Friday, March 1, 2024

Small and regional banks are still very much a worry for financial analysts, policy makers, investors, and bankers themselves. Just today the Wall Street Journal had a front-page article recapping the latest unease with regional banks as they struggle with under-performing loans. 

Well, Calcbench is on the case! We looked at a host of small and regional banks to see what they have been disclosing for non-performing assets, and compared those non-performing assets to total assets on the banks’ balance sheets. 


The result is Figure 1, below. These are the 15 banks with the worst ratio of non-performing assets to total assets over the last 10 quarters. 



For those who can’t quite see the details, the bank with the worst ratio is Blue Ridge Bancshares ($BRBS), a bank holding company based in Charlottesville, Va., with $3.18 billion in total assets. Blue Ridge had kept its ratio below 1 percent until early 2023, when the ratio spiked to 2.68 percent. 


That might not seem like much in total dollars, but in relative terms the ratio increased six-fold from 0.44 percent in mid-2022 to 2.68 percent one year later. Yikes.


Others with spiking ratios include BankFirst Financial Corp. ($BFIN) and First Northwest Bancorp ($FNWB).


Into the Details


If you want more precise details about the banks’ non-performing loans, always remember that you can use our Interactive Disclosure database to search the footnotes. That’s where you’re likely to find an abundance of disclosure, usually in the Management Discussion & Analysis or the bank’s separate Loans footnote.


For example, we dug into BankFirst Financia’s most recent annual report, coincidentally filed on March 1. Dig into its loan disclosures footnote, and you find this nifty table in Figure 2, below.



Many banks also disclose the actual non-performing assets-to-total assets ratio in their earnings releases; Calcbench tracks all that data too, and can pull it from the releases within minutes of those filings reaching the SEC database. 


What you do with all this information is of course up to you, but Calcbench does have the data — and as one can see, the numbers are telling us something.
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