Ms. Nash: We are a 12 billion bank headquartered in Michigan, and we serve Michigan, Wisconsin and Northeast Ohio. We recently announced the sale of 10 branch locations in Iowa. We've got 229 branches and 267 ATMs, and we're the largest bank headquartered in Michigan. In 18 of 41 MSAs in the state, we have a top five deposit ranking, and we're really proud that we are the number one SBA lender in the state of Michigan for two years running. And we did about 2.9 billion of loan approvals last year within our franchise. So we're clearly seeing lending as an important part of growing assets and profitability for the bank. We're really a retail community bank. Our average borrowing commercial customer only has a loan relationship of 674,000. So our clients really reflect the communities we're in, up and down the I-75 corridor and across Southern Michigan through Jackson. We have a strong presence in Flint and Saginaw that spreads across Northern Michigan and the Upper Peninsula, and we are spread throughout Wisconsin, with some concentration around the Fox Valley area, Green Bay and Appleton. We have a 90% retention rate of our client base, which is best-in-class for banks. What we try to do is deliver into our communities a very local feel and local flavor, while being able to have the capacity as a larger bank, offer some services that perhaps a very small bank can't provide.
TWST: Give us an economic review of what the region looks like and how it's performed over the past year or so.
Ms. Nash: Yes, absolutely. I'll focus my comments on Michigan, since 70% of our revenue comes out of that state. Clearly, as Michigan goes, we do as well from the bank's perspective. Michigan in the last two years has had job losses of almost 450,000, and that has a huge economic impact. But I think one of the things that folks maybe not pay as much attention to is that Michigan has really been in a recession for a number of years, well before the rest of the country caught up with us. And certainly leading the country in unemployment has been an issue. But if you think about Michigan employment - we look at the non-farm employment levels, since there's been a lot of noise inside unemployment numbers - and the non-farm employment levels have really stabilized starting around May of 2009. And we've also seen a stabilization in home prices in our state. Michigan never saw a big housing bubble the way the rest of the country did. So we probably didn't, quite frankly, have as far to fall as others. We have seen improvement and stabilization in the bank's results as well, and that correlates to what we see in the state. We've said all along that we didn't need Michigan to get a lot better, we just needed it to not get a lot worse. And so stabilization in the Michigan economy and settling of the manufacturing base has been very important. The number of folks employed in the manufacturing segment in Michigan in October of 1999 was over 21%. Today that is under 14%. So the Michigan economy has really had an evolving composition in the last 10 years, and certainly that helped stabilize it maybe a little quicker than some would have thought. And I think there is a general impression that Michigan is only the big three automakers as a state. And certainly they're an important component, but I think the state in the last 10 years has really moved nicely away from the business concentration to be a little bit more broad-based.
Tickers included in this excerpt: CRBC
For more information call (212) 952 7433. The Wall Street Transcript does not endorse any of the comments made by interviewees, and does not make stock recommendations.