Get you some water.
Thank you.
So thanks for being here.
Thank you for having us.
I wanted to start off by talking about credit, because it is the big question. Probably not a big surprise that we would start here, and maybe just to lay it out there in terms of the big question on investors' minds, and that's really, is BMO a credit outlier this cycle? I think on the call you were very clear to say no, but I wanna give you an opportunity here to address that directly, and to go into a little more detail in terms of what gives you the confidence to be able to say that. And then I've a few follow-ups on that.
Okay, so it's the appropriate place to start, naturally. Let me put a little bit of contour around what we had to say on the call, and the first place I'll start is to reinforce the fact that at BMO, we've prided ourselves for decades on being superior. We write it out, we write it down, we put it out there on being superior managers of risk over the long term, and in fact, it's stated as one of our top five strategic priorities, so we take it very seriously. That goes to how we think about originating, how we think about underwriting, how we think about portfolio management through the cycle, how we think about workouts over the course of credit cycles.
And when I look at it, Meny, in the context of the performance that we've exhibited this year, I have to remind us of a couple things. Over the course of time, and I am gonna get, by the way, to the specific outcomes that we've exhibited in the last couple of quarters, but I just want to make sure it's put in the right frame. I think really important to the conclusion that I offered on the call and why I'm confident in it, is that when you look at our performance over the course of time measured in decades, in fact, and we disclosed this, over the last 33 years, we've outperformed our peers in 29 of them. Not this year. So we've had four years where we didn't. This year will be number five.
In this particular year, difficult as it is, and it has not met our expectations. We've been clear about that, and it hasn't met yours. I just want to put it in perspective. Our year-to-date impaired credit losses are 40 basis points, and the average of our peer group among the Big Six is 33. If I were to narrow to the Big Five, it's 36. So it's higher than that peer group, but to put in perspective relative to our business mix, which I'm going to get into, with wholesale being a higher weighting of our business, it's not, it's not that different. Now, that doesn't trivialize the outcome that we've had so far this year, and definitely we expect better of ourselves.
So that brings me to the question of how we got here and where we think we're going, which is effectively the conversation we had on the call. When we look at the concentration, if there is a concentration, of where the impairments have presented, we've studied this very carefully. And, you know, at first you might think, well, is there a concentration by geography in the United States? You know, is it in California because you bought a bank, or is it in the Midwest, or is it somewhere else? And the answer is no. The answer is no. Is there a concentration by industry sector, CRE or otherwise? And the answer is, again, no. And you look at various ways to try to identify concentration patterns.
What you find is, something different from that, which is also very interesting and very instructive, and it helps us inform how we perform going forward, which is, you may have heard us say on the call that 15 accounts accounted for 50% of all of the wholesale losses that we have in our wholesale portfolio. So we have tens of thousands of unique accounts within the whole wholesale portfolio, and 15 of them have presented the outcome that is different from our expectations and different from your expectations. What do those have in common if they're not those concentration areas that I've talked to? They exhibit, not all, but many of the following characteristics: vintage, some underwriting that occurred in the sort of 2020, 2021, 2022 sort of pandemic era.
They had higher leverage levels at underwriting than were probably sustainable, given the fact that there was some artificial fiscal stimulus, richer balance sheets than one would appear. There was some underwriting that occurred against the expectation of consumer preferences that were present during the pandemic that, you know, obviously weren't present thereafter, and in some cases, we had higher hold sizes than we probably should have, and that's not ideal. But when I look at that outcome and we ask ourselves: Would we have done something differently? The answer is, of course, we would have, across that number of names, but it's 15 names in the context of tens of thousands, and our outcomes so far this year would have been better had we done different things, different escalations, whether we would have taken the same hold amount upfront for a new customer, stuff like that.
What we then did was, we took those learnings and we said, all right, if I apply that as an algorithm and as a screen against the rest of the portfolio, the next tranche, what do I see? I don't necessarily see impairments, but I see some accounts where the combination of those factors or some combination of those factors are present at the same time, in which case, what interventions will we take, perhaps earlier than we might have with this name, this set of 15? You know, and that can involve moving to watch list quickly. It can move, it can involve moving immediately to impairment as well.
And so, you know, we do that all the way across the portfolio, and we then used that, because I think you also said in your question, how does it give you confidence that this is where you go from here? We then use that to say, we're, like, very clear with the market, to say, we don't think this bulge is over yet. We think it probably goes a little bit higher in Q4, and we do think it's temporary, because we do see that cycle completing. And I would say to you, probably, you know, in the next 6 months or so, we'll look back and say, most of this is behind us, because it's been a very diligent exercise to understand it. So we didn't wanna be here. The loss given default outcomes were higher than we would have expected.
Some of that is circumstantial, but we understand it very clearly, and we understand how to bind it, and we understand how to be able to get to the other side of this cycle. Is it different from peers? It is different from peers. It is different from peers because the business mix that we have, which is skewed more heavily to commercial and more heavily to the U.S., and commercial, is different from peers, and over the long, long, long run, has proven to be a pretty good advantage for BMO. In this more narrow sliver of time right now, for a select number of accounts, it's been more difficult.
'Cause that's the real debate out there, I think, in terms of, okay, if BMO's not an outlier, then sort of the next logical question, is it sort of a canary in the coal mine? Is it, a re you just showing something that is gonna eventually catch up to some of your peers? Because I think it came out across from the call, we're saying here, you know, we appreciate business mix is different, but we're looking across, you know, U.S. banks, Canadian banks. We really don't see these types of issues. You know, you talk about COVID being something, some of what's sort of to explain some of this, and we're not really hearing that from other management teams. There's a question of, is there something to explain the timing here at BMO? Is just we're seeing something sooner, and it might catch up with others?
Yeah, it's hard to know. I mean, we do get asked the question, you know, you look at previous credit cycles, and we often get asked, BMO seemed to be a little bit earlier to recognize and then earlier to recover on the back end of that. I can't sit here and tell you today that I know that that will be the case. What I know is that when we see risk, we take action quickly. I do know that. You can't be conservative for the sake of being conservative. You have to rely on the data, and we do do that.
It is the case that, you know, you shouldn't expect all of the other Canadian banks to have exactly the same experience that I described if they don't have the same business mix, with respect to, in particular, U.S. wholesale credit. So that is different from the rest of the Canadians. Whether the outcomes that we're exhibiting will end up being different from the U.S. market broadly, let's say, when you look at the regionals, time will tell, like, I can't predict that as I speak today, but what I can predict for you is that, you know, we know where we think this is going for our book, and we know that we'll be back to our superior credit performance, which we've exhibited for 34 years, as soon as we get through this bulge in the cycle. Credit, you know, always, credit is cyclical. The cycle is temporary. The underpinning performance of the business is enduring.
And, you know, on the call, there was some discussion of, you know, not having some, I mean, I think you addressed it here, but I just want to be clear. On the call, it seemed that there was some lack of confidence in the ability to provide guidance in terms of impaired PCL ratios.
Yeah, it's not so much lack of confidence as it is, if you look at, you know, as I've tried to describe to you, how narrow and short the list is, and even if I add the next few that we'll present, that we think will present in that list, it's so small relative to the tens of thousands of credits that it's hard to predict. It's just fundamentally hard to predict, and you can have a circumstance that accelerates very quickly. We've talked about some of those that you know have been fairly public, that relative to Q2, and then all of a sudden in Q3, they're in a different circumstance. The model doesn't predict that very well, and nobody's model does in wholesale credit.
So it's not so much a lack of confidence. It's just that we certainly didn't want to be in a position to say we know the shareholders might expect us to or hope, I should say, or analysts might hope, that we would say, you know, on this date, on the calendar, at this minute, it will peak at this level. That's impossible. That's false precision. What we can do is put a range around our expectation and tell you that that's what we would expect, and, you know, that's why I've said here today. We think that that's complete, you know, in terms of most of it being in the rear view mirror within the next 6 months.
So the corollary, the follow-up question really becomes: How does this sort of experience impact growth going forward?
Yeah.
You know, you talked about some of the characteristics. The question is, d oes this sort of event mean that you have to scale back growth? Maybe let's start here, at a different spot. I mean, people look at these credit losses and say, okay, like, they just were too aggressive in their expansion in the U.S. I mean, I think you addressed that this is not Bank of the West, but could it be just BMO being more aggressive than was, in hindsight, prudent in terms of pushing on commercial and corporate lending in the U.S. over the past few years?
Yeah, it's a good question, and there's a lot in it because, you know, you have to remember, and as managers, you have to be careful that when you tackle an issue that you wished you had done a bit better job on, some of it was in your control and some of it wasn't, that it doesn't become the only issue in the organization, particularly when you think it's known and time-bound.
Because underlying that, you know, we need to remind people is if you look at the operating performance of the business, I'll come to the U.S. in a second, Meny, but the operating performance of the business, you know, there are some very, very good signs of health within the overall organization if you're able to put this credit issue over here just for now. You know, at 5.2% operating leverage in the quarter, it was double our peer average. If you look at our year-to-date deposit gathering, which I view as a key metric for health of organizations, it's best among our peers, and it's above the peer average in the U.S.
When I look at U.S. operating metrics, when we look at balance growth, when we look at protecting the downside on NIM margin, we've got a slide in our presentation that shows that we're beating the regional peers quite well on those sort of generalized health metrics. So you do have to be careful in your question to say, you know, as a result of making sure that we put our arms tightly around a credit outcome that we weren't particularly happy with, that we spoil that momentum, because there's very real momentum that we want to continue on.
I think I made the point on the call that when we sort of ask ourselves the question, well, it's pretty simplistic to say, d id we grow too fast, and therefore it's as simple as the blunt instrument, that therefore, you know, the chickens come home to roost? Well, when we look at in U.S. commercial, U.S. wholesale, where the growth was faster than market and where it wasn't, the places where we took share, in some cases very well and quite aggressively, included ABL, sponsor finance, sponsor lending, vendor, dealer finance, some of our specialized businesses, that is not where the losses are presenting. So the conclusion isn't you're getting what you paid for there. The losses are actually presenting in the sectors where we were kind of growing much, much closer to market, and therefore, the reasons that I discussed earlier.
So, like I put it all together, and assuming we're right about the trajectory of that curve going forward, when I get myself a quarter, two, three out, our mandate is to continue to deliver that operating performance that we know we're good at because it's happening below the surface, and then have the tailwind of those credit outcomes behind us.
So maybe to ask a different way, have you made any changes to the way you underwrite in the U.S.?
So when you have an outcome like this, you sort of have to figure out whether there's changes that you made. You also have to be careful that you don't swipe the entire page with one brush, because I just told you that for the vast majority of credits and for the vast majority of sectors, we're not actually experiencing losses that surprised us or surprised the market. Where we have, you know, we are looking at things like, you know, should single name hold limits, in the instance of initial underwriting, be a little lower than they are? Are there certain dynamics around a credit underwriting that ought to trigger an escalation in terms of approvals? Like, making changes that apply to treating the particular circumstance, as opposed to trying to treat the entirety of a portfolio and risking the question that you asked me earlier of slowing down the momentum, is what we're doing. It's quite surgical.
So, I think that's an important point, just to highlight that. So, you know, you're highlighting a problem that is, in your confidence, very specific. This is not a broader issue.
That's exactly right.
Yeah. Okay. And then, you know, talking about the U.S., because, you know, this credit issue came up Q2 and then extended into Q3. Q1, we were talking about just, w e weren't talking about credit, but we were talking about, you know, the ability to execute on Bank of the West was slower than what you initially had expected, on the revenue side. And for the obvious reasons, you know, we've seen, you know, the rate situation play out in the U.S., and obviously, you do a deal when you do a deal, and that's, and so you need a little bit of luck there, and maybe you didn't have it this time. Just to highlight that again, sort of putting credit aside in terms of just an update on your outlook for the U.S. business. It feels like many Canadian investors are souring on U.S. exposure.
Yeah.
So maybe help us get a little bit more, get a little more balance here. Like, where, where are we making a mistake in terms of going down that road?
Yeah, so, so fair question. So maybe what I'll do, if it's helpful, is reframe the U.S. thesis, because that's a question I realize is in the water, and then I can come back to w here are we on the Bank of the West execution? Because it's part of it for us, of course. You know, when you step back and look at the core strategy, to have a strong, profitable, very competitive Canadian bank that generates excess returns and then makes decisions as to where to invest those excess returns, and in our case, for the most part, we believe that's the United States, we absolutely continue to believe that that's intact, and this is a long-run strategy. This is a long-term strategy.
It's a coincidence that we're sitting here today to the day on the 40 anniversary of the day that we closed the acquisition of the Harris Bank in 1984 . When we closed that acquisition, we were the 32 largest bank in the United States. We had $8 billion of assets. Today, we're the 10 largest, and we have $450 billion of assets. And over the course of the long run, we believe that has paid well and will continue to pay well, and when we look at the growth that we've employed over that period of time, about 60% of it has been organic, i.e., take share from banks that don't have the same capabilities, and about 40% of it has been the acquisitions that you've seen. I'll come to the one you've got in a minute.
I never begin or end a day without reminding myself that the U.S. has a $35 trillion GDP, and Canada's is 2.7 trillion, and California's, where we've put a stake in the ground, is 3.2 trillion. And so when we look at that against the backdrop of the way we have set up our bank, Meny, the way we've set up our bank, which has been very deliberate over the course of 40 years, we've now got a circumstance where we're operative in two or three of the five largest MSAs in the country, in 14 of the 25 largest MSAs in the country, in 32 states. And by the way, in the 14 of those 25 MSAs, just that, without even looking at the rest of the country, is 10 times the GDP of Canada.
So the question I really ought to ask myself and my team and my board is: Are we set up over the long run to be really competitive in a market that, overall, I would not bet against the United States? There are probably financial institutions who will say, you know, that's a tough pot, right? But when I look at the setup that we've got and the way we've built it over the course of those 40 years, and the way we continue to invest in times that are, you know, muted growth like we've had in the U.S. banking market over the last year, where we're adding capacity, we're adding teams, we're adding the capability to, when the market is more constructive, to bring on revenue, while, when you don't have to then bring on much cost to bring that revenue, I'm very satisfied with it.
And the reality is, you know, it's almost half our bank's income, and it's completely integrated. So I acknowledge the popularity index on investment in the U.S. is not very high right now. But I think you have to be very careful to not paint that with one brush. And done right, which we think we have, for the most part, and will continue to do over the course of time, we think it's a very sound strategy. Now, to your sort of, I think you were asking the update on the Bank of the West question that's sort of buried within all of that.
Yeah.
You know, look, I've said this before. We sat here on the stage exactly a year ago today on the day after we had completed the technical integration.
Right.
And that was a success. We won a Celent Award for the success of that integration. The technology teams know what they're doing. The branding teams know what they're doing. If you've been in California, we flooded the market. The recognition and the consideration for us has gone up, and we've started to add customers after that period where you have attrition post-acquisition. We're now seeing the inflection point. So all of that is very exciting, and it's going very well, and we've kept all of the top talent that we wanted to keep. Where are the challenges, and what hasn't yet gone according to expectations? They are around the revenue side, and there. You know, look, you are right. Sometimes you get unlucky on timing.
You know, we closed that acquisition on February 1st, 2023 , and 6 weeks later, Silicon Valley Bank tipped over, and First Republic, and on it went. And the destabilizing effect of that over the entire market has gotten better today, but it persisted for over a year, right? Because you had the confluence of higher deposit costs, materially higher than you would have expected at the time. You had funding costs that were impacting a bit your lending margins, and then you also had this flattening of demand that is, you know, flat, flat, flat over the consumer business over the course of the last 18 months, when the long-term average is 4% or 5%.
So we've been living with an environment that the revenue pie has been pretty significantly depressed in the market overall, relative to what we thought it was gonna be. If you are betting that that will be the U.S. banking market to the end of time, you know, that'll be a difficult outcome from us. That's not our bet. The number of clients that are telling us that this waiting period that they're in, for two things: for the rate cut cycle to begin, which I think we're on the precipice of, as well as the U.S. election, which is really quite something within the U.S. commercial market, we find, relative to what happens through the course of Canadian elections. That we saw this in 2016 , this pent-up, I'm gonna wait, I'm gonna wait. I just wanna know what the outcome is.
I wanna know what the policy outcome is of an election, one way or another, before I get back into the business of capital formation and demand for banking products. That's the phase that we're still in right now. So as we come out of that phase, my expectation is we're gonna be able to deliver on those revenue promises without having to materially increase the cost base, i.e., more leverage. And we've said before, we think that the consequence of all that is we will get there. Nothing's changed on our expectations, and nothing's changed on our confidence level. It's a timing issue, and we've therefore, as we pushed out our expectation of that full delivery of the revenues from the end of 2025 to the end of 2026.
So that's why I want to. I think that's an important point in terms of you're confident that it's still timing. There's nothing more structural going on here. As the quarter's going, nothing's telling you that thesis is still not gonna play out?
All the health metrics we look at, branch productivity, the increasing cross-sell of the products into commercial, into wealth, those numbers are ticking up as every day goes by. And therefore, the answer to your question is yes. There's nothing that's fundamentally changed in terms of our expectations, other than we've pushed out the timetable. Not on the cost synergies, by the way, they're done. We exceeded those. They're in the bag. On the revenue side, we've got some work to do to make sure that we get all of that done as well, and we'll get there.
I wanted to stick to the U.S., but talk about capital markets. Maybe we can also touch on wealth, but, you know, you have a sizable presence in the U.S. capital markets business. You built that out. This quarter, you know, there was a lot of talk about the upsurge in deal making in the U.S.
Yeah.
Obviously, we can see, you know, Goldman Sachs share price as a proxy for that. If we look at your results, we didn't really see a lot of that excitement come through in terms of your U.S. capital markets business, and I guess the question is why that is, and what lessons do you draw from that?
Yeah. So it's like we're not trying to be Goldman Sachs in the United States. And so just to remind people of what we are trying to be is we've got a really competitive capital markets business in Canada that I think can be even more competitive than it is, and we've got lots of plays that we're investing in to make that true. And our U.S. business, which is about half of our overall capital markets business, you kind of have to look at where we've chosen to play. You know, if you look at the results you saw from the US banks.
You know, somebody told me, I haven't checked this, but somebody told me if you look at year-to-date M&A volumes, you are basically up 25% in absolute deal volumes, but you're down 25% in number of deals, so it's the year of the mega deal. That's not the space, that's not the space we play, right? We play more into that upper middle market. When that market is active, we play a lot better, and in the meantime, the businesses that we've chosen to build, i.e., we're not gonna chase that business and, you know, have the capital that you need and the expense that you need to chase that business. But the places we've chosen to build in that mid-market are running pretty well.
When I look at, for example, the investments that we made, and we think we've come to sort of the end of an investment cycle, and now we're gonna be in a harvest cycle for a while in the capital markets business, it gets pretty interesting because you look at the rates business, for example. Five years ago, rates, securitization, we weren't very prominent. Right now, we're top three in rates. We were number one ranked in rate strategy in an Institutional Investor in the United States. If you look at the securitization business across CMBS and otherwise, we've got a top three position there. When those markets are active, you'll see an uptick in performance from us that you might not from others, right? So what you saw is certain markets uptick that we're not big participants in.
When you see these businesses where we've taken very clear leadership positions uptick, you will see outperformance from us. You know, in the end, we made a commitment to shareholders that we wanted to get the PPPT of our capital markets business to be, A, at CAD 625 million per quarter or better, and, B, consistent. Like, you know, we don't like the notion of really big swings, and of course, you are gonna have some swings in capital markets business, and that's actually what we've done. If you look at the last few quarters, you know, we've put out there a pretty tight band, and we've stayed within it in terms of managing the volatility of that business, and I think there's upside from there.
That's very clear. I wanna talk about something we don't normally talk about, but, you know, guidance. If I look at EPS revisions, consensus EPS revisions for BMO, both 2024 and 2025, definitely BMO looks like an outlier in terms of the magnitude of the downward revisions. So we came into the year, you know, very, very clearly overly positive in terms of the earnings power of the bank, and the expectations for 2025, and we've had to revise that number down. And maybe dramatically is overstating it, but we have had to revise it down.
More than others.
More than others. The question is, you know, what happened here? How much of the blame do you put on me? How much do the—
Oh, it's all on you. None of it's on you. The, s o I saw the chart you put out. Was it yesterday or the day before?
Yeah, yesterday.
Yesterday. So, I think it's a good chart. I don't blame you. The numbers are accurate. I looked at the decline from, I think you drew it from the beginning of Q2, the end of Q1.
That's right.
Right? And that's a pretty appropriate time to draw it because there was an inflection point from there for us, particularly on credit. And I looked at the revision from then to now, and I came to the conclusion that not quite, but almost 100% of the revision is due to credit. Almost 100% of the revision is due to the credit outcomes that we have had that wouldn't have been in neither our guidance nor your models at the end of Q1. And so the flip side of that is that the operating performance, the PPPT delivery, and the operating leverage that we committed to at the end of Q1, when we had negative operating leverage in Q1, and we said we would be positive for the rest of the year.
We were positive in Q2, we were positive in Q3, and we think we're gonna be positive in Q4, is in line. So, I don't mean to oversimplify your question, but the numbers don't lie. The entirety of the downward revision in those estimates, consensus estimates, you and all of your colleagues, is credit. And we're being very clear here today that we don't think that's over, but we do think that it does come to a closure point sometime in the next 6 months.
I wanted to talk about ROE. It's something I'm talking to all your peers about in terms of, you know, medium-term ROE targets and how you get there, and the building blocks of that. You have an ROE target of 15% plus. So the question really is, over a period of undershooting that, do you still have confidence that you're able to get there?
Yeah.
That's still a valid target, and how do you get there?
Yeah, that's the right question. I actually think it's the most important question. So, undershooting, yes, a portion of that undershooting is the same answer we keep coming back to, is the credit, but not all of it. And so, you know, what you need to hear from me is that I actually have a plan, and I have a line of sight, as opposed to, yeah, we think that's a reasonable target, and we'll probably get there. So I'm telling you, we have a plan, and we have a line of sight to get to 15% ROE. What does it include, and what do you have to deliver on, not just believe? It includes a normalization of credit.
It includes delivering 2% operating leverage in the business, taking the efficiency ratio, which we have improved over the last year by 300 basis points, down to 57. It includes bringing it to 55. It includes improving the ROE and the performance in the U.S. business, which is not just PCL, it's that revenue delivery that I won't revisit at all, but that we talked about earlier in this conversation. It includes the work that we're always doing on how we look at capital recycle. So when we do that, we believe, and we believe it with conviction, that over the medium term, we get the 15% ROE that we've held out there. It's not just something we put out and we hope to get to, it's something that we have a clear plan to address.
Now, you know, could the environment swing us again? I suppose, but based on our outlook on the environment, that's the formula we know that we need to execute against to get there. And there's pretty significant value creation, as you know, if you look at the difference between an 11% ROE and a 15% ROE. We've been there before, right?
Right.
We got to the 15% across all of our U.S. businesses in 2022, for example. It wasn't long ago. We've got the toolbox.
I wanted to talk about the outlook for commercial loan growth on both sides of the border. Obviously, you're very well positioned to speak to that. In the U.S., you know, the question often comes up, the role of the U.S. presidential election: Do we need to get beyond—
No
November to see a material improvement there?
I think we do. I think we definitely do. Like, it's not 20% of the conversations I have with U.S. borrowers, it's 80% or 90% of the conversations I have with them will say yes to your question, that we do, and I think, you know, that's why we withhold our sort of generalized guidance on things like, you know, loan growth outlook until the end of our fourth quarter, because then, when we're talking to you all in the first week of December, we've got the election behind us, we've got those conversations with our clients. We can understand how much of the pent-up demand we think is gonna be released. We assess the competition vector from private credit in particular, and then we come to a view.
Having come from flat for the last 18 months, I'll go way out on a limb and say to you today, I don't think it's gonna be flat. It's gonna grow with all of those things coming in our favor, including almost certainly by then, some of the beginning of the rate cut cycle with the Fed. But I can't yet tell you whether I think it's gonna be 1% or 2% or 8% next year. We'll clarify that for you at the end of the fourth quarter, but I do expect some expansion.
And then in terms of Canada, where we've been a lot more resilient, you know, what are you hearing from your customers and—
Generally confident. Like, I would say, generally, the Canadian customer on the commercial side remains confident. There's some tails in areas where folks are more concerned than others. Generally confident. If there's a but to it, it's, you know, whether or not the rate cycle in Canada has been soon enough to catch that kind of tail end of consumer that was levered and had run out of the excess liquidity from the pandemic, and then, you know, is the rate cut today just too late for some of those? Because, as we know, the impact and the transmission effect of the rate cycle in Canada is faster generally than it is in the U.S. because of short-term mortgage impact. So that's good. Like, that's generally good, but I do think we're gonna see some uptick in unemployment in Canada.
And the I think the governor was clear about the right decision today, to say that, you know, the balance of risk has shifted to that, right? It has shifted to we get, you know, too much impact on inflation, and we don't protect the employment picture enough. So, coming back to the commercial borrower question that you asked, we hear that from our commercial customers, saying, like, that's the consumer segment, if they're exposed to that consumer segment, that they're worried about. But I'll come back to the beginning of my question. Just in general terms, there's a, you know, with appropriate caution, there's a general level of confidence.
I think, that's all the time we have. It's always great speaking to you, Darryl, so thanks so much.
Thanks for the time.
Appreciate it. Excellent. Thanks.