Zions Bancorporation, National Association (NASDAQ:ZION) Q3 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

John Pancari : Understood. And then lastly, I know the — you had indicated — I think Paul, you indicated in the prepared remarks, the expense objectives have taken longer than originally planned to execute. Could you just talk about that or what has taken longer in terms of any expense rationalization efforts? And maybe if you could tie into that is the core system upgrades. Is that at all impacting that? Thanks.

Paul Burdiss: Yes. I’ll start and then turn it over to Scott and Harris to supplement that. So you saw us take a severance charge in the second quarter. The run rate improvement associated that — with that, I would expect to occur kind of in the fourth to first quarter. But when I speak to sort of taking longer than expected, what I’m speaking about is the inflation headwinds. We’re seeing that across the board in contracts and other things. And so, as we continue to fight expenses, we’re actively working those expenses down. But the tide — inflation I hope is turning the corner, but the sort of inflation tide isn’t out yet. And we just continue to fight that. And it’s the reality of the environment that we’re all dealing with today.

Scott McLean : I would just add to that the other thing we’re seeing is that the inflation in 2022, even though it’s softened a little bit this year, in terms of major technology vendors and their renewals and extensions of contracts, we’re seeing probably the most vigorous rate pass-throughs that we’ve seen in years. And I think, it’s symptomatic of the fact that the inflation occurred last year, things were doing this year and going into ’24 quite a bit of pressure on those kind of baseline technology vendors.

Harris Simmons: They’ve all been watching Hulu and Disney+, I think.

Scott McLean: And on our core transformation project, I would just say that — and we have commented for years that when we go live with the final deposits release, which we did go live with a pilot, one of our affiliates in the second quarter, that during this period, it’ll take us 12 months to fully convert all of our affiliates. And during that conversion period, just because the way the accounting works, our P&L impact will get worse by about $10 million to $15 million. And then in the following year, the following 12 months after that, they drop by a commensurate amount. So there’s a little bit of a timing issue related to actually the period we’re going live in.

Operator: Our next question comes from Chris McGratty with KBW.

Chris McGratty: Paul, maybe we could come back to the deposit beta slide, Slide 15. I just want to make sure I fully understand. I’m comparing your assumed full cycle beta last quarter of 40 to the new 50. And I’m trying to reconcile the 70 basis points of additional deposit pressure from here. So I guess if the Fed’s done, why would you see that big of an increase in deposit costs from here?

Paul Burdiss: Yes, so there’s two things going on there. As I said, there’s sort of the lagging effect of deposit rates. Again, this is what we’re assuming in the model. I’m hopeful that we can do a little bit better than this. But based on recent history, our expectation is that there are some — interest-bearing products will continue to float up. But another big part of that is an assumption of continued migration of non-interest bearing demand into interest-bearing, that sort of — we don’t normally think of that as beta, but it has the practical or economic effect of a repricing beta. And so all of those things combine into that 70 basis points.

Chris McGratty : Maybe separately, I think John asked about the growth opportunity under a 100. I mean, you’re about 10% or 15% under the 100 threshold. I’m interested in the costs that you’re beginning to budget. I think one of your peers said it’s a 100 million a year from crossing. You have a time to remix and stay under. But how are you thinking about the costs to ultimately go over a 100?