Piper Sandler Companies (NYSE:PIPR) Q3 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

James Yaro: Good morning and thanks for taking my questions. Firstly, Tim, congratulations. It’s been great working with you and best wishes. Turning to M&A, Chad, maybe we could just touch on the question of how long it takes to get back to normalized level. Obviously, results have not been that strong. I think for peers so far this quarter, and it does sound like there are some headwinds there. So just maybe you could just talk about some of the puts and takes around the time line, and whether this is going to look more like historic cycles versus the 2020 — 2021 cycle?

Chad Abraham: Yeah. I think obviously — just — obviously, we’re all sounding like a bit of a broken record. I think in the end of ’22, we all certainly thought the pace of ’23 would be a little quicker. We’ve definitely seen in the back half more transaction starts. So, there’s plenty of transactions to do, plenty of backlog. They’re all taking longer. There’s definitely more deals dying sort of at the end when we can’t quite get there. So, my feeling is we’re just going to continue to see very slow improvement. We certainly can see what we have on the runway in Q4 and some of that stuff slipping into early next year. So, we certainly have visibility, and I just think this is going to be a slow M&A recovery. And for us, it sort of depends.

We’ve got some things still going well in the energy side. Obviously, we’re a market leader in healthcare, and we’ve had some interesting transactions there. We haven’t talked about this, but long term, after a really, really tough period in depositories, we definitely expect that to pick up. But part of why the recovery is going to be slow for us in M&A is once we get those deals announced, it just takes — it takes a while to close. So, in the depository space, it feels like our share is actually going up a little, but it’s off a very, very small base. So, in general, I think we just expect to see more of the same, a very slow recovery. And — but hopefully, it just keeps marching slowly better here.

James Yaro: Okay. That makes a lot of sense. It’s not super uplifting. Maybe just on the MDs and the hiring there. The MD count did come down very slightly in the quarter. I assume that’s just sort of normal attrition. But maybe you could just talk about how you’re thinking about the hiring trajectory from here?

Chad Abraham: Yeah. I would say, obviously, I think it’s been quite a few quarters since we were even down one or two. So it’s a very small number, a couple of retirements. I would say, if anything, when the times are difficult like this, we’re being — we’re being pretty discerning on production, and who can get it done, and pretty careful on hiring. So, we do use these market environments to figure out, sort of, where there’s an upgrade or where there’s a space we don’t need to be in or where we’ve just got an MD that’s not getting it done. I would say, relative to hiring though, our pace is — we expect it to be the same. We sort of talk about that net five to seven, we’ve got a couple of new hires we’ve made that haven’t been announced in strategic sector.

So, we really just haven’t changed that cadence. If anything, we’ve probably slowed it a little bit, but I always got to remind people over five years, we’ve definitely grown MD head count more than others. So, we’ve just taken the long-term approach and also just focused on productivity and performance. We’ve got plenty of MDs to drive significant revenue growth from here.

James Yaro: Makes sense. Thanks a lot.

Operator: Perfect. [Operator Instructions] We’ll next go to Mike Grondahl from Northland Securities. Please go ahead.

Mike Grondahl: Hey, guys, thanks and congrats to Tim. A bunch of my questions have been asked and answered. But, Chad, can you give us just a little bit of color on the restructuring business, kind of how that’s grown roughly in absolute dollars or as a percent of the advisory business?