Business First Bancshares, Inc. (NASDAQ:BFST) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

But I would anticipate that, that would go back to kind of its normal rate. I did want to take just a moment point out because unless you look at our deck, you wouldn’t be aware just based on the screens that our loan loss provision has increased to $0.83, which is higher than it’s been over the course of the year, but still low relative to peers. But on Page 17, you can see the fair value discount when you add that into the overall loan loss provision, you get an effective on loss revision of 1 4, which is well situated, we believe, relative to our peers and relative to the exposure in our books. So I feel like each quarter, we need to kind of reintroduce the idea that we have a fair value discount built in on top of the loan loss provisions and the loan loss revision, of course, is would what screens when you compare banks, the fair value discount you have to get from our deck.

So that was a 20 and change accretion number hanging out there that I talked about. That materially impact our preparation for any adverse incidents over the next year.

Unidentified Analyst: Perfect, thanks for answering that question.

Jude Melville: Sure. Thanks for being here.

Operator: We do have a follow-up with Feddie Strickland with Janney Montgomery Scott. Your line is open.

Feddie Strickland: Hey sorry guys. Just had one more question. I appreciate the disclosure on the growth by region. You noted that Texas is about 35% of on paper and some balances now. Jude, could you just tell us kind of what your thinking is over the longer term there? Does that grow towards 50%? Do you have a target number? Or is it just kind of depend on where growth is in the future?

Jude Melville: So a couple of years ago, we said on our latest 5-year plan. And a couple of the components of the plan were age to grow. So we will need to double our loan book over the 5 years. But as we grew, we wanted to increase diversification. So another primary goal of the 5-year plan was to have — to end up with 50% of our credit exposure outside of Louisiana, not anything being wrong with Louisiana, but we believe in diversification, in particular learning a little bit about the market reaction to perceive exposure to energy in South Louisiana. We certainly felt like there were some benefits, although we did not struggle through that period, we also recognized that we have an obligation to try to be perceived as strong as we can in addition to being as strong as we can.

And so part of that is diversification. And part of that was a goal of being 50% outside of Louisiana. We didn’t say Texas specifically, but given the choice of investments we could make 2, 3 years ago. We felt like those were — that was the right place to do that. And then given the success that we’ve had there, we feel like building on that success makes sense. So I would say the bulk of that 50% non-Louisiana exposure that we expect to reach the conclusion of our 5-year plan would most likely be in the Dallas and Houston areas. And so certainly, we’ve had some success there, moving to 35%. I believe we were at 6% or 7% when we began the 5-year plan. And so we’re ahead of schedule and hopefully we’ll have that within range prior to hitting the 5-year mark.