Primis Financial Corp. (NASDAQ:FRST) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

Casey Whitman: That does. There’s going to be a piece of the expenses that will be tied to production. Okay. There was a lot of noise around a third-party service portfolio this quarter. I guess, can you just dumb down what’s going on there? Should we be assuming the 350 margin is sort of the better starting point or, the 370 or whatever that you reported, 367 you reported.

Matthew Switzer: The — so we’re going to, as we go forward, continue to kind of strip out some of the noise from that portfolio. So, we have a portfolio of loans that we originated with a third-party. They come on our balance sheet directly, but they’re managed and serviced by third-party. And when it was smaller, we were just booking the net revenue from the portfolio. But now that it’s bigger, the accounting requires us to run more of the adjustments from the portfolio through various line items. So, booking yield at a gross level instead of net booking the charge-offs that are on the portfolio, but that are covered by the third-party. And then there are offsets for all that in non-interest income and non-interest expense.

The net profitability that we’re making on these loans is — has not changed. The only thing that’s changed is we have more of the effects from the portfolio running through various lineup. So, it’s really the — where it shows up in our income statement has changed, but the impact on net income has not. So, from a core basis, I would encourage you to focus on the 351, which is really apples-to-apples versus last quarter, kind of where we — how we think about our margin going forward. This portfolio — the accounting for this portfolio is going to create some margin effects on a reported basis, but we’ll do our best to adjust for all that and keep it apples-to-apples going forward.

Casey Whitman: Okay. I guess, I would just ask one last question. Obviously, a lot of noise this quarter. You guys got a lot of stuff done last year. Just if we think bigger picture about sort of the profitability outlook and how quickly we can build the ROA, I guess what kind of sort of outlook can you guys give us over the next few quarters into next year to the extent the environment stays somewhat like it is today?

Dennis Zember: I would say — well, Matt’s got a slide that sort of — that shows where the improvement’s coming from, some is from obviously Panacea and the Life Premium Finance, growth in the core bank. Little more expense marketing, the digital bank mortgage and I think gets us to right at $1.50 of earnings per share. I mean I would say

Casey Whitman: Okay.

Dennis Zember: for 2023. Yeah. We have — the slide he’s referring to builds up pretax, pre-provision, starting with our run rate in the fourth quarter shows the impact of mortgage improvement that we just talked about, the improvement in Panacea and Life Premium Finance and builds us up to a higher run rate or a higher full year pretax, pre-provision for 2023. And if you assume a reasonable level of provision for more moderate loan growth in 2023 and then tax effect that, you could get to $1.50 a share for the year. That’s about — that’s — that will be — we will be very delighted with that. But really that just sort of shakes out to just over a 1% ROA. And clearly that’s — and that’s not our goal. I mean, we need — I really believe that Panacea, Life Premium Finance and Mortgage will be meaningful contributors to the ROA honestly in 2023.