East West Bancorp Inc Q1 FY2026 Earnings Call

Good day, and welcome to East West Bancorp's First Quarter 2026 Earnings Call. Operator provided instructions. Please note this event is being recorded. I would now like to turn the conference over to Adrienne Atkinson, Director of Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Thank you, operator. Good afternoon, and thank you, everyone, for joining us to review East West Bancorp's First Quarter 2026 Financial Results. With me are Dominic Ng, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer; Chris Del Moral-Niles, Chief Financial Officer; and Irene Oh, our Chief Risk Officer. This call is being recorded and will be available for replay on our Investor Relations website. The slide deck referenced during this call is available on our Investor Relations site. Management may make projections or other forward-looking statements, which may differ materially from the actual results due to a number of risks and uncertainties. Management may discuss non-GAAP financial measures. For a more detailed description of the risk factors and the reconciliation of GAAP to non-GAAP financial measures, please refer to our filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, including the Form 8-K filed today. I will now turn the call over to Dominic.

Thank you, Adrienne. Good afternoon, and thank you for joining us for our first quarter earnings call. I'm pleased to report that East West had another record quarter for loans, deposits, and fee income. Our consumer and commercial depositors continue to place their trust in us, helping grow total deposits by 9% year-over-year. Growth in noninterest-bearing deposits was particularly strong this quarter, up nearly $800 million, driven by our continued focus on providing solutions to retail and small business customers. We also delivered 7% year-over-year loan growth. C&I loans increased by more than $900 million quarter-over-quarter, driven by higher line utilization, particularly among capital call borrowers. We also achieved a record quarter of fee income, growing 12% year-over-year. We saw strong momentum in wealth management this quarter as we stayed closely engaged with clients. We continue to see opportunity to grow and diversify our fee revenues over time. Credit performance remained stable. Net charge-offs and nonperforming assets were low in absolute terms, consistent with our expectations and reflecting our disciplined approach to risk management. Our capital position remains a key advantage for East West, with a tangible capital ratio of 10.3%. We maintained this capital level while growing our balance sheet, increasing our dividend, and opportunistically repurchasing shares. We continue to be focused on being disciplined stewards of our customers' trust and our shareholders' capital. I will now turn the call over to Chris to provide more details on our first quarter financial performance. Chris?

Thanks, Dominic. Let's start with deposit growth on Slide 4. Our end-of-period deposits grew by $1.8 billion quarter-over-quarter. Average DDA growth was up 12% year-over-year and nearly $0.5 billion on an average basis. This checking account growth led us to price our leaner Lunar New Year CD campaign more conservatively this year, allowing us to focus on CD balance retention and drive a better mix of deposit costs for the quarter and going into the rest of 2026. Money market deposits were also up 9% year-over-year, as we continue to further diversify away from CDs and other higher-cost deposits. Turning to loans on Slide 5, as we have emphasized before, our focus has been and continues to be on growing our C&I portfolio, and C&I was the primary driver of growth in Q1. Most of the increase was driven by net line draws from existing customers. While utilization ticked up across a range of industries, as Dominic mentioned, capital call-related borrowings made up the lion's share of the first quarter's net growth. The quarter's net draws on capital call lines reflected broad-based increases in M&A and real estate property acquisitions across the quarter. While some of these lines have already been paid down here in the second quarter, private equity markets and real estate markets remain active and we expect to continue to participate in this activity during the remainder of the year. Residential mortgage experienced a seasonally slower Q1 than we expected, but our pipelines have grown and continue to grow into Q2; and we expect residential mortgage to be a consistent contributor to our overall loan growth during the year. We also grew commercial real estate balances this quarter. Our priority continues to be on supporting our long-standing real estate relationship clients. Given the level of net growth we saw in the first quarter and the pipelines we see going into Q2, we are comfortable reiterating our guidance for the full-year loan growth to be in the range of 5% to 7%. Now turning to Slide 6, our loan portfolio remains well-diversified, with over 70% of our loans to commercial customers across a broad range of industries and commercial real estate asset types. C&I now represents 34% of our total loans, reflecting the results of our focus and emphasis on balanced growth across our balance sheet. Our CRE portfolio remains diversified by a number of product types with an emphasis on multi-family, retail, and industrial projects. As we look ahead, we remain focused on growing the portfolio in a disciplined way that enhances diversification and remains aligned with our overall risk appetite. Turning to Slide 7, we provided incremental disclosure on our NBFI portfolio. Growth in this portfolio this quarter has been driven primarily by capital call lines. Our NBFI portfolio is granular, with diversification across industry and category types. Ninety-nine point nine nine percent of our NBFI loans are current, and in the past decade there have been virtually no net charge-offs in this portfolio. Approximately 30% of this portfolio is made up of capital call lines. Capital call is not a regulatory classification, and our capital call loans are spread across a range of private equity, mortgage credit, and business credit borrowers. I'll now turn to net interest income and margin discussion on Slide 8. Quarterly dollar net interest income increased to $671 million, reflecting our ability to grow our balance sheet while overcoming the headwinds of rate cuts in Q4 and two fewer days in Q1. Our short-term liability sensitivity on deposit pricing dynamics and our positive deposit remixing during the quarter allowed us to continue to reduce our deposit costs, driving period-end costs down a further 6 basis points quarter-over-quarter. Looking back to the start of the cutting cycle, we have decreased interest-bearing deposit costs by 111 basis points, comfortably exceeding our 50% beta guidance shared in prior periods. Moving on to fees on Slide 9, fee income grew 12% year-over-year to a new record $99 million for the quarter, with significant growth in wealth management fees driven by structured note and annuity sales and deposit-related fees, driven by higher customer activity. We will remain focused on driving this growth and further diversifying our revenue overall, and are quite encouraged by the pace of growth in fee revenue so far this year. We continue to aspire to deliver double-digit year-over-year growth in fee income in 2026. Now turning to expenses on Slide 10. East West continues to deliver industry-leading efficiency while investing for future growth. The Q1 efficiency ratio was 36.2%. Total operating non-interest expense was $258 million for the first quarter and included seasonally higher payroll-related costs, some increased stock-based compensation costs, and higher incentive comp, reflecting increased commissions for our wealth management activity. Nonetheless, overall, we continue to expect expenses to come in line with our guidance for the year. Now let me hand the call over to Irene for comments on credit and capital.

Thank you, Chris, and good afternoon to all on the call. As you can see on Slide 11, our asset quality metrics held stable and continue to broadly outperform the industry. Quarter-over-quarter, non-performing assets remained stable at 26 basis points as of March 31, 2026. We recorded net charge-offs of just 9 basis points in the first quarter of 2026, or $12 million, compared to 8 basis points in the fourth quarter. We recorded a higher provision for credit losses of $36 million in the first quarter, compared with $30 million for the fourth quarter. We remain vigilant and proactive in managing our credit risk. Turning to Slide 12, the allowance for credit losses increased $26 million to $836 million or 1.44% of total loans, as of March 31, reflecting quarter-over-quarter loan growth and the portfolio mix shift. We believe we are adequately reserved for the content of our loan portfolio given the current economic outlook. Turning to Slide 13, all of East West's regulatory capital ratios remain well in excess of regulatory requirements for a well-capitalized institution and well above regional and national bank averages. East West Common Equity Tier 1 capital ratio stands at a robust 15.1%, while the tangible common equity ratio now sits at 10.3%. These capital levels continue to place us amongst the best-capitalized banks in the industry. In the first quarter, East West repurchased approximately 938,000 shares of common stock during the first quarter for $98 million. We currently have $117 million of repurchase authorization that remains available for future buybacks. East West also distributed approximately $111 million to shareholders via a quarterly dividend. East West's second quarter 2026 dividend will be payable on May 18, 2026, to stockholders of record on May 4, 2026. I will now turn it back to Chris to share our outlook.

Thank you, Irene. We've assumed the forward curve as of March 31, which models no rate cuts. And therefore, we're updating our full-year 2026 net interest income guidance to grow between 6% to 8%, up from our prior expectations of growth between 5% and 7%. We're also updating our net charge-offs and now projected to fall between 15 and 25 basis points for the full year. With that, we'll be happy to open the call for questions. Operator?

Operator provided instructions. And the first question will come from Ebrahim Poonawala with Bank of America.

I guess maybe the first question is, given the capital proposals put out by the Fed last month, can you quantify the impact you expect on your capital ratios? Also, what is the expected impact on what are currently really strong capital levels, and where would this head if the proposal becomes a final rule?

We are happy to cover that for you. The risk-weighted asset adjustment from what has been put out there as Basel III Endgame is roughly a $7 billion reduction in our current risk-weighted assets relative to our current balance sheet. And that would probably translate to something on the order of magnitude of 1.6% to 1.8% increase in our various respective regulatory capital ratios.

Are you going to use all that excess capital to start another bank, but...

Dominic is very opportunistic. And I think we are very comfortable maintaining very strong capital levels and having more capital has never served this bank badly.

We're going to use that capital to grow organically.

That's the best answer. So I hope you do. So maybe, I guess, moving to the P&L, strong deposit growth. I wanted to ask about private capital call-line lending. There's been a lot of focus on private equity in that space. First, it didn't sound like any of that drawdown on capital call-line lending was stressed, and it seemed like there was more activity driving it; can you confirm that? And why are we not seeing more diversified C&I growth pick up, given the broader momentum? I understand the macro volatility, but are you seeing at least green shoots of other areas where C&I is picking up?

Well, EB, I think on the capital call lines, it was pretty diversified. It was the lion's share of the total growth, but it was across a range of industries, and that gives us comfort that things are happening out there and there are green shoots in general. And of course, there was a component that was a capital call line, which is well over $300 million, and that was all encouraging evidence of continued activity across a range of industries. So, we saw activity in true distribution. We saw some cross-border. We talked commercial real estate. We saw a lot of areas that had positive momentum and continue to have positive momentum going into Q2.

And maybe I'll just add to clarify as a clarifying point, none of the drawdowns that we saw in the quarter were anything distressed. Opportunistically, it really is the time of that. And I think, as Chris alluded to, some of those, there's a timing component of this, right? Some of those did pay off in the early part of the second quarter, normal activity.

The next question will come from Dave Rochester with Cantor Fitzgerald.

I just wanted to ask about the deposit growth. Very solid this quarter. Can you just give an update on the competitive environment there? Do you find yourself having an easier time growing core deposits. I mean normally, this is a softer quarter for that for most banks. The DDA trends look really good. How do you feel about that going into 2Q and the rest of the year, especially on the DDA side.

I think the DDA growth that you saw has been the result of a now more than a year's long campaign to really deepen our connection with retail, small business customers across our footprint. That's been successful and continue to bear fruit into Q1 '26. We're not letting up on that strategy. That campaign has been working arguably better than we expected here going after it for more than a year, but in a way that we are continuing to go more time and effort to make sure we nurture it even more. The landscape for deposits, however, is not easy. It is a very competitive landscape. And from a pricing perspective, the fact that we moved from the outlook with multiple cuts to an outlook with no cuts means that deposit pricing pressure is real and coming upon us. And so the reality is, it's doubly impressive from our perspective that our teams are able to go out there and win non-interest-bearing DDA money in an environment where rates aren't expected to come down anytime soon. Kudos to our retail team, kudos to our strong business teams, kudos to all commercial RMs out there working with their customers to find opportunities for us to add value, really paid off here in the first quarter. But no, I don't think pricing is going to get any easier, and I don't think competition is going to get any easier.

I appreciate that. Just a follow-up on wealth management and you talked about staying close to the customer and that helping you guys out this quarter. It's a really big number this quarter. Can you just talk about how you see that trending moving forward? If you've added new people that are helping boost that number, you've got new products. Just anything else that can help us figure this out going forward.

There was a fair amount of volatility in Q1 and some of our clients decided that some structured notes were a good thing, and we added some notable volume in structured notes. We also added some annuities during the quarter as people moved out of equities at record highs into annuity products. But we also added people late in the quarter, so it didn't have a big impact to the Q1 numbers, but we expect it will continue to support continued growth in wealth management as we roll through the rest of the year.

The next question will come from Jared Shaw with Barclays.

I guess sticking on the deposit theme, with the good growth that you're seeing in the mix shift, how should we think about sort of the trend of deposit pricing costs in a flat environment? I mean, do you think you're still going to be able to continue to march that lower as we go forward?

I think, Jared, in some prior calls or meetings, I had alluded to the fact that we have been benefited from rolling down the hill and there would come a point in time where the hill would stop to be so steep and flatten out. And I think we've hit that point now. So no, my comments earlier that I don't think deposit pricing is going to get easier allude to the fact that I think our ability to march down or roll down the next wave of CDs that sort of run its course to a large extent. That having been said, I'll just remind you all, we are asset sensitive which is why when we're changing our guidance from cuts to a flat rate environment, we're also upping our NII guidance because higher for longer is net better for East West Bank.

Okay. That's good color. And then any color, maybe, Irene, on the growth in resi nonperformers? Are you seeing any areas of stress there maybe from tech worker disruption from AI or anything that you're spending a little more time looking at?

Yes. That's a great question. We have seen a little bit of increases in that, ultimately, there isn't anything that we view as systemic. It really is customer by customer, loan by loan. And ultimately, for us, given the low loan-to-values we underwrite at, we don't see a lot of loss content there.

The next question will come from Casey Haire with Autonomous Research.

I wanted to touch on loan growth. Apologies if I missed this, but your guide of 5% to 7%, coming off a quarter where you're growing at an 8% annualized rate and with a constructive pipeline, seems a bit conservative. Why is that? What are we missing?

I would point you to Page 9 of our press release tables which says that from March 31 of last year to March 31 of this year, we grew by exactly 7.0% on total loans. So that felt like it was in the range of 5% to 7% and warranted holding the range.

Okay. Yes. Last year it was much different. We had the tariff and, obviously, the macro is challenging, I get it. All right. Just moving back to the capital discussion. Irene, I heard you say you're going to grow organically. I've also heard you talk about some M&A aspirations on the East Coast, where there are pockets of Chinese American populations that would fit well with the strategy here. Could you share some updated thoughts on that? And given the excess capital under the Basel III proposal, if you were to find an opportunity you liked, what would be the parameters around earn-back and tangible book value dilution?

Well, I'll start and maybe Dominic and Chris can chime in afterwards. We have a kind of hierarchy—organic, right? Organic growth is our priority, and we've been able to show over many, many years the ability to grow our franchise through organic growth. Although, as you know, we have a history many years ago also of being able to do successful well-priced strategic acquisitions as well. So organic growth is our #1 priority. I think, certainly, when is opportunistic stock buybacks, you know what the return is and then also acquisitions, well priced, strategic, makes sense for the franchise, something that ultimately has to be a better return than our ability to grow organically.

And we complement that, of course, with the regular dividend and we review the dividend at least annually and then the dividend is our second go-to after organic growth, and that's where we have most recently increased our dividend, you'll recall in the first quarter by one-third, and we'll continue to look at that to make sure it remains competitive. And then as Irene mentioned, follow up the organic growth with dividends and then inorganic opportunities at the right price and then share buybacks perhaps opportunistically.

The next question will come from Manan Gosalia with Morgan Stanley.

On the deposit growth side, do you typically see a flight to safety from clients, with clients holding more liquidity during periods of elevated geopolitical risk? Did you see any of that this quarter? I'm trying to assess how much of the strength in DDA growth is seasonal or idiosyncratic versus how much you see as a new base to grow off of.

Clearly, East West Bank over the last 15 years has been the beneficiary of being a very strong, well-capitalized and highly liquid bank of net deposit flows from our customers and increased balances from other banks in the region, from other banks in the country and even some pockets outside. All of that has served East West's benefit and continues to be. And it does feel like whenever there's an errant headline, we see more opportunities to engage with more customers and have been successful at gathering more deposits. So we like the positioning that we have. It apparently pays dividends to be the best capitalized bank in the industry and one of the most profitable banks in the industry and for everybody to recognize that and trust us in that way. And so I think we are well positioned, and I don't think it's temporary. But yes, we do see flows come in and out and tax flows do happen on April 15, and we saw some of those flow out, but we feel good about the base that we've built and the year-over-year growth in deposits that we've been seeing for almost 15 straight years.

Right. Perfect. And then you guys gave the C&I loan yields at the back and not a surprise to see that edge down slightly. Is that all just rate related? Or is there anything that comes there from mix shift maybe to capital call or investment-grade clients? Or is there anything you're seeing in terms of competition impacting spreads?

I think we have seen competition broadly impact spreads over the course of the last year. We also provide the net interest margin table on Pages 10 and 11 of the press release. And what you'll see there is a broad repricing downwards because most of our portfolio is floating rate and that just comes through as those naturally move forward with the rate cuts that we saw last year, including the ones that happened in December. But as we've mentioned, our resets sometimes don't kick in for about 45 days. So we saw still repricing impact in Q1 related to the December rate cut.

The next question will come from Bernard Von Gizycki with Deutsche Bank.

Chris, you mentioned the checking account growth led to pricing the Lunar New Year CD campaign more conservatively this year, allowing you to focus on CD retention. Can you just remind us how much CDs rolled off during the quarter? How much was retained? Any color on expected improvement in pricing from rolling forward CDs in 2Q?

Yes. So we had a little over $10 billion of rollover during Q1, and we net grew CDs as presented on Slide 4 by $127 million. So we priced for retention and achieved retention. And then from a pricing perspective, as I mentioned earlier, we've been benefiting from rolling downhill, but we sort of flattened out that roll. And as we sit here today, I'm not sure incremental new CDs will necessarily reprice with much of a benefit as we roll into Q2 and Q3. We're currently pricing our CD special at 3.60%, which is not going to necessarily move the needle a lot on our CD price.

Okay. And just as my follow-up, I think in last quarter, you mentioned the impact from hedging impact. There was a headwind of about $2 million. What was it this quarter? Any expectations for full year you can provide?

Yes, it's roughly flat, and all those hedges today are in the money looking forward, given that backup, and we're still in the money; the mark-to-market value of all the trades is positive. So we're going to add value moving forward.

The next question will come from David Chiaverini with Jefferies.

On the NII outlook, so you raised it 6% to 8% from 5% to 7%. You alluded to higher for longer being good for East West. Was this the main contributor to raising the guide? Or was the loan outlook also part of it? Can you unpack that a little bit?

Yes. We would attribute the guide increase exclusively to the change in the rate outlook. And as I noted earlier, we're not raising our loan guidance at this point in time. So that's still baked in there at 5% to 7%.

Got it. And on the net interest margin, how should we think about the outlook from here based on your commentary on the deposit front, is a dip a reasonable way to think of it? Or how should we think about the NIM going forward?

So we're thinking about the margin and dollar NII as moving higher, they'll probably both track at least flat to positive.

So the NIM flat to positive from here?

Correct. This ties back to the question I answered earlier: even though there's incremental deposit pressure, because loans will be yielding higher for longer this year, we will still end up with better net interest income and likely a slightly better net interest margin than we previously projected. I would remind you, though, that the first quarter has fewer days, so don't index off the Q1 number; index off the day count adjusted number.

The next question will come from Chris McGratty with KBW.

The tweak in the credit guidance is a tweak, but I think it's a fairly important vote of confidence or statement. Could you unpack what drove you to change the charge-off guide after one quarter?

Yes. It's simply put, right? When we look at the portfolio and we look at kind of what we're seeing, this is our view as far as at least today where we think the net charge-offs are going to be.

Okay. So good visibility on the outlook. Okay. And then within the 7% to 9% expense growth. I'm wondering if you could parse out, run the bank versus invest in the bank and how over time, this level of growth. I think this is a similar guide you gave last year at the beginning of the year, how AI might influence that over the medium term?

In the short to medium term, AI is a cost because we all have to act to figure out how to respond to developments and everything else the market is doing. So the reality is we are spending time to ensure we are, as we have been for the last year, investing in our cyber defense, our monitoring tools, and our daily operating capability to be as resilient as possible. These investments are not regulatory-driven; they are made to help us be the best bank for our customers, and we will continue to make them. That is why we continue to believe 7% to 9% expense growth is the right level while delivering the best efficiency ratio in the industry.

The next question will come from David Smith with Truist Securities.

Good afternoon. I was wondering if you could give us any updates on how you're looking at blockchain or stablecoins as you look at ways to better help your plans with international business needs, transfer money more efficiently?

We continue to see the vast majority of our customers wanting and continuing to transact in fiat currencies, but we do have customers that hold a variety of crypto and stablecoin, and we're monitoring those continued conversations, development, new products and new solutions. We have put some projects into the hopper that we think we'll be able to deliver at the appropriate time when there's a little more market acceptance to those, and we've been working with one or two clients on select opportunities to be supporting them on a back office basis. And so we'll continue to be active around the space, but have not yet rolled anything out to customers.

Are tokenized deposits part of that potentially or anything there?

We have explored those. We have not yet rolled out or put something like that on the shelf, but that's one of the things that we've looked at in concert with, I think, some larger industry vendors that have proposed solutions, and we're trying to figure out if we want to use those or something different. So we're just exploring that and monitoring those development cycles.

The next question will come from Sun Young Lee with TD Cowen.

In recent years, your deposit, you generally were able to grow deposits at a pace that's modestly above loans. Is it fair to assume that your deposit growth for 2026 would be the same as in coming in, in line to above your loan growth guide for the year, given the strong results, especially given the strong results from the first quarter?

Janet, I would note that on Page 3 of our financial highlights. We led with deposit-led growth as the story. And so we continue to see deposit-led growth as the story and continue to expect deposits to help us drive a better funding mix, a better liquidity profile and more reservoir dollars available to meet our clients' needs as borrowers over time. But yes, it's been a deposit-led story.

Okay. Maybe I'm missing something here, but if you were able to keep your net interest margin flat to modestly improving versus the first quarter, excluding the day-count impact, and loans grew about 6.5 percent, sorry, what was your loan growth guide? Loan growth is 5 to 7 percent. For your net interest income, what would be the puts and takes around getting to the lower end versus the high end? It looks like you're tracking at least at the higher end and potentially better.

I think some of those things are true, but the other things that we talked about are that deposit pricing pressure continues to build, and we would expect that to eat into some of the benefit that we might see from higher for longer as we move through the course of the year. If the economy is strong enough, or inflation levels are strong enough such that rates are not nearly lower then probably there's more net funding going on in the industry and deposit pricing competition strengthens or becomes more rigid or even increases and makes that more costly, and we factor that into our models for 2026.

The next question will come from Timur Braziler with UBS.

Just circling back on the loan growth, maybe specifically for the coming quarter. I appreciate the comments that some of the capital call lines had already paid down. That's going to be offset with improvement in the mortgage business. I guess, net-net, in 2Q, are you still expecting those loan balances to grow? And are we still thinking that 1Q is kind of seasonally softer for some of the traditional commercial business lines?

So on the private equity capital call line activity that we saw in Q1, Irene mentioned and I mentioned, we've already seen some of that pay off here in April. And we probably expect more than one-third of it to pay off, frankly, in the ordinary course during the ordinary second quarter. So that uptick that we saw should in the ordinary course be paid down to some extent. However, we continue to see continued activity in private equity and in mortgage private capital. And those two areas may therefore offset those paydowns and allow us to deliver additional growth in Q2. As we sit here today, we would expect that. Too much seasonality per se in the other areas of our commercial business.

Got it. And then one on credit. ACL has been building over the last couple of quarters. I think you guys called out some mix shift here in the first quarter. Just give us a sense of where you are likely in that ACL build. And should we expect that to start settling out and being utilized here at some point? Or is that going to remain fairly conservative in holding up at these kind of levels?

I think the bank has traditionally approached ACL as being appropriate and perhaps on the margin modestly conservative, I think we've continued to do so. From a build perspective, it was two basis points for the quarter. I'll defer to Irene on specific comments around the portfolio. But I think the reality is, with the visibility that we do have in the charge-offs, we feel pretty good about where we stand.

Yes. Maybe I'll just add a little bit on the technical side of that. You use a multi-scenario model for calculating our allowance. And as of March 31, the downside scenario did change quite substantially from what it was at year-end. That certainly was one of the factors.

This concludes our question-and-answer session. I would like to turn the conference back over to Dominic Ng for any closing remarks.

Well, thank you to everyone for joining us today. I want to thank our team for their continued hard work and dedication, which continues to show in our results. We appreciate everyone's time and interest and look forward to speaking with you again next quarter. Goodbye.

The conference has now concluded. Thank you for attending today's presentation. You may now disconnect.