Good day, and welcome to Hope Bancorp’s 2020 Second Quarter Earnings Conference Call. All participants will be in listen-only mode. [Operator Instructions] After today’s presentation, there will be an opportunity to ask questions. [Operator Instructions] Please note, this event is being recorded. I would now like to turn the conference over to Angie Yang, Director of Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Thank you, Andrew. Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining us for the Hope Bancorp 2020 second quarter investor conference call. As usual, we will begin – we will be using a slide presentation to accompany our discussion this morning. If you have not done so already, please visit the Presentations page of our Investor Relations website to download a copy of the presentation; or if you are listening in through the webcast, you should be able to view the slides from your computer screen as we progress through the presentation. Beginning on Slide 2, I’d like to begin with a brief statement regarding forward-looking remarks. The call today may contain forward-looking projections regarding the future financial performance of the company and future events. These statements are based on current expectations, estimates, forecasts, projections and management assumptions about the future performance of the company, including any impact as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic as well as the businesses and markets in which the company does and is expected to operate. These statements constitute forward-looking statements within the meaning of the U.S. Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. These statements are not guarantees of future performance. Actual outcomes and results may differ materially from what is expressed or forecasted in such forward-looking statements. We refer you to the documents the company files periodically with the SEC as well as the safe harbor statements in our press release issued yesterday. Hope Bancorp assumes no obligation to revise any forward-looking projections that may be made on today’s call. The company cautions that the complete financial results to be included in the quarterly report on Form 10-Q for the quarter ended June 30, 2020, could differ materially from the financial results being reported today. In addition, some of the information referenced on this call today are non-GAAP financial measures. Please refer to our 2020 second quarter earnings release for the reconciliation of GAAP to non-GAAP financial measures. Now we have allotted one hour for this call. Presenting from the management’s side today will be Kevin Kim, Hope Bancorp’s Chairman, President and CEO; and Alex Ko, our Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer. Chief Credit Officer, Peter Koh, is also here with us today and will be available for the Q&A session. With that, let me turn the call over to Kevin Kim. Kevin?

Thank you, Angie. Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining us today. Let’s begin with Slide 3 with a brief overview of our financial results. We executed well despite the continuing challenges presented by the COVID-19 pandemic and delivered a solid quarter of earnings, driven by significant balance sheet growth and disciplined expense control. We generated net income of $26.8 million or $0.22 per diluted share in the second quarter, up from $26 million or $0.21 per diluted share in the preceding first quarter. To some extent, the environment created by the pandemic has accelerated our progress on a number of the longer-term strategic initiatives that we have in place to enhance our profitability and franchise value. First, we are more effectively leveraging our cost structure with the solid balance sheet growth we were able to generate, while maintaining disciplined expense control. Our non-interest expense to average assets ratio improved to 1.60% in the second quarter from 1.87% in the preceding first quarter. Next, during the second quarter, we made significant progress with our deposit initiatives and had very strong inflows of core deposits, which has enabled us to continue improving our deposit mix. Our total deposits increased 10% from the end of the prior quarter, with the vast majority of that growth coming in non-interest-bearing deposits. As a result, non-interest-bearing deposits increased to 28.6% of total deposits at June 30, up from 24.7% a year earlier. Over the same time period, our time deposits have decreased from 46.7% to 35.1% of total deposits. The improved deposit mix combined with our ability to pass-through rate cuts to our deposit customers helped to reduce our cost of deposits to 87 basis points in the second quarter, a decline of 47 basis points from the preceding quarter. Moving on to Slide…

Thank you, Kevin. Beginning with Slide 8, I will start with our net interest income, which totaled $109.8 million. This compares with $119.3 million in the preceding first quarter, which included $5.6 million in purchase accounting discount accretion due to a large payoff on acquired loans. While we had an increase in average loans and earnings assets, this was more than offset by a decline in our net interest margin. Our net interest margin declined by 52 basis points to 2.79% on a core basis. Excluding purchase accounting adjustment, our net interest margin declined by 33 basis points. Our core margin was largely impacted by our temporary increase in excess liquidity, which we expect to reduce and deploy in the second half of 2020. Without the increase in excess liquidity in the second quarter, our core margin would have declined by approximately 11 basis points for the second quarter. The compression in our net interest margin was largely attributable to a significant decline in our average loan yield due to the repricing of our variable rate loans following the 150 basis point reduction in rates in March. In addition, our interest-earning assets included a significantly higher balance of lower-yielding assets due to the asset liquidity that was built up when the pandemic crisis emerged. Together with our strong growth in core deposits throughout the quarter, the excess liquidity had an adverse impact to our net interest margin. These factors were partially offset by a 59 basis point decline in our cost of interest-bearing deposits, reflecting rate reductions in our money market accounts and time deposits. Together with a $1 billion increase in non-interest-bearing deposits, our total cost of deposits declined 47 basis points from the prior quarter to 87 basis points. On an accounting note, we are amortizing the fees…

Thank you, Alex. Let’s move on to Slide 16. As we move into the second half of the year, we continue to deal with a great deal of uncertainty regarding the length and impact of the current crisis. Given the impact COVID-19 is having on the hospitality and retail sectors in particular, we are not currently pursuing new loans in these areas. And while this has had an impact on our loan pipeline, we are budgeting for meaningful loan growth for the full year driven by higher levels of business activity by our corporate banking, warehouse line and residential mortgage teams. In addition to relatively healthy loan growth, we anticipate that a number of other factors will contribute to improved performance in the second half of the year: First, as Alex mentioned, we believe we should see expansion in our net interest margin due to stabilization in our loan yields, continued reduction in our deposit costs and deployment of our excess liquidity; second, we continue to see strong demand for refinancings in our residential mortgage origination business, which should lead to higher levels of production and gain on sale; and finally, we will continue to look out for opportunities to make adjustments in our overall cost structure to reflect the new environment we are operating in. Alex mentioned the recent staff reductions we made will save approximately $1.5 million per quarter, and optimizing our use of human resources is an ongoing initiative that could result in additional cost savings in the future. Over the longer-term, the changes we are seeing in customer behavior, particularly related to the use of our digital banking platform during the pandemic, will certainly create additional opportunities for us to evaluate and optimize our branch footprint. While the crisis continues, we will remain conservative in our operating philosophies, maintaining a strong capital position, growing core deposits, staying disciplined in our expense control and building our credit loss reserve. We believe this will enable us to continue supporting our customers and communities while delivering solid performance for our shareholders. As we have been communicating to our customers and communities throughout the pandemic, with Hope, we will get through this together. Now we would be happy to take your questions and add any additional color as requested. Operator, please open up the call.

We will now begin the question-and-answer session. [Operator Instructions] First question comes from Matthew Clark of Piper Sandler. Please go ahead.

Hi, good morning.

Good morning.

In the press release, you mentioned additional initiatives in light of the new normal design to restructure our balance sheet. Can you just provide some more color on how you plan to restructure the balance sheet from here?

Sure, Matthew. Definitely, management believes balance sheet restructuring is one of the key to effectively deal with this very challenging environment. Let me start with our liquidity build up during the quarter. We have about $1 billion of non-interest-bearing deposits, and partially about $350 million is coming from PPP loan deposits. But the excess, like $700 million plus is coming from non-interest-bearing deposits from the customers, and we believe this is really strengthening our balance sheet position. Because if you recall, we had like 99% of loan-to-deposit ratio. And the funding side, we had a quite expensive funding costs we have had, but it was really management’s real big focus is to stabilize the funding side, and we were able to achieve those low-cost funding side, which again enables us to kind of use effectively for our operating efficiencies. So with those good funding sources, our kind of strategy to the asset side is more fee income driven as well as dealing with, again, this very compressed interest rate environment. But certain products, such as warehouse businesses and also some mortgage businesses, given this rate environment, it is very attractive, especially for the warehouse businesses, the credit costs we have seen is very, very minimum, and fee incomes, we can also recognize from there. So the asset side, those are the areas. Obviously, we will continue to look for the industry verticals to specialize and maximize our earning asset opportunities. And also, as we discussed during the prepared remarks and earlier discussion, expense control, we have made a quite good strategy implemented already, and we see the reduction started. But I think this will continue going forward. Examples of those expense controls, obviously, effective utilization of HR, human resources, which we already said, $1.5 million per quarter savings, but we will continue to do that. And also, we learned good lessons from the office space and optimization opportunities. We are reevaluating the office spaces or occupancy expenses. I think we can get some efficiencies from there. It might take a little bit time. I don’t expect we have a big dollar amount of savings from the occupancies next quarter or two, but that’s more longer. But certainly, we think that will be coming in terms of expense savings. And also branch consolidations, optimizing the branch locations and kind of recently, the technology-driven businesses convinced us that we can have much more branch – effective branch consolidation which will save our expenses. So those are the kind of a high level basis of our balance sheet and expense saving strategy. This will continue and this will be our top priority to make sure we deliver the financial results at our optimal level in this very challenging environment.

Okay, great. And then the core loan – the new loan origination rate was 3.39%. I think that includes PPP, though. Do you have that rate ex PPP? And then I just loan yields being flat from here. I think the core loan yield was 4.21% ex purchase accounting. So I’m just trying to make sure we’re on the same page in terms of flat yield – loan yields and where the new business came on, on a core basis.

Yes. Given this PPP contractual coupon rate is 1%. But we have loan fees or lender fee because our majority of those PPP loans are under $350,000 at a rate of 5% we can earn. So reflecting those amortization of those lender fee, the effective interest rate for those PPP was about 3.4%. So it’s not that different from what we originated all the loans, including PPP. So I think it’s in the neighborhood of 3.4% as well for the new originations, including PPP and just separate the PPP, it’s at 3.39% or 3.4%. And also total loan yield, the actual loan yield, we had 4.23%. But without the PPP, it’s very minor changes, it’s 4.25%. So only 2 basis point differences.

Okay. I guess what I’m getting at is how are loan yields going to stay flat if you’re putting on new production at 3.40%.

And Matthew, keep in mind that the – during the second quarter, we had a very low level of SBA loan productions because our resources were tied to the PPP activities. In the second half of the year, we expect a robust production from the SBA unit. The SBA rates are much more lucrative than the other type of loans, and I think they will make some difference in the second half also.

Okay. And then just circling back to the excess liquidity, the strong non-interest-bearing deposit growth, excluding the PPP, that’s 700 – sorry, $650 million or so. I guess, what’s your sense that all of that sticks, just given that the people pay their tax – were able to pay their taxes July 15 and, obviously, there’s some stimulus money in there that’s likely to get spent. I guess how much of that do you actually think is going to stick?

Sure. I think it’s really difficult to have a real accurate expectation because there is so many moving parts. As you mentioned, the forgivenesses of those in the period, also the depositors, their own liquidity built up or their operating philosophy or their expectation. However, I also wanted to talk about non-PPP deposits that we gathered. I know you asked about $350 million of PPP specifically. Maybe that given the kind of expense – qualified expense period extended from 8 to 24 weeks. So just considering 24 weeks, maybe majority of that $350 million can be draw down or utilized during the Q4. That would be our expectation. But the remaining $650 million, actually it is a little bit more than $650 million, that we expect to stay much longer period. When we look at the actual composition of this $1 billion DDA increases, we saw about 800 new customers who never had a business with us, but they started business with us. So we believe that non-interest-bearing deposit, new customers, in this environment, very important. So we will try to serve them and retain them as much as we can. So I would expect that the remaining $650 million or $700 million, the attrition, if any, will be minimum. And to support that, we have a look at the actual non-interest-bearing deposit balances subsequent to June 30. And as of, actually, last night, when I checked it, the balance was very stable. It didn’t change. So one month, it didn’t change at all. So we will see, but I think this is really great for us to secure our funding at a very low cost, which is one of our key strategy to enhance our net interest margin and the profitability going forward.

Okay, thank you.

Our next question comes from Chris McGratty of KBW. Please go ahead.

Good afternoon. Thanks for the question. I just want to go back to your mix [indiscernible] interest, that 3% margin by the end of this year…

Sir, if you can speak up. It’s kind of breaking up, sir.

Is that better?

Yes, thank you. Please go ahead. It’s better, Chris.

Sorry about that. Is that better, Alex?

Yes.

Okay. Great. Sorry about that. I am on a cell. The guidance on the margin and net interest income. I think you said reported margin was 3% by the end of the year. Is that correct? Does that include some accretion and the PPP contribution in that?

Okay, Chris, I’m going to try and repeat your question because it was difficult to hear. He’s asking about our new guidance reaching in excess of 3% and whether that includes accretion, the purchase discount?

Yes. Okay. Thank you, Angie. Sorry. Yes. Yes, to answer your question, Chris, yes, it does include. But I think the core kind of margin is more important. And as you know, we have accretion income. And last quarter, in Q1, we have accretion income like 5 – more than $5 million, which kind of overstated in Q1, but it does actually have an impact in the second quarter, looks like a much bigger margin compression. Actually, it did have an 18 basis point of accretion differences, which impacted negatively on net interest margin. So our projection for 3% or higher until the year-end is just core deposits – core net interest margin, assuming the consistent accretion embedded there. And I don’t think we have – I don’t anticipate a big payoff or pay down or charge-off on the purchase loan. So it will be stable, and that does include in our 3% or higher our margin expectation.

That’s helpful. Thank you. And in terms of just net interest income dollars, obviously, appreciate all the moving parts of the balance sheet and liquidity. Should we expect stability in net interest income, growth in net interest income, modest pressure? I’m just trying to get a sense of where to start for the end of the year. Thanks.

Sure. Net interest income – yes, as we discussed, I don’t anticipate, and also I think as Fed said, they would maintain the interest rate at this rate for like next year or like for the time being. And assuming there’s no big interest rate, market interest changes, our loan yield, I don’t think it will have a significant changes, especially, I don’t think it will decrease much further because we did have already 150 basis point rate reduction in full to our variable rate loans, and it is very low loan we are earning already. But I think on the deposit side is we have more flexibility where we can continue to better, meaning the CD that is maturing for Q3, as I said, like it’s a 1.81%, but we can renew it in the neighborhood of 65 basis points and also continuously monitor our money market account, and we reduce the rate. And I didn’t see any real alarming negative reaction from our depositors from the rate that we continue to lower. So with that, I think net interest income, I don’t think it will go back to like a year ago level, given the rate environment, but the dollar amount of net interest income, I think it will be stabilized going forward.

Okay. That’s helpful. And just I was hoping to clear on the expenses. So this quarter included a little over $5 million benefit from the PPP originations. You have merger – severance costs in there as well. And then you announced the $1.5 million perspective savings. How do I think about all of this for expense levels in the back half of the year? Just absolute like where should the run rate be?

Sure. The run rate, I would expect it will increase from Q2. Reason, as you mentioned, we had a $5.2 million of PPP loan origination costs, I don’t think we will have that repeated going forward. But those will be offset by our already executed HR optimization plan over $1.5 million savings. So those two will have, let’s say, about $3.5 million compared to Q2 going forward. But as I said, it’s kind of expense control is management kind of how focuses that I mentioned, like branch rationalizations and continued professional fee reductions. If you recall, as I said, we have a quite elevated level of professional fees last year, but we have been continuously reducing it. And I think there is a further room for us to reduce a little bit. So with all those, I think about $70 million of a run rate, I feel comfortable to say that that. And in terms of efficiency ratio, it will be in the neighborhood of, let’s say, 55%. And net interest expense over average asset ratio, it will be between like 1.65% or 1.6% ranges.

Okay. Thank you.

[Operator Instructions] The next question comes from Gary Tenner with D.A. Davidson. Please go ahead.

Thanks, good morning. Alex, I wonder if you have the average PPP loans outstanding for the quarter versus the 480 – or $470 million at quarter end?

Sure. We have a total origination balance of $474 million after $6 million paid off. The average balance for Q2 for PPP was about $343 million.

Okay, thanks. And then I just wanted to follow-up. In terms of your comments on the amount of deposit stickiness, which ex PPP related deposits you feel pretty good about. When you talk about kind of using that excess liquidity, part of it maybe goes into loan growth, which you all seem positive on for the back half of the year. But any other plans in terms of the investment portfolio? Do you have any goals for how you like that balance to look towards the end of the year?

Yes, sure. In terms of our investment portfolio in conjunction with our increased or excess liquidity, actually, second half – no, actually, two-thirds of the second quarter, we started to purchase investment securities. So total, the amount of investment security that we purchased was in excess of $300 million. And the yield is not that great, given, again, the interest rate environment. But I think we would like because excess liquidity deployment plan is very important. That does have a direct impact to our net interest income and margin. And our priority is, obviously, higher earning assets, i.e., loan portfolio, which includes warehouse and mortgage. And as Kevin mentioned, our SBA production for the second quarter was only $6 million, and I would expect the SBA production will pick up. So if we have the deployment of our excess to the loan, again, that will be our priority. But I think having investment security purchase as a backup or alternative to use the excess liquidity, we will continue to look for and continue to purchase the investment security.

Okay. And then just to go back to the expectations for meaningful loan growth, I think as it was put in the slide deck, I assume that, that is kind of on the base of loans occurred end excluding the PPP balances? Is that fair?

Yes, that’s fair. And year-over-year, we expect high-single digit or low-double digit growth.

Okay, thank you. And then, last question for me, I think. You guys delayed the earnings release, because of the kind of challenges of completing the goodwill impairment test. I just wonder if you could talk about that a little bit, given where the stock is trading at a deep discount to tangible book. How that process went? And obviously, you didn’t incur any goodwill this quarter. So, any comments on that?

Sure. Let me start with what was the reason, why we spent time. Actually, we were very cautious to make sure we do the right assessment. And we wanted to give our accountant enough time so that their actually national office signed off our management’s assessment. And the triggering event was, as you mentioned, our stock price, where we are traded. Compared to even tangible book value, our trade valid is much lower. So having that triggering event, we did have a robust analysis of our goodwill impairment by looking at income approaches. And it’s a kind of accounting terminology, income – actually valuation terminology, income approach versus fair market value approaches. Fair value – fair market value approaches, that’s kind of our traded stock value, which does seem to be much lower, which might lead to a goodwill impairment. But actually, we look at our income approaches, which makes more sense. And this income approaches take into the consideration of our future income going forward, five years with a more accurate projection, the growth rate, and then also after the terminal value we use. So long story short, based on our projected income, discounted with the right amount of discount rate, we concluded we have a significant amount of cushion or the excess fair value over book value. So we have a total of $465 million of goodwill, and cushion that we come up with was about $700 million. So we believe that was good enough, but our auditor definitely need to make sure. So we wanted to make sure everybody be comfortable with that. So going forward, we will continue to have the assessment, unless our stock price bounced back to the level that we wanted to. So – but given the significant amount of excess fair value over book value that we have determined as of June 30, going forward, we will continue to do assessment, but unless there is really unexpected big changes of our expected earnings or something – I don’t know, we will assess again, but less likely that immediate quarters, we’ll have a different conclusion on our goodwill impairment.

Okay. That’s great color, Alex. I appreciate it. And actually, if I could squeeze one last question, your dividend payout ratio is around the 65% to 70% range based on the first half of the year earnings. What are the current thoughts, Kevin, in terms of the dividend payout going forward?

Yes. We feel comfortable about the dividend payout ratio that we currently have. And our intention is to keep on – keep our quarterly dividend at current levels, absent any material unexpected developments in the future. This is based upon our strong capital ratios. We feel very comfortable with our capital situation, including our Tier 1 common equity ratio. And we regularly perform rigorous stress testing analysis on our capital situation. And based upon what we have so far, we expect and we intend to keep our quarterly dividend at current levels. But that is something that we have to assess every quarter, but that is currently what we have in mind.

Got it. All right. Thanks again.

Thank you.

Next question comes from David Feaster of Raymond James. Please go ahead.

Good morning, everybody. Happy Friday.

Good morning.

I just wanted to start out on the commentary about loan growth. I’m just curious, a, have you guys tightened the credit box at all with regards to new loan? And then, b, where are you seeing demand within that commercial segment, where are you seeing demand and where are you interested in growing?

Well, as I mentioned in the prepared script, our corporate banking group, our warehouse line business unit and our mortgage unit, those are the units that we expect to be most active in the second half of the year. In terms of the mortgage productions, we did not have a very productive first and second quarter. But I think that we have a very nice pipeline building up right now. And the reason that the performance was not as good as we would like to see was because of some of our operations in the back office. And I think we have resolved all the issues. So I think we can have a much better mortgage production. And in addition, we are starting up a non-QM loan program, which we plan to retain on our portfolio. So that will contribute to the loan growth. And as you can easily see, our corporate banking group and warehouse line business unit are the major units who will contribute to the growth.

Yes. Then within there, have you tightened up underwriting standards at all or the credit box within the corporate banking space at all? And then, again, within corporate banking, where are you seeing demand, what segments, and where are you interested in growing?

Actually, this is Peter. So in terms of the credit box, overall, we had tightened the credit box in areas that we see impact from the COVID pandemic. So obviously, our CRE portfolio in various places like hotels and retail, definitely we have built a lot more buffer or actually done some moratoriums. In corporate banking, there are opportunities in that sector. With basically maintaining the same credit box, we’re finding good opportunities to grow. Whether that is in asset managers or capital call lines, telecom industries, we see various opportunities throughout that. We see some pipeline – meaningful pipelines building.

Okay. That’s helpful. And then, I guess just on the redeferrals, appreciate all the commentary that you guys gave. Just curious, as these redeferrals start coming in, would you expect to see additional risk rating downgrades in reserve builds in the back half of the year? And maybe, I guess, just how do you think about the overall reserve in your comfort level there?

Sure. We feel comfortable with the level of reserves, as we have assessed the portfolio very closely. I think we’ve done very deep dive assessments in particularly the higher-risk areas such as the hotel and the retail, as well as our C&I portfolio. So we feel comfortable where we are now. As we move forward, obviously, there is a lot of uncertainties in the marketplace right now, so it really depends on the speed of the economic recovery, the success and speed of health vaccines, treatments for the coronavirus, a lot of variables in place. So unless we see further deterioration in the portfolio, right now, these loans are basically put into a past watch COVID-19 rated grade. And so the impact on reserve levels are starting to build, as you have seen in the second quarter. As you move forward, we just have to see how fast the recovery pace is for our borrowers. As we mentioned in our prepared remarks, as we assess the hotel portfolio, which is – I think everyone is looking at that as one of the higher exposures. Really, as expected, what we’re finding, as we do individual loan assessment, is that these hotels are much more limited-service local or drive to destination type of hotels. And so we have seen less of an impact. Obviously, there has been impact through the months of March and April through some of the artificial kind of closures of the economy. But in the months of June and July – we look at both the metro regions, so we’re looking at individual county hotel data that’s coming out from industry reports, as well as comparing that to our actual portfolio performance, and we’re actually seeing hotel recoveries in our portfolio starting to definitely pick up. And we actually have seen some hotels reach even break-even points already. So, we are monitoring this situation very closely. I think we’ll continue to assess the risk rating as we move forward, as we always do. And we really have to kind of see how the recovery looks like.

Okay. That’s terrific. And then just one more kind of – a couple of quick buttoned-up ones. Do you have the levels of purchase accounting remaining on the books? Does that – 3% margin target by the fourth quarter, is that inclusive of the PPP? And then, maybe what are your expectations for the timing of PPP fees? Thanks.

Sure. The remaining total $36 million – actually $26 million remaining on the PCD discount we have. And as I kind of answered to Chris’ question earlier, this accretion impact has reflected on the 3% or slightly higher net interest margin forecast by Q4. And this actually, as you know, the discount is continuously decreasing as we amortize or recognized the interest income.

And then just the expectations for the timing of the PPP fees?

Sure. Got it. Got it. Got it. I think we also mentioned during the prescript – the script, we estimate over the next two years, 24 months, we’ll amortize over that period, using straight-line method. So including the loan fee and the loan cost, in terms of dollar amount, we recognize about $2.9 million in Q3 and going forward. It will be a little bit higher than Q2 – compared to Q2. So it will be about $3.9 million in Q3 we will recognize as income. So that will again spread out the next 24 months.

Okay, thank you.

This concludes our question-and-answer session. I would like to turn the conference back over to management for any closing remarks.

Thank you. Once again, thank you all for joining us today. We hope everyone of you stay safe and healthy. And we look forward to speaking with you again next quarter. So long, everyone.

The conference has now concluded. Thank you for attending today’s presentation. You may now disconnect.