Steven Alexopoulos: Bryan, I wanted to go back to your answer to Casey’s question across $100 billion. And I’m curious, given how this New York community situation played out, has that impacted how you think about crossing the threshold? Previously you said that you thought a transaction was a preferred method. Curious if you still feel that way.
Bryan Jordan: Could you say the last part? Again, it broke up a little bit. I still feel what way about what?
Steven Alexopoulos: Well, in the past — yes, in the past, you indicated that you didn’t want to fall over $100 billion. You wanted to more or less leap over it via transaction. I’m just curious if you still feel that way, just so your community played out.
Bryan Jordan: Well, yes, that’s a — yes, I guess, you have to couple a couple of thoughts. One, if you put M&A in a separate bucket, I still have significant reservations about, one, what can get approved and two, how long it takes to get it approved. And so, that’s not something without greater clarity that looks like a good idea independently. And then you couple it with crossing the $100 billion threshold and in particular, how much readiness do you have to have? Is there really a three-year phase in if you cross in the context of an M&A transaction? I would tell you, while I don’t have any inside information, my gut would tell me that what happened recently is likely to make it more difficult to cross. And I think you’ll have to show a significant great — a significantly greater degree of preparedness to be a category for a bank or a very near term path for achieving that.
So I think it makes it — and said another way, it makes it more likely that if you cross the $100 billion threshold in the near term, it’s likely to be in an organic fashion. And then you sort of deal with is M&A, a — the right strategy, and does it make sense from a shareholder in a capital deployment perspective, independent of trying to cross that threshold?
Steven Alexopoulos: Okay. That’s helpful. That makes sense. And if I could shift gears and talk about C&I loan growth, when I look at balances, they’re pretty flat versus the prior quarter, up a bit versus last year and it’s funny. When I look at your markets, whether it’s what’s going on in Nashville or Texas or Florida, they’re on fire. GDP is probably 4% in your markets. Why are you not seeing stronger commercial loan growth here?
Susan Springfield: Hi. I’ll take part of that, Steven. In terms of C&I loan growth, first of all, we have been focused on making sure that we’re taking care of existing clients first. We’re also very focused on full relationship businesses. And as Bryan said earlier, we continue to remain selective in terms of new underwriting and bringing on new clients. That being said, we are open for business and we are seeing some good opportunities and have brought in both new to bank, as well as some increased opportunities with existing clients. And we are hearing when we — when we have pipeline calls, we are hearing some additional opportunities for us to again lend existing customers, but also bring in some generational opportunities in our communities, as well as in our specialty lines of business. So I think that you will continue to see some opportunities for loan growth across our markets in our business.
Bryan Jordan: As I pointed out earlier, Steve, they’re pockets that are stronger than others and some that are a little softer. And Susan is exactly right. If you step back, we are looking to build relationships and do relationship banking. And we really want to move bank relationships, doing the transaction, lending money, getting it out the door is the easy part of the business. It’s really how you build relationships in long-term nature of the banking business. And I think our teams are doing an outstanding job of working for a relationship, and we’ve taken some opportunities where there is not the opportunity for a long-term relationship to step away from some transactions. So we’re trying to manage our balance sheet in a way that manages the balance between profitability and growth.
Steven Alexopoulos: Okay. That’s fair. And maybe, Susan, if I could squeeze one more in for you on commercial real estate. I see the maturity schedule here on the slide. Can you tell us what was the balance of commercial real estate loans that team do here in the first quarter, and how did those work out in terms of refinance extensions, things like that? Thanks.
Susan Springfield: In terms of things that came up through, we’ve had — in terms of things that have come up, we’ve been, again, as I said earlier, we’ve had good, really good outcomes in terms of working with borrowers on the appropriate way to refinance when there is a maturity. It could be — if things are clicking along like they should, then we look at just kind of a traditional renewal, looking at rates and structure. Sometimes we do talk with borrowers about bringing money to the table, either in terms of a paydown or some reserves. So we’re — again, we’re having, I think, really good success. One of the things that I do want to emphasize and is that we can — I mentioned this earlier, we’ve been very disciplined in our underwriting, really through all the cycles.
And if you look at things like our office portfolio, and this is with updated appraisals in them, our stabilized loan to value on office is about 60%. So there’s a lot of cushion that we have in our commercial real estate book of business, and that allows us, one, to continue to have good outcomes, but also the ability to work with borrowers. And when borrowers have that kind of equity in front of our debt, there’s even more of an incentive to work with us. The last thing I would add is that we’ve also seen in certain cases where we have been able to — as Bryan talked about exiting things that aren’t relationships. But I would tell you, I’ve also still will occasionally see us get refinanced out of something that might not hurt our feelings that we’re being refinanced out of either because of a credit grade or potentially a borrower that didn’t come to the table with quite the right approach.
