LOUISVILLE, Ky.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--April 23, 2020--

Republic Bancorp, Inc. (“Republic” or the “Company”) reports net income of $26.7 million for the first quarter of 2020, resulting in Diluted Earnings per Class A Common Share (“Diluted EPS”) of $1.28, return on average assets (“ROA”) of 1.90%, and return on average equity (“ROE”) of 13.71%. Net income was down 10% from the first quarter of 2019 primarily as a result of an increase in the Company’s estimated Allowance for Credit Losses in response to the potential impact of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Steve Trager, Chairman & CEO of Republic commented, “While we are proud of many of our operating metrics for the quarter, certainly the last month of the quarter was primarily focused on the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic and our corporate response to it. In that regard, our primary focus in response to the pandemic has been:

(1) safeguarding the health of our associates and our clients;

(2) cushioning our clients from the pandemic’s negative economic impact;

(3) mitigating our risk of loss; and

(4) measuring, forecasting and planning for the negative financial impact of the pandemic on a go-forward basis.

“With respect to safeguarding of our associates and our clients, we quickly and successfully enacted a social distancing protocol, which allowed the substantial majority of our back-office operations to work from home. For those personnel not able to work from home, we have physically distanced these associates from each other within our office space. Within our banking centers, we changed our in-person client service hours to be by appointment-only in order to limit the number of people within the banking centers at any point in time. In addition, we diverted much of our client service interaction to our drive-thru operations, with many of our drive-thru transactions facilitated through interactive teller machines (“ITMs”).