COLB - Columbia Banking System Inc. (COLB) Q1 2024 Earnings Call Transcript
2024-04-26 00:22:02 ET
Columbia Banking System, Inc. (COLB)
Q1 2024 Earnings Conference Call
April 25, 2024, 05:00 PM ET
Company Participants
Clint Stein - President and Chief Executive Officer
Ron Farnsworth - Chief Financial Officer
Frank Namdar - Chief Credit Officer
Tory Nixon - President, Umpqua Bank
Chris Merrywell - President, Umpqua Bank
Conference Call Participants
David Feaster - Raymond James
Jared Shaw - Barclays
Jeff Rulis - D.A. Davidson
Ben Gerlinger - Citi
Timur Braziler - Wells Fargo
Brandon King - Truist
Andrew Terrell - Stephens.
Chris McGratty - KBW
Jon Arfstrom - RBC Capital Markets
Presentation
Operator
Welcome to the Columbia Banking Systems First Quarter 2024 Earnings Conference Call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. After the speaker's presentation, there will be a question and answer session. [Operator instructions]. Please be advised that today's conference is being recorded.
At this time, I would like to introduce Clint Stein, President and CEO of Columbia, to begin the conference call.
Clint Stein
Thank you, Dede. Good afternoon, everyone. Thank you for joining us as we review our first quarter results. The earnings release and corresponding presentation are available on our website at ColumbiaBankingSystem.com.
During today's call, we will make forward-looking statements, which are subject to risk and uncertainties and are intended to be covered by the safe harbor provisions of federal securities law. For a list of factors that may cause actual results to differ materially from expectations, please refer to the disclosures contained within our SEC filings. We will also reference non-GAAP financial measures and encourage you to review the non-GAAP reconciliations provided in our earnings materials.
With that, March 1 marked the one-year anniversary of the closing of our merger. It was a notable milestone for our company for many reasons. Importantly, it provided us with a full year of data points for what was working well within the combined organization and allowed us to identify redundancies and inefficiencies that are a natural byproduct of large mergers.
Our one-year anniversary marked the conclusion of our merger integration phase and enabled us to start our operational effectiveness work. Armed with the observations and learnings over the first year, we made significant progress on identifying opportunities for improving our expense profile.
During the first quarter, we reduced our headcount by 91 FTE, with additional reductions communicated internally of 142 for the month of April. The FTE reductions combined with other expense savings enacted in the first quarter represent annualized reductions of $18 million. These savings are reflected as of quarter end, not in the first quarter's normalized operating run rate of $286 million. The actions taken to date for the second quarter add an additional $25 million of savings annualized to the first quarter number....
Columbia Banking System, Inc. (COLB) Q1 2024 Earnings Call Transcript