BankUnited, Inc. (NYSE:BKU) Q4 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

BankUnited, Inc. (NYSE:BKU) Q4 2023 Earnings Call Transcript January 26, 2024

BankUnited, Inc. isn’t one of the 30 most popular stocks among hedge funds at the end of the third quarter (see the details here).

Operator: Good day, and thank you for standing by. Welcome to the BankUnited Financial Fourth Quarter and Full Year 2023 Earnings Call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. After the speaker’s presentation, there will be a question-and-answer session. [Operator Instructions] Please be advised today’s conference is being recorded. I would now like to hand the conference over to your speaker today, Susan Greenfield, Corporate Secretary. Please go ahead.

Susan Greenfield: Thank you, Kevin. Good morning, and thank you for joining us today. On the call this morning are Raj Singh, our Chairman, President and CEO; Leslie Lunak, our Chief Financial Officer; and Tom Cornish, our Chief Operating Officer. Before we start, I’d like to remind everyone that this call may contain forward-looking statements within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995 that reflect the company’s current views with respect to, among other things, future events and financial performance. Any forward-looking statements made during this call are based on the historical performance of the company and its subsidiaries or on the company’s current plans, estimates and expectations. The inclusion of this forward-looking information should not be regarded as a representation by the company that the future plans, estimates or expectations contemplated by the company will be achieved.

Such forward-looking statements are subject to various risks and uncertainties and assumptions, including without limitation, those relating to the company’s operations, financial results, financial condition, business prospects, growth strategy and liquidity, including as impacted by external circumstances outside the company’s direct control such as adverse events impacting the financial services industry. The company does not undertake any obligation to publicly update or review any forward-looking statements, whether as a result of new information, future developments or otherwise. A number of important factors could cause actual results to differ materially from those indicated by the forward-looking statements. These factors should not be concerned as exhaustive.

Information on these factors can be found in the company’s annual report on Form 10-K for the year ended December 31, 2022, and any subsequent quarterly report on Form 10-Q or current report on Form 8-K, which are available at the SEC’s website, www.sec.gov. With that, I’d like to turn the call over to Raj.

Raj Singh: Thank you, Susan. Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining us for the earnings call. About nine months ago, right after March Madness, at the first quarter earnings, we kind of laid out for you what our short-term strategic imperatives are. And they’re roughly where, if we do the summarize them by let’s say improve the balance sheet do then improve the P&L. And improve the balance sheet means, on the left side of the balance sheet, it relied less on resi and bonds and more C&I and CRE growth. The right side of the balance sheet rely more on core funding, defend DDA and if we did all that, margin would expand and of course, keep expenses in check and keep credit front and center given that we’re in uncertain times.

So, over the last couple of quarters, we kind of lay out for you how we did against those stated goals. I’m happy to announce the fourth quarter of 2023 was a continuation of that story. Deposits grew nicely, $426 million, despite the fact that includes a couple of $100 million of and brokered coming down. So, excluding brokered, our deposits grew $604 million. NIDDA was down for seasonal adjustment, literally happened in the last two, three days of the quarter. Average DDA were actually down only $28 million but period-end were down more. And on the wholesale funding came down as it did last quarter, FHLB, brokered everything was down. And on the left side of the balance sheet, just like last quarter, resi loans came down $172 million, bonds also came down $100 million, but we had growth in our core segments, C&I and CRE as well.

I was actually — at the beginning of the quarter, I was so seeing like it might be a flat quarter for CRE, but it also grew. So, total between C&I and CRE, we grew $476 million. On credit, by the way, all of this led to margin expansion again. So, margin expanded from 2.56% last quarter 2.60%. And if we keep doing this margin, we’ll keep expanding, and we’ll talk about next year in a little bit — I think just go through the rest of the fourth quarter first. NPAs, on the credit side, NPAs ticked down from 40 basis points to 37 basis points. And if you exclude SBA loans, then 25 basis points. So NPA’s are getting to a place where they’re so low that it will be harder to drive them down, but charge-offs 9 basis points for the year. If we compare that to last year, I think we were at 22 basis points, if I remember right.

So charge-offs for the full year have been fantastic. And we build reserve again a little bit this quarter — I’m sorry, I still keep calling it reserve — I mean ACL. So 82 basis points, it was 80 basis points last quarter. Criticized assets did increase this quarter, as you would expect, this time in the cycle. But overall, in credit, with charge-offs being where they are, NPAs being where they are and our reserve or ACL, being where it is, I’m sleeping very well at night. Capital is robust. CET1 is now 11.4% and TCE to TA also is now at 7%. Unrealized losses in the securities portfolio improved by over $100 million and AOCI net of tax improved by $50 million. So liquidity position stayed strong. So that’s almost become a moving point at this juncture.

So by the way, there are a couple of — sort of notable items in the P&L which we highlighted in the earnings release, the FDIC assessment, which you guys all knew about, about $35 million. And also, we sold some railcars this quarter, and that was a $6.5 million charge. This actually helps us avoid some expenses in the coming quarters, which the $6.5 million is significantly less than the expenses that we avoid, if we had not sold these railcars. So some reprofiting expenses. So happy about that as well. So what are we seeing in the marketplace? The marketplace, there I’d say we’re seeing a soft landing where we‘re seeing the perfect sort of thing, which we’re all worried that the Fed will never be able to achieve, but it might be actually achieving that.

On mainstream, we’re not seeing a slowdown. We’re not seeing a slowdown in either a loan demand or in margins. We’re not seeing concerns in the credit beyond sort of the day-to-day concern that we always have. So we’re seeing a pretty decent economy, especially in Florida, we’re seeing a pretty strong economy and we need to feel more optimistic than even three months ago. With that in mind, I would say that for 2024 guidance, what we will say to you is, given what we see in the economy and the rate environment, it feels like this year, the strategy is going to stay the same, by the way. It’s to improve the left side of the balance sheet, like I just described, we’ve been doing over the last couple of quarters, the last three quarters. And also improving the right side of the balance sheet.

So we finished our planning for the year just a couple of weeks ago and what it comes out to is high single-digit growth in deposits, not including brokers, so brokers would actually want to take down, continue to take down FHLB. And on the lending side, again, on the C&I, CRE front, high single-digits growth. Resi will continue to shrink probably similar to the amount that it shrank this year, give or take, and NIDDA is where the focus will remain. And we’d like NIDDA to get back over 30%, probably. It’s hard to say when that will happen, but we certainly are gearing the whole company up to shoot for that to get back over 30% over time. It may not happen in the year. It may happen in a couple of years. But that still will be the most important thing we’ll be chasing.

Margins should continue to improve. I mean the first quarter will probably be flattish, give or take 1 or 2 basis points. But after that, margin is a steady increase up into all of this year and into next year. And expenses will be mid-single digits in terms of expense growth. Am I missing anything? Or you can fill in if I miss anything else? And in terms of capital, at least this is the question that will come up to the very first question, I might as well answer it. For the time being, we stay on the sidelines and share repurchases at the February Board meeting, we’ll talk about it again with the board. But I think in the short-term, that’s going to be our stand. In the medium term, it will probably change but we need to see a little more time before we get back into capital repurchase.

There is a dividend discussion that is coming up in February, and I do expect the Board to act positively of that. With that, let me turn it over to — by the way, I’m recovering from a cold, so I tend to lose my vocal cords after a while. So if I speak less is not because I don’t want to, I love speaking, but just a disclosure if I may have to stop. But Leslie, I’ll turn it over to you. Tom first.

Thomas Cornish : Okay. Thanks, Raj. So first off — I’ll start a little bit on the deposit side. So as Raj mentioned, we were up $426 million for the quarter and non-brokered total deposits were grown by $604 million, excluding the non-brokered piece. The overall pipeline for deposits still continues to look very robust. Our near-term pipeline is about $1 billion, which is heavily dominated by operating account business and NIDDA business, in line with Raj’s comments about continuing to emphasize that business. That pipeline has remained strong for a couple of quarters now. And I think it looks very good as we head into the first part of 2024. On the loan side, overall loans grew by $277 million for the quarter. As Raj outlined consistent with the strategy, Resi did decline by $172 million, CRE was up by $77 million for the quarter.

We were happy with that growth. And the C&I growth across all segments, lines, geographies, specialties was up almost $400 million, $399 million for the quarter. So that was an excellent quarter for us in the C&I area. And mortgage warehouse was also actually up a bit for the quarter. We’re starting to see some recovery in that sector as rates trended down, and we saw a bit more activity on the residential side. As Raj indicated, franchise equipment and municipal finance were down modestly, and those will probably continue to trend in that direction for 2024. We’re optimistic about the growth of core C&I and CRE for the year. We are, I think, blessed to be in excellent markets and excellent individual geographies. I think we’ve got great talent, groups of people in the right places in the specialties in Florida, the Southeast, our office in Dallas now.

In many parts of the company, we’re just seeing very, very good growth opportunities on the C&I side. We have an extremely robust C&I pipeline in all areas of that corporate banking commercial and the small business unit, we’re seeing just good quality opportunities across the franchise. We do think as we look towards the latter part of the year, we did have CRE growth for the year. I think we’re pretty well positioned from a CRE perspective as we head into the year given that our overall numbers in the CRE portfolio are fairly modest at 23.6% of total risk-based capital — of loan, I’m sorry, total loans and 13% of construction on total risk-based capital. So we’ve got plenty of opportunities in the future. The market now at rates where they are, is a bit muted, but also as we talk to clients looking towards the latter half of the year, we do see opportunities with clients that have capital at play.

And I think compared to other banks that have much larger CRE and construction exposure issues, I think we’ll be in a good position to selectively take advantage of some good quality opportunities as we get to the second half of the year if the rate market performs the way it’s expected to perform. So with that, let me spend a few minutes on the CRE portfolio. You also have greater detail in Slides 12 through 14 of the supplemental deck, where we’ve provided additional disclosure. So the CRE portfolio does remain modest at 23.6% of total loans, CRE to total risk-based capital is 169%, well below the regulatory guidance threshold. At December 31, the weighted average LTV of the CRE portfolio was 56% and the weighted average debt service coverage ratio was 1.80%.

About 16% of the CRE portfolio matures in the next 12 months and about 8% matures in the next 12 months in this fixed rate. Everybody’s favorite topic is office. So let’s talk a little bit about office. Specifically, we have just a little under $1.8 billion of office exposure. The majority of that is in Florida. Within that, a little over $300 million is medical office buildings. So that — we think that asset class will perform differently. It is in a much stronger position than kind of office sort of nationwide. So our overall traditional office portfolio is around $1.5 billion. During the quarter, we had payoffs totaling $88 million in the office portfolio including what had been our largest office loan in the overall portfolio that went to the CMBS market at the end of the year.

Our total office exposure was down $78 million for the quarter. It was also down in the third quarter by $30 million, so we’re down to $108 million in the last two quarters of office exposure, which is significant as a percentage of the overall. Consistent with the prior quarter, the weighted average LTV of the office portfolio was 65%, weighted average debt service coverage ratio was 1.7% at December 31. We’ve provided some of the breakdown of those numbers by geography on Slide 12. Substantially all of the portfolio was performing and 92% was pass rated to December 31. Overall, the portfolio continues to perform well, is characterized by strong sponsors who are supporting underlying properties generally with low basis in the underlying properties, and we do not expect much in the way of loss content from the office portfolio.

As I mentioned, 60% of the office portfolio is in Florida, where demand and demographics continue to be generally favorable, substantially all of the portfolio is suburban. There’s some charts on Slide 14 that gives you some further geographic breakdown of Florida and the New York Tri-State portfolio is by the submarket. Just as a side story, I was in West Palm Beach last week, visiting a private equity client in their office building in downtown West Palm Beach, I pulled into the building and could not find a parking space and had to leave the building and go find public parking somewhere else. So I thought that was a pretty good indicator of the health of the office market in that particular geography that we’re in. With respect to the New York Tri-State portfolio, 42% is in Manhattan, which totals approximately $180 million.

Our Manhattan office portfolio has 96% occupancy in the 12-month lease rollover of 3%. The remainder is in Long Island and the boroughs and the surrounding tri-state area. Overall, rent rollover in the next 12 months is a small portion of the portfolio at 11%. $146 million of CRE office were rated below pass. The 12/31/23. This compares to $90 million at 09/30/23, an increase of $56 million. Most of this increase is a result of tenants vacating space in some buildings, which is putting pressure release temporarily on cash flows and increased insurance costs and interest rate cost to part of it. There is — in most office buildings today, there is a phenomenon even if you re-lease the space, you have a concessionary period of time. In generally, unless it’s a very short period of time, 90 days or less, we count that cash flow, even if we have an investment-grade tenant signed up to replace that.

So we are seeing some of this turnover in the portfolio, and we’ll work through parts of this. With that, I’ll turn it over to Leslie for more details on the quarter.

Leslie Lunak: Okay. Thanks, Tom. So net income from the quarter was $20.8 million or $0.27 per share, obviously, impacted by the FDIC special assessment that was $35.4 million pre-tax. We also sold or in some cases, entered into agreements to sell some railcars at EFG for a loss of $6.5 million. That compares to a gain of $4.2 million on similar transactions last quarter. So you see a pretty big $10 million swing in fee income quarter-over-quarter, but it’s pretty much all related to those railcar sales. There may be some more of this over the next few quarters, but we don’t expect it to net out to anything material in the aggregate in terms of gains and losses, although it could be lumpy. Net was 2.60% for the quarter compared to 2.56% last quarter.

Earning asset yields went up from 5.52% to 5.70%. The yield on securities increased from 5.48% to 5.73%. There were some coupon resets in there. Some of these things only reset quarterly or annually. So we’re still seeing coupon resets fill through, through the portfolio and some retrospective accounting adjustments. The yield on loans was up from 5.54% to 5.69%. Cost of deposits was up 22 basis points to 2.96%. I’ll mention that, that 22 point — 22 basis point increase this quarter compares to a 28 basis point increase last quarter. So for the last several quarters now, we’ve seen that rate of increase slow quarter-over-quarter, which is a good sign. Average cost of FHLB advances was pretty much flat, but the average balance was down almost $500 million, and that also contributed positively to the margin.

A little bit more about 2024 guidance. Following up on what Raj said, we do expect the NIM to expand overall in 2024, although Q1 will likely be flattish down a little, maybe up a little. I do want to say, I know there’s a lot of curiosity about this NIM expand — the forecasted NIM expansion is a result of what we’re doing on the balance sheet. It’s a result of the transformation that we’re doing on both the left side and the right side of the balance sheet, it actually doesn’t tap much at all to do with whether there’s two cuts, three cuts, six cuts, that’s not going to change the picture. The static balance sheet is pretty neutral. It’s very, very modestly asset-sensitive, but hopefully, the balance sheet isn’t going to be static, and that’s what’s going to drive the NIM, it’s balance sheet composition, not what the Fed does.

Our forecast does have four cuts in it, one each quarter, but that’s not really the driver. And we see NIM getting into the high 2s by the end of 2024. We’re projecting a mid-single-digit increase in net interest income, along with the increase in the NIM, even though we expect the total balance sheet to remain relatively flat. Provision this quarter was $19 million, and the ACL-to-loan ratio increased from 80 to 82 basis points. The ratio of the ACL to nonperforming loans increased to 160% from 143% and the main drivers of this quarter’s provision included commercial production and the remixing of the portfolio and some increase in criticized classified assets. There’s a waterfall chart in the deck that shows you all the things that drove the change in the reserves for the quarter.

I would say for 2024, we do expect the ACL to continue to build as a percentage of the portfolio composition shifts more towards commercial versus residential loans and the commercial loans, obviously generally carry higher reserves. The other thing I would make a point of saying is our pre-reserve is almost 3x our historical lifetime through-cycle loss rate. I get that, particularly with respect to office, we’re looking in a little bit different world now than we have been historically, but that is a lot of cushion. Non-interest income and expense. We already talked about the FDIC special assessment in the railcar sale. The increase in comp compared to the prior quarter, we’re very happy about because it’s related to the impact of the increase in our stock price on the value of RSU and PSU award.

So we don’t wish that away. I don’t think there’s anything else of note to talk about the non-interest income and expense. The ETR was low this quarter mainly because of state RTP true-ups and the outsized impact they have on the ETR in the quarter where the pre-tax signings number is a little lower. Excluding any discrete items, I would expect the ETR for next year to be around 25.5%. And that’s all I have. I’ll turn it over to Raj for any closing remarks you want to make.

Raj Singh: So listen, given where we’re coming from over the last few months, this is a pretty good place. The progress that we’ve made, when I couple that with the momentum I’m seeing in the business, and the health of the economy, which we don’t control, but we’re certainly very grateful for and it impacts our bottom line. So when I look to 2024, I haven’t felt as optimistic in quite some time. So it’s a good place to start the year. I’ll open this up for Q&A. Operator, we’re ready for Q&A.

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Q&A Session

Operator: [Operator Instructions]. Our first question comes from Will Jones with KBW.

Will Jones: I wanted to just start back on the margin guidance. That was really great color you gave just in terms of the margin really benefiting more of the balance sheet composition that go around as opposed to what rates do moving forward. But I guess the question is, the loan side is in process of changing. You guys have really done a lot of heavy lifting on the deposit side. Is the lift really coming from more one or the other? Or is the combination of both. [indiscernible]. Yes, go ahead.

Raj Singh : Yes, I mean, we haven’t — we can’t tell you mathematically like what part of it comes from what side of the other [indiscernible], I mean work needs to be done on both sides. And the comment that Leslie made about the Fed moves in our base numbers, we just use whatever the forward curve was, which was four cuts.

Leslie Lunak : When we put [indiscernible].

Raj Singh : Right. Exactly a month ago, when we put that our budget. But if it was two cuts or three cuts, four cuts or five cuts, it doesn’t really matter. That’s how the balance sheet is structured right now. Now if it’s something really out of that feel of the day, they go down 10 cuts or something, something silly like could raise rates four or more times or that will be a different thing. But we didn’t extra cut or 2 or less doesn’t matter the guidance we’re giving. It’s — it has more to do with our ability to keep doing what we’ve done in the last three quarters.

Leslie Lunak: And I will say, well, the expansion that you’ve seen over the last couple of quarters has been more related to funding mix. But going forward, we’re really starting to get some good traction on the C&I and CRE core growth. So I think it’s both going forward. It’s not more one than the other since [indiscernible].

Will Jones: Yes, obviously I think those slides are important. But just in terms of the loan remix you guys are doing rolling off Resi and adding on C&I and CRE, where do you see that trade-off in yields on the portfolio as you kind of roll off some lower-yielding stuff and then add on some of the newer loans?

Leslie Lunak: I mean today, well, the C&I increase that is coming on around 8, give or take, maybe a little more. And the Resi stuff that’s rolling off — I mean the Resi portfolio has an average yield in the mid-3s. So the big pickup. And we’re also seeing, by the way, even still, and I don’t know how long this will last, but at least for now, the spreads that we’re putting on, on new commercial production are wider than the spreads on commercial loans that are rolling off, even if it’s all floating rate product. Some of that is market conditions and some of that is that we’re just doing a slightly different kind of business. We’ve moved away from some of the SNCs and things that we were doing and doing more bilateral relationship-based business, which also tends to come on at a little bit wider spreads.

Thomas Cornish: If you look, for example, at this year where we finished out, if you looked at every core lending group, corporate, commercial, small business and CRE, the internal spreads that we measure each group for the entire year finished with better spreads than they did in 2022. So we see incremental margin improvement in each of the lending teams.

Leslie Lunak: So all of that is happening.

Raj Singh: And that’s what the pipeline looks like. At some point, maybe spreads will come back later, but we don’t see that yet.

Will Jones: Yes. Okay. That makes sense. And Raj, I’ll ask because I feel like this is an important moment for you guys. It feels like there’s quite a bit of optimism as to where the margin could go by the end of the year, it feels like this is really one of the first years where in a while that you guys are kind of maybe pulling back a little bit on expense growth. Is this the year where we start to see some operating leverage really play out, especially in the back half of 2024?

Raj Singh: Yes. I know in terms of expenses and operating leverage, I’d rather achieve that through the revenue side than from the expense side. We have done a fairly large expense takeout exercise just before the pandemic. And I’ll tell you that something you cannot do every couple of years. Otherwise, you won’t really have much left. So you really have to invest. So we are continuing to invest in the markets — core markets and the new markets that we have talked to you about over the last couple of years. And operating leverage should really come from expanding margins. And top line growth we’ll come talk to you about growing total balance sheet as well. It may not be in the next two, three quarters because it’s still a transforming balance sheet as a story.

But Leslie is kicking into the table because I’m not supposed to talk about 2025. But if I was to take a wild guess, I would say that 2025 and beyond, I think we go back to the normal world of growing the balance sheet rather than just transforming it.

Will Jones: Yes. Okay. That’s great color. Last quick one for me. The gains and losses that you guys see selling the operating lease equipment, is that ordinary course of business for you guys? Or were those really kind of more one-time?

Leslie Lunak: I think we’re trying to pare down on asset classes we don’t think are core to the future of our business. So you’ll probably see some more of that over the course of the next several quarters. I wouldn’t call it one-time, but it’s not something we’ve done forever either. So you should expect to see some more of that. And although it will be lumpy, I don’t expect it to be net-net material over the course of the next year.

Will Jones: So it’s odds equal, I mean, maybe that lease financing business, maybe it’s not. We don’t see much growth there for the foreseeable.

Leslie Lunak: No, it should shrink.