American Savings Bank is taking care of old business and preparing for the future as it looks forward to becoming a stand-alone financial institution for the first time in 27 years.
The state’s third-largest bank said Friday that net income slipped 1.4 percent to $12 million in the fourth quarter after settling a 3-year-old class-action lawsuit for $2 million related to overdraft fees on debit card transactions, and spending about $600,000 associated with its decision to build new headquarters in Chinatown within the next two years.
American Savings is scheduled to be spun off at the end of this year by parent Hawaiian Electric Industries Inc. if a $4.3 billion sale to Florida-based NextEra Energy Inc. is approved by regulators and shareholders. NextEra and HEI filed their application for approval of the sale with the state Public Utilities Commission on Thursday. HEI will release its fourth-quarter and full-year financial results Feb. 12.
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Fourth-quarter net
$12 million
Year-earlier net
$12.2 million
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"We’re very excited about the opportunity that presents itself," American Savings President and Chief Executive Officer Rich Wacker said in a phone interview. "It’s a very motivating time for our team. We are pressing ahead with the same business strategy and the same management we’ve had operating as an independent unit within HEI. It just gives us more motivation and energy to keep us going because as an independent company we’ll be able to directly see the results of the work that we’re doing."
Wacker, reiterating what was said at the time of the Dec. 3 NextEra-HEI announcement, said "our management team is not likely to change as a result of the transaction, and I’ll be the CEO."
Wacker said HEI President and CEO Connie Lau, who previously held those same positions at American Savings, hasn’t disclosed her plans.
"If you ask Connie today, she’ll say she’s totally focusing on running the company and getting people to understand why it’s a good transaction," Wacker said. "She hasn’t started thinking about what she’s going to do after that."
The settlement of the overdraft case stems from lawsuits filed in 2011 against American Savings, Central Pacific Bank and Bank of Hawaii for reordering debit card transactions from the highest amount to the lowest. The suits allege this practice allowed the banks to deplete the customer’s available funds as quickly as possible and maximize the number of overdrafts and overdraft fees.
Bank of Hawaii and Central Pacific ultimately settled later that year for $9 million and $1.2 million, respectively, but American Savings opted to appeal the suit. It was appealed to the Hawaii Supreme Court but settled last month before the court could rule.
"We want to move forward," Wacker said about the reason for settling. "It doesn’t have anything in particular to do with (the NextEra-HEI deal), but it does have something to do with wanting to put it behind us."
Wacker said he’s hoping that the bank will be able to break ground this year on a new headquarters that will be built in a 62,595-square-foot public parking lot next to Nuuanu Stream in Chinatown. The bank, which has been looking for several years to bring its support teams from six Oahu locations into one facility, bought the property on the corner of Beretania and Aala streets for $12 million on Nov. 24 from Pacific Constructors LLC.
Although the location is across the street from a homeless encampment at Aala Park, Wacker views the new headquarters site as a positive development.
"We think it’s a positive because it’s a good large lot near downtown where we can create the environment that we want to create, where we’ll have our whole team together and be able to execute even better for our customers," he said. "(The homeless situation) concerns me as a citizen, and there’s a lot of efforts to address that problem statewide that we support. But we also think as a location for our campus, we feel good. We can have a good environment for our people there."
American Savings heads into perhaps its final year under the HEI umbrella with the wind of an improving state economy at its back. The bank boosted its loans 6.8 percent last quarter to $4.4 billion and increased its deposits 5.7 percent to $4.6 billion.
"We feel like we had a good quarter of being able to respond to our customers’ needs for financing," Wacker said. "It was broad-based through the consumer side, small-business side and the corporate commercial lending side."
The bank, though, did set aside $2.6 million for potential loan losses compared with $554,000 in the fourth quarter of 2013. The higher provision last quarter was due to loan growth and the downgrade of one commercial real estate loan.
Its ratio of nonperforming assets to total loans improved to 0.85 percent from 1.20 percent in the year-earlier quarter.
American Savings’ net interest margin — the spread between its lending rates and deposit rates — fell to 3.65 percent from 3.67 percent. Its net interest income increased 5.8 percent to $46.7 million from $44.1 million.
Noninterest income, which includes service charges and fees, fell 1.7 percent to $15.3 million from $15.5 million.
Total assets grew 6.1 percent to $5.6 billion from $5.2 billion.
For the year, American Savings’ net income dropped 10.5 percent to $51.5 million from $57.5 million in 2013 primarily due to $3 million in lower mortgage banking income, $3 million less income from the full-year impact of federal regulatory caps that the bank could charge merchants per electronic debit transaction, and a $1 million net gain from the sale of its $25 million card portfolio in 2013 to First Bankcard, a division of First National Bank of Omaha.
