Dime Community Bancshares, Inc. (NASDAQ:DCOM) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

Steve Moss: Okay, great. That’s helpful. And then, excuse me, maybe just following up on funding here. Just curious, obviously, marginal funding cost is pretty high here. Just wondering, the longer the curve has moved lower at what point maybe would you consider balance sheet restructuring with your securities portfolio, if at all?

Avi Reddy: Yes. I mean, I think we look at all uses of capital at all times. I think we’re very comfortable with where we are. Supporting customer growth right now is important for us, but we look at it all the time. When you look at our securities portfolio, the yield on the securities portfolio is around $180 million. It’s a fairly short duration portfolio. It’s probably three to four years over there. I mean in our math ahead, Steve, is that, if we reprice that whole portfolio to market rates to $180 million and the market rate for securities right now is $425 million to $450 million, that’s a 35 basis point pick up on the NIM once that whole portfolio reprice. So it’s something we think about in conjunction with the buyback and conjunction with loan growth. And we feel pretty good about our capital levels at this point. So we do have this flexibility to do various things.

Steve Moss: Okay, great. Thank you very much.

Operator: The next question comes from Matthew Breese from Stephens Inc. Matthew, please go ahead. Your line is open.

Matthew Breese: Good morning. Avi, I just wanted to stay on that point on the securities portfolio. You mentioned the duration. And at least in my model, I’m expecting some role from securities into loans to help funding. Could you just give me a sense for kind of the quarterly runoff of securities? The duration implies it’s a little bit sharper than what I have modeled.

Avi Reddy: Yes. So we got around $120 million, $130 million of cash flows coming in, in 2023, Matt. But when we sold our PPP loans a couple of years back, we really put that stuff into treasuries. And those treasuries are obviously bullet maturities, two to three years out. So we got some big maturities in 2025 and 2026, probably around $300 million over there. So it is pretty short on the AFS side just because of the fact of the treasuries we have. So to answer it differently, the cash flows aren’t coming in because they’re treasuries, but they’re all going to mature two years out. So there’s not a lot left there in terms of extension risk on that particular portfolio. And obviously, we have a held-to-maturity bucket, which we moved some securities into that late last year and into Q1 to help protect tangible book. So — and the portfolio is fairly well balanced. 40% held to maturity, 60% AFS, which gives us the ability to consider various things over time.

Matthew Breese: Okay. And then you had mentioned that demand deposits you expect to kind of settle out in the 30% range, you’re at 34% today. So obviously, there’s some implied pressure there. As we think about matching loan growth with deposit

Avi Reddy: Matt, we didn’t say that. We said that our total deposit beta over the cycle would be 30%. I mean our average DDA was 36% for the fourth quarter. So we don’t really expect that or we’re not really saying it’s going to go down to 30%. So that’s not what we said.

Matthew Breese: I’m sorry, I misquoted you. Could you give me some idea where you expect demand deposits to settle out? What’s your best guess with that 30% deposit beta?