Pinnacle Financial Partners, Inc. (NASDAQ:PNFP) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

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Catherine Mealor: Thanks. Good morning, everybody. Just one small question kind of following up on BHG and expenses. So, if I just think back to the past few years, BHG has been really instrumental in really paying for the build that you’ve had in the hiring process and building the core bank. So, at a point in time, we’re seeing the BHG contribution stabilizing, maybe at risk of pulling back a little bit. I guess, what does it take for you to feel the need to adjust the expense outlook a little bit more than this mid-15% range? Is it — is there a level of profitability that you feel like you shouldn’t go below and that might trigger more expense initiatives? Or, is it all just about making sure revenue growth is higher than expense growth and kind of growing EPS that way, but less about maybe what the ROA is? Any kind of just color on that would be super helpful. Thanks.

Harold Carpenter: Yes. The ROA probably not at the top of our list. We do have ROTCE and all that. But at the end of the day, Catherine, what we’ve got are earnings targets, revenue targets per share. And BHG is a component in that. And so, we’re going to try to get to that bottom-line number in the most effective way that we can. If that means we need to cut costs, we’ll cut costs. If that means we need to go try to figure out how to grow revenues in some way, that’s not in the plan, we’ll do that. BHG, in the past, has provided us some tailwind with respect to growth. And so, they typically outgrown our number year in and year out, and that’s provided us a little extra resource to go after and support our hiring platform. This year, it looks like their growth is going to be fairly flat to slightly up.

And so that may — you might imply from that, that we may need to back off on hiring in order to kind of meet our EPS targets. So, I don’t know if I’m getting at all your questions, Catherine, but we’re going to eventually nail down what we think top quartile growth needs to be for this firm, and a simple plan that is the most likely to achieve it. And that would include Bankers Healthcare Group in that, and we’ll use the latest and greatest information we have for them to do it.

Catherine Mealor: Got it.

Terry Turner: Hi, Catherine, let me — if I can just maybe make a slightly different point. I don’t know if it’ll be helpful to you or not, it’s intended to at least give you some insight into what our mindset is, what we’re trying to do here. I made a comment during the presentation about how the incentive plans work here, and really just trying to clarify for people that I don’t think anybody thought that banks were going to grow earnings in 2022, given the loss of PPP income, but we believe that we had momentum in the core banking franchise and ability to do that and our incentives were bet on that, and we did that. In fact, we outperformed the number. Of course, we got the benefit of rate increases that were beyond expectation, all those kinds of things.

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