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

Scott: Your points well taken, it’s definitely seasonal muni outflows. We said that our deposit growth would be driven by a great extent to our loan growth. We funded that throughout the year. But when you look at the quarterly reduction in deposits, it is almost totally attributable to munis. And that is a normal seasonal thing that we see annually.

Rob: Got it. Great. And then just one last one for me, look at the credit marked in the TF’s deal, I thought when it was — when the deal was announced, the credit mark was estimated close to 2%. It looks like it came in close to 3%. You talked about maybe what change or what factors might have driven that?

Mike: Yeah. In the executory period, as you would expect to look at some moving parts as it relates to the mark. When we did the transaction or model the transaction at announcement, we thought it will be in the $50 million range and it is. We had some benefits in other areas of some write-ups.We are conservative by nature. We looked at those marks and the 0.7% is probably $4 million incremental. So as I said in my remarks, what we thought at the modeling stage into diligent stage at TF really materialize that there is no one big factor there.

Scott: And I think to Mike’s point, overall great outcome and once again, right within our range.

Rob: Great. That’s it for me. Thanks for taking my questions.

Operator: We’ll take our next question from the line of Michael Perito with KBW. Your line is now open.

Michael Perito:  Hi, everybody. Scott, first quickly on the buyback on the 125 million of purchase authorization. Can you maybe just give us little more thoughts on how you guys are thinking about executing that in terms of how active on a quarterly basis versus more opportunistic it will be?

Mike: Yeah. I think we’re going to look at — this is Mike. I think we’re going to look at a variety of potential alternatives there, open market purchases. We’re going to evaluate and accelerate the share repurchase, obviously, in the prior year or at ‘14. We had been fortunate enough to buys some shares back from Warburg Pincus.Again, we don’t believe that is necessarily case now but it may be throughout the year. So I think it’s a combination of open market purchases, negotiated transactions and accelerated share repurchase potentially but we’re just looking at them now.We look at all of our opportunities and as they come about in 2015, we’ll see how it works out.

Michael Perito: Okay. And Mike, your comments in your prepared remarks about — I believe whether you could execute the buyback and still have room for additional capital deployment. Can we read into that that M&A is still on the table, even if you guys are maybe more aggressive in the buyback?

Mike: I would say, M&A is definitely on the table and we believe that we can effectuate this buyback and continue to be acquisitive and being acquisitive would be a priority of ours.

Scott: And the deployment of capital needs to continue.

Michael Perito: Okay. And then just one quick clarification, the $55 million of range for the quarterly expense rate in 2015. I know, I saw on the slide that I just want to confirm, that includes a 100% of the expected cost saves from TF?

Mike: It does.

Michael Perito: Okay. Thanks, guys.

Operator: We’ll take our next question from the line of David Bishop with Drexel Hamilton. Your line is now open.

David: Hey. Following up on that question in terms of M&A and the capacity you done that has been successful for the TF Financial integration. Does that change your outlook in terms of the types of banks and the size of banks or the way you approach deals moving forward given the velocity, are you able to close this the TF Financial deal?