Univest Financial Corporation (NASDAQ:UVSP) Q2 2023 Earnings Conference Call July 27, 2023 9:00 AM ET

Corporate Participants

Jeff Schweitzer - President and Chief Executive Officer

Mike Keim - Chief Operating Officer and President, Univest Bank & Trust

Brian Richardson - Chief Financial Officer

Conference Call Participants

Frank Schiraldi - Piper Sandler

Michael Perito - KBW

Operator

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by, and welcome to the Univest Financial Corporation Second Quarter 2023 Earnings Call. I would now like to turn the call over to Jeff Schweitzer, President and CEO of Univest Financial Corporation. Please go ahead.

Jeff Schweitzer

Thank you, Mandeep, and good morning, and thank you to all of our listeners for joining us. Joining me on the call this morning is Mike Keim, our Chief Operating Officer and President of Univest Bank and Trust; and Brian Richardson, our Chief Financial Officer.

Before we begin, I would like to remind everyone of the forward-looking statements disclaimer. Please be advised that during the course of this conference call, management may make forward-looking statements that express management's intentions, beliefs or expectations within the meaning of the federal securities laws. Univest's actual results may differ materially from those contemplated by these forward-looking statements.

I will refer you to the forward-looking cautionary statements in our earnings release and in our SEC filings. Hopefully, everyone had a chance to review our earnings release from yesterday. If not, it could be found on our website at univest.net under the Investor Relations tab.

We reported net income of $16.8 million during the second quarter or $0.57 per share. This was a 26.7% increase in earnings per share over the second quarter of 2022. Our results during the quarter included a $1.1 million after-tax restructuring charge related to the reduction of 3 financial centers, along with reduced headcount primarily focused on our commercial real estate and residential mortgage lending teams. These cost reduction initiatives were in response to the macroeconomic headwinds we are observing relating to rising funding costs. We anticipate these expense reduction initiatives will result in $5.4 million of annualized savings.

Like most in our industry, we continue to be impacted by the rising cost of funding, which negatively impacted our net interest margin, which contracted by 44 basis points during the quarter. Given the rising cost of funding, we continue to increase loan pricing and focus our lending on full relationship customers. While loan production was still strong during the second quarter. This is due to commitments we had already made to customers and we anticipate lending to slow in the second half of the year and full year loan growth to approximate 9%.