You are given a text that consists of multiple sentences. Your task is to perform abstractive summarization on this text. Use your understanding of the content to express the main ideas and crucial details in a shorter, coherent, and natural sounding text. 
Text: As always, we appreciate your interest in Central Pacific Financial Corp
We are beginning the 2022 year with much excitement and optimism.
Our financial results for 2021 are among our best ever.
In fact, this is the best earnings report since before The Great Recession.
Our recently announced executive leadership promotions went into effect starting January 1 and our teams are energized and ready to continue our digital transformation.
After an in-depth evaluation of the banking-as-a-service market, we identified an opportunity to enter this fast-growing market in a way that leverages our strength to maximize our impact as a banking-as-a-service provider, we will focus on partnering with select fintech companies to create strategic customized programs resulting a new differentiated financial products.
There is strong demand for this type of banking-as-a-service offering in the market today.
We believe this creates a great opportunity for us to expand our reach beyond Hawaii and will drive future revenue generation to increase the value of the CPF franchise.
Last quarter, we announced the launch of our new product, Shaka Checking.
It is Hawaii's first and only digital bank account from a local financial institution.
Shaka allowed us to test the product development and launch strategies that we will leverage in our future Mainland banking-as-a-service programs.
The Shaka account demand has far surpassed our initial expectations.
We opened over 3,300 Shaka accounts since its launch in early November.
It's obvious Shaka is serving a key need with a younger tech-savvy audience in Hawaii.
It has a strong value proposition that includes getting your paycheck up to two days early, no ATM fees and 24/7 digital convenience, among other benefits.
As part of our banking-as-a-service initiative to drive additional growth beyond Hawaii, we are also pleased to announce that we will be making an equity investment and bank sponsorship of Swell, a new fintech company that we played a major role in developing.
Swell is scheduled to launch in mid-2022 and we believe will provide a differentiated product offering that the market needs today.
Swell's mission is to provide retail banking services to people via one integrated app that includes the digital checking account with a line of credit.
Elevate is another equity investor in Swell and will be providing the systems and servicing for the Swell line of credit.
There is a revenue-sharing agreement in place between Swell, Elevate and CPF.
And Elevate is also providing a credit enhancement structure to us.
We are currently evaluating additional banking-as-a-service partnerships to create even more value for CPF and plan to announce further developments later in 2022.
Finally, we are announcing the exciting new banking-as-a-service initiative.
We remain committed to Hawaii and are continuing to build a successful and profitable franchise here.
Here to talk about the Hawaii economy and our strong position here is Catherine Ngo, our executive vice chair.
I'll start by giving an update on the Hawaii environment.
We were pleased to have a strong visitor holiday travel season with the daily average air arrivals over 25,000 in November through December.
Our statewide unemployment rate continued to decline and was at 6% in November 2021.
And while we were not immune to the COVID case spike related to the Omicron variant, our state has been able to manage through it, particularly as our vaccination rate is strong at approximately 75%.
We have also not seen any significant slowdown in Hawaii business activity or investment due to Omicron.
The housing market in Hawaii remains very hot with our median single-family home price holding at just over $1 million.
Overall, the Hawaii economy remains on track for recovery.
Our asset quality continues to be very strong with nonperforming assets at just 8 basis points of total assets as of December 31.
Additionally, total criticized loans were at about one and a half of total loans.
Finally, during the quarter, we had net recoveries of $900,000.
In the fourth quarter, our core loan portfolio increased by $183 million or 4% sequential quarter, which was offset by PPP forgiveness paydowns of $127 million.
Year over year, our core loan portfolio increased by 10%.
The core loan growth was broad-based across almost all loan categories.
Our residential mortgage production continued to be very strong, with total production in the fourth quarter of $354 million as several large condominium projects in Honolulu were completed during the quarter, with CPB leading the takeout financing for the homeowners.
Total net portfolio growth in residential mortgage and home equity was $146 million in the fourth quarter.
For all of 2021, we once again had record residential mortgage production, totaling $1.2 billion, putting us near to top of all residential mortgage lenders in Hawaii.
PPP forgiveness continues to progress well with 99% of the loan balances originated in 2020 and 73% of the balances originated in 2021 forgiven and paid down through December 31.
During the fourth quarter, we continued consumer unsecured purchases with our established vendors on an ongoing flow basis.
The purchases during the quarter all were within our established credit limits and had a weighted average FICO score of 750.
As of December 31, total Mainland consumer unsecured and auto purchase loans were approximately 5.7% of total loans.
Both our Mainland and Hawaii consumer portfolios continue to perform well.
Our target range for total Mainland loans, including commercial and consumer is around 15% of total loans.
With Hawaii's steady economic recovery, we have a healthy loan pipeline in all loan product categories and we are expecting our favorable loan growth trends to continue in 2022.
On the deposit front, we continue to see strong inflow deposits with total core deposits increasing by $66 million or 1% sequential quarter growth.
On a year-over-year basis total core deposits increased by $1 billion or 20%.
Additionally, our average cost of total deposits in the fourth quarter was just 6 basis points.
Finally, we plan to build upon our early success with our Shaka digital checking product going into 2022.
With this differentiated product and its strong market acceptance, we expect our comp growth to continue.
We will be expanding our relationships with the new-to-CPB Shaka account holders, which represented over 50% of the new accounts and explore further complementary product offerings using the Shaka brand.
Net income for the fourth quarter was $22.3 million or $0.80 per diluted share, an increase of $1.5 million or $0.06 per diluted share from the prior quarter.
Return on average assets in the fourth quarter was 1.22% and return on average equity was 16.05%.
For the full 2021 year, net income was $79.9 million or $2.83 per diluted share.
This compares to $37.3 million or $1.32 per diluted share in 2020.
Net interest income for the fourth quarter was $53.1 million, which decreased by $3 million from the prior quarter due to less PPP fee income as the forgiveness process winds down.
Net interest income included $4.7 million in PPP net interest income and net loan fees compared to $8.6 million in the prior quarter.
At December 31, unearned net PPP fees was $3.5 million.
The net interest margin decreased to 3.08% in the fourth quarter compared to 3.31% in the prior quarter.
The NIM normalized for PPP was 2.87% in the third quarter compared -- I'm sorry, in the fourth quarter compared to 2.96% in the prior quarter.
The normalized NIM decrease was driven by lower loan yields due to market pricing competition.
While we expect market pricing for loans to remain competitive, our new loan origination yield in the fourth quarter approximated our overall loan portfolio yield and our balance sheet is slightly asset-sensitive.
Fourth quarter other operating income increased to $11.6 million from $10.3 million in the prior quarter.
The increase was driven by higher mortgage banking income and higher bank-owned life insurance income.
Other operating expense for the fourth quarter was $42.2 million, which included nonrecurring expenses of $1.1 million of severance payments, $0.4 million branch consolidation costs and $0.3 million in promotion expenses related to our Shaka digital checking launch.
At the end of 2021, we consolidated one of our Honolulu branches into a nearby branch.
We anticipate $0.8 million in annualized savings from this consolidation.
With the continued successful customer migration to digital banking services, we plan to consolidate three additional branches in 2022.
At the same time, we are continuing to invest in select strategic branch locations including acquiring real estate and fee and developing fully modernized branches.
The efficiency ratio increased to 65.6% in the fourth quarter due to lower net interest income and nonrecurring expenses.
We remain focused on driving positive operating leverage with our strategic initiatives to continue to improve efficiency.
At December 31, our allowance for credit losses was $68.1 million or 1.36% of outstanding loans excluding PPP loans.
In the fourth quarter, we recorded a $7.4 million credit to the provision for credit losses due to continued improvements in the economic forecast and our loan portfolio as well as net recoveries during the quarter of $0.9 million.
The effective tax rate was 25.4% in the fourth quarter.
And going forward, we continue to expect an effective tax rate to be in the 24% to 26% range.
Our capital position remained strong.
And during the fourth quarter, we repurchased 305,000 shares at a total cost of $8.4 million or an average cost per share of $27.64.
Yesterday, our board of directors approved a new share repurchase authorization of up to $30 million.
Finally, our board of directors also declared a quarterly cash dividend of $0.26 per share, which was an increase of $0.01 or 4% from the prior quarter.
Central Pacific had a solid fourth quarter and 2021 year.
Looking forward, we are very excited about the key items we announced today, which we believe will position us extremely well and enable us to deliver greater shareholder value in the near and long term.
In summary, we had record 2021 earnings.
We increased our quarterly cash dividend by 4%.
We will continue share repurchases under our new $30 million board-approved authorization.
We launched our banking-as-a-service strategy, which started with our successful Shaka digital checking launch in Hawaii.
And upcoming soon, we will expand the Mainland with our Swell fintech investment as well as other selected partners.
Further, we remain committed to providing support to our employees, customers and the community as we continue to progress through the economic recovery.
At this time, we will be happy to address any questions you may have.
Back to you, Charlie.

user
quarterly earnings per share $0.80.
net interest income for q4 of 2021 was $53.1 million, compared to $51.5 million in year-ago quarter.
on jan 25, board authorized repurchase of up to $30 million of its common stock from time to time.
on jan 25, board declared quarterly cash dividend of $0.26 per share on outstanding common shares.

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