Primis Financial Corp. (NASDAQ:FRST) Q2 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

We’re still being cautious. We’re still in the roadmap stage where we’re making these customers as core as we possibly can before we get very confident about investing at all and just being prudent there. The sweep helps us because we’re positive on the spread there on the whole platform. But — I mean, I really like the momentum that we’re starting to see on the core bank side, the community bank side and I think mid-single digits is going to be pretty profitable on the — for the bank.

Russell Gunther: Okay. I appreciate that both of you for the color there. And then just switching gears, a number of steps were taken this quarter to support NII and the NIM going forward, be it the sweep or the swap. And just hoping you could tie all that together, give us a sense for where you expect the consolidated margin to trend in the back half of the year?

Dennis Zember: Okay. Matt can do the swap part. On the sweep, the sweep is important to us because really we can grow, and I’m just stating the obvious here, but we can just grow almost infinitely and really not have any impact on our capital ratios, on our margins or anything like that. Everything we do incrementally on the digital platform has positive spread to the suite. And there’s some degree, there’s some amount of that, that ultimately is going to pay for the whole platform. So it’s important for us to continue growing that like we have been. And especially now as the Fed keeps moving, we — our incremental spread just continues to improve there. Most of that goes to noninterest — all of that goes to noninterest income, except for the portion it offsets sweep deposit interest expense.

That added, what, 35 basis points to the margin in the quarter. And to the degree that we raised funds in the core bank, which we’re raising those funds at very healthy margins at substantially less than the national platform, it — that means we can sweep more of the expensive money and save cost of deposits and our margins improve. So with that, what would you?

Matthew Switzer: Yeah. I mean just to put a finer point on that, last bit there, Russell, I mean — and this is sometimes a little hard to appreciate. I mean it’s obvious on the loan side, if we sell loans and we can book the gain on sale and then we can replace those with potentially loans that are higher yield and pick up incremental spread while keeping the loan portfolio flat, let’s say. We can — with the sweep, the one-way sweep, we can actually do the same thing on the deposit side, less so like gains in the near term. But we’ve got about $500 million of deposits on balance sheet at that higher rate that we raised them at in the — late in the first quarter, so around 5%. Every dollar that we raise of deposits either in our local markets, with our new digital business accounts that come on or even through checking accounts on the digital platform, that every dollar we raise lower than 5%, we can keep those deposits on balance sheet and sweep off the $500 million that’s at the higher rate, it doesn’t cost us anything because the rate we’re getting through the sweep service is basically at the same rate.