Columbia Banking reports Q1 EPS 65c, consensus 53c

“Our first quarter results reflect early progress on our targeted actions to improve our financial performance and drive shareholder value,” said Clint Stein, President and CEO. “Enterprise-wide evaluations and targeted changes resulted in tighter expense control and stabilizing deposit costs in the latter part of the quarter. We will continue to exercise prudent expense management, and we expect to see the positive financial impact of near-term initiatives fully reflected in the fourth quarter’s expense run rate. Longer-term initiatives will optimize our performance from a revenue, expense, and profitability standpoint. As an organization, Columbia remains laser-focused on regaining our placement as a top-quartile bank across financial metrics as we strive to drive long-term, consistent, repeatable performance.” Net interest margin was 3.52%, down 26 basis points from the prior quarter given the full-quarter effect of deposit repricing and balance mix shift during the fourth quarter.