First Financial Bancorp. (NASDAQ:FFBC) Q3 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

Jon Arfstrom: Okay. Helpful, very helpful on that. Slide 17 and 18, I think, are good slides. And I just wanted to ask on the business deposits. It looks like they bottomed out in kind of MASH time frame. What do you think is driving that increase again? Is it confidence? Is it rates from you guys? Is it businesses not having the opportunity to invest or being cautious? Is there any way to put a thumb on that?

Archie Brown: Jon, this is Archie. I mean, we have been competitive with rates and certainly have seen a mix — some mix shift but you’re right that they have balances of strength. And then interestingly enough, they’ve strengthened even while so we have seen also businesses with liquidity, take that liquidity and pay down lines. We saw a lot of that in the quarter. So I think businesses are by and large, liquid, not all but many. And so they’re either bringing more of that in because the rates are a little better on some of the products we’re offering or they’re using some of that to pay down pay down their lines. So yes, I think they’re pretty healthy right now overall.

Jon Arfstrom: Okay. And then just one for you, Jamie. I don’t know if you have this or not but Slide 23, the bottom right graph, also good because you’re just showing us the numbers. But any idea of how much of the unrealized losses in the securities portfolio burn off over the next, call it, 4 or 5 quarters. So if we’re sitting here at the end of ’24, how much of that just naturally burns off?

Jamie Anderson: Yes. So we were actually talking about this yesterday. So the overall loss in the portfolio and the AOCI impact in equity, call it, somewhere around that $350 million to $400 million range and about — over the course of the year, about 20% of that will burn off. That’s maybe a little bit conservative but around 20% of that would burn off just naturally. I mean, obviously, there’s a lot of variables in rates given no other rate movement, right?

Jon Arfstrom: Yes, absolutely. So that’s over the next 12 months. Okay.

Operator: Our next question comes from Christopher McGratty with KBW.

Christopher McGratty: Great. Archie, maybe — maybe, Jamie, a question on the margins for you. Just it feels like you’ve got this higher margin starting point in part because of the mix of your assets which should have a little bit of credit volatility but overall, good credit adjusted margins. How do we think just about normalized credit costs? I think somebody asked about it before but is it fair to assume that you’ll have a little bit higher credit cost to peers because you have a higher margin?

Jamie Anderson: Yes. I think that’s fair to say over the long term that if you look at the rest of the industry. And if you just want to say what I’ve always used in my career when you’re looking at overall credit losses, if you say credit losses are, give or take, 30 basis points over a long window, I mean to say ours could be 10 basis points higher than that, 10 or 15 basis points higher over that long term consistently. That could definitely be the case. But again, when we look at it from a risk-adjusted return, our loan yields and overall asset yields are — again, over that long term are significantly higher than the peers as well. So that’s a trade that we’re willing to make. It’s just — there’s times when — again, like this quarter, where we had a slightly elevated charge-offs. But again, when we look at our margin, our margin is between 100 and 110 basis points above the peer median. So I think we’re going to have that just given the makeup of the portfolio.

Christopher McGratty: Yes, completely see that. On the — just a question on the securities book. Your yield is a bit higher. I assume you have floaters in there but interested just kind of competition of that, whether put anything in place to hedge downside risk or also any contemplation of adjusting anything in the bond book given where rates have moved?