East West Bancorp, Inc. (NASDAQ:EWBC) Q3 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

Broderick Preston: Got it. Okay. And then I do have a follow-up, which is a multipart kind of question. I wanted to ask how much of the bank’s loan portfolio SNCs. And of that, what amount is the bank, the lead underwriter on? And then also, I don’t know if Chris or Irene would have this, do you happen to have what the reserve on the office portfolio is?

Irene Oh: Yes, Brody. So as of 9/30, we held $2.4 billion of SNC that we have purchased from others. Out of 9/30, we’re also the lead on $900 million of syndications, $300 million of which we’ve participated out to others. And I think your next question, although you squeeze them three questions for day, I want to comment on that on offsets. So we increased the reserve for office. Total reserve for office was 230 as of 9/30 from 190 as of 6/30. And I’ll just share that half of that continues to be qualitative factors versus quantitative reserve that we need for the — as we look at the portfolio and the economic outlook and the portfolio of credit quality. So, we continue to monitor it and make sure that our reserve is building as we think it is appropriate given the environment.

Operator: Next question comes from Ebrahim Poonawala with Bank of America. Please go ahead.

Ebrahim Poonawala: Just maybe Dominic for you. So as we think about — you have a lot of excess capital, a lot of banking peers are pulling back. Just give us a sense of customer demand as you think about lending on the commercial side and how you’re approaching? Are you pulling back in certain areas? Just give us a sense of the growth opportunity be it market share driven or just customer demand driven that you’re seeing today?

Dominic Ng: Well, our priority has been mainly focusing on taking good care of our customers. As you can see, actually back in March, some of our other former competitors were really hurting their customer in a big way. So one of the things that East West offer is stability and consistency. So, we have, frankly, some really good commercial real estate clients that are year-ins and year-out have been banking with us for decades that went through the cycles of various economic conditions and actually have done really well. In fact, whenever there is a down cycle, they tend to do better. And when there are customers like that, that find really great opportunities, we step up and take good care of them and make sure they get the financing needs.

But we’re not chasing down every other customers who are fleeting other banks and things like that. So obviously, as we all know, the interest rate is relatively high level. And there are not that many great deals out there. And also on the C&I side, many of our very strong customers are not out there making substantial investments. So in the standpoint of where are we today that we’ve got plenty of capital to be deployed, we are able to continue to take very good care of our customers for their needs. But on the other hand, our customers are not out there making very aggressive purchases or acquisitions that require a whole lot of additional line increases and so forth. So with that, I think that I would say that the growth is relatively somewhat stable, and I don’t expect something dramatic just because of the market disruption that happened back in March.

Secondly, I do see that we are getting more increase from customers from other banks from the banks have felt all banks that currently are not doing well. Their customers are making increase to East West. We are prudently taking this new customer one at a time. We don’t want to just quickly and then start bringing too many on and then just causing indigestion for ourselves. So we are just prudently taking them on one at a time. And then we feel that in the next few years, in general, the market is somewhat more favorable to East West simply because of the current competitive landscape.