Bank First Corp (BFC): what the price assumes

In the published model solve dated 2026-Q2, anchored at $152.84, Bank First Corp (BFC) is priced for 12.6% return on equity. boothcheck publishes no house fair value, target price, or buy/sell rating; individual model outputs and user-controlled scenarios are analytical inputs, not Boothcheck targets. Narrative composed 2026-07-25.

Generated: 2026-08-30 · Source: https://boothcheck.com/report/BFC

Headline

What The Price Assumes (Inversion)

The assumption today's price embeds, recovered by inverting the valuation.

Solve inputs: computed at a 8.2% cost of equity with 4% terminal growth over a 10-year stage, on common book equity (FY2026).

How unusual the bet is: elevated

Valuation X-Ray

Every valuation family lands below the price. The price therefore sits beyond what those standard frames encode.

How the valuation models price the stock relative to the market price. Price/FV above 1.0 means the market pays more than that lens defends (expensive); at or below 1.0 the lens can defend the price.

Families that call it expensive: Asset, Earnings

The models below discount at their own flat-beta convention rates (cost of equity 9.3%, WACC 5.9%); the inversion above states its own rate.

Per-Model Detail (n=4)

Economic-Unit Decomposition (Sum Of The Parts)

The issuer is a funded financial business. Debt, interest, and cash flows are operating inputs, so industrial EV, net-debt, WACC, and free-cash-flow lenses do not apply; value the common-equity claim with book, earnings, capital, and payout economics.

No unit-level total common-equity value is stated. Each financial unit requires supported standalone common equity, normalized earnings, capital adequacy, and payout capacity. Consolidated debt, interest, and cash are operating balances, not an enterprise-to-equity bridge; company-level book, earnings, capital, and payout lenses remain the coherent cross-checks.

Solvency

Deposit/float-funded balance sheet: debt is funding, not corporate leverage, and GAAP operating cash flow follows loan flows. Net-debt, interest-coverage, and cash-burn lenses do not apply. The solvency frame for a financial is regulatory capital and payout capacity (CET1, stress buffer, dividends plus buybacks against earnings).

Bullet Takeaways

• This Wisconsin community bank lifted net interest income from $133.5 million in 2023 to $151.7 million in 2025 while total assets barely moved, so the earnings came from what the balance sheet already held rather than from making it bigger.
• The share count has been rising about 10.3% a year over the four years to March 2026 because acquisitions are paid for in stock, so per-share progress depends on every deal being bought below what it earns.
• At roughly 2.1 times book the market is asking this bank to sustain a return on equity at the top of what community banks have ever managed, against a recent trailing return of about 11.1%.

Bull Case

Three of the four ways to value a bank land in the same neighbourhood, and the share price is nowhere near it. Book value plus profitability puts the business at less than half the current quote. Peer multiples land far under it too, and so does capitalizing this year's earnings and stopping. Only one approach reaches the price, and it does so by projecting the revenue growth of recent years forward and applying a sales multiple to the result. Read that spread honestly and it tells you what the market believes: not that the bank is worth a lot today, but that it will be worth considerably more, and that the static frames have no way to represent the compounding in between.

There is real evidence for the compounding. Net interest income moved from $133.5 million in 2023 to $137.8 million in 2024 to $151.7 million in 2025. Total assets over the same stretch went from $4.50 billion to $4.51 billion. A bank that grows earning power by more than a tenth without growing the balance sheet is repricing assets, mixing into better ones, or funding them more cheaply, and none of those require the regulatory capital that balance-sheet growth consumes.

The fee side is quietly doing work as well. Income from the bank's stake in Ansay and Associates, an insurance agency carried on the balance sheet for 35.4 million dollars, rose from 2.9 million dollars in 2023 to 3.5 million in 2024 and 3.9 million in 2025. Service charges reached $8.4 million. Insurance commission income is not correlated with the credit cycle, does not consume capital, and does not reprice when the Federal Reserve moves. For a bank of this size, a growing non-credit earnings stream is worth more than the same dollars of spread income.

There is also a structural advantage most investors outside the state will never have heard of. Wisconsin legislation exempts "a significant portion of the Company's loans from taxation in Wisconsin", and the final rules published in early 2024 let the company reduce its estimated tax liability by $1.3 million. A permanently lower effective tax rate on a defined class of in-state lending is not a strategy anyone can copy from outside Wisconsin, and it flows straight to the return on equity that this price is asking about.

The growth is coming through acquisition, and the record on integration is clean so far. Goodwill of $64.9 million from an earlier merger has been tested and carried without writedown, the company having "evaluated goodwill and core deposit intangibles for impairment during 2025, 2024 and 2023, determining that there was no goodwill or core deposit intangible impairment". Regulators are comfortable: "The Bank was well capitalized at December 31, 2025, and brokered deposits are not restricted." On the growth line the bank sits with the faster half of its cohort, alongside Lakeland Financial (LKFN) at 11.3% and Ameris (ABCB) at 10.3%, and well ahead of WaFd (WAFD) at 3.0% and OFG Bancorp (OFG) at 3.3%.

Bear Case

The assumption baked into this price can be stated in one sentence, which is what makes it testable. At roughly 2.1 times book value, buyers are paying for a return on equity beyond the ceiling that marks the top tier of community banking, sustained not for a cycle but for something closer to four decades. The bank's recent trailing return on equity is about 11.1%, a shade under that ceiling. The gap between those two numbers is small in appearance and enormous in consequence, because the whole premium above book rests on the excess, and the excess is what fades first.

History is unsentimental about that fade. Of the banks that have earned a return at this level, only around 67% were still earning it a decade later. Against the peer group, the price-to-book here sits at the very top. So the fragile assumption is not credit, and it is not funding. It is duration: the market is underwriting a level of profitability that most institutions which reach it cannot hold, for a period longer than most management teams last.

The mechanism most likely to break it is the one that has been producing the growth. Shares outstanding have risen roughly 10.3% a year over the four years to March 2026, because this bank buys other banks and pays in its own stock. That works beautifully while the acquirer's shares are expensive and the targets are cheap, and it is precisely the arrangement that unwinds when the multiple compresses. It also changes what book value means: tangible book value per share is $47.19 against a stated book value of $73.28, so more than a third of the equity buyers are paying 2.1 times for is goodwill and intangibles created by past deals rather than capital that can absorb a loan loss. Core deposit intangibles alone amortize down every year, from $21.2 million to $16.2 million in the most recent one, and that amortization is a real charge against the returns being extrapolated.

Then there is the single method that does reach this price, and it is worth looking at how. It gets there by carrying recent revenue growth forward and applying a sales multiple to the outcome. Applying a revenue multiple to a bank is a defensible arithmetic exercise and a poor description of what a bank is, because bank revenue is a spread that can be widened by taking more credit risk or more duration risk without anyone noticing for several years. The methods that instead ask what the equity earns and what similar banks fetch all land far below. When the only approach that justifies the price is the one that does not look at the balance sheet, that is worth noticing.

Finally, the concession the bear should make. Nothing in the disclosures suggests distress: the bank was well capitalized at the last annual report, brokered deposits are unrestricted, and the credit reserving process is conventional. The bear case is not that this bank breaks. It is that a very good community bank has been priced as an exceptional one for the next several decades, and that when the excess return converges toward the cost of equity, the multiple converges with it. A bank that earns its cost of equity is worth its book. That is a long way down from here.

Valuation

A bank is worth what it earns on the capital it holds, so the price is read against book value rather than against an operating multiple. At $150.47 the shares change hands for about 2.1 times book. Solving that backwards for the return on equity it requires does not produce a clean answer, which is itself the finding: the required return runs past the 11.7% ceiling that marks elite community-bank profitability, and it has to stay there for a period the model can only describe as forty years. Recent trailing return on equity has been about 11.1%. The price does not need a transformation. It needs permanence, which is harder.

That the assumption sits within reach of what the bank has actually earned is genuinely important, and it separates this from the usual demanding valuation. This is not a story stock. It is a profitable, conservatively supervised lender whose recent performance is roughly the level the price requires. The difficulty is entirely in the word sustained. Among institutions that have reached this level of return, only about two thirds were still earning it ten years later.

The methods spread accordingly. Book value plus profitability lands with the price standing more than twice that family's central estimate. Peer multiples put the price about 74% above where they centre, and capitalizing current earnings with no growth credited puts it about 59% above that family. Only a forward projection reaches the price at all. That configuration has a specific meaning: the premium being paid is for durability rather than for assets, earnings, or comparables, and none of the static frames has a way to price durability. They are not wrong. They simply answer a different question than the one the buyer is asking.

Two features of the balance sheet bear on how far that durability can be trusted. The first is that book value is increasingly acquired rather than accumulated: tangible book value per share of $47.19 sits well below stated book value per share of $73.28, and the difference is goodwill and core deposit intangibles from prior mergers. The second is capital and payout capacity, which is the right solvency lens for a lender rather than net debt or coverage. The bank was well capitalized at the last annual report with brokered deposits unrestricted, and it has been raising the dividend while issuing shares for acquisitions, so capital returned and capital raised are running in opposite directions at the same time.

Set against the cohort, the price-to-book is at the very top of the peer group, and the growth that justifies it is running only modestly ahead of names like Lakeland Financial (LKFN) at 11.3% revenue growth and Ameris (ABCB) at 10.3%. The premium is not being paid for a growth rate nobody else has. It is being paid for the belief that this particular bank keeps its return where it is while the others give theirs back.

Catalysts

Second-quarter results were reported in July 2026 and they were a step up. Net income came to $24.7 million, or $2.21 a share, against $16.9 million, or $1.71 a share, in the same quarter of 2025. For the first six months, net income reached $44.7 million, or $3.99 a share, up from $35.1 million and $3.53. The per-share gain is smaller than the dollar gain, which is the arithmetic of paying for growth with stock.

The reason for the step up closed on the first day of the year. Bank First completed its acquisition of Centre 1 Bancorp, parent of The First National Bank and Trust Company, on January 1, 2026, in an all-stock transaction valued at approximately $174.3 million, taking the combined organization to 38 branches across Wisconsin and the Illinois Stateline area and roughly $6 billion in assets. Systems conversion for the acquired bank was scheduled for May 2026. Integration risk on a deal this size relative to the acquirer is the near-term operational question, and conversion is where it shows up.

Capital return moved with the earnings. The board approved a quarterly dividend of $0.60 a share payable October 7, 2026 to holders of record on September 23, 2026, an increase of 9.1% on the prior quarter and 33.3% on the prior-year second quarter. A dividend rising a third year-over-year while the share count is also rising is a specific signal about how management reads its own earning power. The next test of that read is the third-quarter print, the first full period in which the acquired bank runs on the acquirer's systems.

Peer Cohorts (Per Segment, With Filing Citations)

Bank First (consolidated bank) (reported)

• BANF (BancFirst Corporation)
• FY2025 10-K: Form of 7.20% Cumulative Trust Preferred Security Certificate for BFC Capital Trust II (filed as Exhibit D to Exhibit 4.5 to the Company's registration statement on Form S-3/A, File No. 333-112488 dated February 23, 2004 and incorporated herein by reference). 4.5 Form of Indenture relating to the 7.20% Junior…
• FY2025 10-K: ) Cash dividends paid ( 62,207 ) ( 57,773 ) ( 53,642 ) Net cash provided by (used in) financing activities 549,766 966,499 ( 334,787 ) Net increase/(decrease) in cash, due from banks and interest-bearing deposits 850,588 1,156,309 ( 771,447 ) Cash, due from banks and interest-bearing deposits at the beginning of the…
• CBU (COMMUNITY FINANCIAL SYSTEM, INC.)
• FY2025 10-K: 87,085 ​ $ 13,441,707 ​ Interest on deposits recorded in the consolidated statements of income consists of the following for the years ended December 31: ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ (000's omitted) ​ 2025 ​ 2024 ​ 2023 Interest on interest checking ​ $ 14,026 ​ $ 15,790 ​ $ 12,950 Interest on savings ​ 14,259 ​ 11,315 ​…
• FY2025 10-K: 4.1 Form of Common Stock Certificate. Incorporated by reference to Exhibit No. 4.1 to the Amendment No. 1 to the Registration Statement on Form S-3 filed on September 29, 2008 (Registration No. 333-153403). 4.2 Registration Rights Agreement, dated February 3, 2017, by and among Community Bank System, Inc. and the…
• LKFN (LAKELAND FINANCIAL CORPORATION)
• FY2025 10-K: …the Bank must maintain minimum Total risk-based capital ratios, Tier I risk-based capital ratios and Tier I leverage capital ratios as set forth in the table. There have been no conditions or events since that notification that management believes have changed the Company and the Bank's category. Actual Minimum…
• FY2025 10-K: …and paid during 2024. The expense was recorded within other expense on the consolidated statements of income during the year ended December 31, 2024. Restrictions on Cash: The Federal Reserve Bank eliminated the reserve requirement for all depository institutions in March of 2020. Therefore, the Company was not…
• WAFD (WAFD, INC.)
• FY2025 10-K: …fixed-rate term loan agreements. All borrowings are secured by stock of the FHLB - DM, deposits with the FHLB - DM, and a blanket pledge of qualifying loans receivable. The Bank also has a credit line with the FHLB - SF in support of LBC borrowings from the FHLB - SF, but the Bank is unable to take down new advances…
• FY2025 10-K: …the FHLB - DM and FRB of San Francisco, participating in both increases the amount of eligible collateral that may be pledged in support of contingent liquidity needs. The Bank Merger with LBC provided a credit line with the Federal Home Loan Bank of San Francisco (FHLB - SF) in support of LBC borrowings, but the…
• TRMK (Trustmark Corporation)
• FY2025 10-K: …individual customers through offices in Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Mississippi, Tennessee and Texas. As previously disclosed, on August 4, 2025, Trustmark's principal subsidiary, Trustmark National Bank, converted from a national banking association to a Mississippi-chartered banking corporation and changed its name…
• FY2025 10-K: …Plan-Group 2) of Trustmark National Bank, as amended. Filed as Exhibit 10-a to Trustmark's Form 10-K Annual Report for the year ended December 31, 2007, incorporated herein by reference. * 10-b Deferred Compensation Plan for Directors of First National Financial Corporation acquired October 7, 1994. Filed as Exhibit…
• OFG (OFG Bancorp)
• FY2025 10-K: Year Ended December 31, 2025 Banking Wealth Management Treasury Total Eliminations Consolidated Total (In thousands) Interest income $ 636,790 $ 21 $ 149,625 $ 786,436 $ (5,500) $ 780,936 Interest expense (143,644) - (34,325) (177,969) 5,500 (172,469) Net interest income 493,146 21 115,300 608,467 - 608,467 Provision…
• FY2025 10-K: 53 $ 13,622 $ 8,763 Financed repayment of debt security at maturity $ 35,000 $ - $ - Financed sales of foreclosed real estate $ 711 $ 1,349 $ 585 Delinquent loans booked under the GNMA buy-back option $ 56,492 $ 48,586 $ 19,401 Conversion of debt security to equity security $ - $ - $ 376 The accompanying notes are an…
• HOMB (HOME BANCSHARES, INC.)
• FY2025 10-K: …of December 31, 2024. Deposits are our primary source of funds. We offer a variety of products designed to attract and retain deposit customers. Those products consist of checking accounts, regular savings deposits, NOW accounts, money market accounts and certificates of deposit. Deposits are gathered from…
• FY2025 10-K: …valuations of assets acquired and liabilities assumed in business combinations. In connection with the determination of the allowance for credit losses and the valuation of foreclosed assets, management obtains independent appraisals for significant properties. Principles of Consolidation The consolidated financial…
• ABCB (Ameris Bancorp)
• FY2025 10-K: …including limitations on growth and the payment of dividends, if the Bank becomes undercapitalized. Under this framework, the Bank is considered to be "well capitalized" if it has a common equity Tier 1 risk-based capital ratio of 6.5% or greater, a Tier 1 risk-based capital ratio of 8% or greater, a total risk-based…
• FY2025 10-K: …notes. The Company elected to redeem the remaining Bank subordinated notes in full on the September 1, 2025 interest payment date. These notes, which totaled $ 74.0 million outstanding, bore interest at 8.22 % and were redeemed at par. For regulatory capital adequacy purposes, the Bank subordinated notes qualified as…

Methodology Note

• Priced-in inversion: the valuation is inverted on the current price to recover the operating-income growth, duration, and steady-state margin the price embeds (ROE for financials, FFO growth for REITs).
• Valuation x-ray: the valuation models, grouped into four families (asset, earnings, relative, growth). Each model is expressed as a price/FV ratio (distance from price), not a point fair-value estimate. The spread across families is the disagreement.
• Economic-unit decomposition (SOTP): each disclosed business unit is assigned its native valuation basis before any multiple is applied. Operating units are valued on enterprise value; funded financial units are valued on their own common equity, because their borrowings fund earning assets rather than levering the parent. A company total is stated only once every material unit carries a supported value and the parent capital bridge reconciles.
• Solvency: net cash/debt, net-debt-to-NOPAT, interest coverage, and share-count CAGR from EDGAR financials (net debt / FFO and fixed-charge coverage for REITs; regulatory-capital framing for financials).
• Peer cohorts: per-segment comparables with deep-linkable SEC filing citations.

Fundamentals sourced from SEC EDGAR filings. Current price from Databento. The priced-in inversion and valuation x-ray are computed by the boothcheck engine; narrative composed by AI from the structured data.