Western Alliance Bancorporation (WAL)’s Fourth Quarter 2014 Earnings Conference Call Transcript

Brett Rabatin of Sterne Agee

Okay great thanks for the color.

Operator

Next we have a question from Joe Morford of RBC

Joe Morford, RBC

Thanks good morning. You guys have touched on this a little bit. But in the first quarter you grew your loan to twice the rate of deposits and the loan to deposit ratio is getting well up into the 90% range now. Curious how you think about managing the funding side of the business in the year ahead and how important are acquisitions to that as well?

Robert Sarver, Chairman and CEO, Western Alliance Bancorporation

I am not really going to answer any of those questions now that you are a competitor of ours. Yes the funding is really important. We just got off with a call with our entire staff. We do a staff call every quarter, all 1100 of us, and one thing we talk about is some adjusting on our incentive plans. Where our deposits and our goals for annual bonus plan, our deposits are going to be really driven by a non-interest bearing demand. And so we need to pick up in terms of growth, the amount of our business in DDA, and help drive our fee income too from that category, that is a new piece in our annual bonus plan. We got a lot of loan growth demand, we can make good loans, good yields and we are going to focus more on the deposit side this year. It is funny because we have the opposite. Our issues are the opposite of the larger banks. The larger banks are swimming in money but they have hard time lending out money and anything more than 2% or 3%. And so we are, strange than it sounds, I mean that will be one of our focus and that is probably one area I was disappointed in 2014 was our growth in checking accounts.

Joe Morford, RBC

Okay. And then just briefly on just the phase of growth in the fourth quarter, loan growth in the fourth quarter. Look like the end of period balances were quite a bit higher than the average. It is just kind of more back-end loaded or was anything going on in terms of pay down activity?

Robert Sarver, Chairman and CEO, Western Alliance Bancorporation

Yes part of it is back-end loaded and the warehouse stuff funds up towards the end. That is about $75 million swing. I do not know why, I mean it just people get focus on closing business at end of the month and the of the quarter. It is just always kind of been that way.

Dale Gibbons, Chief Financial Officer, Western Alliance Bancorporation

Yes seasonally the fourth quarter has been our strongest and you also have some tax reasons for it on some of the equipment financing elements as well.

Joe Morford, RBC

Okay that is helpful, thanks a lot guys.

Robert Sarver, Chairman and CEO, Western Alliance Bancorporation

Good luck to you.

Joe Morford, RBC

Thanks. I appreciate it.