BankUnited, Inc. (BKU) Q2 2026 Earnings Report, Transcript and Summary

Good day, welcome to BankUnited Inc.'s second quarter 2026 earnings conference call. All participants will be in listen-only mode. Should you need assistance, please signal a conference specialist by pressing the star key followed by zero. After today's presentation, there will be an opportunity to ask questions. To ask a question, you may press star then one on a touch-tone phone. To withdraw your question, please press star then two. Please note this event is being recorded. I would now like to turn the conference over to Jacqueline Bravo, Corporate Secretary. Please go ahead.

Thank you, Chloe. Good morning, thank you everyone for joining us today for BankUnited Inc.'s second quarter 2026 results conference call. On the call this morning are Raj Singh, Chairman, President, and CEO, Jim Mackey, Chief Financial Officer, and Tom Cornish, Chief Operating Officer. Before we begin, please note that our remarks today may include forward-looking statements within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. These statements reflect current expectations and are subject to various risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially. The company does not undertake any obligation to publicly update or review any forward-looking statement, whether as a result of new information, future developments, or otherwise.

Additional information regarding these risks can be found in the company's annual report on Form 10-K for the year ended December 31st, 2025, and any subsequent quarterly report on Form 10-Q or current report on Form 8-K, which are available at the SEC's website. With that, I'd like to turn the call over to Mr. Raj Singh.

Thank you, Jackie. Thanks, everyone. I know it's a busy day. We'll be quick with our comments and get you to Q&A. Before I start the earnings and get into the numbers, I was looking at actually the transcript from our last call, and I read the very last comment that I made. There was a question that was asked, I forget who asked that question, which was if there's one thing that you're looking at that matters more than anything else, what is it? I'm paraphrasing. My answer was NIDDA. NIDDA growth is the most important thing for us. If we take care of that, everything else will take care of itself. I'm happy to announce NIDDA growth this quarter came in exactly where we expected. More importantly, we reached a pretty big milestone that internally we've been focused on for quite some time.

We have finally crossed the high-water mark of NIDDA to total deposits, which now stands at 34.4%. We set the high-water mark during the height of COVID when money was free, rates were zero, and everyone was flush with DDA. Over the last few years, we've been working hard to bring that level back up. We're very happy to report we're now at a record high in the company's history of that ratio, which is a very important number for us in terms of building long-term franchise value. We're also almost at a milestone of $10 billion. It ticks me off that we've missed it by just an inch or two. It's 9.935 or something like that, but I hope you'll indulge me and let me call it $10 billion.

That was also a pretty big sort of battle cry inside the company for the last several months, and I'm very happy. I want to take a moment to thank everyone in the company. It takes a village. It's not just a few people in the company. Everyone from the front line to the back office and everyone in between has been working very hard over many years to achieve this. I actually even went back and looked at that over the last 10 years, we have grown our deposit portfolio by about $10 billion, and $7 billion of that $10 billion has been NIDDA. That's remarkable, and by the way, of course, it goes without saying all of it done one client at a time, not through acquisitions. We didn't pay for this through goodwill or anything, just good old-fashioned bringing in one client at a time.

I just wanted to start off with that. It's a pretty big thing for us, and we've been focused on it. Of course, the new targets will be sent out to everyone's inbox before the end of the day. We're not stopping at 34.4%. We want to move this further. With that, having said that, let me get back into the earnings. These are period-end numbers. Obviously, this is our biggest quarter. I've always said focus on averages. I'll talk more about averages because that's what drives the P&L. I just wanted to get that out of the way. Earnings came in at $0.97 a share, net income of about $71 million. ROE improved. Last quarter was, I think, 8.1%. Now we're at 9.3%. Deposits, like I said, a pretty big quarter for us no matter how you look at it.

Whether it's core deposits which is excluding broker, they were up very strongly. NIDDA was up very strongly. Actually, if I look at quarter-over-quarter and year-over-year, NIDDA year-over-year is up 13%. I think we guided that this year will be like 12%, we're running a little bit ahead of the guidance we gave you. Core deposits are up year-over-year. These are all averages. Up about 7%, and that also, I think the guidance we gave you was about 7%. We're doing a little bit better, but all within the rounding. I would call that right on top of the guidance we gave you. Quarter-over-quarter, NIDDA was up averages again 7%. Core deposits were up 3%. We did take this opportunity to pay down brokered.

Another big milestone actually is that we've now brought our brokered deposits down to just over 10%. To go back in time to see when we were at this level, you'd really have to, again, go back to the highs of the peak of COVID crisis when money was free. Achieving that in a time when money actually costs 3.5%, 4%, that's also a remarkable milestone. Moving on to lending. While our deposit business follows a pattern of Q1 being the slowest, Q2 being the best, and then Q3 and Q4 falling somewhere in between, our lending business follows a different pattern. Generally, it's more straight line. Q1 is the slowest, Q2 gets better, Q3 gets better, and Q4 is our strongest, biggest quarter of the year, and then everything resets again. It's the pattern we've seen over the last couple of years.

It's a pattern that we're following this year as well. If you look at how we're tracking in terms of core loan growth year-over-year, we're tracking at about 4% average loans from last year to this year. If you look at quarter-over-quarter, it was about 1%. I'll talk a little bit about what we're seeing in the lending market, but that's a little bit behind the guidance we gave you. We'll be adjusting all the guidance that we've given you, and Jim will walk you through those numbers. Margin expanded as you would expect with all the deposit growth that we've had. NIM came in at about 3.06%, which was seven basis points better than first quarter and also meaningfully better than same time last year.

Lending, what we're seeing is we're seeing a lot of competition in lending, and we're seeing mispricing of credit from time to time. The second thing that we're seeing is the discipline that the industry had found a couple of years ago in sticking with the relationship business and insisting on getting the full relationship rather than just a transactional view. That seems to have really gone to the side. We're still holding the line, but it is harder and harder to hold the line. We have let some business go. There were some strategic exits that we did this quarter, about $230 million, $240 million that fall into this category. This was not something we had planned, but looking at the price of credit, we cannot justify pricing at the level that that's at. The good part is the economy is in a good place.

Generally, there's a lot of optimism. It's reflected in asset prices. It's reflected in cost of credit as well. Just our view is that it has gotten a little ahead of itself, and that's why we're being a little more cautious at trading loan production for returns. That's really what it comes down to. Fee income, again, very strong quarter. Did better than would be expected marginally. It is a strength to our capital markets, especially the interest rate business. Commercial card was strong. Service charges. I'm really very happy. We put a lot of effort into it over the last two years and how much we've been able to achieve here. Lastly, I'll talk a little bit about credit. We've been saying to you, we'll continue saying that credit is a lumpy business.

You can have a couple of loans, can swing your numbers by a lot, last quarter, our charge-offs were pretty elevated at $36 million. Proof is right in front of you. This quarter, our charge-offs were just $6 million, $6.4 million to be exact. I'm very happy with that, but I'm really happy is the fact that NPLs were down again this quarter by 19%. Year to date, NPLs are down 40%. That's a pretty big swing in non-performers, and they're back down to a very reasonable level. Criticized classifieds were essentially flat. I mean, we were up $7 million, but I call that being basically flat. Capital, we're very well capitalized at what is at 12.3%. We did buy back a little over $50 million of stock this quarter. We are continuing to do that this quarter as well.

We'll probably do a little more this quarter. Macro outlook. I've been reading what other banks have been reporting, I largely agree with the sentiment, which is the economy is doing well. The war has not really impacted Main Street as some might have predicted it. We have to keep an eye on geopolitical developments because it is still not over, and the price inflation is still an issue. Rates are likely to go up and not down. Our house view is there'll be one rate hike in the fourth quarter, and likely more to follow next year. One thing I did forget to mention is we talked a lot about NIDDA, but there was a lot of effort put in this quarter on interest-bearing deposits as well.

In a time when rates are actually headed up, we were able to bring down our interest bearing cost, which I know was not a small task. For everyone who worked on that, great job. Coming to guidance, we have put a slide in here, I think towards the end of the deck, where we've taken our best guess at revising the guidance we gave you at the beginning of the year. I would still call the revisions all fine-tuning rather than any big changes. A little bit better on deposits, a little bit less on loans, a little bit better on fee income, a little less on margin. All within the margin of error. Nothing that dramatic that would change numbers too much. Again, there's as much art as it is science.

I do a pipeline review before this earnings call, and I'll tell you, those meetings over the last two or three days have been fantastic. Pipelines and deposits and even loans are very strong and doing fine. We just have to fight the battle on pricing and stay disciplined and not just put capital to work just to show volumes. That's the discipline I think you pay us for, and we're executing on that. What else? No, that's it. I'll turn it over to Tom.

Great, Raj. Thank you. A little bit more detail on some of the items that Raj covered. Overall deposit performance was really the operational highlight of the quarter. It was a really excellent quarter as we anticipated. NIDDA increased $991 million during the quarter, and average NIDDA increased $564 million. Total deposits, excluding broker deposits, increased by $1.1 billion, and commercial operating balances remain really strong. Raj mentioned the 34.4% of NIDDA to total deposits as being an all-time high. We continue to add new client relationships, core operating balances across the business units. Raj briefly touched on the service charges. I talked about this at the last call. Kind of year-to-date to year-to-date service charge income was up 18.6%, which is a number we're really very proud of. It takes a lot of work to do that.

We're actually touching the high points of product penetration per relationship on the treasury sales side and on the commercial side. It takes a lot of effort to get that done, and I think that's reflective of the strategy of really focusing on core deposit growth, core operating accounts, and fee income producing business. On the loan side, production remained good, I think solid through the quarter. As Raj mentioned, Q3 and Q4 pipelines, which are typically our best quarters, are looking pretty good at this point. I think we're pretty optimistic that we'll see the normal uptick in Q3 and Q4 that we see. Growth this quarter came predominantly from the CRE and mortgage lending businesses. Raj mentioned the C&I balance decline due to selected exits for either pricing or structure-related terms.

We are seeing substantial pricing pressure really in all businesses, probably a bit more in the CRE business than any business. Banks have returned to CRE lending in a significant way. I would say last year when we didn't win a deal, it was largely a Life Co or other permanent market provider. These days, banks are back in the market very aggressively at spread levels that we have not seen in quite some time. We did increase overall CRE point-to-point balances by $120 million and mortgage warehouse by $72 million. Average core loans increased $643 million from a year ago. As Raj mentioned, we continue to focus our efforts on primary client-related business that brings in deposit accounts, transaction business, fee income business, swaps, and everything else that we're trying to drive in the direct relationship business.

We have de-emphasized a lot of what I would call kind of market-driven lending business. The opportunities are out there, we have chosen to put our time on the things that we think drive fee income, drive deposits, and drive NIM for us. We remain optimistic on the second half of the year. The markets we're in predominantly from a geographic perspective continue to do very well. I'm happy to report that we expanded our operation in Dallas this quarter. We essentially doubled our space and are investing more people there. We opened up our office in Charlotte a few weeks ago. We continue to invest in other market segments. We continue to invest in the Tampa market, we're blessed to be in really good markets, we're optimistic as we head into the second half of the year. With that, I'll turn it over to Jim.

Great. Thanks, Tom. Raj covered the earnings highlights. I'll try not to repeat all the information that both he and Tom gave you. I just want to remind everybody that if I start with NII and margin, that we typically follow our seasonal patterns. We're a broken record on that, but it's a really important fact as we think of the ebb and flows during the year. We did see a significant pickup from the first quarter as we expected, with NII up $6 million and up $9 million from a year ago. NIM up seven basis points from last quarter, and importantly up 13 basis points from a year ago. The improvement is largely due to a funding mix improvement. That's a story we've been telling for a while now.

We saw our average deposit cost decrease seven basis points from last quarter and 42 basis points from a year ago. Of course, that's outpacing our decline in earning asset yields. We had almost $600 million higher average NIDDA from last quarter and over $1 billion increase over a year ago. This enabled us to reduce our higher cost wholesale funding. Average balances came down $636 million from last quarter. $1.2 billion from a year ago. Not only bringing down the wholesale funding, we also shifted the mix within the wholesale funding. We talked about that last quarter, that we'd probably rely more on FHLB advances and Fed fund purchase over brokered, and that's what you saw this quarter. We also talked last quarter about some of the actions we were taking in the securities portfolio that did bear fruit this quarter.

It improved the yields on that, improved nine basis points. Even with lower outstandings, it did modestly help margin. As Raj mentioned, I think it's an important point, our core interest-bearing deposits, that balance was up almost $250 million, and we were able to reduce that rate by three basis points. That growth at that lower cost helped us also reduce our wholesale funding. It's important to note, we are tracking a bit behind where we expected to be at this point in the year. The shortfall really is on the asset side. We talked about some of the risk management things that we did related to pricing and structure, et cetera. We're not seeing exactly the loan growth we expected. We'll talk a little bit more about the impacts of that when we get to guidance.

Credit quality, again, I'll just mention, obviously, charge-off ratio at 11 basis points, that's down meaningfully from last quarter. Raj talked about the metrics related to improving non-performing loans, criticized and classified. Non-performing loans down 40% from a year ago, and criticized and classified down 14% from a year ago. Provision expense, I thought, was good this quarter at under $6 million, down $9 million from the last quarter. We were able to take our coverage ratio and allowance up to 91 basis points. Just real quickly on non-interest income, Raj covered it. I'll just remind everybody that there are ebbs and flows from quarter to quarter. We did see a pickup over last quarter as we expected, because some of our activities, such as swaps, tracks our lending activity. Lending picked up, that derivative activity picked up. Generally, we're on track for the full year.

On expenses, I just want to mention a few things. Expenses were up from last quarter, obviously up from a year ago. Everything's generally tracking with how we projected. Deposit costs are seasonal, just like the NIDDA growth patterns. They are up a few million quarter-over-quarter. It's a mix of both volume and a bit of competition. We'll talk about that related to full-year guidance. We did have some elevated operational losses this quarter. It was just elevated by a million. I just call it out just because it's sort of a non-recurring thing. These do ebb and flow each quarter. Generally, for the full year, ops losses are tracking where we'd expect them to be. We'll call out REO disposition expense this quarter, which again, we haven't had some of those in a while.

We only have $1.5 million left on the balance sheet of REO, and that's down from over $7 million a year ago. Capital, again, CET1 was 12.3%, up 10 basis points. It was up even though we continued to buy back stock. That's largely due to the lower ending loan balances that we discussed. We repurchased just over $50 million of stock during the quarter. That leaves us about $146 million left on our current board-approved capacity. As we've discussed before, we are expecting to utilize that somewhere around year-end. It's obviously subject to market conditions, but we're committed to using what we have. Obviously, once that's used up, we'll look at the balance sheet and earnings and talk to the board about where to go next. We are committed to getting to our targeted capital levels of CET1 in the mid-11% over time.

With that, I'll turn to guidance. It's just important to note, as Raj said, the overall story has not changed. Deposit trends remain stronger than we originally anticipated. Specifically, NIDDA continues to grow. Fee income is tracking to plan. The main changes are really a function of the competitive conditions. We saw credit spreads tighten faster this year than we had expected. Both Raj and Tom talked about how we're going to remain disciplined on risk and pricing. On page 15 of the presentation, you can see the guidance. We gave you the original guidance as well as the updated guidance. I'll focus on a few things that changed the most. The loan balances, we're bringing the growth for core loans to 4%-5% from our original projection of 6%. Total loan growth, therefore, would be potentially slightly lower.

We're showing a range there as well. The second half of the year is our strong part of the year, so there's always a chance that we'll hit the original guidance. Just given where we are at this point in the year, we thought it prudent to bring it down a bit. On the deposit side, we are bringing up NIDDA average balances slightly from 12%-13%. On the net interest income side, because of halfway through the year, given where we are, we're bringing the full-year down to 5%-6% growth. It's largely due to the year-to-date tracking a bit behind where we projected. As Raj said, pipelines look really good for the rest of the year. If the winds align properly, we can make up some of that ground. We're being prudent and bringing it down slightly.

Because NII is coming down, we're bringing revenue forecast down to 5%-6%, and that's largely related to NIM and NII. Non-interest income, on the other hand, we're taking up slightly. Those numbers are smaller, so even though it's coming up, it only mitigates some of the lower NII. On expenses, we took the guidance up just slightly. It's really driven by two items. Deposit costs, I mentioned earlier. Our volumes on NIDDA are expected to be a bit higher. There is volume-related costs there. Also the competition. It's a highly competitive market. That's driving a little bit increased cost. On the compensation side, we had a really strong year last year, so there were incentive payouts earlier this year. Importantly, we've been opportunistic in our hiring, and we've been hiring revenue producers, some good hires.

The combination of those two things is going to drive our compensation expense a little higher than we had expected. All the other categories are largely in line. I guess I'd conclude it and say we're always looking for efficiencies. Where we can, we'll try to offset those two items. We did take up the guidance slightly. Provision, the last thing I'll say on that is it'll be a range. We did have higher charge-offs earlier in the year. That could mean a little bit higher provision expense for the full year if you just look at the full year impact of it. A lot of it will depend on where loan balances play out in the second half. It'll be somewhere around our original guidance to a little bit higher. It does reflect strong credit quality.

All these projections reflect a strong economic environment. As Raj talked about it, good economic environment brings a lot of competition, so we're trying to be balanced in our expectations for the remainder of the year. We do assume one rate increase late in the year. It doesn't have a lot of impact on this year's numbers. Obviously, I'll just remind everybody, we're modestly asset sensitive, so as rates rise, it would impact us, but it'd be more of a 2027 thing. With that, Raj, I'll turn it back to you.

Now, let's go to Q&A.

We will now begin the question and answer session. To ask a question, you may press star then one on your touchtone phone. If you're using a speakerphone, please pick up your handset before pressing the keys. If at any time your question has been addressed and you would like to withdraw your question, please press star then two. At this time, we will pause momentarily to assemble our roster. The first question today comes from Woody Lay with KBW. Please go ahead.

Hey, good morning, guys.

Morning.

Morning.

Wanted to touch on the NII guide. As you mentioned, it feels like it's more of a function of the assets and maybe some of the loan competition on pricing and some runoff. Looking at the loan growth guide, it would imply we see a nice little ramp up here in growth over the back half of the year, which is your historically seasonally stronger part. Are you seeing any dissipation in some of these competitive factors that would help on the loan growth front, or is it more just building in the pipeline to account for maybe additional runoff if it occurs?

Woody, we would love to see a dissipation of the competition. I don't think that's likely to happen. I think it's really going to be the continued efforts in building of prospect opportunities and loan transaction opportunities and funding acquisitions and expansions and things of that nature that we typically see building in the second half of the year, as it generally has. I don't think the competitive market will change over the course of the next couple of quarters.

The guidance really reflects we believe we'll hold our own in the second half. We think we'll be able to hold our own on credit spreads and whatnot. A lot of the guide is really just reflecting the actions we saw in the marketplace and the actions we took year to date.

By the way, our credit box has not changed. It is the same it was six months ago or a year ago. We have not revised our credit box. The market has moved meaningfully in terms of pricing credit. We're winning less because we really haven't moved our credit box. This is our view of price of credit. We could be wrong, by the way. We could be maybe a little too pessimistic. We have to kind of hold our own in terms of what we think the right price of credit is. That's the whole sort of essence of the lending business is to say yes and no when you think you need to call yeses and nos. The other part of this is also we are still very much disciplined on doing relationship business.

We might be the last bank left in that space insisting on getting deposits. If you're going to deliver NIDDA growth in 12%, 13%, 14% range, you have to do that.

This doesn't happen by itself. People don't leave a NIDDA because they dislike you. It's because you insist, is how you get that. We see a lot of our competitors not insisting anymore. That's not quite a credit issue or a credit pricing issue, but it's a relationship pricing, you can call it that. We're seeing less and less discipline on insisting on relationship, more willingness on our competitors to do just transactional stuff. We haven't forgotten the lessons from three or four years ago.

Yeah. That's good color. Then maybe just one follow-up on NII guide. You all have mentioned it's better to look at average versus into period, given some of the seasonality movements. If I just look at the spot rate of deposits, it's pretty meaningfully below where average cost came in, and I was just interested to know kind of what your deposit cost assumption is through year-end to hit that 315 year-end margin.

Yeah. Spot deposit rates can be very misleading because, especially at the end of June when we just have a huge amount of deposits that are not going to be there for a long time. I would not pay too much attention to that. I would look at what we did on average actual deposit cost over the quarter. It came down, which we're very happy with. I don't think many banks have taken it down. In the future it'll be hard to take down interest-bearing costs because the two-year is at what? 420, 430, and 10-year is now 465 this morning. It's going to be hard to have deposit costs come down. We'll still keep mining our deposit portfolio for it, but the real breakthrough for us is always going to be on NIDDA. I expect average NIDDA to continue to grow.

Period end may not grow, averages to keep growing, and that's going to help margin. That's where the deposit costs lowering will happen. That's where the margin growth will happen from.

You typically see from second quarter to third quarter margin expansion if you follow our normal seasonal trends, and then the fourth quarter is, I'll call it flattish. It can be up, but you don't see the rate change as much between first and second, and then second and third.

Raj mentioned the word work several times when we talked about the reduction in deposit cost. The market clients and people tend to think about things like this in sort of quarter of a point moves timed with market interest rate moves. The process of trying to fight for four or five basis points across the portfolio is a lot of work. You have to kind of go relationship by relationship, account by account, and really fight for each of those inches and we're going to continue to do that work.

Yep. Well, I appreciate all the color. Thanks for taking my questions.

Thanks, Woody.

Thank you.

The next question comes from Jared Shaw with Barclays. Please go ahead.

Hey, good morning, everybody.

Good morning.

Really good trends on the DDA. Could you share with us what portion of the portfolio is subject to ECR and what your implied payout on ECR is on that?

I think you're referring to deposit costs, not ECR. ECRs, like all commercial deposits, have some kind of ECR, but ECR is just the fees that we don't charge you expressed in basis points. That's generally the entire commercial portfolio. I think you're referring to the deposit costs which are sort of a cash expense. That is largely driven by the HOA business. Which is like, I have round numbers, I don't have it in front of me, like $2.5 billion, right?

Most of it is coming from that. Just how that industry has evolved over the last 20 years is that this whole notion of these arrangements are kind of the norm, and even small clients expect that. That's where it's really coming from.

Okay. How much of that, I guess, the quarterly growth was from the HOA business?

We had I think we disclosed in our Q last quarter, we had $13 million or so I think of deposit costs down and OpEx and a couple million dollar growth in that quarter-over-quarter due to volumes. That's in aggregate. Just rough numbers.

Okay. I guess shifting, going back to follow up on the margin discussion, and hear what you're saying about the spot deposit cost versus the average. How should we think about, I guess maybe the total cost of funding for the second half of the year? Is there likely to be a continued reduction in brokered and shift to FHLB? I guess how are we thinking about that 310 spend rate?

Yeah. Brokered versus FHLB, we basically look at whatever is cheaper and we tap that market. I would throw Fed funds in that as well. Between those three buckets, we just try to be opportunistic, whatever is cheaper. Brokered got more expensive starting I think March 1st.

While that gap has narrowed somewhat in the last few weeks, it's still more expensive, which is why you see we've really brought down brokered very aggressively. Now, if I think of these three buckets together, I call that sort of wholesale funding. That came down quite a bit this quarter. I don't expect that to come down because this is seasonally high deposits from the title business are creating that excess cash that we have, which they do every June this happens. Going forward, I don't expect that number to continue to come down. In fact, it'll probably grow. Will it be brokered that'll grow or FHLB or Fed funds? It's hard for us to say because we'll tap whatever is the cheapest.

If you go back and look at our numbers last year, it's exactly what you saw last year happen.

Yeah.

Very similar trends will happen again this year. I just don't know which bucket it'll be. It'll be one of those three buckets.

Okay. All right.

Yep.

Thanks.

Our guidance is based on following the same seasonal pattern we've seen the last couple of years.

Okay. Then I guess just a follow-up on the margin side, on the yields, hearing what you're saying about the competition. If we're assuming sort of flat rates here, I know you have one hike at the end of the year, but if we look at third quarter, most of fourth quarter, should we assume that loan yields stay flat? I mean, is that possible or how should we think about the trend in loan yields with what you're looking at as that pipeline?

Sorry, Jared, I don't know if you misspoke or I misspoke. We're not expecting a cut, we're expecting a hike.

I mean, I'm sorry. I meant a hike. Yeah.

I think I also misspoke. We're so used to saying cut, we just start saying a hike.

I think generally, and I'll let Tom add to this. Generally, yes, we're looking at loan yields, credit spreads staying stable from here for the rest of the year. Again, Tom talked about this, one of the things that hurt us while we generally had flat core loans, we had a mix shift. Some of the higher yielding portions, C&I, were a little bit lower. Our mortgage warehouse was a little bit higher. Some of the yield will depend on what the mix is at the end of the year, but asset class by asset class, I think we're expecting roughly similar credit spreads.

Yeah, I would say we've held, when we look at production across all of the business lines for this past quarter and really for the whole year, we have held margins and spreads within a very small kind of variance. There is some mix difference that the C&I market has better yields than the CRE market right now. Part of what we'll try to do is balance that a bit better in the second half of the year. I don't think we would have materially different yields than we're seeing right now than we're trying to stay to. A lot of that is also influenced by if we have very strong core deposit opportunities with these clients, we become a little bit more flexible on loan yields. When we don't, we don't. That's part of the trade-off you make.

Great. Thank you.

The next question comes from David Chiaverini with Jefferies. Please go ahead.

Hi. Thanks for taking the questions. A follow-up on NII. You mentioned about how weaker loan growth is the main driver for it. When I look at the updates on the guide, it looks like you went from 2% to 1%-2%, but yet you took the guide down to 5%-6% on NII versus 9%. It seems like a modest tweak lower on loans, but yet a pretty decent cut on NII. Can you walk through, is it a timing issue? Can you walk through some of the factors there?

It's timing.

It's timing, and it's also a little bit of loan mix. Jim just mentioned we did more growth in mortgage warehouse lending than we were expecting to. Also in CRE we had growth, C&I, we actually did some strategic exits. If you look at C&I spreads, they are much higher than CRE spreads, and then mortgage warehouse is kind of about the same as CRE spreads or even slightly a few basis points lower. The mix is also contributing to that.

It's timing and mix, the pipelines right now, the C&I pipeline is pretty decent. If we can actually close on all that, we could probably make up some of it. The issue is you're closing it ratably during the second half of the year, you don't have a full year impact of those higher spreads. You could still land the plane on loan volumes, because we were sort of tracking behind in NII through midpoint of the year, you could only make up so much of that gap. That's timing.

Got it. Very helpful.

Does that make sense?

Yep. It sure does. Then shifting over to the NIDDA. I think you mentioned about expecting continued growth despite the seasonal bump in the second quarter. Can you talk about the cadence and trajectory for 3Q and 4Q expectations there?

Generally what we see is that while end of periods of June to September you may not see much growth, the average balances still continue to grow because our average NIDDA is like $9 billion, and our period end is $10 billion.

That momentum carries into the third quarter. Average NIDDA is generally higher in the third quarter than the second, even though end of period may not be as high or may be even flat. Averages matter, and that's what drives NIM and the P&L. Fourth quarter, again, it starts to decline in December, sort of mid-December, balances start to decline. That can make period-end numbers look bad. Averages don't look that bad because for most of the quarter, we're still doing a lot of business. It only starts to really slow down in the holidays.

Very helpful. Thank you.

The first quarter is definitely just the slowest, that's just the nature of the business. Once it slows in December, it doesn't come back up in any meaningful way till March 1st.

Thank you.

Yep.

The next question comes from Michael Rose with Raymond James. Please go ahead.

Hey, good morning, everyone. Thanks for taking my questions. Raj, I think you described the loan pipelines as fantastic. I think that's the word that you used. Can you just give some color on kind of what is comprising that pipeline and then maybe the interplay as we think about kind of the continued rundown as we move through the next couple quarters of the resi mortgage piece? Because it does sound like the-

I'll let Tom talk to that.

Yeah.

Yeah, Michael. I would say when you look, it's obviously different for each business line. I would say when you look at the C&I line of business, it's going to be, which is comprised of different sort of segments within that market, but it's going to be pretty broadly diversified across a number of industry groups. There's not any significant concentration. We're seeing more growth in new office markets because we're starting from lesser numbers. We've had good growth in the Dallas office. We've had good growth in Atlanta. We're starting to see nice opportunities in the Charlotte, North Carolina, South Carolina kind of market. It's kind of broad across 100 different industries, and that business is very granular based upon that. There is some M&A activity that we're seeing flow through that we're working on now that I think looks pretty good overall.

The CRE pipeline, we're definitely seeing strong interest in the CRE market. The foreign investment is coming back to the CRE market. Our portfolio, as you can see in the data supplied, is pretty well diversified across all major asset classes. I would say what we're going to likely see the most of is industrial and retail. Some in the multifamily sector will be large, although we are seeing more competition in the construction market, particularly for non-recourse construction loans, which generally we have strayed away from. I would say the major asset classes in CRE, if you look at our portfolio, each one is sort of in the 20%-24% range. It's a pretty well-diversified and well-balanced portfolio.

We expect to see good growth in that area, and I think in the smaller business lending teams spread out over 1,000 industries, we expect to see good growth.

I just want to put a little footnote to this. Tom mentioned industrial, but that does not include data centers.

Correct.

We have not done any data center business. I was actually surprised too when I was talking to a few of my peers over the course of the last two or three months how many people are actually actively participating in that asset space. We've not been able to wrap our head around the risk, especially the risk of obsolescence on long-dated assets, and we've stayed away from the data center. We studied it. We continue to study it, but we have not participated in that rush to finance data centers, whether through their bond portfolio or through our loan portfolio. Just a footnote to Tom's comments.

I would add to that, it's kind of more broadly even than data centers. That is a type of lending that if you want to turn on the faucet, you can turn it on. I mean, it's there. There's a lot of stuff that's out there in the marketplace, private credit things that you can do, data center business that you can do, that are typically credit-only products in large amounts.

No relationship products.

No relationship, no deposit relationship. I mean, it's out there to do if somebody wants to do it. It tends to divert the organizational attention away from what we've really set out to be our mission. That's part of even setting aside credit issues and yield and all that kind of stuff, there's only so many things you can focus on and do excellently. Stuff like that diverts everybody's attention, which is why we try to de-emphasize that.

Yeah. I will call out on page 17 in the materials we show our NDFI or private credit exposure, we did bring that down in the quarter.

Yeah.

No, appreciate all the color there, especially on the data center stuff. Maybe just two quick follow-up ones. Anything to read into the build in the office reserve this quarter? I think it was up about 30 basis points Q-on-Q. Just secondarily, was there anything in the other expense category that is maybe one-time-ish, or how should we think about that? Thanks.

Nothing to note. It's just general economic scenario updates. Nothing material to call out. Yeah. Other expenses, we kind of talked to you about the deposit costs. That's probably the only big item in there, but it's not non-recurring. It does move up and down with deposits. Tech quarter being our biggest deposit quarter, it can elevate a little bit, but nothing that I would call sort of uniquely or one time. No. In expenses, just the two items we call, again, ebb and flows of ops losses that can go up or down. The REO was a one-timer. We have had very small REO expense numbers over the last year. This was a little bit larger one due to one unique property that had asbestos. REO is largely cleaned out of our balance sheets, so not much left.

Michael, on the office side as well. If you look at the data, the metrics around the office portfolio continue to be very good. 1.76 weighted average debt service coverage, 65% loan to value. While we're not actively doing much new in that portfolio, the markets that we're in are recovering and doing very well. Miami's an unusual market because it's so hot right now. We don't actually do a lot of office in Miami, even markets like New York is the leasing activity and the growth in the New York office market has been pretty good.

Totally get it. Thanks for all the color, guys. I'll step back.

The next question comes from Ben Gerlinger with Citigroup. Please go ahead.

Hi, good morning.

Good morning.

I hear you on the loan side, definitely core. It seems like you guys are implying it's a little bit kind of more fourth quarter than third quarter. Maybe I'm mishearing that, but I'm trying to think like through the funding aspect of it. I get brokered versus FHLB or just call it wholesale funding, as you said, Raj. Like the fourth quarter does have the better loan growth, and you do need to fund it. I'm just kind of struggling to get to the 3.15% NIM on top of all that, just given the spread where we are today. I was just kind of curious if you just kind of unpack that. There's three moving parts to that, where might I be wrong kind of thing?

I think it's starting with NIDDA growth, average balances will increase. That drives it. I think also continued change the balance sheet on the left side. Resi will keep running off. The commercial will keep growing. Hopefully C&I will grow versus it shrank this quarter. We don't see any exits this quarter. I think interest bearing deposits will probably be the smallest driver, if any at all. I do expect margin to grow to 3.15% by the end of the year. In terms of whether loan growth is more fourth quarter, third quarter, you can have loan closing scheduled for the end of the month that gets spill over into the next month. It's really hard to say when they materialize, but when we're reporting, it's very hard to really say this is third and this is fourth quarter. Overall, the pipeline for the rest of the year looks good, looks strong. We expect both quarters to be good. Yeah. Where it falls depends a lot upon whether we close a deal on 9/29 or 10/2. Yeah.

Right. Yeah, no, I understand that. Okay, that's helpful. Then utilize the buyback, maybe on page 15, you have $146 million.

Yeah.

Should we assume or just kind of how do you think about timing on that? Potentially, would you do another one this year if you utilize the whole thing?

What the board has told us is to use up this and then come back to them. I expect that we will get all of this done this year, and we'll be in front of the board November or December talking about the next block.

Got you. That's helpful. Thank you, guys.

Yeah.

Thank you.

The next question comes from Jon Arfstrom with RBC Capital Markets. Please go ahead.

Hey, thanks. Good morning.

Good morning.

Hey, most of my questions have been asked, can you guys give us an example of some of the more intense competition and mispricing, what you're walking away from, and kind of where and what and why you think that's happening?

Yeah. Well, how many hours do you have?

It's still morning.

Yeah. I would say there is, particularly in the corporate market, middle market type credit, there is broad competition. Part of it is rate, part of it is also structure and terms. You look at things like we exited a private equity, private credit deal this quarter where it got redialed. I mean, here's a very specific example. It got redialed. The credit is probably not as good. The market conditions around private credit are certainly not as strong, to put it mildly, than it was a year ago, yet the pricing is going down and the conditions around the covenants and structure around the credit is weakening. You go like, "Well, why would you do that? That doesn't make any sense." When that deal gets redialed, we choose to exit that deal.

Each one's a little bit different, I would say by and large, when we look at the competitive nature, people are obviously trying to build volume. They're trying to build balances. There are times when you just look at it, and it's maybe less scientific, but there are times you look at it that you just say, "You know what? I think we'll wait for another opportunity with this funding base. We'll look for something that's more within our wheelhouse and has got better relationship aspects to it than this does, and we're not going to chase like that."

Okay. Good. Thank you on that. Then Jim, maybe for you alluded to it in your prepared comments, but on capital markets, you talked about how it tracks lending activity. Is the message there that capital markets revenues can grow from here in the second half of the year?

Sure. I mean, that's why we took guidance up a little bit. Both the swaps activity related to lending has been strong for us year to date. We expect it to continue to be that way. It's a smaller business for us, but FX is an area we've been focusing on. There's loan syndication fees. There's lots of things that it's market dependent, but we have strong pipelines, so if we do our job right, we should be able to deliver that growth.

Yep. Okay. All right. Thanks, guys.

Thank you.

The next question comes from Stephen Scouten with Piper Sandler. Please go ahead.

Yeah, thanks. Good morning. I'm not sure if I missed it, but do you guys have new coming on loan yields for this quarter?

Did you have just new production loan yields?

Yeah, exactly.

Is that what you're asking?

Correct.

No.

No, I don't. I don't believe we disclosed that.

Okay. Got you. On the average 531, I think, would you expect that to kind of continue to move lower from here on those kind of strategic runoff? Maybe along with that, does all the competition that you're talking about and the tightening of credit spreads maybe quicker than you would've expected, does that make you rethink any of the pace or direction of the strategic runoff moving forward?

Well, I'll try to parse this out. When we set the original guidance at the beginning of the year, we had always counted on credit spreads and CRE and C&I to tighten. They tightened a little bit faster, or not a little bit, a lot faster than we had originally expected. That's one thing. Where spreads are today and certainly where we are, our buy box, in our guidance for the remainder of the year, we're expecting that to remain relatively stable from those tightened levels that we talked about. Largely, yields will somewhat depend on the mix of the portfolio as we go through the year. We talked about our mix, a little bit less C&I, a little bit more mortgage warehouse and other things that certainly hurt loan yields earlier in the year.

We should have a little bit higher C&I mix, for example, later in the year, things like that.

I think he also asked about strategic runoff.

That resi portfolio. We expect it to keep running off. It's hard to really pinpoint every quarter how much it'll be, but overall, directionally it'll still be the same. I think we had a little more runoff this quarter than typical. I think it might have been because there was like a one-week period of a refi boom in late first quarter, which those loans probably closed in the second quarter. I'm guessing that's the reason. I don't see any refi boom going forward where the 10-year is, I think that runoff may slow down a little bit. It'll continue to be in runoff mode.

In core loans, we talked about some of the holding firm on pricing and structure. I forget the exact number, $250-ish million of lower loan balances because of some of those actions. We certainly expect to replace that volume. It's just it doesn't happen immediately.

Yeah. I would also add when you think about strategic exits, when I think about that phrase, I think more about we've probably had three of those in the course of the last 10 years. The rundown of the resi portfolio, the exit that we did from the New York rent-stabilized and rent-controlled market, and the significant rundown that we had in the office market. Those are things where we look at an entire sector or asset class and say we want to have whatever percentage less of it than we currently have now. What we're seeing today is more of an individual credit-by-credit decision, which are less predictable because we don't know necessarily what the competition is going to do on the other side. We do try to put a common sense bar against what we're doing, and we're strongly focused on continuing to expand the NIM.

You don't get there by lowering rates dramatically on your yields. We try to think about each one of those. An exit can be a deal that gets redialed, like this private credit deal I mentioned, that you just look at and say, "We're not exiting the entire sector from a strategy perspective, but this individual loan does not make sense." Those are episodic things that are a bit harder to predict when you look at a quarter or two quarters out.

Got it. One last clarifier. I know we just had the March 31 balances, I guess, from the Q, but I think HOA deposits were $2.3 and the title were around $4.1. Are the majority of those deposits contained within the NIDDA? Is the way to think about that expense line, the $13.2 million that you noted, would that correspond kind of proportionally with the growth in HOA? Is that fairly linear?

It's largely HOA. It's a little bit in title and a very small amount outside of those as well. The biggest bucket is HOA. If your question is, are HOA and title all checking? No, that is not true. There is an element of interest bearing in both of them. I would say a majority of title business is NIDDA, but not 100%, not even close. There is a fairly good amount. I don't know if you've disclosed it or not, but it's largely checking, but there's a pretty big element of interest bearing. Same thing with HOA. It's a good amount of checking, but there's a pretty large amount of interest bearing as well.

Fantastic. Really appreciate the color. Thanks for the time.

This concludes our question and answer session. I would like to turn the conference back over to Raj Singh for any closing remarks.

Yeah. I will close where I started this call, which is, a long time ago, 20 years ago, it was beaten into me that the value of a bank's franchise comes from the right side of the balance sheet, not from the left. I believe that. I've preached it. I have never had a shareholder or an analyst or anyone disagree with me on that. It is also the hardest thing to build. It's also the most lasting thing to build. We're very proud of what we have been able to achieve. Almost $10 billion of NIDDA, a record high NIDDA to total deposits. It didn't happen overnight, didn't happen even over one or two years. It took a while to do, and the momentum has not diminished at all. I expect this number to grow.

We'll give you guidance, obviously, at the end of the year for what it can be at this time next year. I would expect a similar kind of trajectory going into the next 12 to 24 months. Very happy about that. We have a company-wide call right after this to celebrate this. In the meantime we'll keep plugging away. Markets go up and down. I mean, listen, we're just a little country bank. We're no Berkshire Hathaway. Berkshire Hathaway is sitting on $350 billion of cash and not deploying it, an article I just read a couple of days ago. Like I said, we're not Warren Buffett or Berkshire, but the sentiment is the same. You have to be prudent with when you want to deploy capital and when you don't want to deploy capital.

We're doing that deal by deal, client by client, and staying laser-focused on building the right side of the balance sheet. Thank you for joining us, and if you have any other detailed questions, you know how to reach us. Otherwise, we will talk to you again in 90 days. Thanks. Bye.

The conference has now concluded. Thank you for attending today's presentation. You may now disconnect.