First Western Financial, Inc. (NASDAQ:MYFW) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

So just looking forward, I think the interesting question, and I don’t really know that we want to give guidance on this. But I guess my feeling is we should plan for the worst, but we can hope for something better than the worst. And I do think that if you look further into the year, we had a lot of pressure in Q4 to catch up on some of the deposit beta that we had kept low through the year. I don’t personally think that’s going to continue. I don’t think we’re going to see half a dozen or whatever it’s been 75 basis point increases from the Fed this year. And so I don’t think that these headline numbers are going to be in the media a time and our clients are going to be saying, hey, how come I’m getting 0 when Fed funds are 5, which we’re hearing throughout the industry.

I mean it’s just going to be a different environment this year, I think. And if that’s true, and I don’t know if it is or if we’re in a recession or whatever, we may get dealt, I mean we know from Page — is it 6 that has our loan stuff on it? I think it’s Page 6 of our slide deck.

Julie Courkamp: Five.

Scott Wylie: Page 5. Thank you. We have something like $100 million or $200 million in loans that pay off every quarter, and we produce something like $200 million or $300 million a quarter, at least last year. And so you do look at the impact of loans rolling off of 3% or 4%, and either renewing or new loans coming on at 7% or 8%. And it just feels to me like we’re pretty well positioned from an already competitively high net interest margin compared to high fee bank peers, private banking peers, I think we’re well positioned to see some growth later in the year but we’re going to see that come down in Q1. And I don’t know what’s going to happen the rest of the year but just the dynamics that seem apparent today, leave room for upside later in the year. So that was a little bit of a long-winded answer to your question, Brett. I hope it was helpful.

Brett Rabatin: Yes, Scott. That was very helpful. And I would agree, you obviously did a good job last year managing the deposit cost has just gotten so competitive and essentially your competition is the treasury curve. So sort of is what it is. My follow-up question, I wanted to ask about the loan portfolio growth from here. 4Q was construction and residential. Obviously, you have slow growth from 21% linked quarter annualized in the fourth quarter. But wanted to get a sense of what the pipeline looked like, what you think you might grow this year and then any magnitude that you’re expecting from pipeline perspective?

Scott Wylie: Yes. We’ve historically said that we think we can grow loans in the mid-teens. I think, again, if you stand back a little further than just a quarterly look, we’ve kind of grown loans pretty consistently organically at least in the mid-teens. So with tighter standards, with higher spreads, could we grow loans in the mid-teens in 2023, well, I think so. We have the infrastructure in place. We’ve got some strong machine, I call it, in our existing offices. And then, we’ve added some more high-quality lenders in some of these new markets that we’re in, Arizona, Western Wyoming and Montana. So yes, I mean, I think we’re well positioned to see growth in deposits and loans in those markets in relationships, but it’s just hard to tell right now.