I am here with Fifth Third Bank, just a brief introduction to them before we start. They're headquartered in Cincinnati, Ohio, about a $200 billion asset institution. Three principal segments: commercial banking, consumer and small business, and wealth and asset management. Very strong profitability metrics, about an 18% ROTCE and a 125% ROA. Non-interest bearing make up 25% of total deposits, very attractive. Valuation of 10.5x next year's earnings. With me today, I have, to my immediate right, Bryan Preston, who's Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer. Bryan is responsible for many functions, including FP&A, corporate development, accounting, and tax. He was named CFO in January of 2024 after serving four years as Treasurer. He was previously CFO of Consumer Payments and Strategy. He served many roles at Fifth Third since 2003, and he started his career at EY.
Jamie Leonard is Chief Operating Officer. He's responsible for many areas of the company, including retail banking, consumer lending, business controls, marketing, operations, strategy, on and on. Jamie became CEO in January '24 after three years as CFO. Before that, he was Chief Risk Officer in the firm's treasurer. Shall we get started? All right, fantastic. Should we start with Comerica? You wanted to watch the customer coming out.
Let's start with Comerica.
Let's start there. Okay. It seems like maybe there is, I'm sorry, wrong set of questions. That's my secret questions. Let's go into this one. Okay. You haven't historically been an M&A shop. In fact, we've had Tim at this conference talk before about the very organically focused. So why pursue the Comerica acquisition now, and how does it fit into your strategy?
Great question. I think one of the things that's important as we evaluate optionality and options for growth, we do believe that foundationally you have to be great at organic growth as a core principle. Real value creation for shareholders comes from being a builder. And so when we do that and the work we've done to be great at retail organic growth, middle market banking growth, it creates a real hurdle for us and a real discipline around evaluating the opportunity cost for an organic transaction because of the distraction it creates from the organic playbook that's working. And it also gives us an option to evaluate the strengths that we have as a company and the strengths of our partner to figure out if the combination is going to make sense. And with something like Comerica, we look at our strength in our retail franchise.
And this was an opportunity to bring something that we're great at. We're great at building branches. We're great at growing deposits. And we can bring that to what is a great platform for future growth. And then looking at the middle market franchise, and you've heard us talk about strength and strength on this one, where we have a strong franchise, they have a strong franchise. And what became important there was ensuring that there was good cultural alignment. Because when it's strength and strength, you want to make sure that you view how you serve the customer, how you grow the business in a similar way, and have a good alignment from a risk appetite perspective and a credit culture perspective.
And when we looked at the Comerica opportunity, we saw those things come together to really create something that creates a pathway for growth for us that can drive us for the next five to ten years with the platform that we have together. The ability to take advantage of the opportunities and the demographics of the Texas market to continue to shift our growth profile from what was originally when we started our Southeast expansion, a heavy Midwest franchise, to now really shift the profile of our growth from a long-term perspective and to give us an opportunity to continue to invest and build and do the things that we do very well to create shareholder value.
Okay, that's very comprehensive. Thank you. The last deal that you did was a while back. It was announced in 2018 and took about a year, just under a year to close. We'll get to that later on the new environment. But it was a bit smaller. It was about 14% of your assets, and this is more like a third. So it's a little bit bigger. So what lessons did you learn from the MBFI transaction and the risks with integration? And I don't know if as part of that, it can kind of touch on who maybe you're locking up more people, maybe just in the context of what you learned from the MBFI transaction. You're going to be doing it, so.
Yeah, we learned a lot from the MB transaction. Some things we did incredibly well, and we will do that again. Some examples of that were early appointment of the regional leadership. And in the Chicago market in particular, Mitch Feiger became the president of Chicago, did a wonderful job, joined our board, and is a great board member today. Mark Hoppe followed Mitch Feiger, also an MB alum and was our Chicago president. And now Mark Heckler, an MB alum, is our Chicago president to this day. And I think when you get the right regional leadership in place that inspires the followership of the RMs, you will do a much better job on RM retention than just throwing money at a problem. So I think we did that very well with regional leadership and with RM retention.
I think some of the things that we learned the hard way on MB that we won't make the same mistake this time is first, the faster you get to legal day one, the faster you get to close, the more flexibility you will have with the integration. With MB, given the environment, it was 273 days to regulatory approval and a full year to get to close. And then the window between close and customer day one was seven weeks. So that's a very tight window to get an integration done. We're hopeful here and highly confident that from announcement to legal day one, let's call it March 1st as a placeholder. And we're looking at customer day one in October of 2026. So that gives us a seven-month window, not a seven-week window in order to get the conversion done.
And the reason why that window is important is with MB, they had a lot of customization predominantly in their payments business. And Comerica is very similar. There's a lot of customization. They're a very customer-centric organization. And we like that about them, but it makes an integration more challenging. And so when you have a short window, you uncover things during customer day one that you wish you would have resolved in that seven-week window. Well, now we can onboard clients between legal day one and customer day one into the Fifth Third network because we're merging their two bank charters into our bank charter on legal day one. So we'll have a little more flexibility to get an integration completed for top customers that have customization of solutions in an extended period of time. So I think that we learned the hard way with MB.
And the other hard lesson we learned was that with consumer data and fraud rules and all of the intelligence systems that exist in a company, when you move data over, the customer looks like it's a new customer, and that presents a different wrinkle to your Zell authorization limits, your fraud controls, your ability to access your money. And so those are the things that you need to make sure you're very careful about. And having that seven-month window gives us more time for testing and building the right analytics so that they have a great experience on customer day one.
Okay, that's very helpful. So let me just skip ahead then to the closing and the timing of the closing. Like they said, MBFI was nearly, you talked about 10 months from announcement to close. What gives you confidence that you're going to, this is pretty quick. And it sounds to me that you're confident you're going to get there.
Yeah, we've completed all the necessary filings, so we really focused on that in the month of October. I think the biggest change is just the environment and where the regulators are and their interest in helping facilitate acquisitions today that that just wasn't the case seven years ago. So the environment's very different. It's more productive. I'm sure Raj will talk about that at lunch as well. So that's probably the biggest driver, but we've also done a lot of work on our side, and the Comerica folks have done a lot of work on their side as well to bring the two companies together in an orderly but quick manner.
Okay, thanks. Fingers crossed. And then Comerica is in some very attractive markets, but it always seemed like maybe their growth was a little bit, their loan growth was a little bit lower than it should have been given the demographic tailwinds that they had there. How do you turn this around? I know you touched on this a little bit, Bryan, in your opening remarks, but how do you enhance that franchise?
I think when you look at their numbers, it's not that they can't grow, it's that they were constrained and couldn't grow given the balance sheet composition. And frankly, at Fifth Third, we're very empathetic to that position because we were in that position 15 years ago, and we had to fight our way through it. We had to build out the three lines of defense, and that's expensive. And that takes resources that you otherwise could have put into product and IT development. The March Madness, when you have deposit runoff, when you're a smaller bank, it's then going to constrain loan growth.
So hopefully their employees see the light at the end of the tunnel, which is when they're on our platform with our products, whether it's in capital markets or lending and balance sheet capacity or in the consumer business, where we're really excited to see what their retail franchise can do when they have access to the number one mobile app in regional banking at Fifth Third, the customer recommendation engine, the MyDay work, the momentum banking with early pay, extra time, My Advance. These are all features that don't exist inside of Comerica because the consumer bank has been underinvested. But the moment this conversion is finished on customer day one, all of those things will be immediately available to their employees to work with their customers and to really improve the customer experience. So I'm excited about what the growth opportunity can be from a personnel perspective.
I think from a demographic perspective, what is exciting is that if you go back to Fifth Third 15 years ago, predominantly a Midwest bank, our retail footprint had a 1% population growth on average. When we're finished with the Southeast buildout and the Comerica acquisition and the additional branches for Texas, our retail footprint population growth will be over 4%. So that's an incredible position to be in when we obviously believe we can take more than our fair share of the market. But even if you were just at the fair share, that's a really compelling growth number for the entire consumer bank.
Okay. And before you can implement this growth strategy, are there changes that you want to make to the composition of Comerica's balance sheet ahead of that, or?
I wouldn't say changes to the composition of their balance sheet ahead of that. They are a very asset-sensitive business model. So as we bring their balance sheet onto our balance sheet, that'll be a factor that we'll take into account as we manage rate risk. The bigger thing is that we have always foundationally believed that the majority of our funding, we want to be granular insured retail deposits. We've always aspired to have that number around 60% during the COVID deposit buildup, commercial buildup more than consumer. So we've kind of been in the mid-50s since then. Comerica moves us closer to that 50-50 now.
So what we will do is we will continue to, either through the investments we've been making from a branch perspective, the marketing analytics, and the positive campaigns that we're able to run, we're going to continue to lean into retail deposit growth because that is what we want the foundation of the balance sheet to be going forward. We think there's a lot of opportunity with the branches that we've already built and that we'll be opening in the Southeast. And we also think there's opportunity in Comerica's franchise because it's a business that's not had the money to invest in consumer marketing. And so we'll continue to grow that. And it'll give us an opportunity to remix their funding because they were so commercially centric. And we'll drive long-term savings out of adjusting their funding mix as we bring more of our deposit capabilities to their platform.
Okay. Just to talk about, to kind of go back to the comments you made about the Texas branches, I'm going to go to that first, and then we'll go to the Southeast one and sort of how that fits in. So what cities are you thinking about there? I know it's a huge place. Where are you going to go first? What's the timing on that? And then how does that fit into the Southeast expansion that you've talked about for many years now?
Yeah, we're very excited about the opportunity in Texas. They bring to Fifth Third 109 branches in Texas. We will invest in that network, 150 locations in 2027, 2028, and 2029. Our teams have already been looking at sites over the past few weeks. I think we have 12 letters of intent that have gone out on site selection. So we're moving very quickly. And as you saw in the Southeast with Fifth Third, we don't settle on location. If we can't get a great location, then we'll move on. So the numbers I'll give you by city may change by the time we're finished if better sites or different sites come up.
But right now, of the 150, we would expect 75% to be in Dallas and Houston, split fairly evenly, and then the remainder split between San Antonio and Austin, such that we'll have top five, our goal being top five location share within those four cities.
Okay. And then this isn't, I think some of the concern is that this is at the expense of your Southeastern buildout, which you've been talking about for quite some time. And so how does that fit into the completing the buildout? And if you can give us a little more detail on sort of your plans for branches there.
So the Southeast program has been very successful. You see the numbers in all the FDIC data. We'll open 55 de novos this year, five in the Midwest, 50 in the Southeast. This year is predominantly a year of Florida. Next year, there's an overweight in Georgia, but it's well on a glide path of 50 this year, 50 in '26, '27, '28. So at the end of 2028, we will be through the 200 locations. Of the 200 locations, we're 90% secured sites. So we're sort of on an autopilot right now where the sites are good, construction is happening. We're really excited. Next month, we'll open our 100th branch in the Carolinas. So we're getting really substantial scale in the Southeast growth markets.
And since we've been on this journey, one thing I love about Fifth Third is we're certainly aggressive in some ways, but we're also humble in other ways where you have to be humble to learn. And we've been learning, and that's one of the things Tim has really brought to the company is a culture of get 1% better every day. And as we've built each vintage of de novos, we've made mistakes. We then fix those mistakes, and each vintage has performed better than the prior vintage, such that the 2024 and 2025 vintages are 160% of their deposit goals based on where each branch is in its tenure. So we're really excited about the Southeast, and we've got a great team, and it certainly helps when you have great products, digital capabilities to go with it.
I wonder if I could just follow up on that just briefly. And I don't want you to give away the store for the competitive advantage here, but you said the 1% improvement and some of the de novos that you opened, you made some mistakes. So was it location? Was it size? What were some of the things that stood out to you that you don't think?
Yeah, I won't give away all the secrets, but a few of the things are pretty obvious, which is we saw this mistake with Fifth Third in 2003, '04, and '05. I've been at the company 26 years, Bryan's 20 years. We've seen a lot. And when you put out a number and you're going to chase a number on branch builds, what happens is when the sites aren't available and you then cave on location quality in order to hit, "I've got to open 200 branches in the Southeast," that is a painful mistake and an expensive mistake to overcome because in short order, you're going to have to move the branch or you just have a legacy underperforming branch. And I think it was last year at Babb, we showed average deposit balances by branch based on age of branch.
And you can see that a lot of our peers have a challenging network where you have some bad sites. And there's always the ingress and egress and what the miles per hour per road. We have a very sophisticated branch geospatial analytics tool that we use for site selection, but you still have to have good judgment in your sites. And we have really good partners. One of our beliefs in how we model the locations and what the tool does is it analyzes customer behavior from where you live, where you shop, and where you work. And we have found that the more you're with where you live and where you shop, you ultimately will do a little better.
Can you bring some of those analytics and experience to the Comerica branches?
Oh, yeah. We've already run our tools on their network. Their Detroit branches are very good. They run a very good retail franchise in Detroit. The Southwest has been challenged because of the resource constraints that it's a thinner network than what it will need to be. And that's why we want to help that network get to a top five location share.
Okay, great. Just thinking about Texas makes sense for Comerica and their Midwest enterprise makes sense. California, I think people maybe have a few question marks there. They might be surprised to know that you already have folks there. Can you talk about that and sort of how California sort of factors into the whole deal?
Yeah, so California, and I think that's one of the interesting things for us with Comerica. I think we were uniquely positioned from where we have people today, right? The Midwest, the Michigan overlap was obvious, but there are really no meaningfully new markets for us. We already had middle market banking teams in Dallas and Houston. We already have middle market banking teams in the California locations where they are. And we have seen great growth from those teams. And they are excited about our ability to bring the whole bank to those markets now. And we think it's going to put us in a position to be able to continue to grow and accelerate what we've done, accelerate our ability to attract new people to our platform as well. That's to your question at the beginning around how do you get the franchise growing again.
Our ability to grow the sales force is such a critical part of growth. And it was part of the lesson that we learned through the years because we went through a decade of not growing the middle market team. We went through a decade of not investing in customer acquisition. And so we know the journey that they've been on, and we know how to get that started again. And we're excited about that. Texas is obviously going to be the focus from a retail investment perspective out of the gate. What we're excited about on California is a couple of things. One, there's a great middle market small business and private banking opportunity with the branches showing up. We do believe it'll be more of a middle market small business opportunity from the beginning.
But even with that, there's still scaled branches in those markets and a lot of liquidity. So it is going to also give us access to retail deposit funding in a way that's not going to cannibalize our core markets. And so we are also going to be able to use that as a funding tool over time. And then throw on top of that, the new line business that we have from a payments perspective, and that's our embedded payments business. There is a great synergy there with creating a very unique innovation economy bank that has great core banking capabilities with Comerica's tech and life sciences vertical combined with our new line business. And we think there's going to be some real opportunity from a growth perspective to be the bank of choice for that part of the economy.
Okay. Yeah, that's helpful. I'm just going to ask a couple more and then open it up to questions. So just going to the capital side, how does this acquisition impact your capital plans? And then how do you think about the timing of share buybacks after you close?
Yeah, no material impact from a capital plan perspective. When you think about the economics of the deal, the pricing of the deal, it should be relatively neutral overall from a capital perspective. Obviously, there'll be a little bit of noise around what are rates on the day of close, thanks to the beauty of purchase accounting today. One day is so important. And so we'll hold back on any share repurchases until we get to close and we know what the final balance sheet and final capital ratios look like. But we would expect to be in a position to restart share repurchases shortly after close, assuming that the economic outlook looks similar to what it is today.
So we feel very good about that, continuing to target that 10.5% CET1 for now and continuing to look at what we think is going to be a fairly nice continued accretion of the AOCI. And from a marked perspective, still on a good path to the marked capital being north of 9% relatively soon.
And then after the deal closes, you'll be the smallest category three bank. How do you think about preparing for those requirements and what are the costs associated with that? And does that sort of, as the smallest category three, does it kind of put you at a little bit of a disadvantage? Maybe you need to be a little bigger, you're the smallest. Could you just kind of talk about that dynamic as well?
We don't feel that it puts it at a disadvantage. We look at, we've got a good sense of what the requirements look like and what it'll cost us to get there. A couple of years ago, we were involved in the First Republic transaction in terms of being one of the banks that were asked to bid on the transaction. As part of that program, as part of that process, we actually went through and built out a, this is our plan associated with what we think the category three requirements are and our path to meet them. And that was part of our submission that we sent to the regulators when we made our bid. They gave us good feedback. We were one of the, we were the only institution to do that approach.
And since then, we've actually spent a lot of time from a readiness perspective of we were looked at the world and said, you had an opportunity to basically double in size overnight. In a disruptive economy, in a scenario, we wanted to make sure we were well positioned if that opportunity ever showed up again. So we actually went through a program of building out all of our diligence playbooks, our integration playbooks, game planning, scenario planning, what that would look like. That had been very helpful for us as part of the diligence on Comerica. But on top of that, we built out a category three readiness program where we looked at the roadmap of the requirements, what we would need to do from a technical perspective.
We made sure as we were continuing to work through our system modernization that we're doing today, that we were doing that work with category three requirements in mind. And we did work on a systems perspective to make sure that we understood if we were in a scenario where we were going to double the size of the bank very quickly, could our systems handle it? And making sure that we were doing the work necessary so that we understood where there were any congestion or any inability for our system to process that kind of volume and making those investments along the way so that we knew what we would need to invest in to head down that path.
And at the end of last year, we had a third party actually come in and assess our category three readiness program and identify any areas where we would need to make incremental investments. From a big picture perspective, the incremental requirements from CAT4 to CAT3 are a lot less than stepping into category four for the first time. And it's a lot of the things we've done already. We will become an LCR bank again. We were an LCR bank previously. We never turned off the capabilities that we built to calculate the LCR, and we were always managing the balance sheet with LCR compliance in mind. And when March Madness happened last year, we went back to, we're going to hold ourselves to category one LCR compliance. So there's nothing that we need to do from a balance sheet management perspective on that front for the LCR.
There's a couple of other reporting requirements that'll be new. We're a 2052A reporter today, which is that's the detailed liquidity reporting that large banks have to do. We'll have to move from a T plus 10 reporter to a T plus 2. There's a little bit of work we'll have to do to accelerate data availability, but we know what that looks like. And then the biggest new requirement is the SECL. It's the single counterparty credit limit reporting. And you'll have two years once you become a category three bank before you have to file that first report. And we've already scoped out and know what that looks like to build out the capability. So we feel very good and comfortable in the cost associated with that.
It's all included in our cost associated with the net synergies we think we're going to be able to realize from the deal.
Okay. Sounds like you're ready. All right. Go to the audience and see if anybody has questions. I don't know if we have the mic. Just one sec, man. Right here.
Hi, Manan Gosalia here, Morgan Stanley. You spoke about how Comerica didn't necessarily have all the investments on the retail side. And you guys clearly have a good brand in your existing markets on the retail side. I guess what kinds of investments do you think you need to make in the Comerica footprint on the retail side? Is it marketing in terms of deposit rate? Is it promo offers? What are some examples of what you need to do there? And then second, how are you thinking about brand in general in these new markets in Texas and California? Thanks.
Yeah, we'll definitely operate the Fifth Third Brand. That brand will exist in those markets starting on customer day one, so October of 2026. In terms of the investments required to really bring to life their retail network, it will be customer marketing, combination of direct mail and digital, which they really don't do today in those markets. So that will be a nice lift. There are some of those offers. We can use our direct mail analytics program starting legal day one, and that offer would go out under the Comerica brand. And then when you get past customer day one, everything will be integrated into Fifth Third, and all offers will be under the Fifth Third brand.
There are some of the branches, when they move to Dallas and built out the branch network that they have today, some of the branches 15 years later need a little bit of a refresh. That's Kirk Colling saying he liked my answer. So there'll be a branch refresh that we'll do as part of the conversion day one. And then the biggest investment is the 150 branches to build out the network within Texas. The wild card for us will be in California. It's a part of your question is they have 85 locations in Southern California, and we'll have to think through how best to attack that market over time. But for now, our focus and resources are going to be dedicated on Southeast, Southwest, predominantly Texas, and then digital offers and marketing to go along with it.
Any other questions? Oh, thanks. One sec, Julian.
Can I ask about the changed regulatory environment? I mean, it created the Comerica opportunity, which is huge for you, but anything else in terms of your day-to-day interactions with the regulators or they're shifting much more in terms of focus on innovation, for example? What else do you think about when you think about the changed regulatory environment?
It is certainly a much more productive regulatory environment in terms of innovation in the banking industry. It's one of the things that we're excited about from a new line perspective is because we have the ability to be the payments technology partner for some of the most innovative companies in the industry right now, leaders in that space. You look at the Stripe, the Trustly, the Nuvve relationships we have. You look at the relationships we're building with Circle and Fireblocks. We have the ability to sit alongside some of the most innovative companies in the ecosystem right now, be the partner, learn, and build innovative products with them. And we think that gives us a unique opportunity to participate in what we think is going to be a rapidly growing sector of the financial ecosystem. And it gives us an opportunity to learn.
It gives us an opportunity to choose where we play. While we don't know what exactly the future is going to hold with things like stablecoin, we do think that they're going to change how payments are done globally, but we don't think they're going to disrupt everything in the US ecosystem, for example. And part of what we like about what we've done with New Line is it is a strategic diversification investment for us because when those companies are winning and the banking industry is losing, we're winning alongside them. And we think that gives us a unique opportunity on that front. And on top of that, they're companies that are rapidly growing. And so we have an opportunity to grow with them when their sales force becomes our sales force and we're growing as we breathe effectively because their transaction volume creates new economics for us.
So we feel very good about where we're positioned and the capabilities that we have to continue to take advantage of and grow share in the innovative sector of the financial ecosystem.
Oh, we have one more. Yep. Chris.
Chris McGrady from KBW. Can you talk about Direct Express, the growth opportunities, obviously keeping it in-house is a win?
Yeah. This was obviously the Comerica transaction came about after the Direct Express win. There was an aspect of the Comerica transaction that is very helpful for us as well, which is we will now own the BINs, the bank identification numbers on the cards under the Direct Express program. And that will actually make the conversion much simpler and much easier for the program participants. So we are very excited about that. From a bigger picture perspective, for us, the primary way to think about the economics for the Direct Express program is primarily going to be the benefits associated with the deposit balances. On average, three and a half to kind of $3.7 billion is what Comerica has reported as average balances for that program. A huge kind of DDA book that creates a good funding opportunity and great funding synergy. So we're excited about that.
It's really about growth in the program participants overall. When you think about that sector of the economy, it is the this is really a program that's focused around the unbanked, people that don't have bank accounts for the most part. And that's where you're going to continue to see growth from a program participant perspective. And then on top of that, now with the executive order on continued digitization of federal payments, the elimination of paper checks, this is the government's payments program associated with digital payments. So there is going to be continued opportunity for other programs to become part of the Direct Express program as the government is looking for ways to continue to create cost savings as part of their operation. So we are excited about long-term growth here.
Okay. Maybe if we switch topics, maybe we'll talk about NDFI.
NDFI.
We haven't talked about that too much. We always like to talk about that. That's been in the news. Can you just talk about a few things with your NDFI lending specifically? What's your total exposure? How much exposure do you have to similar borrowers? And then how do you sort of think about this more big picture? How do you view the risks with this type of?
Yeah, this has been an interesting area, clearly for investors and regulators to think about what is building in the financial sector associated with NDFI credit. Obviously, there was an expansion of the regulatory reporting requirements associated with this type of lending earlier this year. We don't find the categories that the regulators have provided to be that informative. So we have tried to break it down in a slightly different way. The majority of what we're doing here, first is this has not been a rapid growth asset class for us. We do not view this as a strategic growth asset class. There are things that we've done in this portfolio for a long time that we have a lot of history, that we feel very good about understanding the risks that are inherent in it. And that is the core of the business.
It's a $10.2 billion portfolio, as you can see on the slide. The biggest sector is warehouse-related facilities associated with real estate. So think like residential mortgage warehouse, MSR facilities. There's some commercial mortgage warehouse facilities. And this is also where we would categorize our lending to REITs because it's a similar structure. Next is just generic corporate credit facilities to financial companies. So think basically our working capital facilities or revolving lines of credits to insurance companies, payments companies, broker dealers. So just really traditional C&I lending. The third category for us is subscription lines, so capital call facilities where what you're ultimately lending against is rich people and institutional investors and their ability to make their capital commitments to the funds that they invest in. We partner with funds that we know well, we understand, we feel comfortable in this area.
Those first three portfolios, which make up nearly 70% of the balance, we've not had a credit loss in over a decade. We feel very good about the performance of these portfolios that we've been in for a long time. A follow-up question that we always get is where is Comerica's NDFI lending? And it is primarily in that subscription lines portfolio, and they look very strong in that portfolio as well. The last two are the areas where they're the private capital warehouse. So this is the lending to private credit providers. This is the NAV-based lending. This is an area where we have been very cautious from a growth perspective. It's one that we've not done a lot of. It's one that we'll do some because we do think that private capital will be a material long-term competitor to the industry.
And we do think there are really good players in the space. But we think that for an asset class that hasn't been through a credit cycle yet, for an asset class where there is so much money rushing into it now, we just want to make sure that where we extend credit in the space, we do it with the best partners that we can. So we just continue to be cautious. This is the area where it does feel like that there is a lot of growth in the industry and other portfolios. And it's one we're trying to make sure that we really understand the risks before we lean into this portfolio more significantly. And the last portfolio is just broader consumer warehouse facilities. These are things that are non-real estate related. So this is where auto finance facilities are. This is where the TreeClor loan was.
And so this is a portfolio that's our smallest portfolio, one that we try to stay connected with really established providers to make sure that we have strong relationships and continue to manage that credit effectively. But it is one that is our smallest portfolio in this sector.
Okay. I think we're out of time, but thanks so much. Thank you. Please join me in thanking Fifth Third for joining us.