Earnings Labs

Customers Bancorp, Inc. (CUBI)

Q4 2014 Earnings Call· Wed, Jan 28, 2015

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Transcript

Operator

Operator

Good day and welcome to the Customers Bancorp Fourth Quarter and Full Year 2014 Earnings Call. Today's conference is being recorded. At this time, I would like to turn the conference over to Mr. Ted Haberfield, President MZ North America Customers Bancorp's Investor Relations firm. Please go ahead, sir.

Ted Haberfield

President

Thank you and good morning everyone. Customers Bancorp's fourth quarter 2014 earnings release was issued yesterday just after the market closed and is also posted on the company's website at customersbank.com. Representing the company today are Jay Sidhu, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer and Bob Wahlman, Chief Financial Officer. Before we begin we would like to remind you that some of the statements we make today may be considered forward-looking. These forward looking statements are subject to a number of risks and uncertainties that could cause our actual performance results to differ materially including the risk of the results of 2014 results that are different than currently anticipated. Please note that these forward-looking statements speak only as of the date of this presentation and we undertake no obligation to update these forward-looking statements in light of new information on future events except to the extent required by applicable securities laws. Please refer to our SEC filings including our report on Form 10-K for the period ended December 31, 2014 to be filed with the SEC for more detailed description of risk factors that may affect our results. Copies may be obtained from the SEC or by visiting the Investor Relations section of our website. I would also like to remind our attendees that we have an updated PowerPoint on the Investor Relations website under news and market information. At this time, it is my pleasure to introduce Customers Bancorp's CEO, Jay Sidhu. Jay?

Jay Sidhu

Chairman

Thank you very much Ted, and good morning ladies and gentlemen. I too want to welcome you to this fourth quarter and 2014 call. As you know, 2014 was terrific year for us and we are very pleased to share with you the level and the trend of earnings and discuss with you a little bit about our thoughts and our opinion going forward. Customers reported 2014 net income up for 32% over 2013. Our fully diluted EPS for 2014 was 155 per share compared to 130 fully diluted EPS for 2013 and an increase of 19.2%. Our Q4 net income was up 46.2% over Q4 2013 and 13% over Q3 2014. And our fully diluted EPS for Q4 2014 was $0.47 compared to $0.32 in Q4 2013 and $0.42 in Q3 2014. We continue to execute on our single point of contact or a high touch model. And as a result we generated very strong loan and deposit growth in 2014. We added six commercial banking teams during 2014 including national small business administration team that we recruited from a major bank in New York City. And that lays the foundation for continued strong C&I growth as well as other areas in 2015. And we also expect a stronger total deposit growth in 2015 as a result of recruiting all these teams. We support our loan and profitability growth. We supported that in 2014 with also continuing to raise some capital. We raised 135 million of holding company capital and some bank debt in 2014 as you know that had some negative effect on our margin. But we believe that was an effective utilization and allocation of capital. So that as a result of our growth in earnings, and effectively managing capital we were able to achieve a 12%…

Bob Wahlman

Chief Financial Officer

Thank you, Jay and good morning everyone. And thank you for calling into our earnings call this morning. As Jay mentioned, Customers net income for 2014 up $43.2 million compared to $32.7 million for 2013, an increase of $10.5 million or 32%. 2014 was the fifth consecutive year of increase in core net income. 2014 EPS was $1.55 compared to 2013 EPS of a $1.30, an increase of $0.25 per share or 19%. For the fourth quarter of 2014, Customers is reporting net income of $13.2 million compared to $9 million for Q4 2013 an increase of $4.2 million or 46%. Linked quarters earnings of $13.2 million were up $1.5 million or 13%. Q4 2014 earnings per share was $0.47 compared to $0.32 in Q4 2013 and $0.42 in Q3 2014. 2014 was a record setting year for Customers at many different respects. That is not surprising considering that just five years ago, Customers had total loans of $180 million and total assets of approximately $250 million. Today, Customers has total loans of $5.8 billion and total assets of $6.8 billion. Most all of the growth for Customers has been organic. Key financial records set by Customers in 2014 include a net income of $43.2 million up 32% from last year. Total assets of $6.8 billion up 64% from last year. Total loans of $5.7 billion up 79%. Deposits of $4.5 billion up 55% year-over-year. Net interest income of $146 million up 48%. Non-performing loans down to $11.7 million were down 39%. Our non-performing asset to total asset including the FDIC loans and OREO was 40 basis points. Excluding the FDIC number as they had noted it was 19 basis points. Our reserves to MPLs including the FDIC covered loans is 290% and excluding the FDIC covered loans is 425%.…

Jay Sidhu

Chairman

Thank you very much Bob. I will take a few minutes now before we open it up for Q&A to just share with you a little bit about our model for shareholder value creation. We look at three things. One is consistency of growth rate and earnings, return on equity and intangible book value accretion as a driver's for our shareholder value creation. How we execute that is, number one, by building a very high credit quality loan portfolio. By marketing to what we believe to be high quality borrowers and because they are higher quality borrowers, they expect us to charge a little bit less interest rates than you would expect other banks to show as their average yields. And then number two, we expect to fund those loans which are held for investment on our balance sheet with stable core deposits and because we don't believe that the future is all based upon bank branches, so we expect to have average deposits in excess of 200 million per bank branch. And in lieu of paying rent to landlords, we would rather pay a little bit more for core deposits to our customers and attract core depositors and non-interest bearing demand depositors and then vow them with service which will also leads us to our extension of our strategy, which I will talk a little bit about later on which is the BankMobile strategy. Number three, element of execution of our strategy is operating our business at a significantly lower cost. Would this branch like a strategy and then having something what we call single point of contact or high touch strategy for the customer which is supported by hi-tech and by hi-tech we mean very good management information systems and customer management systems as well as profitability system…

Operator

Operator

Thank you. [Operator Instructions] And we'll take our first question from Bob Ramsey with FBR Capital Markets.

Bob Ramsey

Analyst · FBR Capital Markets

Hey. Good morning, guys. I wanted to talk first of all. I had a couple of quick questions on credit. Do you have the $1 amount of net charge-offs in the fourth quarter?

Jay Sidhu

Chairman

Yeah, Bob’s just looking for that. All net charge-offs were recovered loans, Bob, while he is looking for that, there were here in the covered loans or in the legacy portfolio and we’ve had no net charge-offs at all in our any loans that we made over the last five years.

Bob Wahlman

Chief Financial Officer

Bob, I have the total charge-off year to date, I have to compare to the third quarter, which I don’t have it on my finger tips. But it was $2.1 million. Yes, $2.1 million was the total charge-offs for the year and if you compare that to the third quarter information, that's included in the investor materials, it's in there.

Bob Ramsey

Analyst · FBR Capital Markets

Perfect. I can fact that out and get there, that's great. And then as I think about provisioning on a go-forward basis, it looks like this quarter you all provisioned about $2.5 million for what about $200 million worth of loan growth, which is a little bit north of 1% maybe 1.25. That seems high, given your loan mix to me. I’m just curious if that’s a good run rate for provisioning or how we should think about the level of provisioning in 2015 relative to your growth expectations?

Jay Sidhu

Chairman

I think as Bob Wahlman mentioned provisions in 2015 was probably going to be less than even the fourth quarter level.

Bob Wahlman

Chief Financial Officer

I think the information that’s in the -- that we disclose each period, Bob in the 10-Q that discusses our commercial and CRE growth. We reserve about 75 bases point. For multifamily growth we'll growth, we will reserve an additional 40 basis points gets us out to our weighted average maybe about 60 to 70 bases point and this quarter there was a little bit of other charges relating to asset changed valuations that pushed that total number up.

Bob Ramsey

Analyst · FBR Capital Markets

Okay. Great. That’s helpful then. I guess sort of shifting gears to expenses I know you've highlighted this quarter had some unusual items related to OREO charges or litigation or what not. I know you gave good guidance around next year too. How should we just think about the trajectory of expenses through next year? Are you flattish or may be down a little bit in the first quarter given some of those item maybe don't recur or is it a pretty steady build to the year or how are you thinking about that trajectory?

Jay Sidhu

Chairman

While Bob is looking for that, I think the first quarter expenses should be little less than the fourth quarter.

Bob Wahlman

Chief Financial Officer

Yes, that’s exactly right. It were little bit less builds up a little bit through the year. It runs a little bit less in the first quarter and the rest of the year we expect to run about same level.

Bob Ramsey

Analyst · FBR Capital Markets

Okay. Great. Perfect. And last question and I'll hop on out, but I know you all highlighted that the margin benefited a little bit from the multifamily loan sale and the loans were lower yielding than maybe the portfolio overall. Just curious if you could share with us were these newly originated loans, were they more seasoned loans or what was the yield on the loans that were sold in the quarter?

Bob Wahlman

Chief Financial Officer

The yields on the loans that were sold was about 3% and 3.4%, 3.3% to 3.4% and the new loans that we're putting on right now are at 3.5%. They range between 3% and you know 3% and 3.8% to 3.75% overall. So that’s why that helped us to increase our margin by one to two basis points just from that action.

Bob Ramsey

Analyst · FBR Capital Markets

Great. That’s sound good. Thank you. I'll hop out.

Bob Wahlman

Chief Financial Officer

If I could real quickly, the charge-off in the fourth quarter was $1.4 million.

Bob Ramsey

Analyst · FBR Capital Markets

Okay. Perfect. Thank you.

Operator

Operator

We’ll take our next question from Chris McGratty with KBW.

Jay Sidhu

Chairman

Hi Chris.

Unidentified Analyst

Analyst · KBW

It's Mike jumping in for Chris.

Jay Sidhu

Chairman

Hi Mike.

Unidentified Analyst

Analyst · KBW

Good morning, Jay I thought maybe we could spend a minute on capital. When I look your last common equity ratio, I think it was, maybe coming up on a couple of years ago. Your growth outlook looks very strong but the multiple intangible book value wasn't that different. When we fast-forward to today, is it solely valuation that's kind of keeping you guys on the sidelines on the capital ratio perspective, or is it a combination of that, the growth outlook, maybe just not looking as profitable as it was in the past and the headwinds of Durban?

Jay Sidhu

Chairman

Mike, let me say it again. We will not issue common equity and we have no plans to issue common equity at all in 2015. Why, number one, we issued last common equity in May of 2013, we were still a private company at that time. It was done just prior to listing on NASDAQ. We have not increased our tangible book value as a result of common equity above book. We had a strategy to achieve certain scales. We wanted to take our mortgage warehouse business to less than 20% of our business. We wanted to build our multi-family business, we wanted to recruit teams, we wanted to open an office in Boston and in Greater New York we wanted to add teams over there, we wanted to see our C&I business become a bigger percentage of our business than our commercial loans to mortgage companies because there is some volatility in that business. We wanted to build a core franchise value. And we made public that you should expect our assets to be above 6.5 billion by the end of 2014. And that was made public by us in 2013. If you look at our Investor Day, that's what it will say. That's exactly what we done Mike. So there has been a little bit of a confusion in the marketplace about our desires for capital allocation and our capital allocations strategy is 12% return on equity. And that should be done without taking interest rate risk. And that should be achieved with solid asset quality. And at the same time, we should be building relationship oriented core franchise because that is the way we see that shareholder value being created. So, that's why we supplemented our equity capital raise in 2013 with some debt capital. In 2014, and we will probably supplement some of that with somewhere between 25 million to 50 million of possibly that much of perpetual preferred in some time in 2015. And that will in our forecast of constrained growth will actually get us to earning above 12% return on equity once we get to that 1% return on asset range. And you can see it will become a very high performing bank and the value creation is all going to be subject to execution. And so we are laser focused on execution and we believe that we can return a well an excess of 25% average annual compounded shareholder value over the next few years for our shareholders as just as a result of sticking with this.

Unidentified Analyst

Analyst · KBW

Okay. Maybe just a follow asking it a little differently, the - are you at all concerned or maybe concern is too strong word, but selling some of your originations would have maybe not a negative but hinder your commercial franchises growth or are you still confident that you can maintain those relationships in your balance sheet strategy.

Jay Sidhu

Chairman

Mike in our model we have assumed zero sales and zero gain on sales to be honest with you in the guidance that you’ve given to the street. So, Bob mentioned - because this is our core business is making sure that we build a core franchise. We do not expect. We communicate with every single customer if whose loan is put in the package by us for sale to other banks. And some of these banks who are buying our products are by-rated banks by you. So these are high quality banks and we've now had interest also from REITs to buy our multi-family origination. So, we will originate the high quality customer relationships and based upon the relationships that we have with customers, we will always serve them. And we expect that's why to show between 500 million to 600 million of multi-family growth on our balance sheet this year. And if any of our customers ever have a problem with our selling it to someone else, we would just not sell. That's why it’s a core opportunistic strategy on our part. And it is not as one of your other analyst from another firm said, he called it an adventure by us. He is dead wrong, this is – you’re raising a very important point, we will not sell if it negatively impacts our franchise.

Unidentified Analyst

Analyst · KBW

Okay. Thank you, I appreciate that. And then Bob just one quick one on the margin guidance, the stable for 2015. If we assume rates aren't going to move any time in the next or so, are you expecting some modest compression or will the selling of some of the multi-family lower yielding production really offset anything near term that could put downward pressure on the margin?

Bob Wahlman

Chief Financial Officer

I think Jay, further the margin guidance that I talked about, and that we do expected to be around the range of 288, 275, or 280 plus or minus. And we expected to be disciplined in our pricing. We’ve done a terrific job I think over the past year in terms of demonstrating our ability to generate loans. And we think that we can maintained our portfolio and obtain our growth objective without compromising on yields for 2015.

Analyst

Analyst · KBW

All right. Thanks guys. Appreciate it.

Bob Wahlman

Chief Financial Officer

Thank you, Mike.

Operator

Operator

We’ll take our next question from Steve Emerson with Emerson Investment Group.

Steve Emerson

Analyst · Emerson Investment Group

First of all, congratulations on yet another great quarter and great mix rates.

Jay Sidhu

Chairman

Thank you, Steve.

Steve Emerson

Analyst · Emerson Investment Group

Could you update us on the Religare, your Indian investment situation and what your current objectives are for possibly liquidating this $25 million investment which would allow faster loan growth?

Jay Sidhu

Chairman

Sure, Steve, I’m glad you brought that up. First of all let me admit that in retrospect investing in Religare was a mistake on our part, because things have not worked out the way we expected them to work out. Our investment in Religare is today still at about a same value as what we book it at. We did some diligence during the fourth quarter on the state of the banking industry, as well as on strategic partnership to build the deeper relationship with some higher royalty in families of Indian origin as well as companies who are doing business with India. And the bottom line is that by the end of September we – if there is no banking license granted to Religare Enterprises we expect to by end of 2015 to get out of this investment. It’s like as I said, it was a mistake and we take full responsibility for that. And so either you will see a nice gain on this or you see us get our cash back.

Steve Emerson

Analyst · Emerson Investment Group

Excellent. And I don’t know if you discuss this. But what are realistic options for raising preferred or debt monies for year, what room do you realistically have?

Jay Sidhu

Chairman

If I understand your question correct I think is what kind of debt we might raise this year, is that Steven or may I misunderstood?

Steve Emerson

Analyst · Emerson Investment Group

What type of room do you have?

Jay Sidhu

Chairman

I think we mentioned – I think I mentioned just now, just a few minutes ago Steve that we think if we do raise its going to be perpetual preferred Tier 1 qualifying at the holding company that are to improve our Tier 1 ratios at the holding company and the bank and that in essence also raises and improve our cushion for risk based capital. And we believe if we do raise some this year it’s going to be in the $25 million to $50 million range.

Steve Emerson

Analyst · Emerson Investment Group

Thank you very much.

Operator

Operator

We’ll take our next question from Frank Schiraldi with Sandler O'Neill.

Frank Schiraldi

Analyst · Sandler O'Neill

Good morning. Thanks. Just a few questions, first on the margin, you talk certainly a lot about a flattish NIM going forward, I wonder if that has baked into it some expectation of prepayment penalty income picking up next year as – or this year I should say as the multifamily portfolio has seasoned a bit?

Jay Sidhu

Chairman

I think it bound to happen, Frank, but we did not bake in any significant increases or any significant amount. In fact in our model we assume zero prepayment penalties in 2015. But we’ve already received some in January, it’s bound to be. So we are just being conservative because what’s happening Frank is that certainly banks are waken up and saying, ops, we got to increase our running assets and how do we do that is? We got to make loans. You know they haven’t made any done loans over the last couple of year. So we are seeing some stupid thing from some stupid competitors. That should not to be happening. And we are being very discipline. So we are going to stick with the strong credit quality. So we made some assumptions that there might be, you know, we would rather give up a little bit on the pricing but we will never give up on the structure. So that is what we’ve modeled in to see and why we are not seeing continued increased in our margin, but we would rather have modest expectations and margins have a modest expectation on any gains and sale of loans and those kind of things and if all that happens that should be icing on the cake.

Frank Schiraldi

Analyst · Sandler O'Neill

Okay. Jay, I hope I heard you correctly that the prepayment in penalty income you’ve seen so far was in January, so there is nothing in the 4Q margin associated with loans income?

Jay Sidhu

Chairman

No, no, no, no. There were some prepayment penalties given in fourth Q, but Frank as our portfolio matures and based upon experiences you’ve seen from others, you ought to see prepayment penalties actually accelerate going forward. You know although we have not factored any those and because it’s almost impossible to predict those.

Frank Schiraldi

Analyst · Sandler O'Neill

Sure. Just for modeling purposes, do you have the impact in 4Q from prepayment penalty income?

Jay Sidhu

Chairman

That was about three basis points.

Frank Schiraldi

Analyst · Sandler O'Neill

Got you. Okay. Great. And then secondly, just wondering on the BankMobile front. The new accounts you talked about, does that reflect customers associated with Higher One deposits or other customers of the bank or those totally new customers to customers - those Bank Corp?

Jay Sidhu

Chairman

Totally new customers. And these are all believe or not their average age into 35 to 40, which surprises that, you know, like as you know, you will say, we would expecting them to be millennial's and maybe that's because we haven’t done any marketing. This is only been in the business press. So far our real marketing is going to start in March and reaching out to the consumers and everything else. And as far as our student checking accounts are concerned we are going to be targeting the 125,000 to 150,000 who are graduating in May. We will be targeting on them at that time.

Frank Schiraldi

Analyst · Sandler O'Neill

Okay. So in terms of like Higher One customers where deposits are obviously housed at customer’s bank, it’s more of a as a graduate, you hopefully you can entice them to come over to BankMobile?

Jay Sidhu

Chairman

Yes.

Frank Schiraldi

Analyst · Sandler O'Neill

Okay.

Jay Sidhu

Chairman

But let me clarify little bit Frank, even you and we have to take the responsibility of creating any confusion on when you say Higher One customer. They are not Higher One customers. They are our customers. And we own them. And so we – they bank with us. We use Higher One disbursement system to reach them. And we sell them our checking account product to digital means and over to the internet and so that’s essentially how it is. So our objective is to continue to put our brands in front of them. Now it will be the BankMobile brand in front of them rather than customers bank brand. But all these customers, student customers of ours and I want to correct the analysts who called them broker deposits. They are not broker deposits. All these customers can walk into a bank branch of customer’s bank and do business. They get free access to ATMs of all customers bank branches. They are checking account customers. So that’s why Frank it to be very interesting once we are able to convert them from a student checking account of customers bank to a BankMobile offering of customers bank and that will start in the month of in the second quarter of 2015.

Frank Schiraldi

Analyst · Sandler O'Neill

Okay. But I just wanted to clarify on as getting there as getting the student loan reimbursements, right on a customer’s checking account, or in a customers checking account. You don’t expect to convert them over to BankMobile deposits until after they graduate.

Jay Sidhu

Chairman

Absolutely, correct.

Frank Schiraldi

Analyst · Sandler O'Neill

Okay.

Jay Sidhu

Chairman

BankMobile is for people who have a pay check coming and these students don’t have a paycheck coming. BankMobile has an average balance of $1000 plus assumption because of that in our model and there are student checking account customers have a $255 average balance. So that’s why we can’t offer them a BankMobile.

Frank Schiraldi

Analyst · Sandler O'Neill

Sure, okay. And then Bob just on the $1.2 million split between legal settlement and incentive true up, is that mostly incentive true up and could you share is the legal settlement related to CMS Bancorp?

Jay Sidhu

Chairman

I’ll take that because I was involved in that legal settlement directly. And a majority of that is really they exited to about $700 million, $700,000 is related to a legal settlement and the rest is related to the incentive and but as a part of the legal settlement you know we cannot disclose to you the details of that legal settlement. I’m sorry Frank, hope you understand it.

Frank Schiraldi

Analyst · Sandler O'Neill

Sure. And then just finally on Religare, so I’m not totally familiar with the liquidity of that investment, but is that going to be an issue as you maybe look to exit in 2015?

Jay Sidhu

Chairman

No it shouldn’t be.

Frank Schiraldi

Analyst · Sandler O'Neill

Okay. All right that’s all I have. Thank you.

Jay Sidhu

Chairman

Thank you, Frank.

Operator

Operator

And we'll take our next question from Kevin Mirise with Satuit Funds.

Kevin Mirise

Analyst · Satuit Funds

Coming to the topic of the uncertainty or the skepticism of some analysts or investors around the potential of a capital raise overhang, another aspect on which you’ve been very specific in the past is that you would not do an equity raise below the kind of I think you’ve said 1.6 to 1.8 type range on tangible book. So you have said you have no current plans for an equity raise this year but if the multiple got a little more call it respect and recognition for your performance metrics is there an update on that you would offer on that trading multiple to tangible where you would be more likely to take advantage of raising some equity?

Jay Sidhu

Chairman

I think you can never root say never but right now we have no plans to issue common equity because as Bob mentioned the seven that we are talking about moderating our asset growth in the 10% to 15% range or loan growth in the 10% to 15% range or deposit growth greater than 10% to 15% range for using our borrowing, improving our relationship with our clients, improving our profitability and allocating our capital in a way that improves our core return on equity, so that’s what we are very focused. And so I think you should stick with it what we have given to you and what we have said is do not expect us to do any equity raise in 2015 and perhaps even beyond that.

Kevin Mirise

Analyst · Satuit Funds

I guess maybe one other aspect of it. It sounds like you didn’t want to step up to a range, but in my mind I guess I’m thinking you know only a very attractive acquisition would you know something like that would warrant a raise at least anyway in your words trading, I don’t know if you would step up and offer any color on that either.

Jay Sidhu

Chairman

At the present multiple acquisitions are out of question for us and we will not do any, because people are making some crazy offerings of prices and they are looking at four to five year tangible book value on that and our discipline is very clear. If we cannot, if we do any acquisitions at any time we cannot even do acquisitions right now I’d say let me just be very straightforward about it that because of a multiple of our world class you know we still are not done with our CRE exam. And so once we are done with those we might look at acquisitions, but with our multiple where it is right now, it would be crazy for us to do that. If we do any acquisitions we would only do them if the book value dilution and that’s going to be overcome with earnings from that target within a year or two, otherwise organic growth is beautiful. We love it, we would rather acquire teams than buy bearings with legacy columns.

Kevin Mirise

Analyst · Satuit Funds

I appreciate that. The one small modeling data points at a BankMobile marketing launch you mentioned starting in March what kind of range of expenses should we expect to see this year associated with ramping that platform or traction of it.

Jay Sidhu

Chairman

We’ve given the guidance of $5 million to $6 million. We’ve spent about $1 million in the latter part of the third quarter and mostly in the fourth quarter and we expect to spend about $5 million which we’ve already baked in the guidance that we’ve given to the Street this year.

Kevin Mirise

Analyst · Satuit Funds

Okay. Thanks. That’s it for me for now.

Operator

Operator

And we’ll take our next question from Matthew Kelly with Sterne Agee.

Matthew Kelly

Analyst · Sterne Agee

Question just on your thoughts around how you are planning to fund you know the operation from a deposit perspective. I’m wondering if you can give us a sense just during the fourth quarter the cost and the composition of looks like you added about $250 million in deposits in the fourth quarter. What was that? And then for the year ahead, your guidance basically suggests adding $500 million to $600 million of that of loans, how would you envision these deposit composition to support that looking right?

Jay Sidhu

Chairman

Yeah, good question, Matt. Matt we expect like I just said we expect our loans to grow somewhere in the 10% to 15% range. Based upon our strategies we expect to grow our deposits by about 20% to 25% range. Our average cost of deposits could be added onto our balance sheet, to our total deposits in the fourth quarter were in the 55 basis points range. They included $200 million increase in non-interest bearing or $150 million to $200 million increase in non-interest bearing deposits. There is seasonality to our non-interest bearing deposits. So we are looking at about $250 million to $300 million increase in non-interest bearing deposits in 2015. So I think our focus is on core CNI growth, continue to grow our business deposit, that’s the biggest source of our deposits. BankMobile is going to help us with our deposit growth, but it’s not being used by us for deposit growth, it’s being used by us to develop relationships with millennials and under bank and as well as middle income Americans we are assuming only a $1,200 average balance in deposits in the BankMobile and the majority of the income for BankMobile is going to be through the interchange income because we will take advantage of being below $10 billion as a bank. And we expect BankMobile not to be profitable for two to three years. So it’s not going to be a major contributor but it’s going to be a major value enhancer for our franchise as such. In terms of Matt, just one other thing which I think your question is making me think, by the end of 2015 we expect to convert our office, our loan production offices into deposit gathering offices also because that makes it easier for us to then to gather some deposits. So the Philadelphia, LPO, the Melville Long Island LPO, the Manhattan LPO, the City of Boston LPO and the Providence LPOs they may all become deposit gathering branches also by the end of 2015.

Matthew Kelly

Analyst · Sterne Agee

Got it. And then just to clear the air on the higher one deposits, what is that balance and to be clear you know the FDIC fees did have some recent guidance on what does constitute real good and your interpretation of the higher one deposit that you hold leaves you to believe that those are not brokered, is that what I’m hearing?

Jay Sidhu

Chairman

They are definitely not brokered. And they are about 250 million of non-interest bearing DDAs. There are 1.1 million students. So that’s why I say that they are about $250 a little over that average balance. There is the seasonality to that math. They go up to about $350 million you know after the – in the beginning of this year and of the student academic year and they go down to about 220 million, 200 million at the end of the semester. Now our strategy is that we are also going to be going after the graduate students through our BankMobile and our net staff who are working and have an income coming. So we expect that truly our deposit gathering to get better from the student segment. But I will correct that, please don’t call these brokered because that’s a materially misstatement and Matt please don't call our mortgage warehouse business and our multi-family sales as an adventure by our bank.

Matthew Kelly

Analyst · Sterne Agee

Sure. We can take that also we can go ahead to follow up with that. I will say though that, I would like to get your commentary at September 30, just right from your call report, 28% of your deposits were classified as broker, your classification on there. Over the next year or two, as you grow loans at 10% to 15%, do you think that’s the high watermark for the percentage of broker and we'll see that come down or will that drift a little higher overtime?

Jay Sidhu

Chairman

I think it will come down. No question about it. Sometimes Matt what happens, as we are lengthening our deposits, as we are lengthening our liabilities, it is easier for us to do with through broker deposits than to do with core deposits. So we got to look at our deposit system inline and align it with our risk management strategies because interest rate risk management to us is very, very important and its very difficult to manage, to lengthen the liabilities of consumer or business core deposits.

Bob Wahlman

Chief Financial Officer

If I could add just real quickly Matt that the strategy that Jay laid out, we are limiting the loan growth or the asset growth 10% to 15%, that doesn’t mean we are limiting the deposit growth. We do look to grow deposit significantly at a greater rate and its that growth and deposits relative to those assets that will result in running down this dependency the broker deposits and warehouse funding over a period of time.

Matthew Kelly

Analyst · Sterne Agee

Okay. Got it. One other question, you brought Jay transitioning all those offices but I think we’re originally intended for mortgage banking, Phili, Melville, and Boston provenance, have you started that transition of hiring the people who are more geared towards collecting deposits. I assume all the people in the mortgage banking side which I believe you, that's been shut down, you have the space and unit transition move, if you could tell us when you think you will be able to speed on that?

Bob Wahlman

Chief Financial Officer

Right now all our LPOs are small business lending LPOs, and what we call private to commercial banking. The Melville LPO is where we are operating out of the Melville Long Island, that's where we are operating our SBA lending team model. The Philadelphia LPO we also have a CRE related mortgage loans, single family mortgage loan operations out of that. And in other areas of Pennsylvania and New Jersey we are doing CRE mortgage lending. But just to clarify we are not, we are completely out of mortgage banking other than CRE oriented loans and accommodation loans for our existing customers. And so we will only recruit deposit gatherers for Boston, Melville, Manhattan and Philadelphia once we get as already from the Federal Reserve to convert those LPOs into deposit gathering. So right now we are only gathering deposits out of our branch offices and those are where we have a legal authority to generate deposits.

Matthew Kelly

Analyst · Sterne Agee

Okay. All right. Thank you.

Operator

Operator

And we currently have no further questions in the queue.

Jay Sidhu

Chairman

Thank you very much ladies and gentlemen. And if you have any questions please give us a call anytime or email us. And thank you again for joining our call.