First Hawaiian, Inc. (NASDAQ:FHB) Q3 2020 Earnings Conference Call - Final Transcript

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by and welcome to the First Hawaiian Inc. Third Quarter 2020 Earnings Conference Call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. After the speakers' presentation, there will be a question-and-answer session. [Operator Instructions] I would now turn the call over to Kevin Haseyama. Please go ahead.

Thank you, Michelle and thank you everyone for joining us as we review our financial results for the third quarter of 2020. With me today are Bob Harrison, Chairman, President, and CEO; Ravi Mallela, CFO; and Ralph Mesick, Chief Risk Officer. We have prepared a slide presentation that we will refer to in our remarks today. The presentation is available for downloading and viewing on our website at FHB.com in the Investor Relations section. During today's call, we will be making forward-looking statements, so please refer to Slide 1 for our Safe Harbor statement. We will also discuss certain non-GAAP financial measures. The appendix to this presentation contains reconciliations of these non-GAAP financial measurements to the most directly comparable GAAP measurements and now I'll turn the call over to Bob.

Good morning and thank you for joining us as we review our third quarter results. I'd like to start with an update on the current situation here in Hawaii if you can look at Slide 2. As we reported on our last call, the local economy re-opened in early July and following a rise in the number of new COVID cases in late July and August, the Island of Oahu went into a second stay-at-home order in early September. Oahu began re-opening in late September under a new four-tier re-opening strategy with quantitative criteria for loosening and tightening restrictions.

The island started at Tier 1, the most restrictive tier and moved to Tier 2 yesterday as we were successful in holding down the number of new daily cases and have a low positivity rate. Another important step in the re-opening of the Hawaii economy was the start of the Pre-Travel Testing Program on October 15th. The program allows transpacific travelers to bypass the state's 14-day quarantine if they test negative for COVID-19 within 72 hours of traveling to Hawaii. Over the last few days, we've seen the number of visitor arrivals in the 2,000 to 4,000 per day range. This is an important step in restarting the tourist industry, which is the main reason for the state's unemployment rate, which remained high in September at 15.1%.

At the bank, we have begun the process of re-opening the branches that were closed as a result of the pandemic, but after further evaluation, we've decided that four of the branches will remain closed permanently. In July, we launched our online mortgage origination portal enabling borrowers to apply for a mortgage digitally. We also started helping PPP borrowers prepare to apply for loan forgiveness. We have hosted several webinars in conjunction with the SBA to educate borrowers on the forgiveness process and we have already begun submitting applications