Good day, and thank you for standing by. Welcome to the BankUnited 2021 fourth quarter and fiscal year earnings conference call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. After the speaker's presentation, there will be a question-and-answer session. To ask a question during that session, you will need to press one on your telephone. Please be advised that today's conference is being recorded. If you require any assistance during the call, please press star zero. I would now like to hand the conference over to your speaker today, Ms. Susan Greenfield, Corporate Secretary of BankUnited. Ms. Greenfield, the floor is yours.F
Thank you, Chris. Good morning, and thank you for joining us today on our fourth quarter and fiscal year 2021 results conference call. On the call this morning are Raj Singh, our Chairman, President, and CEO, Leslie Lunak, our Chief Financial Officer, and Thomas Cornish, our Chief Operating Officer. Before we start, I'd like to remind everyone that this call may contain forward-looking statements within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995 that reflect the company's current views with respect to, among other things, future events and financial performance. Any forward-looking statements made during this call are based on the historical performance of the company and its subsidiaries or on the company's current plans, estimates, and expectations.
The inclusion of this forward-looking information should not be regarded as a representation by the company that the future plans, estimates, or expectations contemplated by the company will be achieved. Such forward-looking statements are subject to various risks and uncertainties and assumptions, including, without limitations, those relating to the company's operations, financial results, financial condition, business prospects, growth strategy, and liquidity, including as impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic. The company does not undertake any obligation to publicly update or review any forward-looking statement, whether as a result of new information, future developments, or otherwise. A number of important factors could cause actual results to differ materially from those indicated by the forward-looking statements.
Information on these factors can be found in the company's Annual Report on Form 10-K for the year ended December 31st, 2020, and any subsequent quarterly reports on Form 10-Q or current report on Form 8-K, which are available at the SEC's website, www.sec.gov. With that, I'd like to turn the call over to Raj.
Thank you, Susan. Welcome, everyone. Thanks for giving us your time to listen to our earnings. Yesterday somebody asked me, you know, how would you summarize in 30 seconds or less? Let's start with doing that. If I was to summarize last quarter's results, I'd say $1 billion of loan growth. These are round numbers. We'll get into the exact numbers. $1 billion of loan growth, $1 billion of deposit growth, 11 basis points expansion in margin, and improving credit trends pretty much across the board. Earnings per share of $1.41. Good increase in book value as well. This was obviously a very good quarter for us, a quarter we've been waiting for some time.
We told you at the beginning of last year that we expect loan growth to come back in the second half of the year. It took a little bit longer, but it seems to be here now, and we're very happy with what we've done on the left side of the balance sheet. There are a number of notable items this quarter, so I'm not going to go through them. I would have Leslie go through them in her comments. What I've asked is for, you know, for Thomas and Leslie and myself, we'll go a little bit faster than we usually do because there's a lot to cover today. Quickly jumping into it. We had $1 billion of loan growth. This is excluding PPP, of course.
You know, if you think about where we were first quarter, we had a reduction of $500 million in loans. Second quarter, we were down just a little bit. Third quarter, we were up a little bit, and now fourth quarter, we're up very nicely, $1 billion. The momentum is right. Loan demand, you know, we're seeing that come back across industries and across geography. Very broad-based, and Thomas will get into the details of that. Net income came in at $125 million or $1.41 a share. This compared to $87 million or $0.94 last quarter. ROE for the year came in at 13.3%. ROA up to 1.16%.
Net interest income increased by $11 million compared to last quarter, so very happy about that. Margin expanded from 2.33% to 2.44%. Cost of deposits keeps going down. It didn't go down as much, and Leslie will get into that. But we expect it to go down again, more this quarter and the first quarter. Cost of deposits was 19 basis points for the quarter. Previous quarter was 20. We ended the year on December 31st. The spot cost of funds was 16 basis points. So we're starting January 1st at 16th and hopefully, we'll be able to take it down more. I think at some point, the cost of deposits will eventually inflect.
I'm not sure if it's the first quarter or the second quarter, but we're getting close to the bottom as the rate environment is about to change. Deposits grew $1.3 billion for the quarter. Average noninterest DDA grew $418 million, though period end declined $183 million, which was a lot of movement that we saw in the last quarter. Some of that in the last week of the quarter. Some of that has reversed itself in the first two weeks, but that's just usual activity that we see. Credit metrics continue to improve. Like I said, criticized classifieds came down again nicely by $367 million, as did loans that are on deferral or, you know, modified under the CARES Act. They're beginning to look really small now.
NPL ratio was down to 87 basis points from 121 last quarter. If you exclude the guarantee portion of SBA loans, it was at 68 basis points. NPA ratio was down to 58 - 80. The charge-offs for last year came in at 29 basis points compared to the prior year, which were at 26 basis points. On the buyback, we told you that we would be opportunistic as and when we see weakness in the stock price, which is exactly what we did last quarter. We bought back $182 million of stock. It still leaves about $27 million in our authorization, but when that is completed, we expect to go back to the board for more because we are sitting on a lot of excess capital.
Book value per share is now $35.47, and tangible is at $34.56. I've come a long way in the last few years. The macro environment in our markets. Listen, you know, I really can't ask for anything better. The one last thing that I was asking for is loan demand to come back, and that's also back. Line usage is up, just, you know, our people are busier than they have been since before the pandemic, which is a really good sign. Also, rate environment is going to change, and that should also marginally help banks, as rates normalize.
Oh, you know, overall, the economy, you know, whether you measure it through unemployment, whether you measure it through collateral values, it's just there's, you know, a lot of good news around. There are still some challenges obviously. You know, we're going through another wave, Omicron. I'm not sure how many letters are left in the Greek alphabet, but it's something we still have to pay attention to. I don't think it's really had much of an economic impact, but we just need to be aware that we are still in the middle of a pandemic. It did push back our plans for getting employees back into the office yet again. So that's not fun. Supply chain issues are still real.
Inflation headwinds are still there, and labor market is tight. You know, things that everyone knows. I'm not saying anything, you know, earth-shattering. Competition is still intense. Overall, we're feeling very optimistic where we stand at the beginning of this year. Strategy for us looking forward into 2022 and even beyond, you know, our emphasis is to build a commercial bank and keep building a commercial bank. Last couple of years have been a bit of a curveball, and I see us basically returning to what we were doing before the pandemic, which is continuing to grow our commercial business.
You know, we have, in the last two years, you could look at our balance sheet and say it has gotten much lazier in terms of the spreads of assets that are on. I think that's true for every bank. If you see what has happened, you know, with the securities buildup and jumbo residential buildup. I think going forward this year into next year, the strategy is to basically go back and invest and grow higher spread business, which is the commercial business, and deplete down the lower spread business like the securities portfolio. We have talked to you a little bit cryptically about expansion into markets. I will tell you what those markets are. One will not surprise anyone, which is Atlanta.
We had attempted to do that just before the pandemic and had really bad timing. We are convinced that is a good market for us, and we are really doubling up efforts. Instead of doing it, you know, in a piecemeal basis, we're gonna do it holistically with C&I, CRE, treasury management, you know, the whole suite of sales team in Atlanta. That is in the works, and we should be operational hopefully in the next quarter or so. The other location will need a little bit of explanation, so bear with me. It's actually Dallas. Why Dallas? It's not contiguous. It's far away. It's a competitive market.
Well, the reason is as you know, we already do a lot of business nationally, especially in the deposit side. We've had a lot of success over the last three or four years in Texas. We have round numbers about half a billion dollars of deposits from clients in Texas. We are reaching that place where we cannot grow that business without presence on the ground. We have to invest with some people in a branch. I don't expect it to be more than a branch, at least not in the medium term, short to medium term. Just one branch and a few people will do. We can then serve not only the existing clients, but we could grow that book. We could easily double that business in a very short period of time.
We're very bullish on that because we already know the pipeline is there, and just converting that is getting harder from far away. Those are the two markets. Texas is at least initially not going to be so much about lending other than the lending we already do in Texas to our national businesses. But over time, I think that'll open up other opportunities on the asset side as well, but we're gonna start with the deposit side. There's another short announcement. You know, in the coming weeks, you'll also see an announcement from us on overdraft policy. You know, we looked at our overdraft policies. They're already very, very customer-friendly. We really don't, you know. That's not how we make a living. And we're basically walking towards just eliminating consumer overdraft.
It's a rounding error for us. We already are a very customer-friendly bank, so why not just do this? It's not gonna have any material impact to the bottom line. Quickly, guidance for next year. We expect basically loan growth to come in mid- to high-single digits, more coming out of the commercial side and less or maybe not even any from the residential side. Certainly nothing from, you know, no growth in securities, so I'll be shrinking that down. The idea is not to, you know, drive this by just growing total balance sheet, but by improving the mix of the balance sheet and keeping capital free for continued buybacks.
We've done quite a bit last quarter, you know, last year, and there's no reason why we wouldn't do at least as much this year, if not more. Deposit growth, while you know that's always a focus, it's not the number one priority. That's not going to drive earnings. You know, we'll continue to stay focused on growing demand deposits, but really our attention is on the asset side. NIM is expected to, you know, we don't make bets on interest rates. We've said that, you know, hundreds of times. We try to stay neutral on assets. We are mildly asset sensitive at this point in time. As rates rise in the, you know, middle of the year and onwards, we expect some help from that to our margin.
Expenses, you know, it is a tough expense environment, given what we're seeing in the labor market. We expect expenses to be also mid- to high-single digits. PPNR is expected to grow next year. With that, Leslie, I don't know if I'm missing anything. If I did, I will come back to it. Thomas, I'll pass the microphone to you.
Great. Thanks, Raj. As Raj said, for the quarter, excluding PPP loans, we grew by over $1 billion. It's the largest loan growth we've had in several years. We were very excited about that. We see a lot of positive trends. If you break it down, total commercial loans grew by $500 million, while the residential segment grew by $541 million. $110 million of that $541 was within the EBO segment. On the commercial side, the largest increase was in our C&I businesses, which grew by $556 million for the quarter. I think the thing that's the best about that was not only was it a significant amount of growth, obviously, but it was very broad.
If you look at the supplemental information in the deck, you can see it's across a number of industry segments. You know, we had been talking about a strong pipeline in the last earnings call that we did, and we really saw it come to fruition in this particular quarter. That was extremely encouraging. Mortgage warehouse balances grew by $215 million, and utilization was up to 56%. In that area, commitments were up over $200 million for the quarter to approximately $2 billion. Continued growth in commitments is expected for 2022. CRE area declined this quarter by $181 million. I would point out that two-thirds of that decline was in some of the weaker asset classes that we see, which was retail and hospitality.
Even within retail and hospitality, the two classes that declined the most were unanchored, non-anchored retail and independent hotel chains. You know, those are parts of that asset class that we're not putting any emphasis on and we'd like to see a decrease in exposure to. Generally, we were happy to see that most of the other asset classes within CRE were down slightly but relatively flat. We do expect mid- to high-single-digit growth in both the CRE and the C&I segments for the year. Franchise portfolio declined in the fourth quarter, as did the equipment finance and Pinnacle portfolios. For 2022, we expect franchise to continue to decline a bit, although we will lend into selected concepts.
Growth is expected to resume in both the equipment finance and Pinnacle portfolios in 2022. Utilization, we've continued to see, you know, positive trends in that area. You know, as Raj mentioned, we're seeing growth in the economic scenarios in the markets that we do business in, especially from a C&I perspective. You know, all segments grew, all markets grew. We had a particularly good quarter in New York in the C&I segment. I think all of that is very encouraging. The operating lease portfolio was down $19 million this quarter and is expected to be flat to down slightly in 2022 as we continue to de-emphasize our exposure in the equipment finance area, especially in the energy area, and shift more to equipment leasing product within our end market clients.
Just a quick update on deferrals and CARES Act modifications. On commercial, a total of $172 million in commercial loans were made on modified terms under the CARES Act, compared to $244 million at September 30th. All of the commercial loans that have rolled off modification to date have either been paid off or resumed regular payments. On the residential side, excluding the Ginnie Mae early buyout portfolio, $33 million of loans remained on short-term deferral or have been modified under longer-term CARES Act repayment plan as of December 31st. 96% of the residential loans have rolled off deferral or modification have resumed regular payments at this time. Just a closing comment on DDA.
As Raj said, we did have, you know, some fluctuation in larger accounts at the end of the quarter, but we still see, you know, strong core DDA growth, you know, across all of our kind of core banking teams. If you look at the total year, we grew DDA by 28% for the year. If you look at, you know, the shift in composition, we ended the previous year at 25.4%. We ended this year at 30.5%. Very substantial, you know, shift in composition and increase in DDA overall for the total year. With that, I'll turn it over to Leslie for some more detail on the quarter.
Thanks, Thomas. I'll start with the margin. The margin increased to 2.44% this quarter from 2.33% for the third quarter. The yield on loans increased to 3.50% - 3.45% last quarter. It really wasn't any one thing that drove that. A lot of different factors contributed to that increase. The yield on securities increased to 1.54% - 1.49% last quarter, and the main factor leading to that increase was slower prepayment speeds on securities purchased at a premium. You might recall we've been kind of getting beat up. The securities yield has been kind of getting beat up by accelerating prepayments lately, and that seems to have come to an end. That's good news. Duration of the portfolio is still short at about 1.5.
Total cost of deposits declined by one basis point quarter over quarter, and the cost of our interest-bearing deposits declined by twonone basis points. One point I want to make here is that we have, in anticipation of a rising rate environment, extended some duration within the deposit portfolio by issuing some callable CDs. That is kind of moving that number in the opposite direction a little bit. We terminated some outstanding cash flow hedges this quarter with a notional amount of $401 million and a weighted average rate of 3.24%. This, along with the maturity of some of the other higher rate hedged advances, reduced the average cost of FHLB borrowings from 2.35% - 1.86%.
We took a loss of $44.8 million on the discontinuance of those hedges, and we were able to terminate all of the hedges that had pay rates over 3%. That should be a tailwind to the NIM going forward. For next year, as Raj said, we do expect the NIM to increase. That increase will be more back-end loaded because obviously in rising rates are one of the things that's going to drive that increase in NIM. With respect to the provision and the reserve, the provision was $246,000, so pretty much zero this quarter. Slides 10 through 13 of our deck provide you with some further details on the reserve. The reserve declined from 70 basis points of loans at September 30th to 53 basis points at December 31st.
The main reason for the decrease in the reserve, frankly, was charge-offs that we took during the quarter. We had net charge-offs of $34.2 million and I think $24 million. A big chunk of that was related to this one commercial loan that we've been talking to you guys about for several quarters now. That should have been something you were expecting to see. The vast majority of those charge-offs were reserved for at the beginning of the quarter, I think 33 of the $34 million. That led to the decline in the reserve this quarter. Offsetting factors that impacted the provision for the fourth quarter were a $13 million decrease related to improvement in the economy.
Our models were telling us really we should have had another $13 million decline in the reserve. We weren't quite comfortable with that with the Omicron variant floating around out there and some uncertainty remaining around fiscal and monetary policy. We did add a qualitative overlay to the reserve to offset that. The qualitative overlay went up by $15.6 million this quarter. As to risk rating migration and charge-offs, and again, details are in the deck in slides 25 through 27. Total criticized and classified commercial loans declined by $367 million this quarter for a total decline of $1.2 billion for the year 2021. Total non-performing loans decreased by $71 million - $206 million this quarter from $277 at September 30th.
$34 million of that reduction was the charge-offs that I referenced previously. Looking at other income and expense for the quarter, and I know there's a lot of noise in there, and I'll try to walk you through some of that. In the fourth quarter, we recognized a gain of $18.2 million on the sale of a portfolio of formerly covered loans. That sale was related to a tax planning strategy. That was the reason we sold those loans. Otherwise, with respect to non-interest income, we continue to see a steady increase in deposit service charges, and we do expect non-interest income to be up, probably mid- to high-single digits for 2022.
On the expense side, I just talked about a $44.8 million charge related to the discontinuance of some cash flow hedges. Also in December, we paid a special bonus to our employees of $6.8 million. Rajinder, did you want to elaborate on that a little bit?
There's one item I do want to talk about is that, you know, we saw all of this happening in the quarter. We saw the big tax refund from the state, which we had fought many, many years for sort of a, you know, once in a blue moon type of a thing. I looked at, you know, what the team has done over the last two years through COVID. We have not done any kind of hazard pay or anything like that for anyone. At that time, I thought that, you know, sharing a small portion of this is a very wise long-term investment in our people, and we decided to do a $5,000 bonus for every employee in the company.
It's, you know, usually bonuses are performance driven and, you know, the people who make more money get bigger bonuses and so on. This is not that. This is basically everyone got $5,000, whether you're a teller making, you know, entry-level salary or you're running a big business, you got $5,000. I cannot tell you the amount of goodwill that the company earned through the $7 million investment. I know this will, you know, this will provide a return which is hard to measure over the many, many years to come. People will remember this. It just changed the dialogue in the company.
It just so happened it was in the fourth quarter. It was close to the holidays, so the timing worked out well. The feedback that I've gotten, it's just, I'm glad we could do this, and we had the earnings or the one-time earnings to be able to fund this through. That's really what the thinking was. Everyone got $5,000.
Okay. On that happy note, we also recorded $4.2 million in professional fees in the fourth quarter that related to the Florida tax settlement. We took a $2.8 million impairment charge on some of the older sand cars in our railcar fleet, where projected future cash flows had just, you know, come down some. All of those notable expense items total $58.7 million pre-tax for the quarter. Aside from that, I am sure you noticed the compensation expense, even taking into account that $7 million special bonus was elevated this quarter. That was really due to adjustments that we made in the fourth quarter to our variable compensation accruals. We had a really strong growth quarter, which led to some increase in our incentive accruals.
The strong year that we had, we decided to up our discretionary bonus pool as well. We think that's something that we're happy we're in a position to be able to do that for our employees. Those two things totaled another $4.6 million. Income taxes, I think we've talked enough about the Florida tax settlement, net benefit of $43.9 million. You're all aware of that. Unrelated to that, we released some reserves for uncertain tax positions, resulting in additional tax benefit of $25.2 million. This really related to expiration of the federal statute of limitations and some state statutes as well around some tax positions we took when the tax rate was reduced from 35% - 21%.
Even after considering those items, the ETR for the quarter is a little bit low, and that's really a result of return to provision adjustments. For next year, I would expect the ETR excluding discrete items, which always happen but are hard to predict, to be about 25%. With that, I will turn it over to Raj for any closing comments he wants to make.
I know there's a lot in here, but, you know, let's just get to the Q&A directly. Let's give it as much time as we can.
Thank you, sir. As a reminder, to ask a question, you'll need to press star one on your telephone. To withdraw your question, please press the pound key. Stand by as we compile the Q&A roster. Our first question comes from Brady Gailey of KBW. Your line is open.
Hey, great. Thanks. This is Will Jones on for Brady Gailey. How are you guys?
Hey, good, Will. Nice to hear from you.
Morning.
Hey, great. I just wanted to start on credit. You know, I know net charge-offs were, you know, up a little bit this morning. You guys alluded to it being related to that one particular equipment distributor loan. Were all the charge-offs this quarter specifically to that one credit?
No. Will, that was about $24 million - $34 million. Aside from that, I don't think it was a particularly unusual level of charge-offs, but it's $24 million - $34 million was that one loan.
Gotcha. No, that makes sense. I know you guys still have a pretty decent slug of that credit remaining as NPL, I guess.
Yeah. There's 27 left on the balance sheet, Will, and there's an $8 million reserve sitting against that, and we feel very comfortable that that $8 million reserve is adequate. That charge-off, the rest of that $8 million in charge-offs will come over the next couple quarters at some point, I would imagine.
Okay, great. You beat me to it there. That's very helpful. Thanks.
Good.
Just thinking about the reserve, you know, you guys now have a reserve. You exclude PPP loans in the mortgage warehouse. We have it about fifty-six basis points, you know, which does screen on the lower end of your peer range. I'm just curious your thoughts on how comfortable you are with the reserve at these levels, and then just taking a step further, how you would think about forward provisioning if, you know, we continue to see this really nice loan growth.
Yeah. How comfortable I am with the reserve? I'm very comfortable with the reserve, Will. Otherwise, it would be a different number. Yeah, no, I'm very comfortable with the reserve. It's a good question, and I expected it to be asked. We've spent a lot of time looking at reserve levels, particularly compared back to our CECL Day One adoption levels. This is a little lower. There's some good reasons for that. On the residential side, more of the portfolio is the Ginnie Mae EBO segment, which carries a 0 reserve. At Day One adoption, only 11% of the resi portfolio was the EBOs. It's now 23%. Also on the residential side, you know, we've seen an 18%+ increase in HPI in 2021 alone, and that is forecasted to continue to improve.
That's really brought the LGDs down on the residential side. We also have a better unemployment forecast than we had on Day One. In the CRE and C&I space, one of the big drivers is, frankly, that the weighted average life of the portfolio is a lot shorter now than it was two years ago. There hasn't been as much commercial production, unfortunately, over the last two years as we would have hoped. That's brought the weighted average life of those portfolios down, and the weighted average life is a big factor under CECL in determining the amount of the reserve. We also have a better commercial property forecast impacting the CRE reserve. On the C&I side, our borrower financial statement spreads have actually, in the past portfolio, have actually improved considerably since Day One adoption.
By the way, the reduction in the reserve, the specific reserves are about the same. The reserve on criticized classified assets on a percentage basis is higher than day one. What's bringing down the reserve is the loss rates on the past portfolio, and those are really the reasons that those past portfolio rates are coming down. More EBOs, better borrower financial spreads, better economic forecast, better property values. That kind of sums it up. You can tell from my answer, we've spent a lot of time digging into this.
One thing we also did end up putting a qualitative overlay.
I spoke to that in my comments, Rajinder, that we put a $15 million qualitative reserve on if our models would have suggested the reserve should be another $13 million lower than it is.
Got you. Okay. Yeah. Very helpful. Now you're obviously prepared for that one.
I knew it was coming, Will.
Yeah. Lastly for me, guys, really nice quarter on the buyback. It was at, honestly, a really cheap cost. The stock is still trading at a similar level today as it was when you guys bought back shares. Any reason to think buyback's slow from here?
I will say what I've been saying for the last year on buyback. This is still a very volatile time in the stock market. For no reason, stock can go up and down 10%. We will continue to use the volatility to our advantage. We will be opportunistic, we'll be aggressive when we think the stock is unnecessarily beaten up and back off when we think it's in the opposite direction. We did not have that philosophy before the pandemic. We used to just basically let it roll a little bit every day. In the last year, since we've been back in the buyback game, we've been more opportunistic.
We'll continue to do that, but I fully expect another buyback authorization to come as soon as we get this $26 million done or $28 million. I forget what it was. $26 million - $28 million, whatever is left gets actually done.
Okay, great. Very good. That's all for me. I'll jump back in the queue.
Thank you. Our next question comes from David Bishop of Seaport Research. Your line is open.
Yeah. Good morning, Rajinder, Leslie. Hope all is well.
Morning, David.
Hey, just a quick question on the Atlanta initiative. It sounds like that's gonna come to fruition relatively full bore here. Just curious in terms of the talent there, are those people already bonded in place here? Just curious where the new staffing sort of came from and what's the outlook there in terms of timing for this initiative to be up and running?
They're not on board yet, but we're close.
In terms of the Dallas initiative, it sounds like there was already several hundred million of deposits within the market there. Is that gonna be a pure deposit play, or will this also sort of encompass loan growth potential as well?
I think in the short term, it will be pure deposit play. Eventually it'll open up an option for us on the asset side. We're not gonna jump into the asset side, you know, this year at least.
Got it. Thom, I appreciate the commentary in terms of commercial real estate. You know, one of your competitors earlier this week talked about seeing some better pricing, better potential in New York City multifamily commercial real estate. Just maybe update us what you're seeing in terms of that market on the commercial real estate side.
Yeah. I would say that we would be in agreement with those comments. We're certainly seeing, particularly in the free market space, you know, a substantial return to the city. We're seeing, you know, month-over-month rents compared to last year up in the 24% area. We actually closed and committed to, you know, a significant number of new transactions in the New York market in December. We expect to close another large one in the first quarter of this year. We're seeing good quality pipeline in New York. Part of it's in multifamily, part of it's in suburban office, and we're also seeing opportunities in the industrial market.
There's certainly good growth in the city and multifamily, and we're actually seeing good growth in Long Island and New Jersey and a bit in Westchester County.
Got it. Appreciate that color. Leslie, maybe one follow-up here. You noted the trigger in terms of the higher incentive comp in the fourth quarter.
Mm-hmm.
Just curious what triggered that. Was that related to loan growth, credit quality? Just curious sort of what triggered that, $4.6 million and maybe what's helping it for a good-
I would say at the high level, it's a combination of loan growth, you know, the improvement in the margin and just generally the level of our operating results for the year. Our discretionary bonus pool is not formulaically tied to earnings, but I would say it's loosely correlated with earnings. You know, we had a great earnings year, and so it was all the combination of all of those things.
Got it. Any, guidance in terms of maybe what the first quarter run rate could return to?
I mean, the first quarter is always elevated because of payroll taxes and whatnot, but I would still say it's probably going to be lower than this quarter was because of those, you know, adjustments to the variable compensation accrual. It'll come down from the first quarter.
Got it. Maybe one final one for you, Leslie. You mentioned you guys took advantage to do, I think it was a forward deposit hedge. Maybe some specifics there with the anticipation on rates.
Hang on, give me a second. I do have this written down. I just gotta find the page. I think there's about $680 million that we put on in callable CDs. The nice thing about them is if rates actually were to go down, we have the option of calling those. Nobody's expecting that right now, but it was a pretty cheap option, and it's nice to have. They're at a weighted average rate of just over 70 basis points and a term of just over three years.
3 years. Great. Appreciate the color.
Thank you. Again, to ask a question, we ask that you please press star one on your telephone. To withdraw your question, please press the key. As we stand by to compile the Q&A roster, we have a question from Ben Gerlinger of Hovde Group. Your line is open.
Hey, good morning, guys. I was curious if you could kind of clarify a little bit. I think you guys said mid- to high-single-digit loan growth, which kind of correlates to NII. From there, expenses should be up a similar rate. I was curious on how you guys are thinking about rate hikes and what you have in your curve.
We have run our models based on the forward curve. Our expectation is 3-4 increases this year. We don't try to be smarter than the collective intelligence of the market, so we just go with whatever the curve was. I think we ran our numbers as of the first week of January. I'm sorry, what was your question beyond the curve?
No, that was it. I was just kind of curious on how it would play into the NIM because obviously, like, there's a delayed effect. If even if there's a hike in one piece.
Yeah. It'll help in the second half of the year more than in the first half of the year because we're not expecting them to start right away. You know, like I said, we've never bet the ranch on rates one way or the other. We try to stay as neutral as possible. That's been the philosophy of the company since it was founded. We are slightly asset sensitive. That will help moderately. I know there are certain banks that are, you know, way more asset sensitive and just betting on rates. That's not us.
You know, Ben, also to your question, we are expecting, you know, mid- to high-single-digit growth in net interest income.
Okay. That's helpful. Leslie, I was curious if we could just dig a little bit deeper. You said on the previous question that 1Q expenses are likely lower than 4Q.
Yeah. I was talking specifically about comp because of the, you know, the special employee bonus that is in there and the adjustments we made in the fourth quarter to the variable compensation accrual. I was referring specifically to comp in those comments.
Got you. Okay. Yeah. I was just more looking at the cadence because you typically have one Q as the highest, and it kind of works lower the rest of the year. Is that something we should expect to see in 2022 as well?
You know, I don't tend to try to focus too much on what's going to happen quarter by quarter. I think Rajinder gave some overall guidance for the year. You know, there is some hiring that's going to take place during 2022. You know, we really haven't hired anyone during the pandemic, and so there are a lot of open positions out there that are going to get filled. I just really don't have in front of me what I expect it to be on a quarter-to-quarter basis.
Okay. That's helpful. Thank you.
Thank you. Our next question comes from Stephen Alexopoulos, JP Morgan. Your line is open.
Hi. Good morning. This is Alex Lau for Steve.
Good morning, Alex.
Good morning. One question on the mid- to high-single-digit expense growth. Can you clarify the base that you're growing off of? Maybe a specific number, given that a lot of one-time items.
Yeah.
Thank you.
Yes. 2021 adjusted for that list of notable items that are in the press release for the fourth quarter of 2021.
Got it. Adjusting for those four Q items. Okay.
Yeah.
And then-
Exactly. It's going to be, Alex, in the comp and tech lines. That's where we're going to see it, in those two lines.
Thank you. On your non-interest-bearing deposits now at 30% of total deposit growth, with the Fed likely to hike rates later this year, do you think you can grow this concentration throughout the year? Thank you.
We think we have room to grow, but I also think realistic that in a rising rate environment, this tailwind will become a headwind. It's very hard for me to say where all this will eventually fall. What I can look at is pipelines and see if we have new customers signed up and in the process of transitioning over, and that's the case. We're happy about bringing in new clients, new accounts, new relationships. At the same time, what will be the headwind coming from a different monetary policy? When it appears, how quickly do customers react to it? I think that is a second half of the year headwind, and it's really hard to quantify. Overall, I'm optimistic.
We have room to grow, but we'll certainly not, you know, grow 28% like we did last year. That's not, you know, given everything I said, that's not the case. We're more realistic than there, but we are incenting our teams for net growth on DDA this year. They are very much still focused on pushing on that front. We're not pushing so much on total deposit growth because like I said, you know, I'd rather run down some low-yielding assets and use that to fund higher-yielding assets or high spread assets and optimize the left side of the balance sheet while keeping capital available for other things as in buybacks. Total deposit growth is not gonna move the needle so much.
DDA, we're still very much focused on. It will be a smaller number than last year or the last two years. It's, you know, I'll confess that it's a little hard to really predict what'll happen.
Understood. Thanks for
I might add, Raj, also, when you look at the loan growth numbers and you look at an accelerated expectation of loan growth in both the C&I and the CRE books, you know, while it moves from year to year, I would say, you know, 70% or so of the growth that we would anticipate would largely come from new relationships. In the new relationships, you tend to pick up new deposits as well. We see new relationship generation on the loan side will also drive DDA growth in the year.
Thank you for taking my question.
Thank you. Our next question comes from Samuel Varga of Stephens Inc. Your line is open.
Good morning.
Morning.
Morning.
I wanted to ask a question about expenses. I understand the guides you're providing and kind of the one-time items that were discussed. Could you kind of give some color on if we take those one-timers off, I guess the 4Q results are still a step above the last quarter. Kind of on the baseline run rate, was there anything specific that bumped that up?
I mean, I think I understand your question. I'll try to answer it. If I get it wrong, please let me know. You know, the baseline would be taking the 2021 expenses and just subtracting out those $58-$59 million worth of notable items that ran through the fourth quarter, and that would be the base on which our guidance is predicated.
I think we.
We've got all those listed in a table for you in the earnings release.
I guess what I'm trying to look at here is, if I look at kind of the operating expenses, then we have a number of around $120 million for the last fourth quarter, and for this quarter it's more like $130 million.
Okay. I mean, I trust your math. I mean, I really don't think about this quarter by quarter. I really think about it more on a year-over-year basis. You know, as Rajinder guided to, you know, mid- to high-single-digit increases over the course of 2022 compared to that baseline number driven mainly by comp and technology investments. In comp, we've got, you know, the labor market's tight. We've got open positions we need to fill. You know, I think that's a truth across not just the banking industry but corporate America. Those are the two lines you'll see those increases in, the technology line because of the investments we've been making and the comp line. I really don't think about it so much one quarter to the next.
Really, we're looking more year over year.
A lot of the comp line is investments in future growth.
Exactly.
Just like Atlanta and Texas and other
Yep.
major initiatives we have on the revenue side.
Yep.
Understood. Thank you. Thanks for clarifying that. Switching to the securities book, could you give me a couple of numbers? I'm looking for the percentage of floating rate securities of the total securities book.
I can tell you the duration of the book is about 1.5.
Actually on that front, is there a breakdown between available for sale specifically for the duration?
It's all available for sale. It's virtually all available for sale. You can find all of that in our 10-Qs. We only have $10 million worth of HTM securities.
Understood. Thank you. That'll be all for me.
Okay, great.
Thank you. I'm seeing no further questions in the queue. I will now hand it over to Mr. Singh for closing comments.
Listen, this is a very solid quarter, no matter how you look at it. We're feeling very excited about what 2022 will bring. We do wanna get back into the office. That's been my biggest complaint with this. It's been a weird two years. I see a lot of momentum in the economy. I see a lot of momentum inside the company, a lot of enthusiasm for what's coming. We are investing, as you can see from our expansion in Atlanta and Dallas, because I think, you know, where we are in the business cycle, this is the time to invest and invest aggressively and reap the benefits of that in the coming years. I'll end with this note of optimism.
Hope to see you guys in person and not on Zoom. Thank you so much for dialing in. We'll talk to you again in three months. Thanks, everyone.
Bye, everybody.
This concludes today's call. Thank you all for participating. You may now disconnect and have a pleasant day.