans declined by as much as four points into the end of the quarter. Interest rate dropped precipitously and other market indicators decreased across the board. These market changes impacted our gain on sale revenues, the fair value of our hedges, or servicing after revaluation as well as the loans we carry as fair value. If you look at the highlights on Page 7 for the quarter, our balance sheet and recurring revenues continue to grow nicely year-over-year and quarter-over-quarter. All the metrics are largely on track although expenses were up as we hired into the end of the year as Chip mentioned our lending franchise and we continue to invest in our next generation technology initiatives. Fundamentally though, many of the same trends that we discussed with you over the past year continued during the first quarter. Given the moving pieces in the quarter, we thought it might be helpful to outline the various adjustments on our income statement and try to take a closer look at the core earnings power of the bank which we laid out on Page 9. Overall Q1 bank core earnings were pretty consistent from Q4. But there was an awful lot going on in between. So a little more detail on that. The total credit related expenses that would have previously been in the provision line was $18 million which comprises $11.8 million addition to the provision and $6 million that is included in the fair value adjustment on loans. The mark on our USDA lending hedges drove a $4 million swing as loan interest rates dropped 125 basis points in the quarter. The fair value losses on the loans accounted for under fair value was $10 million and as I mentioned over half of that was related to credit. Our servicing asset continue to mark down despite a significant slowdown in prepayment fees and with the SBA paying six months of principal and interest on the entire servicing portfolio, it’s actually a pretty solid asset right now. And lastly, our FinTech losses were in a little higher than the fourth quarter. So all in all there are a bunch of headwinds on income statement that mapped was a pretty solid quarter as it relates to the earnings power of the franchise. Chip covered the credit stats in the quarter, so I won’t go back through them again and the forward is obviously more important than the stat. But I do think it's worth mentioning that our portfolio was really healthy heading into this crisis. As a reminder, I mean over $1.7 billion of our loan portfolio guaranteed by the government $1.6 billion of SBA and $100 million of USDA and a total of $3 billion of the loans on our balance sheet or SBA loans including both guaranteed and unguaranteed. And as Chip mentioned the SBA will be making six months of principal interest payments on all those loans and that on top of the deferrals that we processed before the CARES Act took place. You combine that with securing payroll loans for our customers and we believe that our borrowers have a few unique aspects that will better help them weather the storm. I’ll also point out as they have on protocols the diversity of our loan portfolio. And while we certainly do have some exposure to some of the higher impacted areas like hotels, fitness centers and daycare centers, we also have some areas like renewable energy, chicken farms, self-storage and government contracting, that are much less impacted by the current events. In terms of our go forward thoughts on credit it’s honestly too early to predict the depth of these impacts and the effect that government intervention will have to mitigate challenges that our customers face, but we are actively engaged with our entire portfolio, it’s actually those most impacted. We are staying very close to our customers, having reached out to 100% of them. We are monitoring their liquidity real time, helping to manage their fixed expenses, working through options around rent and franchise relief and trying to ascertain as best we can when revenues will return to some semblance of normalcy. The initial tools at our disposal deferrals, payroll loans and P&I support from the SBA have provided critical breathing room in capital to a large portion of our portfolio. As we progress, we're confident we have a capital liquidity we need to provide working capital to our customers that need it to help them through this. As we indicated in prior calls, we did not expect the day one impact of CECL to be material to our loan loss reserve although the changes in the forecasted macro event were significant. The day one impact ended up being a $1.3 million decrease to our allowance. And as we closed the books on the quarter like most other banks, we evaluated which macroeconomic scenarios to use to calibrate the lifetime loss model in CECL. We settled on the RMA pandemic scenario which contemplates sustained high unemployment that escalates throughout the year and ends in double digits. On Page 12, you can see the impacts of the reclassification to our loan loss reserve that we mentioned earlier basically requiring us to separate our loan portfolio into those loans held at historical cost and those loans held at fair value and reallocate our existing loan loss reserve into those two buckets. As you can see, it really is just balance sheet geography. All in all, our modeling for the quarter generate an additional $13 million in credit reserves previously classified as allowances which comprised of about $7.6 million in the allowance, and a $5.4 million increase in the credit component in this fair value loans. If you look on the far right of Page 12, you can see the total of about $61 million of reserves across these two categories. And if you look at that on a really simplistic basis, we have a little over $2 billion of unguaranteed loans or about a 3% protection on those loans. Given the uncertainty of the ultimate outcome and timing and shape of any recovery, we're going to remain conservative as it relates to forecasting and spend all our energy supporting our customers. On the funding side, our deposit platform remained really efficient and in a lot of ways, the events over the last six weeks have reinforced the importance of digital banking offerings. Given the overall stress in funding markets, however, liquidity remain paramount and our deposit portfolio has not repriced downward quite as quickly as we might have imagined given the Fed's actions. We've seen some pretty rational downward pricing recently though and think the opportunity for us to gain some ground here in the near future. If you look at the blended cost though, it's still a really great source of funding with minimal overhead. We remain really excited about our operating account that Chip mentioned and building up checking accounts and launching that and in the near zero interest rate environment, we find ourselves - the gap between those two costs on a fully loaded base is actually pretty compressed versus the saving product that we have now. In terms of our net interest margin, recurring revenue growth was solid and margin was stable in the first quarter. That said the Fed action in terms of timing it came at a pretty bad time for us as our - 55% of our loan portfolio will reprice with 150 basis points Fed action here at the beginning of Q2 and we were just at the tail end of a lot of our Q1 CD repricing. So we expect our margin to take a hit in Q2, but to recover in the back-half of the year as the deposit reprice. We also have warehoused significant liquidity as Chip mentioned in anticipation of the PPP program and with the introduction of the Fed facility funding 100% of those loans at 35 basis point cost of funds we find ourselves in extremely liquid balance sheet, which is great from a risk perspective, but will also compress NIM in the near-term. On the expense side, as I mentioned earlier we hired into the end of last year anticipating a banner year of small business lending and technology deployment. The silver lining to that is we found ourselves fortunate to have 600 incredibly talented, incredibly dedicated teammates who rolled up their sleeves. I have been collectively working around the clock throughout the PPP program helping small businesses across the country. We repositioned over 200 people into new roles and processed 5,000 loans in two weeks. For contacts that's four times more loans than we made in all of 2019 in two weeks. And we're back to work it out as we speak committing to getting more funds into the hands of small businesses to help preserve jobs and keep them going through this. So our expense line looks high largely result of our team and we don't plan to change that. One thing to note as you triangulate expenses and capital almost $3 million a quarter of our compensation expense is stock-based comp which helps us from a capital perspective. Our team is rock solid while the long-term path to sustain profitability may be pushed back a little bit. We're more confident than ever in our model of service to small businesses. Aside from salaries and benefits, we had a couple of million dollars and increased expenses related to our technology initiatives as we continue to build what we believe to be the next gen platform for the future of small business banking. It really feels like our thesis related to technology and banking has only been reinforced by recent events. Given some of our experience with hurricanes, you know distributing 600 people remotely and working in cloud-based technology has become pretty ordinary course for us and over the last six weeks we really haven't missed a beat. In some ways you can argue that we collaborate even better with Zoom and teams, and our entire company rallying around a common mission. Generating these PPP loans of scale requires flexible architecture and great technology platforms. With the help of our partners we stood up our PPP lending platform quickly. We funded loans on the first day of the program and we booked loans on to a purpose built Finxact platform which we believe will dramatically increase our efficiency in the forgiveness process. In our experience, the importance of robust digital banking offerings coupled with great customer service wins the day. We spoke directly to every single one of the 5,000 small businesses that we funded PPP loans for. And while there may be some fully automated solutions out there, the feedback we got from our existing and our prospective customers was extraordinarily positive. We believe the marriage of great people and great technology truly is the winning model. As Chip mentioned we hadn’t lost sight of our broader technology initiatives namely re-platforming our entire company on the next-gen platforms like FinXact and Apiture and launching our digital small business checking account. We still believe as strongly as ever in our model bank initiatives, but we pause them for a bit as we turned our attention fully to the PPP program. We're still on track for deployment of our model bank this year, savings in CDs launching on Apiture and FinXact in the near-term and a checking account close behind. In the payroll loan program we've proven that we can pivot quickly and redeploy people on the fly. As we look to launch these new deposit products, our team is energized and excited to focus on the new opportunity in what looks to be a slower lending environment in the near-term. Meanwhile, our portfolio of companies within Live Oak ventures continue to perform well. Apiture, FinXact, Payrailz and others. Canapi is sitting on roughly $500 million of dry powder to make financial technology investments and the banking industry now appreciates more than ever the need for next generation platforms to deliver digital banking services. So how do you wrap all this up? Do we go back to the long-term goal slide that we shown in previous quarters. Clearly, we didn't move the needle forward on the profitability side this quarter. And with new business activity slowing and the need to help our existing customers our priorities have obviously shifted a bit. But we firmly believe the goalpost remain the same even if it takes us a little longer to get there. Sustainable revenues, sustainable returns, we still require additional scale on our balance sheet and a more normalized lending environment. But if the past is any predictor of the future, we expect to see great opportunity to help provide capital of small businesses on the other side of this. Away from the payroll protection program SBA loans have always been critical components of economic recovery. And we believe we're well-positioned to provide working capital to recapitalize small businesses and help them recover from the impact of this crisis. Our long-term mission remains unchanged to become the nation's best small business bank. Our current mission and our obsession lies with helping small business across the nation through this crisis. As a company, we focus heavily on the safety and well-being of our people and our people in turn are dedicating all of their energy focusing on the safety of our customers offering them advice, loan deferrals, and payroll loans. We quickly expanded our attention beyond just our existing customers. They are small businesses in our communities both local and within our industry verticals, to help administer payroll loans to provide critical funds to small businesses. That mission is still underway. We've been inspired by the tenacity of our customers and by the small business owners across this country. They truly are and will continue to be the American dream. Roll the questions.