Wintrust Financial Corporation (NASDAQ:WTFC) Q2 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

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Richard Murphy: No, I don’t think there’s necessarily any color that I could give you on that. I mean, it’s – the levels are still very subdued in terms of overall. But in terms of driving changes in the CECL, I don’t know if it really had a whole lot of – yes. So I’m just going to take look at it. Yes. We’re at 1% still. So I mean as it relates to overall levels, I think we’re still in pretty good shape, kind of looking at my list of additions to it. Not a lot of common denominators here. We try to be incredibly proactive in our portfolio reviews of identifying any type of loan that might be in the CRE sub-segment, for instance, where you have a decline in debt service coverage that gets a little bit closer to 1:1 or at 1:1, that’s going to be something.

So we see some – so I see some of that. There’s also as a commercial customer is – compressed a little bit on cash flow. We might make that a substandard and typically we’re going to anticipate that that’s going to turn around. So there’s no one thing I can point to, but just certainly higher borrowing cost probably would be the primary driver of that as it puts a little more strain on cash flow both in the C&I and CRE segment. But as it relates to CECL, I mean, not a whole I think as Dave pointed out earlier, I think the bigger drivers on CECL is really going to be some of these economic factors.

David Alan Dykstra: Yes. I think it’s more a function of just our very proactive approach to reviewing these credits and making sure we understand where everything is. Again, Rich, they remain at very low level.

Nathan Race: Got it. That’s helpful. And just going back to Terry’s question around expenses. I think last quarter, Dave, we were talking about kind of a high single-digit outlook for this year. Is that still kind of hold?

David Alan Dykstra: I think it does. I mean, you got to – if you pack out the impact of the acquisitions, we’ve always said that it’s excluding acquisitions. But yes, I think that still holds. This quarter, I talked about the reasons for this quarter. But yes, I think we still look at that as being appropriate.

Nathan Race: Gotcha. And just one last housekeeping question. With the sale of some MSRs in the quarter, does that impact mortgage revenue in any way materially in 2Q?

David Alan Dykstra: No. We took an opportunity. We always mark the MSRs to market and we had the market value of them at the end of last quarter when we started to look at this transaction when we actually sold them this quarter were roughly the same. So there wasn’t a big impact. That was really just reducing risk again. MSRs have run up nicely and to take a little bit of that asset off of our book at sort of the top of the MSR valuation as we look at it seem to be prudent and the loan – the servicing rights that we sold were generally those loans that were outside of the Chicago, Milwaukee market area, so they weren’t our banking customers. That were loans that we’ve made in other regions of the United States.

Nathan Race: That makes sense. If I could just pass one more on capital. Total risk based took down to 11.9. I know you guys tend to want to stay above the 11.5%. But imagine what the – I’m sorry, the insurance premium finance securitization that’s upcoming and just given perhaps higher for longer interest rate environment, that you guys have plenty of capital to just kind of continue to support the growth opportunities that exist organically in front of you today, that the right way to stand out?

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