S&T Bancorp, Inc. (NASDAQ:STBA) Q2 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

Chris McComish : Yes. And Mike, it’s Chris. I’ll just add to that. I’ve spent a lot of time in the past few weeks out with customers throughout our footprint. And it’s still — you hear a lot of talk from those middle market businesses that there’s — there’s revenue growth opportunities out there. We feel good about the future. While at the same time, those that may be oriented more closely to a consumer may see some slowing down from a revenue standpoint. But nothing that’s dramatic. I would say, as Dave talked about, these couple of instances related to either some — really some customer concentration and some things there that we had to work through.

Michael Perito: That’s really helpful. Thank you. And then just can you maybe spend an additional minute here just on the outlook for loan growth at this point and kind of just the internal appetite for net growth at this point? Is it — we’re halfway through the year. You guys have a good sense of where the pipeline and credit is here and some of the liquidity concerns, I think appear a little bit more manageable today than they were when they were more uncertain 90 days ago. So just curious if you can maybe either the just broad like qualitative thoughts?

Chris McComish : Yes, this is an anecdotal and again, qualitative for me spending a good amount of time out with our teams, with our customers. And we are hearing that this deposit focus in our industry is real. And so you’re hearing a lot of discussion about, particularly in the commercial real estate world that there’s opportunities in the marketplace for growth, if you want it. And it’s a lot of — it feels like it’s a lot of loan-only relationships that our competitor banks are looking and saying, where do we want to allocate and spend our capital. So, we’re going to be very smart and judicious about what we do, and we are very focused as others are on building meaningful deep relationships and staying away from transactions. But it’s clear in the marketplace our industry is looking at things in a similar way.

Dave Antolik: Yes. And to add to that, we lend money in support of our deposit franchise, right? We lend money to our depositors. That’s a key emphasis of ours and a key driver of what’s going to make us successful.

Michael Perito: Got it. And then just lastly, you guys have mostly have rectified these two C&I credits, the reserve still stands at a fairly healthy level. I don’t know that there’s great clarity today in terms of the credit outlook. But I mean, everything seems to be reasonable, I guess, from a risk management standpoint today. So I mean do buybacks kind of continue here if the valuation the industry remain kind of trough or softer from your perspective for S&T?

Mark Kochvar: I mean I think it’s still something we’ll look at, and we are and do anticipate to have good core earnings that can be supportive of that. We don’t have a live, it’s just under $10 million left on this authorization. So we’ll see how it goes for the quarter, how the price and the market behaves, and then we’ll be revisiting how to think about it going forward with our Board with management as – as we get through the rest of the year. We don’t probably limit you.

Michael Perito: Thank you, guys.

Mark Kochvar: Okay, thanks.

Chris McComish: See you, Mike.

Operator: Our final question comes from the line of Manuel Navas from D.A. Davidson. Please go ahead.

Manuel Navas: Hey, good afternoon. Do you consider that the loan growth guide of low single-digits, are you seeing any change in the mix there or how that should progress in the back half of the year? What kind of trends do you see in demand there?