Great. Okay, great. Hi. I am here with Ally Financial. My name is Ruth Nagle. I am from Fidelity, and I am with Russ. I would like to just welcome you back to BAAB. You have been here a couple of times already, and we really appreciate you taking the time to come by and talk to us. Just to set the stage, Ally is the largest auto lender in the U.S., based in Detroit, but also does quite a bit in insurance, products around vehicle protections, et cetera, and a corporate finance business that is growing very nicely. Russ Hutchinson, CFO, you have been at Ally since 2023, so just over three years. I think before that, you spent more than two decades at Goldman Sachs in investment banking.
That is right.
Thank you.
Great. Thanks, Ruth. It is a pleasure to be here.
I would like to just set the stage a little bit, because there has been a lot going on at Ally over the last couple of years. You have a new CEO that started two years ago, and I think there has been a renewed focus on strategy. I think you call it Focused Forward strategy.
That is right.
Have set some ambitious goals on profitability. I would just maybe just setting the stage over the last couple of years, if you could talk about where and how you feel you have done on the strategy.
Yeah, absolutely, and thanks for the question, Ruth. You are right. We launched our Focused Forward strategy at the beginning of 2025, and we are really pleased with how it has allowed us to simultaneously increase our profitability and increase our resilience. We are really proud of the momentum that we have across all three of our core platforms. Our dealer engagement in auto finance has been fantastic, and it has driven really strong application flow, which we have translated into really great origination vintages. Our corporate finance business has great traction with longstanding clients. In that business, we like to be the preferred financial provider for a small set of really strong long-term relationships, and that strategy has paid off really nicely for us.
Our retail bank, Ally Bank, has once again continued to drive really great customer growth, and that, to us, is really a testament to the strength of the value proposition, the strength of the brand. We continue to be pleased with the momentum that we see across all three of our core platforms. That's translated into increased profitability. If you look at profitability today, you take the third quarter that we just reported versus the third quarter from two years ago, it's pretty remarkable the growth in pre-tax income, the expansion in ROE. It's really driven by the things that we've been talking about for the last couple of years. Expansion in our net interest margin, growth in other revenue, decline in net charge-offs, particularly in the retail loan portfolio, and really strong expense discipline throughout the organization.
Combined now with capital discipline and the ability to repurchase shares, we've really delivered on a lot of the things that we've been talking about for the last couple of years. We've done it at the same time that we've been really increasing the resilience of the organization. You can look at the organization a bunch of different ways. You can look at it in terms of the fact that we're carrying more capital than we were a couple of years ago. We've got stronger capital generation through higher earnings. We've got less credit risk by virtue of shedding the credit card business and the point-of-sale lending businesses. We've got less interest rate risk. We've taken a number of steps over the last few years to limit the impact of changes in rates on the business.
From our perspective, the way we look at it, we've kind of accomplished two things simultaneously in increasing the profitability and increasing the resilience, and we're not done. We have more runway to go. We feel really good about our trajectory to getting towards a mid-teens return that we've been talking about, and we think the progress that we've made over the last couple of years should give everyone comfort that that's the direction that we're going in.
Great. Thank you. I'm going to just start right in with credit, because I think that's top of mind for people.
Yeah.
I think on the last earnings call, you talked about some higher early-stage delinquencies in late 2025, early 2026 vintages. But you also were indicating that 2027 losses would be similar to 2026. Could you kind of just describe and double-click on what you're seeing in the portfolio, and probably more importantly, what gives you the confidence in the outlook of that?
Yes. Look, I'd say, maybe I just take it up a level. We're pleased with the performance that we see in the portfolio overall. From our perspective, as we look at how this year has played out, it's played out very much the way that we expected it to play out. We started the year, we talked about a guide of retail auto NCOs between 1.8% and 2%, and we kind of pointed people towards the middle of the guide, and we feel very much, sitting here in November, we're on track to be near the middle of that original guide.
At the time when we put out the guide and at the time when we set those expectations, we talked about the fact that we were seeing really great support from low flow to loss rates and strong used vehicle prices in the beginning of the year. Stronger, quite frankly, than we would have expected. We expected that those conditions would continue to be favorable, but some of that support would abate as we moved through the year. It's played out exactly as we expected. When we talked at the beginning of the year about the fact that you were seeing those year-over-year quarterly declines in NCOs and delinquencies, and as we got towards the back part of the year, that would stop and maybe even potentially reverse a little bit. That's how we've seen it. It's played out exactly the way that we expected.
From that perspective, we're pleased with kind of what we've seen in terms of credit. We are monitoring credit very carefully. We are seeing the impact of inflation and gas prices on the consumer, and we see that in our book. We also see the benefit of low unemployment rates. We're still seeing a consumer that's resilient. We're seeing higher delinquency, but at the same time, we're seeing lower flow to loss as consumers are able to make up the gaps in their budget on a month-to-month basis and are more moving between delinquency buckets as opposed to flowing to loss. We made a number of improvements to our servicing in terms of how we approach servicing, given the environment, and those improvements are paying dividends for us in terms of our ability to manage credit.
I would say overall, we are pretty pleased with the way that things are developing. It is very much on track with what we expected. You mentioned the late 2025 and early 2026 vintages specifically. We have talked a lot about those vintages as we have seen our experience develop on them. We talked in particular about the Q1 2026 vintage, and that was an example of a vintage that was richer. Richer both in terms of the credit that we put on the book as well as the yield that we got in the first quarter. We talked about it back in April when we released our results for the first quarter, and we talked about the fact that it came out richer in both senses, both in terms of yield and credit.
Then you saw in the second quarter of this year, we went the other direction where we had a vintage that was tighter on credit and also less rich in terms of yield. I would like to take folks' focus away from specific quarterly vintages and really just think about what we originate over the course of a full year. As we look at 2026 and how it is evolving, we think the 2026 vintage overall, when you look at the full year, will probably look a lot like the 2025 vintage. Think a low to mid-40s S-tier mix. As you look at that vintage, and we have talked about it, higher yield from that Q1 vintage, kind of higher, more rich credit mix, and you are seeing higher delinquency, and we are seeing that higher delinquency.
Again, very much in line with what we would expect for the credit that we put on the book in the first quarter. Look, again, I just steer people towards looking at full-year vintages and taking into account the fact that our underwriting is dynamic. That means that we are constantly looking at our book on a very granular basis, and we are making adjustments to our underwriting on a real-time basis week by week as we tweak for very granular sub-segments and segments that are underperforming our expectations or overperforming our expectations. That can lead to a little bit of movement on a quarter-to-quarter basis, but again, on a full-year basis, we think it positions us to be able to manage our book dynamically and ultimately get to a better risk-adjusted return.
All right. Thank you. That was very thorough. Why do not we move to the other big driver, which is net interest margin. We have had a big shift in the interest rate outlook this year.
Yeah.
But you've still stood by the guidance that you provided at the end of the year with an exit NIM of around 370. Can you just talk about, again, given the change in the macro environment, the rate expectations, how do you expect that 370 to go going forward? And I guess ultimately getting to the high threes that you had in your target.
Yeah. I think that's a great question, and we've certainly seen meaningful NIM expansion in our book over the course of the last two years.
Yeah.
So we're really pleased with how it's developing, and that gives us confidence in our ability to make it through the final quarter, the last inning, whatever you want to call it, and get to the high threes. I'd say, a lot of the factors that have been in place and have contributed to our NIM expansion over the last two years are still very much there. In particular, I look at the growth of our retail auto loan and corporate finance books. Those are our higher margin assets, and those are strong contributors to our NIM expansion. Both of those books have been growing and outpacing the rest of the balance sheet. At the same time, we've got a mortgage loan book that is in runoff and sheds about $1 billion per year from our mortgage loan balances.
Within our investment securities book, we've got the kind of older, lower-yielding mortgage securities that are also running off. So, we have this ongoing benefit that we've been capitalizing on for the last couple of years to drive NIM expansion, and that's going to very much continue, and that provides an underlying upward force on our net interest margin over time, and that's very much in place. Now, just like you saw over the last couple of years, it's not a straight line. Excuse me. As you look at our net interest margin on a quarter-to-quarter basis, there are different factors that impact it. The rate environment is one factor that impacts our net interest margin, certainly on a quarter-to-quarter basis. You saw it as we were in a falling rate environment, you saw that impact.
You see that now that we've pivoted towards a rising rate environment. One way to think about it is to think about various assets and liabilities that play into our net interest margin expansion in a given quarter. I will start with a rising rate environment, because that feels like the environment we are in today. As you see a rising rate environment, our short-dated assets, so our commercial assets, which are floating rate, our hedges, which are floating rate, those assets respond first. In the near term, we screen asset sensitive, because it is those short near-term assets that dominate the net interest margin movement. Over a couple of quarters, deposit repricing kicks in, and that 60%-70% beta on our deposit book kicks in, and we move towards more liability sensitive, driven by those particular liabilities.
As you go a little bit further out, the portfolio yield on the retail auto loan starts to move up in response to origination yields that come up, where, again, on that asset, we typically see about an 80% beta with respect to Fed funds. You see those different assets and liabilities that tend to dominate the net interest margin movement at different points in time after a change in rates. Over the long term, again, the balance sheet has the ability to adjust, and we have that underlying gravitational pull of replacing some of these under-yielding assets on the mortgage side with higher-yielding assets on the retail auto and corporate finance side.
Okay, thanks. I mean, you have also had some pressure on NIM through lease losses. I feel like you kind of think that that pressure might moderate next year. I mean, what gives you confidence that that is the case?
That is a really good point, Ruth. I should have mentioned that earlier. Lease losses did present a headwind during this year to our net interest margin expansion. Again, it is a manageable headwind that we have worked through. Again, all those underlying trends that I talked about overwhelm the pressure we saw from losses on lease returns over the course of the year. Now, those losses are kind of interesting, because if you look at our lease book overall, and you look at the vehicles that have come back this year, for the most part, we generate gains. We are pretty pleased with the performance of our lease book overall. That being said, there are specific models that have been impacted by Stellantis recalls, and those are really what are driving the lease losses. It started last year with recalls on the Stellantis plug-in hybrid electric vehicles.
Think the Wrangler 4xe, for example. Those recalls really impacted the residual values of those vehicles, and we saw losses as a result of that. This year, Stellantis expanded those recalls across a wider swath of vehicles, including some of their internal combustion engine vehicles. We are seeing pressure on those vehicles as well. That pressure that you are seeing is really limited to those vehicles that have been impacted by these recalls. The rest of the book, the broader book is actually, we are pleased with the performance there. As you go into 2027, what you see is the concentration of vehicles coming back from lease is going to shift. It is going to shift as a result of the leases that we were underwriting effectively three years prior.
You may already know, but we entered into an agreement with a battery electric vehicle OEM back in, I think it was the first quarter of 2024. Those leases come with residual value protection. As you go into 2027, you will see the lease returns migrate towards these vehicles that have the lease residual value protection on them. In addition, if you look at our 2024, 2025, and 2026 lease originations, outside of what has the residual value protection, it is just more diversified by OEM. You will see effectively a concentration of vehicles coming back as we go through 2027 that is, on the one hand, more diversified and has a higher concentration of vehicles that have that residual value protection in place.
As we move through the quarters of 2027, we expect this headwind to abate and really not be an issue as we get to the back half of that year.
Russ, have you sized what that headwind was for 2026?
Yeah, I don't think we've talked about it publicly, though. It's a headwind that was meaningful and significant, but again, very manageable. Obviously, as you pointed out earlier, we've held our guidance for the year. We've been able to manage through that. I think that's one of the examples that I'd like to raise when I talk about how we've made the business more resilient, and that includes making our returns more resilient. We've been able to manage through this headwind and others, and the third quarter, we still printed a 13% core return on tangible common equity. I think that speaks to the resilience that we've built into the business model.
Great. Maybe just moving on to auto pricing. There was a nice rebound in the quarter on retail auto origination yields. Can you just help us frame what drove the increase and the difference pricing between the movement in the benchmark rate and mix, and what the competitive environment is like?
Yeah. I think you framed it well, Ruth, in terms of the different things that contribute to that originated yield in a quarter. There's obviously the movement in benchmark rates, which we respond to. There's also mix, and then there's also the competitive environment, and just our posture towards being able to price in the competitive environment. I'd say all of those things played a role in what you saw in terms of that expansion of originated yield during the quarter. Maybe I'll start first with benchmark rates. We've moved, we've pivoted now to a rising rate cycle. We look at our auto book, typically we expect about an 80% pricing beta with respect to Fed funds. Look, that's a simplification. We look at Fed funds, we look at swaps, we look at a number of factors in the rate environment.
Generally, we kind of expect about an 80% beta. The movement in benchmark rates was supportive of higher origination yields during the quarter. In terms of mix, we took our S-tier mix down a little bit between second quarter and third quarter, but not a ton. That was a factor, but not a big factor. Then there's the competitive dynamic in our posture with respect to pricing, and I'd say, we're very focused on risk-adjusted return and on making sure that we get price in the market where that pricing is available, and the third quarter just provided great opportunity for us. We capitalized on really strong application volumes, and we were able to translate that into leverage, both in terms of pricing and in terms of credit. I'd say that leverage continued throughout the quarter.
When I think about the originated yield, it was higher exiting the quarter than kind of what you see reflected in the originated yield for the quarter as a whole. I think we exited the quarter in the high 9s.
We feel pretty good about kind of where we are from a pricing perspective on the auto side and where that originated yield is. We think it does provide support to help the portfolio yield edge up over time.
Okay. I'm going to switch, because I want to talk about corporate finance a little bit. I feel like that's business that has had great returns. It's growing very nicely. I think assets are up like 40%.
Yeah, that's right.
Can you just maybe unpack that a little bit of where's this growth coming from? How have you been able to kind of grow and still maintain the credit discipline and keep the profitability profile so high?
Absolutely. Corporate finance is one of our higher-margin businesses, and it's a business that we've leaned into with our Focused Forward strategy. It's a business we've been in now for over 25 years, and the business has shown a tremendous amount of resilience in terms of margins, as well as in terms of its overall credit performance through multiple cycles. The business is based on long-term relationships. We partner with strong institutional investors that we've known for years, in many cases, decades. We focus on leading transactions, where our partners are putting a significant amount of capital that comes in behind us. In this business, Michael and I like to talk about relevant scale. It's obviously a very large market, and we're a small participant in the market. But for the institutional investors that we partner with, we want to be their preferred financing partner.
We want to be their leading finance provider. We don't want to kind of be an also-ran player. When we talk about relevant scale, we're really talking in the context of our long-term relationships, with a really strong set of leading institutional investors. Fortunately, those investors, as you'd expect, have had a significant amount of momentum in their businesses, so we've been able to grow with them. When you dissect the growth that you've seen in that business over the last year or so, it's really driven by, for the most part, growth with our existing relationships, and for the most part, in our existing verticals. We're growing with partners that we've worked with for years, and we're growing in businesses that we've known for years.
That, again, is in a business that we have been in for a long time and has demonstrated really strong resilience. Now, it is a business we are leaning in, so in addition to growth within our existing verticals, we are also looking at very carefully, with a lot of discipline, additional verticals that we can grow into. We launched our energy vertical, I think it was just over a year ago. We did it the way that we operate in that business. We did it carefully. We did it selectively in terms of bringing on the right people to help us do that. We are growing it with a lot of discipline, slowly, and with a real focus on credit and on risk-adjusted returns. So, yeah, that is a business that has grown nicely in light of the Focused Forward strategy, and it is deliberate.
It is exactly where we want to be growing.
It sounds like it is very relationship-driven, that-
Yeah
You have longstanding relationships that you are working with.
Absolutely.
Yeah. Okay. All right, just to keep things moving, I am going to move to the other side of the balance sheet and talk about, I would love to talk about deposits and given the rate cycle and expectations for continued rate hikes. Can you just talk about what you are seeing in the competitive environment? I think Ally has not. You have not been the top payer for a while. That has not been the strategy.
Yeah.
How are you approaching this? After that, just to prepare you, I want to ask you about Muse.
Okay. Excellent. Maybe just start a big picture on our deposit business. I mean, we are delighted by the customer growth we are seeing. That traction that we have with customers, we really think is a credit to the franchise, the brand, the product offering, the overall customer value proposition that we think is very compelling. Rate is obviously an important part of the value proposition, but it is not the only part. The way we have been managing that business over the last few years, we have not sought to be the top rate payer. In fact, as rates were coming down, we were often the leader in terms of bringing our rates down. We hope to carry that discipline into this rising rate environment as well. But we really like the traction that we see in this business, just based on that overall compelling all-around customer value proposition.
You see it. I mean, we have been growing our customer count by 7% year-over-year for the past few quarters. I would challenge you to benchmark that against any bank of our size. That is fantastic customer growth by any measure. Again, we are really proud of the way the customer has been responding to our franchise, and we think that is a strength for the institution going forward. It also reflects somewhat of a pivot in terms of our customer base as we migrate towards customers that are generally skewed towards Gen Z, millennial, skewed towards people who are engaging with our platform in multiple ways. So they will have multiple products across our spread of products, from savings to Ally Spend, which is a checking account, CDs, our Ally Invest product offering.
They're engaging with us in terms of getting other services and other value from our products, using things like our smart savings buckets. We're getting a more engaged customer, generally skewing towards some of the more current generations. Also, quite frankly, smaller balances. Still significant, approaching $10,000 balances to begin with, but we're skewing towards a customer that we expect will be less rate sensitive as we move forward. Quite frankly, at the same time, we're running off balances from some of our higher balance customers who tend to be a little bit more rate sensitive. We think that trade-off will work out for us in the long term because we've got enough momentum on the customer growth side to make up for it from a balance perspective.
Ultimately, we get to a customer that's more sticky, less rate sensitive, and is with us for more than just getting that top tick savings rate.
Then we have Muse that comes along that is all about trying to find the highest rate. I mean, what impact do you think that has potentially to the industry, to Ally, to customer behavior? It's not something that's happening today, but something that we're thinking about what could happen later.
Yeah. We spend a lot of time looking at AI search and just trying to understand where we stack up. You can imagine we have a number of people who are just running different prompts through the different AI search engines and looking at where we show up. We show up really well. I credit it to the fact that we've got a platform that we've been investing in and growing for 17 or 18 years. We're one of the pioneers in this field, and we've done it in a very customer-forward way that marries our approach to the business with our brand promise. So, we actually show up really nicely in AI search, and so far, it's probably been helpful to us in terms of being able to help us attract customers.
I think you have to remember that deposits, particularly the digital deposit business that we're in, it's always been a place where rate discovery was pretty transparent, right? From the time that we entered this business, customers have had the ability to compare rates across institutions pretty easily. Rate shopping is not new to this business, and that's why we understand that having a competitive rate is an important part of the value proposition, but it's not the only part. The traction that we have with customers and our ability to have grown our business the way we have over a long period of time, it really, in our view, is a strong proof point to the fact that while rate is important, it's not the only thing.
Even as the customer moves from traditional internet-based search for price discovery to AI-based price discovery, they're still looking at factors other than just rate, right? They're looking at the product offering, they're looking at the brand, they're looking at their ability to move money. They're looking at the broader customer value proposition. So again, transparent pricing in deposits is nothing new to us. We've built our business in that environment. Our business is built for it. So again, I think we feel pretty well-positioned. We're going to continue to invest in our value proposition to make sure that we stay that way.
Okay, great. I'm going to open, just take a pause and see if there's any questions in the audience. Just a second, Ryan. Right here.
Thanks. Hey, Russ. Ryan Nash, Goldman Sachs.
Great to see you, Ryan.
Hey, Russ. Good to see you too. Maybe build on the question that Ruth had asked. Lots of banks have been talking about competition in the auto markets. We have seen some of them have pulled back. Yet you have been able to improve price the last two quarters, particularly in the third quarter when you referenced that you closed at close to 10%. Maybe just talk about which parts of the market you are seeing greater competition, and where are the pockets of opportunity that you think the market is not appreciating and that you guys are getting really good returns? Thank you.
Sure. Look, I would say, one is competitors, particularly among the banks, the ebb and flow of competitors entering and exiting the market is not new to us. We have talked about that for the last three years as we have gone through different cycles where people were entering and people were exiting. I would say in some ways, that is helpful to us, because we are consistent and we are a consistent partner to our dealers. Our dealers get it. They are running businesses that in some cases extend across generations of a single family. Having a consistent long-term partner in the business is helpful to them. We think that is part of the secret to our success in terms of driving strong dealer engagement and relationships.
As you parse different parts of the market, look, the super prime part of the market is always super competitive and the margins are a little tougher. Where you tend to see the most ebb and flow in terms of competitive appetite tends to be as you move further down credit. We do not do a lot of the subprime business. It is a very small part of our book. Where we focus tends to be, it is prime. So neither super prime nor subprime, but prime paper. A lot of our business comes from the used portion of the dealer's lot as well. As you think about that competitive dynamic, we lead in a part of the market where arguably we have less of the heavy price and margin competition that you see in the prime book.
You're in the used part of the lot, not as much focus there from the OEMs as well. Also, quite frankly, it's a great product for the environment we live in today and where you have consumers who are looking for good, strong, reliable transportation at an affordable price. The used lot often provides the best value for that customer. We feel great from a competitive perspective in terms of where our sweet spot is. As you go lower in credit, that can be super helpful for the dealer in terms of being able to provide a solution. We use our pass-through program to provide that solution. We're up to about $1 billion a quarter now of pass-through volume. We're providing a great solution for the customer and the dealer, but it's not something that necessarily goes onto our balance sheet.
We're able to manage our credit profile appropriately. I'd say, I think where we really focus our attention is really helpful to us in terms of being able to manage the competitive dynamic. The fact that we take in so much application volume allows us to pivot and move from quarter-to-quarter. We're able to move our originations, our credit mix, and our underwriting to really get to where we think the best risk-adjusted return is within our risk appetite.
Any other questions? All right, I want to keep going then. I think another big part of the Focused Forward strategy is around capital, and you've started repurchasing shares. Would love to kind of hear more about the trajectory of, given the interest rate volatility, impacts of the AOCI coming along, like, how should we think about the cadence of capital return?
Great. When we embarked on, or when we restarted our share repurchase program, I guess it was at the end of last year, December of last year, we talked about a low and slow approach, right? That low and slow approach was really calibrated around the fact that we anticipated that there'd be some volatility in AOCI from rate movements, and we wanted to make sure that we had an approach to capital return where we could really execute on all the things that we wanted to execute on, right? We want to make sure that we can support the growth of our core platforms. We want to make sure that we can maintain healthy CET1 levels, and we want to be able to return capital to shareholders through both share repurchases and dividends. We called it the story of and.
It was very much calibrated around what we expected to see going forward. We have been pretty pleased. Things have played out the way we expected. Obviously, we did not anticipate the specific rate moves and the impact to AOCI, but we knew that was a possibility, and we prepared for it ahead of time in terms of just how we paced our share repurchases. Also, in terms of steps we have taken over the last couple of years to limit the impact of rate moves on AOCI. You have seen us take steps as far back as beginning of 2024. We moved some of our assets into HTM. We stepped up our hedging program.
Then you go into 2025 when we sold the card business, and we took some of the capital from that sale, and we used it to reposition a portion of the securities portfolio. All steps that we have taken to really limit the impact of rates on AOCI. When I look at where we are today, a few things I think that are helpful to us. Number one, we have increased our capital levels on an absolute basis, and so the heavy lifting behind our capital build is behind us. We have increased our profitability, and by virtue of doing that, we have increased our quarterly capital generation.
That has put us in the position where we are today, where again, I feel pretty good that we have executed on the promise we made of a story of and, not or, with respect to capital. More importantly, we can continue to do that. We can continue to take advantage of starting strong capital levels, strong capital generation, disciplined growth within our core platforms, and continue to execute on the story of and continue to both support the growth of our platforms and return capital to shareholders.
We have very little time left, and I want to talk about expenses because I think that is another area that you have really been able to show good expense control and seeing positive operating leverage. What does that look like as we finish out the year and think about opportunities on expenses going forward?
Yeah. I mean, we've been really pleased with all of our colleagues and the way that everyone has really rallied to put real good discipline around our expenses. What we've effectively done is we've put a lot of discipline around our expenses. We've streamlined quite a bit throughout the organization, and we've cut out unnecessary expenses. It's at the same time that we've been able to invest where we need to invest. Around AI, around cybersecurity, that growth that you're seeing in the core platforms are all areas where we've been able to invest even while holding the line on expenses overall, and that comes from that discipline.
Part of the expense story also came from the divestiture of some of the non-core businesses as we shed those businesses. Then we've taken advantage of the simpler overall organization to shed even more cost through the center of the organization. That story is behind us, the impact of the divestitures. What we'd expect going forward is, call it low single-digit expense growth over time, just respecting the fact that there's inflation and there's underlying growth of the core platforms. At the same time, there's just a tremendous amount of discipline that we're exercising across the institution and streamlining and a lot of benefit that we're getting from investments that we've been making over the last couple of years. Again, our expectation is to continue to drive positive operating leverage.
That is an important priority for us, and it's something that we look at as we manage our budgets from quarter-to-quarter, is making sure that we can demonstrate that.
Russ, thank you very much. We're out of time. We appreciate you sharing the time with us.
Awesome. Great. Thanks, Ruth.