Midland States reports Q4 EPS 89c, consensus 79c

Reports Q4 revenue $78.59M , consensus $75.49M .Jeffrey G. Ludwig, President and Chief Executive Officer of the Company, said, “While continuing to prioritize prudent risk management, we delivered another quarter of strong financial results with a higher level of earnings and returns than the prior quarter, as well as a slight increase in our net interest margin and improvement in our efficiency ratio. Our strong financial performance and prudent balance sheet management helped us to achieve our objective to further increase our capital ratios, while we also had a 7.8% increase in tangible book value per share during the quarter. “Our business development focus remains on high quality commercial relationships in our markets, and the new clients we are adding in our targeted areas helped to offset the intentional runoff of equipment finance and consumer loans. The new and expanded client relationships are also resulting in inflows of commercial deposits, which has enabled us to improve our overall deposit mix by running off higher cost time deposits. “While we will remain conservative in our new loan production until economic conditions improve, we believe that we can continue to deliver strong financial performance for our shareholders, particularly given our relatively neutral interest rate sensitivity that positions us well for whatever rate environment we see going forward. We will remain disciplined in our expense management while also investing in areas that we believe will enhance the long-term value of our franchise. One area is our Wealth Management business, where we have made improvements to our technology platform that we believe will enhance our business development capabilities. A second area is expanding our presence in the higher growth St. Louis market where we recently added a new market president that we believe will help accelerate our efforts to add new commercial, retail and wealth management clients. And a third area is our Banking-as-a-Service initiative, which we expect to begin making a meaningful contribution to our deposit gathering and fee income during 2024. Given the strength of the franchise we have built, we believe we are well positioned to continue delivering strong financial results in the near-term while continuing to operate with a long-term approach and executing on the strategies that we believe will further enhance shareholder value in the coming years,” said Mr. Ludwig.