Regions Financial Corporation (NYSE:RF) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

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So, from a — you’re really talking about just the consumer on page 17, but business customers continue to have more liquidity as well.

Gerard Cassidy: I got it. So, the wage growth, they’re having better wage growth than most people on this call then, right, David?

David Turner: Yes, sir.

Gerard Cassidy: Moving on to slide 19. In the high-risk industry segments, a couple of questions. One, can you share with us — and maybe you addressed this already in the earlier comments on this slide. But in the office space, is it mostly the Class B and C that — or Class B that you’re more focused on than Class A? And then second, could there be other industry segments that could show up in this slide 6 months from now or 12 months from now?

John Turner: Yes. Gerard, I’d say with respect to your question about office, that would be accurate. We’re focused on, let’s say, the non-Class A — 82% of our portfolio is Class A, 63% is in the Sunbelt. About 36% of our portfolio is single tenant. So, the portion that we are concerned about would be Class B space, a good percentage of it is also in suburban markets of 74%, I think, in suburban markets. In terms of industries or segments that we have some concern about, I would say that we’re still watching senior housing closely. I think it’s performed okay, post-pandemic, but it’s an area that we had some concern about rising cost, availability of labor, things that impact that particular segment and then consumer discretionary as people continue to feel the pressure of rising costs and/or the uncertainty in the environment, we think that — and as unemployment begins to moderate a bit, we think that consumer discretionary is an area that could be impacted.

Operator: Our next question comes from the line of Terry McEvoy with Stephens.

Terry McEvoy: Maybe first one, I was hoping you could provide a little bit more details on, I guess, it’s slide 7 in one of those footnotes, specifically how the $40 million security hedge benefit in the fourth quarter will, and I’ll put in quotes here, “migrate to loan yields” as those hedges on loans mature. And I guess, from a high-level trend to make sure I understand the impact of that $6-plus billion hedge on securities that matured last quarter?

David Turner: Yes. Sure. So, what we did at the end of December of €˜21 is we wanted to add some more sensitivity to the fourth quarter. We had some hedges that were maturing in that fourth quarter that received fixed swaps. But we wanted to move that and have those effectively terminate a quarter earlier. We could have torn those up, but it would have taken a lot of effort to do so because there are a bunch of small notionals in there and the cost and time to do that. Really, there’s an easier way to do it, which is we purchased a pay fixed swap for that quarter. And so, when that sensitivity came back, it generated about $40 million in the quarter. Now, our sensitivity naturally comes back in the first quarter because we have received fixed swaps that are maturing right at the end of the year.

So, that sensitivity came back naturally in the first quarter, and that’s why you won’t see a decline due to this $40 million that we had in the fourth quarter. That is also why we’ve been able to give you guidance that we’re going to grow NII in the first quarter somewhere between 1% and 3%. So, it’s not a cliff. You don’t need to worry about having a cliff effect for it. That makes sense?

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