Signature Bank at Morgan Stanley Financials Conference

Jun 10, 2015 AM EDT
SBNY - Signature Bank
Signature Bank at Morgan Stanley Financials Conference
Jun 10, 2015 / 02:55PM GMT 

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Corporate Participants
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   *  Joe DePaolo
      Signature Bank - President & CEO
   *  Eric Howell
      Signature Bank - EVP, Corporate & Business Development

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Conference Call Participants
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   *  Ken Zerbe
      Morgan Stanley - Analyst

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Presentation
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 Ken Zerbe,  Morgan Stanley - Analyst   [1]
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 All right, welcome everyone back. I am Ken Zerbe, the mid-cap banks analyst at Morgan Stanley. Our next presentation is Signature. From Signature we have Joe DePaolo, President and CEO; and we also have Eric Howell, Executive Vice President for Corporate and Business Development.

 Thought we'd actually start off the presentation with a few polling questions, and then we're going to keep this as a Q&A session or a fireside chat session. So, if you all don't mind voting; first question here, given an increase in New York City real estate or competition in the New York market, how concerned are you that Signature's loan growth may actually start to swell?

 And the answer, 55% they believe that your business model actually should largely keep you immune from competition.

 Second question, do you believe that Signature's move into new verticals and new markets, so Greenwich, in particular, will structurally change its business model, [is it no], not sure, or yes, just because what worked in New York doesn't necessarily work in other markets?

 Wow, I don't think I've ever had a 100%, unless just one of you is voting, it's actually very resounding, believe in thought management strategies; that's very impressive.

 Last question, how do you view Signature's lack of [asset] sensitivity? (inaudible) inclined to sit tight or you plan to reduce your position?

 (inaudible) and inclined to sit tight. And zero actually will. So your stock had (inaudible). That's a very overwhelming vote of confidence. (multiple speakers). I have to increase my expense ratio there.

 Thanks for being here guys. Maybe just kind of start off with some of the -- addressing some of the polling questions. In terms of competition, we know the New York City is very competitive. We hear this from all the banks. You guys do have a very distinct and different business model, but how are you seeing that competition reflected in your day-to-day operations?



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 Joe DePaolo,  Signature Bank - President & CEO   [2]
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 The competition hasn't changed in the last couple of years. It really has been the same. It's pretty intense, but that intensity has increased -- has not increased, has not lessened, it's kind of been just about the same for the last two years or so.



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 Ken Zerbe,  Morgan Stanley - Analyst   [3]
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 Is that both pricing and people or --?



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 Joe DePaolo,  Signature Bank - President & CEO   [4]
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 From a pricing perspective, we haven't had a change in -- let's see on the commercial real estate side. We haven't had a change in almost a year and a half in pricing.



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 Ken Zerbe,  Morgan Stanley - Analyst   [5]
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 Your pricing?

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 Joe DePaolo,  Signature Bank - President & CEO   [6]
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 Our pricing. But relative to what we've seen from our competitors, we usually accorded a three-eighths differences. So that really hasn't -- that hasn't changed much.

 From the people side, I don't think we've seen a change at all. In fact, we're seeing opportunities to hire people from our competitors; reasons being, some of our competitors, at least too big to fail, let's say the large ones, they continue to make changes to the negative for their employees. It doesn't help when a large institution like an HSBC, all the changes they've made over the last several years and then to now they are going to reduce on a worldwide basis 50,000 more. It just unsettles some of the performers, top performers that we would like to continue to get. And then there are those institutions that are smaller that believe that they're going to be acquired. And that put thoughts in the heads of some banks that we haven't been able to hire from before and that may now want to come on board, because they believe that the next step is going to be an acquisition.



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 Ken Zerbe,  Morgan Stanley - Analyst   [7]
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 Just staying with the competition theme, I know Bank United has been growing very rapidly in New York. Are you running into Bank United at all in terms of any of your deals?



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 Joe DePaolo,  Signature Bank - President & CEO   [8]
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 On occasion; not any more or less than the other competitors.



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 Ken Zerbe,  Morgan Stanley - Analyst   [9]
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 From a dollar perspective, just the loan growth, last quarter you grew $1.4 billion of loans. Just trying to get my hands or head around this. You keep adding teams, you keep adding products, you're going into new markets and verticals. I would naturally assume that there should be an upward bias to loan growth, and it feels like -- and I know last quarter is fantastic for growth. But it feels like over time there should still be an upward bias, but it almost -- and I don't want to read too much into -- or imply what you're saying, but feels like you try on guiding down. Could you just help reconcile the near-term outlook when it comes to growth by you hiring new teams?



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 Joe DePaolo,  Signature Bank - President & CEO   [10]
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 Definitely not a direct relationship between adding on teams and loan growth, because you have to ask of the teams that you're adding on, loan growth teams or deposit gathering teams, and for the most part, I would say that over the last year and a half, 2014 and 2015, most of what we're hiring are deposit gathering, not necessarily loan growth teams. The verticals that we've added on at Signature Financial will help drive loan growth, because we want that variety. We don't want just being driven by commercial real estate. We also want equipment financing, including some of the newer verticals like municipals. I think it's just our cautious nature of saying where we think [could lead] in terms of growth, like [when you don't] we pull it in. I can tell you that our feeling is that we should be doing, for the second quarter, $1 billion in growth, at least $1 billion in loan growth. You've got to understand, in the first quarter we had $1.4 billion-plus, but we had over $600 million, I believe the number is, in packages -- in loan packages. We don't have nearly as many loan packages in the second quarter, but we have a pretty robust pipeline, a pipeline you would think would be depleted with that significant growth in the first quarter. That is not the case. The loan pipeline is very solid for Q2 and actually going into Q3, we've seen what we have planned for July and we're pretty excited about the growth.



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 Ken Zerbe,  Morgan Stanley - Analyst   [11]
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 Just on the deposit gathering, we've heard lot about that on the conference call, whether you hired deposit bankers or you hired lenders, so to speak. From our perspective, I can't imagine there would really be that much difference between the two, just meaning that you're not going to hire someone only for deposits, they have to do a full job, which is all encompassing, both lending and deposit gathering and really just developing relationships, bringing the business of the clients. When you really look at the teams, like, is there more of a difference between the deposit bankers versus the lenders or it's just the same guys, it's just a matter of degree?



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 Joe DePaolo,  Signature Bank - President & CEO   [12]
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 It is substantially different, but it's really based on a number of things. The number one thing it's based on is the type of clients they have. So if you have clients in the servicing businesses, it's where that they borrow; an accounting firm, a law firm, an architectural firm. Law firms and accounting firms, particularly that have significant cash flow don't need to borrow. So you have a lot of those servicing type businesses. You could have a book -- we have bankers that have books of business of $15 million in loans and $400 million in deposits. It's not as if they don't want to lend, it's just that their clientele doesn't need to borrow. Then you will hire some middle-market bankers, where the middle-market companies clearly need to borrow for their ongoing businesses and keep deposits, but they may keep $2 million in deposits and have a $12 million or $15 million line of credit and then when you multiply that you could have a banker that has $300 million in loans and $100 million in deposits.

 So yes, there really are differences. I think every time Eric and I come across a reporter or someone that's writing about the Bank, they have a tendency to say, Signature has 95 teams of lenders, when there are 95 teams of business developers. So if you're good at bringing in deposits, if you're good at developing loans, if you're good at doing both, that's okay. So, there really is a difference.



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 Ken Zerbe,  Morgan Stanley - Analyst   [13]
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 Obviously your stock commands a very high valuation multiple, a very strong multiple. Do you think the Street may be misinterpreting, because I probably will fall in this category, where, oh, they hired four new teams this year, therefore, loan growth should accelerate. But if you're hiring deposit gathering teams, it seems that -- is it fair to say that maybe the Street's enthusiasm over the loan growth should actually be mitigated a fair bit, because you're not hiring lenders, you are hiring deposit gatherers, so therefore loan growth expectations might be too high?



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 Joe DePaolo,  Signature Bank - President & CEO   [14]
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 No, because we've also added on the Signature Financial side. In 2014, we added on franchise -- the franchise business, the commercial marine business. In 2015, we are adding on the municipal business and there will be another lane that we'd be adding on. So, from a lending perspective, we're continuing to add on, on the Signature Financial side. And I think the enthusiasm should be high on the commercial real estate side, because we are doing larger loans and more packages.

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 Ken Zerbe,  Morgan Stanley - Analyst   [15]
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 Maybe switching over to that -- on the verticals, is there other -- [a separate launch] you just mentioned. Are there other verticals that you would -- and separate from offices or locations, but would you -- that you want to get into, in terms of new products, or when you think out over the next two to three years, are you missing anything that looks attractive to you?



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 Eric Howell,  Signature Bank - EVP, Corporate & Business Development   [16]
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 I wouldn't say there is any -- call it -- verticals. I mean there are certain pieces of underlying equipment or collateral that we'd like to get better at, IT being one of them, a growing area of the economy. Healthcare is another area. So if we can find some underwriters who have better expertise and knowledge base in those areas that's certainly some places where we could add. And we have executive sales officers throughout the country for Signature Financial. This just gives them more to be able to sell and we're looking to broaden that basis. Whilst we have approximately 20, I think we're up to 22 now, if we could increase our ESO sales force to 30 to 35 that will beneficial for growth as well.



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 Joe DePaolo,  Signature Bank - President & CEO   [17]
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 And if I may add, what's helping us is that we're hiring some people from GE. And so, GE getting out of the business will give us an opportunity to do more business and to hire some of their people. So that's all lending generation.



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 Ken Zerbe,  Morgan Stanley - Analyst   [18]
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 When you look at different verticals like IT or healthcare, how do you make a decision in terms of what's worth it, like what -- in terms of potential market size or people, or really comes down to scale, how do you make that decision versus -- or do you just say let's have one guy to do IT lending, that's good enough, because he's amazing?



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 Eric Howell,  Signature Bank - EVP, Corporate & Business Development   [19]
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 For us, typically it starts with finding the right people; that's very important. So if we can find a person that's been in there, unique, niche business for 30 -- 20, 30-plus years, and then determine that it makes sense for us to layer them into our sales force, usually it starts there. And we've identified a few verticals or a few pieces of equipment that we want to get better at. So clearly that's where we're going to be focused and looking for those individuals.



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 Joe DePaolo,  Signature Bank - President & CEO   [20]
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 Let's give an example on the municipal side. We hired this group that we call Signature Financial in March of 2012. When they left Capital One, there were outstandings at the time they came over [of about] $4.5 billion, and of that $4.5 billion, $2 billion was municipals. So here today, at Signature, there are $2.8 billion with none or very, very little municipal business. And we're bringing on a municipal group; that should bode well for us, not necessarily in 2015, but 2016 and beyond, if they can do the level of business that they did at Capital One here.



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 Ken Zerbe,  Morgan Stanley - Analyst   [21]
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 Just in terms of the teams, right, that you are hiring in new verticals, you touched on a bit. One of the concerns, and maybe this is completely unfounded, but one of the concerns is that if you hire really good, strong teams, I know New York is a big market, but there are so many really good strong teams out there and you've hired a lot of them already. Is there the risk that like the easy pickings of teams has kind of largely been done and that's it's just harder to get the next incremental team on board, or maybe you just (inaudible) the team you hired a year ago that you actually might see a slowdown -- and team hiring is poor, a slowdown in the quality, so to speak, of the teams you hired?



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 Joe DePaolo,  Signature Bank - President & CEO   [22]
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 Well, our market share is less than 2%. So, there must be some teams out there that make up the other 98%, and that's our viewpoint. Even if there are -- they don't all have to be A-teams or A-plus teams. We have 95 teams, and not every team is in a A-team. You can have Bs, put in there B-pluses. As long as they become profitable that's fine. We don't see any shortfall right now of teams. In fact, we haven't announced it, but we'll announce it here, we hired a fourth team already. We will be sending a press release out at some point. So we had three teams in Q1, we hired a fourth team so far in Q2, and we have various stages of discussions with other teams that there is a good chance that by the time we release earnings in July, we will have a fifth team.



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 Ken Zerbe,  Morgan Stanley - Analyst   [23]
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 And then pretty -- would you say that after the second quarter earnings that -- is five teams in the first half a good run rate for the second half? I mean, are you seeing any noticeable changes in your ability to hire teams near term?

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 Joe DePaolo,  Signature Bank - President & CEO   [24]
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 No noticeable change to hire, but usually the second half is less than the first half, because if you want to bring a team on board, it's hard to bring them on board in the fourth quarter, knowing you have to pay their bonus for that current year. You might as well wait. I don't know, do you want to comment?



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 Eric Howell,  Signature Bank - EVP, Corporate & Business Development   [25]
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 No, I mean that's exactly what I was thinking. Typically you're going to see a slowdown as you approach later in the year, for -- exactly what Joe was saying. It doesn't makes sense to hire someone in the fourth quarter and then have to pay their bonus early in the following year, when you can just wait for the current institution to take care of that and then hire them early on. So we'll normally pull back a little bit in the fourth quarter. But the pipeline is robust.

 Just to add on a little bit about the teams available out there. If you think about 10 years ago, typically Signature Bank really needed a merger or acquisition to take place for us to acquire teams. And we would have to get on the phones, find someone that we knew at that institution. So when Citibank bought E.A.B., we'll talk to them and say, who do we know at E.A.B., who can we start speaking to, let's add some teams. We really have to go out there and attract those teams, who knew about Signature Bank. We really don't know.

 Now, fast forward 10 years later, there may be less teams available, but to the extent that there is a team that is up, set at one of the mega institutions, we think we've gone from not being on their list at all, to hopefully being at the top of their list. So, now we're really faced with taking in a lot of incoming phone calls. We spend more time now than ever going through those teams and really saying, okay, who are the good teams, who truly has a book of business, because what we're finding is that bankers are truly upset at the mega institutions right now. There is so much turmoil, change, chaos going on, one way or another it's leading to their compensation being cut and that's leading them to look for a home. And they are not going to want to go from one mega institution to another, because they recognize that that's just going to be the same (inaudible) they are faced with. So they are looking for an alternative to those mega institutions, and we think that we've really become the top choice for them.



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 Ken Zerbe,  Morgan Stanley - Analyst   [26]
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 Just going to the second polling question, what was a 100% agreement in your ability to [merge] franchise. When you think about like Greenwich or White Plains or Jersey potentially, it seems as though it should be different markets, right, you're not going to buy a 50-story high-rise in Greenwich, in general, but can you just talk a little bit about the differences that the lenders face in terms of -- whether it's -- or including the growth potential, how long it takes them to ramp up, like fundamentally what are the differences between sort of the newer lenders versus the outside regional lenders?



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 Joe DePaolo,  Signature Bank - President & CEO   [27]
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 It is not that much of a difference, other than it's a little less dense, so they may have to go a little bit farther for business, because you don't have -- like across the street from where we are right now, 300 Park Avenue. There are tremendous number of businesses in that building. You may have to go a couple of miles to hit that number in White Plains or Connecticut. And I don't think of the office in White Plains is just for White Plains. It is pretty heavy duty business in Yonkers, in Mount Vernon, in New Roche11e. There's also -- in Greenwich, we have Stanford and a little bit beyond, so it's a little more extensive geographically. What's interesting about Greenwich is that it's -- you're right, there's not very tall buildings there, but what you'll find is private equity and hedge fund businesses that has been doing well and decided that they can do as much business sitting at their desk in Greenwich, near their home as opposed to being in Manhattan. So, you'd be surprised how much business in Greenwich is Manhattan [like].



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 Ken Zerbe,  Morgan Stanley - Analyst   [28]
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 Switching to margin, we all know you guys tend to do a slight longer duration lending. The consensus view, I think is that your margin is largely flat to down when rates rise, not overly asset-sensitive by any means. How do you guys think about that, like what's the strategy? Are you changing structural reliabilities, making any changes to swaps, whatever it might be, in anticipation of the upcoming rate rise?



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 Eric Howell,  Signature Bank - EVP, Corporate & Business Development   [29]
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 Look, a lot of that asset sensitivity comes down to how core funded are you, right? And we think we are tremendously core funded, and it's predominantly relation based core deposits that we have that's funding our balance sheet. We think in a rising rate environment that it's going to behave really well for us. We try to look at it conservatively. We are bringing in a couple of consultants every year who kick the tires on our assumptions there. They think that we're being conservative, but we want to be smarter on that. But we ultimately think that that's going to give us a pretty large benefit when rates rise. And then you couple that with us taking in the securities portfolio duration a little bit. It's at 2.69 years now. You'll probably see it come in even a little bit more, so that will help. We've got approximately $100 million per month rolling off that portfolio in cash flows. In a rising rate environment, we should be able to put to use into loans, because lending should come back into the equation in a more meaningful way on the C&I front. Should be a trigger if the economy is doing well. Hopefully clients are getting more comfortable with building up inventories, hiring people again, all the things that we really haven't seen over the last few years. So that's beneficial for us as well. And then the mix shift of our balance sheet, right, we continue to move that securities down as a percentage of the overall balance sheet and loans are going up as percentage of the overall. So that's going to be beneficial as well, as rates rise, especially.

 And then the other thing, we're really trying to stick to that five-year fixed duration on the commercial real estate portfolio. We will do seven years from time to time when it makes sense and when we get a better spread out of it, but we won't go out as far as 10 years, like many of our competitors are. So all those things should help us as rates rise.



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 Ken Zerbe,  Morgan Stanley - Analyst   [30]
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 How meaningful is that assumption that C&I growth accelerates in a higher rate environment?



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 Eric Howell,  Signature Bank - EVP, Corporate & Business Development   [31]
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 It's not as meaningful as the mix shift and as the core funding.



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 Ken Zerbe,  Morgan Stanley - Analyst   [32]
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 Just in terms of expenses, which again, fully recognizing that you are the most efficient bank in my entire coverage universe by far, 35% efficiency ratio. Just want to kind of ask a few questions on this though. When you hire another team, like how should we think, and how should we think about the incremental expense build associated with expanding your business, meaning you add 5, 10 new teams, right, and obviously you're paying them (inaudible) to come join the Bank and to produce. If we think about the cost of those teams, is it, all in, say, roughly 35%, or when you suddenly add $2 billion, $5 billion, $10 billion of additional assets, your expense ratio should go down from here, because the incremental cost of those teams is actually a lot smaller than 35%?

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 Joe DePaolo,  Signature Bank - President & CEO   [33]
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 The way I think of it is, if we bring on teams this year and we add on expense, the teams from last year that we hired, revenue hadn't kicked in last year, so it's kicking in this year. So kind of covers a little bit, or a little bit more then the expense. So as you bring on teams each year, and let's say in one particular year we decided we will be opportunistic -- we always are opportunistic -- if we had the wherewithal to hire 12 teams, because it was presented to us, then we come out to you and say, we expect the efficiency ratio to move, because the revenue from the five teams we hired in the previous year is not going to cover that 12.



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 Ken Zerbe,  Morgan Stanley - Analyst   [34]
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 I guess I was thinking more longer, like over the next few years, not so much on a year by year by basis, but if you look at two, three, four years down the road, how do you envision your efficiency ratio trending?



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 Joe DePaolo,  Signature Bank - President & CEO   [35]
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 We would have thought it would trend downward, except that with regulatory and stress testing expenses, it may not trend downward, it may maintain.



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 Eric Howell,  Signature Bank - EVP, Corporate & Business Development   [36]
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 Flat to very slowly moving down.



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 Joe DePaolo,  Signature Bank - President & CEO   [37]
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 If they move the $50 billion to $100 billion or higher, or even if it just moves to $100 billion, that would save us some expense in the future.



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 Ken Zerbe,  Morgan Stanley - Analyst   [38]
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 Do you think that your sort of a simplicity of your business model and your existing efficiency actually gives you an advantage when it comes to the incremental regulatory expenses, meaning that you don't have to file 8,000 pages or 12,000 pages in CCAR, as an example?



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 Eric Howell,  Signature Bank - EVP, Corporate & Business Development   [39]
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 It should. I mean, we're a very simple [bet]. We take deposits and make loans. So, in theory, that should lead to us having to spend less on the regulatory front. But that's very theoretical at this point.



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 Ken Zerbe,  Morgan Stanley - Analyst   [40]
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 Yes. We hear different things across the bank space. First Republic, for example, should have been similar to you and they saw a fairly large increase in expenses. But we hear other things from other banks. So it does vary.



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 Eric Howell,  Signature Bank - EVP, Corporate & Business Development   [41]
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 It's a difficult time to be a bank approaching the $50 billion mark. So timing is very meaningful there.



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 Joe DePaolo,  Signature Bank - President & CEO   [42]
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 So we will look at it this way. If $50 billion doesn't change, which it will, we'll learn from those that go from below $50 billion to above $50 billion and we will be better off when it happens, but it won't happen to us for years. If the $50 billion is moved, then everything I just said is -- [you know what].



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 Ken Zerbe,  Morgan Stanley - Analyst   [43]
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 Fair enough. Last question for you. You're a pretty young guy, Joe. I know you guys don't acquire banks, but how do you think about M&A, broadly speaking? Does there come a time where you might want to go do other things?



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 Joe DePaolo,  Signature Bank - President & CEO   [44]
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 That's an interesting question. I haven't really given it much thought.



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 Ken Zerbe,  Morgan Stanley - Analyst   [45]
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 I think you've gotten that question about two to three times just this morning.



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 Joe DePaolo,  Signature Bank - President & CEO   [46]
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 We've only been asked this a little over 14 years and there is a lot more to see through. Unfortunately, the job I want is taken. I want to be the Commissioner of the NBA. So I will go on record that if the Commissioner of the NBA decides to retire, who just started his job, Adam Silver, I'm in the running.



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 Ken Zerbe,  Morgan Stanley - Analyst   [47]
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 Great. Alright, well, I want to thank you both very much for being here.



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 Eric Howell,  Signature Bank - EVP, Corporate & Business Development   [48]
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 Thank you, Ken.

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 Ken Zerbe,  Morgan Stanley - Analyst   [49]
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 I believe that's a very ambiguous answer. Again, thank you very much. I appreciate it.

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 Joe DePaolo,  Signature Bank - President & CEO   [50]
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 Thank you.




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