CrossFirst Bankshares, Inc. (NASDAQ:CFB) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

And it’s not very big. I think we only have 16 credits or so in the hospitality space. There was strong sponsors, there were professional operators and that portfolio, we have higher average daily rates than we had and better occupancy, and actually those properties overall are performing at better levels than they were pre-pandemic. So we spend a lot of time looking at our portfolio and stress testing it and studying it, and we try to be really proactive in our credit management. And we will continue to do that. And as Randy said, we’ve had lots of external eyes on our portfolio over the last six months. And to an exam, they’ve come back and they validated what we’re doing and very complementary of the team and the job they’re doing. So to your question, Michael, what can we say to them?

All we can do is perform, and we’re going to continue to perform and we’re going to really, really work hard to keep that quality and keep improving it.

Michael Rose: I appreciate it. Maybe just one follow up, separate topic, just on fee income. It looks like ATM and credit interchange income has come down a little bit. Any explanation for that? And then looking forward, it looks like Central will add a little bit to the mix. But can you just remind us maybe some of the strategies you have in place to grow fee income and maybe what your intermediate to kind of longer term revenue mix would be? Thanks.

Ben Clouse: Sure, Michael. As a reminder, one headwind we’ve had on fee income particular to credit card is one large client with a very significant concentration who had a very big spike in their business related to COVID. And they have seen that come down all year. We’re finally at the point where they’re near right sized and the growth in our credit card portfolio is beginning to fulfill that concentration, decline and overcome it. We’ve moved to an in-house platform and are at the tail end of converting all of our clients and believe that will be an additional contributor to our growth there. So we are adding net clients to our credit card portfolio. And as I mentioned in my comments driving additional transaction volume, so we think there is opportunity there for that to begin to turn now that we’ve worked our way through most of that concentration.

Particular to the Central deal, probably the most significant impact we’ll see for 2023 is some fee income from their SBA business and to a lesser extent mortgage which of course is pretty low volume right now. They used a model where they sold all of those loans and harvested gains on them almost exclusively without holding anything on the balance sheet. We will do the same to the extent it makes sense at the current moment like today. The gain on SBA sales is a little bit depressed. And so we likely will hold some of those loans on our balance sheet in the near term, because we can. The yields are very attractive, near double digits on many of those in particular in the guaranteed portfolio. And we’ll simply make a cost benefit decision as we think about what the gain looks like in the future, which we expect will come back from its current depressed levels.

But when that changes, there’ll be significant opportunity for fee income increases for us over our base.

Michael Rose: Perfect. Thanks for taking all my questions.

Ben Clouse: Sure. Thank you, Michael.

Mike Maddox: You’re welcome.

Operator: This concludes our question-and-answer session. I would like to turn the conference back over to Mike Maddox for any closing remarks.