Barclays Virtual Global Financial Services Conference

Sep 15, 2021

Good morning, everyone. Very happy to have Royal Bank contributing to our conversations today. Have Royal CFO, Rod Bolger here. Rod, thank you very much for joining us once again at our conference. Happy to be here. Thanks for having me, John. So, Rod, let's kick this off. Royal, in terms of your platform, is one of the most diversified of the peers, and I can make the argument, in 2021 and even 2020, it's actually served you quite well. But some of the questions that we're getting is investors are looking to see where the growth is going to come from. And so, the macro trends as they're emerging, how does this affect your outlook, and what is the outlook doing for both your strategies and I guess, more near term, your tactics? Yeah. Thanks, John. You're spot on. The diversified business model is a core part of our strategy. It served us very well during the pandemic. As interest rates came down and we faced revenue headwinds in many of our businesses, our capital markets business was able to offset that and have outsized growth such that we can continue our momentum. And in terms of future growth, we're well-positioned for future growth across the board. If you look at our core businesses, whether it be the capital markets business I mentioned, our Canadian banking franchise, our wealth management franchises, both in the U.S. and in Canada, or City National Bank, all of those have strong market share and growing market share. Our asset generation is high. We're poised for growth. That diversified business model means in tougher times, we can offset if there's headwinds, and we have lower volatility in terms of earnings growth than our peers. In good times, given our market share, that diversified business model is going to help us maintain higher than market growth. Rod, one of the things that stuck out with me is the general level of optimism that the Canadian banks have for the outlook. I personally believe it's out of sync with where investors are looking. From your standpoint, what are you seeing in the macro environment that really is bolstering your level of optimism? Well, the economic recovery is ongoing. We've basically been locked down here in Canada for almost 18 months. We've come out of that this summer. But we've shown through technology, through the diversified economy here in Canada, that we can survive this and grow as a country. As the largest bank, we're benefiting from that, and again, as I mentioned, taking market share. We've seen our clients be able to persevere through this, and now we're poised for growth. You look, the markets are strong. Our revenue growth should accelerate. We've hit a bottom with interest rates, and so our net interest income is going to start to pick up as we've had good asset generation both in Canada and the U.S. Credit continues to be benign. So you have good economic recovery. Even with the Delta variant, the economic growth is going to continue, and maybe it puts a little bit of a damper, which means the economic recovery should last even longer. So we're in the early stages of that recovery. Rod, let's drill down. In terms of the domestic retail, we've seen exceptionally strong growth in the residential mortgage market with Royal taking more than their natural share. Where do you expect to see growth coming from outside of residential mortgages? When do we think we're going to see an inflection point? I believe we've seen an inflection point. If you look at our last quarter, certain leading indicators such as credit cards and commercial lending were on the upswing on a quarter-over-quarter basis. Yes, mortgages has been a strength for us, and we've had double-digit growth for many quarters in a row. Just with the law of large numbers and the fact that there's supply-demand catch-up here and there's fewer houses for sale, so there's lower inventory. You also have the supply coming back a little bit. In the pandemic, the value of the home has never been greater, so people wanted bigger homes, they wanted nicer homes. Traditionally, pre-pandemic, it was immigration that was driving a lot of the demand increases. We're not seeing that yet. That may not happen for some time. The demand might come down a little bit, but it's not going to fall off a cliff. Yet the supply hasn't really changed. In fact, it's come back a bit. We're not seeing weakness in the housing market, it's just that that growth should come back to high single digits sometime over the next couple of quarters. Then you look at the other growth areas. In credit cards, I mentioned strong 3% quarter-over-quarter volume growth in terms of balances. The purchase volume has been up over 20% year-over-year, up in the high teens versus pre-pandemic levels. That's a good indicator of economic growth. Those balances will start to revolve, but it's going to take a little while for those balances to come back on a revolver basis because there's just so much cash in people's accounts coming out of the pandemic. You look at the commercial side, and we're seeing good strength there. In fact, August was a very strong month for growth for us across the board, across almost every industry out there. Really in the sweet spot of that CAD 25 million-CAD 75 million range, we saw strong month-over-month growth there. When you think about it, a lot of our customers or commercial clients have been a little reticent. A, because there's been nothing to buy with the supply chains disruption. Two, uncertainty about the economy opening up. Now you're seeing that confidence improve. We are seeing growing momentum in our commercial balances. Those core lending businesses are all looking good right now. Then we've had great strength in non-interest income. The transactions on the credit cards is good from an interchange perspective. Mutual fund revenue and other income has been going up. Foreign exchange should improve as people feel more comfortable traveling, too. Rod, just on the supply chain issues, how much of an impediment currently is that on the commercial loan growth that we've seen, which arguably has been stronger than I would've expected, but it's still impediment. Is it a major impediment or is this just something that is causing headlines in the newspapers? Well, it's a real impediment depending on what your business is, right? And what you're trying to buy. You look at the automotive sector, commercial automotive sector, and there you usually see utilization rates around 80%, and they've been in the 40s because they can't buy inventory. That's going to change, and you see hundreds of billions of CAD of semiconductor plants being announced in Europe and the U.S., across the world. So that supply is going to catch up. It might take a little while, but these are so important for us to be able to make cars in the global economy. That utilization should pick up. What I'm talking about is our overall book is increasing and gaining momentum without some of these supply chain issues being resolved. As that improves, as shipping normalizes and you still have backups at ports across the world, especially in the West Coast of the U.S., as that improves, we should see more momentum there. So we should be looking at good commercial growth over the next several quarters. Now, Rod, the discussion around net interest margins has been beaten to death, and I will fully admit that there are a lot of the factors that are out of the bank's control. Talking the macro environment a little bit in terms of mix. But one of the interesting factors that I've been very interested in is deposits in terms of the growth that we've seen over, actually even pre-pandemic, but especially through the pandemic, how sticky do you think the deposits are going to be going forward when we hit a normal environment, if and when we do? What impact do you think that will have on the evolution of margins moving forward? Yeah. Well, let's circle back to the financial crisis in City National Bank. It was independent public company then, but again, it was a flight to quality bank in the U.S. You saw a few flight to quality banks in the U.S. grow deposits significantly during the financial crisis. But that deposit growth slowed after the financial crisis, but it continued. City National continued to grow deposits. We would expect that to happen at City National again this time, as well as in our Canadian banking franchise. So we expect deposit growth to moderate and come down substantially and hopefully for a little while anyway, not forever, but come down below the loan growth. But the deposit growth has been so strong. At City National last quarter excluding sweep balances from our U.S. wealth businesses, was up to close to 30%. In Canadian banking, we've been in the high teens. Even looking at the most recent levels, they are continuing to grow. They're not coming off yet. So I think deposit growth is sticky. Why? Because our clients want to bank with us, and so we are making ourselves more important to those clients and more valuable with the technology that we're building out, with the capability that we're building out, with the advice that we're giving to our clients, such that we maintain and retain those balances and grow those balances as opposed to shunning those balances. We welcome that growth. That's going to help our net interest income, our net margin going forward, as we're able to put those deposits into loan growth going forward. Right now, it's a combination of loan growth and securities and money with central banks. That puts a big hamper on the denominator, which knocks down NIM. But net interest income has bottomed out, and we're growing across both franchises, and that's going to be a positive for us. I'm glad you brought up City National because wealth management in general had been pushed to the side really in terms of a solid bill. It was good to have, but largely ignored. Through the pandemic, we've actually seen the growth in earnings for Royal on both sides of the border. What is the outlook moving forward, both in the U.S. as well as in Canada? What can we expect to see in terms of Royal's outlook for Is this exuberance for the markets for retail investors going to continue, or should we expect to see that level off to a certain degree? Yeah. Thanks for that. If you look at our deposit growth in Canadian banking, we've basically turned approximately 25% of those into investment in funds and put it to work in the market for our clients. We don't have an objective for that. That enables us to do financial planning for our clients. Where it makes sense, we'll put the money into a balance fund, an equity fund, a fixed income fund, depending on the needs of our clients and what their objectives are. We don't have an objective of 50% or 40% or anything like that. Those businesses benefit from these deposit flows, and they benefit from our recruiting, from our technology. If you look in the U.S., at our U.S. wealth management platform, we're growing financial advisors and assets under administration faster than even the bigger U.S. peers out there. In Canada, we've had a track record for doing that for a number of years for our Dominion Securities franchise that continues to grow, continues to take share, continues to outperform, and our global asset management franchise, where again, we are taking share. Our net sales through the first nine months of the year were a record, and we expect that momentum to continue. Yes, we benefit from stronger markets, but we also benefit from that advice and then the outperformance that we're able to give to our clients. With City National, obviously the growth has been exemplary. It's been a huge win for the bank. Do you anticipate to plant more flags geography for the brand? Or are we looking at just ongoing organic growth in the cities that you currently have? Yeah. City National, we have a multi-pronged approach for growth, which we've been underway with. Yes, we've been growing geographically. Since the acquisition, we've been growing on the East Coast significantly. We've been following that entertainment vertical into Atlanta, Nashville, New York. Broadway is reopening, I believe, today, and we have a number of clients there. Certainly within California, we've been doubling down our geography there. We're under-penetrating a lot of our markets from a market share standpoint. That's because we're nimble and we provide a differentiated product and services. So we have been growing from a geographic standpoint. We've been adding bankers where others haven't been adding bankers. But we've been also strategically growing in the mortgage space with wealthier clients. So these are Canadian-like quality mortgages with low LTVs, high FICO scores, very low risk, but good returns. That's a good way for us to then introduce City National to those clients. We're seeing that as a way to attract new clients to the franchise. Then we have our mid-market strategy, which is kind of that space between City National and Capital Markets. We launched that initiative less than a year ago, and it is outpacing our expectations and objectives. So often when you have a business case as a CFO, you're skeptical of what those results might look like. This one, I'll tell you, they are doing a great job of surprising me on the upside. That's because clients out there want to bank with City National and the capability that we can also bring in with our Capital Markets franchise. It's a win-win for our clients. Then, oh, by the way, those wealthier clients, we can serve them both through our City National wealth products, our City National banking, and we can also introduce our U.S. wealth franchise as well. Rod, on the residential mortgages in the U.S., can you remind me how Royal funds those? Are you moving more towards a Canadian-style funding for the mortgages, or is it still going out into the market and securitizing those products? Yeah, no, these are all jumbo high net worth. A lot of these are not going to be something that you can securitize to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. They are staying on balance sheet. Right now, I mentioned the near 30% deposit growth. So within our risk appetite, we would love to bring more clients in with these style of mortgages. We have surplus funding in the U.S. That's not an issue right now for City National. Well, when you talk about risk profile, credit is significantly less of a concern today than it was even six months ago, let alone a year ago. I do have to ask, the credit evolution that we're seeing right now. We're at historically low levels from my standpoint, outside of government support being removed, I don't see a major uptick moving forward. What is your outlook for the credit environment, and when do you think that Royal's credit experience will be hitting a more normalized level, whatever that may be? Yeah, if you look at the core underlying trends for credit, right? Employment is positive. Inflation can be bad, and having lived in the '70s, it would be really bad for the economy. Some wage inflation, especially for many Canadians, Americans, is a positive. A lot of these are positives from a credit perspective, job growth, commercial growth, and then you also have extra cash in our clients' accounts, and that's both on the retail and the commercial side. All of that is a positive, even when the government support comes off. Those are very positive from a credit trend standpoint. You look at our basis points of Stage 3 losses or impaired losses, they're single digits, and traditionally it's in the 25-30 basis point range. Now, we'll start to migrate up towards that 25 basis points. Or how long it's going to take to get there? Is it a year? Is it two years? I'm not exactly sure. My crystal ball won't tell me that. It's going to take some time for those losses to return because of all the extra cash and the strong economic growth. Oh, by the way, if those losses do come back faster than we anticipate, we built CAD 2.5 billion of loan loss reserves during the pandemic, and we've released only CAD 1 billion of that. We still have an extra CAD 1.5 billion of reserves if those losses do accelerate. We can utilize those reserves against those. I don't think that is going to necessarily happen anytime soon. Well then, Rod, expanding on that point. The Stage 1 and 2 allowances arguably are way higher than what I believe they should be today. But of course, again, visibility, like you said, crystal ball. In terms of releasing those Stage 1 and 2 allowances that you still have, is it more waiting to see how the Delta variant and the fourth, be it fifth wave comes through? Is this going to be more a wait-and-see approach, or can we continue to see those reserves being released and helping to bolster the bottom line? I would expect some of those reserve releases to continue. How fast is it going to happen is dependent on the economy. It is dependent on the Delta variant. It is dependent on the rest of the world getting vaccinated so another variant doesn't come back and hurt the economy again. Our reserves are prudent and within GAAP, and we are going to continue to monitor those, but we are not in a rush to release those. Plus, I mentioned all that loan growth. We are growing our loan book, so we are not going to be able to release all of that because you have to maintain reserves for that loan growth that we are seeing in accordance with GAAP as well. So Rod, we are coming through, or at least coming out of an environment that was lower revenue growth, and yet expectations are that revenue should succeed as long as things fall into place like we expect. Royal has done a very good job in terms of controlling costs, and I guess a hat tip should go towards you for that. But in terms of what should we expect for expense growth moving forward for Royal, and can you remind me of what your guidance or what your targets are over medium term? Yeah, thanks. It is a team effort. I will tell you, we embarked on a zero-based budgeting initiative a couple of years ago. That really helped us identify work that was unnecessary and that we could take out. It also identified where we didn't have to grow spending, and that was a key thing. Because we are growing market share, we are growing distribution, we are growing our footprint. So if you can leverage the scale that we have, and we benefit from that scale. Don't get me wrong, that scale benefits us. We can add more accounts, more customers without adding as much cost as many other banks. But if you look over the last six or seven quarters, if you strip out things like variable comp on higher wealth management and capital markets earnings, stock-based comp, and foreign exchange, our expense growth has been relatively flattish. Now, it's not going to always be that way. Part of that is we invested for growth pre-pandemic, and we significantly ramped up our technology spend. We were able to harvest that technology spend and digitization to be more efficient and to be more relevant to our clients and grow that client base. Again, you're growing, you're able to grow expenses at a slower rate. That is certainly a benefit. There's also the discipline that I mentioned. I would expect there to be a little bit more uptick, and we're not going to be able to keep those discretionary costs flat for long. You're going to see travel pick up a bit, right? It's not going to pick up to 100%, but it's going to pick up. You're going to see business development costs. You're going to see other costs start to grow a little bit, as well as some inflation. You see some inflation out there for certain roles. But we're managing that, and I think we're going to continue to manage that relatively well. I think we gave on the last call guidance of low single digit on discretionary cost growth. Expenses may be higher if our wealth business continues to grow at that double digit. We're going to pay out in accordance with our compensation plans. But that's a win-win if we do that. Rod, a little bit further on technology, because I think that everyone fully understands the benefits in terms of not only cost savings through digitization, but also the ability to get additional clients, bring in revenue growth. But the outlook for technology spend, I don't want you to put a number on it because I know you're not going to. But is the outlook for technology spend over the next couple of years, is the inflation going to be a bit lower than what we've seen in the past in terms of have we passed a hurdle in terms of revamping the systems, getting Royal up to where it wants to be, and the ongoing technology investment is going to be for innovation, not necessarily for making sure that the structure is in place? Yeah. I'll cover two things. I want to cover ventures as part of this because that's a technology innovation spend for us. I mentioned when Dave McKay came in as CEO, he really doubled down on technology and innovation and growing market share, and that worked. As a result, during the pandemic, we were able to slow that down and still win in the marketplace. Now we can start to ramp that up a little bit again. But more importantly, or just as importantly I should say, is our investments in ventures. This was undertaken about three years ago. This has been very successful because what it does is open the funnel of when we engage with our clients. We're able to grow our client base through non-traditional or more fintech-like acquisition channels. Ownr, O-W-N-R, comes to mind. And we've added 40,000 new accounts, two-thirds new to the bank. So that's going to accelerate our commercial growth. And again, this brings in the totality of the relationship, the credit as well as the deposit side, the payment side, the advice side. And it brings capabilities that banks traditionally don't bring to clients. And we have a number of initiatives on the venture side built around ecosystems of where our banking products are relevant and how to increase that funnel with those clients, whether it's around home with OJO, Dr.Bill on the medical profession. We have a number of these channels. And now we're able to accelerate that investment into ventures because now we're seeing revenue streams both on the venture side where they're getting fees and also we're getting fees there, but also on the banking side where we're bringing in actual banking accounts, deposit accounts and lending accounts and other accounts. And then wealth management can come with that as well. Individual owners are great sources of retail growth as well. So that investment is now becoming a flywheel, if you will, for us, for our growth. So Rod, with RBC Ventures, now correct me if I'm wrong, but this is more of an internal germination of ideas and technology. But what's the bank's approach versus using ventures to develop your own technology versus going out and doing M&A for fintech in terms of there's something that pops up outside of something that you may have developed in-house? We're doing both, actually. We've done fintech acquisitions. We did Exactuals in City National, which has been a great fit into our entertainment vertical there and has been able to again deepen our market share there in a market that we're already winning. But then you look at our ventures and yes, we're bringing in people who don't think, look, or act like me and are a lot younger than me and think differently and are very innovative. And they are kind of kept off to the side so that we can infect their thinking. And yes, we have those incubators, but we're also doing it with third parties. And so we're taking investment stakes in those third parties. And those then we're linking into our ventures because we know that there's already fintech technology out there, and we're able to put in VC funding into some of those. If it makes sense, we'll do a bigger fintech. But the math sometimes is difficult for a company to become profitable in 10 years to pay multi-billion CAD. It's tougher for RBC to do something like that. We found that we have great success doing it through the Ventures initiative as well as other incubators we have around North America for technology. Rod, sticking with fintech, a theme that's developing in Canada very slowly is open banking. I wanted to find out what's Royal's take on open banking and what will your response be if and when it actually comes to fruition within Canada. Yeah. Open banking, you want to make sure there's security and privacy and cyber risks are taken care of. But we see this as an opportunity for us to grow market share. You look at our RBC Vantage products, and this is something where we bring the totality of the bank to our customers to enhance the rewards, to enhance the value proposition. You compare that with our competitors who are requiring minimum balances. We believe that open banking would be a benefit for us. We have very low attrition as it is, because once a client comes in, they love our products and services and our offerings and our advice. So open banking would be a positive for us. Fantastic. One final on technology spend. How much are you actually able to share cross-border in terms of your platforms? I know that Royal has a significant scale in Canada. Your U.S. operations only add to that. Is it truly additive, or is there actually some disparate technology spend that needs to happen in each of the geographies separately? It's a little of both. We had a conversation with the leadership team in the U.S. about that, about a number of things, but that topic came up. It's not like you can plug and play a mobile banking app in Canada and then take it to the U.S. But you can take elements of it, you can take design techniques and formats as well as ideas and bring it there and then do it more effectively there and not do it in a vacuum and build it from scratch. You can do it such that we link the two, and the integration between our U.S. and Canadian technology teams has never been greater. Our involvement on both sides of the border has never been greater. But it's not just a plug and play. It's not that simple. The regulations, the systems, the networks are also very different. So it's a little bit of both. Okay. Finishing up our discussion on expenses. You mentioned travel potentially increasing but not hitting the same level. What other factors with return to office are going to impact expense growth moving forward? Also, what is the evolution of a branch or the branch footprint going to look like over the next several years because of lessons learned through the pandemic? Well, certainly safety and wellbeing of our employees and customers comes first on the return to work, and we're taking a slow and measured approach to that, and continue to do so. We have employees back in the office, such as myself today. Then we've had a number of employees who are serving clients who have been in the office for the last 18 months in the branches. They continue to go in every day. So we'll continue to manage that. We have to manage our real estate costs down, but it's not going to be where you take 50% of your real estate costs out day one. These are long-term leases. That's why you haven't seen commercial real estate prices deteriorate, and you've actually seen huge demand when buildings have gone up for sale because there still is a benefit to working together, and things of that nature. We're going to have to bring some of those costs down. But at the same time, we see it's an important part of our culture for us to get together in a safe way. And we'll continue to explore that as we work our way through this pandemic. Rod, one of the surprising things for me has been the strength of the capital markets coming out of the pandemic. Now, one should have expected an increase, but the level of activity we've seen in the markets has been absolutely extraordinary. What is Royal seeing in terms of the pipeline moving forward? As well, what is your push in terms of the league tables, in terms of your market share? Because if we look back 10 years ago in the U.S., you've moved up the league tables at a spectacular pace. What's the drive moving forward in terms of market share in the U.S.? Because, of course, you also still hold the dominant share in Canada. Yeah. We're bigger in the U.S. than we are in Canada, and that has helped us. And we continue to invest in that platform and grow that platform organically. We've invested in technology, we've invested in talent. We've just added teams to technology, aerospace, and a couple other sectors, and healthcare, and we continue to build those capabilities out, and that's serving us well. Right now, the M&A pipeline is strong. The LevFin pipeline is strong. Again, you talk about our diversification. Even within capital markets, great diversification. Trading was gangbusters for five or so quarters. I mean, just absolutely fantastic. And that had to come back to earth, right? Things just don't stay up forever on a volume standpoint because it's client-driven activity. As that came back, all of a sudden, our advisory business has improved. Oh, by the way, all during this time, we have two other core businesses there. Our lending business, where utilization rates are at an all-time low. So that business has upward potential. Then we also have a strong central funding group, which is a repo business. Again, given the liquidity out there, those margins have come down, and that's okay. We can ride that out because of the diversification out there. DCM and ECM ebb and flow a little bit, depending on the markets. But we've had, what? Seven quarters in a row of over CAD 1 billion of pre-provision earnings. Then as FICC and equities came back to earth, still above 2019 levels, which is great and pre-pandemic, but investment banking had two record quarters in a row. So that's a strong business. We continue to invest in that and grow that business. Having that geographic as well as industry diversification and capability diversification will benefit us going forward. Rud, Royal recently increased your disclosures around interest rate sensitivity. I guess we have you and your team to thank for that because that's great. I don't want to go into the numbers, but I'd like to discuss the philosophy that Royal has in terms of managing the net margin. How does your treasury group go about trying to manage the interest rate sensitivities, and what do you and do you not try to hedge on a go-forward basis? Well, you look at the core value of the franchise, right? Asset generation and outsized asset generation through our distribution and our people and our advice. Also the deposit gathering. If you're bringing in deposits, core relationship deposits that are almost zero cost, you can sit on those for a little while. You don't need to invest. We don't need to invest those into five-year assets right now when interest rates are at all-time lows. That would be a mistake. Hedging could be, actually, it could be a big mistake and it would be a big mistake in certain instances. You want to hedge naturally through your balance sheet and then take the risk off, but also be fuel for growth and have that asset sensitivity and take on more deposits, even though we're not getting the value of those that we would if interest rates were at 1%, 2%, 3%. We can wait that out because of our core franchise is strong enough that we can take a little bit of hit to NIM, which is a calculation, because we're not really taking a hit to net interest income. Again, it's about keeping those relationships. We will hedge where it makes sense, but not at the expense of future growth and not to take away the core value, especially the core deposits. You don't want to lock those in longer term when the interest rate yield curve looks like it does today. Rud, moving to capital. I mean, the bank's regulatory capital levels are exceptionally strong. I argue that there's a lot of excess capital in the system. Granted, your hands are kind of tied to a certain degree given the restrictions that the regulator has put in place. Two things I'd like to discuss. One, the outlook for organic growth. Moving forward, if we actually do see lending volumes increase and mix shifting, how much do we think risk-weighted assets inflation is going to peel back in terms of the internally generated capital the bank has been able to generate? Secondarily, if your only other opportunity outside of organic growth is making acquisitions, how high a priority is that for Royal right now, given what you see as an opportunity for organic growth as well as all the other external factors like price for potential assets? Price for what? What's that part? Potential assets, potential targets. Okay. Yeah. I believe we're going to grow risk-weighted assets disproportionately to our peers because of that market share growth I mentioned in each of our core businesses. We expect and plan to continue to grow market share, which yields risk-weighted assets, which does eat into that internal capital generation, but not fully. It doesn't take it away. Right now our dividend payout ratio is in the 30s. Our target is 40%-50%. So if and when the rules get relaxed, then we would be able to take that dividend up. We would be able to incorporate modest share buybacks. We always are ready for client-driven organic growth within our risk appetite. So we're not going down the risk curve. We're not taking all kinds of crazy risky assets. We're going to grow with our client base and then increase that client base to grow even more. As you said, there would be capital for acquisitions. Dave McKay has said we would be willing to do an acquisition if it made sense. However, a lot of the targets out there, potential targets out there are trading at huge premiums, and also it needs to be a good cultural fit and a strategic fit. We can't just transfer value from our shareholders to the acquired company shareholders. It has to be a reasonable price and then provide an avenue for organic growth. That's exactly what City National was. It was expensive at the time. In current times, it's not. It was a great avenue for organic growth for us, and it's continued its strategy and enhanced its strategy since the acquisition over five years ago. Fantastic. Rod, we're getting close to the end. We went through my agenda, and I know you talked about all the areas where you think growth is going to come from, but is there anything in your portfolio or your list of projects that you're really excited about that we haven't touched upon? Well, hopefully you heard a little bit of excitement on RBC Ventures, on our organic growth opportunities across our core Canadian banking franchise, our wealth management U.S. and Canadian franchises, Capital Markets. Our insurance business is growing. We have great diversification, and we continue to invest in talent and continue to grow market share. I think we've covered a lot of the premise for investing in RBC. Thank you for having me. That's great, Rod. No, thanks for your insights. We really appreciate it.