Central Pacific Financial Corp. (NYSE:CPF) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

Arnold Martines: So, Laurie, this is Arnold. Good morning. I’ll start on the Mainland unsecured consumer, and then I’ll turn it over to David and he can speak to Swell. But yeah, we — as I mentioned earlier in my comments, we are suspending Mainland consumer unsecured purchases until such time that we believe the outlook, the national outlook, economic outlook is improving. So, near term, pretty much full suspension of the Mainland consumer unsecured. Okay. So — but as far as, Hawaii, we’re continuing to be very active there on consumer, and in our whole market. And also we’re still looking at auto, auto loans as an area where we believe it’s acceptable risk given the — what we saw in the past, in the last recession, it actually performed pretty well as far as the data points that we’re looking at.

So, generally speaking, we’re open to auto, but in any event, on mainly unsecured consumer, we’re just basically suspending for now until the national outlook improves. And I’ll turn it over to David to talk a little bit about Swell.

David Morimoto: Yeah. And just a clarification, when Arnold’s talking about suspending Mainland unsecured, that’s on the purchase side, Laurie. So, we’re not suspending Swell, but we’re continuing the very deliberate and gradual rollout of Swell. So, at year-end — to give you an idea, we have about less than a hundred customers on the platform. The deposit balances are probably less in the aggregate are less than 20,000. The loan balances are less than 5,000. And so, it’s very nominal balances at this point. We are planning to do some test marketing in the first half of 2023, but we don’t anticipate the balances to be meaningful at all. And so, that’s where we are. We’re not suspending Swell. Any — do you have any follow up questions on Swell, Laurie?

Laurie Hunsicker: Yeah. So, in other words, I guess as we think looking out to 2023, and you said you would ramp it up, that you’re obviously not going to stay at 5,000 in loans. I guess, the question is, what are you taking that to? Are you taking it to $5 million? Are you taking it to $25 million? How are you thinking about that?

David Morimoto: Laurie?

Laurie Hunsicker: Yeah. Are you there?

David Morimoto: Yeah. Sorry.

Laurie Hunsicker: Hello?

David Morimoto: Hey, we had — Laurie?

Laurie Hunsicker: Yes, I’m here. Can you hear me?

David Morimoto: Okay. Sorry. We had a technical glitch on our end, but we thought we lost you. No. I would say that Swell balances are not going to exceed $10 million in any time soon.

Laurie Hunsicker: Perfect. Perfect. That’s what I was looking for. Okay. That’s helpful. And then, just on the unsecured Mainland consumer book that I have that at $310 million at September, what is that as of December 31st? And then, can you help us think about, I mean, your credit is pristine outside of consumer. The consumer piece, it looks like you had $1.07 million of charge-offs. $1.03 million of it came from consumer. Can you help us think about, of that $1.03 million, how much came from the Mainland piece? So just what is your Mainland unsecured consumer at December 31st and then in the quarter, how much of the Mainland charge-offs were in total? Thanks.

Arnold Martines: I’ll ask Anna to respond to the question.