Earnings Call Transcript - MNSB Q4 2024

Jeff Dick, Chairman and CEO

Well, good afternoon and thank you for joining our virtual earnings webcast. My name is Jeff Dick, I'm the chairman and CEO of MainStreet Bancshares, Inc. and Main Street Bank. I'm joined here today with our Chief Lending Officer, Tom Floyd; our Chief Accountant, Alex Vari, and of course our CFO, Tom Chmelik. If you'd like, you can submit written questions throughout the presentation using the viewing portal. We will address your questions at the end of this presentation. If we miss your questions during the discussion, please reach out after the webcast. Chris Marinac will not be joining us on the call today. He did submit questions in advance, and we will address them after the session. Also, Matt Breese of Stephens, Inc., no longer provides coverage for our company. We'd be remiss if we didn't point you to our Safe Harbor page that describes the content of the forward-looking statements. We use certain non-GAAP measures which are identified as such within the presentation materials. The DC market is still a great place to do business. We always talk about the strength of our market because we are in a region that hosts the federal government, as well as world-class universities, hospital systems, airports, tourism, data centers, and at least 16 Fortune 500 companies. As such, we also have low unemployment and high median household income for our workforce. Slide four reminds you of our growth story over the past 20 years. I think there's an interesting correlation to be made from our early years to the present time. We started with a technology strategy of putting our bank in our customer's office. You may recall back in 2004 that the Check 21 Act became law shortly after we opened, which allowed for the remote deposit of a digital image of a check. Acquiring customers with the concept of scanning and remotely depositing checks using our online banking solution wasn't easy. It was new. When we first met with a possible customer, we would give them the presentation and they would typically reply with, 'Well, that's interesting. Let me know when you have a branch nearby.' We persevered. It took a while to get customers comfortable with our solution. Once they had it, they couldn't do without it. Growth was slow in the beginning, but it quickly picked up. All these years later, we are still the largest provider of remote deposit of any bank serviced by our core processor, Jack Henry. Today, we're in a similar situation. We have a great solution. We need to get it in front of the right customers in order to grow. We're working harder than ever to make that happen. We are a Virginia Community Bank serving the Washington DC Metropolitan area, and we have a great organic growth story using a branch-light strategy. We've always been a tech-forward bank with strong online and mobile banking technology. We are traded on the NASDAQ Capital Market Exchange. As of year-end 2024, we had a market cap of $138 million with slightly more than 7.6 million shares outstanding. Our tangible book value was $23.77. Slide seven provides an overview of the intangible impairment determination that the Board and management recently positioned. We determined that the implementation delays affected our expectations for the Venue software-as-a-service solution. After the accounting team put together its impairment analysis, the board and management agreed with their conclusions to fully impair the capitalized intangible assets. Alex will talk you through this process in just a few minutes. Before I turn things over to Alex, you'll see that the three key issues we'll be addressing in today's presentation are focused on the impact of our intangible capitalized asset, the good progress that we've made in working through our small number of workouts, and the outlook for Venue.

Alex Vari, Chief Accountant

Thank you, Jeff. On slide eight, we summarize our financial performance over the past four quarters, as well as for the fiscal year 2024. For the year, we are reporting a loss of $1.60, our return on average assets of negative 0.47%, a return on average equity of negative 4.44%, and a net interest margin of 3.13%. Our performance ratios were impacted by an impairment of our intangible assets recognized during the fourth quarter. As you will see later in the slide deck, we provide core performance ratios after the non-recurring adjustment. As we discussed in our quarterly calls earlier this year, our ratios were also directly impacted by taking action on a handful of problem loans. We have made significant progress finding solutions to non-performing loans, and we remain strongly capitalized and look forward to the opportunities we have in 2025. During 2024, we reversed $1.9 million of interest income, and we had net charge-offs of $4.5 million. An additional $2.9 million of provision expense was added to ensure the allowance for credit losses remains directionally consistent for portfolio growth and our recent history. As you can see, the non-recurring credit issuances impacted our earnings per common share by $0.67, our return on average assets down by 24 basis points, our return on average equity down by 224 basis points, and our net interest margin down by 8 basis points. As we will discuss later in the presentation, our credit metrics will drive improvement in our key performance ratios and will be reflected in our overall allowance for credit losses as it returns to our historical average. During the fourth quarter, as the Board and Management balanced Venue's 2025 gross demand and expense run rate, we made tough decisions about carrying back development personnel and focusing on revenue generation. Those conversations triggered a discussion about whether our changes constituted the need for an impairment analysis to be performed in accordance with Generally Accepted Accounting Principles, or GAAP. In agreement with that accounting analysis, we wrote the intangible assets to zero, effective as the end of the fiscal year, and this negatively impacted several performance ratios. You see the total amount of non-recurring impairment adjustments for the fiscal year after accounting for taxes negatively impacted our earnings per share by $2.14, our return on average assets by 76 basis points, and our return on average equity by 724 basis points. As these adjustments are non-recurring, we expect to see improved and normalized performance metrics through 2025. Turning to slide 10, you will see how the impact of the impairment actually had a positive tangible book value of $0.48 per common share. As tangible book value already excluded the full value of any tangible assets, recognizing the decrease in intangible assets along with the tax and equity actually improves this metric. Moving to slide 11, the interest rate environment has been challenging in 2024. It is impacting bank accounts across the spectrum. Anecdotally, I saw an article recently that surveyed community bank CEOs and 54% of them stated deposit costs as their number one challenge in 2025. Here you will see we ended the year with a healthy net interest margin of 3.13%. Our deposit market remains very competitive as we often compete with super-regional and multinational banks, requiring deep relationship building in our communities. In the fourth quarter, we continued to build new deposit relationships that would fortify and grow our franchise through the year. We used excess liquidity to exercise call options on $60 million in high CDs. We did incur some deposit carrying costs while we executed these options. That added 9 basis points of additional compression on our net interest margin for this quarter only. We are positioning the balance sheet for strong 2025. Without the additional carrying costs, our net interest margin would have remained the same as the prior quarter. We will continue exercising our callable CDs throughout the first quarter as we are laser-focused on managing our funding expense. We are continuing to fund new loans that are underwritten and stress-tested in the current rate environment. Net new loan funding is worth $36 million over the last quarter and $108 million over the fiscal year, which points to continued interest income growth, further enhancing our future interest margin expectations. For the fiscal year 2025, we expect low single-digit loan growth.

Jeff Dick, Chairman and CEO

That will be just one second. There's a message. Is there an issue with the audio? I mean, it could be just the one. If anybody else is having any issues, please let us know. I apologize. Okay, it’s just the audio. The audio was bad. You know, these. Okay, you're fading in and out a little bit, so I would just ask, we'll speak up a little bit more, try to get this resolved. All right, you want start, yes.

Alex Vari, Chief Accountant

We'll start on slide 12. On slide 12, you will see our non-interest bearing deposits represent 23% of our core deposit base and 17% of all deposits. We have an additional $122 million in callable CDs that will be accretive to our net interest margin as they are called. We continue to grow core deposits in a meaningful way, adding $187 million during 2024. Our non-core deposit balances increase strategically to capitalize on market conditions that will reduce funding costs and shorten the duration of our term deposits. As the FOMC reacts to market conditions, they have begun to lower expectations about continued rate cuts in 2025, making it even more important that banks in competitive markets find niche markets to accumulate low-cost deposits. Now turning to 2025, our projected run rate to what we are expecting going into the year. Adjusting for the non-recurring transactions, non-interest expenses increased a nominal 6 basis points quarter-over-quarter. Management has taken action to reduce expenses and increase expense control and efficiency. At this point in 2025, we are projecting a run rate of 83 basis points per month through the first quarter. Of course, we will continue to update you as the year progresses. At this point, I'll turn the presentation over to Tom Floyd, our Chief Lending Officer, to discuss our loan portfolio and loan performance.

Tom Floyd, Chief Lending Officer

Thank you, Alex. 2024 was a challenging year, but a year that I'm very proud of and looking forward to reviewing with you. Over the next few minutes, I'm excited to share details about our loan portfolio composition, trends in credit quality, our annual growth, and a measure of our stability going forward. You will see that over the fourth quarter, we achieved positive movement in terms of total non-performing asset levels and positive trends in total past due levels. Coupled with our commitment to serving our vibrant client base, we remain optimistic about the future. Our loan portfolio is well positioned for stable or falling rates; 61% of our portfolio has rate resets beyond six months, with the remaining 39% with rate resets within six months. Of those, 55% have a weighted average floor rate of 6.34%. As we move forward into 2025, we anticipate this will help our net interest margin as rates are expected to remain stable or decrease. Our legal lending limit remained at $47 million, and our average new loan size was $1.9 million. As we mentioned last quarter, this highlights that as we've grown in our capacity, we continue to serve the smaller-sized capital formation needs in our market. We're very comfortable in our niche. Slide 16 highlights that our loan portfolio is diversified with healthy metrics. The non-owner occupied loans comprise 30% of the portfolio and include hospitality, industrial, mixed-use, retail, and a small amount of office. The weighted average yield is 6.47%, and the weighted average loan-to-value is 60%. Construction loans comprise 21% of the total book and are comprised of mixed-use, multifamily, residential, retail, and self-storage. Our weighted average yield is 7.8%, and the weighted average loan-to-value is 61%. Owner-occupied accounts for 19% of the portfolio and is comprised of end users across roughly a dozen industries. This is a highly competitive asset class, with the weighted average yield at 5.95% and the weighted average loan-to-value of 68%. Multi-family loans account for 13% of the portfolio and have a weighted average yield of 6.45% and a weighted average loan-to-value of 73%. Slide 17 highlights that our CRE concentration is managed well. At the end of the fourth quarter, pre-impairment, our CRE concentration was 375% of capital, which is at the limit set by our board. As you can see, we consistently managed the levels set by our board. And through proactive management, we'll have that number back within the policy limit over the next few months. Through normal business activities, we can accomplish this with a negligible impact on our existing clients. It's worth highlighting that in our current portfolio, we only have $13 million in exposure to pure office space, where the primary source of repayment is dependent on market-rate office rent. Slide 18 shows the trend in stress tests over the past eight quarters and the resulting impact to capital. The Q4 stress test for all working assets reflects the worst-case stress loss estimated at $45.1 million. In all quarters and even after year-end impairment, we remain strongly capitalized. The stress test includes loan level testing for all construction and investor commercial real estate. For other loan categories, we use the balance in each call report category multiplied by our worst ever loss for that call report category. For investments, we use the market price. And finally, for bank-owned life insurance, we determine the liquidation value. Slide 19 highlights the vigorous management of our non-performing loans over the course of 2024. Overall, we were able to reduce non-performing assets by 62% over the course of the year for an ending balance of $21.7 million. Our aggressive action resulted in the overall decrease, with the total principal loss coming to just 10% in terms of the loans that we resolved in 2024. Slide 20 shows a decrease in our classified loan levels. Over the quarter, we decreased classified loans from 4.31% of total gross loans to 2.94% of total gross loans. We continue to rigorously and aggressively work our non-performing loans and expect positive outcomes, which we'll highlight later in the presentation. The next slide shows a positive trend in terms of past-due loans. As you can see, over the last three quarters, we have been trending downward, with the total loans in 30 days past due virtually at zero. Slide 22 highlights our prudent balance sheet management and our allowance for credit losses is directionally consistent with recent performance. As discussed in the stress testing slide, we remain strongly capitalized. Based on positive trends in our past dues and our rigorous management of our non-performing assets, we anticipate this trend will normalize in 2025. Slide 23 is a brief snapshot of our remaining classified and non-accrual loans. As you can see, the common thread is that there is a high probability of a successful outcome. The next slide highlights a recent change being made in DC to help strengthen our local community. This creative approach to modernizing obsolete offices, along with recent developments on federal workers returning to the office, are welcome changes to our local landscape. Rising tides raise all shifts. The recent changes are positive and reasons to be optimistic. Slide 25 highlights our consistent loan growth, even through various economic conditions and economic backdrops, our team has demonstrated a consistent ability to grow. In summary, we've grown the loan portfolio by 6% in 2024. At the same time, our portfolio has broadly seen a decrease in non-performing loans, just as we indicated last quarter. Our lending team has done an excellent job serving our clients in a market that has resulted in a superior yield on earning assets and, more often than not, has demonstrated an ability to exit relationships with minimal losses to principal values. We remain well capitalized and are working vigorously with our borrowers where there remain positive potential outcomes. We're passionate about serving our community, seeing it thrive, and we're optimistic about the future. That wraps it up for our loan presentation. Back to you, Jeff.

Jeff Dick, Chairman and CEO

Thank you, Tom. Our banking as a service balance sheet for 2024 now reflects $62,000 in other assets and $41 million in low or no-cost deposits. The income statement reflects the net loss of $3.6 million for normal operations. Looking at the pipeline, there are five FinTech client contracts. The first is fully live but proceeding slowly at this point. Then you will go into beta as soon as the due diligence is finished for the client number one and should go live quickly from that point. We're thinking beta will be about two or three weeks at the most. As an aside from that, the API integration team is actually accommodating a timeline for implementation of 60 to 90 days. The three clients that are in the queue behind Venue are currently moving at a slower pace at their choices. Venue is moving fast and has a lot of potential. In my mind, the client with the next most potential is one waiting for their California money transmitter license. Once that FinTech onboards with us, we should see some very good momentum. Venue, again, is our cannabis payments solution. We control the app, the network, the virtual terminal for checkout, and the merchant services solution. Each aspect of the solution is very simple and very elegant. The cannabis retail industry is large-scale driven, and we see a tremendous opportunity. Slide 30 shows data from a March 2024 forecast estimating the U.S. legal cannabis retail market at $35.2 billion for 2025. Slide 31 tells us that there are 12,452 cannabis licenses in the United States. The slide also shows us the retail volume of sales in 21 of the 38 states where cannabis retail sales are illegal. The weighted average sales per store in 2024 for those 21 states was $3.5 million per year. Slide 32 shows the Venue opportunity. Again, the total addressable market consists of the 12,452 stores collectively doing over $1 billion in monthly sales, 70% of that is in cash. We've taken a conservative approach to our projections. We assume we could convert one-third of those weighted average sales per store into digital payments. We then assumed we'd add about 500 stores to the network this year. Candidly, once our sales channels are in place, we think we should be able to do much better than that. The power of the Venue solution is at the point we start to see some saturation. With just 20% of the total retail stores and less than one-third of the sales from each of those stores, we could end up earning transaction fees of $90 million or more. This is a captive network at this point. In order to get there quickly, we are actively negotiating a few different sales channels to take Venue forward. We're working with a very few credible independent sales organizations, ISOs, that have large sales teams. They're excited about the opportunity. The competition is virtually non-existent for what we offer. We'll also be working with our banking associations and cannabis associations in our efforts to gain market share. For 2025, we've estimated the average outstanding deposits for Venue for the year to be $135 million. Properly executing this strategy alongside the fee income and expense reductions that we've taken will get Venue to a profitable point in 2025. The board and management know that strategic execution is pivotal to the company's success and future. The core bank is strong and well positioned. The Avenue and Venue teams are relentless in their endeavor to execute and show the market what they can deliver. At this point, we're going to start questions that we received from Chris Marinac, who is the Director of Research at Janney Montgomery Scott. After that, we'll address questions that were submitted earlier in the day and through the portal. So I'm going to start by reading a few of Chris’s questions. First one is an Alex question or Tom Chmelik question. The asset impairment makes sense. Will the other measures that you also put in place be meaningful in taking Avenue forward?

Alex Vari, Chief Accountant

Yes, that's a great question and they are. You know, we took action to decrease our expenses and focus on revenue. You mentioned those actions were reducing some personnel costs. We renegotiated contracts very focused on reducing the expense, increasing efficiency, and trying to be as lean as possible while being really focused on revenue. I think that's going to be a meaningful contribution to the bottom line.

Jeff Dick, Chairman and CEO

Tom, anything to add?

Tom Floyd, Chief Lending Officer

Yes, as you said, we're very thoughtful with the expenses that we went through to decrease for this year and we'll constantly continue to look for other expenses to control as time goes on.

Jeff Dick, Chairman and CEO

Good, thank you. And the next question is still on Avenue. Does the Avenue solution that we have in place today fully support our cannabis opportunity? What does that look like, and how long will that take to see meaningful saturation? Yes, the version one of Avenue that went into place on October 1, 2024, has everything that Avenue solution needs in order to be successful. The small remaining team focused on Avenue will continue to harden the software solution to make it more efficient, work faster, and more scalable. But it's working and all of the alpha testing for Avenue has been very successful. We are working on ISO reseller relationships in place as quickly as we can to get everything moving so we can start to really focus on onboarding the cannabis retailers. This is a bit of a chicken and egg kind of situation. We onboard the cannabis retailers, we do in-store marketing, we do other types of marketing to get to consumers. They download the app from the app stores and we're off to the races, but it really is getting as many cannabis retailers onboard as quickly as we can that will drive the ultimate adoption. So we're excited and we're working hard on that. The next question is the pre-ROA of 53 basis points achievable in 2025, and is there room to improve upon it?

Alex Vari, Chief Accountant

Yes, the short answer is yes, absolutely. We have several factors affecting this. When we consider our performance for 2024, we faced some credit issues and one-time transactions, but those are now behind us. I'm also noting the trend from the last quarter, where our net interest income has increased by about 4.5% over 4%, which is encouraging. Additionally, in the first quarter, we exercised $60 million worth of callable CDs that positively impacted our net interest margin. We have another $120 million available that will enhance our funding as we continue to call those. We're seeing ongoing deposit opportunities in our market and new relationships developing, so we have a lot to look forward to in 2025.

Tom Floyd, Chief Lending Officer

Yes, and the other thing is the decrease in the non-performing assets will also help the margin. Hopefully, with some of the things that will work through on former NPAs, we believe we will see it come here.

Jeff Dick, Chairman and CEO

Excellent. This is a Tom Floyd question. Do you think the loan growth opportunities exist in our market to support our planned loan growth?

Tom Floyd, Chief Lending Officer

I absolutely do. And as I mentioned, we love our market. It's a large market. We have less than 1% market share in our market. So for us to get low-single-digit loan growth, there's an abundance of opportunities for the type of lending we are trying to do, which is owner-occupied, owner-operated, end-user businesses. Those opportunities give us the chance to establish full banking relationships. They are pretty much in the community, including SBA lending and other types of owner-occupied commercial and industrial loans. So we absolutely think the opportunities are within our market.

Jeff Dick, Chairman and CEO

This is a follow-on question. You've answered some of this, but what are the specific types of lending that we're looking at trying to focus on for 2025, and what types of loans, if any, do you intend to stay away from?

Tom Floyd, Chief Lending Officer

So, absolutely owner-occupied lending is what we're going to focus on heavily this year. In terms of loans that we'll approach with caution, we're looking at financing in the government contracting space, where your payments are on billed receivables. We're going to be very conscious with that. We certainly have a good customer base of government contractors and we're going to continue to support their asset-based needs, but we will be more cautious with acquisition financing going forward.

Jeff Dick, Chairman and CEO

Tom Chmelik, you are a veteran of DC native. Does the new administration and Congress present any barriers with what we're trying to achieve?

Tom Chmelik, CFO

One thing that we've always done is whatever the restriction is, whether it's Republican or Democrat, you know, it moves slowly. So there will be some changes, but they will be slow. We still have the federal government here. It's not leaving anytime soon. But I think it's going to be interesting to see what happens. I think, you know, it's not just here; it's all across the country. As I said, we still have a vibrant economy. Without the federal government, there are a lot of things that go on here, as Jeff alluded to at the beginning of the slide presentation.

Jeff Dick, Chairman and CEO

Yes, and it's interesting, the mandate for federal workers returning back to work, I think, is going to be significant. When COVID hit in Washington, DC, like many major cities, all of the very small businesses dried up because there was no foot traffic for years. So there's even opportunities as those spots are still empty, I think, for businesses to return once the federal workers come back and need those services again. So those are wonderful SBA opportunities because they are the right size for that.

Tom Chmelik, CFO

That's a great point, and we've added to the talent of our team with some very experienced SBA staff, so we are excited as we go forward.

Jeff Dick, Chairman and CEO

Good. Again, a question for accounting for the first quarter of 2025. You indicated a three basis point monthly increase in the run rates. Where does that number start from? Is that from the end of Q4, or from 2024?

Alex Vari, Chief Accountant

Right, yes. And so that's starting with the year-to-date, 2024, normalized net interest expenses. So when you take out the non-recurring non-interest expenses, it gets you to about $51.9 million. So we're using that as our basis point to say 83 basis points per month from there. I'd like to just point out that, due to the cost-cutting measures we are focused on reducing expenses, that's actually about a 40% reduction in run rate from where we were in 2024. So we're really excited about the things that we've done and what we're looking forward to in 2025.

Jeff Dick, Chairman and CEO

Yes. I mean, that is a significant 40%. And that's one of the things that we're really focused on to try to improve performance metrics for the coming year. We'll sort of bounce back and forth. Again, a question about loans for credit losses. Have you added about 10 basis points for the losses projected for 2025? Would that be about right? Let’s start with you, Tom.

Tom Floyd, Chief Lending Officer

Yes, I think if you wanted to be conservative, that could work. We've seen a lot of improvements in our credit quality metrics over the last quarter, and we feel optimistic about our direction. We believe that what we have in our reserves should cover what we think we need to clean up.

Jeff Dick, Chairman and CEO

Yes, there's always the absolute unknown, but having said that, the lenders, the credit administration, and the loan review have really scoured the portfolio and it's in very good shape at this point. So those were Chris's questions. There's a couple more here. I've got some on my mobile phone that I will try to read. There's one here that says, can you spend a bit more time discussing just the net, the core results of the bank? And I think if you take the slide that shows, or think about that, let's focus it just a bit on those core results, sort of ex-credit, ex-impairment. How does that play into 2025? We've talked about it a little bit, but I think it's more relevant.

Tom Floyd, Chief Lending Officer

Yes, happy to touch on that. So if we had laid out what the key performance ratios would have been, you know, for the core had you taken out the capital impairment. And frankly, 2024 was a challenging year. We had deposit costs that were challenging. Those are things that the bank is continuing with. But I think the things that we're focused on are the areas I mentioned before, that we have a lot of levers we can pull in reducing funding costs. We know we have a very good interest margin at 3.13% for the year. We're proud of that. We believe that we are primed to continue expanding that. And as I mentioned, we're adding new loans. Net interest income is growing. We still have what I mentioned before, sort of powdering the keg to continue lowering that funding cost with some things we've been doing with the balance sheet.

Jeff Dick, Chairman and CEO

And with improving credit metrics, we're going to continue to see increased profitability metrics on the bank as shown today. I've had a couple of questions that have come in. It says, 'What does we've significantly pared down future work at this point mean?' I'll own that; it was poorly written. It's in reference to the changes that we've made with future software development. When we look at Avenue, Version 1 is in production. As I said previously, we need a core small team to continue to work to make the solution more efficient to take care of any of the small things that come up day-to-day when other solutions update their systems. And there are actually two services that were well underway in development. One is the ability to add debit card functions to the solution, so that a FinTech could offer white label to their clients. That will help a lot in bringing in larger balances. The other one underway is developing what we need for an RDFI, which is ACH terminology, but it allows the customer's FinTech to direct deposit some or all of their paycheck right into that account. So again, both of those are really focused on acquiring FinTech clients that could use those features to maintain higher balances. Pretty much anything beyond that has been put on hold and the reductions that were questioned before have been taken, and everything has been streamlined with immediate effect. We are serious about what we're trying to achieve because we have worked hard to turn things around. The good news is as we are able to present Avenue and Venue as successful, we will look to explore features and functionality down the road when we can support and justify them. So we talked about the run rate expense level being decreased by 40%. Let's see. How do current expectations compare to what was presented in the third quarter revenue projection presentation from the consultant? Again, I shared that average number of $135 million; that's probably in line with the deposit-gathering side of things. It's just an average number as opposed to the primary number to hit at some point in the future. It's probably just more realistic, I think, to look at average balances outstanding. From an expense standpoint, we've pared down those expenses fairly significantly in those projections. Those actions have produced better outcomes. So it is decent with the impairment; how should we make sense of the intangible asset being written down to zero versus some other percentage?

Alex Vari, Chief Accountant

Yes, I can take that. It's interesting; the accounting guidance there gives you a guideline and tells you, you know, here are the criteria and here's how to evaluate that. In our case, we used the income approach, and with the new product that has yet to really generate cash flow, it's a bit more difficult to tie down to a specific number. If you're using projections and looking at things from that perspective, it is difficult to assess it in terms of absolutes as the guidance indicates. We took the opportunity to evaluate it in the best way and finish out our analysis.

Jeff Dick, Chairman and CEO

Tom, anything to add?

Tom Floyd, Chief Lending Officer

No, I mean, that's spot on.

Jeff Dick, Chairman and CEO

Someone asked that question. It’s not Avenue's question. Were the delays in Avenue driven by insufficient market demand, technological development challenges, or heightened competitive pressures? We've been clear about those. We saw the 21 consent orders that the regulator put in place in 2023 and 2024. We assessed those and decided not to rush into many things but to have the technology properly integrated. Now, there were some technological issues as we dealt with third parties, but ultimately we were impacted by our compliance and regulatory desire to do it right. We didn't have that solution ready until October 1. Since then, we've been aggressive in working with potential partners to fill this gap and are exploring opportunities to grow with other FinTech providers that have significant potential.

Unidentified Analyst, Analyst

Yes, questions about Avenue. How many customers does Avenue have currently?

Jeff Dick, Chairman and CEO

The only client fully live is the one in DC. We talked about that earlier and that's been slow to pick up. They went live on December 31 and have been progressing at their own pace. They've downloaded from their customer base, and that has been the case over time.

Unidentified Analyst, Analyst

Can you provide additional details on the status of the causes expected in 2024 and 2025?

Jeff Dick, Chairman and CEO

For 2025. Okay, I mean, it would be 2025. Yes, that’s really a function of the opportunities that we have. We think some will come from the Venue opportunity. We didn't focus much on the cannabis retailers operating in that space, which is an opportunity we're exploring. While not under contract yet, there are some very good potentials out there, and we're working diligently to bring those in. I apologize I can't share specifics, but we are working hard and will see how things develop.

Unidentified Analyst, Analyst

What are the expected expenses for 2025?

Jeff Dick, Chairman and CEO

So they have been pared down. There’s an opportunity, based on variable costs. I'm not going to delve into specifics, as well as the dynamics of the solution. But…

Alex Vari, Chief Accountant

I think it’s focused on reducing expenses and being as lean as possible. We have built a team that's capable of operating with the functionality we have now. But we're focused on keeping those operating expenses as low as possible. If we are revisiting certain contracts to try to lower cost on those contracts during this period.

Unidentified Analyst, Analyst

And then again, for Avenue, you mentioned a 40% reduction in expenses. What was that 40% comprised of?

Jeff Dick, Chairman and CEO

Yes, I'll clarify that. So that's not Avenue-specific. We were talking about a reduction in the run rate for the company. I apologize if I wasn't clear. It's not a 40% reduction in expense. When you're looking at the run rate in 2024 compared to our projected run rate for 2025, it's a 40% reduction in the run rates. That was due to the cost-cutting measures and expense reductions we discussed previously. It is a significant move. It sounds like that's the last question. But I’m sorry, there's one more in public here. I need to find it so I can read it properly. Again with regard to Avenue, please elaborate on what the operational changes versus the reevaluation are. I'm not 100% sure what that means. I'm going to reach out to the author of that and address it offline. We have talked about the operational change. I think I just went through that, so perhaps I answered the question already. But the efficiencies we've gained are definitely more significant of the two. There were more savings built in through streamlining, renegotiating agreements that we've already been able to adjust and reset expectations. The board met for two and a half days here at our headquarters to discuss strategic planning, comprehensive market evaluations, and the accounting team and all the leadership of the bank participated in discussions on how to continue improving efficiency. None of us were satisfied with 2024's overall performance. Having said that, I think we, as a group, worked as hard as we ever have to make improvements. But when I look at 2024, it was a lot of effort to reposition things, so now we can move forward with strong positive momentum. We're excited about that. We know that there are challenges ahead, but we will prove to the market that we can execute. We thank you for your continued investment in MainStreet Bank. If you have questions, please reach out. We will be at an investor conference starting Wednesday morning through Thursday. But we will try to get back to you if we can get together to talk through any questions that you have after this. Thank you again for taking the time to be with us today. We very much appreciate it. I hope you have a good rest of the day.