OceanFirst Financial Corp. (NASDAQ:OCFC) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

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Christopher Maher: As you can imagine, like everyone, right, we’ve had our trials and tribulations with CECL and the kind of high class problem to have is when you have no charge-offs, it’s really hard to come up with a quantitative allowance. That said, the majority of our allowance is qualitative and it assumes that there is some risk of a recession coming in the near-term. So I think if there were a recession, we’d have to evaluate where is that hitting geographically, which product segments, what are our exposures in those segments? So I wouldn’t want to hazard a guess about where that number would go. What I would say is that I’m very comfortable that the composition of our loan portfolio and the underwriting and credit risk management would leave us better than the peer group, which is why you tend to see our reserve being a lower coverage ratio.

Our net charge-offs are about 80% lower than the $10 billion to $50 billion bank peer group. So we have a lower loss reserve. It doesn’t — those two things are correlated. So yes, it could go up. Yes, I don’t know which segments would be hurt and to what degree. But I think the relative performance point that Pat made earlier I think we are going to show that our credit discipline will hold. And just as a long data point, we use the Moody’s SQ as kind of our foundation for our quantitative models, and still have to layer in a whole bunch of qualitative to get to the point where we are today.

Manuel Navas: Okay. I appreciate that color. I can step back into the queue.

Christopher Maher: Thank you.

Operator: Thank you. Our next question is from Matthew Breese from Stephens. Matthew, please go ahead. Your line is open.

Matthew Breese: Hey, good morning.

Christopher Maher: Hi, Matt.

Matthew Breese: I was hoping for a little bit more color around the near-term NIM outlook. And I know there’s some questions around what the Fed is going to do — so maybe ask you an age-old question, which is per 25 basis point hike, what is the expectation for NIM expansion at this point?

Christopher Maher: Well, the one comment I can make is the expectation is expansion. So that’s an important note, right, not contraction. We — I think the last time we spoke with all of you, we were thinking that it might be single high single-digit NIM expansion and the deposits outperformed in the fourth quarter, and we did much better than that. So a lot of it is going to be determined ultimately by how much deposit pressure we see, we haven’t seen a lot to date. So we still see some modest expansion as long as the Fed is raising rates, and we think that will continue for about a quarter after they stop raising rates, and then you should start to see us flat now. So it could be 10 basis points, but I would hesitate to give you a number.

Matthew Breese: Okay. And maybe to get a little bit more specific on the components, could you just re-quantify for us how much of the loan portfolio, I think, is the majority is fixed rate? And then what is the roll-off yield versus the roll-on yields?

Christopher Maher: So we have about 68% or so of the book is fixed and the — and the rest, obviously, is float.

Matthew Breese: And then the roll-off yields will probably have like a high 3 to 4 handle the payoffs. And the new facilities coming on is a high 5s, 6 and change.

Matthew Breese: Okay. And then what was the — if you can provide at the end of the quarter all in cost of deposits?

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