National Bank Holdings Corporation (NYSE:NBHC) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

Tim Laney: Yes. I’ll just remind everyone that when we started this company, we had to agree to operate as though we were over a $10 billion institution from day one. So we’ve put in a lot of that infrastructure and been operating with that cost for some time now. Frankly, it turned out to be a benefit. I’ll give the regulators a lot of credit because it put an infrastructure in place that we’ve really been able to leverage and lean into. Will there be some incremental cost? I’m sure there will be. Our discussions with our regulators to date have not suggested anything dramatic at all or frankly not even anything noteworthy beyond what we’re doing today. But then all this can speak to the timing of this, because it’s not as though the moment you crossed the $10 billion threshold, you’re held to any changes in the first place.

Aldis Birkans: Yes. And certainly given our guidance on the loan growth, which you could certainly apply to how total assets will grow as well and back into that there is a good chance that we do cross 10 billion by the end of this year. And therefore, again, this year’s guidance doesn’t include any of that, because they wouldn’t impact this year. It really starts, if it does, in 2024 on the expense side, on the side, again, for us right now on the run rate basis, call it, it would be about $10 million-ish hit to the interchange, which would for 2024 is only half a year. So I’m estimating 2%, maybe 3% of total net income for 2024, so very manageable impact.

Brett Rabatin: Okay, and it’s a little bigger number than I was recalling. All right, great. And then maybe just one last one just thinking about, Tim, the franchise you have now and you’ve done two acquisitions here in the past quarter. So besides the two unify initiative, would there be other things that you want to accomplish in ’23, would additional M&A kind of make sense if that could happen? Obviously, the current environment doesn’t suggest that’s very unlikely, but just want to make sure I was aware of whatever else you were looking to try and accomplish this year.

Tim Laney: I’m very proud of the team and the fact that we were able to announce a close and fully integrate two institutions in short order in 2022. We certainly continue to have a pipeline of discussions with banks that reside in our core markets. We do like the idea of growing and expanding in attractive markets where we operate. So when you think about certainly Colorado, but Utah, even Idaho at this point, which may be lost on some folks that we’ve got an interesting presence in Boise now, and we really liked what we’re seeing in that market, think we can do a lot organically there. And I think it’s just an interesting market to pay more attention to, at least for us. And as we’ve always been, we’re just going to be prudent stewards of capital.

So if there’s a seller interested in doing something with us, they’re going to have to be cognizant of the fact that we’ve, again, got to create a win-win. And we’re very sincere about that. So we’ll be patient and we’ll be thoughtful. We feel really good about our organic growth prospects. But we certainly have not closed the door on looking at new potential partners to help move NBH ahead. Where we have closed the door, and I’ve mentioned this in prior meetings, is frankly we are not spending time talking to community banks in low growth markets. We are not going to fall into that trap of simply acquiring with the idea of taking out 20% or 30%, riding that accretion for a few years and putting ourselves on that treadmill. That’s just not something of interest to us.