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Company Interview Excerpt
JACK RUSCH - FIRST FEDERAL CAPITAL CORPORATION (FTFC)


Full article published: 08/05/2002


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TWST: Could we begin with a brief historical sketch of First Federal and a picture of things as they are now?
Mr. Rusch: The company was formed in 1989. We went public with the merger of First Federal of La Crosse, Wisconsin, and another mutual, First Federal of Madison, Wisconsin. Simultaneously, we converted to a public company. Since then, we've grown to approximately 2.8 billion. We've got 84 offices covering 13 of the 14 major markets in Wisconsin, Rockford, Illinois, and most recently, Rochester, Minnesota. Principally, out of those offices, 44 are supermarket offices. We are proponents of supermarket banking. We have really used these offices over the last seven plus years to enter new markets. Back in 1993 we were in three of the 14 major markets in Wisconsin. We define a major market as 1 billion plus in deposits. We knew we wanted to grow the organization but there were limited opportunities for acquisitions. At that time, the thrift industry in Wisconsin was very healthy and there were limited opportunities for acquisition. So we chose the de novo route, which we can control ourselves. We used the supermarket because the cost of opening de novo at a grocery store is substantially less and you also get access to a ready customer base. There are a number of customers who come through a grocery store and we are fairly selective as to the size of the grocery store that we go into. So what we get is a sizeable market to promote our services to, and then we become known in the community. What we're doing now is following up those de novo entries with what we call a hub and spoke concept, where we would either acquire a commercial bank or we would build a larger brick and mortar. That's where the main services such as mortgage lending, business banking and investment services would be located. We then use the supermarket offices as the convenience locations to do banking. In the last two years we've changed direction a little bit. Our focus is evolving from a strictly retail to more of a community bank. In fact, our two recent acquisitions were a commercial bank in Wausau, Wisconsin, and the purchase of three branches in Rochester, Minnesota, that were commercial bank branches of Marquette Bank. These acquisitions have brought us commercial banking products and customers. They will also bring us the opportunity to make additional acquisitions because, again, there are a number of community banks, banks of 100 million to 300 million in our marketplace. So our ability to do commercial business banking allows us to at least approach those people and see if they would be interested in merging with us. The concept is to enhance our market presence in those 14 major markets in Wisconsin. Our strategy is to work toward obtaining at least a 5% market share in those markets. Again, 5%, if you look at the numbers, would give us probably one of the top four positions in the market. The intended result is to enhance our franchise and to really build shareholder value, which is the whole essence of First Federal's growth story. The other reason to get into commercial banking is balance sheet driven. If you look at our balance sheet, we really would like to add the commercial business loan to our loan portfolio and change our mix a little bit. Basically, right now the biggest percentage of our portfolio is still one- to four-family, although we have a significant consumer portfolio and a significant commercial real estate portfolio. What we would like to do is replace part of our residential portfolio with the commercial business portfolio. On the deposit side, we've offered free checking for a number of years. For a thrift, we have a fairly large transactional account base. What we would be looking to do, also on the deposit side, is to add the commercial banking deposits and replace part of our CD funding with transactional accounts or money market accounts, both of which would cost us less from an interest rate standpoint than our CDs. Currently, about 60% of our deposit base is funded by CDs; we would like to lower that percentage. So our objective is to get into commercial banking and work on both sides of the balance sheet to improve our margin. On the loan side, we can improve our asset yield and the commercial banking deposits should lower our cost of funds on the deposit side. The net of those two should improve our interest margin. We also are a big non-interest income producer. On average, approximately 39% of our total revenues are non-interest income, which is significant in our industry and also in the banking industry. A very high percentage of our total revenues are produced by non-interest income driven principally by two lines of business. One is retail banking fees, because of our large checking base; the other is our mortgage banking revenues. In low interest rate environments, we benefit from the gain on sale and in times of high interest rates, we realize the value of our servicing portfolio. That's a quick rundown of where we are.

 

Tickers included in this excerpt: FTFC

 

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.