Pinnacle Financial Partners, Inc. (PNFP) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Good morning, everyone, and welcome to the Pinnacle Financial Partners First Quarter 2023 Earnings Conference Call. Hosting the call today from Pinnacle Financial Partners is Mr. Terry Turner, Chief Executive Officer; and Mr. Harold Carpenter, Chief Financial Officer. Please note, Pinnacle's earnings release and this morning's presentation are available on the Investor Relations page of their website at www.pnfp.com. Today's call is being recorded and will be available for replay on Pinnacle Financial's website for the next 90 days. [Operator Instructions] During this presentation, we may make comments which may constitute forward-looking statements. All forward-looking statements are subject to risks, uncertainties and other facts that may cause the actual results, performance or achievements of Pinnacle Financial to differ materially from any results expressed or implied by such forward-looking statements. Many of such factors are beyond Pinnacle Financial's ability to control or predict, and listeners are cautioned not to put undue reliance on such forward-looking statements. A more detailed description of these and other risks is contained in Pinnacle Financial's annual report on Form 10-K for the year ended December 31, 2022, and its subsequently filed quarterly reports. Pinnacle Financial disclaims any obligation to update or revise any forward-looking statements contained in this presentation, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise. In addition, these remarks may include certain non-GAAP financial measures as defined by SEC Regulation G. A presentation of the most directly comparable GAAP financial measures and a reconciliation of the non-GAAP measures to comparable GAAP measures will be available on Pinnacle Financial's website at www.pnfp.com. With that, I'm now going to turn the presentation over to Mr. Terry Turner, Pinnacle's President and CEO.

Thank you, operator. Good morning. As you've seen, first quarter was a very strong quarter for PNFP with outsized loan and deposit growth, even in a difficult economic environment, which I believe is linked to our client-centric approach to the market. Much has been written and spoken, I suppose, within the last month or so about whether regional banks like ours could withstand the inevitable movement of deposits up to the money center banks. So I believe we have now answered that question. We have begun every call for years with this snapshot of our quarterly performance. We choose the 4-year quarterly format with intend to showcase in the long-term reliability of our performance on the metrics that we think matter through the cycle. At the bottom of the slide, you can see that asset quality continues to be extremely strong with nonperforming assets, classified assets and net charge-offs continuing to operate well beneath the 4-year median, which represents a period of exceptional asset quality. It's honestly hard to imagine how I could get any better than that. PNFP has repeatedly been recognized by Greenwich Associates as having one of the best brands in the country. According to Greenwich, PNFP stands out in the areas of being #1 trustworthy; and #2, easy to do business with. That's an incredibly powerful position to own in these turbulent times. PNFP has the #1 Net Promoter Score in our footprint among businesses with annual revenues from $1 million to $500 million. Raving fans are always invaluable, but never more than at times like these. It's just hard to leave a bank that you love and trust. Our ability to leverage the brand to attract the best and most experienced bankers away from our larger national and regional competitors and ever-increasing numbers each of the last several years continues to contribute meaningfully to outsized growth. The primary source of the growth is market share movement as these new recruits consolidate their loan and deposit volumes to PNFP, decreasing our reliance on economic tailwinds. It looks like to me that first quarter of '23 was a dramatic demonstration of the power of a differentiated brand as evidenced by a 17% annualized loan growth, 14% annualized deposit growth, 17% year-over-year revenue growth, 30% year-over-year net interest income growth. So with that as an introduction, let me turn it over to Harold for a more in-depth review of the quarter.

Thanks, Terry. Good morning, everybody. I've got a few new slides this morning, so I'll move quickly through the usual slides to give time for the new information. We've elected to start with deposits. Reporting linked quarter growth of 13% in the first quarter was a real positive for us. Obviously, growing deposits at a reasonable price in 2023 is the key focus. We continue to build out our deposit gathering franchise around HSA, Community Housing Association, nonprofits and others, and we believe we are making headway with these and other special deposit initiatives. Our cumulative deposit beta stands at 46% through March 31. The last 2 rate hikes have seen more cost increases in relation to the earlier rate hikes. We do have some confidence that our client base appreciates the fact that we've been fairly consistent in our approach to deposit cost increases while competitors are, in some cases, just now beginning to experience a rapid increase in deposit cost. This is one of our new slides. It's about addressing many of the hot topics that have come around as a result of the Silicon Valley and Signature Bank failures. We could not be more proud of our relationship managers, our support units and how everyone answered the call when all of a sudden, we were having to defend our franchise like never before. We armed our people with timely and relevant information and they use that as well as years of relationship building to call the deposit base that was jolted by the payer of the 2 franchises as well as all of the media attention that came with the failure of these 2 very unique franchises. As uninsured deposits, the chart at the top left is our trend for uninsured and uncollateralized deposits for the last few years, going back to pre-COVID. The important trend here is the drop of 6% in the first quarter. Most of that is attributable to increased level of reciprocal deposits that we offer those depositors that request increased FDIC coverage. This is a product that we've offered for more than a decade. Our firm is focused on providing several alternatives to support deposits that may require additional support. All in, we've traditionally been about a median performer on uninsured depositors to our peer group. Hand in hand with our uninsured deposit position is our liquidity position. We currently calculate that we have enough liquidity available to us to provide about 155% coverage of our $18.8 billion or approximately $12 billion in uninsured deposits. There is also much interest given the FDIC insurance discussion about deposit account sizes. We were hovering around $80,000 per deposit account for the last 2 years or so. The table embedded in the chart breaks out commercial versus consumer sizes and trends below. During COVID, commercial balances increased meaningfully likely due to PPP, clients retaining more dollars to counter perceive higher risks going forward as well as building cash balances due to a fairly strong economic environment at least for our client base. As to deposit mix shift in the bottom right chart, we are seeing depositors move more noninterest-bearing and lower-yielding interest accounts into higher interest rate products since the second quarter of last year. We're at around 25% noninterest-bearing to total deposits. Our financial plan contemplates further decreases through the rest of 2023, but no one really knows where it will end up. We likely will be into the pre-COVID levels below 20%, as noted on the chart before year-end. Right after the bank failures in mid-March, we began tracking our 200 largest uninsured depositors to determine how they manage their deposit balances going back to just prior to the Silicon Valley failure, call it March 10 through the end of last week. Those 200 deposits comprise about $3.9 billion in deposits as of March 10, with the smallest deposit account being around $9 million. We began contacting relationship managers to find out what changes were happening during this critical time. We identified transactions of about $45 million that went to brokerage account or a large cap bank under what appeared to be applied to safety and something that was not anticipated prior to March 10. As of the end of last week, those same deposits had about $3.9 billion in deposits, which was up slightly from the $3.9 billion that was there at March 10. Lastly, we've been able to specifically identify about $200 million in inbound deposits from Silicon Valley and Signature Bank. Obviously, those were new accounts that were not in the top 200 as of March 10. Given our strong first quarter results on deposits, we believe our deposit base remains very resilient and our deposit growth guidance we offered last quarter remains intact at high single to low double-digit growth for the year. The first quarter was another strong loan growth quarter for us. We are lowering our loan guidance for this year slightly to low to mid-teens growth from mid-teens growth. As we noted in the release last night, we tightened the credit box for construction and certain CRE categories plus adding the incremental weakening of the macro environment, we are often put a lower loan growth guidance this trip. We're also reporting a 6% average yield for the quarter and anticipate other increases as we're expecting more announced rate increases and fixed rate loans are coming up for renewal with higher price targets, so we should see fixed rates expand as well. We're again dissecting our net loan growth based on categories noted on the slide to help everyone better understand the source of our growth. The chart is compared all of 2022 to the first quarter of 2023. As many of you know, our hiring model requires significant experience greater than 10 years in the market to come to work here. Just to reiterate, substantially all of this loan growth is not to new borrowers showing up at Pinnacle Bank with a new idea to pitch the borrowers that have extended relationships with our relationship managers over in many cases, decades of working with each other. This is just not true for Charlotte, Nashville, Charleston and other legacy markets, but that fact applies to Atlanta, D.C. and our special lending units as well. As the top left chart reflects, our GAAP NIM decreased 20 basis points more than we anticipated at the start of the quarter. Out of the bonus of cost, we added approximately $1.65 billion in cash to our balance sheet as a result of the recent bank failures. Thinking back, we built liquidity in a similar way at the inception of COVID, but this trip, we've tapered the absolute size of the liquidity build as well as the maturity of the resulting Federal Home Loan bank balances, which come with an average life of 2 years and a weighted average rate of about 4.5%. With the additional liquidity we have in our balance sheet, our planning assumption that our NIM will likely be down for the remainder of the year by, call it, 10 basis points. That said, our growth model should provide for increases in net interest income. As we enter 2023, we believe net interest income guidance of the mid-teens percentage growth for 2023 over 2022 is reasonable at this time. As to credit, we're again presenting our traditional credit metrics, Pinnacle's loan portfolio continues to perform very well. As noted earlier, we continue to have a very limited appetite for new construction. We adjusted the CRE appetite chart on the bottom right somewhat so that only a limited number of CRE types are now being considered by our credit officer. Additionally, during the quarter, our credit officers notify our lending units that any new CRE loans that are prevalent residing on a note of bank's balance sheet will be more difficult to move to PNFP for the time being. In summary, our outlook for our loan portfolio from a credit perspective remains strong. So if negative trends begin to develop, we believe we remain advantaged. My second new slide for today is about credit. The top left chart deals with trends in construction originations. We began reducing our appetite for construction last summer, which is consistent with the chart. Additionally, the chart would also indicate that our appetite is largely concentrated in warehouse, multifamily and some residential. Secondly, much discussion about renewals of CRE fixed rate loans, which is the objective of the chart on the top right. Over the next several quarters, we will have approximately $100 million in fixed rate renewals, and the average rate on these loans is currently around 4.5% to 5%. Our yield target at renewal will be in the 6.5% plus range. Two comments regarding this chart. The absolute size of the fixed rate volumes coming up for renewal appears very manageable, and that with property rental increases over the last 3 to 5 years and occupancy levels being stable, we have great confidence that our borrowers will continue to be able to afford the incremental interest expense. Lots of noise around office CRE right now and given what we hear about some markets rightfully so. The bottom left shows about 92% of our office portfolio is in our markets. The chart also details where we are not looking. We like our markets and our borrowers. That said, our appetite for any new office is like zero. The table on the bottom right details the granularity of the portfolio as well as select credit metrics. Our credit officers feel very strongly about the quality of our office portfolio. That said, they are aware of the macro case and are on point with these borrowers and lending. Now on the fees. And as always, I'll speak to BHG in a few minutes. Excluding BHG, fee revenues were up more than $8.5 million. All that said, we're pleased with the effort of our fee generating units as we see -- as we saw somewhat of a rebound from mortgage, a nice increase in service fees and wealth management. We also have focused on increasing swap fees this year given recent hires. So far, so good. We continue to anticipate that fee revenues, excluding BHG and our other equity investments will come in at around the high single to low teens growth rate for '23 over 2022. Linked quarter expenses were up primarily due to increased headcount, merit raises at the beginning of January at a target of around 6%, beginning of calendar year adjustments for payroll taxes and 401 (k)plan match expenses, increased FDIC insurance assessments and timing differences related to credit and franchise taxes posted in the prior quarter. Additionally, we have taken a hard look at our anticipated results for the year in comparison to our financial plan for 2023. And offsetting the increased linked quarter expenses, we are reducing our anticipated incentive payouts to approximately 70% of target awards in the first quarter. The reduced incentive accrual speaks to the variable cost nature of our expense base. Along with deferring projects are slowing our hiring, we feel like we have enough levers to throttle back on expenses should we need to. Overall, we have a bold plan for this year and are fully energized to seize the opportunities we have in front of us. That said, we have modified our growth plans for this year and incorporated that into our updated outlook. As it stands, we have lowered our expense guidance and feel like our expense base should result in low to mid-teens growth for '23 over 2022. As the capital tangible book value per common share increased to $46.75 at quarter, end up 18% linked quarter annualized from the last quarter. Our capital ratios remain above well capitalized. We like our tangible common equity ratio, which stands at 8.3%. We believe the actions we've taken to preserve tangible book value and our tangible capital ratio have served us well and have no plans currently to alter up our Tier 1 capital stack via any sort of common or preferred offering. A couple of new things related to this slide. The chart at the bottom of the slide tracks select capital ratios as of the end of December compared to peers given the impact of losses associated with the HTM and AOCI portfolios. We are very pleased with results given our capital peers to be able to withstand any sort of changes to the capital rules that may be coming our way from either the standard setters or the regulators. Now a few comments about BHG before we look to outlook for the rest of the year. As the slide indicates, BHG had another great quarter in originations, even though originations did decrease from the prior quarter with BHG's implementation of a tighter credit mark. So fewer of the lower credit score loans were funded in the first quarter. BHG believes last year's volumes, production year '22 would have been reduced by 18% had the same credit standards been in place for all of last year versus credit standards that are in place now in 2023. All of that is related to the significant reduction in the lower tranche approvals, which now are at 0% approval rates. Spreads did expand in the first quarter from the fourth quarter for loans sold in the bank network. First quarter spreads were 9.4% compared to 8.9% in the prior quarter. Thus, coupled with a larger allocation to the auction platform this quarter, gain on sale revenue was up 12.7% in the first quarter compared to the fourth. So that math works. The accrual for loan substitutions and prepayments increased 5.81% as a more precautionary posture by BHG management has been in effect for the last few quarters. BHG's accrual for loan substitutions and prepayments for its sold loan portfolio increased from $314 million to $350 million, call it, a $36 million increase. As the blue bars in the bottom right chart show, recourse losses were stable at 4%, basically consistent with last year. Just a new slide focused on BHG's on-balance sheet lending strategy. As you recall, the gain-on-sale program is sourced through BHG's bank network as depicted on the previous slides. On balance sheet strategy is a combination of several funding sources, including securitizations, negotiation for blocks of loans to individual banks and other funders, et cetera. The top left chart shows the loans BHG holds for investment versus held for sale to the Community Banks and thus off-balance sheet, along with the associated allowance for loan losses. Given the macro environment, as we mentioned -- and as we mentioned last quarter, BHG increased its on-balance sheet reserve for loan losses to $178 million or 5.19% of its on-balance sheet loans from 4.59% last quarter or about a $31 million increase. Of course, CECL is still on the radar for adoption on October 1. We continue to anticipate the estimated CECL reserve to be in the 8% to 9% range. The bottom left chart shows loan yields for the last several quarters, along with the average funding cost. The yields consider average loan balances and include both HFI and HFS, in the denominator. The borrowing rates would include both borrowings collateralized by loans as well as the firm's working lines of credit. With the securitization completed in March, the borrowing rates increased to 5.6%, while the loan yields were at 15.4%. The spreads were at around 9.8%, which is pretty strong in this environment. As usual, the BHG balance sheet and P&L is included in the supplemental information. The bottom right chart reflects net charge-offs. And as you can see, first quarter shows increased charge-offs at around 4.4%. Lastly, as mentioned, BHG did successfully completed seventh securitization during the week right after the Silicon Valley and Signature Bank failures. To get that accomplished and a repo rate was indeed a great success for BHG and reflects the significant appetite for their credit. As mentioned earlier, BHG tightened its credit box, particularly with respect to lower charges of its borrowing base. This will have an impact on both production and spreads going forward. BHG refreshes its credit score monthly, always looking for indications of weakness in its borrowing base. Credit scores were up slightly from the previous quarter, so their borrowers have remained resilient during the cycle thus far. In comparison to other consumer lenders, we believe BHG borrowers remain well compensated with average borrower earnings being around $293,000 annually. Looking forward, some key points I'd like to reemphasize and several we've been talking about for the last 3 to 4 quarters. First BHG management has responded to the macro environment in a very real way. BHG is and will be increasing reserves based on macroeconomic data at least over the next few quarters. Secondly, BHG has been modifying their credit models towards originating less risky assets. Production volumes are strong, and we believe they have great momentum to maintain production levels equal to those in 2022 or 2023. BHG's new funding alternatives will broaden their already strong liquidity platform, which we believe is unmatched by their figures. Currently, BHG has $1.4 billion in available liquidity to fund this franchise with more interested inbound calls coming. Lastly, BHG took steps to limit its headcount with job eliminations and eliminating most open positions as well as other expense reductions. For this quarter, we are reducing our outlook for BHG from basically flat earnings growth this year to somewhere around $180 million to $210 million for the year. We continue to have great confidence in our partners at Bankers Healthcare Group to deliver strong results over the long term. Quickly, again, the useful slide detailing our current financial outlook for 2023. In the interest of time, I won't go through all of these again. Suffice to say, there's a lot of macro issues working around right now. We have put forth a business case on what we think the Fed will do on rates, who knows what is going to happen. We believe a recession is likely how deep or severe we or anyone else really knows. What we do know is that our business model is resilient, relationship-based, in environments like we have today, that matters a lot. Our management team is experienced, and we have tackled economic downturns before. We have great confidence that whatever curve balls get thrown at us, we can handle them and perform in a very outsized way. And with that, I will turn it back over to Terry.

Thank you, Harold. I suppose it's always true, but it seems to me that I seem to notice it more in difficult economic environments that investors rightly look for the critical measure that unlocks significant value in the current environment. It might be a deposit cost beta. It might be the average deposit account size, might even be the excess FDIC -- deposits in excess FDIC coverage limits. And any -- and all of that is informative to be sure. But at Pinnacle, we will simply continue to rely on what we always have, and that's a differentiated brand. It's evidenced by our unusual ability to turn clients into raving fans. In our most recent data from Greenwich, we continue to have the highest Net Promoter Score in our markets among businesses with sales from $1 million to $500 million. I'm confident that, that has and should continue to enable us to retain and grow deposits even in a difficult economic environment. Fortune Magazine just named us as the 24th Best Workplace in America. And so we continue to be a magnet for talent. We attracted another 26 revenue producers during the first quarter of '23. And we expect to be the employer of choice for those client-focused bankers who are continually frustrated by their inability to get their clients taken care of at many of our larger competitors. I think that most people understand -- that understand our company, they understand the linkage between the pace of our hiring and the pace of our loan growth is simply a matter of our associates consolidating their books from where they were to us. And because of their intimacy with the credits, as Harold alluded to earlier, the asset quality continues to be strong for those credits that are being moved. Similarly, we leverage our brand and hiring model along with a trained focus on execution to attract outsized core funding. We fully expect the various specialty deposit initiatives that we've developed over the last several years, like HSAs, like HOAs and property managers like captive insurance companies just as examples, to continue to support outsized deposit growth. Our capital levels compared to peers, even after marking for held to maturity in AOCI losses are very strong in relation to those peers. And honestly, I think that, that's tied to an experienced management team that's largely been at the helm for 23 years through all the ups and downs. It was tempting for us just as it was tempted for others to deploy excess liquidity in the bond book, but we just can't bring ourselves to load up on bonds when rates were at or near all-time lows. In our first decade, we endured the dot-com bubble and 9/11 and still produced the second highest total shareholder return of all the publicly traded banks in the United States. Our second decade was in the aftermath of the Great Recession and included the pandemic again in the second decade, we produced second highest total shareholder return of all the publicly traded banks in the United States. And I obviously don't know what the future holds, but I believe in that our differentiated brand and our intense focus on disciplined execution is likely to stand us in good stead in the third decade as well. So operator, we'll stop there and take questions.

[Operator Instructions] Your first question is coming from Steven Alexopoulos from JPMorgan.

I want to start first on the comment that you retained substantially all of your clients during this period. I'm curious, after the news of Silicon Valley Bank and Signature failing broke take us behind the scenes, what were the conversations with your large depositors? Were they panic? Did you have to convince them to stay? Do they see Pinnacle as being very different than those banks? Please provide some color with that.

Yes, Steve, that's a great question. I think our normal -- set aside the crisis, our normal operating mechanism here is that every Monday morning, we are in touch with our entire sales force. And so specifically, what I'm saying there is Rob McCabe runs a meeting for Tennessee, Alabama and Kentucky, Rick Callicutt runs a meeting for North and South Carolina and Virginia and Rob Garcia runs the meeting for Atlanta. And so that's our normal mechanism to be in front of the sales force, and we talk to them about whatever the important initiatives are, whatever the priorities are. We give them other sales information. We train relative to product knowledge, all those kinds of things. So on that Monday, following the Silicon and Signature failures, we arm them with a variety of handouts, 1 of which basically took key metrics from Silicon, Signature and Pinnacle and outline things like what's the percentage of assets allocated to the securities book, what's the held to maturity loss, what's the percentage of uninsured deposits, and a series of those important measures that were intended to demonstrate the soundness of our balance sheet and P&L versus those highlight the differences between our deposit book and theirs and so forth. And so in addition to arming them with that kind of information, they were also armed with sort of refreshers on FDIC coverage and what could be done in the ordinary course, account styling, all those kinds of things to maximize FDIC coverage. And then also things like the reciprocal deposit arrangements that Harold alluded to in his comments. And so anyway, we armed them, we encourage them to be proactive, to be in touch with large depositors and so forth. I think the -- I don't think they talked to very many people that had zero concern. I don't think they talked to very many people that were extremely panicked, but clearly, there was concern. But as you know, information is a powerful thing. And so, I think we were successful in sort of allaying concerns that people might have and highlight the difference between our franchise and the 2 failed banks. Am I hitting what you're looking for?

Yes. That's helpful, actually. So it sounds like you gave your frontline staff the information they need to go out to your clients. It doesn't sound like there was a panic from your clients to move to larger banks or money market bonds or something like that. And Harold gave the number that of your largest clients you brought, it sounds like some deposits back. So if things now stabilized, Terry, is that how will you describe it?

I would -- I think -- I had a basketball coach who always said, Turner, we don't hand out awards at half time. I don't think the contest is necessarily over, but it does feel stable to me. It's less a topic of conversation. I think if we are able to get through without further high-profile bank failures and so forth, my belief is it will stabilize.

Okay. That's helpful. And I had a question on the loan side. So you guys dialed down the loan growth expectations for this year. You're known for going against the grain. I'm curious, are you -- what are you seeing from peers? Are they tightening the credit box here, too? And why is this not an opportunity for you guys to use this as an opportunity to take customers and share? Or is the environment just so uncertain that it's time for you guys to be more cautious, too?

Steve, that's a great question. I think in terms of credit tightening, I would say it's mixed out there. I do think most people probably are leaning toward a more conservative stance as it relates to credit. I don't think that's universal, but I do -- I do think you would find it in large measure out there. I think in our case, I appreciate the question because I think as it relates to the approach to the C&I segment, including owner-occupied real estate, those doors are wide open. We haven't tightened there. I think most of the tightening would center in the commercial real estate categories, both construction and mortgage product. And so I think that's really where the slowing is. So to your question about isn't this the time to take share, I believe it is the time to take share, and I believe we will take share, but that is -- would be concentrated in the C&I segment with a particular focus on small businesses and middle-market companies.

Okay. That's helpful. And if I could ask you 1 last one. I'm curious, big picture -- and actually, I'd love to hear from both of you. So as you guys watch what happened at Silicon Valley Bank, who basically lost or was in the process of losing 85% of their deposits in 2 days, right? It illustrated the speed at which deposits can now leave the system. When you look at that, how does that change the way you think about risk, liquidity positioning. I'm just curious, what are your key lessons that you learned from that? And how do you change the way you run the bank now because of it.

Yes, Steve, we're loving that question for sure. I think -- bankers, we tend to focus on the left side of the balance sheet. I think we've already focused back on the right side of balance sheet. Our sales force -- construction to the sales force for years was around deposit gathering. We're now back at that and making sure that our deposit portfolio is as diverse as granular as our loan portfolio that we believe it is. And so, I think it's -- I think it's gotten a lot of our relationship managers, the people who interact with depositors on a daily basis back in the game with respect to how critical this deposit book is. As to liquidity, I think, we're likely to run elevated liquidity at least for the next several quarters. As you might expect, we've had several conversations with regulators. They're all routine in nature, but they're interested in what kind of things we may be looking at differently. So with that, I'll stop and let Terry kind of give you some comments. But at the end of the day, what I believe this bank is getting reenergized around is deposit gathering and if history proves what's going to happen in the future, I think we'll be very successful in some of these new initiatives and how our people approach their client base.

Yes, Steve, I think what Harold said is true. I think there'll be an increased emphasis on diversification within the deposit book. I assume it is the gains for you, for me, the principal risk as it related to deposit granularity had to do with the balances in excess of FDIC coverage limits. It sort of doesn't matter what other concentrations might underlie that, just the fact that it was over the FDIC limit is what created that flight safety. And so again, I think, you'll see for us sort of increased emphasis on deposit granularity and ability to put our clients in a position where they feel safe and secure. I'll switch gears. I will make 2 points. Number one, I do mean what I said in our original presentation. I think the power of having raving fans is incredible. And again, companies have failed to have good fans, too, but they did not have Net Promoter Scores like we do in that commercial segment. And I think that -- as I said, it's very hard to leave a bank that you love and trust. And so we'll continue to pound away on that. I know it's lost on a lot of people who have a preference for financial analysis. But at the core, I do think that was the principal mechanism that enabled us to keep our clients and keep them calm and so forth. Along those lines, one last thing different than some of the financial things that Harold mentioned, I think you'll see an increased emphasis on our crisis communication plans. Again, I think we're a great internal communicators. I think we did extremely well following those bank failures. But I do think that we'll try to enhance crisis communication mechanisms because to your point man things move fast and you better have an ability to get your people armed with what they need when that comes up. And so I think we'll do more work around crisis communications.

Your next question is coming from Jared Shaw from Wells Fargo Securities.

Maybe just shifting a little to the BHG side and good color there. I guess when you look at the BHG charge-off descriptions. What's the difference? Or why is the on-balance sheet charge-off level so much higher than the losses on the sold loans?

Yes. I don't really have a good answer for you there. It's a great question. They do not or have not -- they don't go through any kind of special process to say we're going to keep these loans versus sell these loans. There's -- it's more of a kind of a haphazard kind of process they go through to figure out which bucket the loan goes into. I would imagine that some of the newer credits, call it, the 2021 and 2022 [ vintages ] may be more prevalent on the on-balance sheet side than some of the loans that have been aged longer with the gain on sale platform could have something to do with.

Okay. Okay. And then if we look at that 18% pullback that you're referencing, compared to last year's origination. Is that -- should we be thinking about that being higher risk over the next 18 months or so, just given the lower credit standards compared to what you're putting on now?

Well, I think they believe they're going to have, call it, elevated charge-offs from those E&F tranches probably through the next couple of quarters when they believe that most of them will have seasoned enough, and I think they think anywhere from 24 to 36 months is the appropriate seasoning for those particular credits that the proverbial credit losses will get through the snake. So that's what they believe anyway.

Okay. And then just a final one on BHG. When you look at that Slide 22 and look at the expectation for pretax earnings, does that include the impact of CECL in October? Or would that be in addition to that or separate from that through equity?

Well, that would include the P&L impact of CECL for the last 3 months of the year, for sure.

Your next question is coming from Catherine Mealor from KBW.

One follow-up on BHG was -- it seems that throughout the quarter, there was still a lot of appetite for banks on the auction platform for to buy BHG's paper. Have you seen any change in that in the back half of the quarter or maybe in April so far? And what is the risk that in an environment where you're seeing banks reduce loan demand across the board that they become less inclined to buy BHG paper.

Yes, Catherine. BHG, their management was concerned about that in the earlier part of the quarter. But every day, they opened up the auction platform, the banks came. And so that's true through today. They don't have any reason to believe right now that they won't see kind of a similar placement number in the second quarter. As I think that here for the rest of the year, they ought to have a fairly consistent growth curve here for the remaining 3 quarters of this year, which they'll only be able to achieve with the gain on sale auction platform. So I think they've got great confidence that the banks will continue to show up here over the next several quarters.

Catherine, I might just comment quickly in simple terms. First quarter was a record quarter for BHG in terms of placements. And March was the highest month in the quarter in terms of placements. So it exceeded February on the heels of the bank failures and so forth. So again, that's a pretty good testament. As Harold said here in the early part of April, it appears to be functioning exactly as it always has.

Great. That's really encouraging. And then maybe switching over to credit. Just -- I saw your outlook that calls for the ACL to be flat in the second quarter over the third. And your credit just remains so strong for you. Just curious what it takes from a macro perspective or what you're looking at maybe -- at your borrowers that could -- maybe if your loss potential doesn't change dramatically, but just from a macro perspective, what might make you decide you need to build that reserve a little bit more than what you've got. And I'm particularly curious about the CRE reserve, which is 66 basis points, feels low, but I know that includes a lot of different type of CRE projects in there. So just kind of curious what your -- how you think about -- how comfortable you are with that ACL and the outlook for that over time?

Yes, sure. Well, we're going to -- we're obviously going to let the credit models around unemployment and GDP drive kind of the -- what may be the change they just -- for what the reserve could do over the next several quarters. We do have the ability to overlay, to add qualitative assessments in there, and we have done that. If we were to follow just the strict nature of the quantitative reserve, it would be meaningfully lower. So we are, call it, adding an incremental reserves as a result of the environment and kind of the uncertainty around it. But as long as -- our conversations with our credit officers continue to reflect a pretty benign credit environment. We think where we are is pretty good. So -- we don't anticipate a big uptick in the reserve here in the second quarter, who knows what's going to happen in the third or fourth. But as it sits today, our credits are performing like we would expect them to do.

Your next question is coming from Casey Haire from Jefferies.

I want to follow up on the NIM forecast. Just to clarify that Harold, I think you said down 10 bps. So we end the year at [ 330 ] and then what kind of Fed forecast are you guys contemplating? In the release, you guys talk about potential Fed cuts or the slide deck rather.

Yes. We're, I think, 5.25% by the end of June and then getting down maybe 1 or 2 cuts in the last half of the year, which are pretty inconsequential to our forecast. But that would be where we -- what we think our case is for what the Fed could do, who knows what they're going to do. But as it sits right now, not really sure that's going to have a significant impact on our -- call it our NIM or noninterest income once we get past, call it, August or September. Did that get to your question, okay, Casey?

Yes. No, that's great, Harold. And so they down 10 bps, so by 4Q, you expect to run around [ 330? ]

Yes, that's where our planning assumption is -- in that kind of a modest decrease in NIM.

Okay. Great. And what kind of deposit beta are you -- like where do we go from the 46%?

Well, we think our deposit -- well, if you assume that the rate-up environment is going to end by the end of June, we're probably closer to 48% to 50%.

Got you. Okay. And then just -- one more follow-up on BHG. So if I take the midpoint of the guide, it looks like in the remaining quarters, you guys are expecting a little bit of an uptick from the $19 million run rate in the first quarter. And just looking at the slide, just what's driving that improvement? Is it the cost measures because it feels like you guys are building more reserves and the funding costs are pressuring. Just some color on what's driving that, that improvement?

I think your first -- Casey, I think your first assertion is right. They do believe they're going to see upticks here for the rest of the year. That could be because I think the reserve build in the first quarter was more significant than they think what it's going to be in the next few quarters. So it could be partially that. But right now, their production seems to be hanging in there. They still believe they're going to be near what the production levels were last year. So then they'll have the kind of the ability and the decision to send loans to the auction platform or keep them on balance sheet. They've got some obligations here in the second quarter to fund more on balance sheet with some of the, call it, private equity funding sources that they think they're going to be able -- that they will do and still be able to send loans to the auction platform to kind of get their bottom line number moving on. There's a lot of worries Casey, Did I get through it okay?

Yes, yes. No, that's great. Last one for me, just on the expense side of things. In the release, you guys mentioned potentially pursuing cost measures given a tough revenue outlook. Just what would prompt you guys to explore that further? And is there like a profitability or efficiency ratio in mind that you guys would look to protect?

Yes. I don't think we have any kind of hard goals on efficiency ratios. But what we want to make sure everybody understands is that we do have a meaningful variable cost component in our plan, and a lot of that evolves around our incentive accruals and nobody wants to see us hit that. But in the past, we have always -- when we've had more difficult, call it, earnings growth years to go at that incentive accrual and use it to help insulate our results. We've also got the ability to back off on hiring if we need to do that. We've got several projects that are slated for the rest of the year. Now the projects probably won't result in a significant kind of a cost savings measure for 2023, but they could for next year. So we've got several options that we could go into if we needed to help protect what we believe is a reasonable result for this year.

Your next question is coming from Brandon King from Truist Securities.

So I understand the decision -- so I understand the decision to have a more conservative liquidity position going forward. But I wanted to know what you would need to see for that to change and to feel more comfortable deploying or paying down some borrowings.

Yes. I think it -- we'll see some of these Federal Loan Bank borrowings and they've got an average life of 2 years, and a lot of them have lives of, call it, 1 to 6 months. Right now, we don't intend to renew those. So we'll let our own balance sheet cash probably drift down some. When you look at our own balance sheet cash compared to peers, we're probably a little lighter than say some of our peers. So we'll probably be looking at more of a median performer on that. So that could have -- that could find its way to our -- call it our second quarter or third quarter liquidity position.

Okay. And I also wanted to get more color on the fixed rate loan repricing and wanted to get a sense of what those conversations are with customers and how are they navigating this environment? And it seems like some customers may be preferring more variable rate loans nowadays. And I noticed that your swap fee income has increased, so just some color on that and kind of what that means potentially for the balance sheet as far as variable rate loans versus fixed rate loans and the asset sensitivity of the balance sheet going forward?

Yes. I don't think we'll see a dramatic change in the composition of our balance sheet as far as the allocation of fixed rate credit. With the rate up cycle, we've had a lot more requests for fixed rate lending. Hopefully, well, not hopefully, but we've counted that with an active swap program. Because we believe there comes a point where you've just got to put a barrier around how much fixed rate lending product you want to allocate to the balance sheet. And so we're about try to create more of a variable rate loan portfolio currently. I'll stop there, Brandon, and see if I got to your question.

Yes. Yes. [ And kind of what I'm going to get is ] that we could get potentially [ fare very closely to ] this year and next year. So just wanted to get a sense of how you plan on kind of protecting the net interest margin in that environment?

Yes, we've got some floors that we've entered into over the last several months that will help protect it. But I think going back to the last down rate cycle, we were pretty aggressive on reducing deposit rates. I think that makes sense in light of how aggressive we've been on raising deposit rates. So we will lean into our relationships and make sure that whatever pricing we provide depositors is fair and reasonable, but we won't be hesitant to reduce deposit rates when we need to.

Your next question is coming from Michael Rose from Raymond James.

Just a few -- most of my questions have been asked and answered. Just a few more. Harold, if you could just give some color on the non-BHG fee guide and kind of what you would expect kind of by business unit. Obviously, the growth guide is pretty solid. So I just wanted to get some color on the components.

Yes. I think at the end of the day, Michael, that's a great question. But at the end of the day, it has to do with some hiring we've done over the last, call it, 2, 3 quarters and our expectations that those revenue producers are going to show up, primarily in wealth management and capital markets and capital markets, we include the swap programs, among others. So we expect them to show up with a nice lift in our revenues for 2023. Mortgage last year was down pretty significantly. We like our markets. We like the pipelines that they're looking at currently. And so we expect mortgage to be much more impactful in 2023 -- positively impactful in 2023 than what happened in 2022. So just off the cuff, I'd say those are the, call it the, 3 or 4 areas that we're expecting big things from.

Great. And then maybe just moving back to deposits. I appreciate the color on the different initiatives. Can you just kind of stratify how much that kind of contributed to this quarter's growth and what we should expect from contribution point of view for the various initiatives laid out as we kind of move through the back half of the year? Just trying to size the impact.

Yes. I want to say the specialty initiatives have grown, and I saw schedule the other day on that of about $400 million in deposits since -- call it, end of last year or the fourth quarter of last year.

Okay. Helpful. And then maybe just one final one for me. Just going back to an earlier question around you guys being opportunistic. I mean your efficiency ratio is in the low 50s. Pretty good profitability here, even despite some BHG kind of headwinds. I mean why not ramp up the hiring efforts? I would think that kind of across the industries loan growth slows, there's going to be a lot of kind of idle lenders sitting around, and you guys have built out some markets opportunistically over the years and most recently, D.C. Terry, if you can just give us kind of your holistic thoughts and I know you've talked about some other markets in the past. I don't want to put the cart before the horse. But anything kind of move more into focus just given what's going on industry-wide?

Yes. Thanks for the question, Michael. I think in the case of hiring, I think we are moving forward at a pretty decent pace there. As I mentioned, I think, 26 revenue producers in the first quarter, that gets you north of 100 revenue producers hired for the year. I think last year was a record at something near 140, but north of 100 would be one of our higher years for revenue producing higher. So I think you can see that we're intending to continue the share play of hiring great people, having them moving the books of business to us. I think as it relates to market extensions, what we've said really is we want to be in all large high-growth urban markets in the southeast. And so the principal voids, I think, for us are primarily in Florida and particularly the markets like Tampa, Orlando and Jacksonville would be particularly attractive to us. And so the catalyst to go there is just really about the availability of people. When I say that, I'm not speaking of the availability to hire some revenue producers. That's easy. But what we need before we go is to believe we can hire somebody who can hire a lot of people across multiple disciplines, including the wealth management businesses and so forth. And so I think you're on the right track. I think the likelihood that some of those people are frustrated and want to have a different opportunity is high if we find those people, we would go, and I think you've heard me say it before, Michael, that I'd go this afternoon if I had them, I'll go next week or next year or whatever, we believe we're going to produce dramatic growth without doing it. But if we believe we've got an opportunity to go to 1 of those large high-growth markets in the Southeast, we'll definitely try to seize it.

Your next question is coming from Stephen Scouten from Piper Sandler.

Appreciate it. Do you guys have any data on kind of what you're seeing currently on the marginal cost of deposits? I'm not sure if I missed any commentary there, but in terms of new add-on CDs, other new pricing as of...

Yes. Well, our average deposit costs were up, call it, 63 basis points. I think our incremental accounts are coming in, call it, in the mid-3s, somewhere like that for, call it, negotiated rates.

Okay. Got it. And on the BHG average income you guys give, I know I haven't looked at how far back you've given that. I know it's $293,000, I think that's what it was last quarter. Has that migrated significantly over time to your knowledge? Or has that always kind of been in that range as they've been originating this portfolio?

Stephen, I can't recite the numbers, but I don't think it's a significant migration. It obviously moves some, but I don't think it's -- I don't think it's had a meaningful movement in it. It's always been a high disposable income segment that they [ loan to ].

Yes, make sense. And then just last thing for me, kind of -- a lot of color you guys gave on the office portfolio. I appreciate that. Do you have data, I'm not sure if I missed it on the -- like segmentation between Class A, B, C?

Yes. I don't have it with me, but substantially all of our office would be A and into B. Most of it is suburban, although we've got -- some of the larger projects are more, call it, near city center kind of projects.

Got it. Okay. Perfect. Well, everything else to add was asked and answered.

Your next question is coming from Brett Rabatin from Hovde Group.

Just 2 quick ones. First, on the expense guidance. As you guys approach $50 billion, is there any cushion that you're putting in there related to approaching that number? Have you had any conversations around what might be entailed with potential changes and regulatory oversight for that number?

Yes. Brett, that's a great question. No, we've not, call it, been investing in areas to accomplish a $50 billion kind of regulatory threshold -- what we have been doing is traditionally, the regulators will always -- even though $50 billion might be a bright line in some respects. And right now, we don't know of any changes at that level. But if history proves itself, again, they will begin coaching us immediately. And we'll have, call it, whatever year -- whatever time period, call it, 2, 3 years to kind of get prepared so that when we get the start market, $50 billion, we're in good shape. But today, as far as our stress testing, our crisis management, we feel like we're in great shape with respect to our, call it, regulatory compliance.

Okay. Helpful. And then I joined late, so you may have talked about this, but on the wealth management side, I know you've hired some productive or bigger teams on that platform here in the recent quarter or 2. Have those teams moved over the bulk of their relationships? Or is that still a process that could lead to higher income related to that particular line?

That would still be a meaningful part of the income growth that we would anticipate -- the length of time for a lot of the wealth managers, particularly talk about the brokers and trust administrators, I think, in the case of the brokers is generally a shorter cycle than, say, a commercial relationship manager, which would take about 4 years to consolidate their book. It's a little bit shorter for the brokers. Probably similar for the trust administrators. But yes, we still have hired a bunch of people who are still in early stages of consolidating their clients from where they were to us.

Okay. So Terry, that number in terms of the fee income related to that, that could continue to have sizable increases in this next few quarters, you think, based on the recent hires.

I do.

Your next question is coming from Brody Preston from UBS.

I do just have a couple of questions. Harold, one of them was a clarification on the BHG financials. Could you clarify for me if the provisioning that BHG does every quarter? Is that just related to the on-balance sheet loans that they have? Or is that related to any like first loss kind of position that they have from the loans that they sell as well?

No, that's all related to the loans that are on their balance sheet.

Okay. I asked just because when you kind of back into -- if you use the ALLL disclosure and the provision disclosure, you can kind of back into the charge-offs, and the charge-offs in the last couple of quarters at least from an annualized rate perspective, we're kind of in the mid-teens levels. And over the last 4 quarters, they've averaged about 12.5%. And so one of the 2-part question on that is what's kind of causing the elevated charge-off rate in a relatively strong economic environment? And secondly, if 12.5% is the average charge-off rate over the last 4 quarters, why is an 8% to 9% kind of reserve ratio makes sense just given how the CECL accounting typically works.

Yes, I don't know where -- I don't compute the 12% but there are elevated charge-offs for those E&F tranches from '20 and '21 that are coming forth this year. That's why they believe that over the next couple of quarters, we should see some relief from those charge-offs.

Your next question is coming from Brian Martin from Janney.

Just 2 things for me. Harold, just to clarify, your outlook or just kind of margin conversation, the 10 basis points, does that include the reduction? Or kind of how are you thinking about that -- the liquidity you put on? I mean the timing -- does that contemplate your full reduction in that liquidity? Or I know you said you're going to keep it on for a bit. So just trying to understand that.

Yes. As far as where we are today, we think about half of that will be gone by the end of the year.

Okay. Half will be gone. So half is in this -- kind of the guide this year and then there's more to come next year. And then just kind of the end of period, your kind of March margin inclusive of that liquidity. Can you give a little bit of thought on where you ended March versus the quarter on the margin?

The March margin was around, I think, 348 or something like that.

Okay. So a little bit below it. Okay. And then just -- I think you talked about -- maybe if I heard it right, the continued migration on the deposit side, maybe being -- the noninterest-bearing maybe being below 20% by the end of the year. Just kind of in that context, just the specialty deposits that the initiatives you guys have in place; A, is that 20% what you said or just is that accurate? Just so I heard it right? And then just as far as how much contribution you expect in '23 from these specialty initiatives relative to kind of -- if you're looking at 10% deposit growth, how much of the specialty -- the new initiatives kind of contribute to that 10% this year?

Yes. I think the target that we've handed the -- call it, the leadership around those deposits -- around those specialty initiatives is somewhere around, call it, $2 billion in growth this year. So we're hoping that with where they are thus far that they'll be able to get to that number as -- Brian, did that get to your question?

Yes. Yes, I think the only thing we need to clarify is that 20% number, Harold, if that 20% DDA is kind of where you think you're trending towards by year-end.

Yes, who knows where we're going to end up, but that's the planning assumption that we are building -- that we're using.

Okay. Got you. And Okay. And then just the last one, Harold, just on the -- back to the margin for just a moment. The outlook, if you do see rate cuts later in the year, it sounds like you have some floors in place. So I mean, probably not much of a change? Or just how does the margin outlook with rate -- with potential rate cuts in I guess that's what it sounds like you have kind of in the -- in kind of your planning assumption at the moment?

Yes. Yes, we do.

Thank you. That completes our Q&A session. Everyone, this concludes today's event. You may disconnect at this time, and have a wonderful day. Thank you for your participation.