Heartland Financial USA, Inc. (NASDAQ:HTLF) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

Bruce Lee: Yeah. Just two other things, and I want to piggyback on what Bryan just said about the internal loan participations between our charters. One of the real benefits of the banks that we’ve already consolidated is that their balance sheet and, therefore, their income statement now actually reflects the work that they’ve done, where before, if they had made a loan and it was participated only the amount of the loan that was not participated remained on their balance sheet. So they’re actually now getting the full benefit for everything they’re doing, whether it’s originating loans or on the deposit side. They’re getting the benefit of the deposits if others are using those deposits to fund loans. So that — and then also we had to manage capital at 11 different charters in the past where now you don’t have to do that. So those are just some of the kind of the non-expense side, but the real benefits in how we operate going forward, Terry.

Bryan McKeag: Thanks for the question.

Terry McEvoy: Thanks for all the color there. And then as a follow-up on the deposit side, what’s it, $800 million of brokered CDs at $3.95, can you just talk about how long you expect those to be on the balance sheet? Is it kind of a one year type product and maybe what’s your deposit beta going forward from here, it’s been relatively low so far?

Bruce Lee: Yeah. Bryan, why don’t you take that one?

Bryan McKeag: Yeah. So I think the $800 million of CDs, brokered CDs, I believe, are all less than a year, and I think they’re predominantly less than six months, so they’re not long CDs, Terry. And then our deposit betas and you probably can see in the deck that they’re about — there’s been about 14 basis points or 15 basis points or beta in the fourth quarter. I think those will move up a little bit. It wouldn’t surprise me if we saw another five to 10 ticks on that beta, just we’re going to do a little bit of catch-up, but we moved it pretty close to the market, but we’re going to move a little bit more to stay with the market. And on the consumer — our commercial side, we have been making decisions all along that we need to make, to make sure that we maintain our customers and are open to what relationships we have to customers to price properly.

Terry McEvoy: Great. Thank you for taking my questions and enjoy the night.

Bruce Lee: Thanks, Terry.

Operator: Thank you. Please standby for our next question. Our next question comes from the line of Damon DelMonte with KBW. Your line is open.

Damon DelMonte: Hey. Good evening, guys. Hope you guys are all doing well today and thanks for taking my questions. Just wanted to ask a little bit about the margin, Bryan. I heard the commentary that NII will be down on a lower day count in part. Just kind of wondering, where you see the margin peaking, if you think at the first quarter event or a second quarter event and kind of how you look at the cadence of margin throughout the year?

Bryan McKeag: Yeah. That’s probably the toughest question I’m going to get today because . Let me take it in chunks. I would say the first quarter here on margin, I would say would stay — without any Fed moves, we would probably stay just slightly below the 365 that we posted. I think there is, as I said, there’s some latent data catch up here that I think happened in December and maybe even in early January. So I think we’ll fight without any Fed help to stay there. Now, if the Fed raises, like, everybody thinks 25 basis points in a couple of days, we’ll get a little bit of benefit from that, but not nearly like we were getting before. And I think the deposit betas are going to continue to ratchet up a bit. So we might get a tick or two there.