Seacoast Banking Corporation of Florida (NASDAQ:SBCF) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

David Feaster: Okay. That makes sense. And then maybe on the other side of the coin, just touching on the funding. You talked about, it’s extremely competitive out there. Obviously days accelerating, deposit costs are increasing and you’re doing a great job managing that. I’m just curious, how you think about deposits costs as we look forward. Slower growth does alleviate some of that pressure, but just curious like what are you seeing – how much of the outflows this quarter are surge deposits, our more price sensitive clients leaving. And so you get higher rates maybe in the bond market versus borrowers just using cash to pay down higher cost debt. And then just any thoughts on how you plan to manage future potential outflows between borrowings, brokered funding or even potential security sales?

Chuck Shaffer: You captured it all in the question, David. The bond market, obviously, now a competitor to bank deposits. I think, the pace of which rates moved up on the short end of the curve, created a real competitive. When you look at the overall marketplace for bank deposits, certainly strong, can you seen that not only in the Community Banks, but obviously in the National Banks. When you look at our trends, quarter-over-quarter we look very similar to the national banks in terms of deposits shrinkage and what will be a part of that was driven and we saw it, we had about $150 million lower balances across title companies and attorneys and that’s just the fact that there is a lot less transactions happening in the marketplace.

And then the remainder of it was, just generally customers having less balance in their accounts and some, obviously, rate pressure. That being said, when you look at our franchise, we have $240,000 accounts, 87% of those accounts have under $5 million at Seacoast’s and if you sort of peel it back further, 68% of those accounts are under $1 million. So we are a very granular franchise that’s been built over almost 100 years that provides a lot of strength in these environments and we – 65% transactional on the depository side in terms of our funding base and that is a unique strength we have and I think that’s evident in the prior quarter’s results. And so, when I think when you compare us to most moving forward. I’m confident our ability to perform better than most the banking community, just given the transactional relationship nature and the granular franchise we built over a very long period of time.

But looking forward on, Michael, you want to give some comments on the way we’re thinking about deposits as we move forward.

Michael Young: Yes, David, I’d just add to that. I think on a go-forward basis, we’ll look to hold balances a lot more steady or potentially if we grow them. The competitive environment will kind of dictate some of that in the interim, we’ll fund any gap with FHLB borrowings, as we have done, but we’re not obviously in a very net borrowing position as of 12/31 and so we’ll just kind of manage that as we move forward throughout the year to optimize rate and volume and in NII. As we have throughout the cycle thus far, we’re still a sub 5% deposit beta on a cumulative basis. As a reminder prior cycles, we were at 28% cumulative deposit beta and we still feel pretty good about performing or potentially outperforming that on a stand-alone basis.

So you will see the step up as Tracey mentioned in her prepared comments from Professional Bank once that deal closes kind of just a one-time step up. But other than that, we’ll continue to manage through this with a little more rate to just hold or drive balanced growth. On the security side, I think you mentioned there, we wouldn’t expect additional securities purchases or to grow that book will just kind of let that amortize down overtime and we’ll remix positively into very high loan yields that we’re getting in the market today. And that should be helpful to the overall NIM picture going forward.