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

I think we’re seeing clients that we’re thinking about doing something that makes sense at 4% and maybe doesn’t make sense at 8%. And these are sophisticated people, and they’ve been through cycles, and they don’t need to do something. And maybe they will, maybe they won’t. I would say right now, our pipelines are down, but they’re sure not empty. There’s plenty of activity going on, and people are doing things, and we’re closing on new loans.

Julie Courkamp: Then I would just add, Brett, for the kind of the mix comment that you added into that question. We did see quite a bit of mortgage offering, mortgage production last year. And for us, it continues to be very strategically important to us. Like we’ve always said, it’s a good new acquisition of clients and retaining existing clients tool for us to use. But we continue to be cognizant of generating appropriate risk adjusted returns on our capital. So you’ll probably see us dial back our residential mortgage production from what we did at least in the prior year for the first couple of quarters this year as we look at our competitors what they’re pricing those loans at, they’re not quite as attractive as what we would want to put on our portfolio. So I don’t think you’ll see that same level of growth for us at least in the first part of this year unless things change.

Brett Rabatin: Okay. That’s very helpful. Thanks for all the color.

Operator: And our next question comes from the line of Brady Gailey of KBW. Your line is open.

Brady Gailey: So the $20 million of sub-debt that was raised intra-quarter, is that solely just for growth purposes? Or was there any other thing you were thinking about when you raised that sub-debt? I’m not sure if there’s anything else that’s expiring or maturing. But what’s the — any color behind why the sub-debt raise?

Scott Wylie: Yes. Well, we thought that going into a potential recession, more capital is better than less capital, and we didn’t want to do a common raise. We don’t need to because we’ve been able to generate good earnings here over these last few years to support the growth we’ve had. But we saw a window for an attractive non-rated raise. The one that was done before us, I think, closed at 8% of a regional bank. The one that was done after was 8.5%, we got ours done at 7%, 5-year fixed and gives us $20 million of surplus Tier-2 capital at the holding company that can be pushed down to the bank for additional common. It can be additional cash for the holding company. I mean we said general corp purposes, which is exactly what we plan to use it for.

So it just seemed opportunistic and of course, it’s non-dilutive. The impact on future EPS is minimal. And I think we don’t know what’s in the future. And when the windows like that is there, I think it makes sense to take advantage of it.

Brady Gailey: All right. And the new commercial loan that entered into NPA, it sounds like it’s not a huge risk given the dynamics you talked about. But just a little more color, what type of loan is that and when do you expect to have that loan resolved and back out of the NPA bucket?