FB Financial Corporation (NYSE:FBK) Q3 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

Travis Edmondson: It’s really interesting. Initially, we saw the most pressure from the smaller communities, the kind of the rural markets. We’re now seeing some larger regional banks putting out some specials in the 5s. So, it’s really across the board, either urban or rural that we’re seeing deposit pressures. And they’re all generally in that 5.25% to 5.75% range on the specials.

Operator: The next question comes from Steve Moss from Raymond James.

Steve Moss: So most of my questions have been asked and answered here. Just one thing on office here. Just curious if you could give any color as to when the rents in that portfolio start to come up for renewal, and any color around that dynamic there?

Chris Holmes: Steve, sorry, our Chief Credit Officer is not here. I will say just generally on renewal, Michael went through kind of where we were on our fixed rate portfolio is not office specific. And when we did look at office, I’m thinking about rent renewals, I was thinking about the loan renewals. And so, I’d have to get a little more detailed information and get back to you. Does that — Travis, is that fair?

Travis Edmondson: That’s fair.

Steve Moss: Okay. That’s pretty much my last question. I appreciate all the color here today.

Operator: The next question comes from Feddie Strickland from Janney Montgomery Scott. Please go ahead.

Feddie Strickland: I wanted to start off, I saw borrowings and brokered CDs declined during the quarter, which I’m sure helped on the funding cost side. Did those just mature and you didn’t renew them? And could we see more of that rolling off in future quarters, just given you’ve got loans to deposits, so around 87%.

Chris Holmes: Yes. That’s right, Feddie. Some of them rolled off and we have some more coming due in November. If you remember last quarter, we increased some of that, just because it was cheaper than retail deposits, quite frankly. And so, Chris mentioned this. And we keep our powder dry on sources of liquidity, so that we can leverage it when we want to, need to. So sometimes when we see brokered market is cheaper or FHLB funding is cheaper, we’ll do that. And so, that lever is out there. But we do have, I believe, it’s $100 million rolling off in November. Whether we renew it or not, that’s TBD, certainly don’t need it, to your point. We freed up a lot of liquidity from a collateral standpoint as well during the quarter, good work by the team there to further create sources of liquidity.

Feddie Strickland: Understood. That’s helpful. And switching gears a little bit here. As we look at these expense reductions, coupled with — so the securities portfolio restructuring and some of the other trends that we talked about in the margin and everything else going on, do you think efficiency as the core bank ex mortgage can get into the mid-50s range by the end of 2024 from the, I think, a peg at around 60% today?

Chris Holmes: Yes is the answer. We do, we think on the core, just core bank? Yes. We think we can get below the mid-50s, even.

Feddie Strickland: Got it. And one last question for me. It sounds like we should expect to see the unfunded loan commitments in the CD space continue to come down. As a consequence, do you think we’ll see the unfunded commitment reserve continue to decline as well?

Chris Holmes: Yes. That’s right. If you look at the ACL slide, you’ll see we actually increased our reserve on the construction bucket, but we released from the unfunded strictly due to the volume. And so, you’ll see that continue to decrease, and then we’ll probably land in that 80%, 85% range Tier 1 plus ACL and it would normalize from there.

Operator: The next question is a follow-up from Stephen Scouten from Piper Sandler. Please go ahead.

Stephen Scouten: I’m not sure if you have this number, but I just wanted to follow up, as you referenced, you had C&I credit, had some exposure to the SNC loan in the industry that went bad. But, do you guys have numbers on your total SNC exposure? And if so, like kind of how much of that you lead of the SNC exposure that you may have?

Travis Edmondson: We have roughly $175 million in SNCs. We lead approximately $80 million of that is for round numbers.