Kelly King
Analyst · JP Morgan
Thank you, Tamara, and good morning, everybody. Thanks for joining our call. Let me just start by saying I would kind of describe our quarter improving performance in credit quality, and very strong performance in most other areas, which we’ll describe. So a few quarterly highlights – strong improvement in earnings compared to ’09, Q3 net income available to shareholders is $210 million, up 38.2%, and our EPS is $0.30, up 30.4%. I feel good about our revenue, net revenue is up 4.2%, up 1.1% annualized linked with securities gains. And importantly, our pre-tax, pre-provision earnings was up 61% excluding security gains. You’ll recall a couple of years ago we told you that we were pursuing a five year strategy of overall balance sheet improvement, as we looked to diversify our asset and our liability side. We’ll explain to you the progress in regard to that. For the loan area, we grew annualized linked quarter in all non-real estate loan areas, in fact, growth accelerated in most of the portfolios in the quarter, we’ll show you some detail on that. We had 6.1% growth in mortgage loans, annualized quarter and very strong mortgage revenue growth. In fact, our origination for $6.7 billion in Q3 compared to $5 billion in Q2. Very pleased about average non-interest bearing deposits increasing 15.4% on an annualized linked-quarter basis. A very strong balance sheet and capital levels, which continue to improve, Tier 1 common is 9%. We had 130% allowance for the coverage of NPLs helpful investment, if you exclude covered loans. Importantly, we want to discuss with you the substantial progress in the closing of problem assets. We told you last quarter we were embarking on a more aggressive disposition strategy, which we started in the second and substantially progressed on in the third, and we mentioned intra-quarter that we’d be transferring over $1 billion to help us, so we did that. We transferred $1.3 billion in non-performing loans to help the sell and we’ve written those down consistent with actual sales experience, in terms of the mark. Very good sales activity, we sold $207 million of NPLs in the quarter, we also sold $244 million of other real estate loans, and we currently have more than $350 million of NPA under contract to sell, so a lot of really good activity, and all that activity is consistent with the market level that we expected. Importantly, our TDRs, our NPAs, our NPA inflow and foreclosed property expenses all declined during this quarter. If you follow along on the deck, you go to slide four, security exchange unusual item for the quarter. We did take $239 million of security gains in the quarter, which is an usual income item, obviously, in conjunction with some other unusual items that we had. There was a $0.21 positive impact. We did have a $321 million, or $0.28 negative impact related to the transfer of NPLs, and then we had a small remaining Colonial merger charge of $10 million, or $0.01. So the way I think about this, I always try to get back to what I feel like our normalized earning rate is, so if you take the $0.21 in security exchange away, and then if you add back the $0.28 in unusual earnings impact because of the NPL transfer, and the penny of merger related charges, you start out with 30, add back 8, so I think of a normalized run rate of about $0.38. Obviously we can debate that, but that’s the way I think about it. If you look at our underlying community bank performance, we’re making really good continued progress. We continue to have the best value proposition in the market, where our community banking models deliver the best service in reliable and competitive responsive competent service. We know that because we continue to evaluate that in terms of the outside market research that we have provided for us by (Merrill Corp), and I’m pleased to share that we have a substantial improvement in our very high level, and also a substantial improvement in terms of the gap over our major in market peers. So remember, our value proposition is the best in the market place, because value functions have quality relative to (inaudible 0:14:46). Our community bank has been working very hard in terms of efficiency improvements, so their discretionary expense has decreased by 4% compared to last year. We’re making good progress in terms of building out community bank presence in Texas. You’ll recall, from Colonial, we picked up about $830 million in deposits, 22 branches in Dallas/Ft. Worth and Austin. We’re now building out a corporate banking presence across the state, particularly in Houston, with a lot of emphasis in the energy space. The Colonial acquisition continues to provide very significant growth and (inaudible 0:15:25) opportunities, particularly in the Alabama and Florida, where they had such a large presence. To give just a little bit of color on that, we had a 53% increase in retail production per relationship manager in the Colonial market during Q3, and a substantial improvement in net new account openings, from a negative $10,000 in Q3 ’09 to a plus $2,400 in Q3 ’10, so nice momentum there. We also had net new transaction accounts increase from $17,400 in Q3 ’09 to $37,000 Q3 ’10. I think a lot of that is because of our very low turnover, which continues to improve, so we feel good about the quality of service we deliver. If you look at page six, we continue to have really good improvement in C & I, and CRE mix improvement. On the balance sheet side, that’s one of our key objectives. In fact, our percentage of C & I, the total loans improved from 30.7% in Q3 ’09 to 31.4% Q3 ’10. I know that’s not a major increase in actual outstanding, but the actual production, the commitments are even much greater than that, so (inaudible 0:16:52). On the deposit mix, our DDA presented a total deposits increase from Q3 ’09 from 16.2% to Q3 ’10 to 19.4%, so that’s a really nice improvement there. Really good progress in the small business area. 20% growth in total households, compared to last year’s 4.9% average includes Colonial. We had double digit growth in most services. We’re spending a lot of time now on our bundling sales efforts, which were 34% more effective, compared to last year, so that’s really getting traction for us, which is the real key to long term service results and profitability in small business. Our corporate banking emphasis is really getting traction, as we had a 20% annualized growth in our large corporate banking outstandings and commitments. That’s growing very, very well, as I said, we’re developing a Texas bank energy chain, which has a lot of promise. So really good corporate banking progress. A lot of progress in various lending niche areas. I’ll show you in a minute, but a really good number in terms of diversified growth in those lending areas. Our wealth strategy is working very well. Record revenues, about 29% on an annualized linked-quarter basis. We continue to add producers in the wealth division area, we’ve recently launched an ultra-affluent strategy in the wealth area, so we’re doing a really good job there. It’s important (inaudible 0:18:25) the last four or five years and it’s really doing really well. In insurance, we continue to do really well, relative to the market. As you know, insurance continues to be a soft market, but we had record revenues, up 1% of the year. That may not sound great, but it’s much better than the industry, which we think is down about 8 to 10%. And our insurance revenues are now consistently over $1 billion and we recently improved to sixth largest market share, sixth largest broker in the United States, and in the world. If you look at slide seven, I’ll give you a little color in terms of our non-real estate loan portfolios. If you look up, you’ll see that our loan portfolio from Q3 ’09 is essentially flat. That’s what we told you would happen, we said that it would be basically flat, and as we grew non-real estate areas and we’ll add the real estate areas to run off. C & I Q3 to Q2 annualized is up 6%. Other CRE, as we planned, is down 5.5%. Sales finance, automobiles, (inaudible 0:19:31) paper was up 10.4%, revolving credit was up 9.1%. Mortgage was up 6.1%, specialized lending, I’ll give you that detail in a minute, which is up 20.8%. I would point out, in direct retail, it was down 3.6%. We, like everybody else, are still struggling in direct retail. We are seeing a little momentum, because the rate of decline is slowing, generally, but it’ll probably be about two quarters or so before we see that drawn to depositing. I’ll point out to you that our ADP portfolio was down Q3 to Q2 $771 million, and Q3 to Q2 annualized reduction of 59%. Obviously, that’s a substantial reduction and very much in line with what we had planned to do. So overall, if you exclude the loan sales transfer, the transfer to help the sell, our loan growth was 3.2%, which we think is very good. So in summary, all the non-real estate loan portfolios grew, the pace accelerated in almost all the areas. Loan production for Q3 was $18.4 billion, up an annualized 20.8% compared to Q2 ’10. So that’s real encouraging, I think, to see the loan momentum begin to pick up. I don’t know that the overall market has been picking up that much, to be honest with you, but I think we’re really moving market share on a lot of cases, in particular in the large corporate market, and specialized lending. On slide eight, just to give you a little color about our specialized great niche areas, I mentioned that our prime sales finance automobile paper was up 10.4%, we did have a smaller non-prime portfolio that’s 5.9, more importantly, the link has a really good possibility of improving, a really, really good program there. Our revolving credit card was up 9.1%. Insurance premium finance is up 55%. Now that’s organic and (inaudible 0:21:35) that we were able to acquire, a good portfolio during the last year, that’s worked very well. Small ticket finance, through our small finance area has increased 38%, there’s some really good granularity there. We finance, for example, all terrain vehicles, loan boards for commercial operators, etc., so that’s really good paper. Asset based lending’s growing very fast, 21% increase. And our mortgage warehouse lending operation though small, is gaining traction, and there’s a real market opportunity for us there. It’s growing 43%. So you see, in all these areas we had strong benefits from these previous investments. We’ve been investing in these areas for the last ten years, and it’s really beginning to come home now, at a very, very good time. By growing these areas, it improves our diversity in non-real estate segments, it grows our overall granularity, geographic and product diversification, and one thing I would mention to the group, just for us all to watch over the next few years, this is substantially the way I think you’re going to see remediation occur. We talked about over the last 25 years how we just undermediated out of the banking system, and market shares went down from 80 to 30%, well you’re going to see, over the next several years, in my opinion, a process of re-intermediation where a substantial amount of those previous assets that were sold out of the banking system will come back to the bank, that will be a very good thing. And you’ll see a lot of that occur now, just organically. A lot of it will occur in a different sort of organic approach, in that we’ll buy paper from originators that would have historically taken that paper through securitization process, they’ll now bring it more directly to us, which is a really good growth strategy for us, and I think you’ll see in other institutions as well. If you look at page nine, just a little bit of detail on our deposits. We’re very pleased about this. Our non-interest bearing deposits, DDA, increased 15.4%. I would point out there, you see the interest checking is down 43%, a couple of points there. It’s just a small portfolio, and it’s mostly municipal funds, so we basically price that dependent on what our funds needs are, so you know, with loan growth being slower, and other DDA going well, we didn’t need as much in municipal funds, so we pulled back on pricing. Other type deposits have grown 2%. CDs are down 39%, that is absolutely by design. We have been managing our margins and holding rates back on single service, more expensive CDs, particularly in some of our markets, like Florida, where the pricing gets very, very sensitive. We’re not losing relationships, we’re simply not carrying those CDs at a time when it’s relatively more expensive than makes sense for us. So our total deposits were down, but I want you to understand that the net underlying areas that we’re interested in growing, are growing very nicely. For example, we’ve been really pursuing transaction accounts, which are up 17% compared to Q3 ’09, and annualized 5.6% compared to Q2 ’10. So really nice growth there. Our mix is improving, in terms of CD pricing and municipal pricing. We’ve increased our net new transaction account development from $17,400 in Q3 ’09 to $37,700 for Q3 ’10, so really big increase there, and we increased net new transaction accounts by $111,000 this year, an 98% increase over 2009. So if you look through the underlying numbers on the loan side, and on the deposit side, you see this really nice improvement, really strong momentum, and we feel very, very good about that. So let’s go to Clarke now, and let him give you some color on the loan area.