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

We'll ahead and get started next stop for the last bank's presentation of the day, we have Synovus Financial. From Synovus, we have President and CEO, Kevin Blair; and CFO Jamie Gregory. So thank you both for joining us.

Ebrahim, great to be with you.

Maybe just to kick it off, Kevin, give us -- there's a lot of like macro crosscurrents debate around whether the economy -- GDP print looks strong, but questions around, we're not seeing that translate into loan growth momentum at the bank. So what's -- what does it feel like? What's your view on the economy across your footprint? And where are the stress points?

It's a really good question. And one of the things we try to do every quarter is survey our clients to get it from the proverbial horse's mouth. And what was interesting coming out of the fourth quarter survey was that our clients are generally in the same condition they were in third quarter. What I mean by that is roughly 20% of our client surveyed so that they expect that the next 12 months, business activity to slow about 25%, so the expected business activity to pick up. And the remaining 55% said it would stay about the same. And so when we look at that, it would say that the majority of people are still feeling good about the underlying economy. So either staying the same or getting better. But there's still that roughly 20% to 25% that's expecting it to go down. And so what's causing that? Number one, I think there's a tremendous amount of uncertainty in the environment. The election is obviously weighing on people. And there's a long-term implication of what that means to the underlying economy. Two, interest rates, I think you've seen that there was some belief that would see lower rates sooner. And so if you're on the fence about doing a new capital expenditure, you might wait until you get a better rate on loan. And then three, I think the geopolitical environment has just been challenging. Where every time it feels like we have a risk on trade or people feel good about where they are. There is some level of uncertainty that's created internationally. So I would say there's still cautious optimism. People are doing fine. Their margins are fine. One of the interesting things I think we got out of some of the comments and it was interesting. Some of the folks were asked, do you plan to have the same number of people working for you over the next 12 months? And we got answers like, yes. But in the qualitative portion, people would say we probably don't need as many people as we have today but we're afraid to lay people off because if the activity picks back up, we're not sure we'd be able to hire those individuals. So it shows you, that's a pretty costly insurance policy to keep staffing higher than you need just because you're afraid that you may not be able to get people back. That's what's resulting in compressed margins. But I think it gives you the sentiment that people are more worried about the risk than they are worried about the opportunity at this point.

Got it. That's helpful. I wonder if that creates a risk at some point. They no longer want to retain these people and then that leads to much faster weakness in the job market.

I think the longer it plays out. Obviously, it's a more expensive insurance policy. You can't do that forever. And so to your point, that's why I think there's a little latency in what you see in terms of unemployment because people are hanging on to those folks, even though the data would suggest maybe they don't need it. And to your first question, I'll just -- on the loan demand side, we went into the year expecting 0% to 3% loan growth. And that's a bit of a misnomer because we have several lines of business that continue to grow at a very good pace. The biggest headwind for us in '24 was on the CRE front. When you look at CRE, our pipelines are off 90%, 95%. So there's not a lot of activity today. But worse than that, what we've seen -- and maybe this is not worse than that, maybe it's a good thing, we started to see normal payoff and paydown activities occur in the fourth quarter. There hasn't been a lot of constructive marketplace for transactions. People haven't been refinancing notes. And so we saw for the first 3 quarters of 2023, very low payoff activity. We expect that payoff activity to continue to increase in '24, which creates a pretty big headwind. You're not putting on a lot of new production, you're going to get normalized payoffs. That's the one reason you're seeing 0% to 3%. But outside of that, we still feel very bullish on some of our -- mainly C&I businesses.

Got it. So I guess the 0% to 3% probably is 5% to 6% if you remove the payoff headwind.

That's right.

So maybe just talk to where -- what areas are driving the growth be markets or vertical-wise?

Yes. The big -- I'll start with our newest vertical, which is corporate and investment bank. It's been in existence really for 18 months. And so we would expect that to continue to grow double digits. We brought on 21 clients organically since we've started the 3 industry verticals, and we think that's going to continue. And if the marketplace is constructive, that we could have level of growth this year that we had in '23. The other area is our middle market, wholesale banking area. That's generally companies with revenue size, [ $50 million ] to [ $250 million ], and that continues to grow. Part of that is just we're in great footprint and across the metro markets in the Southeast. Two, over the last 3 years, we've increased the size of our middle market team by roughly 50%. so we brought a lot of talent from larger institutions and that traction of bringing on their business that they're moving over from either their previous institution or just their prospecting activities is really generating strong growth. Those are two big growth engines. Our community bank, which is generally things below $50 million in the company revenues. That's been growing at a very slow pace, but we're hopeful that some of the improvements we made there. We've been adding talent, will generate growth over time. And then on the headwind side, it's mainly third-party consumer, which we've been deemphasizing in this capital and liquidity constrained environment. Mortgage obviously is slowing with production and CRE, as I mentioned before.

Got it.

And I should say we've deemphasized. So we talked a lot about portfolio management and balance sheet optimization. We won't be selling any more loan portfolios or doing any bond restructuring. Jamie can touch on that. But we are looking at all of our asset classes and looking at it from a profitability lens to say which asset classes are not toeing the line in terms of returns. And so things like shared national credits where we did those as kind of fill ins, we'll do less of that. Our senior housing book, which was about $5 billion in outstandings, we're going to slow the growth there and actually shrink a little bit just for concentration management. But generally, our goal is to get the growth in those core businesses and to continue to add new sources of growth, whether it's our restaurant vertical or asset-based lending, some CIB that will generate that mid-single-digit growth that you talked about.

Got it. And you expect that growth to come through despite the macro uncertainties you talked about, right?

Yes. I mean, look, our pipelines right now are off about 25% from peak levels on the C&I side but that's still enough to generate growth in those asset classes. The wildcard would be if we went into a hard landing and you saw contraction in the economy, obviously, that would change our outlook. If we saw a significant shift in line utilization, today, we haven't seen that positively or negatively. But if people were to continue to draw down their lines, that would provide a headwind. But in today's economic environment and based on our talent that we have and our strategy and our ability to win business, we still feel very bullish about that.

Got it. I want to come back to the capital markets business. But maybe first, just let's touch on, there's a debate around the ideal scale of a bank, like $50 billion, $500 billion, $1 trillion plus. Just give us a sense of, in your seat when you look at this, we're seeing some de-tailoring on the regulatory front. Like how do you think, from a size standpoint where Synovus fits the puzzle and competitive advantage or disadvantage?

We've run all the equations and the optimal size is $60 billion headquartered in Georgia. I don't know how the numbers came out that way but it was really weird. Look, we believe -- we've said this for a long time, I believe, in the Goldilocks principle. We are large enough to where we can provide the capability, functionality and possess the talent that competes with the largest institutions out there. We do it every day. In 2023, we grew our market share in the state of Georgia by 100 basis points. Now we're competing with the big guys where we're doing that but yet we're growing market share. Why is that? Because we're winning because we're providing a very personalized consultative approach to banking. Now if you look at the other end of the spectrum, these smaller institutions are hyper-personalized and they're community oriented but they don't often have the capabilities and functionalities of the larger institutions. So they lose their client. They mature past the community bank or a smaller bank. We feel like we have the best of both worlds. And at $60 billion, we're not being encumbered by the new tailoring rules at $100 billion. I think we've all heard or it's been suggested that at $80 billion, it's suggestion or...

The magic mark.

Yes, you start having to transition and put together a plan to get to the $100 billion. So we're well below that. So we have a lot of runway to continue to grow without having to spend the additional capital, without having to spend additional expense to be able to comply. Now Jamie has brought up a really interesting point over the last two conferences we've been. We've gotten a lot of questions where some of our peers have said it $50 billion, they start to feel a little more pressure. And we just haven't felt that. And Jamie's point is when you look at our executive team at Synovus, everyone's worked largely at a Cat 4 bank. And so, we've all been through stress testing. We've all run LCR. We've done the things that are not required but are good business practices. So I think when our regulators look at Synovus, they see the things they want to see for a $60 billion bank. So they're not having to ask for additional things. The great news for us, we do all those things, but we don't have to fill out the 1,000-page CCAR report or we're not having to do daily LCR reporting. So we feel like we've built an infrastructure and capability that looks like a larger bank but we're not having to spend the dollars administrative burden of that.

Got it. And I guess, as you think about for any bank learnings from last year and what happened with the deposit trends. I guess how do you internalize that for Synovus in terms of more liquidity, lower loan-to-deposit ratio, just how does it change? How you manage the balance sheet?

Yes. Well, we feel very comfortable with where we are right now. You've seen our loan-to-deposit ratio decline in the past couple of quarters. And some of that is through just normal business and part of is through active management with the sale of the medical office portfolio, the attrition of the third-party portfolio. Loan-to-deposit ratio is not a metric that we guide to or that we target per se. But we have looked at where we are versus peers in -- on wholesale funding, and we feel really good that we've kind of converged get back to median on those ratios. And we feel good at where we are on liquidity. As we look forward into 2024, we're excited about our production. When you saw production in 2023, it was up 83% versus the prior year, and we think that we can maintain that strength of origination and continue to grow deposits this year. Obviously, there's some seasonal headwinds in the first quarter. But once we get past that, we're looking forward to growth in the deposit base.

And I guess just sticking with deposit base, I think your guidance is 2% to 6% year-over-year growth. What are the drivers of like -- in a world where rates are still high, QT is still ongoing, what's driving that growth? And what drives it to 6% versus 2%?

Well, I mean, we've had a consistent client account growth that will continue in 2024. We're continuing to manage the balance sheet. We think that our team -- we've seen delivery of growth in money market accounts, I mean, pretty consistently. And so we expect to see that continue. We're not a price leader out there, we don't win with price per se. But we think that as we look forward with our business plans, that production will continue in 2024. Our clients, we're seeing growth in their accounts. We don't think diminishment will be the headwind that it was in 2023. If you look at our consumer accounts, they're back to where they were pre-pandemic. If you look at commercial, the average balance in our commercial account is about 20% higher than it was pre-pandemic. But we don't think that necessarily means that's a large risk because of the amount of inflation we've seen over the past few years. And so inflation adjusted, may they're a little bit higher than they were prepandemic but it's not a big number.

And double click on Jamie's comment because I think every bank, there's 4,500 banks that are all competing with deposits. So how do you win? We've been making investments for years. We started investing in our treasury and payment solutions area 4 years ago. And I think we have one of the best treasury and payment solution talent and technology and capabilities in the industry that gives us the ability to win those deposits. We've added liquidity specialist roles that just focus on larger, more complex clients, and we give them on and off-balance sheet solutions. We've rolled out new business units like the money service business where it's a little higher operational risk with AML/BSA but it brings fees and deposits. And so to Jamie's point, a lot of it is blocking and tackling and just ensuring we're getting our full share of wallet from our clients. But we're also trying to carve around the edges and think where are those new sources of growth. And then to his point, once the diminishment stops and you still have that elevated level of production, you're going to get good core deposit growth.

And you mentioned thousands of banks are competing with pricing competition? Has it ebbed like you feel good about the NIV mix, what you're seeing in the markets? Or is it still intense?

I mean there are definitely still competitors are out there with some pretty high compelling rates on deposits. But I do feel like it's come down a little bit in the past few months. You can always find high rates in any market but we do feel like the pressure there has come down a little bit recently on -- specifically on time deposits.

Got it. I guess we spent a lot of time talking about RWA optimization. I'm just wondering from a deposit base optimization post last year, do you look at certain deposits and you're like, this no longer makes sense because it's hard to put a duration on those or...?

I mean if you look at what we learned in 2023. I mean, deposit base, in general, ended up for some participants being lower than expected, specifically with large deposits like corporate bank deposits, high net worth deposits. But we feel good about that. If you think about the on the asset side, our sensitivity is managed. We believe we're relatively neutral to the front of the curve. Our securities portfolio is a little bit smaller than others. We think that it all plays into us being able to be nimble and react to deposit betas. Our deposit tenors or durations being a little bit shorter than what we originally thought they were on those that are a little more price sensitive. But looking forward, we feel good about 2024. We think the deposit cost will peak early in the year. And the reason for that is because we think core interest-bearing deposits will continue increasing through the year. I mean I'm assuming a flat rate environment. Obviously, easing would help that. But we do expect to get some benefit through runoff of the broker deposit portfolio in 2024.

How big is that? Have you talked about it?

Yes. Right now, we're at 12% of deposits or broker deposits. We could see runoff in any given quarter between $250 million to $500 million, and we'll just kind of let that come down over time, given our loan and deposit forecast, but we'll kind of update that as we go through the year but that's our current expectation.

Got it. And just on NII, you mentioned relatively neutral to the short end of the curve. If you don't get any rate cuts, which is essentially your guidance based on no rate cuts. So full marks to you for that, already foreseeing what the bond market [ massed ]. But if you don't get any rate cuts, does that mean NII is at the higher end of the guidance? Or like how should we think about it?

Yes. A couple of things. First off, on our guidance, the rate outlook is extremely volatile, like we're all aware of that. Our intent was we didn't want to have to continue to adjust our guidance based on current changes and expectations. We really want our guidance to be a result of performance. And let's see how it's going. Let's see how it's going here in the Southeast for Synovus. But we want to give everybody what they need for an easing environment as well. In a flat rate environment with -- where we expect the margin to be about 320 in the fourth quarter. Now the interesting this is at a conference in early December, we said 325 but I was using a 4.5% 10-year. The 320 is using a 4% 10 years. So that gives some indication of the asset sensitivity to loaning the curve. And that's just due to our long duration assets. But our view of NII and the margin is relatively stable through the beginning -- through the first half of the year and then increase in the second half of the year as you get the benefit of that fixed rate asset repricing.

And how big is the fix rate asset repricing in terms...

Yes. That -- it's about 20 basis points a year, and it continues. This is not just a 2024 store date, like this goes into 2025 and 2026 actually. And I mean, you can't just add that to the margin because there are some offsetting negatives like mainly NIB decline. It's our view that noninterest-bearing deposits as a percent of total will decline somewhere between '23 and '24 by the end of this year. We're at 25% right now. And then if we look further out, we'd probably expect that decline a little bit from there, assuming rates stay elevated. But the fixed rate asset pricing is a really powerful tailwind to earnings.

And when these assets are repricing, especially on the loan side or new loans you're making, how are spreads holding up? Are the spreads tighter today than 3 years ago or 5 years ago or?

Yes, I'll take that, Ebrahim. When we look at fourth quarter, we are at roughly 8% on the production of new loans on the commercial side. And the production of our deposits were right around [ 390 ]. So you're getting almost a 4% spread on new production. So the margins are fine. When you're being more selective lending side, it allows you to have a little more price -- pricing power. And what we've tried to do is obviously not change the credit standards, but price appropriately. And if you're doing a loan only relationship without getting deposits and ancillary fees, you've got to get a good return on capital to be able to do that. So I think with less competition in the marketplace with our bankers being incented and rewarded to go and get the full price, based on the value they're providing that client, we think that you're going to elevated numbers. I just saw industry report this morning from the provider of our pricing tool precision lender. They put out a monthly report. And it showed that for the industry, although volumes were up in January, they actually saw better pricing overall with spreads over [indiscernible] the industry continuing to stay at high levels. So I think it's just Synovus. I think it's the industry has been very thoughtful about their use of capital and getting the appropriate price to deploy it.

Got it. I guess maybe pivoting to just credit quality. Talk to us when you think about year-end reserve ratio, what was baked into it in terms of the macro-outlook? And where are we seeing stress drivers of net charge-offs as we look forward?

It's interesting. When you look at the allowance, obviously, we feel like we have the appropriate allowance for outlook of like life of loan loss estimates. But what saw in the fourth quarter actually was, I guess, a slight increase in the allowance on C&I and a slight decrease on CRE. I mean the CRE portfolio continues to perform. And these are not big moves. I mean, you saw our allowance went up 2 basis points. These are minor moves. But I think that, that little trend is indicative of our outlook for 2024, where we think that you will see some losses in C&I, we feel good about our CRE portfolio. But when we think about the 30 to 40 basis points, feel good about that ratio but we think that, that's going to largely come from C&I in 2024.

And I appreciate these are relatively low numbers in terms of charge-offs. But when you -- what's the driver of the C&I losses? Is it an industry vertical? Is it in a market where you're seeing that?

You'll take that?

Sure. We are not -- we're pretty rehearsed on this. But it's not systemic. I mean I think when you look at the C&I losses, the one thing that we could point to that has commonality, a lot of these companies that have charged off had problems prior to the pandemic. And in many ways, the stimulus that was provided during the pandemic actually was a saving grace for these companies that help them to recapitalize their balance sheet. They took Main Street loans, they got PPP. And then what's happened on the other side is they've gone back into having margin compression and in many ways struggling from an operating model perspective. The other area we've seen some stress is where some of our previous clients sold to private equity. Generally, we're not a big financial sponsor shops, so we're not out doing a lot of those transactions but we'll follow a client. And if they sell themselves because we want to continue to bank the company from a depository and treasury side. And those companies have gotten levered in a couple of cases that pushed them into bankruptcy. So bankruptcies in the United States were up 23% last year. So banks weren't immune to that. We had our share of those. But I would tell you it's not specific to a geography or industry, it's more episodic as to -- these companies largely had stressed prior to COVID, and they've come out of the other side and they're seeing stress again. And to your point on the levels. We've heard a lot about CRE, and Jamie said, our charge-off forecast was more predicated in C&I. And we've had meetings even in the last couple of days on what we're seeing in CRE. We've gotten questions about multifamily. We've gotten questions on office. And couple of things that are just, I think, important to talk about, and I heard that from the previous speaker, not all real estate is the same. You can't paint this industry with a broad brush. When we look at our office portfolio, people say, what are your reserves on your office book? I had said, well, let me just give you a better number. We only have 2 loans. 2 loans that are in nonaccrual status, and both of them have been charged off. That's it. I mean we don't have any more there. And so we don't expect to see a bunch of additional losses with office. Then you get the question with multifamily. There's a lot of deliveries coming this year. Looks like there's about 700,000 units that are going to be added. We believe, based on the Southeast and where we are, there's about 700,000 units that will be in demand. And so although the deliveries are high, '25 there aren't a lot of delivery. So it looks like net absorption is going to be fine. I think fourth quarter of this past year was the third highest absorption rate of multifamily in the history of tracking it. So it shows you there's still pent-up demand. And although people are building new properties, there's a lack of single-family homes and people are still trying to get into these newer properties.

So you're not worried about the multifamily supply coming through this year and next in terms of...

No, we feel like it's fairly well balanced when you look at '24 and kind of the 700,000 coming on the marketplace and what the demand is projected to be, and then you look into '25, it actually looks like there's a deficiency in supply just based on the demand.

Got it. And a lot of the higher for longer stress we discussed on CRE. You talked about some of the C&I but most of your C&I borrowers, have they been against higher rates or they've just absorbed higher rates and moved on?

When we look at the charge offs, we haven't seen a lot of charge-offs that were a result of higher rates, right? I mean the larger credits, when we're underwriting those deals, if we think that rates are going to be an issue, we may require someone to swap that note to fixed rate. So there's lot of that on the books. But in many ways, Jamie and I talked about, these clients, if you're -- if 25, 50, 70 basis points in interest rate is what's pushing you from being able to cover your debt or not, we're underwriting with a little more flexibility and capacity than that. So we have not seen interest rates causing a problem. If you look into the future and our credit team went out and looked at all the maturities in '24 and '25 on the real estate side, fixed rate and said, what's our exposure to those clients that are going to see potentially a 300-basis point increase in the rate. It's about $250 million, $300 million. That's it. And the entire portfolio that would see a material increase. And if rates continue to decline, it's going to be even less. So although interest rates can cause challenges, I would submit that the biggest challenge for our VaRs has been the increase in labor cost, not the increase in debt expense just based on what they've seen. So borrowers are tremendously resilient. And at this point, they've been able to pass on that higher cost to their end users. And that's why you see the inflationary numbers that you see in the marketplace. So I think you got to look at both sides of the equation, and we do see with some of our data, our cash inflows, we're seeing some disinflation across the board and that should be healthy because I think that's what's driving a lot of the criticized and classified movement you're talking about. It's just compressions of people's margins when we're getting their updated financial statements. They're not making as much money as they made the prior year, which may result in a risk rating change, which could result in a special mention or watch credit. And that's what's driving most of the migration in -- on the front end of the credit side, not people moving all the way to charge-off.

And I think another data point to support exactly what you're saying is, if you look at FDMs, formerly known as TDRs, 70% of them just extensions only, no rate concession. And so it's not that -- the rate is not the issue for the vast majority. It's just an extension, and it's in still small dollars.

Got it. And the extension is a function of this in be a -- in a normal course, this loan would move off the balance sheet to...

Yes, we could move to permanent financing. It could have been renewal that you're saying instead of renewing it today at 7%, we'll extend it another year.

Got it. Maybe just switching to from an investment standpoint, a lot of focus on expense management but like through Synovus forward, last few years, you made a lot of investments in wealth management, Florida cap markets, just talk to us where the investment dollars are going and just the ability of the franchise to extract savings to continue to reinvest?

Well, look, it's -- I think it's part of our DNA now. So when we talked about expense discipline this time around, we tried not to put it in the context of a program because I think you can out program yourself by every year or 2 years. Somebody is asking, what's the new program. And so for 2023, when we saw the revenue headwinds, our leadership team came to the table, I challenged every leader to come out and say, look, depending on what happens with the economy, what happens to the top line, give me your plans to cut 10% of your expense. And we went through each executive leaders plan. Everybody came up with a 10% scenario but we evaluated the risk of each of those decisions. And we evaluated the cost of not making investments. And so I would tell you that it was excellent work but we came to a good equilibrium of being able to achieve roughly 0% year-over expense increases while continuing to invest in key areas. And so for us, those investments are going to continue to be in talent, I mean where we've added, as I mentioned, a lot of middle market talent. We're going to continue to do that. We've added on the wealth side. We're adding what we call our business owner wealth strategy, private wealth advisers. They're just focused on commercial owners of businesses. So they have a unique specialized focus. We've added on the technology side, we continue to invest in digital self-serve capabilities, our treasury products and solutions. And so for the things people talk the most about were MAAST in CIB. Both of those businesses, one, MAAST cost us about $12 million a year, CIB about $10 million a year. And so when you put that in context, we haven't made gigantic bets in the businesses. We've gone about it in a very regimen way where we make these investments, and we're not spending more money until we're actually getting the benefit. So CIB, our Corporate Investment Bank became PPNR positive in the first quarter of this year. And so we told them that we'll probably not add another vertical until we get through the latter part of this year. And then we would look to expand staff again, let's build -- we built the capacity now, let's fill it. On MAAST, we have 9 clients that are signed up for the platform. We have 40-some odd clients waiting to come on the platform. What we've done there is we've slowed the new sales to new clients because the last thing you would do is sit in the pipeline and ask when you're going to be onboarded. We want to double down on execution. We want to make it easier and scalable to get people on the platform. And so in both those cases, we've slowed the growth but we've done it intentionally. That's not going to impact our long-term success but just being smart in this current environment. And going forward, look, we cut 9% of our head count this year. A lot of that came out of the mortgage business just based on gearing ratios but we went through our front office, back office and found place to cut back, and it feels like it's not impacting client service levels. It's not impacting our ability to grow and generate growth, and generate new sources of revenue. So I feel like we have a good balancing act here between the two but we have to remain disciplined because if we see further headwinds on the revenue side, we have to go back to the same thing. It's headcount. It's third-party spend, it's real estate. The categories are the same. It's just how deeply you can cut it.

And just on MAAST. I think when you rolled this out, I'm not sure it was the first time at the Investor Day or you talked about it but a lot of excitement. Just give us a sense of any learning so far in terms of things that you had to tweak strategically relative to 2 years ago?

Yes. So when we rolled this out, we said that we had 3 investment hypotheses. Number one, the ISVs and the ISO markets wanted this product. And as I've said in the past, I think, based on the pipeline we have and who we've signed up, it shows that these companies want this product. Why do they want it? Because these Software-as-a-Service models or merchant acquiring companies are seeing their margins compress. And the easiest way to make more money is to provide more solutions to your clients. So if you can provide a banking solution end user, you can make more money. So who doesn't want to make more money. Two, that we had to have what we called the minimum viable product to be able to attract their end users MAAST as a solution. We've now rolled out our payment facilitation platform, which was facilitated by Qualpay, which was the company that we majority interest in. We now have savings accounts. We have debit cards. We have money movement. So we've built out the MVP product. The third leg of the stool was can we generate enough adoption by the end users that we start to make money. And that's the part of the thesis that we think will prove out but it's just taking a longer period of time to do so. And part of it is because the technology to onboard these new clients is much more manual than we would like. And that involves AML/BSA, involves all the things we're doing. And so that's part of why we've slowed things down. We want to get the client service model scalable and flexible to where we can onboard these clients. And let's not keep adding new. Once we do that, then we think we'll see end user adoption. And we have some new bells and whistles we hope to roll out this year, which will make it even more attractive for the end user. And I think when we do that, I think we're going to prove out the third leg of that stool.

Got it. I guess in a few minutes, we have maybe just switching very quickly to capital. I think Board approved a $300 million buyback authorization, I guess. Just talk to us around how you're thinking about the pace of those buybacks? What drives it to faster versus slower?

Yes. Well, first off, it's really nice to be where we are. We've created a lot of capital over the last couple of years and being in the middle of the range feels good. It allows us to be opportunistic. Clearly, we're not expecting a lot of loan growth. And so capital generated through earnings is going to be strong this year. So we'll be opportunistic with share repurchases. We'll be there to defend the stock but also we'll just continue to deploy that capital into share repurchases, but maintaining our -- the range that we're in now, the 10% to 10.5%, that feels right to us. We'll constantly watch the outlook -- the economic outlook in the environment and make sure that we have that in mind. But given what we see right now, we feel comfortable with where we are, and we'll stay balanced as we go through the year.

Got it. So you don't -- if the macro stays as is, you don't see capital ratios going about 10.5%. So either it's loan growth or buybacks. One...

Given everything that we see now, I would not expect that. I would expect...

Everything you see today -- as of today but if you see tomorrow?

And the reason I say it that way is because things can change, right, with the regulatory environment or who knows what's out there. And so given everything we see right now, I would not expect to go outside of our range, and I would expect us to be balanced. Obviously, deploying capital as much as we can to client loan growth. And then beyond that, we'll use -- capital generated through earnings, we'll use that through share repurchases or balance it.

And where does, if at all, like bank M&A fit here, is there an opportunity here where there are small peers who might be struggling but might be good deposit franchise that you could acquire or?

We've said the best investment we can make today is in Synovus. And when you look at the plans that we've laid out and our ability to win business, the footprint that we're serving, talent that we're bringing in, we think there's enough organic growth there that gives a compelling story that you don't need M&A. Obviously, the $100 billion mark is becoming a brighter line. And so for banks that want to pursue that strategy, it feels like it's going to be much more onerous not only to do the work but actually to overcome the incremental expense that you have to bear to do it. So for us, we're really focused on Synovus. And I do think, to your point, there are a lot of smaller banks that are looking to sell. There aren't a lot of acquirers. And I think you'd have to find the perfect match to do that but for us, we think that the best investments in ourselves and that can generate a lot of growth for our company but also for our shareholders.

Got it. I just want to quickly stop and see if anyone in the room had any questions? If you have any questions, raise your hand. If not, I guess, we will continue. So maybe just one more, Kevin. So we did the acquisition, I think it was 2018 when you announced FCB created a much larger franchise in Florida. Just talk to us how that's progressed from my recall? There's a big emphasis on wealth management at the time wit it across Florida as well. Just give us an update on the Florida franchise.

The thing -- going back to the thesis for FCB. Number one, we were already in Florida but we weren't in South Florida. And if you're going to be in the Southeast and you're going to represent yourself as a Southeastern franchise, we felt it was important to have more exposure into Central and South Florida, and we've done that. The franchise that we bought with FCB was largely a commercial bank that I think they had about 50 branches but we've closed some of the branch locations. But we've been able to build upon the strong middle market focus that they had here in South Florida. We've expanded our team run out of Fort Lauderdale. We've brought over some folks from larger institutions who's helped to supplement that team. And so I would tell you that the commercial strength and our density in this marketplace is an opportunity for future growth. The retail network was not as strong as we would have liked. I mean we're not -- I'll give you the good -- the pros and the cons of it, when rates were at 0 before, we didn't see the need to keep a lot of the higher cost single-serve CDs that Florida Community Bank had. So we ran those off. In retrospect, that took a lot of funding out of the South Florida franchise. And we're back here again now advertising promo rates in South Florida. So it wasn't the best deposit franchise, and we've had to improve that through the years. But when we look back, Jamie and his team, his corporate development team looks at what's -- go look at what's here from FCB, we basically bought it for tangible book value. And I don't need to tell many folks, if you could go buy a South Florida franchise a tangible value today, it's a pretty good deal, just given scarcity value. And so we think that we're happy we did the deal. There's always things we can learn from it. We wish the deposit franchise was a little better. We heard so many concerns about credit. It really didn't play out that way. And so I think it's a success. Now for us, our success going forward is to continue to look in those markets where we have a presence where we can have more density. And that means adding talent adding our treasury sales team, adding our private wealth team. We've added a trust team in South Florida, brokerage team, private wealth advisers because part of what FCB had, they didn't have a full-service regional bank model that provided all the solutions. And so we're able to provide that today. And I think I look back and I'm pretty happy that we have that franchise.

And remind me, just from a total branch count perspective, are we adding branches on a net basis?

We've been declining. And if you think about it, our transactions are declining about 5% to 6% a year. So as we continue to add more digital self-serve capabilities, fewer people are coming in the branch. And so we're taking those opportunities to continue to downsize the network, we're taking opportunities to do 2 for 1, 3 for 1s, where you're creating more of a hub and spoke model going forward. And so that will continue to be the trend. We were 300 branches 4 years ago, we're down about 246 today. And I think that you could see that trend continue to decline but at a much slower pace just as we have opportunities to condense.

And are you opening you opening any new branches in new markets?

We do what we do. We'll go and do relocations or if we find a marketplace like in Atlanta, where we want to be in a different micro MSA, we'll close one and open a new one but there's not a lot of just net new de novo branch growth.

Got it. With that, I know we're out of time. So Kevin, Jamie, thank you so much.

Thank you.

Thanks, Ebrahim.