Berkshire Hills Bancorp, Inc. (NYSE:BHLB) Q1 2022 Earnings Conference Call April 20, 2022 10:00 AM ET
Company Participants
Kevin Conn - SVP, IR & Corporate Development
Nitin Mhatre - President, CEO & Director
Subhadeep Basu - Senior EVP & CFO
Conference Call Participants
Mark Fitzgibbon - Piper Sandler & Co.
Bill Young - RBC Capital Markets
Chris O'Connell - KBW
Operator
Good morning or good afternoon all, and welcome to the Berkshire Hills Bancorp Q1 Earnings Release Conference Call. My name is Adam, and I'll be your operator today. [Operator Instructions].
I will now hand you over to Kevin Conn to begin. So Kevin, please go ahead when you are ready.
Kevin Conn
Good morning, and thank you for Berkshire Bank's first quarter earnings call. My name is Kevin Conn, Investor Relations and Corporate Development Officer.
Our news release is available in the Investor Relations section of our website, berkshirebank.com, and will be furnished to the SEC. Supplemental investor information is provided in an information presentation at our website at ir.berkshirebank.com, and we will refer to this in our remarks.
Our remarks will include forward-looking statements, and actual results could differ materially from those statements. For details, please see our earnings release and most recent SEC reports on Forms 10-K and 10-Q.
In addition, certain non-GAAP financial measures will be discussed in this conference call. References to non-GAAP measures are only provided to assist you in understanding our results and performance trends and should not be relied on as financial measures of actual results or future projections. A comparison and reconciliation to GAAP measures is included in our news release.
On the call today, we have Nitin Mhatre, President and Chief Executive Officer of Berkshire Hills Bancorp; Subhadeep Basu, our Chief Financial Officer; Sean Gray, our Chief Operating Officer; and Greg Lindenmuth, our Chief Risk Officer.
At this time, I'll turn the call over to our CEO, Nitin Mhatre.
Nitin Mhatre
Thank you, Kevin, and good morning, everyone, and welcome once again to Berkshire's first quarter earnings call.
I'll begin my remarks on Slide 3, where you can see the highlights of the first quarter. It was another solid quarter with strong financial performance, continued balance sheet strength and steady progress on our best strategy. Our earnings per share of $0.43 was up by 4% quarter-over-quarter and up 37% year-over-year. Revenues were lower year-over-year driven by runoff in the PPP and nonstrategic loan portfolios, while our continued expense discipline resulted in expenses flat quarter-over-quarter and lower by 8% year-over-year. As we've said before, we will self-fund our best strategy through optimization initiatives while reinvesting those saves in bankers, customer experience and technology investments that enable our future growth. We are pleased to see that trend come through once again this quarter. Adjusted return on tangible common equity improved to 7.5% from 6% a year ago.