Zions Bancorporation Chairman and CEO Harris Simmons commented, “First quarter results continued to reflect the adverse impact on net interest income of the bank failures a year ago, with taxable-equivalent revenue down 11.3% from the prior year. We nevertheless saw incremental improvement in our net interest margin and earning asset growth, and adjusted operating expenses (which exclude an additional FDIC special assessment related to last year’s bank failures) increased a modest 0.4% from last year’s quarter.
“Although we experienced an increase in classified loans during the quarter, our commercial real estate portfolio continues to perform relatively well; classified loans in that portfolio increased only 7%, and we had a slight net recovery in previously charged-off CRE loans during the quarter. We continue to expect that ultimate realized loan losses will be very manageable over the remainder of the year, as indicated by annualized net charge-offs for the quarter which were a very low 0.04% of loans and leases.
“Immediately following quarter end, we completed a very successful conversion of all the deposit accounts at Amegy Bank and Nevada State Bank to our new TCS BaNCS™ platform. We anticipate completing the conversion of substantially all remaining accounts later this summer, providing us the ability to post transactions to our core systems in real time, significantly improve internal processes, and better serve customers.”