The Bancorp, Inc. (NASDAQ:TBBK) Q2 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

And we’re constantly repricing our portfolio as new loans. We do new loans and they run off our sheet. So it doesn’t really hurt us. Plus, we’re kind of husbanding cash right now on our balance sheet is, we are ultimately going to buy bonds to get a lot more fixed rate securities exposure. So we’re not very concerned about the run-off of that business. It seems to be normalizing and will – and it doesn’t hurt us that much. So we’re – I think we’re in a fantastic position on our balance sheet to be very responsive to the current environment.

Frank Schiraldi: Okay. And it seems like with the Fed’s commentary and what the market is expecting, we’re getting maybe pretty close to the end here in terms of Fed rates. And so would we – do you think we expect to see securities purchases at the back half of this year? Any sort of size range you think of when putting securities on the books here, what we could see in terms of securities to asset ratio by year-end? Any thoughts there?

Damian Kozlowski: I don’t think we’re going to buy securities. This isn’t a guarantee. I don’t think it’s going to happen to the end of this year. I think you’re still going to have a fairly inverted yield curve, and that’s probably going to disinvert next year. So I don’t think the securities purchases will happen this year, but I – we’re being very nimble on this. We have to pay attention to what’s going on in the marketplace. I mean strange things happened. You saw the 10-year move last year on news in Japan. So you never know what’s going to happen, and we will take advantage of those opportunities. So I would expect them to happen probably midpoint next year. And we are way – our balance sheet is actually smaller than it should be.

If you look at the amount of securities we have versus our peer group and general and banks, we have at least 15% room to add security. So $1 billion, $1.5 billion we could add pretty easily. And now that we have such a great amount of liquidity on the balance sheet, we will be able to do that very effectively without having to borrow into the market or anything. So I think we’re going to keep it. We’re being – we’re watching every second of every day. We are in a fantastic position, obviously, because we had really anticipate the interest rate increases. And we’re slowly moving back up the fixed rate scale. So if you looked at what we did over the last 4 years as we went from the mid-30s to 26% fixed rate assets, and we’re already back to 32% fixed rate assets and have taken 11% asset sensitivity off the board because now we’re flexing the balance sheet back to a fixed rate structure with a target of 60% in order to mitigate our deposit beta, which is about that.

So I think we’re going to be very flexible over the next 18 months. I don’t think there is going to be a big change in rates, and we’re going to have time to adapt to change our structure to be much more fixed to mitigate the downside impact that there is rate cuts.

Frank Schiraldi: Right. Okay. And so you’re saying 60% fixed. I mean the deposit beta is like 40%, right, in terms of the…