Owner Scorecard


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NFBK, Northfield Bancorp, Inc.

Banks financial

Northfield Bank also offers select loan and deposit products through the internet. 2 Northfield Bank's principal business consists of originating multifamily and commercial real estate loans, construction and land loans, commercial and industrial loans, one-to-four family residential loans and home equity loans and lines of credit.

Northfield Bancorp uses the support staff and offices of the Bank and reimburses Northfield Bank for these services.

Northfield Bank offers a variety of deposit accounts, including transaction, money market savings, certificates of deposit, passbook and statement savings deposit accounts, which are Northfield Bank's primary source of funds for its lending and investing activities.

Latest annual: FY2025 10-K
NFBK · Northfield Bancorp, Inc.
I

The business

What it sells, where the money comes from, the kind of company it is.

Revenue · FY2025
$154M
+17.5% YoY · 2% 5-yr CAGR
Vital signs · FY2025, with 5-yr average
Revenue $154M 5-yr avg $152M
Return on equity 0% 5-yr avg 6%
Return on tangible equity 0% 5-yr avg 6%
Efficiency ratio 84% 5-yr avg 61%
Equity / assets 12.0% 5-yr avg 12.6%

The business in brief

read the 10-K →

What this business is and what moves its needle, from its own SEC filings.

What moves the needle
Net interest margin, loan losses, and book value. A lender is read on the quality of its balance sheet, not an earnings multiple, and the worst year of credit losses matters more than the best. On its own account, the filing leans hardest on pricing power & competition, set against the numbers in what the filing emphasizes, below.
Is it a good business?
Return on equity has sat below the cost of equity (median 5%, above 12% in only 0 of 10 years). It runs at a 84% efficiency ratio, on the heavy side. The cycle and the loan book decide this one; weigh the recession years in the record, not the average, and read the 10-K.

Every line is arithmetic on the company's filings, shown in full in the sections below.

II

The record

Ten years of arithmetic, read across the cycle.

The record, 2016–2025

realized figures from each filing · older years to the left
2016’162017’172018’182019’192020’202021’212022’222023’232024’242025’25
Income statement
$113M$121M$119M$127M$141M$170M$166M$137M$131M$154MRevenueRevenue
$103M$109M$111M$112M$130M$156M$158M$125M$114M$137MNet interest incomeNet int.
$10M$12M$8M$15M$11M$14M$8M$12M$17M$17MNoninterest incomeFee inc.
$635K$1M$3M$22KCredit-loss provisionProvision
$26M$25M$40M$40M$37M$71M$61M$38M$30M$796KNet incomeNet inc.
34%52%19%24%26%27%28%27%26%Effective tax rateTax rate
Cash flow & returns
0.7%0.6%0.9%0.8%0.7%1.3%1.1%0.7%0.5%0.0%Return on assetsROA
4%4%6%6%5%10%9%5%4%0%Return on equityROE
2%1%3%3%2%6%5%2%1%−3%Retained to equityRetained/eq
4%4%6%6%5%10%9%6%5%0%Return on tangible equityROTCE
64%56%56%58%56%47%46%61%66%84%Efficiency ratioEffic.
Balance sheet
$3.9B$4.0B$4.4B$5.1B$5.5B$5.4B$5.6B$5.6B$5.7B$5.8BTotal assetsAssets
$2.7B$2.8B$3.3B$3.4B$4.1B$4.2B$4.2B$3.9B$4.1B$4.0BDepositsDeposits
$38M$38M$38M$38M$41M$41M$41M$41M$41M$0GoodwillGoodwill
$621M$639M$666M$696M$754M$740M$701M$699M$705M$690MShareholders’ equityEquity
Per share
45.7M46.9M47.1M47.2M48.8M48.8M46.4M43.6M41.6M40.2MShares out (diluted)Shares
$0.57$0.53$0.85$0.85$0.76$1.45$1.32$0.86$0.72$0.02EPS (diluted)EPS
$0.31$0.33$0.40$0.43$0.44$0.50$0.52$0.52$0.52$0.53Dividends / shareDiv/sh
$13.59$13.63$14.15$14.75$15.45$15.18$15.10$16.03$16.93$17.18Book value / shareBVPS
$12.75$12.81$13.33$13.94$14.61$14.33$14.22$15.09$15.94$17.18Tangible book / shareTBVPS
Per-share growththe realized rate an owner's share compounded
9-yr5-yr
Revenue / share+5.0%/yr+5.8%/yr
Owner earnings / share+5.6%/yr+4.1%/yr
EPS−31.2%/yr−51.8%/yr
Dividends / share+6.1%/yr+3.6%/yr
Capital spending / share+3.8%/yr−14.5%/yr
Book value / share+2.6%/yr+2.1%/yr

The record, charted

FY2016–2025

Each measure over its full record; the current point and the worst year marked.

Share count
40Mpeak FY2020
Revenue
$154Mlow FY2016
III

Quality & stewardship

Returns, the balance sheet, capital allocation, and pay.

Owner’s Scorecard

FY2025 10-K · source on SEC EDGAR →

Is it a good business?

  • Below the cost of equity
    Net income $796K ÷ equity $690M
    Industry peers: median 6%
    What this means

    The bank's north star, what it earns on shareholders' capital. Cost of equity is roughly 10%, so a return durably above that builds value and below it destroys it. One year is noisy; the durability across a full credit cycle is what counts.

  • Modest
    Net income ÷ (equity − goodwill $0 − intangibles $0)
    Industry peers: median 7%
    What this means

    The cleaner return, stripping out the goodwill paid for past acquisitions. This is the number a buyer of the whole bank actually earns on the hard capital.

  • High cost ratio (>75%)
    Noninterest expense $130M ÷ (net interest income + fees)
    Industry peers: median 69%
    What this means

    The share of revenue eaten by running costs; lower is better, and below about 60% marks a genuinely efficient operation. A low ratio held for years is the operational side of a moat.

Is it sound?

  • Capital (equity / assets) 12.0%
    Well capitalized
    Equity $690M ÷ assets $5.8B
    What this means

    A plain-English leverage read: how much of the balance sheet is the owners' own money. This is a rough proxy; the regulatory figure is the CET1 ratio, which is risk-weighted and reported in the filing. The point is the same, how much loss the bank can absorb before depositors are at risk.

  • Deposit-funded
    Deposits $4.0B ÷ assets $5.8B
    What this means

    Low-cost, sticky deposits are a bank's real moat, the cheap raw material it lends out at a spread. A bank funded mostly by deposits earns more durably than one that rents its money in the wholesale market.

  • Credit cost (provision / NII) 0%
    Low
    Provision for credit losses $22K ÷ net interest income $137M
    What this means

    What the bank set aside this year against loans going bad, as a share of its lending income. This swings hard with the cycle, low in good years and spiking in recessions, so read it across the record, not in one year. Disciplined underwriting shows up as low, stable provisions through a downturn.

Does AI threaten the moat?

Low contestability

The moat is physical, regulated or balance-sheet-funded, the kind AI cuts costs within but does not contest.

In its own filing A competitive risk, new this year

Its FY2025 10-K names artificial intelligence as a competitive threat, in language that was not in the prior year's filing.

“If we cannot effectively manage these challenges, including adapting to rapid technological change and ensuring responsible AI governance, our reputation, competitive position, and financial performance could be significantly harmed.”

AI is unlikely to contest a moat that is physical, regulated or balance-sheet-funded; here it reads more as a cost tool than a threat.

Read from the filing's own risk factors, paired with the industry's structure under its SIC code; the durability is read above, the price below.

All figures as filed; the source filing is linked above.

Acquisitions & goodwill

from the balance sheet & the 10-year cash-flow record

Goodwill grows only when a company acquires and falls only when it concedes it overpaid. The size of that bet, the cash put into buying rather than building, and how much has already been written off.

Goodwill$00% of all assets; the premium carried on the balance sheet for businesses acquired
Against book equity0%goodwill is this share of book equity; the rest is the company’s own retained and paid-in capital
Cash spent acquiring$0over 10 years buying other businesses, against $23M of capital spent building

$41M written down across 1 year (2025): goodwill the company has already conceded it overpaid for, charged against earnings. A write-down costs no cash (the cash went out when the deal was signed), but it is management marking its own past judgment to market.

Goodwill, acquired intangibles and equity from the latest balance sheet; acquisition spend and write-downs summed across the 10-year record, from the company's own filings.

Management, ownership & pay

read the proxy →

From the proxy: how much of the business the people running it own, and how they are paid, beside what the business earned for its owners in the same years.

Fiscal yearChief executivePay, as filed“Actually paid”Owner earnings
2020Steven M. Klein$1.3M$1.1M$52M
2021Steven M. Klein$1.5M$1.6M$63M
2022Steven M. Klein$1.5M$1.5M$81M
2023Steven M. Klein$1.2M$1.1M$43M
2024Steven M. Klein$1.5M$1.3M$30M

Both pay figures are the company’s own, from the pay-versus-performance table its proxy statement files. “As filed” is the Summary Compensation Table total: salary, bonus, and equity awards at their value on the day of grant. “Actually paid” is the SEC’s prescribed recalculation, which re-marks those equity awards to what they became as they vested; it can swing far above or below the filed figure in either direction, and negative years occur. Owner earnings are the whole business's, from the record above, for the same fiscal years.

  • Insider ownership6%

    The stake all directors and executive officers hold together, per the 2025 proxy: skin in the game, the first thing Munger reads.

  • CEO pay ratio24:1

    What the chief earns for every dollar the median employee makes, per the 2025 proxy. A high ratio alone settles nothing; some businesses are genuinely top-heavy in scarce skill. A runaway figure is where Buffett starts asking whether the board is doing its job.

  • Stock-based compensation$5M

    The slice of the business handed to employees in shares this year, 3% of revenue, equal to 5% of operating profit. Buffett's oldest accounting fight: this is compensation, compensation is an expense, real whether or not the headline earnings admit it. One trap: the cash-flow statement adds SBC back, so the operating cash, and the owner earnings drawn from it, are flattered by exactly this amount; counted as the cost it is, what an owner keeps is lower.

Peers, Banks

The same industry, side by side on the bank lens. Each figure is a through-cycle median, so a peak or trough year can’t distort it; the group median at the foot is the line to read each against.

CompanyRevenueROEROTCEEfficiencyNII / assets
HTBHomeTrust Bancshares Inc.$213M6%7%71%3.1%
CFFNCapitol Federal Financial Inc.$201M6%6%51%2.0%
NFBKNorthfield Bancorp, Inc.$154M5%5%57%2.5%
KRNYKearny Financial Corp$154M4%4%69%2.2%
WSBFWaterstone Financial, Inc.$142M7%7%76%2.5%
FMAOFarmers & Merchants Bancorp Inc.$121M9%10%63%3.1%
PDLBPonce Financial Group Inc.$109M2%2%81%3.0%
FGBIPFirst Guaranty Bancshares, Inc.$95M9%10%66%3.0%
Group median6%6%67%2.7%
IV

The price

What a price has to assume.

What the price implies

price / tangible book

A bank is worth a multiple of its tangible book value, and the multiple it deserves is set by the return it earns on that book. Type today’s price; we show what you would be paying against what Northfield Bancorp, Inc.’s record justifies.

$
The assumptions

Tangible book / share, delivered3%/yr’20→’25

The justified multiple is (return on tangible equity − growth) ÷ (cost of equity − growth). A bank earning exactly its cost of equity is worth about one times tangible book; the premium above that prices each point of durable excess return. A higher cost of equity lowers the justified multiple for a bank.

Enter a price above to run it.

Price / tangible book
Justified by the return
Normalized return on tangible equity5%
Price / book
Earnings yield
P/E (3-yr avg ’23–’25)
Graham’s price gate

Graham applied the same standards to financial enterprises (Intelligent Investor ch.14): the 15× multiple cap on averaged earnings, and P/E times price-to-book at most 22.5. The gate marks the bargain-hunter’s floor, not a verdict.

Tangible book $690M on 42M shares, a 5% normalized return on it. The dials set the multiple such a return would justify; your price sets the multiple you are paying. It assumes the bank keeps earning that return; a credit cycle, a rate shock or a bad acquisition changes it, which is what the record and the 10-K are for.

Cite: Owner Scorecard, "Northfield Bancorp, Inc. (NFBK), the owner's record," https://ownerscorecard.com/c/NFBK, data as of 2026-07-09.

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