Flushing Financial Corporation (NASDAQ:FFIC) Q3 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

Manuel Navas: Here at the year-end with some of the seasonality you’re having on deposits, is that the main driver on kind of increasing your CD rates a bit?

Susan Cullen: It’s part of it, but it’s also growing our customer base across all the new branches that we’ve opened. There’s a lot of specials in there as well.

Manuel Navas: Can you walk through some of your channels that are seeing the best inflows? Is it the new branches? Is it the CD product? Your digital is up to 3% of deposits. Is that — how is that growing? Just kind of where are you seeing the best inflows at the moment?

John Buran: I would say our branch network is doing quite well. We did note that we had a very nice increase in non-interest-bearing. That’s a result of a focus that we put in place beginning in July to put in place a very special incentive program. That incentive program has really done very well in terms of getting the organization very much focused on developing a stronger noninterest-bearing DDA base. Branches are doing well. The digital seems to be doing well. And then business banking, our ability to garner more deposits from our business banking customers and our commercial real estate customers has continued to grow. So all of those pieces are pulling together to give us what we think is a favorable direction, particularly with respect to noninterest-bearing, which, of course, as you know, moved opposite the direction of the industry in this quarter.

Manuel Navas: Is the pipeline for that to continue first half of next year? How do you feel about that with the incentives you’ve added?

John Buran: We’re working to do that, no guarantees in this market and that’s for sure.

Manuel Navas: It’s lumpy. I’m sure it’s unpredictable.

Susan Cullen: Yes.

John Buran: Yes. But we put in place some significant changes in the incentive structure to do that.

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

John Buran: Well, I want to thank you all for your attention, and we’re looking forward to continuing these conversations and engaging with our investors and our customers on a continued basis. So thank you very much, and everybody, have a good weekend. Bye now.

Operator: The conference is now concluded. Thank you for attending today’s presentation. You may now disconnect.