SunTrust Banks Earnings Call Insights: Operating Losses and Broad-based C&I Lending

SunTrust Banks Inc (NYSE:STI) recently reported its fourth quarter earnings and discussed the following topics in its earnings conference call.

Operating Losses

Kevin St. Pierre – Sanford Bernstein: Question on the credit related expenses, Slide 25 and the appendix. If I look at those, you had – if we look at operating losses, excluding your settlement charge, seem to be down significantly to say $45 million, a big decline in OREO expenses in the quarter. Can we use that just for the settlement charge and make that a new base and expect a continued decline or how do we think about those expenses going forward?

Aleem Gillani – CFO: Yes. I think take a look at this number and we do expect to see continued improvement in this quarter as we get improvement over the year as go through 2013. If you look at the total, you’ll recall, what we’ve been saying for a while is that we think 2011 was the peak in these costs at about $800 million per year and prior to going into the financial crisis, we were running more like $200 million or $250 million a year. After peaking at $800 million this year, we are now down to $650 million. I don’t think we’ll actually go back to that run-rate of $200 million to $250 million before the financial crisis, but we are headed down toward a much lower number from $650 million and we think we’ll see some of those benefits in ’13 again.

Start 2013 better than ever by saving time and making money with your Limited Time Offer for our highly-acclaimed Stock Picker Newsletter. Click here for our fresh Feature Stock Pick now!

Kevin St. Pierre – Sanford Bernstein: Then the actual net charge-offs have been bouncing around a bit based on NPL sales and change in policy. Your guidance or outlook for stable to down net charge-offs next quarter kind of sticking in his 90 basis point to 1% range, any reason we shouldn’t expect that those trend down significantly over 2013?