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: Today's call will also include non-GAAP financial measures.
Non-GAAP financial measures should be viewed in addition to and not as an alternative for our reported results prepared in accordance with GAAP.
Net income in the second quarter of $29.6 million produced core earnings per share of $0.31, a core pre-tax pre-provision ROA of 1.82% and a core efficiency ratio of 53.1%.
Importantly, pre-tax pre-provision net revenue of $42.9 million was slightly ahead of the consensus estimate, reflecting good underlying second quarter momentum in our key businesses.
Lending rebounded in the second quarter, increasing year-to-date loan growth to 5.3% annualized rate, and that excludes PPP loans.
The loan growth was broad-based and although indirect lending and corporate banking led the way, mortgage, branch-based consumer lending and small business all contributed meaningfully.
Our corporate bank had several big wins and is seeing deepening pipelines.
Bucking national trends, our branch team has originated $209 million in home equity loans year-to-date, which represents a 12% increase year-over-year.
Geographically, Ohio continues to lead the way with the majority of our loan growth, although PA production remains strong.
Our regional business model and a focus on execution have been key elements in driving balance sheet and fee income growth.
We have also lifted out some talented lenders from large competitors over the last past year.
Consumer and small business household growth helped fuel noninterest income, which remained strong at $26.1 million, even as mortgage gain on sale income tapered.
Card-related interchange income at $7.4 million was a quarterly company record by a wide margin.
At $2.7 million, trust revenue was a quarterly record as well.
Our SBA business contributed $1.6 million to gain on sale income and SBA pipelines have never been stronger.
This is four quarters in a row of strong contribution by the SBA business.
Importantly, in this discussion around growth, business conditions in the second quarter in our markets recovered faster than we anticipated, and our business customers are generally positive about the outlook ahead.
Expenses remain well controlled, and the core efficiency ratio was an impressive 53.21%.
Over the last six years, First Commonwealth's revenue base has broadened considerably with significant investment in new commercial lending teams, a de novo mortgage business, indirect lending, SBA lending, credit card and new digital platforms to include online loan and deposit account opening.
We have expanded -- also expanded our footprint through five strategic M&A opportunities.
Even as we've made these significant investments and transformed our company, at the forefront of our planning is adhering to the core principle of maintaining positive operating leverage.
Jim will provide important detail in a few minutes.
But at a very high level, I believe our NIM is benefiting from our long-term approach to building a diversified loan portfolio that is balanced between commercial and consumer loans.
At a time when banks are struggling to deploy excess cash, our consumer loan growth has been strong all year, and our commercial loan growth picked up steam as the second quarter progressed.
We like the contribution margin a new consumer loan brings versus having money parked at the Federal Reserve or in investment security.
And we also have the potential of cross-selling a new consumer customer as an added bonus.
We're also enthused about the lift-out of an equipment finance team from a larger institution that we recently announced as well as the momentum in our SBA business.
Both of these businesses are scalable and will enable our margin to expand by generating high -- higher-yielding assets.
Importantly, we're very pleased with the adoption of our new digital platform.
The second quarter, our active mobile users increased an annualized 22%.
Additionally, we continue to bring new capability forward, and we'll be introducing a new mobile mortgage platform in August where our customers can easily apply for and track their mortgage status from anywhere at any time.
Lastly, regarding credit, we feel our asset quality is solid and coupled with improving economic conditions, we expect credit to be a tailwind in the back half of the year.
As Mike already mentioned, we were pleased with our financial performance this quarter, especially with regard to loan growth, fee income and expense control.
Hopefully, I can provide you with a little more detail on our NIM, asset quality, fee income and expenses.
Our net interest margin for the second quarter was 3.17%, down from 3.40% last quarter.
Loan yields fell by 11 basis points, but we were able to offset most of that by reducing the cost of interest-bearing liabilities by seven basis points.
But to understand our NIM, you have to look at the effects of PPP and changes in our asset mix, especially cash.
For example, we began the quarter with $479 million in PPP loans.
By June 30, that figure had shrunk to $292 million.
Similarly, excess cash dropped from $414 million to $189 million over the period.
These changes don't come through if you only look at our published average balances, which barely moved.
Essentially, what happened is this.
We started the quarter with a lot of excess cash because of government stimulus programs that took place in the first quarter.
In addition, PPP loans were forgiven over the course of the quarter, generating even more cash.
We invested some of that excess cash into securities early in the quarter and into strong loan growth toward the end of the quarter.
To be more precise, PPP and excess cash had two distinct effects on the margin.
First, the first quarter NIM had the benefit -- excuse me, the first quarter NIM had the benefit of $7.9 million of PPP income, while second quarter PPP income was only $5.5 million.
Second, we put excess cash to work by purchasing approximately $300 million of securities in the second quarter.
That's better than leaving it sit in cash.
Those investments will generate about $3.9 million of net interest income annually or about $0.03 per share, but they still yield us than what we were earning on the PPP loans, and it's still a layer of thin margin assets on top of the balance sheet that drags down the NIM.
Because of the noise from PPP and excess cash, we have been publishing a core NIM that adjusts for both of those things.
Our previous guidance was for our core NIM to fall between 3.20% and 3.30%, and our core NIM for the second quarter came in at 3.20%, which was within that range, albeit at the bottom of that range.
The reason for that is simple math.
The more excess cash we invest in securities, the less cash there is to adjust for in the core calculation.
The good news here is that our loan growth in the second quarter was very strong, especially toward the end of the quarter.
That should help the margin going forward.
We expect to maintain that trajectory for the remainder of the year, which would replace PPP runoff and further soak up excess cash to the benefit of the margin.
As a result, we are reiterating our core NIM guidance of 3.25% plus or minus five basis points.
Let me switch gears now to asset quality and offer a couple of thoughts that may be helpful to you.
First, we realized that deferrals were the number one topic a year ago, but our deferrals have all but disappeared from a peak of over $1 billion during the pandemic to $138 million last quarter to only $59.5 million this quarter or just 88 basis points of total loans.
Second, nonperforming loans are just 0.82% of total loans ex PPP, and the reserve coverage of nonperforming loans is 182.9%.
These are levels that we believe compare very favorably to peers.
Third, we just completed our regular semiannual loan review process in which we review every commercial credit in excess of $350,000.
This involved a review of about 1,000 relationships totaling $2.4 billion out of a $3.9 billion commercial loan portfolio.
At the conclusion of that exercise, there were 0 downgrades to special mention or substandard in the portfolio.
The thoroughness of that exercise gives us confidence as we took noted declines in both special mention and classified loans this quarter.
Classified loans, for example, dropped from $72.3 million to $56.3 million, a level very close to the pre-pandemic level of $52.5 million at the end of 2019.
Fourth, delinquencies, which are sometimes seen as an early warning sign of trouble ahead, not only went down from last quarter, but they are at an all-time low for our bank at just 11 basis points of total loans ex PPP.
Fifth and finally, our reserves remain at 1.50% of total loans ex PPP protecting our capital and our earnings stream going forward.
As for fee income, even with mortgage income slowing down a bit in the second half, we anticipate being able to sustain the pace of $26 million to $27 million per quarter in noninterest income for the remainder of 2021 due to favorable trends we are seeing in SBA, swap and trust income.
NIE came in at $51.5 million in the second quarter, down slightly from $51.9 million last quarter.
Our previous NIE guidance was $52 million to $53 million per quarter, so we've been comfortably below that.
We do, however, expect some expense associated with returning to a more normal work and travel environment, elevated hospitalization expense that we have been seeing, new hires in revenue-producing and credit positions and the new recently announced equipment finance effort, bringing our NIE guidance to $53 million to $54 million per quarter for the remainder of the year.
Finally, we repurchased 72,724 shares in the second quarter at an average price of $13.95.
And with that, we'll take any questions you may have.

user
first commonwealth declares quarterly dividend.
qtrly diluted earnings per share $0.31.

assistant