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

Casey Whitman: Morning. I guess, as moving on to think about capital here, first, can you touch on your appetite for buybacks going forward and how price-sensitive you are there? And then the follow-up would be just sort of give us an update on how you’re viewing M&A for you guys this year?

Todd Clossin: I’ll start off on the capital side, and let Dan jump in on that, and then I’ll hit on M&A as well too. But I think from a capital perspective, we were watching what was going on in the last couple quarters with AOCI, some say it matters, some say it doesn’t. But we were paying a lot of attention to it. And we did slow back the buybacks. The buybacks we did do in the fourth quarter were at the early part of the fourth quarter. And part of that was because we wanted to watch to see what happened with AOCI, and trying to stay in our 7%-ish type of range. But also, the price to the tangible book was up close to 200% or so, and we felt that was a pretty big number. I think as we look at this year, some of the things — I think AOCI is moderated; we don’t see that, we don’t know that.

I’m not sure that’s going to be as big of an impact on peoples’ planning this year, maybe it was last year. But when I really look at the whole buyback piece of it, it’s something we’re going to have to evaluate. I mean I know a lot of people are looking through AOCI. So, if you look through AOCI, maybe you’re not at the 190% or 200% of tangible book, maybe you’re at a lower number. So, that’s something that we’ll evaluate. We haven’t made up any firm decisions yet, but we still have 1.2 million share authorization, and we’ll pull on that when we think it’s appropriate. That could be this year, we may start doing some of that, but I think that’s going to be dependent upon what we see over the next couple of months. Dan, anything else you would add on that?

Dan Weiss: No, I think you covered it well.

Todd Clossin: Okay. Sorry to call your comments on that.

Dan Weiss: No, I think you’re good.

Todd Clossin: On the M&A side, I would tell you that we’re not actively looking at anything right now. We’re doing a lot of introductions. Jeff’s sitting next to me here, and he and I are making a lot of trips to the markets that we have a lot of interest in, and introducing him to some of the key executives at some other banks, people that I’ve known. And he’s introduced me actually to some people he’s known as well too. So, we’re definitely interested if the right thing were to come along. We think we’ve got the capital, the liquidity, obviously got a new core operating system we put in place a year-and-a-half ago now. So, we feel like we would be ready to do something, but we don’t feel like we need to. I think we’ve finally been able to realize the loan growth that we’ve been working towards for a long time.

It’s kind of nice to be in that position and just focus on organic growth. So, we may very well just decide to do that. But also, at the same time, if we had the right opportunity come along I think we’d be prepared to act on it. But at this point, we’re not actively looking at anything.

Casey Whitman: Understood. Are there particular markets that you would be most interested in or is it footprint-wide?