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

Christopher Marinac: Got it. Okay. And then if we go through the fraud situation, this is not the first time you’ve seen and dealt with these things, can you kind of just remind us all the things you’ve done internally since you’ve been at the bank and kind of where that positions you going forward? And maybe just the costs that you’ve already put in for some of the systems you’ve done to kind of avoid future incidents like this legacy problem?

Matthew Switzer: I wish I would have prepared better for that. I mean because — so that I could be concise.

Dennis Zember: I mean put in a new Chief Credit Officer, put in a fully staffed credit administration team, lowered the level for — substantially lowered the level for — or analyst and underwriter, independent analyst and underwriter approvals. Put in a full — I say this, but this is the fact, put in a regularly occurring process for approving loans. In other words, we don’t just approve loans randomly one-off here and there. I mean we have a team of experts that get packages, that review loans and that approve them. And that probably sounds very basic, but yes, we’ve had to do that. The amount of loan systems and monitoring that we’ve put in, extraordinary. I mean when we focus — when we say no — I mean just learning how to say no to a lot of customers when they want extensions of this or renewals of that.

When we — not being so — I mean I — this is everybody — every banker that hears this will know what I’m saying, but when you don’t have to say yes to every single loan demand, every single loan request because you have other options, I just — processes for renewals, processes for extensions. How — ask yourself how hard do you look at renewals and extensions or do you just sort of quickly approve those to get through? We don’t do that anymore. It’s pretty extensive. Honestly, and a lot of that happened right out of the gate because as soon as I got here, we fell into COVID. We had the hospitality book that wasn’t performing very well. And a lot of other customers that were stressed. And so it was really in that we just instituted a lot more detailed review, a lot more detailed understanding of everything.

So…

Matthew Switzer: And — I mean, Chris, I don’t want to go into a whole lot of detail, but — we’re very confident that this was a one-off issue. There’s a rogue employee, he’d been conducting this for quite a while, taking advantage of his knowledge of policies and procedures and controls and basically leveraging relationships and his tenure at the bank to avoid a lot of those and get around them. But what Dennis was just describing is what caused it to all unwind. I mean he had built a house of cards that he was able to manage under the previous policies and kind of how things were structured, but with those changes that Dennis talked about, it made it untenable for him to keep all the balls in the air, and that’s how it all fell apart.

Christopher Marinac: Sure. That’s all helpful background. Thank you very much for all that. Just a quick final question for me just on the mortgage business. Does the seasonality both in Q3 and Q4 suggest that you can still make a little bit of pretax income now and then have a small loss in Q4 or do you think it can be better than that?