Brookline Bancorp, Inc. (NASDAQ:BRKL) Q1 2024 Earnings Call Transcript

Chris O’Connell: Got it. And I know last quarter was pretty light on the M&A discussions. I mean has there been any pickup at all on kind of your general market or discussions since then.

Paul A. Perrault: Yeah. May be maybe a little bit, but it’s not too strong, because it’s so difficult. I mean everybody pushes the stuff around and you get these capital holds. The holes are just way too big to fill from a capital perspective at the moment. Part of the problem is that the investment bankers have nothing to do. So they come up with all these great ideas.

Chris O’Connell: Got it. And just in general I guess going forward, I mean, what are you guys thinking about in terms of a normalized charge-off rate in this type of environment?

Paul A. Perrault: Well, certainly less than we saw in Q1 is where I plan to be headed. It’s a little bit difficult early in the cycle here that I tried to pick a number. But if you look at our charge-off behaviour, in our past, that was a lot more comfortable so that’s where we really tried to get to.

Chris O’Connell: Great. That’s all I had. Thanks for taking my questions.

Paul A. Perrault: Thanks Chris.

Operator: This concludes our question and answer session. I’d like to turn the conference back over to Mr. Perrault, for any closing remarks.

Paul A. Perrault: Thank you, Emily. And thank you all for joining us this afternoon. And we will look forward to talking with you again in the next quarter. Have a good day.