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

Gary Small: Mike, we started in ’22, back in the middle of the year to do just that on the mortgage book. We still have some funding that’s coming from that because we’re in a — we’re a pretty big construction player. So commitments that we had made back in ’21, we’re funding all during ’22, even though we weren’t still originating in that space. But — so rest assured that we have backed off and made some product adjustment and we’re back to about a 70% sales versus portfolio mix, and we had allowed ourselves to get off of that when the pricing was so forth, Fannie and Freddie back in the second quarter of last year, and we won’t be doing that this year. Same thing on the consumer side. We had a really great consumer growth through the first three quarters, and then we put the TAMs on it, mostly around indirect, which is what that portfolio is designed to do.

And we really haven’t grown that book in any meaningful way over the last four months. We are creating our capacity for balance sheet growth through commercial. But having said that, if we just let commercial run, given the team we’ve got in the market the way it is now, we might be surprised at how much growth we see just through the commercial channel. So we will be managing our effort a little more so in ’23 to make sure that we don’t outrun our appetite and get over our skis too much. That’s the right side of the balance sheet catch up with the left side.

Michael Perito: Got it. And then just lastly for me. As we look to next year, based on the guide you provided should still be generating pretty good capital internally. I think the back half of this year will probably be the low point on capital for you guys, especially if the balance sheet growth kind of moderates. I’m just thinking — wondering are you seeing similar M&A headwinds? And does that free up maybe some capacity to do some buybacks in ’23? Or just any updates on the capital plan would be great. Thank you, guys.

Paul Nungester: Yes. Thanks, Mike. Yes, it does create that kind of capacity. But we’ve turned the corner here on capital. So we’re going to let this chug most likely for a while here and kind of let that grow a bit. But obviously, opportunistically, if it makes sense. We’ve got over — sorry, 1 million of approved shares for our buyback plan that we could deploy if it made sense at the time. But we don’t have dividend plans right now to do that at this point. So we’ll just monitor the market.

Gary Small: Mike, over time, we’ve always said we play a balance for our card on equity utilization. We want enough there to support organic growth. We want to provide the dividends and shareholder return through that vehicle and buybacks are part of that shareholder equation. With the balance sheet growth that we’ve seen right now, it feels like balance sheet — organic balance sheet support gets a bit of a priority, but it didn’t change the scorecard timing of how we’re using our capital and we’re fully deployed right now.

Michael Perito: Great, thank you guys. Appreciate it.

Gary Small: Thanks, Mike.

Operator: Thank you. And our next question goes to Christopher Marinac of Janney Montgomery Scott. Christopher, please go ahead. Your line is open.

Christopher Marinac: Hi, thanks. Good morning. So Gary and Paul, I wanted to kind of go back to some of the comments I think you were making at the beginning of the call about loan yield repricing and just better understand the kind of betas on the loan side and maybe even earning assets, too. Is there an opportunity for those to be stronger this next quarter or 2? And do you think that will look differently as this year shapes up?