WSFS Financial Corporation (NASDAQ:WSFS) Q3 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

And so, that’s really a function of how the securitization market is going. We do have a pipeline that we’re looking at that potentially have some more non-interest bearing deposits in Q4. But it’s really driven by the capital markets and the securitization activity and the type of deals that are being done in the market.

Rodger Levenson: Frank, this is Roger. I think the only thing I would add to it, just building on Steve’s comments about the commercial loan business, with C&I being the largest segment, those deposits come with those relationships and with the overall focus more broadly on relationships, in addition to wealth. We have a strong focus on full relationships in the commercial space, which should give us some ability to offset, as I said, some of the lingering absorption of the excess liquidity in the consumer book.

Operator: Your next question will come from the line of Russell Gunther with Stephens.

Russell Gunther: Just a quick follow-up on the loan growth question earlier. Obviously, a good environment for you guys to continue to take share from competitors, given your positioning. How’s the environment for taking commercial lending talent? Does that still remain an opportunity and any wins in the quarter?

Stephen Clark: Russell, Steve Clark. Yes, it remains an opportunity. No, there were no wins in the quarter. But we have active outreach and we’re receiving inbound calls from relationship managers in the market who are interested in joining the WSFS team. So we have active dialogue, and we believe there will be some talent coming our way in future periods, but nothing to report in the third quarter.

Arthur Bacci: With our competitive positioning, we’re the natural landing spot for talented relationship managers, particularly from larger banks. And you’ve seen that as the relationship manager group has expanded over the last several years under Steve’s leadership. The bar, though, is very high to join us at this point. Obviously, we want people who can move business with them joining us and we’re also culturally consistent and have a same kind of philosophy around relationship banking. So we get a lot of inbound calls, but the bar for us is definitely higher in terms of the quality of people that we would bring over.

Stephen Clark: Russell, this is Steve Clark again. I need to correct myself. I have my quarters confused. So we actually did add to RM talent in the quarter one in the Philadelphia market. A long tenured relationship manager came to us from a large national bank. So he’s housed in Philadelphia, and then a healthcare RM, long experienced RM in the market joined our healthcare vertical. So those two RMs did occur in the third quarter.

Russell Gunther: Just quickly, switching gears. From a margin perspective, cash balances came down quite a bit this quarter. Can you just remind us kind of where they stand today relative to maybe a base you’d like to remain at, but maybe relative to total assets?

Arthur Bacci: I would say, Russell, that balances are within the range of kind of what our long term goals are. Remember, it fluctuates a little bit depending upon what’s going on with Cash Connect, and the on-balance sheet, off-balance sheet business, and then overall liquidity planning. And right now we’re within our liquidity goals. So it should stay in and around this range.

Russell Gunther: I know we’ll get a full-year outlook in a few months, but as we think about your updated margin range for the fourth quarter, just bigger picture, how are you guys thinking about where that can ultimately trough even just from a timing perspective? We’ve seen competitors this quarter talking about trough in 3Q, 4Q. How are you guys generally thinking about the timing there?

Rodger Levenson: Russell, assuming rates they’re at, we’re thinking somewhere second quarter next year we start to see a bottoming of the margin. There’s still some opportunity with us to increase our betas lightly. We have some budget left in our beta where we do see some competitors increasing rates, and we certainly want to protect our relationships. And as Steve said, a lot of our new business comes with deposit relationships. But I think in the second quarter, we start to see a bottoming of the NIM.