First Financial Bancorp. (NASDAQ:FFBC) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

James Anderson: And Scott, this is Jamie. Just another thing to add on that. I mean that, so essentially when you look at that acquisition we acquired that back in the fall of 2019, so just a little bit more than three years ago. It has essentially doubled in revenue from the time that we bought it. They were doing in that roughly in that $28 million to $30 million range of revenue, so this past year, obviously in that the mid 50s in revenue. So it has essentially doubled. So we’ve been really happy with that acquisition.

Scott Siefers: Yes definitely understandably so. So that’s great. All right, thank you guys very much for all the color.

Archie Brown: Thanks Scott.

Operator: Thank you, Scott. We have other questions from Daniel Tamayo from Raymond James. Daniel, your line is now open.

Daniel Tamayo: Good morning everyone.

Archie Brown: Hey Danny.

Daniel Tamayo: I just want to take a little bit deeper dive into the Bannockburn, if you don’t mind. It — just curious kind of you mentioned adding customers and obviously it was a strong quarter there, but just, I’m just curious how what might drive another strong quarter like this going forward an outsized quarter, if you will? I mean, is it carrying more than just adding new customers or is that the primary driver? I’m just curious how to think about what might create surprises on the upside going forward?

Archie Brown: Yes, Danny, this is Archie. What we’re very pleased with is they continue to add net customers and grow what we call the core base that continues to move higher. And then they still have a number of transactions that will occur in a quarter that would be larger and they’re just lumpy and it’s just sort of hard to predict the timing. I think it is traditionally their fourth quarter has got a little more seasonality where they have a little more activity that happens in that quarter. You think about things that, you know, you’re getting close to your end. There’s a lot of companies wanting to get some things done and that leads to a little bit of a surge in activity and then you, you combine that with just the economic environment we’re in.

This is a little more volatile, you know inflation concerns, interest rate concerns and all that again is catalyst for activity for Bannockburn. So it’s kind of a, just a perfect quarter for adding new clients, a lot of activity heading into their seasonal, best seasonal quarter combined with the economic activity or the interest rates and inflation issues, so all those things combined. They’ll have, I think it was probably back in, I think it was Q2, they had one month of really in Q2 that was probably $7 million. So they have other months like that. It’s just this quarter was spectacular.

Daniel Tamayo: Okay, helpful. Thank you. And then the other major fee income business leasing was also very strong in the quarter as you touched on. Just curious if that kind of outstripped expectations in the fourth quarter and if there’s any kind of what the outlook looks like maybe for 2023 in the leasing business?

Archie Brown: Yes I would, you know, we’ve, I think we talked about in our color that these will come back to more normalized levels in Q1 from Q4. Summit certainly has significant activity in the fourth quarter and which we were expecting it, they contributed a lot to our growth. Additionally, they wound down a customer relationship where there were some additional fees we got for those leases that wound out of the program. So that added a little bit to the quarter. So we won’t have that going forward. So that’s why we said it sort of normalizes, but as it normalizes, as their volume continues to grow, you’re just going to see that line item move up fairly steady, a little more ramp up in the back half of the year that’s when their volume is heaviest.