First Horizon Corporation

Good morning and welcome to First Horizon National Corporation First Quarter 2020 Earnings Conference Call. All participants will be in listen-only mode. If you need assistance, please signal a conference specialist by pressing the star key followed by zero. After today's presentation, there will be an opportunity to ask questions. To ask a question, you may press star then one on your telephone keypad. To withdraw your question, please press star then two. Please note, This event is being recorded. I'd now like to turn the conference over to Ms. Artie Bowman, Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Thank you, Nick. Please note that the earnings release, financial supplements, and slide presentation we'll use in this call are posted in the Investor Relations section of our website at www.firsthorizon.com. In this call, we will mention forward-looking and non-GAAP information. Actual results may differ from the forward-looking information for a number of reasons outlined in our earnings materials in our most recent annual and quarterly report. Our forward-looking statements reflect our views today and we are not obligated to update them. The non-GAAP information is identified as such in our earnings materials and in the slide presentation for this call and is reconciled to GAAP information in those materials. Also, please remember that this webcast on our website is the only authorized record of this call. This morning's speakers include our CEO, Brian Jordan, our CFO, BJ Loesch, and our Chief Credit Officer, Susan Springfield. I'll now turn it over to Brian.

Thank you, Artie. Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining our call. I hope that everyone is staying healthy and safe in this environment. The COVID-19 health crisis is certainly unprecedented and causing significant economic uncertainty across the world, not to mention here in the United States. While early in the game, I'm encouraged by the efforts of the Federal Reserve to provide liquidity and orderly markets and the stimulus passed by the Congress and signed by President Trump. Before we go into the quarterly trends, I'll talk about how we're responding to the COVID-19 crisis. We are focused on supporting the well-being of our employees, our customers, and our communities. For our employees, we provided resources and flexibility to work remotely and offered extra sick time and financial assistance for childcare. We understand how critical the role of banks is now, and our employees are working incredibly hard to support customers and our communities. Our bankers are proactively reaching out to customers to discuss challenges and solutions. We're participating in the PPP program, So far, we've approved approximately 5,500 applications and processed $1.6 billion of loans. We're also working with our customers to provide payment deferrals, liquidity lines, and fee waivers. On slide five, our business diversification combined with our strong capital and liquidity gives us a position of strength from which to successfully manage through the current economic challenges. First quarter results demonstrated our solid foundation. PPNR was up 19% year-over-year and reasonably steady linked quarter, driven by profitable balance sheet growth, strong counter-cyclical business performance, and excellent expense management. Earnings, however, were impacted by a $145 million loan loss provision, building reserves to incorporate the steep decline in the economic outlook in March. We also adopted CECL accounting rule on January 1st. Net charge-offs remain modest, or $7 million in the court. We will continue to closely monitor and evaluate COVID-19's potential impact on the economy, our customer base, and our loan portfolio. Our current loan loss allowance represents 74% of 2019 stress test losses over a nine-quarter period. As the full impact of the economic shutdown becomes clearer, we will make appropriate adjustments if necessary. Balance sheet trends were strong, with period-end loan and deposit growth of $2.3 billion and $2 billion, respectively, linked quarter. Loan growth was driven by increases in loans to mortgage companies and higher line draws. Low rates drove an uptick in volume in loans to mortgage companies and draws increased from customers preparing for economic uncertainty. Period-end deposits reflected significant customer inflow. So far, in April, we've seen deposit growth continue while line draws have moderated. We have also seen some decline in loans to mortgage companies, which increased sharply in the last week of March. Our capital and overall liquidity position remains strong with excess funding capacity that will allow us to continue to utilize our balance sheet to support our customers' needs. Our period and capital ratios were impacted by an increase in risk-weighted assets, primarily due to loan growth, combined with an incremental provision bill. I'll give a quick update on our merger and branch acquisition before turning the call over to BJ to provide more financial details. Our merger of equals with Iberia Bank is on track. We've made good progress in integration planning and processes, and we've completed initial regulatory and shareholder filings. Our shareholder votes are set for April the 24th, and the two major proxy advisory firms have recommended votes for the merger. We anticipate closing the merger by the end of the second quarter of 2020 after final regulatory approval. Regarding the branch acquisition, we've agreed with Truist to postpone finalizing the transaction until the third quarter due to the ongoing pandemic situation. The postponement will alleviate customer disruption in this uncertain time and allow us to comply with social distancing guidelines. We believe both of these transactions will enhance our long-term value with improved funding, additional earnings accretion, and capital generation. I'll now turn the call over to BJ to go through the financial highlights. BJ?

Great. Good morning. Thanks, everybody. And I will start with financial results on slide eight. Year-over-year highlights included strong PPNR, NII growth on strong balance sheet growth and pricing discipline despite Fed tightening, higher fixed income revenue, and excellent expense management. The NII was up year-over-year due to strong commercial loan growth, coupled with solid deposit pricing discipline, with the linked quarter decline driven by lower accretion and fewer days in the quarter. The income was up from continued strong performance from our fixed income business. Average daily revenues were $1.3 million in the first quarter, an increase of 73% year-over-year, and up $200,000 per day, or 19% linked quarter. Fixed Income's extensive distribution platform remains well-positioned to capitalize on its favorable market conditions in today's environment. The implementation of the new CECL loan loss methodology this quarter, which, as you know, is supposed to be an estimate of lifetime losses in the credit portfolio, contributed to a much higher provision from $8 million in first quarter revenues from $8 million in the fourth quarter to $145 million in the first. Net charge-offs were again very low at only $7 million in the quarter, with the additional provision increase driven by future economic factors in the models related to the COVID-19 pandemic. I'll get into more details on the reserve increase in a few minutes. Balance sheet trends were again strong on both the loan and deposit side, particularly in the last five weeks of the quarter. As you can see on slide nine, we saw significant increases in our period end loans with the vast majority of the growth occurring in the last week of the quarter. Link quarter total period end loans were up $2.3 billion. About $1.3 billion of the growth was related to loans to mortgage companies. About $750 million of the loan growth associated with line draws. And about $300 million was related to organic loan growth across the other commercial and consumer portfolios. So far in April, line draws have abated. Loans to mortgage companies' balances are down from period end levels and expected to come down about $1.5 billion to $2 billion from period end levels as purchase and refi volumes decline due to COVID-19 impacts. In this uncertain environment, our job is threefold in terms of lending. Number one, utilize the government programs, particularly PPP, to get funds into the hands of those who need it. Two, to keep credit flowing to strong credit-worthy borrowers. And three, protect our balance sheet and capital levels. And in this context, where we are seeing the majority of our lending are in areas that tick these boxes. Over the next quarter, we expect the majority of new loan growth to be driven by PPP loans, which carry zero percent risk weighting. We expect loans to mortgage companies given the industry dynamics related to COVID-19 impacts to come down meaningfully in the range of $1.5 billion to $2 billion from 331 levels. And we expect line draws to occur but at lesser rates while new fundings decline and offset those incremental line draws. Turning to deposit trends on slide 10. You see we saw strong deposit inflows towards the end of the quarter with balances up $2 billion linked quarter on a period-end basis. The growth was driven by a B&A increase in market index deposits. In March, we saw significant inflow of these balances as customers exited the equity markets and put their cash into FDIC-insured accounts. Additionally, we've executed on an additional $1.4 billion of insured network deposit contracts at attractive rates currently between 5 and 30 basis points. We've seen similar trends in April quarter-to-date deposits, which are up by about $2 billion, or 5% over 331 levels. The drivers of deposit growth in April are related to organic customer activity, consumers receiving stimulus checks, seasonal public funds, and increases in non-interest-bearing commercial deposits as customers hold more cash, in addition to continued inflows of market index deposits. Moving on to capital on slide 12. As I noted earlier, we had strong PPNR in the quarter that led to capital generation that supported the dividends and the increase to the provision. As you can see on this slide, the decline in CET1 ratio was due to the increase in risk-weighted assets at the end of the month. About 54 basis points was related to commercial loan growth from the period end uptick in loans to mortgage companies, in addition to the increased line draws. About 16 basis points of the impact was related to higher market risk assets in our fixed income business. The increase was largely driven by a March spike in value at risk due to the extreme volatility. Therefore, as you all know, capital ratios are calculated on period end assets, not average assets. So even though average assets were roughly $2.8 billion lower than period end, the capital ratio calculation is sensitive to the spot balance at the end of the quarter. To put the impact of the period end run-up in assets in perspective, The rule of thumb for us is that about a $450 million increase in RWA is equal to about a 10 basis point capital ratio impact. Therefore, that increase in $2.8 billion in period end assets over the last five weeks of the quarter versus the average assets in the quarter is about a 65 basis point impact to the CDT-1 ratio. said a different way if CET1 was calculated on average risk-weighted assets versus period end, our CET1 ratio would have been about 9.2%. As I said earlier, when talking about loan growth, we expect risk-weighted assets to go down in the second quarter as loans to mortgage company balances decline and new loan growth is driven primarily by 0% risk-weighted PPP loans. With the expected reduction in RWA, combined with continued strong PPNR, we would expect our standalone CET1 ratio to move back more towards the 9% range in the second quarter. Slide 13 shows the drivers of change under CECL adoption. As you know, CECL replaces the incurred loss methodology with a life of loan estimate concept. While net charge-offs were only $7 million in the quarter, the initial day one impact and the so-called economic factors related to the future economic outlook drove the aggregate increase in our reserves. To put numbers to it, as you can see in the walk forward, the ending reserve as of 12-31-19 was $200 million. We then booked a day one impact as of 1-1-20 of $106 million. And subsequently, by quarter end, Even though we had very little change in portfolio characteristics from things such as charge-offs, grading changes, or loan growth in the quarter, only $12 million, the economic factors, the associated changes in the future economic outlook, led to an additional $126 million of reserves, resulting in an ending loan loss reserve balance at $444 million as of March 31st. We believe this represents a healthy reserve, particularly when compared to both peers and our own severely adverse stress test, which you can see on slide 14. Turning to slide 14, there are several key points that I'd like to highlight here. First, as noted in the top bullet, our total loan portfolio is predominantly commercially oriented at 75% of total loans. with a meaningful portion of them, about 42%, considered investment-grade equivalent. And within that, 20% of those commercial loans at quarter end were loans to mortgage companies, which, as we've discussed many times, carry minimal credit risk. 90% of loan-to-mortgage company balances are collateralized with government-guaranteed loans. While these loans are commercial loans and therefore carry 100% risk weighting, If held individually on our balance sheet, they would be 50% risk-weighted. It is a very high-quality portfolio. Second, the consumer loans that we have are of high quality as well, as evidenced by the high average Refush FICO scores and the lack of a meaningful higher loss content credit card exposure. Third, about 12% of our total loan portfolio still has $65 million of unamortized loan marks, in addition to $42 million of reserves, which provides additional loss absorption capacity. And finally, as you can see on the right-hand side of this slide, our reserve coverage to total loans and to Q1 annualized net charge-offs are very healthy relative to peers, and we have prudently built reserves that equate to 74 percent of our severely adverse model losses, well above the peer averages. And if you add in the additional $65 million of unamortized loan mark, we are at approximately 85% of our severely adverse model losses, a very healthy number. Turning to slide 15, since this is both the first quarter using the new CECL methodology and the factors related to the future economic outlook are such large drivers of both the size of the aggregate loan loss reserve and the first quarter provision, We thought it might be helpful to give you some details on our economic assumptions. As to other regional banks, we utilize various Moody scenarios and weight them to arrive at our quantitative model outputs. We then use more severe scenarios on specific portfolios as warranted to come up with additional qualitative overlays to the model results. So as you can see on this slide 15 in the upper left, Our most heavily weighted baseline scenario had the following characteristics. It considered the COVID-19 pandemic impacts, including the CARES Act, the Fed stimulus, including the open-ended quantitative easing, as well as the various announced liquidity and credit facility programs. It assumes a fourth stimulus in 4Q20. The recession starting already in the first half of this year with only a partial bounce back in the third quarter, then slow growth, with acceleration of GDP growth not occurring until later in 2021, and no return to full employment until 2023. For certain select portfolios, we felt might have more stress, such as aspects of the restaurant franchise finance or hospitality portfolios, we used more severe moody scenarios with characteristics such as in the upper right. At the bottom, we also laid out for you the epidemiological assumptions that corresponded with our various weighted scenarios. Then on slide 16, we thought it might be helpful to graph out some of the key economic assumptions driving the loss estimates and compare them to our stress test assumptions. On each of these graphs, you have five lines. The lighter dotted lines are the individual upside baseline and downside scenarios utilized. The heavy blue line is the weighted average of the scenarios we utilize across our portfolios. And the heavy gray line is the 2019 stress test assumptions. A few observations that I'd make here. First, on rates assumptions, such as for the three-month Treasury yield and Fed funds, they're very similar. On both GDP and unemployment, the current weighted scenario shows a deeper GDP drop and steeper spike in unemployment initially, but over the following 18 months, the severely adverse assumptions are worse for longer. And for key price indexes, such as CRE or home prices, or the Dow index for equity markets, the stress test assumptions are worse both near and longer term. While the outlook obviously remains uncertain, a key difference between the stress test assumptions and the current environment to be determined is the ultimate effectiveness of the massive Federal Reserve liquidity programs and the unprecedented financial stimulus programs via the CARES Act. Regardless, with our reserves as of 3-31 at 74% of our severely adverse model stress test losses, We believe we have been proactive in building healthy loan loss reserves for an uncertain environment. Wrapping up this section on slide 17, I wanted to remind you of our stress test results to show the resiliency of our business. First, our PPNR earnings power remains strong due to our countercyclical business and fixed income, and we are seeing that countercyclicality play out currently. And second, the lower loss content mix of our credit portfolio with a meaningful portion of C&I and very low risk loans to mortgage companies, an underweight CREE portfolio, and a de minimis credit card portfolio should serve us well in a stressed environment. With that, I'll turn it over to Susan to give you a little bit more color on our credit portfolio.

Thanks, BJ. Good morning, everyone. I'll start with slide 19, which gives an overview. of how our loan portfolio has evolved over the past 10 years since the last financial crisis. Since 2009, we have meaningfully reduced our real estate exposure and exited certain riskier portfolios. As BJ said, our loan portfolio is now commercially oriented with more than 40% of our loans would map to an investment grade rating. And the portfolio is diversified by product, categories, and geography. Note also on this slide our low CRE to total capital ratios versus peers. During this time, we've built experienced teams across line and credit leadership with significant experience in underwriting. Within our commercial loan portfolio, specialty areas comprise about half of that. This specific industry knowledge by these teams allows us to have strong client selection and strong underwriting discipline. and will provide expertise in navigating through this unprecedented economic crisis. Now I'll turn to slide 20. This slide shows the detail of our commercial loan portfolio based on NAICS industry codes. Our loan balances are across several sectors in C&I. We've also broken out certain commercial real estate balances as well. The overall pre-portfolio is diversified across property type and geography. We've remained disciplined in requiring significant equity across property types and have sized new loan amounts in our pre-book using a minimum underwriting rate that was typically 200 basis points or more higher than the prevailing rates at the time of underwriting. This type of underwriting builds some conservatism into the portfolio at the initial origination. Across all our portfolios, we believe we've taken the right approach to risk and have been prudent in our credit discipline. I'll go over some of the specific portfolios in the next few slides. On slide 21, first let's take a look at the healthcare portfolio. It's diversified among physicians' offices, medical centers, hospitals, and residential facilities. This $1.6 billion of average balances includes the healthcare specialty area as well as other healthcare-related loans on our balance sheet. The energy portfolio is $735 million or about 2% of our total loan portfolio. About half the energy portfolio is comprised of reserve-based loans with approximately 70% of reserve-based borrower revenues hedged through 2020 and with approximately 50% hedged through 2021. The remainder of the energy portfolio is diversified between midstream compression, refineries, terminal storage, and other oilfield services. Obviously, with the price volatility in the energy market, these are portfolios that we discuss on a very regular basis. On slide 22, I'll go to the hospitality and restaurant portfolio. The hospitality portfolio is about $600 million, with roughly three-quarters of it related to hotels. In this hotel portfolio, more than 90% are flagged hotels and are predominantly business traveler oriented with very few properties in resort destination categories. The average loan size for our hotel loans is about $14 million. The restaurant portfolio is $1.3 billion of average balances and includes the $1 billion franchise finance specialty area. These borrowers are experienced business owners and have typically had access to multiple sources of capital, and we're about 70% of our borrowers have more than 20 locations. As we've talked about previously, about two-thirds of this portfolio is limited service, meaning fast food, representing well-known concepts. The full-service restaurants are mostly family-style restaurants, and we have limited exposure to fine dining. I should note that the franchisors are working closely with their franchisees during this time in a number of ways, deferring, discounting, or waiving marketing fees and royalty fees, lowering prices on supplies that are provided by the franchisor. So in addition to the government programs, we are seeing work across different segments trying to help businesses during this difficult time. On slide 23, I'll talk about loans to mortgage companies, one of our specialty areas that we talk about every quarter. Period imbalances were $5.7 billion. As BJ noted earlier, over a billion dollars of the growth came in the last five days of the quarter. The growth reflected elevated levels of typical month-end increases driven by, largely by increased refinance activity. Loans to mortgage companies are a counter-cyclical business since low rates tend to drive mortgage activity. The loans to mortgage companies include collateral that are 90% government guaranteed, mitigating most of the credit risk. As BJ noted earlier, if these loans were directly on our balance sheet, they would require only a 50% risk weighting. We have over 25 years of experience in this business, and our balance sheet capacity, knowledge, stringent focus on operational controls and expertise have led to increased market share. With our commercially oriented diverse loan portfolio and our consistent balanced approach to risk, in addition to our reserve bill associated with CECL adoption and the increase associated with the unknown economic impacts of COVID, we believe we are well positioned to weather the current crisis. I'll turn it back to Brian for the wrap-up.

Thank you, Susan. On slide 25, we're excited about our merger of equals with Iberia Bank. We see it as truly transformative. We've made a great deal of progress planning the integration. The merger strengthens our presence in key markets, diversifies our loan portfolio both geographically and in industry concentrations, and it gives us a unique opportunity to drive greater efficiency. From the day we announced the merger, we have each been comfortable with the combined loan portfolios, and while the economy has changed due to the coronavirus pandemic, I believe together we are a stronger and better institution positioned to drive attractive shareholder returns and strong earnings accretion. While these are clearly unusual times, I believe we are well prepared to deal with the fallout of COVID-19. We have a strong capital and liquidity base. We've maintained consistently strong underwriting standards and have built a diversified portfolio that is focused on profitability. And our loan loss allowance is strong. We have good expense controls in place. And very importantly, we have solid underlying earnings power. We're facing an economic environment that differs from any in the past. but we're also seeing unprecedented government programs aimed at mitigating COVID-19's economic effects and hopefully leading to a quicker recovery. Our company stands ready to continue to assist our employees, our customers, and communities in an effort to overcome COVID-19's impact and revitalize the economy. The health and safety of our employees remains of utmost importance. It's almost unimaginable the amount of work that our folks did over the last several weeks to help the Treasury and the SBA roll out the PPP and really serve our customers and communities. Teams of people working around the clock. I'm grateful for all of the dedication and commitment that my colleagues have shown in dealing with these unprecedented times. many of them working remotely. So thank you for all that you are doing. And with that, Nick, we'll now take it, we'll turn it over to you and ask for questions.

We'll now begin the question and answer session. To ask a question, you may press star then one on your touchtone phone. If you're using a speakerphone, please pick up your handset before pressing the keys. To withdraw your question, please press star then two. This time, we will pause momentarily to assemble our roster. First question comes from Steven Alexopoulos, JP Morgan. Please go ahead.

Good morning, everybody. I wanted to start on reserves. If we look at the 2Q reserve build, it seems fairly aggressive in terms of the reserve covering 74% of DFAS losses, which is well above peers. Now, we look at most banks. They're at risk for another sizable reserve increase in 2Q, just given the Outlook on the economy seems to have worsened since 3.31. How do you guys think about this for First Horizon? Do you think you're at risk also, or do you feel like with the assumptions you've made, which seem more harsh than others, that you've gotten ahead of the curve?

Hey, Steve, it's BJ. Good morning. So we obviously, as I talked about, used the Moody's economic scenarios, which were done very late in the quarter. And then even through April, we continued to monitor the economic assumptions. And so while we ran our models using weightings from the Moody scenarios, as I talked about earlier, we also overlaid qualitative reserves on top of those specifically stress sectors to make sure that we were trying to take into account as much as we knew at the end of the quarter to be able to build as healthy a reserve and try to follow what is supposed to be the rule around CECL, which is truly estimating your lifetime losses as of a period end date. And so with all those factors, we tried to be, as we've tried to be over the last 10 plus years, very prudently conservative in terms of transparency, and how we built those reserves. And so, as you talked about, we built it much more towards a severely adverse environment. Clearly, the unknown going forward is what does the economy ultimately do? How do borrowers actually behave? How do the stimulus programs and the unprecedented Fed programs ultimately soften the impact? but those are hopeful, and what we wanted to do is make sure that we were building as healthy a reserve as we possibly could right now. So next quarter, as we would in any given quarter, we'll reevaluate our existing portfolio and the portfolio changes as well as any new economic factors over the next 90 days and reevaluate, but the bottom line is we feel hopeful very good about the healthy reserves that we built this quarter.

Hey, Steve, this is Brian. To add on to BJ's comment, this is an environment that we sit around and we, like the rest of the world, clearly have a lot of things. We don't know what we don't know. And maybe more than any other environment in my career, there are more known unknowns than we've seen at any point in time. And our view, really, if you go back to the 2007, 8, and 9 timeframe, was to make sure that we provide as much transparency about what's in our portfolios and we try to be realistic, not overly conservative, but realistic and conservative about what we think the lifetime losses are in the portfolio and lay that out for our investor base, and our regulators as well. At the end of the day, our risk profile is very, very different today than it was in 2008, 2009, and 2010, but we've taken the same approach, which is to be realistic, to take what we do think the economic environment looks like and, as BJ said, use a Moody's baseline and then those portfolios that we think will be adversely impacted, use more severe scenarios around them But, again, provide transparency and be realistic about how we think it plays out. As BJ said, facts on the ground are going to change. We're all going to know a lot more in 90 days than we know today. We're going to know a lot more in 180 days, and we'll make adjustments as necessary.

That's helpful. Maybe for Susan, can you give us a sense as to the loans which you provided, deferrals, modifications in the quarter? maybe the overall balance and maybe some color on which segments?

Certainly. So if I look at the deferrals that we've provided, business purpose deferrals would be on about $3.3 billion worth of underlying loan balances. Of that, about $600 million would be what I consider small business deferrals. The two biggest portfolios you would imagine, we had about $850 million in Cree or about 20% of the Cree book and about, not quite 40% of the franchise finance. And then the remainder was in just what I would call core C&I. So we are dedicated to working with these great customers who are experiencing this difficulty related to the pandemic and believe that this will could be a factor in addition to the government programs that can help get them beyond this point. In addition to that, on the consumer side, we've had deferrals on traditional consumer of about $256 million of balances and mortgage about $230 million. OK. Now, I think it was mentioned earlier, about $100,000 in fees waived.

$100,000 in fees.

OK. Thank you. And then finally for BJ, I know it's almost impossible to forecast the margin here, but in terms of just the ability to absorb losses, can you talk about, do you think you can grow net interest income in the coming quarter with all the pressure on NIM and some offsets on PPP? Thanks.

Yeah, so we do have a slide, slide 28, if you want to look at our net interest margin and net interest income trends in the appendix. But yeah, I think in terms of NII, I think there's going to be continued pressure as we expect LIBOR to continue to come down. It's remained more elevated than I think any of us would have thought given the rapid decline in Fed funds, but we expect that to continue to come down, though it hasn't yet come down to where we think it'll be. So that'll That'll continue to be a headwind. Our teams have done an excellent job both taking care of customers and growing deposits while also remaining very disciplined around pricing, whether it's base rates, earnings credit rates, promo rates, retention rates, et cetera. And as you can see in the quarter, we brought deposit rates down quite significantly. And I would expect that to continue into the second quarter, so that will be helpful as well. I would expect that those two, the net impact, would probably be a net negative because LIBOR and our floating rate loans would come down more than what we could bring down deposit costs. But as you said, the PPP program, particularly around the fees that we will generate from the $1.6 billion of fundings that we are making will flow through the net interest income line and hopefully be able to offset any of the net negative in terms of the rate dynamics. So all of that to say is I do think that we can hold our net interest income relatively steady with the addition of the PPP fees.

Terrific. I appreciate all the color. Thanks.

Thanks, Steve.

Thanks, Steve.

Next question from Abraham Poonawalla of Bank of America. Please go ahead.

Good morning.

Good morning. Hey, Abraham.

Hey, I guess, Brian, just following up to your comments relative to 2008, 2009, I think there's one, like you provided a lot of details on the portfolio. Like, At what point, like what's your level of comfort around the portfolio as someone who took the bank, came to the bank in 07, ran it through the crisis, through the cleanup? When you look at the portfolio, do you see a realistic risk where losses exceed your severe loss estimates? Because I think the numbers you can all look at, you should be able to earn it even if you have $600 million instead of $440 that you've reserved today, right? But just talk to us in terms of the portfolio and just your confidence around that number is probably the high watermark when you think about losses.

Yeah, so as I think about the portfolios today versus 2007 and 2008, I don't think there's any comparison at all. The risk profile in the portfolio is completely different. We didn't have... We don't have the national businesses. We don't have all of the residential construction. We don't have all of the non-footprint home equity exposures. We don't have the correspondent portfolios that we had in 2007, 2008, and 2009. Today, we have made a very conscious effort over a 10-year period to transform the way we underwrite, the way we document, the collateral. And there was a slide, I don't recall which one, there's a slide in there, V.J. show me, page 19 that shows the risk ratings in the portfolio and sort of the evaluation. But I would suggest that I have a very high degree of confidence in our underwriting and our portfolio management. We have transformed it intentionally. Our mantra has been we want a portfolio that we will be proud of in any cycle, and this would qualify as in any cycle. We believe that this portfolio will perform well. Clearly, our losses will go up as everybody's will, but we think this portfolio will hold up and perform very, very well. I think there's very little comparison to 2007, 2008. If the framework that people are applying, how do we do in 2007-8, how we're going to perform today, it's night and day. I think the portfolio performance will be vastly different and vastly better in this cycle.

Got it. And I guess, Susan, just following up on that, do you know what percentage of your restaurant finance customers or total business customers were qualified for the PPP program? you asked about franchise finance customers and how many are applying yeah how many qualify for ppp yep yeah we've we've over 50 percent of our franchise finance customers have applied for ppp got it got it and in terms of the mortgage warehouse like 90 of the collateral government uh gsc backed mortgages is there any risk in terms of the warehouse where a mortgage company runs into trouble, do you see any meaningful credit risk there or not?

I really don't. We've got 90% that's government backed, another 5% or 6% is jumbo and really conforms in every other way except for the loan size and a small amount of non-QM.

Our experience, Ibrahim, with those portfolios, even when we've had to manage out of a position, The collateral is liquid. We liquidate it, and we get out of the position. And so we see it as more of an operational risk portfolio than a credit risk portfolio. As Susan just reiterated, as you pointed out, it's a highly liquid, almost essentially a conforming GSE-eligible portfolio. So we see it as very little liquid. credit risk, and it's really most important that we stay focused on what we've always been focused on is that we have good title to good collateral.

The other thing, Abraham, is that these mortgage warehouse customers were highly profitable through 2019 and year-to-date 2020. And so their ability, should you have a mortgage or two that can't go into the permanent market, their ability to pull it back, amortize it, take it back from us, their ability to do that has been increased because of the profitability that they've had in 19 and year-to-date 2020.

Got it. And if I can sneak in one last for BJ, just when I look at your amended S4 from March 9th, stocks come down, just help us think through around how the performer capital ratio tangible book looks coming out of the Iberia deal. If you could provide some color, that would be helpful.

Yeah, so... you know, clearly with the significant moves in the stock price, there's been, you know, some talk around, do you have goodwill or do you have a bargain purchase gain and those, those types of things. And really when it comes down to it, none of that really fundamentally changes the tangible common equity that you'll get from the transaction. Uh, so, you know, the tangible common equity will be the same. What's going to change as we get closer to close is clearly the fair value marks that we're going to be looking at on the portfolio from a credit perspective or an interest rate or liquidity mark perspective, as well as the mix of PCD, purchase credit deteriorated, versus non-PCD loans and that mix and how we'll have to account for those. We're clearly going through all of that work right now. And as Brian talked about, we anticipate closing the transaction towards the end of the second quarter. And we'll be doing our calculations on fair value marks as of that date.

Thanks for taking my questions.

Sure.

Next question is from Brady Galley of KBW. Please go ahead. Hey, thanks. Good morning, guys.

Hi, Brady. When you look at some of the categories in your loan book that would be deemed higher risk, like energy, hotel, restaurant, healthcare, none of these exposures are big for First Horizon, which is good. But when you look at the riskier exposures, which categories are you most concerned about actually losing money as this current economic status continues?

Well, Brady, clearly we've stressed several portfolios more heavily as we've previously discussed. And, you know, the immediate impact to hospitality and restaurants was significant. And then within the healthcare sector, since all non-elective procedures and visits were put at bay, that's where we've seen the most requests for assistance, either in deferrals or liquidity lines. What we don't know, as we've talked about previously, is that the stimulus that's out there and the additional stimulus that is planned to be out there with another round of PPP, the Main Street Lending Program, some specific programs for healthcare, hospitals, it could end up being better than it looks right now because we've not seen an economic environment with this much stimulus. So even while we believe those portfolios are probably more at risk based on what's going on today, which is why we did stress some of those portfolios a little bit more heavily, really, as Brian says, the next 90 to 180 days, I think all of us will see what is the impact. And then the other thing that I've been thinking about as we think about managing those portfolios not just what happens during the shutdown, is what patterns of behavior change and how does that drive different things. So I think we will all have to kind of go through this together and see how we emerge from the COVID pandemic.

All right, that's helpful. And then, you know, First Horizon has been great at, you know, operating leverage and lowering its expense base and getting the efficiency ratio down. When you look at the company now, especially with what's going on with higher provision costs and the net interest margin coming in, is there opportunity to go back and look at the expense side even more to harvest some more savings at this point?

Hi, Brady. This is Brian. I appreciate the confidence and our ability to manage it. I think our team has done a very good job. And we saw it gets masked a little bit by FTN Financial, and we had in our expense base a $10 million roughly increase in our reserve for unfunded commitments. If you take those things out, we showed good credit, good expense leverage in the first quarter from fourth quarter and from a year ago. We will have a fair amount of work to do, and we think that there are opportunities to control some costs in the categories of known, unknown. It's not clear today of what our work footprint looks like. Today we have about 50% or more of our people who are working remotely. How do we have to space people out and some of those things? But we do think that there is operating leverage that we can get in the foreseeable future. The other thing that I pointed out when I commented about Iberia Bank, when we do that merger of equals, we still feel very strongly that we can get at least $170 million of cost savings out of that combination. And those are costs that neither one of us could get at if we weren't doing that merger. So in essence, we have a cost tailwind by completing that merger. that also allows us to restructure our entire combined cost base. So I think there is opportunity for leverage on the cost structure, but there's some things about the operating environment that we'll need another 90 days or so to figure out how it impacts us.

All right, and then lastly for me, BJ, when you're talking about the mortgage warehouse coming down $1.5 to $2 billion, you're talking about end-of-period balances, correct?

Correct. Yeah, yeah. So you saw, I think, on one of our slides, Brady, that literally in the last five days of the quarter, we saw loans to mortgage companies go up by about a billion two or a billion three. So huge, huge spike. And we actually show you the day-by-day chart from 1231 to 331 of what loans to mortgage companies did. So if you go back five weeks before the end of the quarter, it was almost $2 billion change over five weeks, so significant, significant run-up. We expect that to come back down in that $1.5 billion to $2 billion range from the period end, simply because on the purchase side, we've seen a significant backup in reduction in applications, as you might expect, because of the COVID pandemic and people just being very hesitant about on new purchases. And then even with refi, there's still activity out there, but a lot of it is just finishing what was already in process. And if you think about having to do a refi, there are appraisers that have to go into houses, there are title companies and closing attorneys that actually have to be able to finalize the paperwork. And with the stay-at-home orders and those types of things, it's made it much harder to actually get those things done. So, again, the combination of those two, we believe, you know, caused the spike at the end of the quarter, but correspondingly we think will cause a reduction of a somewhat equal amount by the end of the second quarter.

Hey, Brady, this is Brian. To add to BJ's Estimates vary, but it was something like 20% or so of the mortgage universe could benefit from these low rates in a refi environment. As BJ said, a lot of that started in the March timeframe, and we'll see the pull through. There are some structural issues that BJ mentioned to further refi. I think purchase volume, which is a little less than half today, continues to decline Depending on your outlook on the economy, unemployment rates are going to have an impact on ability to refi. We think that there's natural downward pressure on that. We talk about that portfolio and its impact on the capital ratios. As that portfolio shrinks, those capital ratios go up. One of the reasons that I don't worry in addition to the strength of the credit portfolio, about the CET1 ratio at a given point in time is if the economy gets bad and that capital is more of an important factor, that mortgage warehouse business is going to be probably a billion or a $2 billion portfolio. It's going to come down because the economy is bad. Those capital ratios go up in the neighborhood of 100 basis points if that happens. That portfolio will ebb and flow based on the economic environment and the impact of rates. We like that business. It is a business that has, as Susan said, a very strong customer base, and it has been very attractive to us from a financial perspective. So we're not worried about what that portfolio does. BJ is sort of pointing out that it's got a natural tendency down over the next couple of months. So as you're modeling that, Don't forecast it at almost $6 billion in outstanding. Got it. Thanks, guys.

Next question comes from Michael Rose of Raymond James. Please go ahead.

Hey, thanks, guys. So it looks like if I take those four categories that you outlined as kind of higher risk, it's about 15% of loans, ex-warehouse. Do you have a sense for what that looks like with Iberia included? I know their energy portfolio is about 5.5%, and you guys are about 3.5% pro forma. Do you have a sense for, A, what that would look like on a complexion basis, and then, B, would you look to maybe de-emphasize some of those portfolios or take a bigger mark potentially on those portfolios once you consummate the deal? Thanks.

I'll speak to a couple of the portfolios. As you mentioned, you're a Your energy comment was correct on a combined basis. On a commercial real estate, I'm just talking about commercial real estate overall. They do have a larger commercial real estate book as a percent of their portfolio than we do. So that will go up. But I do want to reiterate, we did significant due diligence on each other during the process before the merger was announced. The energy portfolio will go up somewhat. The equity portfolio will go up a little bit more. We do feel very good about the disciplined underwriting and client selection that both banks have employed and so feel like we'll be able to manage through that. I do think there probably is an expectation that over time as we are a bigger bank as an MOE that we would look for ways to continue to diversify the portfolio and clearly those could be areas where Over time, we would want to de-emphasize the growth there. We want to remain open for good customers once we get beyond this pandemic. But at the same time, that's another benefit of being a bigger organization is the ability to continue to diversify. So that's really how we're thinking about that. But again, pre-pandemic, looking at the portfolio, it's a very similar approach, very disciplined approach to initial underwriting, servicing, and client selection.

Okay, that's helpful. Maybe just one follow-up for me. If I look at the PPP program, just one or two questions there. I think if I combine both you and what Iberia announced last week, it's about $3.5 billion. How long would you expect those loans to stick around? And then when you do combine the company, do you expect to hold those loans as held for sale or held for investment? Because the way I understand it is if you hold it in held for investment, it'll impact the margin. But if you hold it as held for sale, the fees will go through –

Yeah, and that last question, I don't think we've fully decided yet on which one we're going to do, HFI or HFS, so we're still working through that. I think the terms are two years, but the forgivable portion is much shorter, so we would expect them to largely just stay on the balance sheet, maybe maybe through the balance of this year, uh, running down towards the end of, end of the year.

It's kind of a zero risk waiting to Michael. And, and I think we'll also step back and look at the liquidity facility that the fed has provided. It's because that, that looks like an attractive way to fund these. There's zero risk waiting, but as you point out, they're very low spread with a 1% coupon rate. And, and, uh, So we've been running, as I said in my transition to questions, we've been running really, really hard to get these loans underwritten, booked, and funded. And so now we'll catch our breath and we'll figure out how we finance them on the balance sheet. But we don't think it's a problem either way, either on the balance sheet or using the Fed facilities. And so we'll work through that over the next 30 days or so.

Yeah, and forgive me for stating the obvious, but what I'm obviously talking about is the what we just funded. If the government does re-up the program and comes on new, we'll have it going on further. But again, the way I understand it is the fees as well as the spread are included in the margin. So once we figure out exactly how that's going to flow through and when you recognize the fees, we'll certainly be transparent and disclose all of that.

Okay, very helpful. Thank you.

Thank you. Our next question comes from Tyler Stafford of Stevens. Please go ahead.

Hey, guys. Good morning.

Good morning, Tyler.

Hey, I apologize. I hopped on really late, so I'm sorry if you've already covered this, but I just had a question around the fixed income business this quarter. It looks like the revenues out of that segment were up around $14.5 million, but the expenses were up around $19 million. I know there's a footnote that said that the fees were impacted by trading losses given the extreme market volatility. So can you just I guess, help parse out for us what is going on, I guess, behind the curtain and drove the negative operating leverage this quarter and why that should move differently next quarter. Thanks.

Yeah. Hey, Tyler. It's BJ. Yeah. So what we clearly saw in the quarter was the rapid change and increase in volatility, which led to our higher market risk assets because of higher value at risk. So Mike Kisper and the team in fixed income did an excellent job working through our inventory and managing our exposures and marks over the last five weeks of the quarter. But as they were repositioning the inventory and having to take those marks, those trading losses day to day were coming through the revenue side, but the actual activity of the sales force was fully commissionable, if that makes sense. So though our ADR was net about $1.3 million in the quarter, if you take out the trading losses, the gross ADR was more in the $1.7 million range. But netting out those trading losses, it reduced the ADR, so your revenues looked lower with the higher commissionable comp on the other side. As they've worked through that inventory by the end of the quarter, it's very much better positioned such that going forward, we believe we're going to have much lower net trading losses and the gross ADR and the net ADR will be much more aligned and you'll see the normal pattern start to reemerge between our incremental revenue growth and any incremental variable comp growth.

Okay. This is Brian. We refer to them as negative splits. You've heard us say in the past we're in the moving business. We're not in the storage business. We move these portfolios through the balance sheet. And the significant dislocation that happened, particularly in the municipal bond marketplace, some of the corporate marketplaces, and the volatility that sort of erupted in the late March timeframe was largely stabilized by the efforts of the Fed that I mentioned earlier to bring liquidity and stability to the marketplace. So we think the majority of that sort of worked through the systems. And there were days in there with high volatility where we did a day, I think it was about $5 million in average daily revenue that netted down to about three with the negative splits. There was a lot of activity, and we think that the stability in the marketplace has largely put that behind us. We think it ought to move to more normalized levels, depending on how things play out, more normalized levels in the second quarter. The second quarter is off to a decent start.

Okay, thanks for that, Brian and BJ. So I guess if some of these more extreme market volatility issues and trading losses have been cured at this point, I mean, do you expect, you know, I guess going back to Brian, your last comment there, to cue to be more towards that gross 1.7 or the net 1.3 or somewhere in between, or what's your kind of near-term expectation or what you're seeing?

You'll have to forgive me on the 21st day of April. I'm not going to take the bait on that one. Average daily revenues have been good. There's a couple of things that could impact the business that I think we will keep our eye on. One is financial institutions, broadly speaking, are funding PPP loans, and a number of our customers do. until they can put loans into the Fed facility. That will constrain liquidity, so that could have some impact on the bond business. I think our total return business continues to look good. We're optimistic about the outlook for the quarter. As we started off, if 21 days or so is a trend, we're starting off in the same area we ended the first quarter in. We feel good about the outlook, but It's way too early in the quarter, and as I said, there's too many unknowns about the economy to know how this is going to play out over a 90-day period.

Sure. That's totally fair. Thanks, Brian. And then just one more for me on the mortgage warehouse business. How much of the mortgage clients or balances are to mortgage originators versus mortgage servicers?

It's almost exclusively mortgage originators. We have very few.

There's some of our customers that will service, but we don't really finance in that space. Our lending is against the originations.

Okay. Very helpful. That's it for me. Thanks, guys.

Thank you. Thanks, Don.

Our next question comes from Garrett Holland of Baird. Please go ahead.

Good morning. Thanks for taking the question. I appreciate all the detail, but could you help us understand the sensitivity in the reserve level and the potential reserve build if you weighted the CECL forecast more towards your downside economic assumptions versus the baseline employed for the current reserve level at 1.3?

Yeah, so let's see, to try to give you a sense of the magnitude, I think The pure downside model would probably be, I'm doing this, I've caught my head, about 70% more than what the baseline would be, 60% to 70% more. So, you know, I think we took that into account in terms of, A, our weightings of the baseline upside and downside, as well as what we talked about, particularly around the sectors where we thought they were most vulnerable to that downside and might not have as much support from the various stimulus programs or the Fed facilities that others might have. So we took all that into account using quantitative modeling, multiple discussions on qualitative modeling and overlays and feel comfortable about how we've looked at the aggregate reserve to this point.

Thanks, BJ. And then just to follow up on Iberia, obviously a lot has changed on the macro front since you announced the deal and heard the reiteration of the cost savings projections. Do you still feel good about the timeframe for realizing those benefits and maybe some of the pro forma profitability metrics?

Yeah, this is Brian. So if I take it in reverse order, you tell me what the economy is going to be at the end of 2021, and I can tell you better about the pro forma profitability metrics. But I think over time, yes, I feel very good about our ability to get to the pro forma profitability metrics. I think by 2021, We have forecasted about 75% of the cost saves in 2021 and being at the run rate by the end of 2021. I still feel good about that and our ability to achieve that. It'll be interesting to see how the first year plays out. We may be a little shy in year one simply because of all of the needs to support PPP and the the market that we're in, but we think by the time we get to the end of the year, even then, we will be at our 25% cost reduction level in 2020. So we still feel good about it. We still feel good about our ability to hit the pro forma profitability numbers. We're not sure that 2021 will be or 2022 will be back to 100% economy, but given that it is, we feel good about our pro formas.

That's helpful. And then just wanted to ask a quick one about the dividend payout here. Obviously, capital levels are solid, but wanted to confirm how you're thinking about that claim on capital. Thank you for taking the questions.

Yeah, sure. So, you know, we think that returning capital to our shareholders is important, and BJ pointed out on several slides in the deck and in the the appendix on our stress testing. In our stress testing through the most severe adverse scenarios, we assumed that we continued with the dividend at current levels. That's our working assumption, that we continue to manage the dividend at current levels. We believe that capital adequacy is sufficient in pre-tax, pre-provision earnings. even net of provisions will be adequate to clearly support the return of capital to our shareholders.

Thanks, Brian. Appreciate it.

You're welcome. Again, if you have a question, please press star then one. Our next question comes from Jennifer Demba of SunTrust. Please go ahead. Thank you.

Good morning. Hi. Brian, what do you think the long-term implications of this pandemic shutdown are going to be on First Horizon, whether it be less need for office space or other implications?

Yeah, we've spent a good bit of time talking about that, and we think there are a number of things, you know, operationally, office space, and in the short run, how you clean office spaces and things of that nature, how you protect customers that come in your financial centers. It's interesting. I'm doing this off the top of my head. All of our financial centers are open. Most of the activity is happening in a drive-through facility. Our transactions are down, but we're doing all of it through drive-through facilities. And In some ways, you almost have to smile because we're using old technology to serve customers, a drive-up facility. Clearly, customers are using call centers. They're using online technology. I do think that we'll have to figure out how we cope with social distancing. If you believe the epidemiologists for a year or two, maybe longer, I think people have gotten much more comfortable, and we're much more comfortable in our ability to work remotely. we've done the vast majority of the PPP work on a remote basis. I think we'll have more people working remotely. We will probably need less office space and centralized facility within those spaces. We will probably spread people out more. I think customers over time will do less business in financial centers because they've gotten closer to technology and using the tools that are available to them. So I think it is a opportunity to really rethink how we do business. And that's one of the things that as we plan for the integration of the merger of equals with Iberia Bank is we think about how does this change our business long term. And as we make our systems and process decisions, let's think about what this educates us about customers and customer preference and the likelihood of doing business. So I think more remote banking. spread out more, more social distancing and using more technology to serve customers in unique and different ways.

Thank you.

You're welcome.

This concludes our question and answer session. I'd like to turn the conference back over to CEO, Mr. Brian Jordan, for any closing remarks. Please go ahead.

Thank you, Nick. Thank you all for taking time to join us this morning. Please let us know if you have any further questions or you need any additional information. Most importantly in this environment, stay safe and stay healthy. Thank you again. Have a great day.

This conference is now concluded. Thank you for attending today's presentation. You may now disconnect.