Veritex Holdings, Inc. (NASDAQ:VBTX) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

Terry Earley: 1.89. The year was 3.35, okay? So if I can just – by stopping the long-dated locks, letting the gain on sale margin revert to where they’ve historically been, deal with their expense cuts, you should see much better financial performance out of Thrive. NAC, we — I mean, you see their pipeline, you see their quarter. You can tell that if we close $75 million in the fourth quarter and only $117 for the year, I mean, we’ve got – some of that’s pent-up demand after Q2 and Q3 and the USDA really came through for us. But we’re pretty – we feel good about ’23 in NAC.

Brady Gailey: All right, great. Thanks, guys.

Terry Earley: Question, but that’s as good as I can do.

Brady Gailey: I hear you. All right. Thank you.

Operator: Thank you. Our next question comes from Gary Tenner with D.A. Davidson. You may proceed.

Gary Tenner: Thanks, guys. Good morning.

Malcolm Holland: Good morning.

Gary Tenner: Terry, just to kind of start on your recent comment on the expense line kind of annualizing the fourth quarter and adding a little bit, as you said, in 2023. I think last quarter, you talked about kind of high single digit growth in 2023. That comment you just made sounds like you’re more kind of mid to high teens loan expense growth. Is that what you kind of intended to suggest in your comment?

Terry Earley: Well, what I would – I’d say high single digits over the full year, high single, low double digits over the full year 2021 is more what I’m thinking right now. But certainly, look, I was surprised by Q4. Just that it was across the board. So I’m not trying to go as high as it maybe it seems. So let me – I hope I cleared that up, more high single, low double from 2022 levels.

Gary Tenner: Okay. Thank you. And then also on Thrive, I mean, based on your comments you just made, is there visibility – to the degree there is visibility in mortgage at all, is there visibility in ’22 based on or in ’23 based on what you were talking about on the expense side to where at least Thrive would be a breakeven scenario in 2023 to where it’s not a headwind for VBTX?

Terry Earley: Absolutely. That’s – look, we spent a lot of time over the last 60 days talking to the – some of the best people in the industry and what the success for Thrive look like in ’23, and it’s exactly what you just said. It’s kind of where the industry is based on all the feedback we can get.

Malcolm Holland: And they have put together a clear road map to get there. It’s not a hope and a prayer. They’re making the appropriate expense reductions. Candidly, they have some really nice volume. They did a small acquisition at the end of the year that was not very costly that helped on the volume side. And so we feel pretty darn confident in a breakeven year for Thrive.

Gary Tenner: Okay. Great. And then last for me. Just on the deposit side and the growth there, I think last quarter, you talked about probably utilizing some more in the way of brokered time deposits in the fourth quarter. I didn’t see it called out anywhere. I wonder if you could kind of talk about what your activity was on that side of things in the fourth quarter?

Malcolm Holland: Like I’ve seen many peers report. It was – the brokerage side was very meaningful in the fourth quarter. We still grew – absent brokered, we still grew – we still grew 4% or 5%. I haven’t done the math, and I’m doing my head. I’m somewhere on the linked quarter annualized, absent brokered. But so that kind of tells you that, yes, that’s the right number, 4% to 5%. And if we did 17 that tells you where the rest of it was.