Sterling Bancorp (STL), parent company of Sterling National Bank, reported $2.3m in net income in Q210 — or $0.09 per diluted share — up 2,300% from the $100,000 reported for the year-ago quarter. Shares were trading up more than 5% by midday after the news. According to Sterling, the significant growth in earnings result from warehouse lending and public share offering initiatives that produced the highest net income the company has seen in four quarters. In April, the company launched a mortgage warehouse lending program. Sterling said the company continues to experience an improvement in credit quality of their assets, leading the provision of loan losses to decline to the lowest level of the past six quarters, $5.5m for Q210. In March 2010, Sterling Bancorp priced a stock offering that increased capital gain by 7.33%, compared with 4.47% in June of last year. The company also made significant growth through non-interest income which rose 5.2% to $11.4mn, up from $10.8mn in Q209. “Looking ahead, we have abundant capital and liquidity to respond to the vast opportunities we see in our marketplace, but are still in the early stages of prudently deploying that capital,” said Sterling chairman and CEO Louis Cappelli. “As a result, our current asset mix reflects a relatively high level of short-term, lower-yielding investment securities. As we continue to respond to the needs of quality borrowers, we would expect to shift that asset mix to loans, thus achieving higher yields.” Write to Christine Ricciardi. Disclosure: the author holds no relevant investments.