Nick Place
Analyst · Piper Sandler
Thanks, Joe. Turning to Slide 9. We continued to generate robust loan growth as balances increased 22% annualized in the fourth quarter and nearly 27% year-over-year. Overall, we have seen a decline in demand in recent months as fewer deals are penciling out due to higher interest rates. However, our teams are continuing to get in front of good high quality clients with good yielding loans in our core business lines. For example, there are many large names in the Twin Cities that we've been trying to bring on board for years. We were able to bring some of these clients over during the quarter as other banks pulled back. This is similar to what we did in 2008 to 2010 to develop some of the long term client relationships we still have today. So despite the funding pressures our growth is creating in the near-term, we believe it puts us in a better position for the long term. We have certainly demonstrated a comfort level with growing the loan portfolio in excess of 20%, but we are also aware that our loan to deposit ratio is close to 105% as we enter to 2023 bear the top end of our comfort range. We are taking several actions to help manage the growth of the portfolio going forward, including selling participations on new loans, being more selective on pricing and credit and requiring increased compensating deposit balances on new and renewed loans. We do expect a much slower pace of loan growth in 2023 as we look for better alignment with core deposit growth. Turning to Slide 10. Given the reduced loan demand in the market, we continue to see a slower pace for originations and advances, which totaled $313 million in the fourth quarter, down 13% year-over-year. However, this has been more than offset by the decline in payoffs and pay downs, which is contributing to the continuation of our robust loan growth. Pay offs and pay downs declined 37% from a year ago as many borrowers have interest rates below current market rates making refinancing less attractive. As I mentioned, we have also been selling participations on new originations to help manage our growth. Over the past two quarters, we have sold 116 million of participations for 17% of our total originations and advances. Our loan participation portfolio balance is now over $425 million and over $580 million including unfunded commitments. In addition to helping manage our growth, this servicing provides an added revenue benefit as well. On Slide 11, you can see we had strong fourth quarter loan growth across the various loan types led by multifamily, which continues to be a key growth driver given our expertise in the Twin Cities market and the low risk characteristics of the portfolio. We also saw good growth in the construction and development portfolio, which we expect to continue in 2023 given the upcoming construction draws on existing loans. As these projects complete their construction phase, some of the balances will migrate into other loan portfolios similar to what we saw in prior quarters. In addition to continued growth in the C&I portfolio, we are taking steps to expand our C&I function to help drive incremental growth and diversification of our loan portfolio while also creating new deposit growth channels over time. This is a long term initiative we are building out in 2023 that will take time to implement but we expect to see the benefit in future years. Turning to deposits on Slide 12. Growth has remained strong as balances increased 13% annualized during the fourth quarter and 16% year-over-year. As we've mentioned, generating sufficient core deposit growth to keep up with our loan growth became more challenging later in 2022. In addition, new deposit relationships don't always come in a linear fashion given the larger nature and sophistication of our commercial deposits, which have longer and less precise onboarding than our loan pipeline. As a result, we brought in more higher beta brokered deposits and borrowings during the fourth quarter than we have in the past. Over the course of 2023, our focus will be on funding more of our loan growth with lower beta core deposits. It is worth noting that we have -- the cumulative beta on our core interest bearing deposits has been well controlled at 31% cycle to date. Increased funding from core deposits should help our overall spreads even as betas are likely to continue trending higher. I'll now turn it over to Jeff Shellberg.