Question-and-Answer Session
Operator
(Operators Instructions). Ken Zerbe of Morgan Stanley. You may ask your question.
Ken Zerbe - Morgan Stanley
Hi, good morning.
H. Lynn Harton
Good morning.
James Gordon
Good morning.
Ken Zerbe - Morgan Stanley
I guess my first and probably the only question. Just when you think about the shift towards your core markets and obviously, the decline in your non-core loan portfolio, how long should this process take for you to be substantially through and because I saw your comments just there about the decline should be similar to first quarter, but how should we think about that? Are you in terms of -- I guess overall balance sheet growth or decline?
Is there something where we should see a substantial reduction in your balance sheet hence possibly helping your capital ratios or is this you expect to keep your balance sheet relatively flat over the next several years?
H. Lynn Harton
Yeah, great question. It will decline the balance sheet will decline before it begins to build again. If you look at the rough percentages of amount of dollars in the non-core, it's about $2.5 billion. It's about a, we expect about a four to 4.5 year run-off of that portfolio. We would expect the core fees to grow at an increasing rate as the economy improves.
So obviously, your core business is defined lot but loan demand right now is week. So, while the core is growing slowly now is growing, but we'd expect that pace of growth to pickup over the next several quarters as the economy improves.
Ken Zerbe - Morgan Stanley
There is not as much as the decline in the non-core I guess?
H. Lynn Harton
Yes, that's right. It's certainly not for the next four to six quarters.
Ken Zerbe - Morgan Stanley
Okay, great. Thank you.
James Gordon
Thanks.
Operator
Adam Barkstrom of Sterne Agee. You may ask your question.
Adam Barkstrom - Sterne Agee
Hey, everybody good morning.
H. Lynn Harton
Good morning, Adam.
Mary Gentry
Good morning.
Adam Barkstrom - Sterne Agee
Hey, I want to follow-up on the last question. And I guess maybe if you could take a minute and talk about the core versus non-core, and how we're looking at that and what is core versus non-core, maybe some -- just some color around that. And then I have a follow-up.
H. Lynn Harton
Sure. We're really trying to focus on really relationship high transactions, so probably the easiest example is, the majority of our indirect auto is in non-core. We do or continue to do some indirect auto business or auto dealers who have deep relationships with us. So that the relationship tie is there. But many of our indirect auto businesses were done, the auto dealers that we didn't have a relationship with and we were not able to penetrate the relationship with our ultimate customers, consumers.
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