Call Start: 09:00 January 1, 0000 10:07 AM ET

Amerant Bancorp Inc. (NYSE:AMTB)

Q3 2023 Earnings Conference Call

October 20, 2023 09:00 ET

Company Participants

Laura Rossi - Head of Investor Relations & Sustainability

Jerry Plush - Chairman & Chief Executive Officer

Sharymar Calderon - Executive Vice President & Chief Financial Officer

Conference Call Participants

Michael Rose - Raymond James

Brady Gailey - KBW

Feddie Strickland - Janney Montgomery Scott

Matt Olney - Stephens

Operator

Good day and thank you for standing by. Welcome to Amerant Bancorp Third Quarter 2023 Earnings Conference Call. [Operator Instructions] Please be advised that today's conference is being recorded.

I'd now like to hand over conference over to your host today, Laura Rossi, Head of Investor Relations and Sustainability. Please go ahead.

Laura Rossi

Thank you, Liz. Good morning, everyone and thank you for joining us to review Amerant Bancorp's third quarter 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 over to our Chairman and CEO, Jerry Plush.

Jerry Plush

Thank you, Laura. Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining Amerant's third quarter 2023 earnings call. We're happy to be here today to update everyone on the continued progress we made during the period. So during the third quarter, we focused on improving balance sheet composition, which included the continued prioritization of organic deposit growth, which enabled us to reduce higher cost institutional deposits which are highly rate sensitive and therefore subject to flight risk. We provided more granular information on the sources and type of deposits in today's earnings presentation, and I'll go into that in detail very shortly.

We also entered into an agreement to sell the single largest credit exposure in our discontinued New York City portfolio and you'll see that in loans held for sale, and that closing is scheduled to take place today. We continue to work on further reductions in non-performing assets and we've now reached the marketing stage with a real estate owned. We also spent considerable time and energy on the upcoming core conversion in November and I'll provide more information on that shortly as well. So while this was not an asset size growth quarter like recent periods, as loans and deposits overall were relatively flat quarter to quarter; and in fact, the key driver of our asset size decreased this quarter was from our using $100 million in excess cash on hand to pay down advances. We made a lot of progress on many fronts which we will cover as we review the upcoming slides. And as an aside, which Sherry will cover later in her remarks. The loan and deposit pipelines for the fourth quarter are very strong and we expect to be back in growth mode in 4Q. And in fact, we've already booked $90 million in loan production month-to-date which has resulted in $71 million net increase in loans as of yesterday.