All right, welcome everybody, and thank you for joining us today at the Sidoti Year-End Conference. My name is Brendan McCarthy. I'm an analyst here at Sidoti. Now, I'm very pleased to welcome First Business Bank, the ticker is FBIZ. Joining us from the company are CEO Corey Chambas, CFO Brian Spielmann, and President and COO David Seiler. And before I hand it over, a quick reminder: the Q&A tab is located at the bottom of the screen. Feel free to type in any questions, and we can save time for Q&A at the end. But with that said, I will pass it over to Corey.
Thanks, Brendan, and thanks everyone for joining us today. Happy to talk to you a little bit about the First Business Bank story, explain who we are, what we do. We're a bit unique in the banking space, so it does take a little bit of time to understand us. So we'll try to get you up to speed as best we can today. We're about a $4 billion bank with approximately that same amount of assets under management through our private wealth group. On the banking side, we're unique in that we are a business bank, so we do not have branch networks. We don't do retail banking. We serve businesses on the conventional banking side, along with a few other little unique things that we do that Dave will get into a little bit more.
So that's who we are. We've always been very tech-forward in what we do since we began, and we will continue to try to drive efficiency through both our model and use of technology. So we've been public for 20 years now and have had a good run on Nasdaq. And again, appreciate your interest. With that, I'm going to turn it over to Dave to talk a little bit about what it is exactly that we do.
Sure. Hi, everybody. Thanks, Corey. So when you think about us, it's probably easiest just to think about business banking and private wealth. That's what we do. Business banking, Corey mentioned that we have $4 billion of assets for banks. Those are loans generally, or the vast majority of our assets are loans. And we bank, we do what I'd call conventional commercial banking in four markets. And those markets are Madison, Wisconsin, Milwaukee, Wisconsin, Appleton, Wisconsin, and Kansas City, or Leawood, Kansas, Kansas City market. And so that's regular commercial banking and treasury management, as everyone's probably familiar with.
The other thing we do that's a little unique in our business banking space and in our markets is company retirement plans or 401(k)s for businesses. So in addition to that, we also have five niche C&I lending businesses that are national in scope.
And they're national in scope because they all take specialized platforms or some type of specialized expertise or monitoring to do properly. And those businesses are equipment finance, we tend to call it vendor finance, asset-based lending, accounts receivable financing, floor plan financing, and SBA lending. So that's a majority of our business banking. Then we also have private wealth. So that's dealing primarily with, well, it started out as working with owners and executives from our commercial banking clients and has spread on outside of that.
So 80%, we have, Corey mentioned, just under $4 billion in assets under management. I believe it was $3.8 billion. And that's really just doing financial planning, asset management, and trust administration for individuals. And in addition to that, you can see on the right side of the slide is bank consulting.
That's really more of an expertise we have than a business that we have. Our founder was a bank consultant who was very involved in asset, or an expert in, asset liability management. We still have that expertise. We focus on it a lot. Brian will talk about that a bit later. We also do some asset liability management and security selection for other banks. I believe we have about 13 other bank clients. That's a little bit about what we do. I'd like to move into a little bit about how we do it. We strongly believe that if we have happy engaged employees, we're going to have really happy clients. We focus a lot on employee engagement and making it our culture, really making it a great place to work for our employees.
We measure that annually through an employee engagement survey. We do it every year. We have very high participation in it, and we have very good results. The last study that we got full results for was in 2024. We had 90% of our employees participate, which is above the kind of finance benchmark of 81%. We had employee engagement of 86%, which again is higher than the industry benchmark of 78%. In addition to that, we've taken part in USA TODAY's Top Workplaces survey since 2022, and we've been named a top workplace every year that we participated in that study, so five years in that survey, so five years in a row.
We believe we have happy and engaged employees. How does that translate into client satisfaction? We also do a client survey annually. We measure client satisfaction in two ways.
The first is just overall client satisfaction. Are you happy with us? We're at 91% on that. But we focus a little more on Net Promoter Score. So it's more of an industry standard way of measuring client satisfaction. So it looks at how many of your clients would recommend you minus or and subtract off all of those clients who wouldn't recommend you. And with that, we have a score of 70, which is nearly three times the banking industry average score. So we feel like we've got very happy clients. And we see that because our clients don't leave us. Corey talked a little bit about we're a growth company, I believe. And we try to grow at 10% a year. And it's much, much easier to grow at 10% a year if you're not losing clients because they're not satisfied with you.
It's like filling a bucket with a hole in it. And we feel like client satisfaction and being able to maintain our clients and retain our clients is key to our growth success. We also get many of our referrals from our clients. So another benefit of having great client satisfaction. If we go on, we wanted to talk a little bit about our strategic plan. Strategic planning is really kind of fundamental to how we operate and manage the bank. We have a really robust process. We've always worked with five-year strategic plans. We just started the most recent strategic plan in 2024. So we had a team working on that for all of 2023 during the last year of our prior strategic plan, involving probably a total of about 80 people in the company.
So about a quarter of our employees, I believe, were involved in our strategic planning with a key group of 11 senior execs. So on that strategic plan, we look at, so what are the key strategies that we need to focus on to hit our goals and objectives? And for this strategic plan, we came up with 11 strategies that I just want to briefly share with you. The first of the strategies is culture. We really think culture is our secret sauce. A lot of people talk about culture and kind of give it lip service. To us, it's critical because, again, it goes to if we have culture is why our employees are engaged and happy. Excuse me.
So and the reason we thought this was a really important strategy for this strategic plan is when you're small and everyone is in the office, it's really easy to look around and figure out what the culture is, right? You look at Corey, you look at the other senior managers, and you can see what the culture is. Well, today, we're much larger. We operate national businesses. We operate in many markets. We have a lot of remote employees. And you have to be a lot more intentional about how you talk about culture, how you make sure your culture is protected and strong. So examples of things that came out of this. Oh, I didn't mention. So for every strategy we have, we have a team of executives that work on that strategy and work on initiatives to advance each of these five strategies.
Examples of things that came out of the culture strategy were really revamping our all-employee meetings, talking much more about culture, having manager trainings where we talk with managers about how to model our culture and how to really protect and enforce our culture. So that's the culture strategy. The next one is future-ready talent. I mean, obviously, we have to attract and retain employees. So that's important. We want productive employees to stay with us for a long time. So that examples of things that come out of the future-ready talent strategy are things like having development plans for each employee that are worked on with their manager and with partners from human resources.
For this strategic plan, one thing that we really focused on was that with so many advancements in technology, our employees all have to be accepting of technology and ready to utilize it. So an example of something we've done with this strategic plan is AI. We want all of our employees to become more productive and use AI appropriately. So one of the things we did, we had five training sessions. We use a lot of Microsoft Office products.
All of those have AI embedded in them. We had five all-employee training sessions on, excuse me, how to use Copilot in the Microsoft suite of products. We put tips on how to use AI effectively on our intranet multiple times a week and really just bring how people are using it to the forefront so all employees can see it and know that they should be utilizing it.
Next strategy is deposits. So for us, deposits are really important. They're really our raw materials. So we get deposits. We have to, and that's what we can use to lend out to clients. Where a lot of banks that do retail lending or consumer lending, they get their deposits through individual savings accounts, individual checking accounts. We don't have that. And that's not a bad thing for us. If you've paid attention over the past several years, a lot of those deposits are going to the large banks. They're very easy to move using mobile technology. They're going to fintech companies. Our deposits, we get from approaching businesses and trying to be their bank and have their checking accounts.
And the way we do that is we go to them with treasury management specialists and talk to them about what are your receivables, how do you get your receivables, how do you make your payables, and try to be more efficient and add value in that way. And that way, when we do become their bank, it's a very sticky, deep relationship with that client. And again, they stay around for a long time. Next, operational excellence. Operational excellence is how to be more efficient. We're doing that a lot with using things like robotic process automation or making software robots that do routine tasks for people.
We started that in 2023 using an outside vendor, and we've brought that whole project in-house. We have three full-time software engineers who work on robotic process automation throughout the company. And then the last one is profitability.
That's really focusing on. We're a growth company, and growth is important, but you can't sacrifice growth for profitability. Really optimizing the profitability of each business line that we have. How have we done? We're almost two years through our strategic plan. You see on the left side here are the goals that we have. Employee engagement and participation, we want over 85%. We're at 86. We have a Net Promoter Score of 70 minimum, and we're at 70. We want total core deposits, so that's regular business checking accounts and private wealth checking accounts, to be greater than equal to 75% of our funding. We have a little more work to do there. We're at 73. We want revenue growth of over 10% a year. We're at 12.3 this year.
Efficiency ratio, so that's how many dollars of expense does it take to earn a dollar of revenue? How many cents of expense to earn a dollar of revenue? Lower is better. We want to be below 60, and we're already at 59.51. Return on equity, a return on average tangible common equity, we want to be greater than 15. We're at 17.3. And tangible book value growth, we want to be greater than 10% a year, and we're at 15.6% a year. So, so far, so good in terms of our plan. And just really quickly, we talked about being a growth company. This slide shows how we do in terms of loan growth and deposit growth and tangible book value growth over the last five years. So you can see we're well in excess of our 10% goal for each of those line items.
Let's see. Oh, with that, sorry, I wanted to turn that over to Brian, so we talked earlier about our expertise in asset liability management, and Brian's going to talk a little bit about how we do that and what the benefits are for us.
Great. Thanks, Dave, and thanks, everyone, for joining today. We'd like to think at First Business Bank that we do interest rate risk differently, asset liability management differently. A lot of times when you think about banking, it's banks are funding on the short term and then lending that out long term, and so that mismatch creates potential for volatility and earnings over the long term, and so we think we take a disciplined approach to asset liability management and security selection. We analyze our balance sheet carefully, matching the structure and duration of our assets and liabilities.
Our strong risk management principles have protected us from industry pitfalls. I think Dave mentioned that kind of back in 2023 with some of those bank failures that had something to do with poor risk management. We try to avoid that through limiting our concentration and having prudent diversification. So really, the 2023 bank failures kind of highlighted, like I said, the dangers of poor risk management and overexposure to interest rate movements. In contrast, our adherence to robust asset liability management practices and proactive monitoring has kept us resilient through these volatile cycles.
We didn't see the wide swings on either interest rate moves on the income statement or the balance sheet as some of these other institutions did who were playing the yield curve, taking bets on the yield curve. So how do we do this?
One of our key goals is to maintain a stable net interest margin through all interest rate cycles, ensuring consistent earnings. We expect to grow net interest income through balance sheet growth. Dave mentioned 10% balance sheet growth. We don't want to take bets on the interest rates. We achieve this, and that's what this slide gets to, through match funding our balance sheet growth, structuring our portfolio to lock in spreads and stabilize margins. You can see here the examples we give are on specific transactions.
We may go out and match fund a loan. So we have a five-year loan that we'll go out and find funding through a brokerage CD or equivalent and lock in that interest rate spread. So we mitigate the interest rate not only on the short end of the curve through a balanced balance sheet, but also out on the yield curve.
We think this approach translates growth into reliable, predictable earnings for our stakeholders. I think somebody may have mentioned earlier, but predicting interest rates is extremely difficult. We kind of see that coming through here with the Fed decisions, probabilities of changing monthly, weekly.
Our strategy to mitigate interest rate risk is to prepare for that, not predict it, and so that's what we've done here, and we really see the benefit of that coming through in consistent earnings, as shown on this slide here, over time through various rate cycles and relative to peers, our ability to generate consistent net interest spread through that match funding discipline approach, so other risks we obviously consider in banking. Interest rate risk is one that we think we can eliminate, if not really strongly mitigate. Operational risk, obviously, is there. You have cybersecurity practices, controls in place. The other big risk, obviously, for banking is credit risk. And we think we do that better than most. And that's kind of what Dave will dig into here next on this next slide.
Right. So credit costs are obviously important, especially in down economic cycles. And the way that we mitigate credit risk is really through being consistent and disciplined in our underwriting and our managing of credits. We have a loan committee process. We're very thorough in underwriting loans. And you can see that over time, the graph here shows what our credit costs are relative to the industry from 2005 through the present. And you can see we're at about one-third of the industry average in terms of credit costs. You can see through this, particularly want to point out the Great Financial Crisis from 2007 to 2010, 2011.
You can see we were well below the industry in terms of our credit costs. The only blip you'll see is in 2016 and 2017. That was related to an acquisition that we made in late 2014 that we had some credit issues to work through, but that's been resolved. We've kind of migrated back to more of our normal credit cost relative to the industry. With that, I just wanted to throw it over to Corey to talk a little bit about our performance.
Overall, Dave mentioned a key point that I want to emphasize is we did have one small acquisition, really small in the scope of our total assets, did cause us a little bit of angst for a while. We're an organic growth company. We talk about being a growth company. For a bank, 10% plus is really good organic growth.
We don't grow through acquisitions, and where that really shows itself is when you look at tangible book value per share. This is a metric that a lot of bank investors will focus on, even more so than EPS growth is tangible book value. It does take the vagaries of valuations out. Banks do go in and out of favor as things are projected to happen in the economy or with the yield curve, etc. And so valuations do go up and down a bit over time, but you take that vagary out when you just look at tangible book value per share. It's our net worth divided by number of shares. As an organic growth company, we're not issuing new shares to grow. We're not giving some other company's shareholders what we think are very valuable shares to acquire them.
As you can see here, we've grown tangible book value per share every year since we've gone public. That includes the Great Financial Crisis and the most recent episodes that we had in 2020, 2021 timeframe as well with the pandemic. We've had very strong organic growth and very strong tangible book value growth. As you look further, on the right is really that tangible book value growth relative to peers. How does that compare? You can see it's double-ish to peers over any of those timeframes. On an EPS growth on the left-hand side of the slide, you can see that we've had really strong earnings per share growth compounding over shorter timeframes or longer timeframes up to the last 10 years, all double digits.
We've talked about double digits throughout the presentation in terms of our targets for loan and deposit growth, revenue growth, etc. That's our goal. We strive to meet and exceed our goals. You can see that flows through to the bottom line in terms of the earnings per share growth. On the next slide, you'll see how that rolls up compared to a couple of different groups, our peer group, the Russell 2000 and S&P Bank Index. S&P Banks are the big banks. That's at the green line. You look at the last five years, even the big banks who've really been the beneficiary of some of the things that have happened with Silicon Valley Bank, etc., we still have well outperformed.
Now, even with that outperformance, you can see over on the right that we're trading at a discount to our peer group in terms of our multiple on the last 12 months' earnings per share. So while the performance has been really good, we think it's not too late when you look at us on a relative basis in terms of valuation. And then finally, just kind of big picture zooming way out since we went public, how we've done in terms of our stock performance, you can see pretty well. So with that, I will wrap it up, say thank you for your time today. And hopefully, we'll have left a little time for some questions.
Great. Thank you, Corey, Brian, and Dave. We have about five minutes here for Q&A. Why don't we start off looking at the commercial loan portfolio? Maybe you can walk us through some of the characteristics there, any concentrations or the different loan types, and perhaps what areas you think are going to be the key revenue drivers going forward.
I'll start with the different types. You can start dividing our loan portfolio into two major buckets: the C&I commercial and industrial portfolio. That's about 40% of the portfolio. And then about 60% is commercial real estate. But when you look at each of those slices of the pie, they divide even further. So in the commercial real estate portfolio, we have non-owner-occupied and owner-occupied. We would look at owner-occupied commercial real estate more like the C&I portfolio because those are the manufacturing or distribution facilities for those types of businesses that we bank. But then in the commercial real estate portfolio, we've got other industrial buildings. We've got some office, not a lot.
Our commercial real estate is in our markets, as Dave talked about. We've got our four banking markets, so we don't do commercial real estate across the country. We do it in our backyard where we know and understand it, and then probably the biggest segment of that would be multifamily, which is very strong in the Wisconsin market. And most of that is in the biggest percentage in Madison area, next biggest in Milwaukee, and by far most of it in the Wisconsin market, which is a strong and stable market. On the C&I portfolio, that's across a lot of different industries in a lot of different segments. Growth would probably, if recent history is any guide, our C&I portfolio, commercial industrial portfolio, has been growing more rapidly than our commercial real estate portfolio over the last several years.
That continues to be more of our focus where we put more of our resources in terms of our people, simply because there's better yields there, and we can get more treasury management fee activity, those deposit relationships, 401(k) plans, private wealth relationships with those business owners, so larger and more robust relationships there. So that's our focus.
Got it-- [Crosstalk]
[Crosstalk] I would just add real quick on the revenue side to private wealth. I think in terms of where we see our current revenue and where we see it going and where the opportunities are, that really is a huge value for us going forward in terms of just opportunity to grow revenue, but also capital-free revenue with the off-balance sheet growth. I don't know if you want to speak to that at all.
Yeah. Good point. As Dave talked about, one of the metrics we focus on is our return on equity, and the fee income side for us, the other kind of standard banks do residential mortgages, and that's a fee income driver. We don't do the retail banking. We don't do residential mortgage for secondary market fees. So our biggest driver, our treasury management fee income from our commercial clients, but by far the largest is the private wealth that Brian mentioned, and because that is fee income, it doesn't require capital. So that enhances return on equity, why that business is really important to us and why, well, we expect to grow that 10% plus. We have historically grown it faster than that net interest income that you were alluding to, Brendan, that comes from the loan side.
That makes sense. That's very helpful. Looking back at the loan portfolio, any areas of concern as it relates to credit stress or how have loan loss provisioning trended in recent quarters?
Provision has been pretty steady. I mean, it jumps around a little bit because of the methodology that's used. We use Moody's forecast, and that causes us to have to follow the CECL guidance on utilizing that. It can move around a little bit quarter to quarter, but it's been pretty stable over the last several quarters, last couple of years. Credit quality, I would say the term that you hear in the banking industry has normalized. If you go back a few years from 2020 to 2023, I think we had recoveries. We had net recoveries, not even net charge-offs.
I think over the last couple of years, it's gotten to be a more normalized credit environment where there are some charge-offs. Nothing alarming for us or the industry, really. Most of the issues that we've seen in the segment that we were in was in the transportation side with our equipment finance business. So that's the one industry segment where we've seen some issues. Other than that, the credit issues that have arisen are more idiosyncratic and probably more relate d to management of the businesses or projects or whatever it may be. Nothing industry trend-wise that's systemic.
That makes sense. That's helpful. And last question, just looking at the stock, I think you mentioned it's relatively cheap to book value and to its forward earnings as well. Maybe as a final takeaway, you can provide investors why is now a great time to look at the stock?
I would say you look at the track record that we've had. We've been pretty clear about what we're going to do, which is organic growth and grow at that 10% clip. And we've been doing it consistently. Dave talked about the strategic plan. We did it consistently through the last five-year strategic plan. And so our ability to generate core earnings just compounds regularly as we stack that 10% growth on that 10% growth.
So we're a little more complicated than a standard bank in the sense that we're different with our business focus, but we're a little simpler in some ways in terms of what we say we're going to do and what we've been able to do and execute on in terms of our growth strategy. So in some ways, we're a little simpler to model. And to your point, Brendan, as you look at modeling and putting evaluation on us, we think we've become pretty predictable in our ability to generate consistent kind of growth and returns.
That's great. Well, Corey, Dave, and Brian, we really appreciate the time today and the overview.
You bet. We appreciate the interest. Thanks. Thanks, Brendan.
Thanks, everybody. We'll conclude there. Have a great day.