CapStar Financial Holdings, Inc. (NASDAQ:CSTR) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

Feddie Strickland: Just want to go back to expenses for a second and make sure I understand the expense guide. If I back out that $1.5 million in mortgage expenses from the fourth quarter numbers. I think I get about $15.9 million, $16 million in the fourth quarter of 2022 is kind of the core bank expenses and that’s actually down a little bit in the quarter? But your guidance seems to imply expenses ex mortgage are going to rise to $17.4 million on a quarterly basis. Are we going to see that all occur starting in the first quarter or is that sort of an average quarterly rate for the year? And just – if you average all the quarters together, that’s what you’ll yet?

Tim Schools: First of all, good job and good math because that’s pretty much what we came up with. So yes, so CapStar to me is a little unusual versus some of the other banks that we’ve got these fee businesses. And so sometimes – it’s frustrating even internally to get your arms around it because I’m used to maybe just a bigger steadier balance sheet – and more of the fees on the deposit service charges which are steady. So that’s why in the past we’ve said, hey, $16.5 million. I mean we don’t want to – I don’t want to be ultraconservative, but also I want to under-promise and over deliver. So we’ve generally been under that $16.5 million a little bit. I know there were some questions after third quarter. But that’s generally what we came up with in fourth quarter is that we’ve continued to operate under that range that we put out there when you reverse the recovery in fourth quarter, we also got about $15.8 million.

If you put $1.5 million on that, it’s like you said remember there’ll be the $800,000 additional for the SBA. And then remember in first quarter FICA comes back. So that is a number that comes back in. And secondly, fourth quarter didn’t have any executive incentive accrual because we had backed out $600,000 or $800,000 in third quarter and then did not do any in fourth quarter. So I can get with you offline, but you generally are on track Feddie, but just keep in mind you’ve added back the recovery, you’ve got FICA tax coming back. I think the executive accrual runs when is it $200,000 or $250,000 a quarter. It’s about $250,000 a quarter Feddie for the executive loan that wasn’t enforced. So you’ve got the $15.8 million, you had $800,000, you’ve got FICA and then you got the $250,000 that sort of gets you to your core and then you’ve got the $1.5 million of mortgage on it which that doesn’t really have a lot of variable in it.

There’s some. Not far underneath that would be the core run rate just to run the business that again we could continue to look at throughout the year if it stays slow.

Feddie Strickland: Got you. And I guess on mortgage, if that’s a little better, the expenses will be a little higher, but the revenue will be a little higher because you’ll have better gain on sale you know?

Tim Schools: Correct, correct. That’s absolutely – excuse me, I got a frog in my throat. That’s exactly correct that and – if you look at fourth quarter, I think there was $600,000 perhaps in fees on mortgage. So there’d be some commission in that number and so forth. But you are correct that if that went up and you would get associated revenue same thing with SBA. The number I gave you of the $800,000, that does have some commissions sort of for the $1.5 million level. But if it went up to $2 million, $2.5 million, $3 million there would be additional revenues for that expense.