Pinnacle Financial Partners, Inc. (NASDAQ:PNFP) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

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Stephen Scouten: Okay, great. And within that composition, Harold, you mentioned some other niche kind of verticals and I noticed it appeared in the slide deck that indexed deposits jumped maybe to 17.2% of deposits from like 11.3%. Was there any meaningful changes there in terms of product or verticals there that drove that increase?

Harold Carpenter: Yes, I think most of that would be public funds. We’ve attracted some public fund clients here locally as well as in Washington. And I think some — most of those are tied to some kind of index.

Stephen Scouten: Okay. And then just last thing for me. Just on that share repurchase, the $125 million plan, as well as you noted a potential sub debt raise, can you give us an idea about how you’re thinking about that into ’23? How aggressive you might plan to be? And what the size of a potential sub-debt raise might look like?

Harold Carpenter: Yes. We modeled out $200 million to $300 million. Right now, we think we can step through it — step through the year without any kind of need to go out raise sub-debt. But we’ll just have to see how that pans out, how loan growth performs, all that.

Stephen Scouten: Okay, great. Thanks a lot for the color. Appreciate it.

Harold Carpenter: Thanks, Steve.

Operator: Thank you. And the next question is coming from Steven Alexopoulos from J.P. Morgan. Steven, your line is live.

Steven Alexopoulos: Hey, good morning, everyone.

Harold Carpenter: Hey, Steve.

Steven Alexopoulos: I want to start on expenses. So, if the revenue environment proves to be worse than expected, could you walk us through which levers would you expect to pull early on, right? What’s like first to go, last to go? And how quickly could you throttle down expense levels, if needed?

Harold Carpenter: Yes. There are several things that we can respond to fairly quickly. One is that if Terry believes the — kind of the revenue number appears to be kind of — will be consistent for the year, then, like we’ve done in the past, we can always reduce our hiring profile or hiring plans for the year. We also anticipate what the payout is going to be on the incentive plan, so those accruals would also come down. And then, we’ve got plans for various events throughout the year that could get on the table for complete elimination or reduction or whatever. So, this year, I think, given what’s going on here today and what we reported in earnings, I think there’s going to be an intense focus on not only expenses, but revenue growth, pricing, all of that by this management group to make sure that we achieve our targets this year.

Terry has allocated time in his senior level meeting to review those kind of things. And so, I think, our firm, our particular senior leadership, is committed to hitting our targets and doing whatever we need to do to accomplish that.

Terry Turner: Hey, Steven, I might just tag on there a little bit, maybe not exactly what you asked, but I think some color related to that topic. As you know, in terms of annual cash incentive plan, generally we have clear sound and threshold, we can’t make bad loans and win. So, we clear that, most of our existence, the two variables that determine to payout were earnings per share growth and revenue growth that was required to hit that earnings per share growth. And last year, we looked at PPNR and I guess for a year or two during a difficult period where allowances are being build and those kinds of things, we relied on PPNR more than revenue. Our Board has not technically approved the comp plan. They’ll do that here in the next few weeks, in February meeting.

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