Heritage Financial Corporation (HFWA) Q4 2025 Earnings Call

Investor webinar replay

Replay transcript excerpt

Hello everyone and welcome to the Heritage Financial 2025 Q4 earnings call. My name is Emily and I'll be coordinating your call today. After the presentation, you will have the opportunity to ask any questions, which you can do so by pressing star followed by the number one on your telephone keypad. I would now like to turn the call over to Brian McDonald, President and CEO to begin. Please go ahead. Thank you, Emily. Welcome and good morning to everyone who called in and those who may listen later. This is Brian McDonald, CEO of Heritage Financial. Attending with me are Don Johnson, Chief Financial Officer, and Tony Chalfant, Chief Credit Officer. Our fourth quarter earnings release went out this morning pre-market, and hopefully you've had the opportunity to review it prior to the call. In addition to the earnings release, we also posted an updated fourth quarter investor presentation on the investor relations portion of our corporate website, which includes more detail on our deposits, loan portfolio, liquidity, and credit quality. We will reference this presentation during the call. As a reminder, during this call, we may make forward-looking statements which are subject to and other factors. Important factors that could cause our actual results to differ materially from those indicated in the forward-looking statements are disclosed within the earnings release and the investor presentation. Our improving net interest margin and a shift in our loan mix benefiting the provision expense drove earnings higher in the fourth quarter. On an adjusted basis, diluted earnings per share was up 18% versus last quarter, and up 29% versus the fourth quarter of 2024. And on the same adjusted basis, our ROA improved to 1.29% versus 0.99% in the fourth quarter of 2024. We now ha...