Northeast Bank (NASDAQ:NBN) Q2 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

Alex Twerdahl : Okay. And is this — I mean, does this kind of keep your sort of hands full for the time being? Or I know you’ve talked about the market being pretty solid. Is there a possibility to continue seeing purchases over the next couple of quarters?

Rick Wayne : Well, I think we will — sort of generally been — normally, we buy 100 — excluding these big transactions, and not only we buy $150 million to $200 million quarter. No, I certainly at that level, we would expect that, and it’s entirely possible that we could see some larger ones — positive quarter past a year. This is why I have been here, Alex, to help you with these about year. And we don’t know whether we’re going to see another big transactions, certainly within the realm of possibility. But I’m not predicting that I’m not predicting that to be clear to set expectations.

Alex Twerdahl : Right. And then I know you have the ATM going on, but what sort of constraints would there be on the balance sheet with respect to funding or capital that would be considerations for thinking about future purchases?

Rick Wayne : Well, I just want to find this — so at 12/31, after we took our loan book worth of $2.5 billion at the end of December, which is obviously up a lot. At the end of December, our loan capacity, if you look at our capital ratios, it was $150 million. So that came back down from like a year ago, it was $1 billion of capacity. There’s $150 million. As you know, Alex, our loan capacity will increase as we earn money. And we have the ATM, which is if we need to sell more shares to raise capital, we can do that as well. That’s all in place. And in fact, I didn’t note that in here, but it’s in our earnings release. How much did we sell in…?

JP Lapointe: 34,000 shares.

Rick Wayne : So we haven’t done much of it yet. It was approved kind of late in December, but we are not very late, maybe mid-December, but we sold those 33,000 shares. So we can sell more shares to raise more capital. I don’t see us as capital constraint if we have opportunity, which we were going to keep on the balance sheet.

Alex Twerdahl : Great. And then can you just walk through the — you talked about the — some brokered CDs going from — I thought you said 4.43% and then maturing between June and December of this year and that funding going out before. Can you just walk through the amount of that again in the actual numbers?

JP Lapointe: Sure, Alex. During the quarter, broker deposits went up about a little over $500 million with a weighted average rate on that being about 4.43%. That was more for immediate funding, not our long-term funding strategy of this. So our plan is to pledge the loans that we purchased from the FHLB and take out some longer-term advances to better match the structure of the loans. And right now, where rates are from the FHLB advances, we think we can borrow money around 4% to match some of the maturity of the loan pool. So we do expect the funding cost to come down once we can deploy that strategy as these brokered deposits mature.

Alex Twerdahl : Okay. And then you talked about the increase in expenses. And can you give us maybe just a sense for what — how many people you might have to hire or an efficiency ratio or some sort of guideposts to sort of give us some sort of sense for how much expenses might go up as a result of meaningfully increase in the size of the balance sheet?