Flushing Financial Corporation

Good morning, everyone, and welcome to the Flushing Financial Corporation's fourth quarter 2020 earnings conference call. Hosting the call today are John Buren, President and Chief Executive Officer, Susan Collin, Senior Executive Vice President, Treasurer and Chief Financial Officer, and Frank Korsakwinski, Senior Executive Vice President and Chief of Real Estate Lending. Today's conference call is being recorded. After today's presentation, there will be an opportunity to ask questions. To ask a question, you may press star and one. To withdraw your questions, you may press star and two. A copy of the earnings press release and slide presentation that the company will be referencing today are available on its investor relations website at FlushingBank.com. Before we begin, the company would like to remind you that discussions during this call contain forward-looking statements made under the safe harbor provisions of the US Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Such statements are subject to risk uncertainties and other factors that may cause actual results to differ materially from those contained in such forward-looking statements. Such factors are included in the company's filings with the US Securities and Exchange Commission. Bushing Financial Corporation does not undertake any obligation to update any forward-looking statements except as required by under applicable law. During this conference call, references will be made to non-GAAP financial measures as supplemental measures to review and assess operating performance. These non-GAAP financial measures are not intended to be considered in isolation or as a substitute for the financial information prepared and presented in accordance with U.S. GAAP. For information about these non-GAAP measures and for reconciliation to GAAP, please refer to the earnings release and or the presentation. At this time, I'd like to introduce John Buren, President and Chief Executive Officer, who will provide an overview of the strategy and results. Sir, please go ahead.

Thank you. Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining us for our fourth quarter 2020 earnings call. I'd like to start off reflecting on 2020 and the impact it had on our employees, communities, customers, and organization. Clearly, the pandemic had a significant impact on everyone, and I'm proud and thankful for how our employees worked to help customers and communities through this difficult time where significant parts of our footprint were shut down, social distancing became the norm, and we all had to adjust to remote working. While none of this was easy, our employees rose to the challenge and worked tirelessly, not only to serve customers and communities, but to close and integrate the Empire Bancorp transaction remotely. 2020 was a significant year, and we look forward to a better 2021 with the rollout of vaccines and a path to return to normal activities. On today's call, I will discuss our fourth quarter highlights and our strategic objectives for 2021 before turning the call over to our CFO, Susan Cullen, who will provide greater detail on our financial performance. Following our prepared remarks, we will address your questions along with our Chief Real Estate Lending Officer, Frank Kozakwinski. Beginning on slide three, our core results this quarter were strong with EPS of 58 cents up 42% from a year ago and the core net interest margin increased eight basis points. Our gap earnings were impacted by several items relating to the empire merger and the actions we took to improve our funding profile. Our full year 2020 core EPS was $1.70, a 4% improvement over 2019. We delivered these results despite a very challenging operating environment, which included elevated provision for credit losses given the effects of the pandemic and a significant portion of our footprint being shut down. Despite these challenges, we achieved record core net interest income for the third consecutive quarter as we benefited from the low interest rate environment. Our cost of interest bearing liabilities declined 12 basis points to 86 basis points in the fourth quarter, while the yield on our interest earning assets fell only two basis points to 3.82%. As a result, the core net interest margin expanded to 2.97 percent or eight basis points from the previous quarter. We should have some pricing benefits on our funding costs with 342 million of CDs scheduled to mature in the first quarter at a weighted average rate of 1.23 percent compared to our standard one-year rate of 64 basis points. In December, we restructured our funding and securities portfolio by prepaying 290 million of higher cost borrowings and selling 90 million of lower yielding securities. These transactions are expected to benefit the net interest margin by seven basis points in 2021. However, loan pricing has shifted lower with new originations for the quarter yielding 3.41% compared to our fourth quarter 2019 origination yield of 4.19%. The net interest margin will also be influenced by over $100 million of new PPP loans, which have yields below 3% and the shifting loan mix. Overall, we expect modest core net interest margin expansion going forward. Another key driver of our net interest margin is how we're able to fund our loan growth. Loan growth rebounded in the fourth quarter after stalling early in the pandemic. On a period-end basis and excluding Empire, net loans increased 71 million or 5% annualized from the third quarter. Average deposits also rose 4% year-over-year, with Empire accounting for most of the growth. We are cautiously optimistic for the outlook for loan growth in 2021. Strong credit quality is a hallmark of Flushing and is a point of differentiation among our peers. While there's an increase in credit metrics due to CECL and the closing of the Empire merger, we remain confident and comfortable with our underwriting and credit exposures. Net charge-offs were only 646,000 or four basis points of average loans. Our reserve coverage was 214% of non-performing loans. We continue to aggressively monitor our exposures and work with customers during these times. Loans and forbearance declined 57% during the quarter and are now 5.4% of loans and only 3.2% excluding loans paying interest only. Over 90% of forbearance loans are secured by mortgages with a loan to value of approximately 45%. The majority of loans that exited forbearance this quarter resumed normal payments. Helping our customers in this challenging environment is one of our top priorities. The provision for credit losses was $3.9 million and included a non-cash, non-recurring charge of $1.8 million from the Empire transaction. Excluding this charge, the provision was 3.2 times our current quarter net charge-offs. As a reminder, our maximum charge-offs were only 64 basis points in the midst of the Great Recession, while the industry peak charge-offs We're nearly five times that experience. We remain comfortable with our credit risk profile. As mentioned previously, the Empire transaction closed on October 31st, and the systems conversion occurred without a glitch in November. In fact, we retained over 99% of the accounts after the conversion. As a reminder, Empire added about $982 million in assets, $685 million of loans, and $854 million of deposits. So far, the merger is progressing in line with our expectations of 20% earnings accretion in 2021, and we're excited about enhancing the community bank in the legacy empire markets. As you can see, there was a lot of activity during the quarter. So let me take a minute to walk you through some of the items so you can get a better understanding of our core trends. On slide four, we outline the significant items, which include merger-related charges of $7.2 million, or 19 cents per share, and balance sheet restructuring charges of $8.4 million, or 22 cents a share. A full reconciliation of our gap to core EPS is provided on slide 21 and in our press release. Turning to slide five, we outline our strategic objectives for 2021, which include managing our cost of funds and continuing to improve the funding mix, resuming historical loan growth while achieving appropriate risk-adjusted returns, enhancing our core earnings power by improving scalability and efficiency, managing credit risk, and remaining well capitalized. I'll now ask Susan to walk through how we performed against our strategic objectives. Susan?

Thank you, John. I'll begin on slide six. Our first strategic objective is managing our cost of funds and continuing to improve the funding mix. Average deposits rose 10% in the fourth quarter with Empire accounting for most of the growth. Our average non-interest bearing deposits rose 68% from a year ago and our core deposits comprised nearly 80% of average deposits, an improvement from the 70% in the fourth quarter of 2019. Our total cost of deposits declined 124 basis points over the past year to 47 basis points. The number of mobile banking customers and usage continues to grow as well. The number of active users rose 12%, items processed increased 33%, and dollars processed expanded by 52% during the quarter. Online banking and active bill pay subscribers also grew 14% and 16%, respectively, in the fourth quarter of 2020. On slide seven, we show our CD maturities over the next year. The greatest repricing opportunity will occur the first quarter of 2021 with $342 million of CDs maturing with a weighted average rate of 1.23%. Assuming current rates, we expect deposit costs to head lower in 2021. As shown on slide 8, our next strategic objective is to resume historical loan growth while achieving appropriate risk-adjusted returns. Net period and loans increased 16% compared to a year ago, with Empire contributing almost 12 percentage points of the growth. Loan growth resumed in the fourth quarter after sluggish growth in the prior two quarters as a result of the pandemic. Despite the 150 basis point reduction in short-term rates in 2020, Our core loan yields have only declined 34 basis points in the fourth quarter versus a year ago. We expect some pressure on loan yields for MIPS due to the low-yielding PPP loans and rate pressure on new production. From January 19th through January 22nd, we have processed 434 PPP applications with a total requested loan balance of $115 million. On slide 9, we discussed the drivers of the net interest margin. Our net interest margin is impacted by the shape of the yield curve and how we fund our loan growth. With our liability-sensitive balance sheet, we have benefited from declining rates. Our core net interest margin rose 64 basis points over the past year and 8 basis points in the fourth quarter. Our deposit costs fell 124 basis points in 2020 and 10 basis points in the fourth quarter. We continue to expect improvements in our deposit costs, but the pace of improvements will slow. Core loan yields rose one basis point in the fourth quarter to $399, but we expect some pressure over time due to changes in the portfolio mix and a lower rate on new loan originations. The balance sheet restructuring occurred in late December 2020 with little impact on the fourth quarter results. We expect some of the benefit of the restructuring to be offset by loan pricing mix in 2021. Slide 10 provides further detail on our previously announced balance sheet restructuring completed late in December. We prepaid $291 million of borrowings with a weighted average cost of 1.93% and replaced this with lower-cost short-term funding. We also sold nearly $90 million of low-yielding investment securities and replaced them with securities bearing higher rates. All in, these transactions are expected to improve the net interest margin by seven basis points in 2021. We will continue to actively manage the balance sheet to take into account liquidity, interest rate risk, and net interest income outlook. Our third strategic objective, as shown on slide 11, is to enhance core earnings power by improving scalability and efficiency. We closed the Empire transaction on October 31st, which expanded our footprint into attractive markets in Suffolk County, recognizing only $1.5 million with goodwill. The system conversion occurred in November with no issues, and we remain on track to achieve our $7 million after-tax cost savings over 2021. The loan portfolio acquired in the Empire transaction has a 2% purchase accounting mark. Overall, the Empire transaction is performing in line with our expectations, and we remain comfortable with our 20% earnings accretion expectation for 2021. Slide 12 has our fourth strategic objective, which is to manage credit risk. During the pandemic, we have supported our customers with various forbearance programs. At year end, we have $364 million, or 5% of our loans in forbearance, down 57% in the fourth quarter, with about 40% of the total loans paying interest only. The majority of the $482 million dollars Late quarter decline in forbearance loans has resumed regular payments. We remain well secured from a collateral standpoint with an average loan-to-value of 45% for the real estate-backed mortgages, although borrower cash flows are temporarily impacted by the pandemic. We remain vigilant in monitoring borrowers' cash flows, and we perform regular site inspections. We continue to work with our customers to help them get through this difficult time. On slide 13, we provide the details of our allowance for loan losses. We had only four basis points or $646,000 of net charge-offs in the quarter. Under CECL, the $685 million of Empire loans required a provision for loan losses of approximately $2 million. This is in addition to the $4 million related to the purchase credit deteriorated loan. Overall, the reserves to loan loss ratio rose two basis points to 67 basis points during the quarter. Slide 14 is a reminder that our loss history has been significantly better than the industry for the past 20 years, and even in the Great Recession, our losses were four and a half times below the industry peak. Additionally, we have tightened our underwriting standards since then to further reduce risk. For example, we've reduced construction and mixed-use loans by 19% each, and the loans of values have improved from 48% to 38%. On slide 15, you can see the impact of the change in underwriting standards since the Great Recession. Our reserved to non-performing loan ratio has improved over 214% from 164% a year ago and from under 25% 10 years ago. We remain confident that there is minimal loss content in our portfolio. Importantly, we continue to underwrite each loan using a cap rate in the mid-fives and stress test each loan. Next, on slide 16, our non-performing assets improved length quarter, declining 15% to only 31 base points of loans plus REO. The loan-to-value on real estate-dependent loans amounted to 38% as of December 31st, and the average loan-to-value for non-performing loans collateralized by real estate was 31%. Criticized and classified loans rose to $72 million in the fourth quarter, but are still low at only 107 basis points of loans. Of the $29 million increase, $15 million was from the Empire and $8 million was from one Cree relationship. To provide further detail, 16 million of criticized loans are in forbearance and 47 million were real estate dependent with an average LTV of 39%. We continue to actively monitor these credits and are comfortable with our risk exposure. Slide 17 has our final strategic objective, which is to remain well capitalized. We continue to exceed all regulatory capital requirements with strong capital ratios. Our book and tangible book value per share are $20.11 and $19.45, respectively. The TCE ratio declined 7.52% due to the Empire transaction, and our leverage ratio is 8.38%. Our primary use of capital is to support customers through the balance sheet growth, and then we return any excess capital. We expect to approach 8% TCE by the end of 2021. The current dividend yield is over 4%. Lastly, let me remind you of some items that could impact the first quarter. First, Empire was only included for two months of the fourth quarter. Our net interest margin should be positively impacted by deposit repricing and the balance sheet restructuring, but will have some pressure due to the loan yields. Excluding the expenses for the merger and the balance sheet restriction, the core expense base is $33.5 million. As a reminder, the first quarter will be impacted by seasonality and compensation and a full quarter of the Empire expense base. Our effective tax rate in 2021 should approximate 26%. With that, I'll turn it back over to John.