First BanCorp. (NYSE:FBP) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

Timur Braziler : Great, thanks for the color.

Operator: Thank you for your question. The next question comes from the line of Kelly Motta with KBW. You may proceed.

Kelly Motta: Thanks for the question. Good morning. Are there any pick up on the loan side? We’ve had really strong growth this quarter. And that seems to be one of the factors that helps offset some of the other areas of pressure that we’ve been talking about. Can you speak to your pipeline how demand has been holding up as we’ve gotten quite a few rate hikes now and kind of the outlook for growth and color around categories would be helpful?

Aurelio Aleman: Yes, if you look at by segment obviously residential mortgage, we don’t expect any growth, I started with the portfolio thing called being. And if we saw last quarter, we have a slight growth, it’s really a mix of repayments and origination at the end of the day, because you know how the market — the currency market is performing, obviously, the more conforming rates go down, we’ll be moving a little bit better, the non-government body will move to that. So we’re forecasting that segment to remain flat. We continue to see strong demand for the consumer in auto businesses, credit card, and we continue — and the pipeline for construction and commercial remains very strong, actually probably very similar to the prior quarter that we started.

Some of the Delta, one quarter versus the other depends on the consumer, what we did last year close to 10%. While within the commercial was less than that, it depends on the more chunky deals. I will say it on a blended basis, for the year, we should think about 5% to 6% mid-single digits, as a closest estimate, based on what we see today, what we have, and that could be some larger chunky deals that we’re not including here, that could be participation in some of the public private partnerships that the government is structuring, to be able to refine the timing of those, it’s quite complex in terms of predicting when they will be finished and close, but some of those are floating around are part of the fiscal plan, and they’ve been in the negotiation with different bidder.

So some of that could help banks to which I’m sure, most of the bank locally will participate as part of our support to the infrastructure and the economy. So that I will say, Kelly, the closest estimates are all mid-single digits here.

Kelly Motta: Got it, that’s helpful. And to circle back on NII and NIM, as we — you think about it potentially expanding in the latter part of the year, how should we be thinking about the churn in threshold of NII reaching the bottom? Or should we be anticipating a similar level of deposit pricing pressures this quarter, is a potentially heating up. And if you could give any numbers around the core deposit base, excluding the government deposits and how betas are trending on that that would be helpful in understanding this?

Aurelio Aleman: Okay. This quarter, we do expect, still some pressure. Remember that obviously, you were seeing average impact in the last quarter of what happened with rates movement throughout the quarter. But obviously, the ending number in the quarter is higher than the average that we had, because of it. Clearly a lot of — it’s a push on a more volatile government component that had a very large beta. And that we expect that to have some impact in the second quarter, although future impact because of rates, expectations are not necessarily going to be at the same pace. On the rest of the path. As I mentioned, the average cost of all the other deposits was 40 basis points in September and the September quarter, it was about 66 basis points in the fourth quarters.