Financial, which has been a pretty big supporter of this event, you know, ever since, they've gone public maybe now.
2014.
2014, a little bit ways ago. From the company, very pleased to have Bruce Van Saun, who's Chairman and CEO. Bruce, welcome back.
Thanks, Jason.
You know, Bruce, maybe the best place to start, you know, I just think back to 2014 until today and just how far Citizens has come since it's gone public. Maybe just as you look at the competitive landscape today, how are you feeling about, you know, Citizens' current positioning and maybe what opportunities are you most excited about?
Yeah. I mean, I look back over that whole transformation journey since 2014 and just feel really good about how we went about it, putting the right foundation in place, with a strong board and leadership team, getting the right talent in, getting the right culture, investing in our people programs, our risk management, our technology. We basically built things brick by brick and then really focused on getting our businesses oriented around where areas in the market where we could be distinctive and where we had a right to win. What I really like about where we are today is we like to describe our strategy around a triangle of businesses. The consumer bank is really a foundation block because well-run banks need to have stable, low-cost deposits, and that's what the consumer bank provides for us.
We've done a lot of work over the years to segment the marketplace and try to move more upmarket and serve mass affluent and affluent customers, and that brings bigger non-interest-bearing deposit balances and more needs on the part of the customer for wealth advice, other services. You know, consumer bank still has a lot of opportunity, I think, to grow. One of the big moves that we made about four or five years ago was to recognize we, as a strong northeastern bank, we were going to have to get into the New York metro region. We bought HSBC's East Coast branches. We bought Investors Bank. We paired that together into about a 200 branch system across New York and New Jersey.
It's been our fastest-growing region in terms of households and deposits, and there's still, I think, a lot of juice left to squeeze out of the lemon there. Anyway, that's consumer. Commercial bank is something that we basically built up from being more of a regional player focused on traditional bank products that are sold to treasurers to actually having the full range of capital markets capabilities, M&A, equities capability, debt markets capability, securitizations, et cetera.
Through either acquisition or hiring teams, we've built up a full set of product capabilities, and then we focused the sales force, the coverage bankers, on both middle market, and we went upmarket into mid-corporates who have more needs and require us to be very strong in terms of industry knowledge, so we've set up industry verticals. We also saw that the sponsors were gonna increasingly own more and more of middle market America, so we built out capabilities to serve private equity, private capital more broadly. I think we're exceptionally well-positioned. I like to say we're the best-positioned superregional bank in the U.S. in the commercial space. The third kind of leg of the triangle was more recent.
We always had a desire to get into kind of high-end private banking and wealth management. We had made an acquisition five years ago of a company called Clarfeld, which was a very respected registered investment advisor. It really wasn't at the scale to kind of balance out the triangle. When First Republic Bank failed, we made the bold move to try to buy it, and JPM ended up buying it, but a lot of the talent didn't wanna go onto that platform, we signed up 150 people one day in June, which was a big bet in a turbulent time to take on all the expenses before the revenues were gonna show up.
But we had confidence that we could scale it up and kinda even recreate a model that was better than how First Republic was running it. And we had ability to surround that and work as one Citizens with our corporate bank working with the private bankers, and that's been very effective. We look at it today, and we're filling that void in the market that the demise of First Republic created. We have over $16 billion in deposits, you know, about $7.5 billion in loans, $10+ billion in wealth client assets. You know, and the nice thing is it's growing very nicely, and it's growing at a very good ROE, so we're making it over 25% ROE on the business.
Anyway, those are the things, you know, we're a good size, so we like to say we're big enough to matter but small enough to care. We can go toe-to-toe with the big guys in certain spaces, but we can't spread across the waterfront, so we have to really focus on those areas where we have a right to win.
A lot in there. I'd love to unpack that a little bit, maybe delve more into each one of those three legs of the stool. I guess maybe just following up on the private bank, I think now it's, what, 10% of pre-tax income, you know, from a very little number not that long ago.
Just broke even for the first time in the third quarter of 2025, right? 2024. We said it would be 5% accretive last year. It was 7%. It's already 10% in the first quarter.
I guess maybe just looking further out, It's on a nice trajectory. You know, how much more hiring do you plan on doing? You know, how big do you think this could get?
Well, right now we're calling kind of medium term that we get into the mid-teens. You know, we still see very strong growth. We've kind of started out with six major markets, Boston, New York, Florida, Northern California, a concentration, three big teams in Northern California. We've since moved into SoCal, so we have L.A. presence, San Diego, Orange County. You know, we're continuing to reinvest and bring in complementary people like private wealth teams. We're doing a bunch of lift-outs so we can have the bankers situated in a co-location format with these wealth managers.
The other thing that we're doing is we're opening up PBOs, private bank locations at kind of ground level retail, which has great billboard value, but it also, you know, is good for brand visibility in general and ability to provide services to customers. I would say California is running fast. That was the epicenter for First Republic, so we've got a significant set of new PBOs and talent there. The next market that I wanna keep building out is Florida. We have a flag planted in Palm Beach, which is a really critical market. We're opening this month in West Palm Beach, which sounds like, you know, what's the difference between Palm Beach and West Palm Beach, but they're actually different markets.
We wanna thicken in Florida, doing it in a controlled way, but there's other cities we wanna get to in Florida. Just kind of continuing to leverage the opportunities in core markets like New York and Boston. We're gonna open a PBO in Greenwich. We're looking at converting one of our high-end retail branches in a Boston suburb to a PBO, we're looking at Philly eventually as another market where we could see a lot of opportunity.
Sounds good. I guess maybe on the commercial side, you mentioned private capital, a space you've been in for a while, but now is all of a sudden receiving a lot of attention.
Yeah.
You know, clearly there's some concerns in the marketplace around certain segments. Just maybe talk about, you know, what you're seeing there and, you know, can that continue to be a driver of growth?
Sure. Again, I think, we're very well-positioned with the private equity side of private capital. You know, there hasn't been the kind of, you know, velocity of exits in investing over the last three or four years that we would have expected to see. We started to see that logjam break a little bit in the second half of last year. You know, we have the war and some uncertainty. I still think there's pent-up demand there and pipelines are looking pretty good. Feel good about how we're positioned there. A lot of those firms broadened out to be more considered like asset managers or alt managers.
Since we had an in on the private equity side, as they opened up their private credit arms, we were there to help facilitate the build-out and the growth, and do it with the kind of clients that we know really well. We kind of aren't taking marginal opportunities. We're staying with riding the horses that we've already know very well, which is important in banking. I think the distribution of what we have in terms of private credit looks fine. Most of it's investment-grade lending. It's very well structured. We have people with deep expertise. I know there's noise around it and the funds that took, you know, exposure to retail investors that now have these semi-liquid products and people heading for the exits.
There's some challenges to work through there, and there's maybe some funds went a little long on software industry paper. When we look about the portfolio that we have, the discipline that we have, I don't feel there's credit issues there. I think it's sometimes good when a segment of the market grows really rapidly to have a bit of a challenge period or a little stumble, forces you to go back and rethink the business model and tighten things up a little bit. I think private credit is here to stay, but I think it'll go through kind of a kind of consolidation phase for a little while.
Makes sense. On the consumer side, you highlighted, you know, New York City metro expansion. On the recent earnings call, you made a comment that caught my attention. Basically said you're in the process of analyzing existing branch footprint for net new investments and optimization within New York City . Can you maybe talk to what you kinda meant by that and what we could expect?
Yeah. You know, what I mentioned a moment ago that, like, having strong retail deposit funding is very important. You're seeing different regionals in the U.S. go about that in different ways. Some are deciding to open branches in other geographies than their natural core geography, or they're doing acquisitions to try to, you know, go to those other regions with a jump start. You know, sit down with our team, and we say, "Actually, we have very good brand recognition inside our footprint, and we should think about optimizing the network to get more growth from it." Because when you go out of region, you have to elevate your top-of-funnel brand image. People don't know who you are, you're spending a lot of money on those marketing dollars.
If we do a better job of kind of assessing market by market, do we have the optimized branch footprint? For example, we used to have a high percentage, like, maybe 30% of our branches were in store with supermarket branches, and we've been whittling that down over time. That's become kind of less effective as a way to grow and capture that deposit share. Should we look and tighten up those relationships even further and then open more de novos? We're doing that in certain markets already in the footprint to good results. That's what we're looking at, and I just wanted to mention that I do think since we're doing so well in New York, that was kind of proof of concept.
Could we go in there and challenge all the big competitors there and gain market share and be effective? I think the answer we got is yes, that's happening. You then start to think, well, how much more branch presence do we need, and kind of where would it be? Would it be right in the center of New York City, or would it be in outer boroughs? Would it be in Long Island or New Jersey? We're just going through that work, thinking that through. Obviously, you know, we're already investing a lot in the private bank, and we have to kind of maintain expense discipline, so I think this plays out over time. I do, I would love to see an acceleration of our deposit growth in retail.
That's really valuable. Part of that isn't just the configuration of the branches, it's investing in the people. Do you put another two people in a branch that has a lot of potential, but you're under-punching your weight in small business, or you're not getting enough wealth cross-sell. Part of the analysis is looking at the staffing models to try to optimize and squeeze more out of the footprint.
Makes sense. You know, one area I had questions about is, you know, what you've, I guess, determined or Reimagine the Bank side of the AI initiative. You talked about $450 million of P&L benefit by 2028. Just maybe delve into kind of what you're doing there, any early wins, and just how we see that playing out.
Sure. Some of you may not know our story, but I think we got quite good since the IPO of having an annual TOP program. It was called Tapping Our Potential, where we tried to figure out ways to deploy some new approaches to how we're running the bank and serving customers, and some of that was technology-oriented, some of it was organizational redesign or kind of consolidation of vendors and things like that. We were typically getting about $100 million a year of benefit from these programs.
When we got to the middle of the year and we were looking at 2026 and beyond, it really became apparent that we needed something more than just a TOP program that had some quick wins to it, that we needed to take advantage of some of all of the technology innovation that we're seeing and lever these tools and step back and look at everything the bank does. How do we onboard a new customer? How do we service a complaint or handle a fraud matter on someone's card? Lay that out the way it happens today, and then reimagine the future.
Go three years out and say, if I had a whiteboard and I could create human bot forces, or I could change my technology around to make it a much better customer experience, have less human interaction, more self-service, et cetera, how would I do that? We took probably 25 people offline in the summer, and we mapped out all those processes and basically constructed a program that has kind of 11 major building blocks, and it has about 50 initiatives in it. We've mapped that out, and we have owners for that. You know, some of this, because it involves reconfiguring your technology and introducing these new tools, it takes longer than what a typical TOP payback program would look like. That's why it's a three-year program.
What we didn't want to do was kind of, I think the market might have been a little nervous that we would incur all this one-time cost to get the program off the ground. We front-loaded some of the 2026 initiatives that will have quicker paybacks, things like vendor reconfiguration and consolidation. We have a bunch of that. We have some scattered offices that opened up during COVID that we're gonna kinda refocus and consolidate. There's a number of things in the short run that'll get us, I think, to about a $100 million run rate by the end of the year, but keeping those bigger initiatives on track. There's things like the call center investments that we have is introducing more AI and more bots into the call center.
That should already make a lot of progress this year and starting to be paying some dividends, by late in the year.
I guess maybe before we kind of shift gears to the financials, because you know I'm going to do that. You know, despite kind of geopolitical tensions, uncertainty in macro, you know, results have actually been pretty solid, particularly in the first quarter, which is seasonally soft. Maybe just talk to kind of what you're hearing and seeing from your customers.
Yeah, I, it's kind of surprising that you look at the headlines and all the worry beads that people have. You know, they had the kind of noise around tariffs. Now you have a war going on. It really hasn't weakened the economy to a material degree. I think we're still. We thought coming into the year we'd have 2% to 2.5% GDP growth in the U.S. I think we might head a little to the lower side of that, but still be in the range. We'll see how long the higher energy prices last and if that has a further impact. You know, consumers generally are still getting on with their lives and spending money.
There's kind of a two-tiered economy where the more well-off people are benefiting from still strong stock market, strong housing values, and not even batting an eye at what they're seeing in the headlines. I'd say the folks that are less fortunate are still catching up to the inflation that we had. Their kind of real wages took a dip, and now salary increases are catching up, but they're not all the way caught up. I think they're being a little more cautious still at this point. We look at the credit stats on the consumer, even in that kind of lower end customer, and they look okay. We don't see increases in delinquencies and things at this point, just probably a little more discipline and caution.
Then when I look at the corporate book, we've had, I think, very clean performance. Most of our companies, They've basically had to do two things. They've had to be resilient and adaptable, given everything that's happened over the last five years. They got through COVID, they got through the high inflation and high rates, they got through Liberation Day. Basically, they're good at kind of scenario analysis and trying to figure out if this happens, then kind of what am I gonna do? They're still investing. They still want to grow their businesses. They're still kind of maybe one foot on the brake and one foot on the gas. But anyway, it still feels good, and we have no credit issues there either, really on a corporate side.
CRE feels like, you know, the office sector that basically suffered the most from the pandemic. Those problem credits across the industry and for us are being worked out. Multifamily has stayed strong. You're seeing in some markets like New York City, the new construction for office is in high demand, and they're getting record rents. I think, you know, there again, we're gonna be very cautious in kind of what we do in CRE. I'd rather be growing the C&I book and growing some quality private bank and consumer assets. I feel from a credit standpoint, we like where we're at on CRE.
I guess maybe following up, you know, we're just thinking obviously you talked about actual cloud being very stable. I guess any areas, one or two, three, that you're maybe paying particular attention to?
nothing really pops up, Jason.
All right. You kind of touched on loan growth. We've actually seen four consecutive quarters of sequential growth. Maybe just talk to kind of what have been the drivers there and kind of, you know, as we look out to the remainder of the year?
Sure
persist?
One of the idiosyncratic drivers that's unique to us is the private bank. As the private bankers bring on businesses, business and previous relationships, and they start lending money, that's just kind of market share gains for us that is kind of separate from what's going on in our traditional consumer growth and our traditional commercial growth. We have that kind of driver that I think, you know, should generate maybe $1 billion a quarter of loan growth, which is very positive. We're seeing good, healthy demand on the corporate side. C&I and MDFI, another one of the latest kind of hand-wringing phrases that we feel very good about.
There's opportunities there to either see corporates getting a little more aggressive, pulling down their lines a little bit. I think there'll be more new money deal flow as the M&A cycle heats up once we get through this war uncertainty. And that'll also benefit on kind of subscription lines, more line utilization. Feel quite confident that we're gonna get very good commercial growth this year. And then in consumer, we have kind of two very steady eddies. One is mortgage. We're continuing to grow in mortgage. And then HELOCs, like we are the biggest HELOC originator last year in 2025 in the whole U.S. for a bank our size, and we only originate in 14 states. We originated more than any other bank, including the mega banks.
We've kind of mastered the art of making a complex process to originate and close one of these HELOCs a very powerful, positive experience for the customer. Something that usually takes 45 days and has a lot of document gathering, we have that down to, like, 14-20 days. As a result, people refer their friends. "If you wanna get a home equity line of credit, go to Citizens Bank. They do a great job." We have growth there. We'd like to see a little pickup in card growth. What's nice is that all three of those segments are contributing to the growth.
For the last three years, as we were running down non-core indirect auto book, that was masking the underlying book, but that's small enough now that the drag of what's left to run down in non-core is not offsetting the combined growth in the other three segments.
Got it. Maybe just shift gears the other side of the balance sheet. I guess deposit trends for the industry is kind of mixed in the first quarter. Let me just talk to, you know, as the environment where loan growth is getting better, the Fed is probably on hold, just your outlook for both, you know, deposits and kind of what happens to deposit pricing.
Yeah. So there again, excuse me, I have a little frog here. Sorry. There again, the having the unique private bank that's growing rapidly, the impact from the private bank is very positive to our deposit funding. As I said, $16 billion that we have delivered, we've only had the thing up for maybe 10 quarters. The composition of that is very attractive. About a third of that is non-interest bearing, which is accretive to our overall non-interest bearing mix. That, again, that's an idiosyncratic driver for Citizens to see that nice, consistent deposit growth coming in from the private bank. I'd say in consumer, we're still expecting to see growth overall as New York is contributing to the growth.
And then in commercial, we have some initiatives like expansion into middle market in California and Florida, that's contributing to some of our deposit growth on the commercial side. I think realistically, if the Fed holds for the rest of the year, the ability to drive down your deposit costs is not going to be as high as you thought coming into the year. There's also the flip side of that is then the yield compression on the loans will be less, and we're slightly asset sensitive. Anyway, I think I feel really, really good about the NIM trajectory that we laid out and our ability to achieve that and deliver that.
I guess on that NIM trajectory, it's probably one of the more, or the higher rate of expansions among peers. You know, part of that is kind of some of these hedges are the drag of hedges rolling off. I guess just how confident are you in the outlook and, you know, obviously the interest rate environment has been somewhat fluid. Are there any kind of backdrops that kinda make you more nervous?
Well, a high percentage of the NIM expansion is we like to call it time-based benefits. When we tore up the swaps, when we saw rates were going higher a few years back, you cauterize your loss, but then you have to, from an accounting standpoint, amortize that loss over the remaining life of the swap. We don't even have to get out of bed, and a certain amount of that is gonna drop off every quarter. We've, I think, shown that very transparently, that's a positive. The non-core, when we got the cash in from selling a non-core asset, we were paying off our higher cost funding. A lot of that's already flowed in, but there's still a little more for that as well. You have that underpinning of time-based benefits that's really powerful.
You know, the rest comes down to how we're growing our balance sheet, how we're managing deposits, keeping the mix consistent, et cetera, which we feel good about. We feel good about our ability to deliver that.
I guess maybe shifting to the fee income side. I guess kinda down sequentially in the first quarter as capital markets revenues came down, albeit still a high level.
record first quarter.
Record for a first quarter. Just maybe talk to maybe just the outlook for the key, you know, fee drivers. Maybe start with cap markets.
Yeah
you know, the success there.
I feel really positive about the capital markets outlook for the year. The folks who lead that business say, you know, pipelines are excellent and conversations are really strong and consistent. People may pull back on timing a little bit based on some of the external events, there's a confidence that things will get done over the course of the year. We feel good, and as I mentioned, I think we're the best-positioned superregional commercial bank to benefit on the capital markets line. As activity levels pick up, I think what the power of what we've built will manifest itself more, and we'll start to gap maybe versus some of our peers in terms of the revenue capture there.
In wealth, we've been putting record quarter after record quarter for probably the last six or seven quarters. I think we've found a way to unlock the cross-sell opportunity in the branches, which has taken years to get the right people and the right approach in place and have the data to go after the best opportunities. Now that's been really nice to see that we're getting consistent growth and improving the penetration of the deposit customers who also have wealth accounts and consider us their wealth advisor, not just their bank. These lift-outs on the private wealth side, they bring teams that have assets, and then we can feed the growth from referrals coming in from the private bank and the corporate bank.
We're really staying at the tippy top end of quality. We wanna make sure that we really have great people. They fit our culture, and they work well with other people around the bank. So far, we're very pleased what we've been able to attract.
I guess maybe on the expense side, you know, so I think 4.5% growth last year, targeting 4.5% growth this year. Is that how to think about the company longer term and just, you know, how you weigh investments?
I mean, I know, the market, likes stories where I'm grinding down on my expenses and I'm keeping it to 2% and I can get 4% revenue growth. You, I think, have pointed this out in your research. Like, a bank that had 8% revenue growth and 6% expense growth is going to have far more positive operating leverage, just the way the math works. We're not going crazy. Don't think I just was opening the door to a 6% expense growth. I think at 4.5%, we basically are running the core bank at 3%, and then the investing that we're doing in the private bank adds another 1.5%-2% to that 2.5%-3% for the core bank.
We're still maintaining that discipline in the core bank and looking for efficiencies. These numbers are before any benefits from RTB. When the growth opportunity is there to invest in, when you can, you know, really invest in the private bank and capture that white space, that void that First Republic left, when you can have, we have people beating on our doors to get onto the capital markets platform. When you can select really good people and keep building out that business, you gotta go for it. You know, the technology needs. We're the first superregional bank to migrate all of our infrastructure to the cloud, and now we have things in Reimagine the Bank around deploying AI, deploying agents.
There's a lot of things to spend money on, and you have to stay disciplined to try to find ways to self-fund, that. I think we've demonstrated over the years that we're pretty good at that. The only other thing I'd say there too is, like, if you look at street estimates for our revenue growth this year, it's like 10%. You know, you grow your expenses 4.5%, your revenue growth is 10%, 550 basis points positive operating leverage. It's no wonder that the consensus EPS estimates for up are up, 30% for the year.
That's, you know. Anyway, I think having a guardrail that forces us to set priorities and pace things out is good, but you could easily spend more, and I think it would probably be productive spend. Anyway, we're gonna keep kinda for now at that, at that limit.
Makes sense. I guess maybe on capital reform, you know, the revised standardized approach, is a 10% reduction in RWA. The new CECL model is maybe even more than that. Your SCB should certainly come down at next year. Just maybe just talk about how you're thinking about capital deployment and kind of overall capital targets.
Yeah. The regulatory reforms are very positive. They're more accurate, and they'll, I think, drive bank participation in different asset categories that maybe were held back a little bit by the blunt kind of weight of how the risk weights were assigned before. I think it's a good thing for the banking industry. I think it's a good thing for the economy. We said that if we look at the proposal that we gain maybe 110 basis points of RWA relief, and then if you have the AOCI, if you took that off today, that's about 110 basis point drag, you're kinda net neutral.
If you go out, if it's phased in over five years, a lot of that AOCI is burning off because those securities are maturing, the swaps are maturing, so you probably end up with still a 30-50 basis point net, after, you know, the AOCI impacts. That's something to think about, you know, what to do with that. I think, you know, smart person on the analyst call said, "Do you think you have kind of the same risk on your balance sheet?
What will the rating agencies look at, and will the TCE to TA ratio come back into vogue even though it's not a regulatory ratio? There's a lot of things to play out on that, but you're in a position of strength because now you have a higher CET1 ratio coming down the pike. Our SCB has been a frustratingly high number, which has no basis in accurate methodology, but I think that's gonna change. I think we're very hopeful that we go through this round and even if they don't change the SCB, by the way they set it up this year everybody will see that the SCB is a lot lower, and it's more back in line with peers. That's another positive. Anyway, we'll wait and see.
I like to run with a little bit of a conservative mindset around our capital position. I think the strong banks operate that way, and then when you get into choppy waters, you can be opportunistic, just like, you know, we had a chance to bid on Silicon Valley and on First Republic because people knew, you know, we had strong balance sheet positioning, strong funding, strong capital, et cetera, et cetera. We'll kinda work that all through, Jason. It's a good problem to have. It's a good, it's a good situation to be in.
All right. We got two minutes left, or four minutes left and two questions.
Be succinct is how you're telling me?
I'll just point out. Obviously you gotta cover M&A. You know, there's a window here that banks seem to be able to consolidate. Maybe just talk to, you know, your thoughts on scaling the industry, you know, is Citizens, you know, thoughts on Citizens expanding further through acquisition, both on the banking side and then maybe on the non-bank side.
Yeah. I've been pretty consistent that with the amount of organic growth that we have and the initiatives that we have in motion, that the bank M&A right now is a lower priority. It's not something that we're actively focused on, because in effect we did our M&A was the startup of the private bank. You look at, you know, 10% accretion to your bottom line within two and a half years, you can't really find a deal that delivers that, and you'd have to spend a huge amount of capital to deliver that. We found a capital light way to get into a new business and have huge benefit to the bottom line, and making sure that that is sustainable and maturing on the right trajectory has to be our highest priority.
RTB is also another initiative that is capital light. You take some one-time costs, but if you can deliver $450 million improvement to PPNR, that's also really, really big. Making sure that gets off the ground and we manage that and execute that well is important. I'm less concerned about, you know, scale. If you know, some of the folks in our peer group are buying banks at, you know, $30 billion-$75 billion. I don't think that game changes your scale a whole lot. You gotta do what I said in the beginning is build out your business strategy and focus on areas where you have a right to win and you have real strength and distinctiveness, and that's what we're doing.
Makes sense. Maybe just bring it all together. You know, you've talked about getting, you know, the 16%-18% ROTCE target by the end of next year. Kind of everything you said so far feels like you're on track.
Yeah.
When you made that target, RTB wasn't something you had talked about. We didn't know about this, you know, Basel III Endgame, reduction in risk-weighted assets. I guess how should we still think about it? Is that still the right ROTCE number?
I, you know, I remember when we did the IPO, people made me promise that I could get to 10% within three years when we were starting at five, then when we got to nine, people were saying, "Well, you should raise it." I said, "I'm not even there yet. Let me get there first." That's my mindset now is, you know, don't keep stretching, don't over-promise. Just kinda get the returns into that level, and then make sure that, you know, it's something that we think is pretty sustainable. When markets go through inevitable cycles, we wanna have much lower tail risk.
I think we have that the way we have more diversification in our revenue streams, and we have tightened up our lending criteria. It was always good, but I think it's a much better now in terms of our credit risk profile. I think we can deliver that, manage to deliver returns, we'll see how much growth we want to achieve. Any growth should be accretive to that. If we can continue to grow the private bank and continue to execute on our strategy, I do think down the road there could be upside to the 16%-18% for sure.
Perfect. That's a good place to leave it. Please join me in thanking Bruce for his time today.