Cadence Bank (NYSE:CADE) Q3 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

Catherine Mealor: And then one classification on the capital gain from the insurance sales, that $620 million capital impact, does that include taking out the $91 million of goodwill associated with insurance hub?

Valerie Toalson: I think that includes that number.

Catherine Mealor: And then just to circle back on the capital, is there a capital ratio that you target, via CET1 or TCE that you just — I mean this is a great capital accretive event. And so now that we’ve got our capital ratios back up to levels that I think we all feel better about, is there just a bottom in either of those ratios that you really don’t want to get below as you think about bond restructuring and buybacks into next year?

Dan Rollins: No. I think we want to make good decisions. And I don’t think we want to be trapped by 1 basis point or 2 basis points on some ratio. We want to make good intelligent smart decisions at the time.

Operator: The next question comes from Brody Preston with UBS.

Brody Preston: I wanted to ask Valerie, just maybe if you could talk a little bit about the moving parts on NII. I was wondering where the spot rate on interest-bearing deposits were at quarter end? And also, could you talk about the loan repricing that you expect going forward? We had previously spoken about a 50% loan beta cycle to date but I think you’re running closer to 44% now. So any commentary you can give around those 2 items, I’d appreciate.

Valerie Toalson: Yes, sure. So we did see our noninterest-bearing mix moderate pretty meaningfully during the quarter, where noninterest-bearing really only came down a little over 26% in the second quarter, a little over 25% in the third quarter. And so that obviously is a positive impact. And as we also mentioned, the cost of deposits went up 27 basis points at was half of what it had done in the prior couple of quarters. So all of that is meaningful. If you take a look at Slide 20, that shows the standard repricing that we’ve talked about and where things are in the floating category and then where things are in the next 3 to 12 months and that obviously flows into our margin and helps improve that loan yield. One of the things that we saw this quarter was because we didn’t have net loan growth, the pace of that loan yield increase was down from — or with moderated anyway, that impact was moderated because of the lack of new loans.

And so that is bringing down our beta assumptions as we go forward. The loans, excluding accretion, direct for the third quarter was flat. The beta was flat at 44% compared to the second quarter. As we look towards year-end, it’s probably going to inch up a little bit. And again, some of that depends on the volume of loan growth. But probably, it will be sub-50, I think, at this point from what we saw this quarter but it will be up a couple of percent probably, 2, 3 along that line. On the deposit beta side, again, that slowed it was 35% on a cumulative basis in the second quarter, 38% now. Similarly, I think it will probably move a little bit between now and year-end but 2, 3 basis points kind of thing or percentage points.

Dan Rollins: You got that, Brody?

Brody Preston: Yes, that’s helpful. And then, Dan, I wanted to ask just how do you think about — we talked about buybacks, we talked about securities, restructure. We haven’t talked about whole bank M&A at all. I think that we saw at least one other bank use proceeds of an insurance sale to buy another bank up in the Northeast. At BXS, you’d been a prolific buyer of smaller banks and then you did the MOE. So any thoughts around using some of the proceeds or a bigger inorganic transaction? And then secondly, I did want to get your thoughts about how you think about overall levels of profitability and where you’d like to drive those 2 at some point over the medium term. I think the ROE target when you did the deal, the MOE was like a 1.3% ROA. I think with this transaction, it gets you back to 1. So just trying to think about longer term how do you get back to that kind of trajectory that you had laid out before.