Mr. Delamater: Our company has been around a long time; we've been in existence since 1872. I joined the company in 1981 as President and CEO. And throughout that time, we've grown to approximately 600 million. We serve western, southern, central and coastal Maine, and some of southern New Hampshire from 24 locations. We specialize in the delivery of all financial products and services using the community bank model.
TWST: What is the financial snapshot, the balance sheet, P&L and asset levels of the company? Are there any areas of particular strength or any areas that should be improved?
Mr. Delamater: The best way I can answer that is to share with you that about five years ago, we made what we felt was a very significant decision. We sat down, evaluated the marketplace and determined that we didn't like what we were seeing, we didn't like the low or non-existent underwriting standards in the credit markets, and we didn't like the pricing. We felt the market was being overheated by a secondary market that was delivering unrealistic loan products. So we told our shareholders that we were determined to make earnings secondary and to make the quality of our balance sheet primary. As a result, we focused on doing things like developing a higher level of income diversity, and hiring and developing a world-class risk management team so we could properly evaluate credit risks and interest rate risks. We are very proud of the results of this effort. Throughout the past several years, it was difficult to watch peers announce record earnings when we were convinced that those earnings did not represent the kind of quality that we felt was important. So we sat back and basically delivered flat earnings for a period of time while we were developing these other lines of business and strengthening our balance sheet. As part of this effort, we re-evaluated every significant credit in our company. We didn't play in the subprime sandbox and avoided changing our underwriting standards. So the results we think have proven to be very good. Our balance sheet is in good shape. Our loan loss reserves are deemed to be adequate. We believe credit risk is well managed as well as interest rate risks. The key to me is that we've developed a high level of non-interest income. In fact, we are amongst the leaders in the nation of banks under 1 billion in the development of non-interest income with over 40% of our revenue coming from non-interest income.
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