PacWest Bancorp (NASDAQ:PACW) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

Gary Tenner: Okay. And then in terms of kind of the expectations on the deposit side, knowing that it sounds like the balance sheet is going to be pretty flat. Do you have a view or expectation for deposit flows in the DC space? Obviously, we’ve heard Silicon Valley talk a little more optimistically towards the back half of the year, but do you have any expectations in terms of maybe recovering some of those flows and remixing the deposit base later in the year from that channel?

Paul Taylor: Well, I can tell you, we’d absolutely love to have venture deposits increase. Venture deposits are very, very hard to estimate. I’d have to tell you it’s very frustrating. They come down quite a bit. As I look at this year, I mean, in the first half of the year, they seem to have sort of floored and we seem to be flat. We did have declines in the second half of the year, but they’re nothing like we’ve seen in the past. So we would like to think we’re about $11 billion in venture deposits. So we’d like to see them floor out somewhere around there, and that’s sort of what we’re planning for. They’ll go down a little bit. And I hope we’re right. Because then that will allow us to remix the deposit base, get out of some of the wholesale deposits and really dramatically decrease the cost of funds.

Mark Yung: It’s a great low cost of funds to Paul’s point. But at the same time, we will be very careful what assets we stack up against those deposits because of the element of volatility.

William Black: And Mark, I would agree the softness kind of earlier in the year and we expected a better market towards the tail end of the year. And again, this market is very rate sensitive as well, right, the venture market. There’s a tremendous amount of dry powder, but obviously, people are €“ have slowed down investment cadence with all the news that we saw here in Q4, and that’s carrying through earlier part of this year.

Gary Tenner: Thanks very much.

Operator: Thank you. And we’ll go to our next question from David Chiaverini from Wedbush Securities.

Paul Taylor: Good morning.

David Chiaverini: Hi. Thanks. Good morning. Thanks for taking the question. So I wanted to ask some follow-ups on the ROA discussion. You mentioned 1.1% for 2023 in December, getting to 1.2%. And then the overall target is 1.5%. Can you talk about the timing of getting to that 1.5%?

Kevin Thompson: Hello, David, good to hear your voice. As Paul mentioned earlier, 2023 is €“ it could be an interesting year. We could see a mild recession. We’re expecting two more Federal Reserve rate increases of 25 basis points. And so we’re very focused on armoring our balance sheet, being prepared from a liquidity perspective and making some big decisions and moves in terms of our operational efficiency going forward. So 2023, you may see a lot of noise because of that, but those should set us up really well in 2024 and 2025 to have a really good chance to get back to the great profitability this bank has seen in the past.

Paul Taylor: expect a little bit. I’m not a very patient person, so we’re going to push as hard as we can to get to these overall goals that we have and that we released yesterday.