Wesbanco (NASDAQ:WSBC) released first-quarter financial results and hosted an earnings call on Wednesday. Read the complete transcript below.
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Summary
Wesbanco reported a 38% increase in diluted earnings per share to $0.91 and a 44% increase in pre-tax pre-provision earnings to $114 billion compared to the previous year.
The company achieved a net income of $87 million for common shareholders, excluding merger and restructuring charges, and maintained a solid capital position with a CET1 ratio of 10.7%.
Strategically, Wesbanco exceeded its financial targets for the Premier acquisition, continued its Southeastern expansion with a new team in South Florida, and opened new financial centers in high-growth markets.
Loan growth was recorded at 3.6% year over year, supported by a strong commercial pipeline, despite a $1 billion headwind from commercial real estate project payoffs over the past nine months.
The company anticipates mid-single-digit loan growth for 2026, supported by its expansion in South Florida and the increased commercial pipeline.
Management highlighted successful cost management with a slightly reduced operating expense from the previous quarter and strategic investments in digital capabilities and branch optimization.
Wesbanco plans to further expand its presence in Florida and other markets, with an emphasis on relationship-driven growth and adding local product capabilities.
Full Transcript
OPERATOR
Good day and welcome to the Wesbanco first quarter 2026 earnings conference call. All participants will be in listen only mode. Should you need assistance, please signal a conference specialist by pressing the star key followed by zero. After today’s presentation there will be an opportunity to ask questions. To ask a question, you may press star then one on your telephone keypad. To withdraw your question, please press star then two. Please note this event is being recorded. I would now like to turn the conference over to John Ioannone, Senior Vice President of Investor Relations. Please go ahead.
John Ioannone (Senior Vice President of Investor Relations)
Thank you. Good morning and welcome to Wesbanco Inc.’s first quarter 2026 earnings conference call. Leading the call today are Jeff Jackson, President and Chief Executive Officer and Dan Weiss, Senior Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer. Today’s Call, an archive of which will be available on our website for one year, contains forward looking information. Cautionary statements statements about this information and reconciliations of non-GAAP measures are included in our earnings related materials issued yesterday afternoon as well as our other SEC filings and investor materials. These materials are available on the Investor Relations Relations section of our website wesbanco.com all statements speak only as of April 22, 2026 and Wesbanco undertakes no obligation to update them. I would now turn the call over to Jeff.
Jeff Jackson (President and Chief Executive Officer)
Jeff Thanks John and good morning everyone. Today we’ll walk you through our first quarter performance and share our current outlook for the rest of 2026. There are three key takeaways from the quarter. We delivered solid year over year financial results. We exceeded our year one financial targets for the Premier acquisition and we stayed disciplined in executing our strategy to position Wesbanco for long term success. Overall, it was a solid start to the year. Turning to our financials for the quarter ended March 31, 2026, we reported net income available to common shareholders of 87 million excluding merger and restructuring charges. That translated to diluted earnings per share of $0.91, up 38% from a year ago. On a similar basis, we reported pre tax pre provision earnings of $114 billion, an increase of 44% year over year. The strength of our first quarter financial performance was reflected in our returns on average assets and tangible common equity of 1.3% and 17.4% respectively. Our capital position also remains solid with a CET1 ratio of 10.7%. That gives us flexibility to support growth and and navigate the operating environment ahead. As we mentioned last quarter, developers continue to seek permanent financing or the sale of properties during the first quarter. That drove elevated commercial real estate project payoffs which totaled 340 million during the first quarter and created a 1.4% headwind to our year over year loan growth. In fact, we have incurred a significant CRE payoff headwind of of a billion dollars during the last nine months. Despite that headwind, our teams continue to execute at a high level. Loan growth was largely funded by deposit growth and our commercial pipeline has reached all time record levels. Adjusting for the payoff activity, total loans grew 3.6% year over year. The commercial pipeline has increased 35% since year end to a record 1.6 billion and in the few weeks since quarter end the pipeline has grown another 200 million to 1.8 billion. About 45% of that pipeline is coming from existing loan production offices and the former Premier footprint. Impressively, this pipeline does not yet reflect the benefit of our recently announced South Florida expansion. That team has hit the ground running and built an initial $400 million pipeline just in a few weeks. They are on pace to grow that pipeline by a significant amount as the year progresses. Even with elevated CRE payoffs during the first half of the year and the potential of influence of geopolitical events, we continue to expect mid single digit year over year loan growth for 2026, supported by our record pipeline and early momentum from our South Florida markets. A little over a year ago we completed our transformative acquisition of Premier Financial, an acquisition that placed WestBanco among the 50 largest publicly traded banks in the U.S. when we announced the Premier acquisition in July 2024, we laid out clear financial targets for the first year including 40% earnings per share growth, a 1.3 return on average assets and a CET1 ratio of 9.6% along with a tangible book value earned back in under three years. I’m pleased to say we delivered and in many cases exceeded our targets. Over the last 12 months, core EPS growth reached 49% and ROAA was 1.3%. We also exceeded the pro forma CET1 ratio by more than a percentage point and shaved more than a year off the dilution earn back as our first quarter tangible book value per share of $22.45 is well above the June 2024 figure and nearly at the year end 2024 level. In addition, we have been making other strategic investments that demonstrate our commitment to long term sustainable growth. We continuously invest in digital capabilities and products like WestBanco One Account and Treasury Management Services to ensure we serve our customers how, when and where they want. At the same time, we continue to optimize our physical branch network. Over the past four years we’ve closed 64 locations with limited customer traffic, including 10 of them in Northern Ohio that will close next month. We’re selectively opening new financial centers in key markets and consolidating others into more central and higher demand locations. Our loan production office strategy continues to perform well. We’ve opened LPOs in high growth markets including Chattanooga, Indianapolis, Knoxville, Nashville and Northern Virginia. We’re seeing strong results as these teams deepen relationships and bring on new commercial clients. As these offices achieve scale, we add product capabilities locally as well as financial centers to better serve our growing client base. Chattanooga is a great example. We opened that LPO less than three years ago and it has generated strong relationship driven growth. That momentum supports the opening of our first Tennessee Financial center this week. We anticipate that several other of our LPOs will follow this pattern within the next couple of years. I’m very excited about our recent expansion into Florida which is a thoughtful extension of our long stated southeastern expansion strategy. Last month we announced the launch of our commercial banking business across key high growth South Florida markets starting with Palm beach and Broward Counties. We brought on a seasoned team of nearly 20 professionals including market leaders, commercial bankers, credit underwriting and a client relationship support as well as a Treasury management leader. These are attractive high growth markets and ones I’ve come to know well during my banking career. I’ve worked with many of these bankers before and they consistently delivered top performance while maintaining strong credit discipline. Just as importantly, their client focus aligns well with our relationship led approach. Our Florida expansion also provides meaningful organic growth opportunities for our strong healthcare banking vertical. As the regional business which is primarily focused on C and I lending develops, we will evaluate additional services and solutions including retail financial centers, treasury wealth management and mortgage offerings to deliver even a greater value to our clients. I would now like to turn the call over to Dan to walk through the financials and outlook in more detail. Dan thanks Jeff and good morning.
Dan Weiss (Senior Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer)
For the first quarter we reported GAAP net income available by common shareholders of $84 million or $0.88 per share and when excluding restructuring and merger related expenses, first quarter net income was $87 million or $0.91 per share. To highlight a few of the first quarter’s year over year accomplishments, we generated strong pre tax pre provisioned core earnings growth of 44%, grew core earnings per share by 38%, improved the net interest margin by 22 basis points and reduced the efficiency ratio by nearly 4 percentage points to 52.5%. Total assets of $27.5 billion include total portfolio loans of 19.1 billion and securities of 4.4 billion. Total portfolio loans increased 2.2% year over year driven by commercial real estate and home equity lending and declined slightly on a sequential quarter basis due to elevated payoffs. We expect commercial real estate payoffs to remain slightly elevated during the second quarter but at a lower level than the first quarter before returning to a more normal historical levels level during the back half of the year totaling 700 to 900 million dollars for the year. While very small, we ended our indirect auto program as it’s not core to our organic growth strategy and at quarter end it represented about half of the $325 million of consumer loan portfolio and anticipate that that portfolio will run off over the next three to five years. Deposits increased 2% year over year to $21.7 billion due to organic growth. We continue to be successful in remixing higher cost certificates deposit into interest bearing demand and of our remaining $2.7 billion certificate of deposit portfolio approximately 1 billion matures in each of the next two quarters with an average rate of 3.48% and 3.2% respectively. Our current seven month certificate of deposit rollover rate is 3.25%. Further, we started the year with $100 million in broker deposits, $50 million paid off early in the quarter while the last of our broker deposits paid off on April 1st. Credit quality continues to remain stable as key metrics have remained low from a historical perspective and favorable to all banks with assets between 20 and 50 billion over the last five quarters. Criticized and classified loans as a percentage of total portfolio loans decreased $49 million or 24 basis points from the sequential quarter to 2.9% while non performing loans increased 53 million sequentially primarily due to three CRE loans across different markets and property types, none of which were office the allowance for credit losses. The total portfolio loans at the end of the first quarter was 1.1% of total loans or $210 million. The decrease from the fourth quarter was primarily due to lower loan balances, faster prepayment speeds and macroeconomic factors. The first quarter margin of 3.57% improved 22 basis points year over year through a combination of lower funding costs and higher security yields, but declined 4 basis points sequentially. This decrease resulted primarily from lower net loan growth as well as modestly higher seasonal deposit contraction in the first two months of the quarter which fully recovered by the end of March. Total deposit funding costs including non interest bearing deposits declined 11 basis points year over year and 7 basis points quarter over quarter to 177 basis points for the first quarter. Non interest income of 41.8 million increased 7.2 million or 21% year over year due primarily to the acquisition of Premier combined with organic growth. Service charges on deposit and digital banking fees improved due to increased general spending and higher transaction volumes from our larger customer base as well as organic growth from Treasury Management which generated revenue of $2.5 million in the first quarter representing an 82% increase year over year reflecting record asset levels which totaled 10.4 billion. Combined trust fees and net securities brokerage revenue increased due to the addition of Premier wealth clients, market value appreciation and organic growth. Non interest expense excluding restructuring and merger related costs for the first quarter of 2026 was $143 million, a 25% increase year over year due to the addition of the Premier expense base which was only in the Wisbanco expense base for one month in the prior year period. Higher core deposit intangible asset amortization from the acquisition and higher FDIC insurance expense due to our larger asset size. On a similar basis, operating expenses were down slightly from the sequential quarter reflecting our focus on managing discretionary expenses and some one time credits approximating $2 million. Please note that the first quarter does not fully reflect our strategic expansion into South Florida as the hiring occurred late in the quarter. If we turn to capital, all of our key ratios improved quarter over quarter. Our CET1 ratio as of March 31 was 10.7% which increased more than anticipated due to lower risk weighted assets during the quarter. Based on the strategic investment that we’re making in the Southeast Florida and other markets, we anticipate CET1 to now build 5 to 10 basis points per quarter for the remainder of the year, putting us on pace for our 11% CET1 target by year end. Turning to the outlook, our current outlook for 2026 includes our Southeast Florida expansion which currently totals nearly 20 individuals and is expected to achieve positive operating leverage within 12 to 15 months and be additive to our long term financial outlook. We’ve removed our previous rate cuts from our modeling and currently do not anticipate any cuts or increases during the remainder of 2026. We anticipate our second quarter net interest margins to rebound into the low 360s and then continue to improve into the mid to high 360s during the second half of the year. This assumes, among other things, that the competition for loans and deposits remains stable. Loan growth is fully funded by deposits and an upward sloping yield curve. Generally speaking, there are no meaningful changes to our fee income outlook for the last from the last quarter, trustees and securities brokerage revenues should benefit modestly from organic growth and be influenced by equity and fixed income markets. And as a reminder, first quarter trust fees are seasonally higher due to tax preparation fees. Mortgage banking should grow modestly over 2025 beginning in the spring driven by recent hiring initiatives. Total treasury management revenues should see increases from 2025 as the compounding effect of our services continue to expand and gross commercial swap fee income excluding market adjustments should be in the 8 to $10 million range. Overall, we currently anticipate our quarterly fee income to grow in the 3 to 5% range year over year during the remainder of 2026. While we remain focused on delivering disciplined expense management, we are making strategic investments to drive long term value for our shareholders. We’re closing 10 financial centers during May and anticipate the annual savings of approximately $2 million to begin to be realized midway through the second quarter. Salaries and wages will increase reflecting the South Florida expansion and the annual mid year merit increases which take effect midway through the second quarter. Occupancy expense should be flat to slightly down compared to 2025 due to our branch optimization efforts, slightly offset by our branch expansion initiatives in our new and existing markets. While equipment and software expenses are expected to increase somewhat as compared to 2025 as we continue to invest in products, services and technology to improve the customer experience and drive revenue growth in support of our organic loan and deposit growth model and our commercial lending expansion efforts. Marketing is expected to increase to approximately $4 million per quarter and based on what we know today, we expect our expense run rate during the second quarter to approach $150 million and then to increase a couple of percentage points in the third quarter from a full quarter of mid year merit increases. The provision for credit losses will depend on changes to the macroeconomic forecast and qualitative factors as well as various credit quality metrics including potential charge offs criticizing classified loan balances, delinquencies, changes in prepayment speeds and future loan growth. And finally, we anticipate our full year effective tax rate to be between 20 and 21%. This concludes my remarks. Operator we’re now ready to take questions.
OPERATOR
We will now begin the Question and Answer session. To ask a question, you may press Star then one on your telephone keypad. If you are using a speakerphone, please pick up your handset before pressing the keys. If at any time your question has been Addressed and you would like to withdraw your question, please press star then two. Please limit yourselves to one question and one follow up, then return to the queue. At this time, we will pause momentarily to assemble our roster. And your first question today comes from Manuel Navis with Piper Sandler. Please go ahead.
Manuel Navis
Hi, I appreciate having us on for the commentary.
Jeff Jackson (President and Chief Executive Officer)
What are the funding expectations for the South Florida Commercial Lending Team? And can you dive a little bit more into your ties to the area and the potential to add to that team? Yeah, sure. Good morning. I’ll start with the ties of South Florida. As you may or may not know, I worked as the regional president in South Florida when First Horizon bought Capital bank and really built out that team and so worked down there back in 2018 through essentially 2020, 2021. They were a very top performing team. And so when the opportunity came around to bring them over to West Banco, it just seemed like a perfect partnership. As I mentioned before, I kind of put together that team back at my previous employer. And so when you look at what they can do and where they’re headed, I think it’s going to be one of our big growth drivers for this year and future years. We are opening up two offices as mentioned, Palm Beach and Broward County. We would also follow up with two branches as well. So when you look at the funding piece, we are expecting them to provide a significant piece of funding, their own loan growth and that will be followed up with two branch locations which we’d hopefully have opened by the end of the year. But overall we feel like it’s a great growth market. And I think your other piece of that question was more expansion. We are looking at other markets there in Florida. As my previous history, I had the whole state of Florida. So we will be looking to add additional people when the right people come along. But do believe, and as I mentioned in my prepared remarks, they have a current pipeline of about 400 million and I feel like the loan growth and the revenue opportunities there will help propel us into the future. I appreciate that. Diving a little bit back into, more
Dan Weiss (Senior Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer)
deeply into the NIM outlook. Can you speak to more of the components that should drive improvement from here, can you have deposit declines beyond CDs? What kind of current pricing levels on the loan book? Just kind of, if you could walk through some of the wild cards there on the nim. Yeah, sure, Manuel, I’ll take that one. So, you know, we talked about kind of 3 to 5 basis points of NIM improvement here in the second quarter. A lot of that is really the repricing of the back books for both, you know, loans as well as securities. And then kind of an assumption that, you know, we’re going to fund the majority of the deposit or the loan growth with deposits in the second quarter. As you know, and as you heard in my prepared remarks, we did see a little bit of outflow here in the first quarter in deposits which is seasonally expected. It was just a little heavier than anticipated. And we also saw about $150 million of non interest bearing migrate into interest bearing. So those two things kind of combined with the loan growth kind of provided that headwind to first quarter margin. But if we think towards that three to five basis points, when I talk repricing, we do have about $400 million fixed rate commercial loans weigh the average rate of about 4.25% that will mature in the next 12 months. Those will be repricing up almost 200 basis points into the low sixes. We’ve also got another 400 million of variable rate loans. These are those that would be repricing 48 to 60 months roughly that would be coming due in the next 12 months. Weighted average rate there is about 375. So that’s going to provide some nice tailwind as well. And if we just think about other sources, securities cash flow, that’s beginning to tick up a little. We’re kind of projecting around 275 million in security cash flows per quarter. And so that’s going to reprice upward from kind of call it 3.3% up to about 4.75 to 5% depending on where rates are. So that’s another nice pickup of about 150 basis points or so. And then of course as I mentioned in the prepared commentary, we do have continued downward repricing of the CD book. So particularly that $1 billion of first quarter CDs that repriced down about 40 to 50 basis points. That’s going to benefit the second quarter quarter quite a bit. Similarly, the billion dollars in the second quarter of CDs that are maturing, those are going to reprice down about 25 basis points that will begin to benefit second quarter and really kind of fully benefit third quarter. But I think those are probably the major items. I mentioned again in the prepared commentary that we did pay down the remainder of our brokered deposits. So we had $100 million in brokered on the books at the beginning of the year. 50 million of those paid down kind of early in the first quarter. The other 50 on April 1st. So that also would provide, I believe some nice tailwind towards that 3 to 5 basis points of margin expansion here in the second quarter.
Manuel Navis
I appreciate that commentary. If there is a rate cut, If there is rate cuts, what would that impact this progression if at all?
Dan Weiss (Senior Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer)
Yeah, so we’re pretty neutral. So I would say there’s you know, not a whole lot of, you know, movement one way or the other with rate cuts. Certainly our, you know, commercial loan portfolio is, you know, 50% of that is variable rate reprices within three months. But we’d also be able to, you know, reprice downward our deposits, our FHLB borrowings are all, you know, mostly one month advances. And so we think that, you know, in a rate cut scenario or a rate, you know, hike scenario which is now potentially, you know, on the table, we would be well-positioned.
Manuel Navis
Thank you for the commentary.
OPERATOR
Your next question comes from Jake Sivillo with DA Davidson. Please go ahead.
Jake Sivillo
Hey, good morning Jeff, Dan and John. Hey, good morning Jake. Morning. Wanted to touch on the uptick in NPAs. So obviously you mentioned that the three non office credits were the driver. Can you provide a little bit more details in terms of what actually those credits were? Yes, I can. They were like as I mentioned, legacy premier credits. They’re all three in three different markets. Two are multifamily and I would tell you that we feel like we’re very well collateralized. There’s and well reserved for those three and feel like that we will be working out of those. Once again there are three credits. I think the other piece I would highlight is the CNC did tick down back to our kind of our normal range sub 3% which is top in our peer group. But we are looking at those NPAs and still feel very good about working through those three credits.
Dan Weiss (Senior Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer)
It’s also worth recognizing that those NPA NPAs or non accrual loans are included in the CNC total. So that 24 basis point reduction in C&I that includes these as well. So you know, continue to see positive momentum on the credit front.
Jake Sivillo
Okay, I appreciate that. Thank you.
OPERATOR
And your next question comes from Carl Shepard with RBC Capital Markets. Please go ahead.
Carl Shepard
Hey, good morning guys. Hey, good morning Carl. Congrats on getting the Florida team in place.
Jeff Jackson (President and Chief Executive Officer)
Thank you.
Carl Shepard
I guess I wanted, I wanted to start there.
Jeff Jackson (President and Chief Executive Officer)
You highlighted the pipeline I think around $400 million. Yeah. Can you help us understand maybe your expectations for, you know, how much of that you would think can close and is that over the rest of the year is There a little bit longer timeline. Yeah, I think that they will close their first deal this month. I would hope that by the end of the quarter they would have anywhere from, this is a guess, but 100 million closed this quarter. And I would hope by the end of the year anywhere from 3 to 500 million closed could be more depending on the number of bankers we continue to add there. And that’s just not loans. I mean we’re bringing up, we would be bringing over full relationships once again. We hope to have a couple of deposit branches open soon and this would also include fees and treasury management services and all those other things. But no, I think it’s going to be a heavy driver for the, for us this year. And just while we’re talking about it, just to bring up, you know, I think our overall pipeline, if I look back and compare it to last year this time I think our pipeline last year was about a billion two. Today we set at nearly 2 billion 3, 2 billion 4. So if I look at that and then I also look at, you know, payoffs, at least what we see today for the quarter today we see about 100 million plus less payoffs than we saw in first quarter. So when I combined a much higher pipeline, less payoffs that we see today, I feel very good about where we stand from a loan growth perspective for the rest of the year.
Carl Shepard
Okay, that’s helpful.
Jeff Jackson (President and Chief Executive Officer)
And then I guess just on the payoff piece, I think you just said it, but I just wanted to clear it up too because I know this is an area of concern, but I think last quarter you thought 600 to 800 for the full year. I think you said 700 to 900 today. So the first quarter was maybe just a little bit ahead of stuff you thought was going to pay off. Is that a fair way to see it? There’s really not much of a change in your expectation. And obviously the pipelines are strong and the production looks solid as well. Yeah, 100%. Some of the payoffs moved to first quarter. As I mentioned, we see this current quarter less payoffs than the first quarter of over 100 million. And no, I think that’s a perfect way to see it. The other thing I would add just the first quarter is we had a couple non-depository financial institution loans that we decided we were not going to be in that business, you know, and just to point out that we have a very small exposure, like I think less than 50 million to non-depository financial institutions. And so we chose not to do a couple of those deals in the first quarter that could have given us some more loan growth. And then we did have a couple deals really slide from first quarter, second quarter. So some of this is really just a timing issue with the loan growth.
Carl Shepard
Okay, great. Thank you all.
OPERATOR
Question comes from Russell Guenther with Stevens. Please go ahead.
Russell Guenther
Hey, good morning guys. Hey, good morning, Russell. Also. Hey Jeff, Just following up on the pipeline discussion here would be helpful to get a sense of the mix and the yield and then just in general how you guys are thinking about pull through rates relative to historical level. Yeah, I think the mix, if I was to look at it, I would say it’s probably 60, 40 CRE to CNI would be my guess. And then the yields, I’m going to guess the low to mid sixes from a loan yield perspective. Once again, I would also highlight that everything we do is a full relationship that has some level of deposits and treasury management services. As far as the pull through, I don’t see it being any different than what we’ve seen in the past from adding and closing business. Obviously the new markets will have to measure that with Florida coming on. But once again feel very good about where we’re at and some of this loan growth is a timing thing and I do believe we will see strong loan growth for the rest of the year. Helpful, Jeff. Thank you. And then switching gears for my second question here would be to capital. So CET1 roughly 10.7% today. Do you guys have a preliminary sense for the impact of the Basel iii proposal on RWAs and CET1? And then would there be any shift in your appetite to consider repurchases?
Dan Weiss (Senior Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer)
Yeah, Russell, I’ll take that one. And great question. I think we’re still obviously evaluating the impact there, but preliminary estimates kind of indicate that we would see a benefit to CET1 of about 5 to 6%. And so on a 10.7% ratio today, that’s worth about 55 to 65 basis points. So that frees up about, call it around 120 million or so in capital. And that certainly would provide opportunity to deploy, whether that be through buyback or additional growth. But I think that certainly would accelerate the buyback view. So like I said in the commentary we are building, we built capital back very quickly here in the first quarter up to 10.7. We were kind of projecting that to be closer to 10.5 and of course lower risk weighted assets is what drove that extra kind of 20 basis points of CET1 here in the first quarter. But with the growth that we’re anticipating from all of the things that Jeff has discussed. We expect that, you know, that to slow down a little the growth in CET1. But like I said, all that being said, we do have today 900,000 shares available for repurchase. I think that, you know, we’re not now that we’re above 10 and a half percent, that’s kind of our, you know, our target. I think that it offers us more flexibility to evaluate how we can, you know, deploy that capital. But as Jeff said, you know, with the growth opportunity eve we have organically, we’re going to continue to evaluate there.
Russell Guenther
Okay. Helpful, Dan. Thank you guys for taking my questions. Thank you.
OPERATOR
Once again, if you have a question, Please press star then 1. Your next question comes from Daniel Tamayo, which with Raymond James, please go ahead.
Daniel Tamayo
Morning, Jeff, Dan, John, Danny. Yeah, maybe just a clarification, Dan, for you on the expense guidance. So I think you said approaching 150 million in the second quarter and then a couple percent growth. Just so we’re clear on that,
Dan Weiss (Senior Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer)
we should be looking for roughly 153 million or so or just below that in the third quarter. And then is that kind of the normal run rate including all the new hires at that point? I know it’s an ongoing thing, but just trying to get a sense for maybe where we’re going to end of the year. Yeah, I’d say that 152 to 153 is probably a pretty good, pretty good estimate for third quarter, as you said. But you know, it is going to be dependent on the commercial hiring and the investments that we’re making here throughout with the market expansion. So today that’s where we’re at. But if we end up ticking any higher, that would be certainly very accretive to long term earnings per share in that we’d be hiring revenue producers who’d be putting on loans and fee income, treasury management services, et cetera, into 26 and begin to benefit us in 27.
Daniel Tamayo
Okay. And I’m sorry if you guys talked about this, but are there any non competes that we need to be aware of for the new hires?
Dan Weiss (Senior Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer)
Yes, it’s kind of. They all have standard non-solicitation, non-solicitation agreements that we work through. That’s pretty standard in our industry and we’re 100% behind working through that and making sure they comply with all those different non-solicitations. There is no. As far as the more non-competes.
Daniel Tamayo
Got it. Is there a timeframe that we can think about that maybe starts to ramp after a certain period.
Jeff Jackson (President and Chief Executive Officer)
I would think that we would have significant progress from a ramping of business towards the end of the year for the Southeast Florida team. Once again, we think that they would close anywhere from 300 to 500 million in New loans between now and the end of the year. And it could be higher than that based on some deals we’re looking at. So I think by third quarter, we’ll have a very good feel into third quarter where this team stands. But I have very, very high expectations of this team because I have worked with most of them in the past and feel like they will be delivering a really great return for our bank.
Daniel Tamayo
Great. Thanks, Jeff. And then maybe one more clarification for you, dan. On the three loans that drove the increase in the NPLs, were there reserve, overall reserves came down in the quarter or at least as a percentage of loans, were there reserves, incremental reserves, taken on those three loans that were moved into non-performing loan. And I know you said you’re comfortable with where they stand now. I’m just trying to get a sense for, for coverage of those loans as we, as we look forward.
Dan Weiss (Senior Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer)
Yeah, no, there were not incremental reserves taken on them, as I said, as Jeff said. Rather, they were, you know, generally well secured, well collateralized and, you know, certainly evaluated, discussed, but nothing additional.
Daniel Tamayo
Thanks for taking my questions, guys. Appreciate it.
Jeff Jackson (President and Chief Executive Officer)
Yeah, no, thanks, Danny. And you know, one other thing I’ll mention is we have started hiring another team in Nashville and they have just started as well. So there’ll be more to come on that in future calls.
OPERATOR
And your next question comes from Hannah Wynn with kbw. Please go ahead.
Hannah Wynn
Hi. Thanks for taking my question. Hannah Wynn stepping in for Kathryn Mueller. I just had a quick question on deposits.
Jeff Jackson (President and Chief Executive Officer)
I know you mentioned your deposits were going to fund your loan growth and deposits were flat for this quarter. So wondering where you see those trending for the rest of the year? Yeah, typically they’re pretty seasonal in first quarter where they drop and they come back to kind of flat. And then second quarter we start trying to build the deposit piece. With most of our deposits historically been coming in the third and fourth quarters, so we do continue to see them. We are opening up a branch this week and in Chattanooga, Tennessee, our first Tennessee branch. That goes along with our LPO strategy. But that is really critical. We have also increased incentives on driving deposits and feel like we expect to fund our loan growth, the majority of it with deposit growth. And as we have done in the last two years, Dan, I don’t know if you want to comment any more on deposit growth.
Dan Weiss (Senior Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer)
No, I think you nailed it. I think one of the keys too is just you’re getting those branches in that southeast Florida market up and running so we can take deposits.
Hannah Wynn
Sounds good. Thanks for taking my question. Thanks Anna.
OPERATOR
This concludes our question and answer session. I would like to turn the conference back over to Jeff Jackson for any closing remarks.
Jeff Jackson (President and Chief Executive Officer)
Thank you. And to wrap up, we remain focused on appropriate investments and disciplined execution of our long term organic growth strategy. The successful integration of Premier, our continued expansion through loan production offices and targeted investments in high growth markets have positioned the company well to continue delivering value for our customers and our stakeholders. Thank you for joining us today. We appreciate your continued interest in WestBanco and look forward to speaking with you at one of our upcoming investor events.
OPERATOR
The conference has now concluded. Thank you for attending today’s presentation. You may now disconnect.
Disclaimer: This transcript is provided for informational purposes only. While we strive for accuracy, there may be errors or omissions in this automated transcription. For official company statements and financial information, please refer to the company’s SEC filings and official press releases. Corporate participants’ and analysts’ statements reflect their views as of the date of this call and are subject to change without notice.
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