Western Alliance Bancorporation (NYSE:WAL) Q2 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

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Operator: Thank you. The next question will be from the line of Casey Haire with Jefferies. Your line is now open.

Casey Haire: Yeah. Great. Thanks. Good morning, guys. Just want to follow up on the borrowing paydown. So just you guys have a PPNR guide of around $280 million, what you have here in the second quarter. Just wondering the pace of what the guide assumes for borrowing paydown and timing as well, like, how low does that $10 million go?

Dale Gibbons: Well, I don’t have a number for you, Casey, exactly. What I would say is, we are trying to do two things here. One is paydown further, particularly in the more expensive line as I mentioned, but secondly as well, to provide more liquidity for our clients. So the combination of those two. So it’s going to — I don’t have a number in terms of what exactly that looks like. That’s the trajectory we are on. That’s the trajectory we started to be on in the second quarter and I think we are going to be more focused on that as we complete to 2023.

Casey Haire: Okay. And given your — given the progress you guys have made on the deposits quarter-to-date, which is pretty strong. Have you — has there been any paydown quarter-to-date? You are making use of that deposit growth, like do you have a borrowing balance as of July 17th?

Ken Vecchione: Yeah. This is Ken. Yeah. We do. Let me just take you through the deposits. Yeah. We are seeing great deposit growth so far early into the quarter. To remind everyone that the natural flow of our deposits, they grow early, and just about in the next couple of days, we are going to see some paydowns coming from our warehouse lending group for P&I and T&I accounts and so that those deposits will shrink, okay? So for us, we have the borrowings scheduled to be paid down, probably, closer to the back end of the quarter as a safer way of thinking about it. As we grow our deposits to $2 billion, we actually hope we can do better, but as we grow our deposit growth to $2 billion.

Casey Haire: Okay. Very good. And just, I guess, switching to the dispositions about $1.8 billion left, so apologies if I missed this. But is — can you get that done this quarter and within the original fair value mark of 2% that you took?

Dale Gibbons: We have updated our marks. We think that they are good. What we did initially, I think, proved to be pretty accurate. I don’t think it’s all going to get done this quarter, but we expect to make kind of significant progress on that, and as I mentioned, that will be coincident with paying down higher cost, I think.

Casey Haire: Okay. Dale, any color on what’s causing the delay, because I mean, what’s left does not look like a lot of high risk stuff for you guys?

Dale Gibbons: What?

Tim Bruckner: Let me take it. Hi. Tim Bruckner. Yeah. We are actually receiving much stronger values on some of these discrete single note sales related to some of the assets, and just in the normal course, that takes a little bit longer than doing a large pool of sale.

Ken Vecchione: I just want to…

Casey Haire: Got you.

Ken Vecchione: …make…

Casey Haire: Thank you.

Ken Vecchione: Thanks for the question, Casey. But we were pretty early in moving assets to HFS and I think our aggressive fostering of that helped us keep the dispositions inside of our marks and that’s sort of the hallmark and the culture here at the company and which connects to the asset quality that we are approach that we take as well. So we tend to be early on everything and try to execute early on. We have found whether it’s disposition of assets, whether it’s asset quality and talking to clients being there early, being there first, produces better results. So I just wanted to add that little color commentary.

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