Amerant Bancorp Inc. (NASDAQ:AMTB) Q4 2023 Earnings Call Transcript
Amerant Bancorp Inc. (NASDAQ:AMTB) Q4 2023 Earnings Call Transcript January 25, 2024
Amerant Bancorp Inc. isn’t one of the 30 most popular stocks among hedge funds at the end of the third quarter (see the details here).
Operator: Greetings. Welcome to the Amerant Bancorp Fourth Quarter 2023 Earnings Conference Call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. A question-and-answer session will follow the formal presentation. [Operator Instructions] Please note this conference is being recorded. I would now like to turn the conference over to Laura Rossi, Head of Investor Relations and Sustainability. Thank you. You may begin.
Laura Rossi: Thank you, Darryl. Good morning, everyone and thank you for joining us to review Amerant Bancorp's fourth quarter and full year 2023 results. On today's call are Jerry Plush, our Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, and Sharymar Calderon, our Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer. As we begin, please note that discussions on today's call contain forward-looking statements within the meaning of the Securities Exchange Act. In addition, references will also be made to non-GAAP financial measures. Please refer to the company's earnings release for a statement regarding forward-looking statements as well as for information and reconciliation of non-GAAP financial measures to GAAP measures. I will now turn it over to our Chairman and CEO, Jerry Plush.
Jerry Plush: Thank you, Laura. Good morning everyone and thank you for joining today's call. Today, we will cover our performance for the fourth quarter and full year. But, before we do this, I would like to acknowledge and thank all of my Amerant colleagues for their dedication and effort this quarter as we completed our conversion to new core systems. This project, which required a significant amount of planning and effort was a huge undertaking and the team was up to the challenge. Please note that work continues in a number of areas post conversion as more enhancements are on the way. So moving on to what we will cover on today's call. There are clearly a significant number of items to touch on, including the commercial real estate sale and a number of additional actions we took this quarter to best position our company for 2024 given an expected decline in interest rates.
For reference, we filed a Form 8-K covering these on January 16, 2024, but it's important to give some additional context on today's call, which we will do. While these actions created additional non-routine gains or charges this quarter, we expect this to be behind us for 2024 and as I mentioned, best position us to execute on our growth strategy. I also want to note here that we will cover credit in detail and we've added a number of new slides to the presentation, with more detail on credit components which Sherry will be covering shortly. So we'll turn now to cover Slide 3, and here we've outlined a number of key items that took place in the fourth quarter. First, deposits grew by $326 million, reflective of our deposits first organic relationship-based approach, while total loans grew $132 million.
As previously reported, we made the decision to reclassify $401 million of Houston based multifamily loans as held for sale and we recorded a non-cash charge of $30 million before taxes in the fourth quarter. This sale is expected to be completed sometime this month. As $370 million of these loans are variable-rate and at an average yield of 6.7%, this sale protects the Company in a projected declining rate environment. Also, this strategic asset liability move, together with our projected increase in earning assets, is expected to create a net positive on margin after the first quarter, as we plan to use the proceeds of the transaction to reduce higher-costing non-relationship institutional deposits at an average cost of 5.6%. Finally, this repositioning also reduces CRE exposure.
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