Washington Federal reports Q2 EPS 17c, consensus 49c

Reports Q2 NII $158.6M vs. $175.0M last year. CEO Brent Beardall says: “In the future, when we look back at the acquisition of Luther Burbank, we will see the addition of this $8 billion asset franchise in California as a transformational event for WaFd Bank. As expected, there is a lot of noise in the quarter so we have provided disclosures showing what earnings would have been without the merger costs and certain non-operating income and expenses. Absent these items, net income would have been $54.8 million, a 6% decrease from the December quarter. While the continuation of the challenging interest rate environment has made strategic execution more difficult, we remain excited by the potential of this purchase. “I am especially proud of how quickly we were able to complete this acquisition once regulatory approval was granted. We closed on the acquisition of LBC on February 29, 2024. The next day, Friday March 1st, we started the systems conversions and branch re-branding and completed the work just two days later, opening our doors March 4th as WaFd branches operating on WaFd’s core systems. To my knowledge this was one of, if not the fastest close-to-conversion in modern history for U.S. banking for transactions over $1 billion. Speed only matters if you are able to execute with quality and our teams, especially our front-line bankers in the California branches and the support teams in operations and technology, were remarkably successful executing the conversion plan. The best indicator of this success is the behavior of the impacted clients. From conversion until quarter end, deposit accounts are down only 1.1%.”