New York Community Bancorp, Inc. (NYSE:NYCB) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

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At the same time, I want to refer to Lee Smith, because he’s obviously running the mortgage business, and that’s always going to be a very interesting opportunity if the mortgage business does start to pick up. But reality is that we’re starting at probably low points. So we’re hoping it doesn’t get much worse than this, but we’re starting at the low. So maybe Lee Smith could add some color on fee income between sourcing and mortgage production. Lee?

Lee Smith: Yeah. Thanks, Tom. And we provided this in the guidance. So we’re guiding for Q1 gain on loan sale to be between $18 million and $22 million. And then the net return on the MSR asset is — we’re guiding 8% to 10%. I think we’ll be at the top end of that range. So if you combine those two numbers, we’re in the $45 million, $50 million range from a fee income point of view on the mortgage origination side. And then we’ve obviously got loan admin income on the servicing side, given our significant sub-servicing business. Now from a GAAP accounting point of view, the reason offset as it relates to the interest we pay on escrows, which should really be up in the net interest income line, and so we’re going to get a benefit from that. Even though you don’t quite see from a GAAP point of view, when we break out the servicing P&L, you do see that fee income given the significant sub-servicing business we have.

Thomas Cangemi: Yeah. So with that being said, just to add on to Lee’s commentary, assuming there is a Fed pause and it good moves the other way, say, towards the end of this year, that will also generate higher fee income because. Now the cost of that liability becomes much lower as we manage that servicing portfolio.

Mark Fitzgibbon: Okay, great. And then, Tommy, could you share with us the timing and cost associated with rebranding?

Thomas Cangemi: So we’re not going to throw a cost number out there, it’s ongoing. We feel very comfortable that we’ve done a ton of work over the past two years now on really setting the NewCo, which is going to be the new Flagstar. A lot of spend has been already taken place. As far as the branding efforts for the future, more towards 2024 than 2023, I’d say where the dollar outlay will come in. But where we stand right now money has been spent on setting up the brand itself, our vision, our mission, obviously, our position in the marketplace. And obviously, there’ll be new signage to all of the 395 locations. It’s all going to be, as we said, one cohesive brand, one culture, one name, and that will start towards the back end of 2023 and with maybe some marketing dollars going into 2024 run rate.

Mark Fitzgibbon: And last question I had for you was on the loan-to-deposit ratio. Is there a level at which you’d sort of cap that wouldn’t exceed? Thank you.

Thomas Cangemi: So Mark, I would say, big picture is that, our passion, as you can see over the past few years, we’ve done a significant shift in how we’re funding the balance sheet, right? There’s been a lot more deposit growth. We’re looking at alternative solutions to fund our business. That’s going to be part of our DNA going forward. We are focusing on funding this balance sheet very differently than it was historically. We want to get away from our dependency on non-traditional funding. We believe that various mortgage-as-a-service businesses, the government-as-a-service business are focused at and really trying to take the embedded nature of mortgage and go after the clientele as a $90 billion organization, could put us in a very unique position to gather more deposits.

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