Rajinder Singh
Analyst · Hovde Group. Your line is open
Thank you, Susan. Welcome everyone to our earnings call. Thanks for joining us. And let me start by just highlights of the quarter. Net income came in at $87.9 million or $1.12 per share, like [ph] 37% increase in EPS, ROE came in at 13.5%, we’re very happy with those results. This growth in earnings really driven because of NIM expansion, I’d like to remind everyone that we’re not very asset-sensitive or little asset-sensitive. But, I think, we’re writing business at better margins, which is helping. And, of course, a slight asset-sensitivity is also helping. So our margin expanded by 13 basis points compared to last quarter were [indiscernible] this quarter, last quarter, we were at 2.63%. And if I remember well, third quarter of last year, we were at 2.33%, so nice trajectory there. Our core C&I and CRE businesses grew by $444 million this quarter. This was pushed partially offset by declines in mortgage warehouse, which is a slight decline in Pinnacle and Bridge as well. But mortgage warehouse declined a little less than $200 million. I think the utilization now is that historically low level given everything that’s happened in the mortgage origination business. Consistent with similar trends at the Fed tightening, deposits declined by $1.1 billion. Our non-interest DDA declined by $851 million, but NIDDA now it still stands up 32% of total deposits. I’d like to remind everyone that this journey of building NIDDA, which is like 5 years in the making now, when we started on this journey, which was let’s say going back in 2017, our DDA balances were just 14% of our total deposits. Even before the pandemic, which was, let’s say the end of 2019, we were only at about 17.5% and today we’re at 32%. I don’t like seeing these declines happen. We’ll talk a little more time will get into the details of where just coming from a large part about, half of it is coming from one particular business line, and Tom will shed some more light on that. But despite that for this year for 2022, if you stick like a 9-month view, NIDDA is down by $182 million, because in the first part of the year we were growing NIDDA this quarter we shrunk. Overall cost deposits came in at 78 basis points. Again, given how fast the Fed is hiking, you should expect this to keep climbing up. I think last quarter unless we were at 30 basis points, so 30 to 78 basis points now. Really quick, the last week of this quarter, we were hit by Hurricane Ian, happy to report that there was no significant damage to our facilities, our people are all safe. And we’re reaching out to our customers who might have been impacted. So far, the information that we’ve compiled, we don’t expect a material impact on credit. Having said that, we did put $5 million into our provision just in case as the next few days and weeks roll on, we might have a credit here. Therefore, that purposes we did take a $5 million provision that’s included in our numbers. We’re not seeing any systemic credit issues. We’re looking very hard during every walk around to find any issues that they might be out there, because as the economy is slowing, it’s natural to be very, very careful. But, so far, we really have nothing to report. In fact, I’ve criticized classified loans, they continue to decline. This quarter also, it was a very healthy decline of $175 million. Excluding the guarantee portion of our SBA loans, the NPA ratios stood at 32 basis points, which is a very small uptick from prior quarter. And annualized net charge offs for the 9 months, not this quarter, this quarter was very low, but for the 9 months stood at 16 basis points that compared to 0.9 basis points of net charge-offs for last year. So we’re happy about that credit as well. As you already know, the Board did authorize another $150 million buyback, sometime mid-September, we have executed about $11 million of that already through the end of the quarter, and we’ll continue to judiciously execute on that as time goes on. So if you take all the buybacks that we’ve done so far through the end of September, I think the number comes to about $337 million. In terms of quickly updating the guidance that we’ve given you, we expect loan growth for the year to come out at about mid-single-digits, driven again by C&I and CRE. By the way, CRE was a positive quarter, which is – we have not said that now in many, many quarters. So we finally have – it’s not a very big positive, but it is a positive quarter and we were very happy about that we’re now sort of inflected onto the other side of nice [ph] growing CRE. C&I still will be the largest driver of growth, C&I’s small business, middle market lending, all doing well, my clients are very healthy. In terms of deposits, I think deposits, this will be a challenging environment, I expect deposits this coming quarter to be under pressure, somewhat both NIDDA and total deposits. And cost of deposits will climb as the Fed keeps tightening. We’re expecting another 75 basis points here in a few days, and then another move in December. So having said that margin, overall should still – we’re still positively biased when it comes to margin. So, yes, deposit costs will go up. But, our yield on assets, loans and securities will also go up. Overall, we still think there is a room for margin expansion in the fourth quarter. In terms of, overall, I usually actually start with this talking about, what is seeing the economy. My comments will be very similar to what I said last quarter, which is that we’re cautiously optimistic. We’re looking very hard to see if there are any cracks appearing anywhere, but we’re not finding that. We’re talking to our peers. We’re talking to smaller banks, bigger banks, non-banks. We’re trying to see where trouble will emerge, but we’re not seeing it yet. Having said that, we’re not sitting and assuming that everything will be fine, we are taking a view that long-term, there will be a significant slowdown. And sometime next year, we just have to be careful. So this is not a time to be very brave and aggressive, but be a little cautious. So we are on the scale of that 1 to 10 that I described on the call last quarter, we say about the same way we were around the six in terms of cautiousness and optimism, and we’ll keep revising it as more data comes along. But, Florida is doing very well and we’re very thankful that the Hurricane missed us for the most part. Let me turn it over to Tom to get into a little more details about deposits.