National Penn Bancshares (NPBC)’s Fourth Quarter and Full Year 2014 Earnings Call Transcript

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We are more weighted in the loan portfolio towards commercial lines of business than consumer. But we are very happy and pleased with the consumer lines of business and how the lines of credit continue to be accessed and continue to be originated. So it’s a good balance between all lines of business and pipelines continue to build based on this customer confidence.

Mathew: Okay. Got it. And then, what should we be using for an effective tax rate for the year?

Mike: The effective tax rate historically has been in the mid-20s, and we don’t see any significant change to that.

Mathew:  All right. Great. Thanks, guys.

Operator: We’ll go next to the line of Rick Weiss with Boenning. Your line is now open.

Rick: Hi, I’m filling in for Matt today. And just I was wondering if you could give a little bit of color of — you’re not far away from going over the $10 billion of asset figure. What do you see happening and how that affects fee income, for example? Or would you have any additional costs associated with compliance or whatnot?

Scott: We think that Durbin amendment would impact us by about $7 million on an annual basis. As you know, Rick, there is a delay and when that impacts you, when you go over in another six-month period.So quantifying the Durbin amendment is about $7 million. We haven’t really gotten into disclosing. We’re certainly analyzing what that incremental expense maybe. We don’t believe that to be of a significant magnitude, but certainly additions to staff in both the finance and the risk management areas.

Rick: Okay. Those were my only questions. Thank you.

Scott: Thank you, Rick.

Operator: We’ll go next to the line of Blair Brantley with BB&T Capital Markets. Your line is open.

Blair: Good morning everyone. As a follow-up to that, with the $10 million asset thresholds, should M&A now play out as expected? Would you expect to surpass the $10 million mark just on an organic basis, or would you see maybe using that investment portfolio to fund loan growth?

Scott: Yeah. We think the economics are going over $10 billion on an organic basis would be beneficial. So to your point, our investment portfolio arguably, it may be bigger than others. But we have capacity to reduce the investment portfolio to fund loan growth. So we’ve said that we won’t grow organically over $10 billion and if we do through acquisition, we want to do in a meaningful way.

Blair: Okay. Thank you for that color. Also regarding to a recent peer being acquired, any potential opportunities there, any fallout that you could see that maybe, maybe having some upsides to what you kind of thinking for 2015?

Scott: Just as we have done in the past, when there is some disruption in the markets we operate, we will continue through Dave Kennedy and the Chief Banking Officer, Sandy Bodnyk and her credit folks. We attack the market in a very deliberate direct way on identifying customers continuing to roll out more marketing plans, to try to take advantage of that disruption and bring more customers into the National Penn family.We’ll also end up looking at bankers that might become available where we can round out our teams. And I would think that would not only go for that region, but also any region that we operate in or any contiguous region that we operate in. So it’s one thing that we need to continue to stay focused on and we will.

Blair: Okay. Thank you very much.

Operator: It appears that we have no further questions at this time. I’ll now hand the call back to Mr. Fainor for any closing remarks.

Scott: We would like to thank all of you for your questions today. We’d like to thank all of you for joining our fourth quarter and full year 2014 earnings webcast call. And we wish you all a great day and a great weekend. We will be talking with you all of you soon. Thank you.

Operator: This concludes today’s presentation. You may disconnect at any time.

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