After finally getting its initial public offering completed Thursday morning, EverBank Financial Corp. officials were able to have some fun.
Chairman and CEO Robert Clements and other top officers of the Jacksonville-based banking company were invited to ring the opening bell at the New York Stock Exchange as EverBank’s stock began trading.
“It was a thrill and hard not to reminisce about everything we’ve done,” Clements said by telephone shortly after the opening bell ceremony.
Clements said EverBank decided to go public to raise additional capital to fund its growth.
“The primary reason is we’re experiencing tremendous momentum in all of our business channels,” he said.
EverBank sold 19.22 million shares at $10 each in the IPO, but the capital from the initial offering is less than the company had hoped.
EverBank indicated in a Securities and Exchange Commission filing last week that it was seeking to sell the shares at $12 to $14.
Because of the lower price, EverBank’s net proceeds from the stock sale are estimated at about $172 million, $53 million lower than it had projected at the potential higher price last week.
The proceeds could increase by $27 million if EverBank’s underwriters exercise options to purchase an additional 2.88 million shares.
Clements and EverBank President and Chief Operating Officer Blake Wilson said they are not disappointed about the lower initial price of the shares.
“We’re always really managing for the long term,” Wilson said.
“What we discovered is it’s still a choppy IPO market. But we were really pleased with the level of interest,” Clements said.
EverBank’s stock did rise Thursday when trading began on the New York Stock Exchange. It opened at $10.40 and rose as high as $10.80 during the morning, before closing at $10.60 Thursday afternoon. About 6.6 million shares were traded during the day.
EverBank’s shares trade under the ticker symbol “EVER.”
EverBank’s stock sale came more than a year and a half after it first filed plans for an IPO in October 2010.
“We were considering launching a year ago,” Clements said, but a couple of factors delayed completion of the IPO.
“There were a lot of changes going on in the regulatory environment,” he said.
EverBank in April 2011, along with other large U.S. mortgage lenders, agreed to a consent order to change its foreclosure procedures. The company also noted in its SEC filings that banks were subject to new regulations under the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act of 2010 and in July 2011, federal authorities changed the regulatory structure for supervising savings banks like EverBank.
“More important was the fact that we had a lot of excess capital at the time and we didn’t need the additional capital,” Clements said.
But now the company is hoping it can use the new capital from the stock sale to grow its business.
“We’re seeing tremendous lending opportunities in all three of our core businesses,” Wilson said.
EverBank has major operations in mortgage banking, commercial finance and commercial lending.
The stock sold Thursday in the IPO represents only about 17 percent of EverBank’s total shares outstanding. The rest are owned by investment firms and company executives.
The existing stockholders had been planning to sell a total of 5.9 million of their own shares as part of the IPO. That would have included 165,613 shares sold by Clements, who owns 3.67 million shares, and 99,368 shares sold by Wilson, who owns 2.26 million shares.
But all of those 5.9 million shares were pulled off the market when the IPO price was lowered to $10
“The selling interest [by existing stockholders] was modest at the beginning,” Clements said.
“There was really no interest in selling at that price.”
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