George Makris
Analyst · Piper Jaffray. Your line is open
Okay. I'll see if I remember all those. If I forget, let me know. The first one is the transformation – and I'll use our loan policies, Peyton, as an example. So as you can probably expect, each bank had their own loan approval process; they had their own loan authorization limits for individual lenders for certain committees. We brought all that into a common structure, with the idea that we will try to continue to have as much local decision-making as possible in order to take care of our customers' needs. So we've broken that down into regional loan committees. And quite honestly, our director's credit committee has changed its purpose quite a bit. It used to be very active in actually looking at loans and approving loan packages. And now they are more of a risk management group. So they're very active in looking at our policies, looking at committee reports, checking our asset quality lender by lender, our exceptions to policy, and so forth. So that has changed quite a bit since we have begun this process. I'll also mention our human resources policy. As you can imagine, all of the banks had different sets of benefits; they had different compensation packages. We have merged all that together, so that our commercial loan officers are all paid the same way in all of our markets. That was all across the board a year and a half ago. So it has been an extensive process to merge all these cultures, all these policies together into one we can operate with as innate to, we say, a $15 billion corporation. IT is another big area where we brought divergent policies and procedures, security processes, together. And we expect our infrastructure out to $15 billion to $20 billion. So we have a scalable process and procedures now that we think will take us even to the next level. That's required a lot of work from a lot of people in all the banks. So we didn't just take a Simmons policy and shove it down people's throats. We spent a lot of time with representation from all the banks to come up with what we felt were best practices to develop these new policies. So that's sort of a general 30,000-foot view of how we have dealt with policies and procedures. From a branch and FTE allocation process, we used an outside consulting firm that came in when we were merging banks to take a look at each one of the banks, the efficiency that they had in these functional areas, and what we should look like when we put all the banks together. Since that time, we've had him come back in, and – after we have enhanced particularly some IT processes – to take a look again and tell us what our goal ought to be from an appropriate staffing standpoint. And they've done that. And I will tell you, there are two or three areas in the bank where we have real opportunity. One of those you see the results of periodically, and that is branch rightsizing. That's not necessarily all driven by inefficiency on our part; a lot of that is driven by consumer habits. So we see a lot more dependence on electronic banking, which means that our brick-and-mortar locations aren't seeing the same number of transactions that they have in the past. We're about to the point, though, we're getting ready to take a look at our entire branching structure and determine where we need those branches, what those branches need to look like. So it could be that in the future in a specific geography, we may close three branches but actually build one in a better location with better services for our customer base in that location. So we'll continue that efficiency process. And then integration to products and services; as we mentioned before, we have several unique products and services that offer real good non-interest income opportunities for us. A credit card is a prime example. We just completed an internal offering to our existing customers and approved 10,000 new credit card applications during the quarter. That's up from normal 3,000 approvals during the quarter. So we're seeing some real progress in being able to offer products and services, at least across our entire footprint. Now, there are a couple of products and services that are going to be slower-go than others. For instance, our investment business, we can't go out and just create that overnight with our existing customers. That is a people issue. So as we find appropriate staff to expand our investment products and services, we'll do that. Another one is consumer finance. We've talked about that; that is very specific to markets in Tennessee. It has a high compliance risk associated with it. So for us to be able to roll out those products across our entire footprint will take much discussion and much planning, and I wouldn't expect that to happen anytime soon. So we do have some products and services that are going to be easier to roll out than others. I think you're starting to see some of that gradual increase in that revenue in our non-interest income line item. We expect to see that continue.