The Bancorp, Inc. (NASDAQ:TBBK) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

Damian Kozlowski: Well, we’re always focused on efficiency productivity but the one thing — there is core inflation, there’s no doubt. And that’s — that will affect us next year. One of the area is just employee cost. So we’ve been — I mean we’ve got now 4, almost 5 years, basically with flat expenses. I mean, if you look on a historic basis and that’s all been the restructuring of different things that we’ve done on the operational side. I think you’ll see from a historical perspective, we’re not going to be zero. We’re not going to be at 2%. We really want to continue to invest in our people. And while the regulatory side isn’t our issue because there’s been so much investment in that side of our business, that’s not where the cost is going to come from.

It’s going to come from the embedded core inflation. Now we’re obviously benefiting from rate price and inflation in our GDV and everything else. So I think this is a year that you’ll still get a big differential. You’re going to have a big differential between revenue growth and expense growth. But you’ll have above what our trend has been which has been flat, above that trend. We’ll have at least 10% jaws between revenue and expense, will probably be significantly more than that but you won’t see flat expenses this year due to — mostly due to employee costs and core inflation.

Operator: There are no further questions at this time. I will now turn the call over to Damian Kozlowski for closing remarks.

Damian Kozlowski: Thank you, operator. It’s been — it was a really good quarter for us. We made a lot of progress. As I said, we’re looking forward to the next quarter to really tell us a lot more about 2023. So as we get information, we will continue to talk with everyone on the phone. And when we get to the end of the first quarter, I think we’ll have a lot more information to share about how 2023 might ultimately end on the metrics in which we measure this business. So thank you, everyone and have a great day.

Operator: Ladies and gentlemen, this concludes your conference call for today. We thank you for participating and ask that you please disconnect your lines.