WesBanco, Inc. (NASDAQ:WSBC) Q3 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

Russell Gunther: Okay. And that’s in that — okay, that’s in your overall commentary. Thank you for the clarification. And then just the final question for me would be the criticized/classified uptick. I know year-over-year pretty unchanged and all other leading credit indicators were still very benign, but any color you could share there on the migration this quarter?

Jeff Jackson: Sure. It was a few projects, CRE projects, different industries, different areas that just ticked into the C&C. Once again, we remain in very good shape, better than our peers and feel really good. Obviously, it fluctuates quarter-to-quarter or so, but it was just a few transactions.

Dan Weiss: Yes. I would say almost the outlier would have been the first and second quarter coming in at only right around 1.6% of total loans.

Operator: The next question comes from Dave Bishop of Hovde Group.

Dave Bishop : In terms of going back to loan growth, obviously year-over-year in that double-digit range 10%, ticked down this quarter, I think 6% and change. Do you think mid-single-digits is sort of the new environment, the new norm in terms of what the market gives you even with some of the lift outs, do you think you can still be in sort of that high-single-digit, maybe low-double-digit growth rate?

Jeff Jackson: We always target mid to upper-single-digit. I think one of the things if you look at, we had a higher number of payoffs in third quarter than we did in second quarter. So I think we would have been very similar loan growth, have we not had the higher payoffs. I do believe that adding all the new talent we have, increasing the LPOs, I think, does give us some momentum. We did that kind of mid to upper-single-digit growth. But it’s an interesting environment today and I’m not going to commit to either number, but that’s kind of what we target as mid to upper and we feel really good where we sit today.

Dave Bishop : And then the final question for me, great job in terms of growing the swap fees. Just curious maybe where you think those can — where you can take those two maybe on an absolute level or percent of total fee income?

Jeff Jackson: Sure. Yes. We’re — I think as I told you last year, we did $4 million in swap fees. I think we’re on target as we’ve said before to double it this year. I think, we can continue to grow it, as we grow our lenders and continuing to train our lenders on swaps. We are obviously targeting a total fee as a percentage of revenue at — we’d love to get to 30% as we’ve said. Obviously, that’s a long-term goal, but we feel like this is one of the many avenues we have to get there.

Dan Weiss: Yes. And I would just add, this quarter with swap fees, including fair value adjustments coming in at $3.8 million, that was pretty remarkable. It certainly exceeded some expectations there. But just want to point out that $1.3 million there is a fair market value adjustment and typically that’s something that tough to model and not something that we do model typically. So we obviously saw a 75 basis point kind of rate increase from second quarter to third quarter in 5 and 10-year, and that’s what really drove the $1.3 million positive fair value adjustment. So as we look forward into fourth quarter and beyond, that may or may not be there in future quarters.

Operator: The next question comes from Karl Shepard of RBC Capital Markets.

Karl Shepard: I wanted to follow-up on some of the commentary on the treasury products. You guys sound like you’re pretty bullish maybe about the fee revenue opportunity there next year. But curious, are you assuming any deposit or funding benefits from rolling those out in kind of across your lender base?