Aaron Graft
Analyst · KBW. Please go ahead
Good morning. For the fourth quarter we earned net income to common stockholders of $18.1 million or $0.67 per diluted share. Return on average assets for the quarter was 1.6%. 2018 was a transformative year for TBK. We bought factoring company and three banks. We onboarded hundreds of new team members with these acquisitions; successfully converted them to our core systems and completed an equity offering to enable all of it. Loans grew by $798 million in total and we generated $378 million of that growth organically. On top of all this, we completed or will complete in early 2019, 72 separate strategic initiatives that will broaden our product offering, improve the technological advantage in our niche businesses and lay the framework for efficient growth in the future. My heartfelt thanks to the team for a job well done in 2018. While it was a busy year in terms of our initiatives in acquisitions, our core earnings have continued to improve. Fourth quarter results reflect the first full quarter of the operations of all entities acquired during 2018. As I said in the opening, our return on average assets for the fourth quarter was 1.6%, which is the highest level we posted this year. Our return on average assets for all of 2018 was 1.33%. Average loans were up $239 million or 7% over the prior quarter. Period end loan growth was $96 million. Our ABL portfolio was shrunk during the fourth quarter by $59 million or 22%, largely as a result of our efforts to decrease the overall risk profile of the portfolio following a fraud loss earlier in the year. Other lending lines grew during the quarter. Commercial real estate loans increased by $86 million or 9% and equipment finance loans increased by $28.2 million or 9%. Mortgage warehouse lending was up at the end of the quarter. The average mortgage warehouse balance decreased $33 million this quarter to $257 million due to a typical seasonal increase in demand for mortgages. At Triumph Business Capital, we continue to see growth. Total factoring revenue increased by $247,000 quarter-over-quarter or 1% to $29 million. Purchases increased by approximately $38 million or 3% to $1.5 billion during Q4. The number of invoices purchased climbed 45,000 over Q3 to 882,000 invoices. The average invoice size this quarter decreased $49 to $1,747. Average transportation invoices decreased $41 to $1,625. Outstanding transportation invoices comprised approximately 83% of the gross balance of factored receivables at December 31, 2018. Our number of active clients increased by 259 clients to a total of 6,191. For TriumphPay, we will have 113 clients utilizing the TriumphPay system up from 86 last quarter. During Q4, TriumphPay processed 83,000 invoices, paying 19,000 distinct carriers approximately $123 million. In Q4, we signed a top 25 broker to the TriumphPay platform. We expect to integrate another top 25 broker in Q1. Collectively these two companies will contribute approximately $800 million in annual carrier payment to the TriumphPay platform. In addition to these large brokers, we continue to sign and integrate several smaller freight brokers on to TriumphPay. We think the future of TriumphPay is bright, but we do not expect it to be a net contributor to our earnings during 2019. Fourth quarter net interest income was up $3.1 million over Q3. Net interest margin declined by 25 basis points to 6.34%, which is in line with what we expected, considering the acquired banks' portfolio impact on this quarter. Loan yield was 8.14%, and the cost of total deposits increased 6 basis points to 91 basis points. We accreted $1.4 million of loan discount in Q4 and have $17 million of accretable discount at year-end. We have added a disclosure about loan discount accretion to the end of our earnings release. Our loan-to-deposit ratio at year-end increased to 105%. This ratio was inflated by approximately 10% due to our use of FHLB advances to fund mortgage warehouse lending. Overall, we continue to see improvement in our asset quality metrics. Last quarter, we highlighted a single ABL relationship with a fraud-related loss that materially impacted both charge-offs and provision for loan loss. Excluding that single relationship, the ratios for nonperforming loans and assets as well as net charge-offs have been good and improving. Year-over-year, the level of both nonperforming loans to total loans and nonperforming assets to total assets have decreased. And they decreased, again, this quarter. Nonperforming loans are now down to 1% and nonperforming assets to 84 basis points, below our 1% or better goal for 2018. Net charge-offs were approximately $1.6 million for the fourth quarter or 5 basis points. Year-to-date, net charge-offs are 23 basis points of average loans or roughly 8 basis points, excluding the total ABL fraud-related charge-off. Noninterest income was up $736,000 from Q3 to $6.8 million. This is up $1.6 million from the first quarter of this year, reflecting the addition of the acquired banks and factoring company in our financial results. Q3 noninterest expense included $5.9 million in transactional costs associated with the bank acquisitions. Fourth quarter expenses were very close to the $47 million estimate we provided in our last earnings call. The core increase was driven primarily by the full quarter addition of the three acquired banks as well as investment in technology development and overall infrastructure, including TriumphPay and Triumph Business Capital. As I mentioned in the first part of my remarks, 2018 has been a transformative year for TBK. We have substantially completed 72 initiatives, which include expansion and improvement in our product offerings, delivery and service, technology enhancements and office expansion to support our growth. We will increase our investment in 2019 to support technology enhancements and infrastructure development for Triumph Business Capital and TriumphPay. We estimate that noninterest expense will increase to $49.5 million for the first quarter of 2019 and remain essentially flat for the remainder of the year, resulting in total noninterest expense of approximately $200 million for the fiscal year 2019, assuming no M&A activity. For 2019, we expect organic loan growth of approximately 15%. As a reminder, the first quarter of each year has historically been our weakest quarter due to seasonal factors, especially in our transportation-related businesses. First quarter loan growth, over the past three years, has ranged from negative 3.6% to positive 2.2%. If this historical pattern repeats in 2019, first quarter earnings will be weaker than Q4 of 2018, followed by a rebound in subsequent quarters. Our expectations for the 2019 fiscal year called for mild net interest margin expansion, as the commercial finance portion of our business, again, outpaces the growth of our community bank lending. Following the Christmas holidays, we see a pullback in factored receivable purchases in January of approximately 10% to 11%. That typically translates into relatively flat or down factoring activity in Q1 from Q4 and shifts our net interest margin down on that mix change. We remain committed to achieving our goal of a 1.8% core return on average assets in the fourth quarter of 2019, which should translate into earnings per share of approximately $0.84 to $0.86 per share in Q4, again, assuming no M&A. In closing, I am encouraged by the core trends in our business. We continue to grow and improve, and we are very optimistic about the path forward. With that, I'll turn the call back over to the operator for any questions.