Square 1 Financial Inc (SQBK)’s Fourth Quarter 2014 Earnings Call Transcript

Below is transcript of the Square 1 Financial Inc (NASDAQ:SQBK)’s Fourth Quarter 2014 Earnings Call, held on January 21, 2015, at 10:30 a.m.EST.

Square 1 Financial Inc (NASDAQ:SQBK) is a financial services company. The Company is a bank holding company for Square 1 Bank. Through Square 1 Bank, the Company focuses its banking activities almost on venture capital firms and private equity firms and the portfolio companies funded by such firms.

Company Executives:

Leah Webb, General Counsel

Dough Bowers, President & CEO

Pat Oaks, Chief Financials Officer

Analysts:

Jennifer Demba, Suntrust

Aaron Deer, Sandler O’Neil

Julianna Balick, KBW.

Operator
Good morning, my name is Saeid and I’ll be your conference operator today. At this time, I would like to welcome everyone to the Square 1 Financial Fourth Quarter 2014 Earnings Call. All lines have been placed on mute to prevent any background noise, after the speakers [inaudible] there will be a question and answer session. At this time I would like to hand the conference over to Miss Leah Webb, General Counsel. Ma’am you may begin your conference.

Leah Webb – General Counsel
Thank you, Saeid. And thank you everyone for joining us for our fourth quarter 2014 earnings call. Doug Bowers, President and CEO and Pat Oakes, CFO are here to discuss results. As a reminder, the Square 1 Financial current earnings release is available on the Investor Relations section of square1financial.com.

I wish to caution you that we will be making forward-looking statements during this call and that actual results may differ materially. We encourage you to review the disclaimer in the earnings release dealing with forward-looking information. This disclaimer applies equally to statements made in this call. In addition, some discussions may include references to non-GAAP financial measures, information about those measures including reconciliation to GAAP measures may be found in our SEC filings and in our earnings release. And with that I will turn the call over to the President and CEO of Square 1 Financial, Doug Bowers.

Dough Bowers – President & CEO
Thank you, Leah, and thanks everyone for joining us today for our fourth quarter and full year 2014 earnings call. I’m with our Chief Financial Officer, Pat Oakes, and our Chief Credit Officer, Diane Earle. Pat and I will have some brief some comments and then we will open it up for questions.

To begin with, we are very pleased with our results for the fourth quarter and indeed for all of 2014. We’re especially satisfied with the solid growth in loans, deposits and favorable credit cost. In the fourth quarter we generated net income of $9.5 million, our best quarter to date and we generated full year net income of $34.1 million. We finished the year at 68 basis points for net charge offs, all together these results add up to a strong financial performance for the quarter and a very good full year 2014 for Square 1.