Premier Financial Corp. (NASDAQ:PFC) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

Operator: Thank you. And the next question goes to Michael Perito of KBW. Michael, please go ahead. Your line is open.

Michael Perito: Hi, good afternoon guys, thanks for taking my questions.

Gary Small: Hi, Mike.

Michael Perito: So obviously, Gary, you provided quite a bit of commentary for next year, but just to confirm on the efficiency ratio, kind of taking into consideration all different parts. I mean it sounds like you expect to be more in the full year range than the fourth quarter, I think you said the 53%. I just want to make sure that I’m thinking about that correctly, which would likely assume some rebound in mortgage, maybe some stabilization in NIM and then the cost efforts that you mentioned. Is that fair?

Paul Nungester: Yes. Correct. Mike, this fall on the full year estimate for efficiency. It won’t be the fourth quarter run rate. We have some elevated expenses there, as we mentioned, but that will be coming back down. And yes, NIM plays out the way that we’re talking about here, if mortgage — we’re not projecting it to really rebound. We just expect it to be kind of steady state. If you look at it on a full year basis, ’22 versus 23 mix will be different. Gains should be a little better, but we won’t have the MSR gains that we had this year but servicing in excess of our amortization. So net-net, call it a push or so on mortgage that’s how we’re getting to that full year efficiency estimate.

Gary Small: The fact that we’ve got — it’s not as high as our traditional number, but we do have positive operating leverage kind of helps keep a cap on the efficiency ratio.

Michael Perito: Got it. Thank you for clarifying. And then just on the — maybe a follow-up to the NIM kind of line of questioning. I mean when I think about the fourth quarter and what happened in terms of the new compression, it doesn’t really seem like kind of the foundational elements of how your NIM structure change. It just seems like loan world accelerated in a quarter where incremental funding was expensive, right? And so I guess, the follow-up I would have is you guys guided to lower earning asset growth, but like, what’s the line to site on that? I mean it sounds like pipelines are a bit slower to start the year. Is it more environmental? Is it both environmental and you guys being more selective? Is there more of an effort to kind of target a specific earning asset growth rate that will be easier to fund in this environment? Or is it just kind of the way the cards are playing at this point in time?

Gary Small: Mike, I think your comment on the environment combined with targeted effect will be bought us by design, whereas take the fourth quarter, I think we had targeted that we thought we’d see 1% to 2% growth, let’s call double of that and the third and fourth quarters for both quarters, we thought we would see a pullback on the client — from the clients on business and it just kept coming. So as we plan for ’23, there will be certain asset classes and transaction types that core customers and so forth that will get more preference on our attention, and we will manage our number from a growth standpoint to deliver those sort of growth that we talked about, a little more so than we’ve had to do in the past.

Michael Perito: Is it just a simple Gary, is limiting the on-balance sheet mortgage production? I mean that would seemingly — if you have decent growth elsewhere and you just put a lot less mortgages on, that would seemingly we get you like 6% or 7% point-to-point growth on the loan book. I mean is that — is it that simple? Or is it more nuanced than that?