Q4 2024 S&T Bancorp Inc Earnings Call

In This Article: Participants Mark Kochvar; Chief Financial Officer, Senior Executive Vice President; S&T Bancorp Inc Christopher McComish; Chief Executive Officer, Director; S&T Bancorp Inc David Antolik; President, Director; S&T Bancorp Inc Daniel Tamayo; Analyst; Raymond James & Associates, Inc. Kelly Motta; Analyst; Keefe, Bruyette, & Woods, Inc. Sharanjit Cheema; Analyst; D.

A. Davidson & Co. Matthew Breese; Analyst; Stephens Inc.



Presentation Operator Welcome to the S&T Bancorp fourth quarter and full year 2024 conference call. (Operator Instructions). Now I would like to turn the call over to Chief Financial Officer, Mark Kochvar.

Please go ahead. Mark Kochvar Great. Thank you very much, and good afternoon, everyone.

Thank you for participating in today's earnings call. Before beginning the presentation, I want to take time to refer you to our statement about forward-looking statements and risk factors. This statement provides the cautionary language required by the Securities and Exchange Commission for forward-looking statements that may be included in this presentation.

A copy of the fourth quarter and full year 2024 earnings release as well as this earnings supplement slide deck can be obtained by clicking on the Materials button in the lower right section of your screen. This will open up a panel on the right, where you can download these items. You can also obtain a copy of these materials by visiting our Investor Relations website at stbancorp.

com. With me today are Chris McComish, S&T's CEO; and Dave Antolik, S&T's President. I'd now like to turn the call over to Chris.

Christopher McComish Thank you, Mark, and welcome, and good afternoon, everybody. I want to thank the analysts for being on the call. We really appreciate you being here with us and we look forward to your questions.

As always, I want to thank our employees, shareholders and others also listening to the call. To our leadership team and employees your commitment and engagement is what drives these financial results. These results are yours and you should be very proud.

Before we discuss Q4 specifically, I would like to take a few minutes to discuss and wrap up 2024. Overall, S&T navigated a very dynamic environment in 2024 exceptionally well. Following two straight years of record financial results, we produced $3.

41 per share in earnings while delivering excellent returns and building to record levels of capital. Additionally, we made great progress on our asset quality initiatives, and our efforts to grow and enhance our customer deposit franchise were significant. None of this could have happened without the commitment of almost 1,300 S&T employees who is defined by organizations like the American Banker and Energage are some of the most engaged, loyal and talented employees in the industry.

Our performance, capital levels, balance sheet strength and business activity levels give us great optimism as we head into 2025. Now turning to the quarter. The fourth quarter, our $33 million in net income equated to about $0.

86 per share, up slightly from Q3. Again, our return metrics were excellent with a 13.25% ROTCE, 1.

37% ROA and our PPNR remains solid at 1.72%. Our net interest income showed slight contraction versus Q3, while our net interest margin at 3.

77% also declined slightly, but remained very strong. Mark will be able to provide more details on both our net interest income and our net interest margin in a few minutes. Asset quality continued to improve as we had another quarter of declining or improving ACL, and Dave is going to dive more deeply in here in a few minutes.

He'll also touch on the meaningful pickup we are seeing in our loan growth pipeline. Moving to Page 4. Loan growth was just under 3% for the quarter because of very strong new loan production in the quarter.

Payoffs were also higher in the quarter. However, some of this provided a contribution to the asset quality improvements you see on the page. Notably, on the deposit side, customer deposit growth of more than $75 million produced over 4% growth annualized, and this is the sixth consecutive quarter of meaningful deposit growth for our company.

While deposit growth was broad-based, we are particularly pleased with our DDA and [NOW] performance with overall DDA balances growing to a very strong level of 29% of total balances. In a minute, I'm going to turn it over to Dave, and he'll talk more about the loan book and credit quality, and then Mark will provide more color on the income statement and the capital but let me reiterate again how good we feel about all that we navigated in 2024. As I said, capital levels are at record levels.

Earnings were strong, results and metrics look very good, pipelines are strong, and we feel very confident about 2025. So with that, I'm going to turn it over to Dave to talk a little bit more about the balance sheet..