Synovus Financial Corp. (SYU1.DU) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Good morning, everyone. My name is Michael Rose, and I'm pleased to introduce Synovus Financial as our next presenter with nearly $60 billion in assets. The company is based in Columbus, Georgia and it has operations across 5 southeastern states. With us today from the company is Chairman and CEO, Kevin Blair; CFO, Jamie Gregory; and Director of IR, Cal Evans. And with that, I will turn it over to Kevin.

Thank you, Michael. Can everyone hear me okay? It's great to be with you this morning. Beautiful weather here in Florida. I'll kick off by saying that we are going to have some forward-looking statements. And so please read all of our disclosures to keep me out of trouble so that we make sure that we cover those. But given this is a generalist conference, I want to make sure, first and foremost, everyone here knows who Synovus is. We are a $60 billion asset institution, headquartered in Columbus, Georgia. And we have a very long heritage over 135 years. But what we talk about internally is we're probably the youngest 135-year-old institution in the United States. And that's because, during the great financial crisis, we made some significant modifications to our go-to-market strategy and ultimately, our organization. Prior to the global financial crisis, we operated as 29 individually chartered institutions across the southeast, across our 5-state footprint. Post the global financial crisis, we collapsed those charters and we came up with a unified brand, which was Synovus. And you'll note on this slide here, although it's often mispronounced, when we came up with the name Synovus. It was built around an intentional competitive differentiation to the marketplace. First, the Synovus portion, or the Synergy piece, we felt like larger institutions largely compartmentalized their lines of business and products and delivered and siloed organizations. We believe that we could take our heritage as a community bank and build out the capabilities, deliver those seamlessly across our client segments, across our geographies, creating a more simplistic approach. And the new portion, the Novus, was the delivery of those products. And we talk about it in the terms of Goldilocks, where we have maintained our roots and our communities and serving clients, putting the client at the center of the room, providing an exceptional client service but bringing to bear all of the capabilities and solutions that the largest institutions in the United States have. And we bring those two together, we provide great service, that the large banks can't always compete with, and we provide the functionality and capability that small banks can't compete with, which gives us a competitive positioning in the marketplace. Now that's words, but when you look at some of the accolades that we received, it reinforces that what we're doing matters, and it means something to our clients. We don't put these awards on the screen to brag. We use it for adjudication purposes to say what we're doing is delivering value. On a small business and medium-sized business side, you'll see 20 Greenwich awards this past year, puts us in the top 10% of all banks. And when you look at the J.D. Power Consumer Awards, we always rate in the top quartile for top client satisfaction amongst our peer set. So we believe this model is differentiated, and it's creating a bond and relationship, a trusted relationship with our clients. Now our investment thesis is pretty simple. You have to execute and deliver, but we believe it has all the components that will allow us to achieve outsized growth and client satisfaction and ultimately a growth in tangible book value that will outpace our peers. It starts with the Southeastern footprint. I'll share some data later, but we see the population inflows, the business starts that continue to occur in the Southeast and rising tides do lift all boats. And so we'll get the benefit of that. Secondly, when we talk about focusing on the right to win, I think banks are sized $60 billion too often try to peanut butter out their investments. They try to be everything to all. And unfortunately, we can't do that. We can be everything to some. And so we've doubled down on the commercial space where we believe that not only we showcased the right to win, but we believe going forward that we can have even greater growth and market share gains in that client segment. The third is around a resilient risk profile. And when I talk about the changes that we've made since the global financial crisis, probably the greatest area of change has been around our risk profile, completely diversifying our balance sheet on the lending side, and I'll cover that later. Building a stronger institution with more capital and reducing our loan-to-deposit ratio, which has traditionally hovered in that 95% to 100% range, down below 90%. And as we all talk about today, deposits will be a key focus going forward. And our way of dealing with the strategic initiatives is to make sure that we're in businesses that generate not only the asset, but also generates the deposit that comes with it. And in many situations, looking for new industries and opportunities to generate even more deposits to fund the robust growth that we're creating in our footprint. The other thing I think is very important is whether you're in a recessionary period or whether you're in good times, I believe you have to continuously invest in future sources of growth because this is a market share business. If everyone is trying to take market share from on another, it becomes very competitive. And what do we all do in the banking space? We lean in with price and try to win business by pricing it lower. But for us, we -- obviously, we're going to be competitive on price, but the way in which we can create a sustainable growth profile is not only to win market share, but continue to bring new solutions and new products, new specialty businesses to the marketplace that allows us to grow at even a faster pace than the market or even at a faster pace than market plus taking market share, and we'll talk about some of those today. That all translates our long-term objectives that we rolled out at Investor Day back in February of '22, was to create a company that delivers sustainable top quartile performance. And throughout this last year in '22, we were very, very pleased to see that from an efficiency standpoint and ROA standpoint, we're already delivering top quartile results. Now one year doesn't make a trend, and we know that, that's something that we have to continue to execute in order to deliver top quartile performance over a sustained period of time. And then lastly, the next slide will go into this in greater detail, but we believe that we're positioned for consistent growth. And as we look at valuations, we know that consistency in earnings is very, very important. And the way that we can do that is, number one, delivering on the operating model I've spoken about; two, continuing to attract talent. And that's something we've been able to do the last couple of years. You'll see that in some of the slides in the presentation; and three, it's around execution and making sure that we're getting full value for the services that we're providing and making sure that we get a full wallet share. And if we deliver on that, then it's going to allow us to not only grow, but to grow profitably. So when you look at this slide and consistent growth, what jumps off the page to me is when you look at the last 2 years, '21 and '22, we've had double-digit growth in both loans and core banking fees. That core banking fees excludes mortgage just based on the interest rate volatility. And what that's allowed us to do, we've continued to invest in some of these new initiatives, but in a measured and disciplined way that we've continued to have positive operating leverage as the top line has grown, which has allowed us to continue to reduce our efficiency ratio. Now what that allows us to do over time, if we continue with the same execution path that we'll get double-digit bottom line growth for the foreseeable future through the cycle. And what allows us to do that are some of the components at the bottom of the slide. Number one, relationship deepening. And I've said this in other forums, we do a great job of serving our clients, but in many ways, we've only, in the last 3 years, taken, the dirty word, the cross-sell approach to make sure that we're getting all of the needs that our clients have with solutions that we can provide. And I'll give you a couple of examples real quick. Number one, we had business units that in the past considered themselves lenders. They actually wouldn't sell deposits and treasury solutions. More recently, with the environment we're in, those business units don't have the option just to provide capital to their clients. Ultimately, they're providing treasury solutions and deposits, and we've seen low-hanging fruit where we've been able to generate that. This last month, we rolled out our brand-new FX platform in treasury. So for years, we had clients that were doing international business, they would bank with us. And when they needed some sort of foreign exchange business solution, they went to a competitor to provide that. We now have a full-service FX platform, and we already have a pipeline of $2 million in revenue that's already signed up for it. So we have the opportunity with just our existing clients to continue to deepen the wallet share, not just with existing products, but also with some of the new products we're bringing to them. Two is business line diversification. For many years, we focused on the community banking model. Now we have a full set, and you'll see later, of specialized businesses, primarily on the commercial side that allow us not to be encumbered by the 5-state footprint in which we serve, but rather it becomes a national presence because the bankers that we're employing are experts in their industry, expert in their asset classes, not just experts in the city that they live in. Credit vigilance, we'll talk about this in great detail today, the diversification of the balance sheet, the deleveraging. Most of the investments that we're making on asset generation are in lower expected loss asset categories: Income-producing real estate, corporate and investment banking, specialty lending, asset-based lending, all of those carry lower risk ratings than what would have been the traditional balance sheet, which was more speculative real estate and ultimately smaller business loans that carry higher EL. And then lastly, we'll talk a lot about core deposits and our focus there. I mentioned the footprint that we sit in, and you've seen different stats, but the one I love is you just think about population simply over the next 5 years, the population growth in our footprint is going to be 2x that of the national average. And that's going to create more jobs. It's going to create more businesses. It's going to create greater opportunities for our bank. And so we are blessed to sit in this footprint. But the most important thing that we've done over the last, really, 10 years is recognize within our 5-state footprint, we have 55 markets in which we serve. But some of those markets are more rural in nature and aren't growing at the same pace. So we've doubled down on the fast-growing markets, the Atlantas, the Miami Fort Lauderdale, the Tampas, the Charlestons. And what you can see by doubling down on those efforts, we've increased our share of loans and deposits in those faster-growing markets. Now it doesn't mean that we don't love those markets that are smaller and not growing at the same pace. In many ways, those provide great low-cost source of funds for us, but we'll take that liquidity that's presented in those marketplaces and reinvest it in some of these metro markets that are growing at an even faster rate. Talked to Michael on the way in. So we get some questions on CRE. And I'm not here to tell you that I have a crystal ball, and I know how this is all going to play out, but what I can tell you is when we look at the data, in our CRE portfolios, we feel very good about the portfolio that we have today. And it starts with that geography that I just referenced. And you look at the left-hand part of the slide, what you'll see is that rent growth and occupancy in the Southeast is far better than where it is on a national average. And so when we look at the right-hand side and we look at areas that created some valuation declines during the global financial crisis, it was an oversupply and speculative real estate. When you look at the two asset classes, we get asked about the most, office and retail. What you'll note is the percentage of deliveries that are slated this year as a percent of total inventory is much lower than what it was back in 2008 or '09. So it doesn't -- it means that fewer new buildings are coming into the marketplace, which, ultimately, will allow more of the absorption that exists today. Now you'll notice in warehouse and multifamily, the deliveries are about the same, but that really speaks to the bustling ports and logistics markets in which we serve in the Southeast and, quite frankly, the income -- the population increase that we're seeing, where multifamily is still being placed in some of these fast growth markets. But in general, the underlying trends look favorable for the Southeast, and that is not only on rent. It also when you look at cap rates and the like, you'll see that the Southeast is performing at a better rate. And when we think about our portfolio and the diversification that's occurred over the last 10 years, I think the pie chart shows that in spades and that you can see that some of the losses that we had in the global financial crisis were in that one-to-four family land and development, which today represents only 2% of the portfolio. And our commercial real estate is mostly income producing. And when you look at the LTVs at 55% or below, there's a tremendous amount of equity in each of these deals that we believe will give it strength and there's probably protection behind it based on the developers and the sponsors that we've chosen to bank. When you look at our consumer portfolio, it's a super prime portfolio, largely consisting of mortgage and home equity, and we have some third-party loans, which -- if you look in our appendix, we've said, given the current liquidity environment, we'll continue to downsize that portfolio in the back. We noted that we've moved some loans into held for sale this quarter that were third-party portfolios, and that's consistent with our strategy to make sure that we are deploying our liquidity, using our liquidity in those asset classes that come with relationships. And so if it's a third party, we'll continue to diminish that as an asset class that we use. And if you look at the right-hand side of the of the pie chart, you'll see that we're very diversified on the C&I side. Over 20 NAICS codes represented here, but I'd tell you underneath this is probably 11 or 12 sublines of business that helped to drive the growth in C&I from small business to specialty lending to our new corporate and investment bank, and that's going to allow us to continue to grow C&I as a percentage of the pie. As we think about our guidance for this year of 5% to 9%, the large percentage growth that will drive that is really C&I loans. On the right-hand side, maybe this is pedantic, but if you look at what the credit statistics support today relative to 2012 and even in years -- several years ago, our credit metrics are at some of the lowest levels we've seen in the history of the bank. It's performing at levels that probably aren't sustainable. We would expect to see NPAs and NPLs increase over time, but we think that part of the benign credit environment we have today is we've been able to rebuild the balance sheet in a way that will perform extremely well in good times like we've seen in these last several years, but also during times of uncertainty or economic downturns. Talked a lot about doubling down on commercial. And what I would point to here is that we have 200 bankers across our geography serving small, medium and large businesses. We also have 80 relationship managers that are just focused on specialty banking. And you can see some of the verticals that we've built out from lender finance to quick-serve restaurants to tech, media, communications, FIG and healthcare. And as a result, a lot of these are brand-new businesses in the last 2 years, which will provide future growth and maybe an inflection point from where we are today. But when you look at the last several years, we've largely delivered double-digit loan, deposit and fee income growth from this commercial segment. And I think the reason for that has been this doubling down, making sure that we're making the right investments in treasury, which I'll talk about in a second. Continuing to be an attractor of talent from mostly larger institutions where bankers are looking to come to a platform that better fits their goals and objectives personally and for their clients. And ultimately, our ability to focus on productivity. Our bankers are getting better at providing solutions that our clients need. And ultimately, we have new solutions that allow them to provide that. But if you look on the right-hand side, it's not just about generating a loan and deposit, we have to make sure that we're bringing to the market all the treasury and payment solutions that they need. Ultimately, we have a syndicated finance shop now where we moved from an originate and hold bank to now originate and distribute, which we think is prudent going forward. But we've also rolled out more strategies around private wealth. It's not just about banking the business itself, it's about banking the business owner. We think that will provide additional fee income opportunities, deposit opportunities and, ultimately, provide full relationship services to these institutions where we already have trusted relationships built. When we talk about deposits, I think the left hand of the slide is different than most other banks our size. Back in 2019, we made the decision to invest heavily in treasury and payment solutions. We brought in a new leader. You can see that we've increased the staffing there by 25% over this time frame. We've introduced 31 new products, functionalities and capabilities over that same time. And what's happened is our analyzed account, so that's noninterest-bearing and interest-bearing checking accounts, have increased by $5 billion over that time frame. So that's not PPP money sitting around waiting to be deployed, that's us selling additional treasury products that basically force our clients to put more money in those accounts to offset the fees for the services they're using. And that's allowed us, as you see on the right-hand side here, to better diversify and create a better optimal mix of our deposits. And now our noninterest-bearing deposits at over 30% of the total. But when you look at DDA and NOW, it's almost 60% of our deposits today. And we believe that not only is that something that we've done over the last 3 years, but something that will continue into the future with our focus on commercial and with our continued investment in treasury and payment solutions. And then lastly, as we think about this year and the future, a couple of salient points on this slide. Number one is we have been an asset-sensitive bank. We've grown our NIM 60 basis points from '21 to '22. And what we've talked about, and Jamie said this earlier in some discussions, we were early in the third quarter to say that we believe our through-the-cycle beta is going to be 30% to 40%, and maybe we're one of the first to say that. It seems like other banks have kind of come in our way since that time frame. And as of this last month, we are at 29% through the cycle. Where at the end of last year, we were at 24%. So we're still on pace to that 35% to 40%. So nothing has changed there. What we've said is that in the short run, because of the increased beta and because of the Fed getting closer to their terminal rates, that there would be some latent impact from betas that would put some pressure on the margin in the near term, where it can level off and decline several basis points. But what I think has been lost in all this is what the long-term value is of the balance sheet that we've built and ultimately in a position today to start to hedge to allow us to preserve some of the margin that we've been able to gain over the last year. And a number that I think is very relevant here is when we look at the $30 billion of fixed rate assets that will reprice over the next 5 to 6 years, we believe by 2025 that, that could represent 40 basis points of gross margin improvement. So as these assets continue to reprice as hedges mature as securities, cash flow, we think that we could get a gross 40 basis points increase in margin from now until the end of '25. Now what that ends up being on a net basis will be determined based on the hedging programs we've put in place, it will be based on betas and where the Fed's terminal rate ends up being. But we feel like there's a significant tailwind here that may not be in view based on everyone's focus on just '23 and some of the pressures we're seeing on the margin. So I want to make sure I'm mindful of time. I have 2 minutes. Let me conclude by saying, look, our investment thesis is clear. We're in a great footprint. We believe our model is differentiated. It's a platform that continues to attract talent. We think from a strategic planning process, the new initiatives, like Corporate and Investment Banking, our money as a service technology, our Banking-as-a-Service platform, all of those things are in execution phase. And for us, 2023 is a year of focused execution. And when we continue to execute and we have tailwinds like you see on this slide, we believe that not only will '23 deliver double-digit PPNR growth, but in '24 and '25, we still have a growth trajectory in front of us, one that we believe as we started this hypothesis, which is, it will create an ability to deliver sustainable top quartile performance and allow us to stand out versus our competitors in this space. So thank you for allowing me to spend some time with you today. And Michael, I'm happy to field any questions.

Yes. And any questions, if you could just repeat, I'm going to come up and ask -- kick off with one. Maybe we can start with just -- I know there's no guidance slides in here, but we did get some negative updates yesterday from [indiscernible]. And I just wanted to see if there was any updates specifically on deposits.

So I got to get out of this light here. I'm blinded. So no updates. We've said this over the last about 2 months. We gave our guidance in January, we believe that the guidance still holds for the year. Are there puts and takes? Are we seeing things that are tailwinds, headwinds? Sure. But we think largely, if you go back to our guidance, Michael, we gave some pretty wide ranges for that reason because a lot of the assumptions that we had to use in order to give the guidance, we knew there'd be some variability there. On the deposit front, we've said 2% to 3% growth for the year, and we still feel good about that. Short run, we've said the first half of the year probably has some more pressures. Number one, we felt there would continue to be diminishment from the Fed's tightening; number two, we have a seasonal public funds portfolio that has outflows in the first and second quarter. But we felt like the second half of the year would provide some tailwinds and that we could get to that 2% to 3%. Some things that will drive that. We've changed our incentive plans. We've seen record levels of production in the fourth quarter, and now it looks like the first quarter of '23 could be even higher than that. Two, we are focusing on some new businesses that are deposit-rich like money service businesses. We have our first two clients we've onboarded there. And ultimately, as I said earlier, we have bankers that in the past would not have been as focused on liquidity and treasury that are focused on it, so it gives us a little bit of low-hanging fruit. So you may ask the question, if you're growing loans, 5% to 9% core deposits, 2% to 3%, why would you do that? We believe that we need to lean in at this time. We think there's a lot of market share to be gained. We brought in a lot of bankers. We've rolled out new initiatives, and we think that loan growth is going to provide a long NPV for the future. And so in the short run, if we have to do a little more wholesale funding to support that, we'll do it. But the goal long term is to crank up the deposit generation to mirror that growth of the asset side.

From the audience? Maybe I'll ask another one. At Investor Day, you guys rolled out some new initiatives and businesses. Can you just give a brief description of what those were? Whether it be masked or the commercial build-out and then kind of an update on expectations?

Yes. So we really had three big investments out -- the first -- well, maybe four. The first two are related to the core businesses. So as Michael mentioned, commercial banking, we've added some specialty groups restaurant services. We've been doubling down on middle market banking. We've increased our staffing there over the last 2.5 years about 50%, the number of middle-market bankers, and we've also invested in analytics. Analytics to help our bankers identify opportunities for solutions to provide to their clients and analytics to our clients where we actually be more proactive on our digital portals to suggest a product that may be necessary for them. So that's really been the investment in the core businesses, talent and analytics. On the new businesses, corporate and investment banking, we rolled out three new industry verticals: Financial institutions, healthcare and tech media and communications. All three groups are fully staffed. We have analysts we have to fill there. Pipelines are very robust. We have over $100 million in outstandings today. We've done our first left lead transaction, booked our first two deposits. And so the challenge there is, first, to get the talent in place. And I think some people question whether entering that space, could you get the right talent? I say, check, we've done that. Now we have to get the productivity. Those individuals have to deliver. And it should be -- it's not an easy business, but they have big Rolodexes and they'll be able to continue to call on clients that they've called on in the past. So we're very optimistic about that. And I'd say it's probably a little ahead of schedule. On the money as a service technology, that's our Banking as a Service platform. We've onboarded our first client in January. We booked our first revenue. We'll bring on our second client this coming week, and we'll have our third client come on in the next 2 months. Those three clients will be live, but they also continue to serve as our beta clients. We want to make sure that we're testing the functionality of the platform that we've built to ensure it's meeting their needs. The idea is that in July of this year, we will open up mass to all of the ISVs, and we'll start to onboard additional companies. The real important thing here is that the initial product is mainly focused on payment facilitations and deposits. We're already beginning to work on Phase 2 and 3 where we're adding new solutions, including a lending platform, as well as additional treasury and payment solutions that will be added in. Our initial business case was really just built on the PayFac, deposits and some lending revenue. And what we said is this could create $100 million of revenue, whether that's in 3 years, 5 years, it's hard to know because you're trying to guess how quickly these software providers will come in the platform, how many users will use our solutions. And ultimately, how many payment transactions or solutions will those end users actually take up? But we remain optimistic that this is a product that is very viable. It is still in demand by these ISVs. And ultimately, we feel like at the end of this year, we'll have a pretty good understanding of that ability to penetrate the end users from the ISV perspective.

Great. I'll keep going. Maybe going to credit, and I appreciate some of the details that you put in the slide deck. Hopefully, that will provide some more comfort. But if I look at your stock and where it trades relative to peers, I think there's still kind of a credit discount despite the fact how much progress you guys have made since the GFC. So how would you kind of defend what you guys have done and how it's going to produce a different outcome than last time?

Mike and I were talking on the way in. I can defend it with words, but unfortunately, I think this is a show-me story because we can show you a lot of data that suggests that what we've been able to accomplish in the last 13 years is pretty Herculean and how diversified the balance sheet is today, how much of a lower risk portfolio than it is today. And the stat that I point to that I think gives you an order of magnitude. If we took the same loss rates that we incurred during the global financial crisis, and we apply those loss rates by asset class to our existing balance sheet, the losses, the cumulative losses over those 13 months or 13 quarters would have been half of what they were in the global financial crisis. So just the change in mix, moving away from speculative real estate, moving more to income, producing real estate, would suggest that our losses will be half. Now we'd be foolish to think that's the only changes we've made. We've made changes to underwriting. We made changes to risk management frameworks. As I mentioned before, we were 29 banks operating independently with their own credit policies with their own risk managers. We're now a regional bank that has a central risk framework, a central Chief Credit Officer with lots of individuals, like Cal, looking at market intelligence data, and having concentration limits and levels that allow us to produce what we showed on that pie chart, which is a very, very diversified business mix that I think will hold up very well. And again, I put an exclamation point on the Southeast. If you look at all the statistics that point to deterioration in CRE. There's been -- Cal said, all the absorption that's happened on their office side happened in properties that were older than 2010. If you go look at our office portfolio, our average collateral is probably 2014, 2015. And that's another one Synovus shows up on a lot of the reports as having outsized portfolio size and office. Well, $1.7 billion of the commitments out of that $3.1 billion are medical office buildings. They're not your traditional office space. And so we believe that the diversification, the amount of equity, the underwriting our footprint, all of those things are going to allow us to perform at or better than what the industry will perform at. But again, I think that's a show-me story.

[indiscernible]

So on the construction underwriting, a lot of our peers have just exited the business. We've had lots of inbound calls from developers saying, will you finance this? And back to our rigors, we have a bucket every quarter that we hold out for construction. We limit that based on the -- it counts as a high-risk transaction. So of that $250 million in that bucket, we're only going to use that for our clients that we have a long history with and that we have a full relationship with. So we have tightened the underwriting standards there. Obviously, with cap rates, we stress it. Kal and his team are looking at NOI stresses. We're looking at interest rate stress. And so it's harder to get a deal to fit the box. But the good news is our developers understand that. So they're not bringing as many deals. Our production -- our pipelines are off about 80% in that category just because they can't make the numbers work. We're still doing a little bit. Most of the construction loan growth that you'll see in our balance sheet are deals that were already approved and are just funding up. But it's largely dried up in terms of demand, and we get many inbounds because some of our competitors are just slowing it down. So there are marketplaces that we would continue to build multifamily and we'll follow the right sponsors into those markets. There are other markets that -- we like the developer, but we think the market's overheated, so we wouldn't do a deal there. So we're being more selective. I think we're prudently underwriting, but the marketplace for those developers that want to do something, it's shrinking. It's hard to find banks that are willing to do it.

[indiscernible]

Quarter-to-quarter. So our first quarter is off 70% to 80% from where we entered the fourth quarter.

Great. That's all we got time for. Thank you so much.

Thank you.