The Bank of N.T. Butterfield & Son Limited (NYSE:NTB) Q3 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

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And — but pricing is still holding up, and so we’re happy to continue to underwrite in that market. It’s been a great credit performance for us. I wouldn’t say unlimited capacity, but we certainly have a lot of capacity if there are borrowers coming into that market. But again, typically the profile of the borrowers is a borrower that perhaps doesn’t need to borrow. And so there is that consideration, right, because we’re not in High Street. We’re in the prime Central London neighborhoods only, and we’re only 60%, 65% LTV underwriting. So, again, there’s a lot of skin in the game for both parties. But yeah, definitely, we’re still very active across all our markets. It’s just when you run an amortizing loan book like we do, amortization sometimes overtakes originations and that’s what’s happening in terms of slowdown, plus the FX impact as well.

But we definitely have ample capacity.

Alex Twerdahl: Okay, and then one thing that just caught my eye in the filing was the loans that are past due and still accruing seem to have been increasing over the last couple quarters. You guys obviously haven’t added to the ACL and your charge-offs have been really low. Can you just maybe walk us through what’s happening there and just give us a little bit more color around those increases?

Michael Schrum: Yeah, sure. So it’s Michael Schrum again. I mean, principally this quarter — last couple of quarters have been driven — the last quarter increase was driven by one legacy mixed use residential hospitality loan facility, which actually entered receivership post quarter end. It’s been a long road for that one, and I think it’s finally getting to a point where in Bermuda where we’re seeing a good exit point. It’s well collateralized, so we’re not expecting any credit impact from that. But it obviously just has drifted on, and we need to get some — to a recovery position on that. I think overall credit provisions were slightly down this quarter, but consistent with the lower balances that we saw in the quarter.

And we do have a few facilities in London where the exit point was the sale of a property, and they haven’t been able to get their asking price. So maybe there’s some expectation adjustments there. But, again, given the equity that’s in the property, even if it goes 90 days past due, we’re still accruing.

Craig Bridgewater: And technically, we go through a process or evaluation around whether a facility is well secured. So if the answer to that is yes, and in the cases of what you’ve seen, the answer is yes. If they’re well secured, well, we will continue to accrue interest, because, again, we feel that we’ll be able to recover both the principal and the accrued interest in that scenario.

Alex Twerdahl: Okay, great. Thanks for taking my questions.

Operator: This concludes our question-and-answer session. I would like to turn the conference back over to Noah Fields for any closing remarks.

Noah Fields: Thank you, Andrea. And thanks to everyone for dialing in today. We look forward to speaking with you again next quarter. Have a great day. Thank you.

Operator: The conference has now concluded. Thank you for attending today’s presentation. And you may now disconnect.

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