Popular, Inc. (NASDAQ:BPOP) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

Carlos Vazquez: Yes. I don’t have that number right now, Alex. We can try to dig it out, but I don’t have that off the top of my head or in my notes, my apologies. You can see that the overall yield of loans, the overall loan yield of our book did go up 31 basis points on in the quarter. So obviously, we are originating our new at higher rate, but I don’t have the answer to your question. We will get back.

Alex Twerdahl: Okay. Are you able to give us a little bit more color, like if you look at the commercial growth sort of the percentage or just a rough breakdown of what might be the larger corporate customer that’s based off of and we saw some press releases this quarter on sort of pricing that maybe we could apply to that in Puerto Rico versus what might be more tied to prime?

Carlos Vazquez: Yes, the — and Lidio, maybe correct me, the take-up of sulfur in Puerto Rico has been pretty limited — pretty slow. So I think big picture assumptions for the moment, Alex, is that whatever part of our book is floating is still linked to the old floating rates. Again, the pickup of sulfur has been slow so far.

Alex Twerdahl: Okay. And then I just wanted to clarify your comments on the timing for capital return. It sounded like you guys go through this process every year where you engage the Fed and then a quarter later or 4 months later, you windup actually telling us what you guys have all decided for the capital return. Is it the second half of this year that you gave the Fed? Or do you intend to have an announcement in the second half of the year.

Ignacio Alvarez: Yes. I think our plan would be to do both, we would engage the Fed at some point, but the announcement, I think when we talk about second half of the year would be an announcement.

Alex Twerdahl: Okay. So you engage the Fed at some point in the next couple of months. And realistically, July, we could still, a expect a capital update.

Carlos Vazquez: What we — we will make the decision of what we want to do once we have clarity on the outlook for interest rates and the economy, Alex. So that is the starting point. So again, our guess is that, that point in time will come in the summer and that we ended up talking about the second half of the year. So that’s the starting point. And from there, we would do our modeling and discuss the opportunities on the alternatives with our regulator, we would have to decide how we want to execute anything we want to execute. We want to revisit what has been our practice in the past of having very structured every January, we have an announcement, we may choose to change that moving forward. So we’re going to — again, the underlying thing we want to do that has not changed, which is to move in the direction of our Mainland peers as a buffer, but exactly how we execute that will be revalued and we may decide to execute in a different path than we did in the past, okay?

So don’t assume we will be back to January announcement and that’s it for the year. Again, we may choose to manage our capital return to slightly different moving forward. If and when we choose to make a change, obviously, we will discuss over the market.