George F. Jones
Analyst · Dave Rochester with Deutsche Bank
Thank you, Myrna. Good afternoon and welcome to our earnings call. As you can see from our release, we reported record earnings for 2012. Net income increased 59% for the year and 22% for the fourth quarter of 2012, as compared with the same quarter for 2011. Those results for the fourth quarter and 2012 included a one-time charge of $4 million or $0.06 after tax related to the successful settlement of our Oklahoma litigation, which we are very glad to put behind us. We are very pleased with our operating results of $0.82, which we achieved in the fourth quarter before the one-time charge and our operating results for the year of $3.07. We have a strong pipeline and we're confident in our ability to continue to generate industry-leading results for 2013. We experienced a significant reduction in credit cost and improvement in nonperforming assets in 2012. Charge-offs for the entire year only 10 basis points, compared favorably with 58 basis points in 2011. Nonperforming assets of 1.06% were down from 1.58% in 2011. Our strong growth and average loans held for investment continued in 2012 at 22% year-over-year. In the fourth quarter, end balance was up 2% over Q4 average, thus giving us a good tailwind moving into 2013. Our specialty lines of business, energy, premium finance, builder finance and lender finance were instrumental in achieving exceptional growth. We also found our pipeline, as mentioned earlier, quite robust at year end. Total average deposits increased 25% year-over-year with average demand deposit showing exceptional growth, increasing 42% year-over-year. Our Treasury Management, correspondent banking and mortgage warehouse lines of business were the top contributors to that growth. Loan held for sale, our mortgage warehouse unit, remained high in 2012, averaging $2.7 billion at year end, up from $2.1 billion or 27%, again, taking advantage of market demand and our ability to take market share in a very competitive environment. We are confident in our ability to manage this line of business in such a way to generate maximum shareholder value. Finally, we were very pleased to complete 2 capital offerings, an $88 million equity transaction and $111 million subordinated debt issue. Peter will cover the financials and I'll return to discuss credit. After that, as Myrna mentioned, we'll be happy to address your questions. Peter?