Pinnacle Financial Partners Earnings Call Insights: Loan Growth and Late Quarter Activity

Pinnacle Financial Partners, Inc. (NASDAQ:PNFP) recently reported its fourth quarter earnings and discussed the following topics in its earnings conference call.

Loan Growth

Jefferson Harralson – KBW: I want to ask you a question about the content of your loan growth. What types of companies are borrowing more money and are you seeing any themes in this late quarter loan quarter that we’re seeing?

Harold R. Carpenter – CFO: We’ve looked at that from a variety of perspective. Most of it was C&I, substantially all of it was C&I actually. We were really pleased that you get in there and you start digging around and trying to figure out was it a few big loans or whatever. We did have one meaningful loan that we think is going to pay off here in the first quarter, but generally we were pleased that ticket sizes were in the $5 million to $8 million range. We had a handful of those that are nice commercial accounts here in Nashville and Knoxville that we’re real pleased with. The other thing that we’re pleased with about those new loans, were the rights we were getting. We were anticipating if you had asked me this question last year, I would have been real nervous about where loan yields are heading but we are real pleased with these yields that are kind of starting to stabilize and maybe even hold up a little bit going into the first quarter.

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Jefferson Harralson – KBW: My follow-up is with the loan yields going up it seems that a 464 new loan or an average of new loan that must have been higher than 462 is higher than what the marketplace allows. I guess can you comment on the ability – or what’s driving the ability to put on loans at these kinds of rates?