Heartland Financial USA, Inc. (NASDAQ:HTLF) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

Jeff Rulis: Thanks. Good afternoon. Maybe one for Nathan. Just wanted to the type of loans that were, I guess, resolved out of non-accrual in the quarter, I think it’s $6 million net. But I just wanted to kind of get a sense for what was recovered.

Nathan Jones: Yeah, absolutely. We — it’s certainly — there wasn’t any area of significance. The recovery was really on a credit that we had in agriculture from really several years back just due to the really great work done by our special assets group to stay with it. It was really to see through and get some recoveries there. From the non-performing perspective, kind of how that’s going. We just continue to work it down. I wouldn’t say there’s any one area of specifically you could call out as being a systemic as we were working through it. It’s just the overall book itself. We continue to work hard to make sure we’re getting ahead of those credits and getting them either A, back into our performing line of business or helping find for bank or opportunities for them going forward.

Bryan McKeag: And Nathan, that’s not a change — Sorry, Bruce, go ahead.

Bruce Lee: No. I was just going to provide a little more color. Jeff, the recovery was on a loan that had been previously fully charged off. So it didn’t have any — that was not connected to the decrease in our non-accrual loans.

Jeff Rulis: Right. Yeah, if I kind of clubbed the question there. I was really looking for the direction of non-accrual, I got you. But I think, Nathan, kind of not anything overly specific. It’s been just continued work. And kind of the follow-on was there’s no change in aggressiveness. It’s not as if this mild recession is upon us. You didn’t change gears or anything. It’s just work in those credits and just got, like you said, non-descript reductions in non-accruals?

Bryan McKeag: Correct. Okay. Thank you for the clarification on that, Bruce.

Jeff Rulis : And just a follow-on, maybe for Bryan. Did that recovery impact the margin at all? Was that — was there anything in there that you’d say that kind of non-core, the $3.65?

Bryan McKeag: Yeah. No, there was no interest recovery. It was all principal recovery. This one, Jeff, just for a little bit of color, this one was — one of the loans that we charged off coming into the COVID. We had a couple of big charge-offs as we entered COVID. I think it was back from that time. So it’s been like three — almost 2.5, three years since we took the charge off.

Jeff Rulis: Okay. Got it. And just jumping over on topics to the expense side. I wanted to make sure I got the $108 million to $109 million. Bryan, you said 2% to 3% full year growth, correct?

Bryan McKeag: Yeah.

Jeff Rulis: Okay. And that would exclude the chartered restructuring costs of $2.5 million, correct?

Bryan McKeag: Correct. Yeah. It excludes those items. I always exclude the charter. We can restructuring any tax credit costs from last year and any gains and losses that are in that expense line item. If you back those out of last year and put a 2% or 3% increase on top of that, that’s why.

Jeff Rulis: Bryan, do you have a ’22 core expense number relative to the $443 million, like what would be the core?

Bryan McKeag: I probably could get it. I don’t have it here. I need to do some math and sometimes doing math while everybody is on the call.

Jeff Rulis: I understand. Yeah, if we could follow up, that’s that we do and I’ll…

Bryan McKeag: It is pretty easy though, Jeff. If you go to our income statement, if there’s three line items specific to those three items I talked about.

Jeff Rulis: Okay. Appreciate the query crack it down. Okay. Well, thank you, I’ll step back.

Bruce Lee: Thanks, Jeff.