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UMB Financial Corporation (UMBF)

Q3 2012 Earnings Call· Wed, Oct 24, 2012

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Transcript

Operator

Operator

Welcome to the UMB Financial Third Quarter 2012 Financial Results Conference Call. [Operator Instructions] The conference is being recorded today on October 24, 2012. I would now like to turn the conference over to Kay McMillan. Please go ahead.

Kay McMillan

Analyst

Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining us for our conference call and webcast regarding our third quarter 2012 financial results. Before we begin, let me remind you that our comments in this conference call contain forward-looking statements within the meaning of Section 27A of the Securities Act of 1933, Section 21E of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, and within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Such forward-looking statements rely on a number of assumptions concerning future events and are subject to risks and uncertainties, which could cause actual results to differ materially from those indicated in our statements made during this call. While the management of UMB believes our assumptions are reasonable, UMB cautions that material changes in interest rates, the equity markets, general economic conditions as they relate to the Company's loan and fee-based customers, competition in the financial services industry, the ability to integrate acquisitions, and other risks and uncertainties which are detailed in our filings with the SEC, may cause actual results to differ materially from those discussed in this call. UMB has no duty to update such statements and undertakes no obligation to update or supplement forward-looking statements that maybe become untrue because of new information, future events or otherwise. By now, we hope most of you on the call had a chance to review our earnings releases, which was issued yesterday. If not, you will find them on our website at umb.com. On the call today are Mariner Kemper, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer; Peter deSilva, President and Chief Operating Officer and Mike Hagedorn, our Chief Financial Officer. The agenda for today's call is as follows. Mariner will provide high level commentary on our results and Mike will review the details of our financials. Then Peter will review key fee income business drivers, and following that, we'll be happy to answer your questions. Now I'll turn the call over to Mariner Kemper.

J. Kemper

Analyst · KBW

Thank you, Kay. Welcome everyone and thank you for joining us today as we talk about our third quarter results. We reported net income of $26.1 million or $0.64 per diluted share. Total revenue for the quarter was a $186.7 million, an increase of 3.7% when compared to the third quarter of 2011. Non-interest income increased 5.3% to a $106.3 million for the quarter and represented 57% of total revenue. The revenue contribution from our fee businesses were due to reliance on spreads, income and advantage especially in this protracted, low interest rate environment. Yesterday in our release we announced an increase in our quarterly cash dividend on $0.01 per share to $0.215 per share payable in December. This 4.9% increase is the sixth since the beginning of 2008 with a total quarterly dividend increase of more than 43% during the same period. The industry recorded a median dividend decrease of 50%. On our first quarter call in April, I shared our core priorities for the year. One of those priorities was a commitment to growth achieved through accelerated fee business, loans and improved sales leverage and maximized efficiency. A few highlights from the quarter included double digit loan growth, an increase of 10.5% over a year ago; an 8.4% increase in trusts and securities processing revenue driven by strong AUM and customer growth in our asset management and servicing business; and an improvement of 2 percentage points in our year-to-date efficiency ratio. Steady momentum in our fee business is paying off from investments we have made and continue to make in people and technology that will position us for the long term. In the third quarter, our salary and benefits expense rose by 5.2% as we have added resources to deal with our growing business needs as well as…

Michael Hagedorn

Analyst · KBW

Thanks, Mariner, and welcome, everyone. First, I will review our company’s financials and then provide a more detailed summary of our 4 business segments. Beginning with the balance sheet, average earning assets increased 8.9% to $12.1 billion. The average balance in our investment portfolio was $6.6 billion, 1.1% higher than the last quarter and 14.5% higher than third quarter year ago. The average yield on securities was 2.13%, a decline of 9 basis points from last quarter and a decline of 24 basis points from the third quarter of 2011. Activity during the third quarter included the roll-out of $355 million in core portfolio securities at an average yield of 2.35%. In turn we purchased $362 million of securities at an average yield of 1.41%. The average life is now 42.57 months up from 35.45 months last quarter. The average life in the third quarter of 2011 was 33.84 months. Changes in the portfolio along with some modifications to our security modeling, inputs and tools lengthened the duration to 38.7 months from 28.29 months in the second quarter. Over the next 3 months, $385 million in core investments with an average yield of 2.24% will cash flow and over the next 12 months $1.4 billion of core investments with an average yield of 2.04% will cash flow. Additionally, 72% of our loan portfolio is expected to reprice or mature in the next 12 months. As we have reported, the securities mix in our portfolio has shifted and approximately 50% of the total was invested in mortgage backed securities at the end of the quarter. We continually monitor our amortization risk and have seen only a slight increase in 2012. Our current average book price on this portion of our portfolio is $101.51 as compared to $101.63 at year end 2011.…

Peter deSilva

Analyst · KBW

Thank you, Mike. Good morning, everyone. As Mariner mentioned earlier, income from our feed businesses represented 57% of revenue this quarter. This gives us a distinct advantage in an industry where the median level of the income was 17.7% in the second quarter according SNL Financial. To provide additional context to our results I would like to discuss the primary drivers of our fee income and highlight some of the developments in each of our operating segments. Let me begin with our institutional investment management segment which is comprised of scout investments, equity and fixed income mutual funds and separately managed investment accounts. Revenue in this segment is driven by mutual fund and separately managed account net flows and equity and fixed income market performance. To add context, the S&P increased 6.4% and the MSCI EAFE index increased 7% for the third quarter. Year-to-date as of September 30, the S&P 500 had increased 16.4% and the MSI EAFE had increased by 10.6%. Scout Investments ended the quarter with $22.6 billion in assets under management. This represents an increase of 18.6% compared to the third quarter of 2011. Assets and Scout mutual funds closed the quarter at $10.5 billion. Scout fixed income separately managed accounts ended the quarter with $11.3 billion in assets under management and Scout equity separately managed accounts totaled $834 million at quarter’s end. According to the investment company institute, the industry continues to realize significant redemptions from equity funds and purchases in the taxable bond funds. In the third quarter domestic equity funds had net outflows of close to $41 billion. International equity funds had more than 7 billion of net outflows and taxable bond funds experienced net inflows of $78 billion. We looked at our flows separated by equity and fixed income across all of the…

J. Kemper

Analyst · KBW

Thanks, Peter. As we end the call today, I would like to share of little of what we are hearing from our customers. In general our customer base continues to be reporting better operating results in last year. However, sales growth has tempered some due to uncertainty surrounding the elections and fiscal policy. Overall clients and prospects are glad we are through 2009 and 2010 and feel things are slowly getting better. They are more comfortable with the pace of the economy. However, they are still taking a wait and see approach. Unemployment rates in our larger markets are improving and in most areas are nearing mid-2008 lows. We continue to have strong commercial loan pipeline growth as we look into the fourth quarter. In early October, the FDIC released its annual deposit share market report. UMB continues to make gains in deposit share growth across our footprint, including maintaining the top bank status in the Kansas City, Metropolitan region with 13.8% of the market share. In the past year 7 of our 12 large markets improved in deposit market share since 2008. UMB deposits have grown faster than metropolitan statistical areas as a whole in 4 of our largest markets Kansas City, Denver, St. Louis and Phoenix. We are incredibly pleased with this performance and all of our associates who have helped us achieve these results. This is the last conference call of 2012 and when we talk again in 2013 we will be celebrating our 100th anniversary. We are incredibly proud of this accomplishment, not only because of the way the world and our company have changed, but because we have stood the test of time in all economic climates. During this management team's tenure we continued our legacy of doing what’s right, not always what’s just popular. We believe this philosophy has served us well and our customers and our shareholders as well. In our most recent decade we have more than doubled net income and total revenue all in a time when our country has experienced an economic crisis that rivals the great depression. We appreciate your interest in UMB and hope that you find this conference call valuable. With that we will turn it over to the operator for your questions. Thank you.

Operator

Operator

[Operator Instructions] Our first question comes from the line of Chris McGratty with KBW.

Christopher McGratty

Analyst · KBW

Peter, can you review those numbers in fixed income outflows. I think -- correct if I’m wrong, this is the same event that you talked about last quarter. I just wanted to make sure that was not a separate loss of a client and I know you would love to delve into a little bit more of the details and financial impact.

Peter deSilva

Analyst · KBW

Let me do both sides of this Chris, you have everything at your fingertips. On the equity side we had inflows of $15.4 million in the funds, $36.2 million in mandates for equity, for a total of $51.6 million and then we have positive market action of $703 million. On the fixed income side, our funds contributed $58.5 million of net inflows, the mandates we did to have outflows of $681.4 million and we had positive market action of $354 million on the fixed income side. We did have one larger mandate that we lost during the quarter. It was a 20-year customer of ours who changed their strategy from core to LDI and as a consequence, through a consultant, picked another manager. That’s going to happen from time to time in the business and the one client we lost was about 80% of the overall net outflows in the fixed income mandate category.

Christopher McGratty

Analyst · KBW

In this quarter’s results, do they state the full impact from the loss or should we see another kind of revenue potential impact next quarter?

Peter deSilva

Analyst · KBW

Chris, I think you’re trying to link that to the second quarter which was a custody, they are 2 different things. Yes 2 different events, one it was in our custody business as Mike mentioned and this was an actual money management mandate that shifted to another manager.

Christopher McGratty

Analyst · KBW

On that note can you review the custody impact one more time?

J. Kemper

Analyst · KBW

Sure we had one large custody client that chose to exit UMB in the second quarter, converted around June of the year. This was a long term client that deviates upon pricing ultimately. We just couldn’t compete with Bank of New York for this event with our competitor and they chose to go to the lowest cost provider and that’s not our strategy. Our strategy is to be a boutique provider to, price reasonably and competitively but not always be the lowest price necessarily in the business and it also was a legacy client and a client that was a single product only. It was just custody and today we really go after in the UMB fund services area, we go out to customers between 0 and $10 billion of assets and this was probably our core customer, it was a legacy client. We got beat on price and as a consequence it went to another provider.

Christopher McGratty

Analyst · KBW

That's helpful, taking a step back, is there a I guess how are you thinking about these 2 separate events as it relates to the whole strategies. Obviously there's a little bit of a concern given the negative headlines but just maybe help frame how you guys are positioned going forward.

J. Kemper

Analyst · KBW

We win a lot more business than we lose. We do lose from time to time. As I said the custody won obviously is of concern but it was a unique situation with a legacy client, it was strictly on price and we wouldn’t compete that business today necessarily. In the money management business, you know we are going to win some, we are going to lose some. This was, as I mentioned, a long term client with a new consultant that chose a different strategy and ultimately chose to exit. So I don’t think there is anything symptomatic here. Our performance was stellar in this particular portfolio but they decided to choose another provider.

Peter deSilva

Analyst · KBW

We bust the trends in the industry in both categories. We have had better fund flow performance than the industry has on the fund flow steady and the custody piece really was an outliner. This is not a traditional piece of business for us and our business continues to perform as we expect it to.

Christopher McGratty

Analyst · KBW

Mike on the tax rate, what should we be using going forward. I think it was off a little bit this quarter.

Michael Hagedorn

Analyst · KBW

28.5%. The slight changes in the tax rate are the function of municipal revenue, representing a lot, I shouldn’t say lot, somewhat lower amounts of total interest income that has changed in the portfolio have occurred and there have been some minor tweaks to state tax rates as well for several strategies that we have but 28.5 is a good number.

Operator

Operator

[Operator Instructions] Our next question is from the line of Matt Olney with Stephens Investment Bank.

Matt Olney

Analyst · Matt Olney with Stephens Investment Bank

In the payment solution segment of data, it looks like revenue was down, expenses were up sequentially. I think Mike mentioned the timing difference of the few initiatives. Can you give us any more details as far as your investments in this business and what this could potentially mean for revenue and what kind of timing drag are we talking about?

J. Kemper

Analyst · Matt Olney with Stephens Investment Bank

Yes, the key thing as you pointed out and as we stated in the call is the expenses in this business and we are making investments in payment solutions. One of those that we can talk about because it is public is dynamics and you can go out and check that out on the web. There are several press releases as well that will explain exactly what dynamics is but that is part of the investments that we are making in payment solutions. Also keep in mind, I made comments that we had timing in the third quarter relating to business development and advertising initiatives and I pointed that out when I talked about the segments that payment solutions is the place where we have that and that’s where that cost is showing. So it's really those 2 things.

Matt Olney

Analyst · Matt Olney with Stephens Investment Bank

Okay, and then I guess staying in that same theme and payment solutions, your mix of purchase volume continues to evolve. Can you kind of give us some more details as to what that mix is today versus a year ago and then the second part of that question would be how has that mix affected the overall interchange margin today versus a year ago?

Peter deSilva

Analyst · Matt Olney with Stephens Investment Bank

Matt, this is Peter here. Those numbers are, I will give you in a rough numbers here. So we look at it in 5 dimensions. Consumer credit has been relatively flat from a purchase volume standpoint, consumer credit grew almost 10% on a year-over-year basis. Consumer debit was up 6.5, healthcare was up almost 14% and institutional cash management was up 704% because we won a big, big piece of business earlier in the year. So the mix is shifting around a little bit, commercial credit is still the biggest contributor, almost 45% of our interchanged revenue comes from commercial credit, interchange from healthcare is a little lower than you might expect because we have to negotiate a lot of these arrangements with partners. We generally go to market in a partnership model there and institutional cash management, you have to be a little bit careful, this large one that when we won because we are been paid a fee as opposed to an interchange rate. But generally speaking, I would say the strongest parts of the portfolio right now are commercial credit, healthcare and some of these large broker dealers that we are doing card business for.

Matt Olney

Analyst · Matt Olney with Stephens Investment Bank

And then lastly it sounds like you have been selling a few of your non-core branches, in what looks like some non-mature markets. Could we see more of that or it's just 1 or 2 of those in the past.

J. Kemper

Analyst · Matt Olney with Stephens Investment Bank

This is something that’s sort of an ongoing process I think really any bank is going through or should be going through as local economies change and such so we will always be looking at our branch network. What’s happening in local economies, coupled with what the regulatory environment is, we have to make sure that our branch networks and our retail banking network is efficient so we are constantly evaluating and revaluating that. So can’t make any commitments to what will look like but you can expect that our branch network will shift and evolve over time.

Operator

Operator

And our next question comes from the line of Peyton Green with Sterne Agee.

Peyton Green

Analyst · Peyton Green with Sterne Agee

I was wondering if you give some color on the loan pipeline and how it looked or how it looks now going into the fourth quarter and maybe anecdotally how customer behavior has changed. And then secondly bank card fees were down late quarter. I was just wondering if you can comment maybe on why they were down.

J. Kemper

Analyst · Peyton Green with Sterne Agee

Yes on the loan pipeline I would say that the pipeline maintains the same level of strength as last quarter when we had this call. Some of what -- link quarter base is some of what we expected to happen to the third quarter we believe has pushed into the fourth quarter. So along with having a strong pipeline we think some of that is pushed into the fourth quarter in general. So things generally are the same, most of it as I mentioned in the call is still market share gains. You don’t see a whole lot of economic activity driving the pipeline but we do continue to see a very strong showing as it relates to gaining market share in all of our regions really and sentiment from the customers as I mentioned in the call, performance is slightly better but there is a great deal really of uncertainty around the fiscal cliff and the election. People are sitting on the cash and but that’s generally the sentiment. On the bank card side, I think that’s really mostly just consumer behavior for the most part. And maybe some others, Peter you might have more color.

Peter deSilva

Analyst · Peyton Green with Sterne Agee

Yes, a couple of thoughts Peyton if you look year-over-year, we were down 2.2% on a link quarter basis, we were down 1.2%. The major driver there as Mariner said 3 months in a row if you look at the industry data, total purchase volume has been down across the country as consumers retrench and I think Mariner talked about some of the uncertainties in the economy. So some of it is definitely consumer spending. The other is some seasonality that we have more seasonality this year than we have had in the past that are healthcare debit business, you will see that pick-up here as we go into the fourth quarter and people rush to the finish lines of December but a little bit more seasonality in that business this year.

Peyton Green

Analyst · Peyton Green with Sterne Agee

So you are expecting to bounce back in the fourth quarter being seasonally stronger quarter, is that fair enough?

J. Kemper

Analyst · Peyton Green with Sterne Agee

I think you’re referring to the enrollment season for health is that what you’re referring?

Peter deSilva

Analyst · Peyton Green with Sterne Agee

There are 2 things, there is enrollment for sure but there is also utilization as the old use it or lose it on the FSA card and it's still in force and we always see some seasonal uptick in the fourth quarter.

J. Kemper

Analyst · Peyton Green with Sterne Agee

And as then as our business grows, that seasonality will grow within our portfolio.

Peyton Green

Analyst · Peyton Green with Sterne Agee

Okay and then the last question would be, certainly it's been a good year on the execution front. I mean how do you view strategically, are you seeing more opportunities to expand the company through acquisition or organic opportunity is better at the margin.

J. Kemper

Analyst · Peyton Green with Sterne Agee

Well, as we have been saying recently you know we do want to maintain our flexibility to look at opportunities in an opportunistic fashion but we are really more focused on making sure that all of the investments we have already made perform and that we execute on the investments that we have made. We think there is a tremendous opportunity, we think our strategy is working and don’t see any changes to the strategy that we set forth and our seem most of them, all of the businesses that we are focused on have you know are hitting stride so we feel pretty good about all of it.

Operator

Operator

And I’m showing there are no further questions. I will turn the call back to management for closing remarks.

Kay McMillan

Analyst

Thank you very much for your interest in UMB today. This call can be accessed via replay at our website beginning in about 2 hours and will run through November 7. As always you can contact UMB investor relations with any follow-up questions by calling (816) 860-7106. Again, we appreciate your interest and time.

Operator

Operator

Ladies and gentlemen, this concludes our conference for today. If you would like to listen to the replay of the call you can dial (303) 590-3030 or 1 (800) 406-7325 with the access code of 4568203. We thank you for your participation. You may now disconnect.