BankFinancial Corporation (NASDAQ:BFIN) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

Brian Martin: Okay. And then on the commercial finance side, I think, the…

F. Morgan Gasior: Yeah. There you…

Brian Martin: with higher?

F. Morgan Gasior: There you are looking at anywhere between Prime plus half on the low side, which gets you, if there’s a modest bump here in the Fed funds rate and the Prime rate here in the first quarter, that’s 8.25% on the low side. And then you can see Prime plus 2 on the high side. So if you again weighted average that, depending on the mix in the portfolio, you can get yourself in the mid-9s, which is kind of where we are trying to target it.

Brian Martin: Got you. Okay. And — okay. And then just on the, I guess, just jumping — you said, the pipelines today in general are, I guess, it sounds like you kind of outlined where you are targeting your growth, but just the pipeline in general support, I guess, kind of the outlook that you are kind of talking about here today that seems fair?

F. Morgan Gasior: Yeah. I think it explains the pipelines in healthcare are the strongest. There’s quite a bit of activity out there now, plus we have the opportunity for greater line utilization, right? So let’s assume we are trying to grow that portfolio by $40 million, $20 million of it is quite foreseeable based on greater line utilization. But we think we probably will do better than that with growth and commitments. The next area to focus on is commercial finance and government finance. Those pipelines are relatively thin right now. That’s where the marketing has got to come from. Lessor financed, there’s some opportunities there. That one is the hardest to predict growth, because it tends to have line utilization during the quarter, but period end, they usually discount the transactions from the lines and you don’t see much quarter-over-quarter growth in that portfolio.

And then community finance, so the business finance side, we have got some new product development that’s just rolling out right now. That’s intended for our small business customers who are also seeing some liquidity consumption. They will probably need some credit support during the course of the year. No more PPP, no more ERTC, no more EIDL. So we will see some modest growth there. But healthcare, we feel the strongest about, the others are really going to be a function of marketing and growth. So that’s why we have kind of underweighted those until we can prove up the efficacy of the marketing.

Brian Martin: Got you. Okay. And just maybe one on the payments or the payoffs this quarter, I guess, you have kind of talked about maybe the payoffs coming down a bit at least in one area, there was one you mentioned. But just in general, kind of should we expect or I guess, are you expecting the payoffs in 2023 to be a bit lower than what they were in 2022 or just trying to gauge kind of the trend, I mean, the trend in the last two quarters has been definitely lower. So just trying to understand if that’s kind of a trend you expect to continue? It sounds like it is.

F. Morgan Gasior: Well, certainly, in the real estate portfolio, we would expect lower prepays compared to 2022 and that’s in two dimensions. One, the rate environment right now doesn’t really lead — lend itself to a significant amount of refinances from our portfolio. Two, the multifamily markets in a bit of transition with higher debt service requirements on new purchases, maybe somewhat higher cap rates, maybe somewhat lower NOIs. We are seeing real estate taxes in almost all markets take a bite out of NOIs compared to the last couple of years. So those building valuations and the relative trading values might alter a bit during 2023. So I would say the fourth quarter payoff rates were probably a reasonable proxy for what’s going to happen in 2023, absent a material change in the rate environment.