Thanks again for joining us. next up, we have Citizens Financial. from Citizens, I'm delighted to welcome Chairman and CEO Bruce Van Saun. Bruce, thank you so much for being here. it's been an exciting time for the industry, but it's been even more exciting for Citizens, just given you've been busy.
Yep.
Would love to start out with, one, in terms of just the positioning of the franchise, given that you are in the midst of some of these merger integrations. In your view around how the Citizens franchise is positioned, and then the state of your clientele. Like, what are they telling you in terms of the macro outlook and economy?
Yeah. I think we're really pleased with how we enter the year here in 2023. We have a number of real important initiatives that we're driving on both the consumer bank and the commercial bank. At the same time, we're, you know, prepared for a coming storm in case we have one. We're playing strong defense, very top of the range on our capital ratios, very strong liquidity and funding position, keep building our reserve and being very disciplined and prudent on our risk appetite around lending. You know, what's exciting is I think you can't just go to one side of the ball and play defense. You have to also continue to play prudent offense.
I think the New York Metro play is a big one for us with the HSBC and Investors acquisitions. This is a big weekend upcoming, and Presidents' Weekend, I should say, when we convert Investors' core systems.
Mm-hmm.
We've already converted a number of their systems, the wealth systems, the mortgage have already been converted. This is the big one. We've got real traction on HSBC, all the metrics in terms of customer sentiment, colleague sentiment, sales. Deposit growth is very strong in the branches that we've already converted under the name. We're really focused on wealth. We've launched some new approaches to really deepen our relationships with our core consumer customers, and there could be a lot of growth coming from that if we're executing well on that. Citizens Pay, we've brought in a number of big partner relationships.
Sure
... over the past year, we should start to see faster growth there. Our national digital bank, building on Citizens Access, we've created a national storefront so we can bring lending and deposit products together.
Mm.
Offer a consistent value proposition, particularly targeted young professionals around the country who we serve really well in our core footprint. Good stuff there. I'd say on the commercial bank as well, we've basically built out both coverage and our product capabilities. We're gaining market share in the middle market space and the mid corporate space. We're able to compete effectively against the mega banks in that space and win jump balls against JP Morgan and B of A when we go toe-to-toe in the bigger super regionals. We also have focused on sponsors and building out a strong sponsor coverage effort. Increasingly, sponsors are owning more and more of middle market America.
Sure.
I think they own over 50%, we're positioned to play that trend and benefit from it. A lot of good stuff that we're excited about. The whole enterprise focus on moving to digital first business model and migrating our infrastructure to the cloud, there's some really cool stuff we're doing there as well. You know, with respect to the second part of your question on the economy, you know, I've kind of had a consistent view going back a year now that the conditions aren't right for a kind of hard recession. It's just if you look at your customers on the consumer side who still have good liquidity levels and the employment market is very good, and all our credit stats are in really good shape, it's hard to see how.
Sure
...kinda go, take a big downturn, off of that, current situation. Same thing on the corporate side. Most of the corporates that we bank have done a good job making it through the pandemic and refining their business models and strengthening their funding profiles. We see very little stress across the C&I portfolio. Probably the one area we're watching is the CRE, general office space, due to everybody talks about it all the time. Re-return to office seems to be slower than people had hoped. Now you have high rates and a slowing economy, so it's not necessarily good for office space absorption. Again, the way our, our portfolio distributes, I think we're in pretty good shape there overall.
We're monitoring things, but much of our exposure is outside of central business districts. It's suburban. We tend to lean into areas like life sciences and owner-occupied space where there's really good tenants. Feel pretty good about that overall. I think the Fed is still speaking hawkish. I think they mean what they say.
Mm-hmm.
I think we'll still see a couple more increases probably in the short term rates. We're, I think, positioned to manage through that. I think our hedging program has been pretty successful and thoughtful. We're doing a good job on how we're pricing our deposits. Feel that we can come through this year and kinda hold the advances we've made in NII, and then also start to see some bounce back fees, as the capital markets start to calm a little bit and volatility comes down. You can already start to see the early signs of that here in the first quarter.
Sure. That was a great overview. Thank you. I guess to drill down into things that you say, talked about. One, let's just talk about maybe the HSBC transaction. Remind us because I think If you go back, I think average investor thinks about HSBC had some private banking locations in the New York metro area. Like, one, what has the HSBC added to the franchise, and where does it stand in terms of integrating the employees, the clientele within Citizens, and what's the growth runway there?
Yeah. HSBC brought us 63 branches in New York Metro and eight in D.C. and six in South Florida. They're actually generally pretty well-situated branches in good physical condition, and they have good people that had kind of one arm tied behind their back.
Right
'cause they didn't have the full product set and technology tools that we have. They've migrated over pretty seamlessly, and we've trained them up. We actually had branch managers from throughout our system kind of, we call them Green Ambassadors, but they adopted a branch, and they worked in the branch for two months leading up to conversion to show them the ways of Citizens and make sure our culture was infused into those HSBC colleagues. Right now, the overall engagement scores for the colleagues that came over are near the top of the charts for the whole system. The growth rate in terms of new account openings, deepening with customers, deposit growth is faster in the New York metro region than it is throughout the rest of our system.
I think we can replicate that. We've off to a good start with Investors, but until you actually convert the brand and get on our platform, you won't have the same lift there. When Investors comes fully on board, there's another 135-ish branches. We'll have 200-.
Right
in the New York Metro region, and we'll have probably a number eight deposit market share, you know, 800,000 to $1 million new customers in the New York Metro area, I think who've been underserved by both banks relative to what we can do with those customers. On the consumer side, it's both deepening but also growing. The account load in Investors on the consumer side is very light compared to our branches, so we think we can actually really grow that. Investors did a good job in small business, we're kind of melding that into our existing small business area and making some investments in new technology tools to help the small business customer.
In the bigger end, Investors was focused more at lower middle market, we're bringing over their bankers plus supplementing with some team hires. We brought a woman over from JP Morgan to be the regional executive for commercial banking, and she has good followership and people who wanna come work for her. A combination of the Investors coverage bankers plus some new ones, I think we'll be able to really deepen and penetrate in the New York region as well, which is a huge market, as you know.
Right. Agreed. I think the Investors conversion is this weekend.
That's right.
All the systems will.
Yep
to Citizens systems then.
The signs go up, and they go green.
Okay.
That's also exciting.
You're right in terms of just when you look at the density of the New York market, both small business and consumer, like are there specific strategies that you can discuss in terms of how you're gonna go after? Because it is dense, you have a lot of large bank presence, so there is market share to be had.
Yeah. I, you know, I think that it sounds pretty simplistic, but
How quick can that be in terms of actually translating?
Yeah. Yeah. We're gonna kinda lay this out more as the year goes on.
Sure
... kind of what metrics we're tracking. I think it'll probably take us three years to get kind of something that's similar to the penetration and stats we have in Boston and Philadelphia. It's basically a bet on ourselves, and it's a bet that our approach to being a trusted advisor, for an individual on their life's journey, and also similarly on the corporate side to be that trusted advisor helps businesses grow and achieve their objectives, with thought leadership and the full product set and good ideas and really invested in the customer's success. That's been the secret sauce for us, a real customer orientation and a customer-centric culture, which we will replicate here in this region.
Got it.
That's, by the way, these deals pencil out with the expense and funding synergies, so the numbers that we revealed when we did the deals, which were attractive, we said, "Okay, so..." That's circled.
Right.
We have that in train to be able to deliver that. John and I said, you know, what really will make this, you know, not just a double but a home run.
Right
... is if we actually deliver the revenue upside, and that wasn't in the deal model. I still think there's some very attractive growth that we can.
Does it entail a fair amount of, like, frontline hiring of bankers?
Yeah. There's more, there's more hiring. There's more marketing dollars. That's another thing. When you come into a new market, the kind of brand awareness needs to increase.
Right.
We're spending a lot of money on top-of-funnel advertising. I personally was surprised. I saw one of our commercials, right after the Super Bowl ended, and they were cutting to the pregame show. There was our little ding commercial. I said, "Wow." You can see us on the airwaves. You can see us on billboards and lots of digital media. We're tracking that awareness, and aided awareness is going up very rapidly. Unaided awareness goes up more slowly, but is still moving in the right direction.
Yeah. It helps to have a catchy green color, so.
Yeah.
I guess maybe, you mentioned funding synergies with the deal, but more broadly, I think deposit liquidity has been a big source of investor focus. I would say Citizens. The guidance you provided is a little bit more unique in that you do expect relatively steady NII growth through the One, just talk to us around your confidence level in terms of delivering there, the risk for the downside, and remind us of the stickiness of your deposit base when we think about that.
You know, it's been, I'd say, an interesting period because you haven't seen the Fed raise rates so steeply so quickly historically. We really didn't have good historical data to build your models, and I think all banks are wrestling with that a little bit is what's the deposit migration gonna be, you know, from A, you know, is there a migration out of the bank to other savings alternative? Is there a migration inside the bank from non-interest bearing into interest bearing? You know, I think we're honing in on that now that we've had the passage of time. Anyway, we feel we've got a pretty good grip on that at this point.
I think one of the factors we originally had, kind of NIM we thought could go to 3.50%, and then we had some movement in the yield curve, and then I think migration had picked up a little bit. So far, we're now seeing this new call that we'll go from 3.30%-3.40%. We think there's a pretty high degree of confidence that we can deliver that. Having said that, there's still things that could happen in the external environment.
Sure
... that you're kind of beholden to. You know, I think the other aspect to this has been over time, we've tried to transform the deposit base to move from what, Citizens, the old Citizens had been, which was an amalgamation of, somewhat thrift-like, franchises on the consumer side, with a rate-led value proposition, to moving to broader value add propositions, and focus more on mass affluent and affluent customers who tend to have bigger balances in checking, for example.
Yeah.
As we've upped our game and improved our offerings and grown, we've probably been the fastest grower in the regional banks in terms of mass affluent and affluent customers over the last 3 to 5 years. You've seen that migration up in terms of non-interest bearing as a percentage of our total deposits, and good solid deposit growth. We didn't go out and take in a lot of surge deposits on the commercial sides.
Sure
... which many of our peers did, who are now showing faster outmigrations. We've also, on the commercial side, built out broader capabilities. We have an excellent cash management platform, so we can compete for operating deposits in bigger companies. We've built out some interesting capabilities around escrow and bankruptcy offerings. We have some now innovation around green deposits and kind of some deposits with a twist that are very appealing to different companies that are looking to achieve their own ESG objectives, and seeing some nice growth there. Anyway, I feel that we're, we've done a lot on deposits. There's more to do, but I feel good about the outlook there.
Got it. I guess the other side of the NII is, and I think John's talked about the hedging program and to protect the margin against lower rates. Remind us how you're thinking about that in terms of the NIM, I think about a 3.2% floor?
Yeah
... is how John's talked about for a 200 basis point decline. Like, is that fully baked in when you think about the NII outlook you provided to the Street, and is there more work to be done there?
It's interesting. It's a very dynamic exercise because it's more likely than not that the Fed is going to keep going longer, there's usually a pause of at least seven months before they make their first cut, if you believe history. The protection we had layered in to 2023 in terms of having swaps to protect against a rate decrease in 2023 wasn't all that beneficial once it became apparent that, you know, the rates are likely to stay up in 2023. We've been terminating and replacing swaps and extending those swaps to give us more protection into 2024 and 2025.
That's been kind of a little bit of a work of art, is to kind of look at what the forwards are saying and listen to what the leading economists are saying and having our own house view, and then, you know, making, I think, considered bets on, you know, when are things gonna happen and what do we need to protect against in different scenarios. I feel good that we've done a nice job at that. You know, previously when we said 350, we had the floor at 325. With the extension program, we probably tightened that band a little bit, so 340-320 is 20 basis points.
Sure
... versus 25. you know, the book's not written, so it's, you know, we're still writing new chapters.
Mm-hmm
... as we get new information, and we process inflation and, take a view as to what the Fed's gonna do and when. The good news is, I think we have a process inside the bank that allows us to, you know, regroup, and then constantly evolve kind of a dynamic position that's worked out so far.
Got it. I guess maybe switching to expenses, the other thing that you've done very well is the TOP programs, and driving efficiency. You've been doing that for several years now. Just talk to us around when you look at the franchise today, I mean, I think the mergers are gonna provide some synergies, but what are the expense levers in terms of flexing expenses lower, and how do you think about managing to an efficiency ratio or just nominal expense growth?
Yeah. You know, I think it's quite distinctive that we've been able to, you know, repeat this top effort.
Right
... year in and year out basis. Now embarking on TOP 8.
10's gonna be a big one.
One was a two-year program, but so we really haven't missed a year. You know, there are certain areas that you can go mine. You know, your organizational design, having a flat organization is important. Vendor contracts is a big area. Your branch costs of distribution is a big area. There's a number of kind of steady rocks that we go back to every time and try to figure out how to up our game there. We've added, I think, new stuff over time, which is I would probably refer to as fruit that's higher up in the tree. You know, what's happening in artificial intelligence?
Sure.
What can we automate? What can we make more efficient? When we migrate, technology infrastructure to the cloud, can we do it in such a way that we actually can reduce the run cost of the bank? We're in the process of that. There's some really, good stuff in there that, you know, we task ourselves with trying to come up with some of those ideas inside the house. We'll talk to the leading consulting firms to get kind of their best thinking on what's best in class across, all size banks all over the world and bring us those ideas, and let's figure out what's applicable here.
It takes a discipline and a rigor, but I have confidence we're just kind of putting a bow on TOP 7, and that'll have a bigger run rate benefit this year.
Good.
We're shooting for at least $100 million in TOP 8 with run rate by the end of the year, and then that has a bigger run rate benefit into 2024, so feel good about that.
It doesn't sound like you'll be done even after that, right?
I'm hopeful that, you know, as long as I'm at the helm here, that we continue to do this, because I think it's really good discipline. The mindset is really, kind of a mindset of continuous improvement and self-funding. We wanna continually run the bank better and more efficiently so that we can self-fund the investments in offense, so we can have the more coverage bankers, we can have more wealth advisors in our branches.
Right
... and things like that. If you look over time, we've probably, out of 18,000 people when I got here, we probably exited at maybe 4,000 due to these programs, but brought 4,000 other people back in who either are customer-facing or they're the skills we need for the future, the software engineers, the digital talent, some of the new marketing disciplines that we need. It's been, it's been kinda continuing to say, "If we wanna make investments, what can we make more efficient in how we're running the bank so we can self-fund that?
Got it. I guess, maybe segueing to fee income, I think that's been another focus of yours and you've done a few deals around that. Just give us a sense of the fee income strategy, like from a client standpoint, what's the end game and how do you see the momentum in the wealth management and then maybe even the capital markets business?
Yeah. Well, I'll probably start out with capital markets 'cause, you know, I think we've done 10-12 acquisitions of all shapes and sizes since we have kind of got our life as a public company. Most of those in the last five years. We spent the first few years just putting a foundation in place so we were ready to do stuff. Probably half of that number was in capital markets plays where, you know, we had a good commercial bank, but it was limited geography, and it was limited in product capabilities.
Yeah.
We had to hire up a bunch of folks to have a Debt Capital Markets group to replace what RBS had basically offered Citizens-.
Right
... in terms of FX and interest rate hedging and stuff. We had a lot of, again, just kind of self-investment, but then supplement that, particularly around the M&A product, which was increasingly important, to companies that are looking to sell and private equity firms who are looking to buy. To provide that kind of matchmaking service, has been really big for us and very powerful us. We have, you know, now I think the right complement of, M&A folks, and they're focused on the industry verticals where we think, there'll be the most activity going forward. I don't... We can be opportunistic if we, if we do anything else, in terms of acquisitions. I think we've built it out.
I'm very excited about kind of what we can deliver in fees in the capital market space. If I go back to the fourth quarter of 2021, when the market conditions were really nice, we generated $184 million of capital markets fees. Most of last year, every quarter, we probably were between $90 and $100, so call it $95 on average. We're kind of operating at half of where we were.
Sure
... when the market conditions were favorable. I kind of take comfort that, you know, we're now at kind of high teens ROTCEs. A little of that's AOCI fuel, but still roughly 16% if you back that out. We've got the benefit of higher rates. The true value of our deposit franchise wasn't recognized in our returns.
Sure
... until we got off the zero bound. There's another leg to happen, which is when the.
Mm-hmm
... capital markets calm down, and then we can get that kind of bounce on the, on the capital markets fees. Also wealth, you know, is partly affected by asset levels, but part of that has just been a very long build to turn the old approach of how we had kind of a bank-owned brokerage offering to being a true wealth advisor. I think we've turned the ship, and we're starting to show some really great new sales numbers that will really start to come through, I think. To me, the big bounce in fees is gonna be led by capital markets and wealth as the kind of one, two. Mortgage, I'm not counting on.
I've said we're kinda bouncing near the bottom last quarter. In the fourth quarter we even drifted a little lower. You know, you're starting to see some early signs that that fourth quarter probably was the bottom, and you're seeing margins start to reflate. People are getting out of the business, which is a positive. Activities, in applications is ticking up a little bit, and the servicing book is pretty strong. Anyway. I'm not counting on that as-
Sure. Yep.
as a big driver. It'll be less of a drag, and it'll start to help. Cards is another area that we've done some interesting things, and I think you'll start to see some growth in card revenue as well.
In the capital markets, like, the markets have had a strong start to the year. Like, would you say it's tracking better than you expected?
Yeah, I don't like to give updates, like one month the results into the quarter, but, yeah, I think, as I said, the tone is better.
Sure
... in the market, the pipelines are all good. It's very possible that that could be the outcome here already. I would say, when we gave our guide for the year a few weeks back, we said it'll probably build over the course of the year and probably get to pretty good levels in the second half. Maybe we can pull some of that forward and start to see some of that in the first half as well.
Maybe, a lot of that probably obviously comes down to customer sentiment and being ready to do things. When you look at from your outlook for loan growth for the year, clearly there's a little bit of a remixing of the loan book going on.
Yeah.
Just look... Talk to us in terms of the... philosophically, why you're doing that. Then just from organic growth opportunities, like, where do you see the best opportunities, and how's the customer segment sort of, holding up given the macro uncertainty?
Part of our view here is, we really wanna focus on deepening relationships, and certain portfolios, like auto, were somewhat expedient. When they had, they offered the opportunity for us to grow and relever in relatively safe short duration assets, and the spreads were okay.
Sure
... but not great, it was a Okay thing to do. But now that we have other opportunities and there's more pressure on deposits, we kind of need to go back and look, like, what's the state of the different loan portfolios we have. We've put auto now on a pretty hard glide path down. We should run that down $3 billion this year. We already ran it down $2 billion last year. We'll run it down again in 2024.
Sure.
That's kind of baked in. We're being more disciplined and selective around mortgage. So the stuff that we were doing kinda out of footprint that wasn't for core customers, we're kinda starting to cut loose some of those loan officers and really tighten that, which makes room for things like HELOC and Citizens Pay...
Mm-hmm
which I think are kind of the opportunities to have deeper relationships with some of our core customers in the footprint. Then similarly, on the corporate bank, we I think have over time been very good at trying to gain entry into kind of mid-corporate syndicates. Maybe we go in as the number three bank. We're trying to get to be the number one bank. You get to the number one bank, you get a lot more cross-sell and economics over time. If that's not happening, if you were wrong, then you just extract your capital and move on and go to the next opportunity. I think we're...
We would expect commercial to net grow, but we're exhibiting the same kind of discipline of making sure if we're gonna provide capital to our customers, that we're getting rewarded for that.
That's fair. I think maybe title loan book, when you think about credit quality, clearly no one's seeing any real credit stress at the moment. You mentioned CRE office earlier. Within your loan book, where do you think the stress will appear if and when we get to a downturn? What do you anticipate will be the driver of the loss content within that?
Yeah. I You know, it's a little hard to say right now because, again, the consumer is so healthy, and we're not much of a lender to subprime.
Sure.
Maybe we had a few, you know, prime that migrated to subprime, but we aren't.
Sure
subprime for originations. I think that's where the stress happens first. Fortunately, we're not really exposed to that in a material way. I feel good broadly about, you know, the consumer book is just moving back to pre-pandemic levels in an orderly way. I don't really see a big upside risk in terms of charge-offs there.
Sure
in the consumer book. Commercial, again, there's good diversification across industries. Our leveraged loan book is very well-diversified, and the average hold position is $12 million. Even if you ended up in a tough situation with a company, it's not.
It's not, yeah.
it's not big like some of the things you've read about with the big banks and all the hung paper.
Yep
...at the end of the year. We're not in that game. It really goes back to the CRE, and multi-family's in good shape, and industrial distribution stuff is in good shape. There's not much retail exposure that we worry about. It's just keeping our eye at this point, on office.
Sure. Maybe, moving to capital, I think at the end of last quarter, the capital ratios moved towards the higher end of where you've been targeting. Just remind us of the capital deployment priorities and how you're thinking about buybacks in the context of where capital ratios are and the macro sort of uncertain-certainty.
Yeah. I think when you're, again, preparing for a potential storm, you wanna run at high levels.
Sure.
We have a range which is probably a little more than our peers, 9.5%-10%. I think it's good to be conservative in your capital ratios. We're operating at 10% at the end of the year. The guide that we gave for this year is that we'll have most likely about a 100% return to, of capital to shareholders. You know, it's important to keep a good dividend on the stock. We would fund, I'd say organic growth and then look at acquisitions and buybacks as kind of the.
Right
...the absorption of the remainder. What I said back on the call was, we're generating lots of capital with that high return on equity these days. We, net don't see a lot of incremental spot loan growth-
Right
...with the rundown of autos. That's not gonna be something that absorbs capital. We don't have a big M&A pipeline. We're being very selective on looking at deals. We wanna make sure we get the deals that are in flight, like the New York Metro play, executed well.
Sure.
Again, that wouldn't be at this point seen as a big absorber of capital, so that frees up the capital to buy back our stock. You know, for everybody in the room, we think our stock is a very attractive purchase at this point. Because if you look at kind of where P/E ratios are and where multiples to book are for a bank that's, you know, got a target to deliver 13% ROTCE, you're trading well below where through the cycle levels should be. Being able to, you know, this is the time that we think, "Let's back up the truck and buy back some stock.
That sounds good. Just on the ROTCE, the 16%-18%, we've talked about the NIM and defensibility against lower rates. You talked about fee revenue. Is it correct in concluding that you'd think that the 16% lower bound in your ROTCE target should be sustainable in different rate fee revenue backdrops?
Yeah. That's one of the reasons that we've been very focused on hedging the downside-
Right
we don't see NIM fall off a cliff.
Right
...which would certainly potentially hurt that floor in terms of that 16% of the range that we're targeting. I think as deposit pressures ease, which they will, the Fed's going through QT and there's other factors that are impacting that, and the rate moves are impacting kind of deposit growth. If you look historically, you really haven't had a sustained period of deposit outflows from the banking system. I think that'll support more loan growth going forward. Even if you had a little bit of correction as the Fed moves down, and you move to the lower side of the 3.20%-3.40%, you can potentially make up for some of that with volume. I think fees is the story that I mentioned.
When rates go down, we saw, you know, the mortgage business came to life, and we coined money in that business in a down rate environment. Capital markets tends to do well too-
Sure
...in lower rates environments. I think the ability to kind of look out and say, "Can we get revenue growth and can we keep our expense growth under the revenue growth?" That's been the hallmark of Citizens since the IPO. That's what's allowed us to take 5% ROTCE and get it to where it is today, combined with the kind of moving off the zero bound on rates. Those two things have really helped deliver that. I think that'll continue to be the mantra inside the company is be disciplined on expenses and kind of keep that growth rate below kind of where your revenue growth is. The other thing is, you know, there shouldn't be any catch-up on credit costs.
If you look out over the medium term, we're already, by building reserves, we're providing at, you know, 40 basis points in 2022.
Sure.
you kind of have a normal load built into your P&L.
Built, yeah.
...even though your charge-offs are only 22 basis points in the fourth quarter. The amount that we're putting away in terms of reserve build is much higher than that. Anyway, I feel pretty confident that, you know, we would obviously wouldn't put out the target.
Right.
...if we didn't think we could deliver it. The outlook to me is pretty confident on that.
On capital, anything from the stress test scenarios that came out last week that was particularly jumped out?
Yeah, no, there's always puts and takes every time they come out with a new scenario. You know, there's I think, a big residential correction.
Right.
higher unemployment. There's, but then there's other things that kinda go the other way. Net-net, I try to read everything that all you guys write and different pundits and it looks like people think it's slightly more challenging than the year before. Having said that, you know, we have operating at the target range we have wherever that SCB comes out.
Right.
We've got massive cushion over that. I don't think that I think we'll get a good result. You know, either way, I don't think it's gonna affect our capital plans.
Right.
that we have, built into both 2023 and for the medium term.
Understood. I know we have two minutes. Just wanted to see if anyone in the room had a question. If you wanna raise your hand if you have a question. If not, one last question, I guess, I'll go ahead with it, is so you've been resourceful in terms of M&A on the fee revenue side. I mean, the bank's clearly a focus on it. One, is the pool of, like, fee revenue M&A rich today and if so, would it be again within capital markets and wealth management or are there other areas that you're looking at?
You know, I'd say there's two areas that we've spoken about previously. Wealth has been kind of a longstanding area of interest. The problem is it's been a seller's market. You know, finding someone that is a strategic fit, a cultural fit, and at a price that we like has been the challenge. We got one deal done, Clarfeld, which has been a home run. It has allowed us to cover the top end of the wealth pyramid, the ultra-high-net-worth business owner who sells their business or does a leverage recap in commercial. We can capture the assets and the planning opportunity for those business owners. That's got massive cross-sell. It's going very, very well.
There's other things within our strategy that we'd like to fill out, but we haven't found those.
Sure.
-ability to transact there. It's not... We're certainly gonna keep trying. The other area has been really looking hard at the payment space and all the innovation that's happening in payments and the tools that we can bring to help our customers just manage their cash flows and their working capital better. We have a number of fintech partnerships there. You don't always have to buy.
Sure.
You can kind of partner and rent and build those into your offerings. You know, there's some interesting plays around payments capabilities or that come with deposits, deposit platforms. Clearly, in this environment, deposits is a good thing. Some wealth firms come with deposits. If you can get a twofer, if you can add wealth capabilities and it comes with some deposits or payments capabilities and it comes with some deposits...
Right.
those are interesting things, that we're focused on.
Good. I know with that we've run out of time. Bruce, thank you so much for doing this.
Okay.
Thank you.
Thank you.