Community Bank System, Inc. (NYSE:CBU) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

Mark Tryniski: Yes, I’ll just kind of brief and let Dimitar jump into it further. But if you look at the summary financial results, it doesn’t look like those businesses had a tremendous year with the exception of insurance. As I said, that was up 17% in revenues. The wealth business was down a little bit against a market that’s down almost 20%. The benefits business, which is half lever to the market, as I said, was up, even though the market was down 20%. So the organic performance of those businesses in 2022, might have been the best year we’ve ever had. They all grew organically, and some of them grew a lot. But it got clouded by the market, because they’re on different levels levered to the market. So there’s a lot of momentum in those businesses right now, which I think is going to continue. And I’ll let Dimitar provide any further commentary he might want to add to that.

Dimitar Karaivanov: I think that’s pretty good summary. I would just say if you kind of think about historical growth rates in those businesses in the high single digits. If the market recovers, we feel very confident we’re going to get there. If the markets kind of stays where it is, we think we’re still going to have a pretty decent year might not be high single digits, but low to mid single digits is definitely achievable. Because again, we put on a lot of a lot of new units and clients, especially in the second half of the year, and we did not get the benefit of most of those. So we feel pretty good about the outlook, barring the market going down another 20%.

Matthew Breese: Got it.

Joseph Sutaris: Matt, this is Joe. With respect to your prior question about unplugged securities about $3.2 billion at the end of the year. We also have, you know, a blanket availability at the Federal Home Loan Bank that’s secured by our mortgage portfolio, which is about another $1.1 billion. And then we also have some securities pledged at the FRV, which creates another $500 million. So that’s how we get to kind of $4.9 million, but $3.2 million of which is the unplugged ?

Matthew Breese: Got it. Okay. Last one was, I saw this the calculated tangible book value in the earnings release a bit higher. And the one component I don’t have is the deferred tax liability. So I was curious what that updated balance was and if there was any meaningful change quarter-over-quarter?

Joseph Sutaris: So I’ll break it down at the end of the end of the year, Matt. So, on a book, book value basis, the available for sale securities portfolio, about $4.7 billion, about $500 million of market value adjustment for about 4.2, is kind of the carrying value. And the held-to-maturity portfolio, about $1.1 billion. At the time, we did the transfer — excuse me, the book value is about $1.42 billion. There’s about $340 million effectively in gross market value adjustment on that held-to-maturity portfolio, and about 24% or 25% of that is effectively in a deferred tax asset of about $80 million. So leaving behind effectively net AOCI of about $250 million.

Matthew Breese: Got it. Okay. That’s all I had. Thank you so much.

Joseph Sutaris: Thank you.

Operator: Our next question will come from Chris O’Connell with KBW. Please go ahead.

Chris O’Connell: Hey, good morning. I may have missed it in the opening comments, but was there any commentary regarding the overall expense outlook for 2023? And I guess if not, can you guys talk a little bit about that?