Newtek Business Services Corp. (NASDAQ:NEWT) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

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Bryce Rowe: Thanks. Good morning, Barry. I appreciate the discussion here this morning and all the questions from the other guys. I wanted just to kind of dive into your sources of fee income that you lay out, I guess, on Slide 17, bank versus non-bank entities. I think you touched on this a little bit with Paul’s question, but curious if you could just walk through kind of what the driver of the growth is at the bank. I would assume it’s more gain on sale. And then the — just the sources of non-bank fee income that you show there on Slide 17. Thanks.

Barry Sloane: Sure. Thank you. So the growth on the non-bank side is a lot of it is from the return on equity for the JVs, and we’re going to put a lot of equity into that business. We don’t show in the forecast material growth in payments, tech solutions, insurance and payroll. I think we’ll get down to some more granular numbers going forward as we report the first quarter and start to put marks out there, but I do appreciate the question. In the bank, you’re going to get growth from the SBA business. Though frankly, we muted the volumes, and we also have muted currently gain on sale numbers in the forecast versus what the current market is. But you’re also going to get value from the servicing aspect of the non-conforming business and the fee income.

So now in the event that were lower in those numbers, we will have lower capital raising needs up at the holding company if that makes any sense. So we’ll be doing less issuance. We’ll have more capital because there is capital that goes into the non-conforming business. It does eat capital because it’s more of the traditional non-bank type financing, where you got to put up equity, you got a commercial bank line, you do the securitization. It generates great returns, but the capital is expensive. I mean down the road as a thought process of that business was never able to go into the bank, and it might down the road if we can get the regulators comfortable with our projections. We didn’t want to do that starting off a bank. We just wanted to keep the bank very simple, very vanilla.

But so far, our track record in history is pretty good. But right now, using commercial financing, that’s a pretty big driver of growth. In the event that that’s not the case, we have capital to do a lot of other things that did pay creative dividends, buy back shares. If we felt strong about the 7(a) business, put more money into the 7(a) business. You’re dealing with a fairly volatile environment. What a different 60 days makes. We talked about that relative to us becoming a financial holding company versus being a BDC. But also the difference between December and January was night and day in the capital markets. Now February has been a little bit softer, but it looks like things are starting to turn around again because we’re starting to see hints of a little bit of softness in here.

So I’m not — I was never a believer that was going to be cutting rates anytime soon, and I’m not a believer that we’re going to go much past 25 or 50. I think we’ll go up there, and we’ll sit there for probably a long period of time. And the Fed’s go just look at the math, but you can’t raise interest rates by this amount of money without the economy slowing, and it will.

Bryce Rowe: Got it. That’s all I had, Barry, appreciate the time.

Operator: And our last question, one moment, comes from the line of Steve Alesio, Investor. Sir, your line is open.

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