Douglas Hultquist
Analyst · Piper Jaffray
Thank you, operator. Welcome, ladies and gentlemen and thank you for taking the time to join us today. I will start the call with a brief overview of the Springfield Bancshares merger that we completed earlier this month. Then, I will provide some highlights of our second quarter and Todd Gipple will finish up with additional details on our financial results. As we have discussed on prior calls, one of our key strategic objectives is to participate as an acquirer in the consolidation occurring within our industry. Our focus has been and remains on markets with similar characteristics, as our existing MSAs, those exhibiting favorable economic and demographic trends and where relationship based community banking is valued by clients. In April, we entered into an agreement to merge with Springfield Bancshares, Inc., the holding company of Springfield First Community Bank, or SFC Bank, providing us entry into the attractive Springfield Missouri market. On July 1, less than 75 days from the initial announcement, we closed the transaction and welcomed the clients, employees, and shareholders of SFC Bank into the QCR Holdings Family. We are excited for them to join us as this merger fits well with our strategic growth plans by combining two high performing financial institutions who share similar values and approaches to client service and community involvement. The team at SFC Bank values innovation, collaboration, and achievement, while focusing on exceptional client based relationships just as we do across our charters at QCR, Inc. And a large group of folks from SFC will be joining us at our retreat this week. We believe that SFC Bank will continue to build upon its strong brand and grow its market share in the Springfield market. Not only will they benefit from increased scale, operational support, and improved funding, but we look forward to offering SFC Bank clients additional products and services that have been valued at our other charters. I would like to thank all of our team members, both at QCR Holdings and SFC Bank for their hard work and dedication to closing this transaction in a seamless manner and in such a short period of time. Adding SFC Bank to the QCR Holdings family positions us to continue growing our franchise and create value for our shareholders in the years ahead. Now to our second quarter results. We are generally pleased with our core operating performance. We reported another solid quarter of net income, driven by continued organic loan growth, strong fee income, improved credit quality and careful management of expenses. Second quarter net income was 10.4 million and diluted earnings per share was $0.73. Core earnings, excluding acquisition related costs, were 10.9 million and core diluted EPS was $0.77, a modest increase from the first quarter where we recorded core earnings of 10.6 million and core diluted EPS of $0.75. On a year-over-year basis, our core earnings for the quarter were up 25%. Our annualized organic loan growth was 7.8% during the second quarter, somewhat lower than the strong showing in the first quarter. However, when both quarters are combined, the first six months of 2018 produced an annualized growth rate of 10.1%, which is within our long term target of 10% to 12%. Our loan growth for the quarter was driven by strong broad based demand for commercial and industrial loans, partially offset by loan payoffs. While the competition for new loans continues to be high, we remain focused and disciplined in our origination and underwriting efforts and continue to grow loans organically by attracting clients that value our relationship based community banking model. Our loan and lease growth was funded by an increase in core deposits, supplemented with short-term borrowings. Core deposits, which we define as total deposits, excluding brokered, increased by 62 million or 2% on a linked quarter basis. Brokered deposits declined by 43 million in the quarter. Going forward, our goal remains funding all of our loan and lease growth with core deposit growth, but we don't want to turn down the opportunity to bring attractive and high quality loans on to the balance sheet, so we may choose to temporarily fund them with short term borrowings. As the competition for deposits is also fierce and with the Federal Reserve’s plan to continue increasing the Fed funds rate, we, like the rest of the industry, are facing higher deposit costs, which puts pressure on our net interest margin. Todd will go into more detail on our NIM during his portion of the call. We continue to be pleased with the performance of our non-interest income, which in the second quarter was 8.9 million compared to 8.5 million for the first quarter of 2018 for an annualized growth rate of 17.4%. The increase was primarily driven by nearly 700,000 in higher swap fee income, partially offset by the lack of gains on the sale of government-guaranteed loans. As we've mentioned on previous calls, our SBA loan production has been lower than its historical levels, as some of our competitors are originating these loans without the government guarantee, which is something that we won't do. However, we remain focused on building our pipeline for USDA loans and hope to see increased activity in this area in the coming quarters. Wealth management revenue was 3.1 million for the quarter, essentially flat from the first quarter of 2018. For the first half of the year, wealth management revenue growth is nearly 20% year-over-year. We're very pleased with this growth, as these fees helped drive our earnings growth and provide important diversification in our revenue mix without requiring additional capital. We're excited to be expanding our wealth management business with the acquisition of the Bates Companies, one of the longest tenured financial planning firms in the Rockford, Illinois region. We expect that the acquisition will close in the third quarter, and at that time, will add nearly 700 million of assets under management, along with a high quality and experienced group of investment professionals to our team at Rockford Bank & Trust. Turning to our expenses, we maintain our focus on controlling non-interest expenses, which continues to enhance our profitability. Our non-interest expenses for the second quarter were right in line with our expectations. To help support our recent and expected growth, we are bolstering our operational infrastructure and investing in additional staffing, both at the corporate level and at some of our charters. Some of the hires are opportunistic, as we are taking advantage of strong talent out in the marketplace as a result of ongoing industry consolidation. As we have previously discussed, improving our ROAA is one of our long term goals for the company. So, we remain focused on making continued progress in this area. For the second quarter, our core ROAA was 1.08% on an annualized basis, up from 1.06% in the first quarter and 1.03% in the second quarter of ‘17. Overall, we're encouraged by the progress we're making on the seven key initiatives that we have shared with you over the last three years. We remain committed to the pursuit of these objectives, with the overriding goal of delivering consistent upper quartile peer performance, which we believe will ultimately translate into increased shareholder value. I will now turn the call over to Todd for further discussion on our second quarter results.