WesBanco, Inc. (NASDAQ:WSBC) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

And I still don’t think that you’ll see us on the lower side from a beta perspective of peers. We expect that advantage to continue right through the rate cycle that we’re in right now.

Karl Shepard: Okay, that’s helpful. And then I wanted to pivot here to talk about loan growth a little bit too. I get that you’re reluctant to provide a full-year view kind of the economy and what that might mean for loan growth. But could you help us understand the quarter a little bit better, of the trends for 4Q, is that new offices and execution or do you think it’s also strong loan demand or is it more moderating payoffs, just help us break out those pieces a little bit so we can think about where to go from here?

Todd Clossin: Sure. Well, that 13% of our pipeline is from the LPOs, right? So, they’re showing up in the pipeline, but we’re not seeing, really, loan growth in any material way at this point from the LPOs. We should see that, I think, this year or next year, again economy dependent. So, that is something that’s going to be a benefit to us. But I would not say that the loan growth that you saw last year from us was based upon new LPOs because that wouldn’t be accurate, it was a minor part of it. I think it was more of just hiring into the markets that we’ve already been in. And as you guys know, over the last decade or so, even longer than that, we’ve been acquiring into higher-growth markets like Louisville, Lexington, the Mid-Atlantic markets.

So, put a little more of a growth profile on WesBanco, while still keeping our core advantages on the credit deposit side and everything else, I think this is just the fulfillment of that, at least that’s way I look at it, was we had to acquire into those markets, and then assimilate those organizations and then hire additional people into those organizations. And now we’re seeing the benefit of that starting to show up, which is why, and really looking at the upper single-digit loan growth going forward is because we’ve been building this for quite a long time now. And I think our organization is positioned well to take advantage of that. With regard to the fourth quarter, we did get some benefit from a lower level of commercial real estate payoffs of about $60 million.

And we had $160 million, I think, in the quarter before that. So, we expect about $80 million to $90 million to kind of be our normal quarterly commercial real estate payoff rate. So, we did get a benefit from that. And as Dan said in his comments, we are putting 80% of our resi mortgage on our books as well too. We typically would do about 50%. So, I think if you were just to roll the resi mortgage back to 50%, and look at that, assuming we had done that last year, we would have had a loan growth of about 8% or 9% because we put more resi on, and that bumped us up to a little over 11%, but that’s market-dependent based upon what’s going on with what consumers want. But that’s why I really feel like we’re more at an upper single-digit loan growth rate, which I think is sustainable over time.

Any quarter can be up or down. A couple $100 million is going to move the needle a lot with a bank our size. And you really need to look at it, I believe, on an annual basis or two to three-year basis to really get a good idea of what the franchise run rate is.

Karl Shepard: Great, thanks for all the help.

Todd Clossin: Okay, thank you.

Operator: The next question comes from Casey Whitman with Piper Sandler. Please go ahead.

Casey Whitman: Hey, good morning.

Todd Clossin: Hi, Casey, welcome back.

Casey Whitman: Thank you.

Dan Weiss: Yes, good morning.