UMB Financial Corporation (NASDAQ:UMBF) Q1 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

Mariner Kemper: Yes, I mean, we expect that we can continue to fund loan growth with deposits. We’re recentering I think as everybody is around relationship banking which is what we’ve always been, it’s kind of, I think it’s somewhat important to note that – after over the last decade you come off of the great recession, banks like us benefited pretty handsomely from flight to safety. So our balances grew then. And then you go into the pandemic and the government pumped money into the system and there was an enormous amount of excess liquidity dumped into the system, which has been absorbed. And during that time, a few banks like ourselves and many others, I think started placing some high quality loans on our balance sheet that maybe didn’t come with as much deep relationship and deposits.

And if there’s anything we’ve reminded ourselves over the last 45 days, it’s a who we are and what we’ve always been, which is a fantastic relationship based bank with really deep relationships. And so I think if – how we’re going to go forward with funding our loans is, we’ll just be more recentered around deeper relationships and that’s how we expect to fund loan growth going forward.

Nathan Race: Okay, great. And then turn into some – the income drivers in the quarter, it looks like you guys had a pretty strong quarter when it comes to fund services and the corporate trust and institutional segment. Is the rate of growth that we saw in those lines kind of sustainable as you look out over the next few quarters? Or I guess kind of what are some of the underlying kind of growth drivers that you guys are seeing in terms of new client adds and just overall pipelines within those segments?

Mariner Kemper: Yes, I think – yes, Nate, I think largely that a lot of which is just coming from multi-year investments made in those businesses. So we’ve talked actually in the last few quarters about what the pipeline looks and fund services, for example, based on consolidation in the space and private equity backed firms being sidelined for new business. So we’ve benefited a lot by some of that pipeline coming, actually coming to fruition on the fund services side, for example. And also obviously, private equity has – because of what’s happened to the public and liquid markets, private equity has been really strong over the last many years and continues to be, and that’s a strength for that space. All of our investments in corporate trust are paying off.

We have that new office in Europe that allow – in Dublin that allows us to do business with 72 more states as it relates to airline business than any of you have been in an airport recently, you know, that the travel business is on fire and therefore airlines are investing. And so I just really kind of across the board, the investments we’ve been making over the past many years have paid off. We bought some healthcare accounts from Old National, our healthcare business is expanding, growing, broadening. It’s just really across the board. I’ll let Jim talk, he’s probably going to say, I said everything, but…

Jim Rine: You did, but it’s a combination of new client acquisition, but we’ve also had fees turned on. Mariner really did cover it, but that business has been extremely steady and growing for us and the real contributor to our fee income growth. And we don’t see that flowing down for us anytime soon.

Mariner Kemper: And our credit card, we didn’t mention this in the comments, but we saw a spend go over 4 billion for the first time in the last quarter that’s in our deck. You can find that in there. So it’s really just kind of, I would suggest hitting on all cylinders. And as far as our business model goes, you talk about the tightening of credit and the cycle that we’re in right now, what we’ve said forever is our fee income is buoys us. And the diversity of our business model is what takes us through economic cycles like this and allows us to outperform against our peers. And we don’t expect that to be any different this time.

Jim Rine: And whereas other banks are more reliant upon their mortgage operations for their fee income, that’s just a friendly reminder that’s just completely different.

Nathan Race: Yes, that latter point is not lost on, if I could just ask one final one, just going back to the office CRE portfolio. Appreciate all the disclosures there. Can you speak to kind of how recent that across this portfolio to get to that average LTV disclosed in the deck and just internally how rent rolled are trending across that portfolio?

Mariner Kemper: I’m not sure I heard that totally. Well, did you hear that, Tom?

Tom Terry: Well, if you asked about loan-to-values, the thing to remember is our average loan in the office portfolio is $8.2 million. And when we underwrite out of the gate, we don’t trend rents. And so we’re underwriting these to a lower sizing than a lot of our competitors do. And so by virtue of how we underwrite on the front end, we do have lower loan-to-values than I think some of our competitors would have. And again, back to the nature of our portfolio beings more suburban, more low and moderate size versus a high rise type product. We’ve not seen a lot of change in rental rates thus far. But again a lot of our portfolio goes out past 2025, 2026, we just haven’t seen it yet, but today they’re performing as expected.