Midland States reports Q3 EPS 74c, consensus 64c

Net interest margin of 3.10%, compared to 3.12% in prior quarter. Efficiency ratio of 62.8%, compared to 65.2% in prior quarter. Jeffrey Ludwig, President and CEO of the company, said, “We executed well in the third quarter and delivered a higher level of profitability while making continued progress on our balance sheet management strategies, which resulted in further increases in all of our capital ratios, an increase in our tangible book value per share, and an increase in our level of liquidity with a reduction in our loan-to-deposit ratio. We continue to utilize the payoffs resulting from the intentional reduction of our equipment finance and consumer portfolios to fund high quality loans generated in our community bank and the purchase of investment securities. We are also seeing good results from the investments we have made in the business, such as increasing our presence and business development efforts in the St. Louis market, where our loan balances increased at an annualized rate of 12% during the third quarter, and growth in our Wealth Management revenues due to an increase in assets under administration, partially driven by the new wealth advisors we have added in recent quarters. Improving our credit quality is a priority and we are taking proactive steps to resolve problem loans in order to reduce our level of non-performing and classified loans going forward. We continue to closely monitor the health of our borrowers and be conservative in downgrading loans where we see the potential for weakness. We also recently added a new Chief Credit Officer whose background and experience is consistent with our increased focus on in-market relationship lending in our community bank, which will continue to result in a higher quality, lower risk loan portfolio.”