Cadence Bank (NYSE:CADE) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

Michael Rose: Hi, good morning, guys. Thanks for taking my questions. Just wanted to start on your commentary around the fee businesses. Obviously, understand mortgage and service charges under pressures given the ECR, but can you just kind of lay out expectations for some of the other businesses, like, I know insurance obviously benefiting from a relatively hard pricing market. And I guess, maybe I’m a little bit of — on the trust in wealth side, maybe that’s a little bit harder to see, but it sounds like you’re kind of guiding or at least the outlook is to see kind of year-over-year progression. Can you just kind of walk through some thoughts there by business line? And maybe how we should think about them? Thanks.

James Rollins: Yes, I think you’ve covered some of that, Michael, good to hear from you. Mortgage is clearly flying into headwinds. I would expect that 1Q is not going to be a good quarter for mortgage hopefully, 2Q, 3Q, during normal home selling season will come back a little bit on that piece. We’re portfolioing more of those loans to the secondary market for ARMs is not working today if that market comes back on, and then we can fix that. That means we’re not collecting that gain on sale for the loans that we’re booking onto the balance sheet the ARMs. So, mortgage is clearly under pressure. I think you spot on insurance. Insurance looks to be in good shape today. I think we continue to win business. Our insurance team is growing customer base.

Our insurance team is growing their fee income and the hard insurance market will help us. So we expect to see good progress on the insurance side in 2023. The wealth management team is all similar to anybody else in wealth management, dependent upon asset values. So, depending upon what asset values do, this year will drive that revenue. We’re hoping that the market will move up and that, that we’ll see benefit there. And then, I think you hit the ACR on treasury management. We do believe that we’ll see some pressure because of rising ACR on treasury management. Other than that, though, I think our bank fees, we’ve already given back the pieces of the puzzle we needed to give back. And so, we continue to see stability there. Our card servicing fees, we continue to see increasing volume on cards.

We continue to see increasing average ticket, or average transaction on cards. So the card income continues to be moving up. Valerie, did I missed anything?

Valerie Toalson: I think you covered. That’s the big ones.

Michael Rose: It sounds like the big ones. Thanks for the color. Maybe just a question on capital and the repurchase. It sounded like, if I got this right from the prepared comments that maybe buybacks wouldn’t be a near-term thing, maybe like capital, build a little bit here is kind of the operational efficiencies from the merger continue to play out. Is that the way to think about it, that maybe near term purchases, not on the forefront, but maybe, think about it more usage in the back half?

James Rollins: Yes, I think that’s a fair way, Michael, to look. I think, we want to be prepared, if the market backs up on us. We certainly have that in our tool kit. We can take advantage of the market if it backs up. But we’re currently watching where we are. We’re watching the economy. They are still unknowns in front of us and we want to make sure that we’re fully prepared.

Michael Rose: Okay. And then maybe just finally for me, just on the margin, back to the margin color. I assume you– Valerie, you’re talking about the core margin. I believe last quarter you kind of talked about accretion income for the year, somewhere in the $22 million to $23 million range. It’s obviously higher this quarter. I just wanted to clarify that and then get any sort of updated expectations for what you’d expect for scheduled accretion for this year? Thanks.