Synovus Financial Corp. (NYSE:SNV) Q2 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

Page 3 of 12

Brady Gailey: Okay. And then the $25 million burden, if you look at that on a pre-tax point of view, I think, it’s only like 2.5% of the loans being sold. So that’s a pretty minimal loss there. But I was wondering, what was the reserve on that portfolio, that reserve probably gets wiped out. I am just wondering what the overall loss was on selling those loans?

Jamie Gregory: Yeah. Brady, that will — we will put all that out there at closing. But you are right to think that that’s a net number and so we do feel good about it is a little less than the 2.5% you mentioned, but it’s a net number and we will put out all the details of the economics at closing.

Brady Gailey: Okay. And then just finally, it’s great to see Qualpay close. I know that is beneficial to Maast. Can you just remind us the benefit that, that has on Maast and with that business now closed, as your outlook for Maast change at all?

Kevin Blair: Brady, Qualpay is the front-end for our payment facilitation platform so that we can process payments through the Maast platform. And so we have been very clear that having a majority ownership interest in Qualpay allows us to ensure that the capital that’s provided to our platform is their number one priority. So it is great to have it closed. It has a minimal impact to our P&L, but it’s a big impact as we continue to expand the capabilities and functionalities of Maast. When we started this program a little over a year ago, what we said is we would get into 2023 and we would start to pilot with a couple of software vendors. Well, we are up to three partners that are on board today and we also have five others that have signed on.

So we will have a total of eight that will be on the platform, with five additional software vendors in the contract phase today. So that could take us to as many as 13 software vendors that are signing on to the platform. So I think we have confirmed our initial hypothesis that Maast would be a product that is highly desirable by the software vendors, just based on the interest and the individuals that have signed up to this point. But I think it’s premature to talk about what the revenue is going to be from those software vendors, because we are still finalizing the NVP product and that will be rolled out more broad-based at the end of this quarter to all of those eight software vendors that have signed up. And then the final stage, which will determine how fast the revenue grows will be the end user adoption.

So those clients that are using the software, will they leave deposits on the platform, will they sign up for the money movement capabilities and eventually the lending capabilities. But having Qualpay finalized ensures that a big component of the capabilities within the platform, we have control over not only what’s there today, but the ultimate advancement and development on that platform.

Brady Gailey: Okay. Got it. Thanks for the color.

Kevin Blair: Thanks, Brady.

Operator: Our next question comes from the line of Stephen Scouten with Piper Sandler. Stephen, please go ahead. Your line is now open.

Stephen Scouten: Thanks guys. Good morning. I just wanted to follow-up on the earlier conversation about kind of balance sheet trends around the non-interest bearing. I know that’s really hard to predict in this environment, but you did note that average balances have declined a little bit. I am curious if you have some more detail around that, what those average balances look like now maybe to pre-COVID and kind of how we can think about the room for potential normalization there?

Page 3 of 12