Dominic Ng: What we’ve seen is that we see nothing that’s the scary part. Well, actually, we do a regular loan by loan review. That’s part of East West Bank. It’s been — we’ve been doing this for years and years. I’ve been concerned about potential CRE portfolio five, six years ago. And so we did loan-by-loan review, and we continue — well, I guess, because the vigilance we do have pretty high asset quality from our portfolio, and we do the same thing for C&I. And we just — even with the pandemic, I thought it’s going to be — I mean, we started, let’s get back to you earlier. We start with the tariffs that we said, wow, we got tariffs. Our trade finance portfolio is going to be getting hit hard. Let’s just review one by one.
We knew one by one. We manage this credit really, really closely, monitoring very closely. We have discussion with clients. Ask them to do what the right thing. And then at the end of the day, we didn’t take any loss to get through that, and then now becomes tariffs becomes just a mobile day-to-day business. And then we are going to through pandemic. We thought, wow, we’re going to lose a lot of money. We’re taking a lot of losses with all these hotels and then strip centers get shutdown and tenants not paying rent in their apartments. And then at the end of the day, we didn’t take any loss. And then when this interest rate spike in this very, very aggressive manner, we said there’s no way our clients can pay this kind of interest rate at some point.
But as of today, the payment and they’re doing fine. Well, I think, Brandon, it helps when we have very low loan to value, which give a lot more incentive for clients to stay on the property. And then in addition to that, our clients have a lot of liquidity and many of them have personal guarantee. All of these characteristics help to keep this portfolio strong in the commercial real estate side. And then Brandon, if you ask, I think that as I mentioned, as part of my sort of like script that we talked about you. Loans mature in 2023, there’s only 3% of our CRE loans will be maturing for the remainder of 2020, and then in 2024, only another 7%. So altogether, for the next 18 months, we will have 10% of our loans coming due. So, we just happen to have a very stable portfolio that there’s not a whole lot that we need to worry about.
We don’t have this big high-rise building in downtown that cause us — cause other banks concerned. So, I think it’s all of that that helps. Now the criticized asset improved in terms of ratio. Some of them have to do, again, because we’ve been prudent and conservative. These loans that we downgraded during pandemic, we wanted to give a little more time to make sure we could have upgraded probably six, nine months ago, if we — I mean, because when — after the pandemic, things getting a bit normal from the business back to get them back on track. We didn’t immediate upgrade. We wanted to see how it operates. Do they have a sustainable good cash flow and when things getting better, really better and then we upgrade back. So to a certain degree, maybe some of these upgrades is a little bit of a timing difference.
It’s not like suddenly, today, these credit perform even better, and two months ago or three months ago, like that. It just — there are some, I would say, that loans should have been upgraded earlier that we took care of. Now from the last two months. And the other thing will be here and there, a couple of notes here and there that are having some challenges, we find a way it can help declines to pay off this credit and then that also help reduce the criticized loan ratio. And all in all, that’s — I think that’s the reason.
