Todd Clossin
Analyst · D.A. Davidson. Please go ahead
Thank you, John. Good morning, everyone. On today’s call, we will be reviewing our results for the third quarter of 2017. Key takeaways from the quarter are, we continue to make strong progress on our long term operational and growth strategies, loan growth over the past 12 months was driven by our strategic focus categories, we've demonstrated continued strength and credit quality, profitability measures and expense management and we're well positioned for success in any type of operating environment. For the three months ended September 30th we earned fully diluted earnings per share of $0.60 on net income of $26 million, for the nine-month period we earned fully diluted earnings per share of $1.79 on net income of $79 million. We continue to generate solid returns as demonstrated by returns on average assets and average tangible equity of 1.06% and 13.31% respectively. In addition, our consolidated and bank level regulatory capital ratios are well above the applicable well capitalized standards promulgated by bank regulators and the Basel III capital standards. Our long-term growth is focused on five key strategies, growing our loan portfolio with an emphasis on commercial and industrial lending while maintaining our high credit standards, increasing fee income as a percentage of net revenues over time, deriving high quality retail banking services, generating positive operating leverage and expanding our franchise. Total loan growth for the third quarter was 2.2% year-over-year reflecting the impact of our stated strategies related to our residential mortgage and consumer loan portfolios as well as higher payoffs compared to the second quarter as we continue to see developers going to the secondary market sooner to take advantage of the aggressive refinancing options being offered. Overall loan growth was driven by our strategic focus categories as we realized mid-single-digit growth and total commercial loans of 5.5% and home equity loans up 4.3%. Recent national trends and anecdotal evidence from others in the industry as well as customer comments have shown that companies are being cautious, not pessimistic which is a key distinction, and waiting to make desired capital investments until there is more certainty in the business environment in particular with regards to tax and healthcare reform. While we have not seeing any credit deterioration in any of our markets we've seen a similar slowdown in our recent loan growth compared to national trends. That said we remain optimistic on the opportunities in our markets as we continue to diversify and strengthen the quality of our overall loan portfolio. Our C&I and home equity lending focus continues to gain traction and provide diversification. We continue to reduce the overall risk through appropriate management of our consumer portfolio. As I mentioned last quarter we continue to manage the risk and return of our loan portfolio by allocating capital to our highest opportunity product areas. An example of this is our focus upon the utilization of our existing financial set of network to support our home equity lending product. We've expanded the team in our Kentucky and Southern Indiana markets during the first half of the year and are excited about their prospects as they've already begun to show nice traction in building their book of business. Furthermore, we have continued to reduce the risk profile of our loan portfolio through targeted reductions in the consumer portfolio which has declined 15% year-over-year to now represent approximately 5% of our total loans. We continue to maintain our past discipline of prudently managing loan growth and we will intentionally give up a few percentage points of loan growth by not chasing the relaxed credit standards we're seeing within our markets. This discipline is reflected in the overall strength of our credit quality measures, in addition we continue to have no concentration issues or concerns across our portfolios, as our energy related, hotel and retail exposures remain minimal. As we invest to become a larger organization we remain focused on expenses and maintaining the strong efficiency ratio which we believe is the best long-term measure of demonstrating balanced revenue growth and disciplined expense management. While our efficiency ratio might fluctuate from one quarter to the next we've maintained it in the mid 50% range for the last couple of years. We're working to control discretionary expenses as we make revenue producing hires in our new markets and complete preparations for crossing the $10 billion asset threshold of which we're about two thirds through the associated cost. Regarding preparations for the $10 billion asset threshold there're no changes to our previously communicated plans. We continue to methodically make the necessary investments and feel that we're prepared from a staffing, infrastructure development and CRA perspective. While we're ready to cross the threshold tomorrow we expect that to occur sometime over the next one to two years without having to constrain loan growth. Our preference remains to cross via a franchise enhancing acquisition within a five to six-hour drive time of our WHEELING headquarters, it is through a combination of several small to midsized deals or larger several billion-dollar asset transaction. Finally, WesBanco remains well positioned for success in any type of operating environment. We've the right teams and products across our geographies for growth during an economic expansion. Our legacy of strong credit quality and risk management will help insulate us in a downturn, we're positioned to benefit from rising interest rates through our asset sensitive balance sheet, however if the yield curve continues to remain flat we've demonstrated our ability to manage discretionary expenses. We firmly believe that our disciplined approach to credit quality, products and services we offer, expense management and our core deposit funding advantage are key long-term differentiators for WesBanco. I would now like to turn the call over to Bob Young, our Chief Financial Officer for an update on our third quarter's financial results. Bob?