Boston Private Financial Hldg Inc (BPFH)’s Fourth Quarter 2014 Earnings Conference Call Transcript

Clayton Deutsch, President and Chief Executive Officer

Well I will just — Casey, I will refer to things I have said in the past. There is no change in it. Our appetite for wealth management is high. And if we can accelerate the development of our wealth management business portfolio through M&A, we will absolutely do that. So we are active lookers and that is about all I can say. We do not declare our intentions beyond that. We are very excited about what Banyan has done for us in the early days. We were looking for a catalyst or a bit of a transformational deal, if you will. And the combination of our Boston Private Wealth Management business in the bank which was itself a strong business with Banyan Partners really does good things for us. But we are going to keep going down on this path. Thanks Casey.

Casey Haire, Jefferies

Okay, thank you.

Clayton Deutsch, President and Chief Executive Officer

Thanks Casey.

Operator

Thank you. The next question comes from Jennifer Demba with SunTrust Robinson Humphrey

Jennifer Demba, SunTrust Robinson Humphrey

Thank you. Good morning. Can you just give us some more details of the credit downgrades that you talked about during the quarter?

Dave Kaye, Chief Financial Officer

Sure. It is really three unrelated relationships as we said. One in Southern California, two out of Boston. One was a construction of loan that has been sort of a long standing criticized loan. And we moved more aggressively to take a mark and hopefully come to a resolution shortly on that. So we took a charge-off. And then another was a CRE deal, where they had a loss of a very large tenant and so we downgraded that and also took a charge or reserved. And then the final one, just a borrower that ran into financial difficulties and we put it in elevated reserved in that relationship. So really three different types of relationships and loans. I don’t see any pattern if you look at our overall criticized loans they were down, so these were existing problem loans that got worse, three of them, but overall the amount of criticized loans did improve for the quarter.

Mr. Clayton Deutsch, President and Chief Executive Officer

Jen, all three are paying as agreed. But we are pretty conservative on our loan review and we just felt these are appropriate moves.

Jennifer Demba, SunTrust Robinson Humphrey

Alright, thank you.