Midland States Bancorp, Inc. (NASDAQ:MSBI) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

Eric Lemke: Yeah. Nate, if that scenario happens, I think there’d be some benefit to us with some of the additional funding we’ve added that floats with Fed funds, seeing the Fed cut later in the year would definitely help.

Nathan Race: Okay. Great. And then just going back to the credit discussion. I think we’ve talked in the past that kind of normalized charge-off levels are maybe in the 25 basis point range historically. Is that kind of a fair scenario to think about this year, just based on kind of what you guys are seeing in terms of criticized classified trends as well as just obviously given some improvement in non-performers in the quarter or do you guys think that’s maybe too high of an expectation for this year just based on how much the portfolio credit metrics have improved recently?

Jeffrey Ludwig: Yeah. I mean I personally, so I think it’s — that’s too high. We came in at 13 basis points this year. Yeah, I do think that’s high. But depending on where this economy goes, that’s hard — is hard to predict. But again, what I said earlier, we’re working real hard around here to get our credit quality metrics down closer to the peer group, which is going to then impact charge-offs. We saw some of that in the current quarter. One quarter is not a trend. So we’re hoping as we move forward, we can minimize our charge-offs which then impacts the provision and really impacts the bottom line profitability of our company. So that’s a big focus here and has been for the last couple of years.

Eric Lemke: One thing, Nate, one thing I’d tag along to that too is, if you look at our ACL by portfolio, that page in the slide deck, as over the next year, we’ll see some provisions just because of the remixing of our loan portfolio as GreenSky comes down. As we’ve talked about in the past, I mean, our ACL right now is at 97 basis points of total loans. The credit enhancements of GreenSky is only about 25 basis points to 30 basis points. So as that pays down, and we remix into other loan areas, you’re going to see our ACL go more to that adjusted number that we disclosed, which is 113 at the end of the quarter. So there’ll be some remixing in our allowance, and we’ll see some provisions just related to that because of those loan portfolio changes.

Nathan Race: Okay. So yeah, under that scenario, I’d imagine the ACL as a percentage of loans maybe steadily rises this year, again, assuming maybe charge-offs are kind of low or similar to kind of what we’ve seen historically from you guys?

Eric Lemke: Yeah. That’s where we see it, yes.

Nathan Race: Okay. Perfect. Thank you. I appreciate all the color guys. I’ll step back.

Eric Lemke: Thanks, Nate.

Operator: One moment for our next question. Our next question comes from Daniel Tamayo with Raymond James. Your line is open.

Unidentified Participant: Hey. Good morning, guys. This is Tim , actually on for Danny this morning. I was hoping if you guys could expand kind of on the plans on the BaaS partnerships. Just giving us an update on how talks of partnerships are going and then some of the nature of the deposits that could be coming in, are those interest-bearing, non-interest-bearing. Just any color there would be helpful.