BankUnited, Inc. (NYSE:BKU) Q1 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

Steven Alexopoulos: Yes. Raj, if I could follow up on what you just said, so when we look at the results we’re seeing from the industry, it’s very clear that what you have in your slides, right, there was a week of outflows or a couple of days, and then it’s pretty much back to normal, I know CNBC is going out of the way to convince everybody we’re in a crisis. We’re not. But the question is, do your customers still think we’re at a crisis because they’re watching CNBC or when you talk to them, do they feel like, okay, that was a storm, it’s over, and it’s pretty much back to business as usual now?

Rajinder P. Singh: Yes. If I was to describe this, it was and try and draw comparisons to 2009, this felt like a tornado, 2009 felt like a hurricane. Hurricanes come to give you a little bit of a warning, they’re headed your way. They sit on you for maybe two, three, four days, a long period of time to do a lot of widespread destruction. Tornados hit you with little to no notice, do a lot of disruption, but it’s very localized and then they are gone. And that’s what this feels like. It happened with little to no warning. I mean I didn’t know that a week before that this was going to happen. I’m not sure anyone did. And it happened, it happened very fast, and it went back normal with clients not with CNBC, but with our clients, it went back to normal a week later.

So we’re still a little shell shocked to be honest. We’re still worried is the tornado season could this happen again, is another one which might happen, which is normal. The building codes, i.e., regulations will change to make the structures, i.e., bank stronger going forward, and there’ll be a price for that. But there is a difference between what 2009 felt like and what this feels like. This was very, very sudden. 2009 was not very sudden. We saw that happen over all of 2008, starting in 2007 and then bottoming that in 2009 early. So it is a little different, clients aren’t — we’re not showing them slides anymore. We showed them slides for about a week about how we’re — every bank was doing this, by the way. This is us. This is Silicon Valley Bank, and this is Signature and how we’re different.

That lie was used for about a week. And after that, it’s no longer in any pitch book or anything that’s been taken out. We’re not talking about safety and soundness issues, we’re talking about products and services and selling the way we were back in February.

Thomas M. Cornish: And I’d also add, when you talk to clients, if you look at our target client, there’s an entrepreneur running a $40 million plumbing supply company. They’re actually not reading the Wall Street Journal and CNBC and they don’t have a Bloomberg screen on their desk. They’re running their business. They’re not as panicky about these kinds of issues.

Steven Alexopoulos: Thanks for taking all my questions. Appreciate the color.

Operator: Thank you. One moment for our next question. Our next question comes from the line of David Rochester with Compass Point. Your line is open.

David Rochester: Hey, good morning guys. Sorry to extend the call here, but just had a few follow-ups. I’ll make it quick. On the expense side, I appreciated your comments about hitting the high end of that guidance range which I believe was mid to high single digits, so you’re talking about a high single-digit growth pace. It looks like that implies a pretty decent step down in that quarterly run rate from here, I was hoping you could just maybe ballpark that for Q2?

Leslie Lunak: Like Raj said, I think we’re in the process — we had that $4.4 million operational loss. That was pretty unusual for us. I don’t expect anything like that to recur. We’ve actually never had anything like that in the past. That’s going to be gone. As Raj said, we’re also taking a pretty hard look right now at the expense base. While we don’t want to sacrifice the investment we’re making in teams of producers, we are taking a pretty hard look at the rest of the expense base right now and seeing that there’s areas where we can pull back or push things out.

David Rochester: Okay. And then on the margin, I appreciated your 250 for the year comment. I was wondering if you had any rate cuts in that, and then in terms of the cadence, it sort of sounds like you’re looking for maybe a little bit of a bigger step down in 2Q and then possibly stability from there, how are you thinking about that?

Leslie Lunak: So we used the consensus forward curve and I think there are 225 basis point rate cuts baked into that later in the year. And yes, you’re probably right about the cadence being lower in Q2 given the starting point.

David Rochester: Alright. And then on the deposits, I know the scenario you gave for the 250 is included. It’s not only flat funding mix, I believe you said. But then you talked about the solid pipeline there on the deposit front, I know it can take a little while for some of those to pan out, but just wanted to get a sense of the size of that opportunity if you’re talking about hundreds of millions or maybe billions, and then to the discussion earlier on the GDA mix, I was just curious what that component and the pipeline you’re seeing right now?

Rajinder P. Singh: Yes. I think on the guidance, that’s just mathematically just to show you, we ran the numbers assuming everything is flat. That’s — we kind of made that a base case.

Leslie Lunak: On the NIM guidance.