To my fellow shareholders:
It’s my honor to introduce you to our new brand, HTLF. As shareholders, you’re already familiar with the letters HTLF as our stock ticker symbol. Now, we will use those same four letters as the name of our company and to portray the strength we have today.
The bold type of the HTLF logo signifies Strength. The letters are connected, like we are to our banks, clients and communities, giving us Insight to deliver extraordinary banking experiences. The sharp edges and angles represent our continued Growth and forward movement.
We move forward as HTLF but must also reflect upon 2020, a year unlike any other. The Covid-19 pandemic impacted and disrupted our lives in countless ways. The teams across HTLF and our 11 banks not only met the year’s challenges, but thrived in spite of them.
Part of our mission is to enrich the lives of our employees, and in mid-March our focus quickly shifted to their health and safety. We implemented our pandemic management plan, and the strategic investments we’d made in the business enabled us to pivot and protect the health of our employees while continuing to serve our customers and communities.
HTLF is proud to have helped thousands of small businesses in our communities obtain Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) loans. During 2020, we processed nearly 5,000 PPP loans totaling $1.2 billion, which helped preserve more than 112,000 jobs.
In the initial months of the pandemic, we proactively implemented relief programs for our consumer and small business customers. We worked individually with our commercial customers to help them address financial challenges.
We were humbled to provide much-needed support to our communities in 2020. We contributed $1.5 million to nonprofit organizations responding to challenges created by Covid-19 and to high-needs schools for student technology and personal protective equipment.
We continued to make investments in Operation Customer Compass, our multi-year strategic initiative. We delivered new digital banking capabilities for consumers, completed installation of more than 100 new full-featured ATMs and enabled our commercial teams with best-in-class technology and processes.
Consumer behaviors have changed and we provided customers the in-person and digital options they want to interact with us. We continue to rationalize our branch footprint to more efficiently serve our customers.
Financial highlights for the year include:
- Increased total assets by 36 percent to $17.9 billion
- Delivered an efficiency ratio of 56.65, a 585 basis point decrease from 2019
- Deposits grew by $3.9 billion
And we completed two acquisitions that further diversified our assets and increased our presence in important growth markets of Phoenix and West Texas.
These are lofty achievements in any year, much less during a pandemic. We emerge even stronger than before.
Strength. Insight. Growth. It’s what we bring to our customers and what our unique business model and geographically diverse footprint brings to our shareholders.
Sincerely,
Bruce K. Lee