Earnings Call Excerpt
Sovereign Bancorp Inc (SOV)
Q4 2007 Earnings Call
January 24, 2008 9:00 am ET
Executives
Joe Campanelli - President and Chief Executive Officer
Mark R. McCollom – Chief Financial Officer
Bob Rose - Head of Risk Management
Analysts
Gerard Cassidy - RBC Capital Markets
Heather Wolf - Merrill Lynch
Bob Hughes - KBW
Matt Kelley - Sterne Agee
James Abbott - FBR Capital Markets
Ken Usdin - Banc of America Securities
David Pringle – Salespoint Research
Presentation
Operator
Good morning, my name is Latrisha, and I will be your conference operator today. At this time I’d like to welcome everyone to the Sovereign Bancorp 2007 fourth quarter and year end earnings conference call. (Operator Instructions) I would now like to turn the conference over to Mr. Mark McCollom, CFO of Sovereign Bank, please go ahead, Sir.
Mark McCollom
Thank you, Latrisha, good morning everyone. I’d like to thank you for participating in Sovereign’s earnings call for the fourth quarter of 2007. As a reminder, during this call you will hear statements about our strategies, plans and objectives, as well as estimates of future operating results that constitute forward-looking statements within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. These forward-looking statements involve significant risks and uncertainties. Actual results could differ materially from the results discussed in these forward-looking statements. Factors that might cause such a difference include but are not limited to general economic conditions, changes in interest rates, deposit flows, loan demand, changes in accounting principles, and other factors.
During today’s call you will hear remarks from Joe Campanelli, our president and CEO, as well as myself. We will then follow with a question and answer period at which time Bob Rose, our head of Risk Management will be available for questions as well. With that I’d now like to turn to call over to Joe.
Joe Campanelli
Thank you, Mark, and good morning everyone. I too would like to welcome you to our fourth quarter earnings call. As you know the entire industry is facing significant challenges. We are fully focused on managing these issues prudently and implementing strategies that will put us in the best position to improve the operating earnings of our franchise.
In times like these there are often issues that lie outside of our control and we are clearly feeling the effects of those. While we are all hopeful that the environment and related macroeconomic trends will stabilize sooner rather than later, we are taking aggressive actions to manage these issues as we can, and focus on improving our operational and financial performance. Some of the industry-wide items trigger charges that we outlined for you in our 8-K that was filed in January 14. Mark will review the financial details of that and the rest of our numbers in a moment, with particular emphasis on credit quality and capital strength. I know these are two important areas of focus, as they should be as part of the economic cycle.
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