Old National Bancorp (NASDAQ:ONB) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

Terence McEvoy: Okay, thanks for taking my questions. Appreciate it.

James C. Ryan III: Thanks Terry.

Operator: Our next question comes from Chris McGratty with KBW. Chris, please go ahead.

Christopher McGratty: Hey guys, good morning.

James C. Ryan III: Good morning Chris.

Christopher McGratty: Hey, good morning Jim. Brendon or Jim, the efficiency ratio you talked about 47.5% just being a great level. How should we be thinking about the trajectory of this metric, I know it’s one metric, but balancing both sides of the equation, how do we think about directionally that the efficiency ratio were it kind of settles?

Brendon B. Falconer: Some obviously, we give you the expense outlook for 2023, where the efficiency ratio falls out will largely be a function of where revenue sit. But I can tell you that sort of this — I don’t know that we can repeat 47.5% but I do think for the full year, we’re going to have a really strong efficiency ratio, and we continue to work on opportunities to continue to control expenses.

James C. Ryan III: Yes. I would just suggest that, Chris, we’ve had a long history of being very disciplined around the expense base here and it’s obviously been nice to have some tailwind from the revenue side to help us out. But having said that, there’s no magic bullets, there are no easy wins out there, but it’s going to be a continued long-term focus on driving expenses lower. A lot of these come through just long-term enhancements through technology and business process automation which should help continue to reduce costs. So there’s not any quick wins out there that are going to reduce it significantly, but it’s just a continued focus by our leadership and management teams to make sure that we’re driving our expense dollars and most efficiently we can.

Christopher McGratty: If I could just, I guess, push on that a little bit, Jim, I think in the deck, you say there’s $5 million of savings coming from this branch optimization. The one timers, we’ll call it 27, how do I wrestle with that kind of earn-back math, was there something I’m missing in that strategy like I would expect it a little bit more to fall, I guess, to the bottom line?

James C. Ryan III: Yes, I mean most of this was from real estate redisposition right. So the reality is, I think it’s something less than a five-year earn back. That’s a little longer than we would anticipate normally. But nonetheless, we think it was the right — these were properties which are problematic, around 20 pieces of property in total. About half of those were in the branch world but very small branches. So again, something like over less than a five-year earn back, a little longer we’d like it to be, but appropriate for us, particularly given the HSA gain we had to reinvest.

Christopher McGratty: Got it. Great. And then maybe I could on credit. I think I’m getting some questions about what’s the pace of reserve build. You guys have, I think, been viewed as very, very good on credit. SMBI’s history is a little bit more chunky but overall, you kind of put them together pretty good credit. How do we think about, I guess, two questions, the pace of build based on your economic forecast and also how you view the kind of the normalized charge-offs of this pro forma company?