Question-and-Answer Session
Operator
(Operator Instructions) Our first question comes from [Albert Sungar - Sidoti & Co.]
[Albert Sungar - Sidoti & Co.]
My first question is on the yield. Do you have the net interest margin for the month of March available?
David V. Devault
March was about 2.5%, 250, now when you get into individual months that can be very misleading. I mean February because of the number of days, with fewer than 30 days, but also having a mortgage portfolio that’s on a 30/360 basis pushes the margin up. So the margin has I would say increased slightly from the beginning of the quarter to the end of the quarter, but only slightly. And I wouldn’t draw too many conclusions from that.
John C. Warren
I think as we look forward, Albert, what we’re really looking at is a margin that stays somewhat level. And we’ll see if the Fed drops another 25 basis points. But that appears to be the work we’ve done in the forecast.
[Albert Sungar - Sidoti & Co.]
On March 18 as you know, we had another 75 basis point cut. So how much of that is reflected in your March net interest margin?
David V. Devault
Well, certainly some of it was the loans that are tied to prime and immediately re-price would have been affected by that. Other loans, primarily home equity lines, would re-price on April 1 being tied to the Wall Street Journal prime index. At the same time we’re repricing deposits downward. There’d be a lagging effect of those changes as well.
[Albert Sungar - Sidoti & Co.]
Switching to wealth management, do you have a target assets under administration by the end of 2008?
John C. Warren
Are you going to forecast where the stock market’s going to be?
[Albert Sungar - Sidoti & Co.]
In terms of the rewards that you’re trying to set basically the bar for the wealth management division.
John C. Warren
Within the numbers that you see there in the decline we actually had pretty good net growth from new customers coming in. So that if the stock market begins to come around and hopefully we’ll be truly the leading indicator for the economy. Hopefully we easily surpass the $4 billion by the time we get to the end of the year, as we would have been forecasting as you can expect to the beginning of the year.
- To read the full transcript on Seeking Alpha, click here »
