WSFS Financial Corporation (NASDAQ:WSFS) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

Rodger Levenson: No, I think that’s a good characterization of where we’re at. I think it’s representative of the fact that there has been a lot of noise in the numbers the last couple of years because of the beneficial and bring more deal, that’s all behind us now. Obviously, we’re seeing the benefits of the rate environment. And as you know, Mike, the way we manage the company is to be a top quintile performer in our peer group measured by ROA, and we think we’re there now, and our goal would be to grow — to grow from here.

Michael Perito: Perfect. And then just last for me, and I’ll step back, is on the buy backs, you saw some authorization here, you’ve been active. I guess the question is, how do you balance? It sounds like your base case is for the mild recession in the back half of the year, capital should build throughout the year, but still probably not as high as you guys are used to it being. So how do you balance that with the ongoing appetite for buybacks over the course of the year?

Dominic Canuso: Sure, Michael. This is Dominic. As you mentioned, we do have 9% share authorization. We were very heavy participants in share repurchases throughout 2022, particularly in the first 3 quarters as we caught up to some share repurchases that we pended during the waiting period for the BMT acquisition. As we’ve said, our historical practice with regard to capital is waterfall approach, where we evaluate the overall economic environment and protect the balance sheet with our capital, then we look at organic growth and then to the extent we have additional capital that is not needed relative to those first 2 tiers, we would then redeploy it. Now we do anticipate routine share repurchases regardless of price. And we would expect between that and our dividend, we would return about 35% of our core net income through the cycle and on average throughout the year.

Incremental to that would be dependent upon that waterfall of capital demand need followed by our IRR model looking at our share repurchase plan, and would — we’ll take that on a quarter-by-quarter basis as we evaluate the overall economy.

Operator: Your next question comes from the line of Manuel Navas with D.A. Davidson.

Manuel Navas: The deposit beta that you have projected out, have you already started to increase the deposit costs? Or you just kind of have that out there to be — to anticipate some future deposit cost increases?

Dominic Canuso: Sure. In our materials, you’ll see a chart on our NIM slide in the supplement that demonstrates the last few quarters deposit betas and deposit pricing, and they have continued to tick up. And in fact, at accelerated rates. So we have seen through the cycle deposit betas of 15% by year-end. So we have been judiciously moving pricing, particularly on our CDs and the shorter-term CDs to attract and retain deposits given the anticipated rise and potential stabilization of the interest rate environment. And we expect through some rack rate movements, product shifting exception pricing to deliver that deposit beta in the mid-30s by the end of this year.

Manuel Navas: Do you have a spot rate for the end of the year?

Dominic Canuso: We have not disclosed that, but we do think, relative to where we are today, I think the deposit beta would provide that detail for you.

Manuel Navas: What type of offers are you putting out there? And what kind of — have you already seen some pretty nice success rate for attracting deposits?