Zions Bancorporation, National Association (NASDAQ:ZION) Q1 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

But in the near term, we’re not seeing anything that’s giving us any real concern. So, to the extent it comes, I think it’s going to come later in the year and into next year.Paul Burdiss I think you can see that pretty clearly on Page 20 of our investor slides.Brandon King Got it. Got it. Is there a normalized net charge-off range that you underwrite to or that you kind of keep in mind when [indiscernible] underwriting process?Harris Simmons We underwrite to get repaid on every deal. We really do. I mean, it’s, you know, obviously, customers run into problems, they, you know, there’s things that are unforeseen that happened. But I’m quite serious about the fact that over the last decade plus, we become certainly more careful about concentration limits and about the – perhaps particularly in the CRE space.

But I think we’ve always had good underwriting standards. I think if you go back and look at what happened to us in the great financial crisis, it was more about concentrations, and it was about underwriting per se. And we had too much land and construction, land development acquisition. That was really where we had the most pain. We have very little of that these days. And so, I rather expect we’re going to – in [relevance since] [ph] I think we’re going to be in quite good shape.Paul Burdiss Well we’ve said before, numerous times that if you think about a recession, you think about the asset classes that are going to be under the greatest pressure in a recession, a general broad based recession, you think about consumer, we don’t really have any consumer unsecured to speak of buying retail paper, that kind of thing.

We just don’t have a lot of that. Construction lending, construction is only 20% of the CRE portfolio. And as Harris just said, there’s virtually no land in it.So that’s always toxic area, and then highly leveraged transactions, what the industry refers to is highly leveraged transaction. We believe our exposure to that is, is less than peers. Moody’s has said that some years ago, they’re doing another study on it right now, we believe and we think we’ll compare well. Those would be three asset classes that would, you know, would pop-up on most people’s radar in terms of potential challenges.Brandon King Thanks for taking my questions.Harris Simmons Thank you, Brandon. Alicia, we are at our time limit. We’re just going to see if we can very quickly go through two more questions.

Just really skip through them very quickly. And so we appreciate everyone’s patience for just going over time. Just a minute.Operator Of course, no worries. Our next question comes from Chris McGratty with KBW. Please proceed with your question.Chris McGratty Great. Thanks for squeezing me in. The 110 basis points of OCI that’s going to come back Paul over the next seven quarters, that would in a static world take you to around 11, I know you’ve always said top end, you know about peers. We’ve seen some peers, kind of officially bless 11. Is that a fair level of capital that you might consider running?Paul Burdiss I think there’s maybe two things going on there. As you know, we do not include the AOCI in our regulatory capital. So, our CET1 ratio, which is at 9.9% is not affected by the accretion of the accumulated other comprehensive loss.

It’s an important distinction. We know that and we managed to regulatory capital, we know that there are those who are – have been recently looking at tangible common equity. And so, the purpose of the slide is, you know, for those folks who are focused on tangible common equity, to demonstrate that, you know, without a whole lot of leaps of faith, we can get to an accretion of about 110 basis points in that ratio, based solely on the, kind of continued accretion of that accumulated other comprehensive loss into capital, as the relatively short duration of our portfolio allows for fairly rapid amortization.Chris McGratty Great, thank you.Paul Burdiss Thank you.Operator Our next question comes from Steven Alexopoulos with J.P. Morgan. Please proceed with your question.Steven Alexopoulos Hi, everybody.

Harris, this one’s for you. I want to follow up on your response to Ken’s earlier question, a new regulation, we basically said that SEBI and signature are unique models that you hope that the baby doesn’t get thrown out with the bathwater. But if we put the regulation aside, when you look at the speed at which deposits moved out of those banks, not to mention the role that social media played, which is a totally separate topic, even though your business is very different than them, this has changed the way you and the board, think about managing risk and liquidity.Harris Simmons Yeah, I mean, listen, I think that that’s – it’s very much a new element, you know, the, it’s not just social media, it’s the reduced friction, if you will, in moving money, from institution to institution, etc.

And so, I think that is something that pretty much needs to be in everybody’s calculus, as you think about the duration of core deposits. And I, you know, I think it’s hard to figure that out really from Silicon Valley and Signature, because they, for all the kind of I think all the obvious reasons, in terms of the size of their accounts, and particularly Silicon Valley was, you had a buyout, a few dozen people managing, you know well over half of the deposit base of that company could have been, I think government’s the digital puppeteers that really brought that thing down in a moment that I don’t think that’s how most banks are actually built.And so, I don’t think it’s a precursor to what you’re going to see with a traditional bank getting into trouble that way.

But certainly, as you think, you know, as we think about what is the duration of a core deposit, that’s something that we’ll be taking into account. And, you know, I think, I do think we’ll, you know, it’s actually been a useful exercise and looking at where money, which money moved, is it operational, was it insured? And I expect that we and probably others will be going through and adjusting the assumptions on all of our models around the duration of funds based upon not just the type, but their attributes, as well.Paul Burdiss If I could add to that Harris, so I totally agree with everything that Harris just said. I think that, you know, we manage liquidity, for example, to liquidity stress testing. And so, we’ve got, kind of a massive amount of deposit outflows incorporated into that.

I don’t know, I agree that we’re going to probably change our view of what’s at risk and what’s not at risk. But I don’t think it’s going to massively change, kind of the end result of the stress test. And, and the, kind of what I would characterize as very strong liquidity management practices, are the reason that we’ve got $38 billion right now available and untapped sources of liquidity.So, I don’t know that it’s going to change the result much, but it might change the – might change the analytic.Steven Alexopoulos Okay. That’s helpful. If I can ask one more bit of an [indiscernible] question, but Western Alliance reported earlier, and they said on their call, they saw a pretty sharp reaction from their depositors as our stock price was under quite a bit of pressure, right in the aftermath of SEBI.