Hello, welcome to the annual meeting of stockholders of Republic Bancorp, Inc. Please note that today's meeting is being recorded. During the meeting, we'll have a question and answer session. You can submit questions or comments at any time by clicking on the message icon. It is now my pleasure to turn today's meeting over to Steve Trager, Chairman and CEO of Republic Bancorp, Inc. Mr. Trager, the floor is yours.
Thank you, good morning, everyone. As many of you all know who have participated in our shareholder meetings in the past, we've got a scripted portion of the meeting, where we welcome questions, we take some votes on matters, then following that, I'll do a presentation of our results for the year of 2020 and the first quarter of 2021. Again, I'm Steve Trager, Chairman and CEO of Republic Bancorp, Inc., and welcome to the annual meeting of shareholders. Due to the ongoing public health impact of the coronavirus outbreak and to support the health and wellbeing of our shareholders and other meeting participants, we again chose this virtual format for our shareholder meeting. We miss the face-to-face interaction with our shareholders, but we trust you understand our reasoning.
I would also like to take this opportunity to acknowledge the hard work and dedication of our Republic Bank associates in continuing to deliver banking services at this difficult time in all the communities in which we serve. I now ask that the 2021 annual meeting please come to order. At today's meeting, our agenda will be to cover the matters described in the proxy statement dated March 12, 2021, mailed to our shareholders of record as of February 19, 2021. A list of shareholders as of the record date who were entitled to notice of this annual meeting will be available throughout the meeting. I'll act as chairman of this meeting, and I appoint John Rippy, who is assistant secretary of the company, to act as secretary of this meeting. Jan Hollum will act as teller. The polls are now open.
To vote, or if you wish to change your vote, click on the Cast Your Vote button on the webcast screen. The polls will remain open until the conclusion of the matters to be voted on portion of the meeting. If you have already voted, there is no need to do anything now. The assistant secretary has provided a certification that a notice of internet availability of proxy materials in the notice of the meeting were mailed to shareholders of record on March 12, 2021. I've been advised by the assistant secretary that shareholders holding the majority of the voting power are present in person or by proxy at this meeting, and that a quorum has now been officially established. This meeting is now properly constituted for the transaction of business.
The first item of business on the agenda is to elect Directors of the company to serve until the next annual meeting of shareholders and until their successors are duly elected and qualified. In accordance with the company's bylaws, the Board of Directors has fixed the number of Directors at 15 to serve until the next annual meeting of shareholders. The proxy statement for this meeting contains information regarding the 15 individuals nominated for election. The following persons nominated by the company's nominating committee and approved by the Board of Directors are the only persons duly nominated to serve as members of the Board of Directors.
They are Ron Barnes, Laura Douglas, David Feaster, Craig Greenberg, Heather Howell, Ernest Marshall, Pat Mulloy, George Nichols , Ken Oyler, Mike Rust, Sue Tamme, Andrew Trager-Kusman, Scott Trager, Steve Trager, and Mark Vogt. I now declare the nominations closed.
I believe all the Director nominees are present virtually at today's meeting. I will say that we have a retiring Director who is not being nominated in Campbell Brown, and I thank Campbell for his years of service to Republic Bancorp, and appreciate all his support and good work. I'd like to welcome a new Board member, who is George Nichols . We're excited about having George on the Republic Bancorp Board, and welcome him as a new nominee for the Republic Bancorp Board. The second item of business on the agenda is to, on an advisory basis, vote on the compensation of the company's named executive officers as disclosed in the proxy statement. The third item of business on the agenda is a vote to amend the bylaws to increase the limitation on the maximum number of authorized Directors from 15 to 18.
The fourth item of business on the agenda is to ratify the appointment of Crowe LLP as the company's independent registered public accountants for the year ended December 31st, 2021. As stated in the proxy statement, representatives of Crowe LLP are virtually participating today and available to answer appropriate shareholder questions you may have for them during the Q&A session. Under the company's bylaws, they are the only matters to properly come before the shareholders and be voted upon at today's meeting. Is there any discussion specific to any of the items of business? If not, the polls are now closed. I can also report that the voting tabulation has been completed. The results of the vote are as follows. All Director nominees were elected for one-year terms and until their successors are duly elected and qualified.
On an advisory basis, the compensation of the company's named executive officers, as described in the proxy statement, has been approved. The proposal to amend the bylaws to increase the limitation on the maximum number of authorized Directors from 15 to 18 has been approved. The shareholders also have ratified the appointment of Crowe LLP as Republic's independent registered public accountants for the year ending December 31, 2021. Teller, please file your written report and the ballots with the secretary as part of the recording of this meeting. The final results will be reported in a Form 8-K to be filed in connection with the matters voted upon at this meeting. There being no further business to properly come before this annual meeting, I declare the meeting adjourned and will now provide a brief presentation for our shareholders.
If everyone would like to follow the PowerPoint, again, welcome to the annual meeting. You can see on page two, and there may be a bit of a delay. We've got our safe harbor statement that says, you shouldn't really rely on anything I say as it relates to your decisions with regard to purchases or sale to Republic stock. You should refer for your primary information, to our 10-K, 10-Q, and other publicly filed documents. Again, I am Steve Trager, the Chair and Chief Executive Officer of Republic Bank. Looking to page five, let me review some financial highlights for the year end of December 31st, 2020. As everyone knows, this has been an incredibly unique year, and I must say, we've been blessed to experience much success at Republic Bank.
I don't know that I've ever been more proud of our results and the things that we've done to be there for our customers, to grow our customers base, and really, I think, distinguish ourselves from others who were not as equipped to adapt the way all financial institutions and all companies had to adapt during 2020. I think the two highlights are, we had continued good growth in the franchise's earnings, Republic Bank's earnings. We also dramatically, and I think cautiously, appropriately, and conservatively, increased our loan loss provision in response to the pandemic, given the unknown risk that was out there. Overall, if you look at the company's performance, you can look at the bottom line there and see pre-tax, pre-provision, which we think is somewhat comparing apples to apples.
We saw a nice increase, a 7% increase in total company earnings, from $127 million to $136 million. Our publicly reported net income was $83.2 million, which you can see is down slightly from the $91.7 million, given predominantly the provision, in our conservative, again, we think our appropriate approach to the provision. Looking at page six, we're very pleased that our net interest income, particularly at the core bank, remains strong. This is despite the industry-wide net interest margin headwinds and compression. You can see there in the core bank, our net interest income actually grew to $186.7 million, in spite of, again, compression, which is fairly common in the industry, from 3.61% to 3.39%. Very proud of that. On a total company basis, you can see we remained relatively flat in our net interest margin.
While it's decreased to 4.10% from a total company perspective, remains very healthy. Looking at our financial highlights, it's again, a very strange year. What I'm proud to say is, we dramatically increased this provision, increased our allowance by $15.2 million based on COVID at the core bank and the total company. Yet, maybe somewhat to our surprise, and probably as a result just of our typical high-level credit quality. If you look at our credit metrics, not only did they not worsen, they're actually better than they were in 2019, which again, I think is a tribute to our underlying great credit quality, which is held up through all kinds of times historically. I'm not ready to spike the ball by any means. I think there's still some risk out there. There have been a lot of banks in the first quarter that are returning reserves, reducing allowances.
We're not ready to do that. Again, I think I'm proud of our credit folks so far. Again, not ready to call it victory, but there certainly are some positive signs, and if you look at traditional credit metrics, they remain at the top of our industry and very good. Looking at page eight, one of the things, I think the primary thing that really created strong revenue in 2020 was our strong mix of non-interest income, which grew 16% in 2020. At the end of the day, it's our job to provide our customers what they want, and they wanted a few things in 2020. Number one is they wanted mortgages. If you were in the mortgage business, you were going to have a pretty good year in 2020.
Not only did we have a good year, our mortgage income grew 285%, which is spectacular, well above peer. We were able to adjust our workforce and our technology to make sure in an out-of-office environment, we could dramatically respond to customers' desires in the mortgage space. The second big one was obviously PPP loans. We'll talk about those later. That's what customers wanted. That's what other banks had difficulty doing, particularly the large banks. We were able to apply a lot of resources to make sure we accommodated customer need when customers needed it the most. As a result, as you'll see later, we dramatically increased our customer base, our deposit base, which is something I'm very proud of. We were able to react very quickly in a unique environment, thanks to the great efforts of our many associates.
Speaking of which, a lot of banks, a lot of companies furloughed a lot of people. They cut back on their investments. As you can see from slide nine, we did just the opposite. We're all in. We had folks that stepped up to take care of Republic Bank and take care of our customers. We increased our non-interest expense from $172 million to $185 million. We didn't put anybody on furlough. We made sure that because our folks were able to step up and serve customers around the clock this past year, we were going to take care of those folks, and we kept our folks. I'm really proud of that. We also continued to further invest in technology. We've got a new commercial loan system in NextGen. We kind of doubled down on Salesforce to upgrade our Salesforce delivery.
We're all in. We continue to be invested for the future, which has worked out for us over time. Looking at our balance sheet, page 11, one of the things that we've been able to do over the last several years is diversify our loan portfolio. At one time, several years ago, we were heavily influenced by residential real estate, which at the time represented over half of our loan portfolio. We've had a strategy to diversify that. You can see that we've got a very diverse loan portfolio, three biggest categories being, in this order, traditional commercial portfolio. Residential real estate now represents only a quarter of our portfolio.
Warehouse lines of credit, which is a business that we've been in, I don't know, I guess about 10, 12 years now, which saw tremendous demand this past year, now represents a fifth of our portfolio. All in all, when you plug all those in, we had nice growth of 9% in 2020 with a loan portfolio that's now $4.8 billion as of December 31st. I mentioned that we dramatically increased our allowance. You can see from December 31st, 2019 to 2020, we've actually grown our allowance by $21 million at the traditional bank. At the traditional bank, we didn't include PPP loans because those are all government guaranteed. We've almost doubled our allowance, in spite of the continuing very, very good credit metrics. Again, as of this point in time, we would not be comfortable returning those reserves like a lot of banks have done.
Again, we've got our traditional bank allowance to loans of 1.5%, which is by far the highest it's ever been. If you look at the total company, we've increased our allowance from under 1% to 1.27%. I think that was the right and prudent thing to do, and we'll continue to monitor that very closely. As I mentioned, our credit quality statistics remain impeccable. You can see that our charge-offs in 2020 were 0.03%, basically a third of what they were in 2019, a pre-pandemic year. In spite of that, we've dramatically increased our allowances. Our non-performing loans, which have always been well below peer, are at 0.5%. Last year, they were at 0.54%.
While we continue to monitor our credit portfolio very closely and in many ways, not just the traditional ways, so we can get out on the front end of any issues, our credit quality continues to be very, very good. Deposits, by far the best deposit year we've ever had. Our deposits are up 25%, about $1 billion in total deposits. A huge chunk of those are core deposits. Certainly stimulus and government assistance, people's savings habits, and also, I think people's frustrations with the big banks during this time of need. I think we were able to distinguish ourselves. Our customers continue to have access to us, so I'm very proud of that. I think a staggering figure in that pie chart is the fact that our core bank non-interest-bearing deposits are now over 50%.
That is absolutely staggering. If you include our interest-bearing transactional deposits, which are very sustainable, stable deposits, if you add those two, it's 83% of our deposits. Do I think that's going to stay forever? I think we've got a lot of new, really high-quality relationships. We keep expecting that to run off as people begin to spend again. It hasn't happened yet, so we'll continue to keep a close eye, and we're very proud of the relationships we've created. Our loan-to-deposit ratio is the lowest it's ever been. We're floating in and around 100%. Historically, we've been 120% and above. The moral of that story is that we have reduced dependence on borrowings. Our Federal Home Loan Bank borrowings, which have always been a premium source of wholesale borrowings for us, typically cost more. That's down to virtually nothing. Historically, that ran $700 million, $800 million.
We're under $50 million. It's a very healthy loan-to-deposit ratio. Looking at page 16, we remain one of the highest and best capitalized financial institutions in the country. This gives us a lot of dry powder to pursue opportunity. We continue to maintain a very high level of capital, especially as compared to peer. Dividend, this is about as good of a chart as you can have. You can see that since 1999, we have, in consecutive years, annually increased our dividend. Our annual dividend is 1.21%, which is about 2.5% of our stock price. We continue to produce a very, very solid long-term return for our shareholders.
Some of the other things that I wanted to mention that I'm just extraordinarily proud of, I think the pandemic and these unusual circumstances really gave Republic Bank and our people a chance to distinguish ourselves and shine. We transformed within a matter of days, almost 100% of our back office to a work-from-home environment. This was an extraordinary effort, and it was all about us making sure we protected our customers, we protected our associates, and continued to provide our customers access which they've come to expect at Republic Bank. We provided remote service through our fleet of interactive teller machines, which are almost in every branch location and will be by the end of 2021. This proved to be a phenomenal investment, where our folks could, on a video basis, interact with our customers and provide them live service through our 42 locations.
I also think that we stepped up in a big way through the last year and a quarter since last March. We've originated 4,700 PPP loans totaling over $700 million. That has just been a godsend to people, consumers, businesses throughout the communities that we serve. I can't think of anything we've ever done where I've gotten more appreciative and positive feedback of customers. In addition, we stepped up during 2020, and we provided loan deferrals and forbearances in a very time-sensitive basis for over 1,700 loans, representing approximately $800 million in loan balance, which was a fifth of our loan portfolio. In June, I was very proud to welcome Logan Pichel as our new President for Republic Bank, and again, very proud to continue to invest and add in our executive team.
Pedro Bryant, in July, was appointed Republic Bank's Managing Director for Community Lending, and began managing Republic Bank's newly formed $3 million Community Loan Fund, which was a fund that was established to provide small businesses in challenged areas of the communities we serve for small business loans up to $50,000. It's really something I'm very proud of. I think while other folks were planning and trying to decide what they were going to do to help various small businesses in our community, as is our way, we identified an issue, we found the right leadership, and we acted. We are passionately working to identify small businesses in need and disperse those funds. In addition, in September of 2020, we recruited successfully Ashley Duncan, who was appointed Republic Bank's Director of Inclusion and Diversity. Very proud to have these folks added to our executive team.
In addition, I'm very proud that people have recognized Republic Bank for different things that we've done over 2020. We thought we'd throw in there some of the things that people have recognized in Republic Bank. We were, again, a Best Places to Work for the fifth consecutive year. We were selected as a Business Impact Award by Louisville Business First. 14th consecutive year recognized as the Best Local Bank by LEO Readers' Choice Awards here in Louisville. We were recognized by Mastercard with an Innovation Award at their annual Community Institution Segment Awards. Our foundation was recognized for our contributions to support charities and philanthropic enterprise in Louisville Business First Partners in Philanthropy program. We were included on Forbes list of America's Best Banks in each state, ranked as the number one home mortgage lender in volume here in Jefferson County.
People seem to recognize the many good things that we're doing. Let me shift to the first quarter. In the first quarter, we had a nice first quarter, especially at the core bank, where we were up to $16.5 million from $10 million. Overall for the quarter, we are down 23%, and that all comes in our Republic Processing Group segment, where it's all about a delay in the tax season. The tax season has been delayed three weeks, so that impacted the IRS and our delivery of our tax season to our customers. Also, the IRS was the primary party that is responsible for distributing stimulus payments, so that's impacted their funding of tax refunds dramatically. Ultimately, we will judge the tax season by the end of the second quarter. When you throw all those things together, it's just an oddball of a tax season.
As you can see, typically, all that income from our tax segment occurs in the first quarter of the year. That was down $12.6 million. We'll see how that plays out in the second quarter. Certainly, the stimulus payments and the cash people have has had an impact on the demand for our tax product. We'll see how that shakes out in the second quarter. Overall, I'm pretty pleased. Again, unlike a lot of banks, we chose not to return any reserve. We thought that was a prudent, appropriate, and cautious thing to do. If you look at our first quarter results, again, thanks to our mortgage folks, we continue to experience very heavy mortgage volume. In fact, our mortgage banking income increased $2.4 million or 50% from the first quarter of 2020. Along that theme, warehouse lending net interest income increased $2.1 million.
Both of those segments continue to justify our investment, and continue to respond to customer demand. In addition, we continue to help our customers with PPP loans. I think we've actually surpassed what we thought we would do, and the demand is more than we thought it would be in originating over $175 million in PPP loans to 1,000 businesses just in the first quarter. Core deposits, maybe slightly to our surprise, continued dramatic growth. $232 million in the first quarter of 2021. Net charge-offs continue to be very, very positively low, at 0.03% for the core bank, 0.09% for the total company. Both those rates are annualized. A lot of people have worked hard to keep those very low, to work with our customer base. I continue to be very, very proud of that. Again, we can't ever take credit risk lightly, and we don't.
That remains very low. To close, I couldn't be more excited about the long-term future of Republic Bank. We've learned some unbelievable things in taking advantage of this opportunity that COVID has presented to us to show our folks that work at Republic how much we care, to show our customers that we care. Again, I remain very proud of that. If you look at our long-term initiatives, and it's hard to establish long-term initiatives because many of the great things we've done, we might not have known we were going to do them two months before we were doing them. We seem to be very good at reacting to opportunity when it surfaces. That's kind of what happened in 2020.
If I had to identify some long-term initiatives, we see some great opportunities to increase our market share within our footprint, enhance capital deployment in technology, digital, and fintech. We think there's some great opportunities out there where we can take advantage of our high capital level. We are passionate about customer service. This has been challenging for our customers to access Republic Bank in different ways. We will continue to fine-tune and enhance to make sure we deliver on our promise to customers that they can access Republic Bank like no other customer service organization, like no other financial institution. It's a moving target. Certainly, a ton of our volume shifted from in-branch to ITMs to contact centers, and we continue to bust our tails to make sure we can respond.
Our contact center folks, they apologize at times when our response time, on average, on a given day, may go to 30 seconds. Our customer service level expectations are less than that. I will say, I can't think of any other organization or any other customer service organization that I call and I reach a person within 30 seconds. I remain very proud of those folks. Virtually all of whom are working virtually at this point in time. Finally, we continue to support Diversity and Inclusion for the community and our associates. I can tell you that while many others are talking about it, issuing press releases, we're acting on it. We are not going to wait to do what we think is right. We are not where we want to be.
What we've done is not enough, as proud as I am of it. We will continue to do more. With that, again, I thank everybody for attending. It has been reported to me by Christy Ames that we have not had any questions submitted. I will remind shareholders and others, that there's a lot of ways to reach me. We have an email the CEO portal that I get some great feedback from our website. Always feel free. I will absolutely respond, and I read every single one of those. Those are important to me. There are no questions, I believe. Christy, do you want to comment on there being no questions or?
No, I just want to confirm that there are no questions at this time.
Great. Thank you, Christy, and thank everyone for joining. This does conclude our meeting. Thanks for your continued interest and support of Republic Bank, and you may now disconnect. Everybody have a wonderful day.