Hello. Thank you for standing by, and welcome to the Interactive Brokers Group third quarter earnings call. At this time, all participants are in a listen only mode. After the speaker presentation, there will be a question and answer session. To ask a question during the session, you will need to press star one one on your telephone. Please be advised that today's conference may be recorded. I would now like to hand the conference over to your speaker today, Nancy Stuebe, Director of Investor Relations. Please go ahead.
Thank you. Good afternoon, and thank you for joining us for our third quarter 2022 earnings conference call. Once again, Thomas is on the call, but asked me to present his comments on the business. Also joining us today are Milan Galik, our CEO, and Paul Brody, our CFO. After prepared remarks, we will have a Q&A. As a reminder, today's call may include forward-looking statements, which represent the company's belief regarding future events, which, by their nature, are not certain and are outside of the company's control. Our actual results and financial condition may differ, possibly materially, from what is indicated in these forward-looking statements. We ask that you refer to the disclaimers in our press release. You should also review a description of risk factors contained in our financial reports filed with the SEC.
This quarter showed the strength of the Interactive Brokers business model, automating substantial parts of the brokerage business in order to keep costs low and global product offerings and opportunities high, even as unfavorable market conditions continued to extend into this quarter and beyond. While we were able to maintain our commission income, just barely, it is understandable that in these mostly one-way markets, only very few retail clients feel any urge to open new brokerage accounts. This has a large and unfavorable implication for the growth of our business, and we expect this to continue into the early part of next year. In spite of that, by this time next year, we expect that our accounts will be about 30% higher than today due to some new, larger introducing broker relationships we have mentioned earlier.
Preparing to onboard these accounts is a very slow process, and it is unlikely that any sign of these will show before the spring. Account number growth comes on the retail end from direct and introducing broker customers, but much of our commission income comes from hedge funds and proprietary trading groups. An average hedge fund account generates 67 times as much revenue as an average individual account, and for prop trading accounts, this multiplier is around 10. Hedge funds and proprietary trading accounts are less affected by the direction of the markets, and are therefore our emphasis has turned more in their direction lately. As most recent Preqin statistics illustrate, for the past three consecutive years, the number of hedge funds on our platform has grown faster than at any other leading bank or broker.
IBKR is now the sixth largest provider of prime brokerage services by number of funds, and we feel fairly confident about moving to be number four in the current year, right behind Morgan Stanley, Goldman, and JP Morgan. This growth in hedge fund accounts is happening even though we still do not provide some of the products hedge funds use, like non-exchange-listed products outside of cash forex, or firsthand research and organization of meetings and introductions to corporate CEOs or CFOs. Our aversion toward non-exchange-listed products is due to our fear of taking on counterparty credit risk that often turns out to be the source for existential difficulties in the business. These products also create opportunities for outsized trading gains, as they are usually exchange-listed options dressed in different cloth, i.e., different custom-made terms, but they are always ultimately hedged by exchange-listed products.
Since their terms are unique, they cannot be directly compared to anything to ensure reasonable pricing. While we are not gonna change our stance with respect to OTC products, we do not feel the same way about other products like research and corporate introductions. As we continue to grow in this business, that is something we may consider in the future. The point is that ever since we started in the brokerage business, we said that we'll build our platform for the most demanding investors, and we automate it so that we can easily make it available for anyone who may care to use it. We were often told that that was not a realistic approach. You must choose your target audience.
Relying on our growing hedge fund customer base, we are now able to turn this logic around and market the platform to the more sophisticated individual investors by saying to them, "To get better results, get a better platform. The best-informed investors choose Interactive Brokers." We are planning to use this as our tagline in our branding efforts. Another welcome development during the quarter was the growth of our bond platform. For many years, this platform has been growing very slowly, recording about 1,000 trades a day. Suddenly, with more active bond market volumes, this now reaches 3,000 transactions a day. Given the relevance of bonds, our bonds marketplace has a search tool where you can scan by maturity date, yield to worst and duration to analyze and compare issuers and save your scan to run again at any time.
Many of our customers realize that they can achieve better execution prices by sending us limit orders between the prevailing bids and offers. We go out to numerous other platforms to show these orders that if no trade occurs and we get an offsetting order, we match the two. We also have order types that instruct us to keep the order internally and wait for a match. This way, the client is not driving the quote in the market against herself. Despite the slower growth in accounts, we welcomed our two millionth customer in September, less than two years after adding our one millionth customer, and ended the quarter with a record 2,012,000 accounts, an increase of 31% from last year.
We saw account growth in all client segments and all geographic regions, with particular strength, 43% and 31% in Europe and Asia, which together represent the majority of our accounts. Account growth once again occurred in all five of the client types that we service. Individual account growth was fastest at 38%, followed by proprietary traders at 28%, introducing brokers at 20%, financial advisors at 14%, and hedge funds at 13%. Commission per DART continues to rise as our clients continue to be active in options and especially in futures, which carry a higher commission, although the bulk of that goes to exchange fees. In equities, higher commission per DART was driven by a mix of fewer penny stock orders, where we limit our commissions not to exceed 1% of trade value.
Higher futures commissions include very high exchange and regulatory fees, which in part explain our higher execution and clearing direct expense. An advantage of providing many product types to worldwide customers is the ability to capture opportunities when one product or another becomes active. This quarter, while stock share volumes were below those of last year, options and particularly futures volumes remained strong. We are always looking to find opportunities to grow our business. We have been letting investors know that Interactive Brokers pays its clients 2.58% on their cash balances, and if the Federal Reserve raises rates again by 75 basis points, then their rate will also rise by 75 basis points to 3.33%.
We recently introduced our Options Wizard, a tool where you can enter your outlook about the future of the underlying price movement, and the wizard will provide some standard strategies that can be filtered by aggressiveness or by probability of profit. You can set up your own strategy. Continuing high inflation is a catalyst that convinces people that holding on to their money as cash will not earn them any return. Investing in securities worldwide will be necessary for a chance to earn a positive rate of return, which is why we have focused on investor educational materials like our Traders' Academy courses, our webinars, podcasts, and blogs to inform our customers and make our platform the platform of choice for successful investors, the two million we have and the millions more we hope to have.
With that, I will turn the call over to our CFO, Paul Brody, who will go through the numbers for the quarter. Paul?
Thank you, Nancy, and thanks everyone as usual for joining the call. We'll review the third quarter operating results, and then we'll open it up for questions. Starting with our revenue items on page three of the release, we recorded another strong quarter with record net revenues and pre-tax income on an adjusted basis. With customer account growth of 31% year-over-year, we continue to expand our potential for both commission and interest revenues in the future. Commissions were strong, reaching $320 million despite weak equity markets worldwide. Futures volume outpaced the third quarter of 2021. Options volume was roughly unchanged, and while stock share volumes declined from the last year's quarter, the drop in notional dollar value of stock trades was generally in line with the drop in regional equity indices around the world.
Net interest income of $473 million reflected higher margin loan interest despite lower balances, thanks to increases in benchmark rates and higher interest earned on our segregated cash portfolio as U.S. rates have moved from an average effective rate of 9 basis points last year to 218 basis points in this year's quarter. These gains were partially offset by higher interest we paid on customer credit balances as we passed through rate hikes above 50 basis points to our customers on their qualified funds. Other fees and services generated $45 million, with the biggest contributors being market data fees of $19 million unchanged and options exchange liquidity payments of $9 million, down 18% from the prior year. Risk exposure fee revenues were $5 million, down 38% in the current risk-off environment.
Other income includes gains and losses on our investments, our currency diversification strategy, and principal transactions. Note that many of these non-core items are excluded in our adjusted earnings, and without these excluded items, other income was $9 million for the quarter. Turning to expenses, execution, clearing, and distribution costs rose 41% from last year, led by lower liquidity rebates, higher futures volumes, which carry higher fees, and an increase in the SEC fee rate on U.S. stocks and options. As a percent of commission revenues, execution and clearing costs, which are driven by a combination of trading volume, exchange rebates, and changing fee schedules, were 21% this quarter versus 18% in the second quarter.
Note that market data expense, a pass-through item, is included in execution, clearing, and distribution fees, while the corresponding market data revenue is reported in other fees and services rather than in commission. To align the volume-driven expenses with commissions, we look at pure execution and clearing costs, excluding market data expense. Compensation and benefits expense rose $14 million or 14% over the prior year, in line with hiring. While up in dollar terms for the quarter, comp and benefits expense fell to 13% of our adjusted net revenues, somewhat below its historical level. Our headcount at quarter end was 2,752. G&A expenses were down $7 million or 16% versus last year's third quarter on lower legal expenses from a higher than typical number last year. Our adjusted pretax margin was a record 68%.
Automation remains our key means of maintaining high margins as well as continued expense control while we hire talented people and invest in the future of our business. Income taxes of $40 million reflects the sum of the public company's $23 million and the operating company's $17 million. Moving to our balance sheet on page five of the release. Our total assets were $115 billion at the end of the quarter, with growth over the last year driven by increases in our segregated cash and securities, partially offset by a reduction in customer margin loans. We maintain a balance sheet aimed at supporting our growing business and providing ample financial resources during volatile markets. We have no long-term debt.
In our operating data on pages six and seven, our contract volumes for all customers were strong, about even with the strong prior year quarter in options and the third highest ever in futures, up 37%. Stock share volume was down significantly versus last year's active third quarter, and the drop-off is largely attributable to trading in pink sheet and other very low priced stocks. Of note, the notional dollar value of shares traded dropped less than the number of shares traded, reflecting this shift away from low-priced stocks, which tends to raise the average commission per order. On page seven, you can see that our account growth remains robust, with nearly 90,000 net account adds in the quarter, and total accounts exceeding two million, up 31% over the prior year.
Total customer DARTs were 1.9 million trades per day, down 15% from the strong prior year quarter. Our cleared IBKR Pro customers paid an average of $2.96 commission per cleared commissionable order, up 20% from the last year, as our clients' volume mix included higher per order contributions from stocks and options. Page eight presents our net interest margin numbers. Total GAAP net interest income was $473 million for the quarter, up 73% from the year-ago quarter, reflecting stronger margin loan and segregated cash interest, partially offset by higher interest expense on customer cash balances. The Federal Reserve raised interest rates twice in the quarter by 75 basis points in late July and by a further 75 points in late September, with about a week left in the quarter.
The latter raise had a minor positive impact in a 12-week quarter but will have a fuller positive impact in the third quarter. Many other central banks also raised rates this quarter. This group includes the U.K., Canada, Australia, and Hong Kong, as well as the Eurozone and Switzerland, which are now out of negative rate territory for the first time since 2014. Margin loan interest was up 125% to $317 million, despite average margin loan balances that were down 9% from last year's third quarter. Higher rates in the U.S. and internationally continue to bode well for our margin interest income.
Net interest on segregated cash was $228 million, primarily due to Federal Reserve rate hikes, but also to our managing to short duration uninvested funds, which has allowed us to pick up benchmark rate increases quickly. At September 30th, our U.S. portfolio duration was 42 days, so the investments roll over into new higher rates with fairly short lag time. Securities lending net interest was $114 million, down 7% from the year-ago quarter. It's worth noting that while securities lending opportunities maintain a relatively strong pace, it is also the case that as benchmark rates rise, a greater portion of the revenue generated by securities lending is reflected in interest on segregated cash because the cash collateral received is invested as segregated funds.
We estimate this impact to be about $24 million for the quarter versus the year-ago quarter. Interest on customer credit balances or the interest we pay our customers grew as higher rates in many currencies led to our paying interest on qualifying accounts as we passed through rate increases. We paid $248 million to our customers on these balances in the third quarter. Now for our estimates of the impact of increases in rates. Given market expectations of more rate hikes to come, we estimate the effect of increases in the Fed funds rate to produce an additional annual net interest income as follows. At 25 basis points, an increase of $55 million. At 50 basis points, an increase of $110 million. At 75 basis points, an increase of $166 million.
At 100 basis points, an increase of $221 million. Note that our starting point for these estimates is September 30th, with the Fed funds effective rate at 3.08% and based on balances at that date. These estimates don't take into account any change in how we may adjust our investment strategy to take advantage of newly higher rates or any change in our assets. About 20% of our customer segregated cash is not in U.S. dollars, so estimates of U.S. rate change impact exclude those currencies. We estimate a 25 basis point increase in all the relevant non-USD benchmark rates would produce an additional annual net interest income of $14 million and rising to about $56 million at a 100 basis point rate increase.
In conclusion, the company generated another solid performance in the third quarter, reflecting our continued ability to grow our customer base, deliver on our core services to customers while continuously adding new features and products, all at a low cost and managing the business effectively with strong expense control. With that, we will open it up for questions.
Thank you. As a reminder, to ask a question, you will need to press star one one on your telephone. Please stand by while we compile the Q&A roster. Our first question comes from Richard Repetto with Piper Sandler. You may proceed.
Yeah, good evening, Thomas. Good evening, Paul. I guess the first question is on account growth. You know, Thomas, you had sort of warned that you were starting to feel a slowdown. If you look at the quarter, you know, you had a couple months at about 20,000-25,000 and then August of 38,000. Can you give us what you feel like is a run rate going forward and what happened? Why August? It seemed like it was, you know, 35%-50% higher than the other months. Just a little bit of color on the delay, just administrative delays with these introducing brokers.
Look, the account growth is very lumpy. Sometimes we get introducing brokers or larger RIAs who bunch up and all come to us in the same months. In other months, you know, we have much fewer of those. You generally understand that in these markets, people are not as anxious to open a new account with a brokerage firm as they are in up markets, right? I mean, that's, I think that's pretty clear to everybody. Since I expect the market to continue to go down for a while, I expect the new account openings to become even slower going forward. As we have said indicated before that we have two large introducing broker accounts that we are going to onboard probably early next year.
To tell you frankly, I am. Maybe Milan could talk a little bit about what all the complexities are, why that takes such a long time.
Sure. There are really two different things going on. One of them has to do with the fact that we are dealing with larger organizations, and just to arrive at an agreement that we can both live with takes a while. There's an army of lawyers involved on their end. There's a smaller group of lawyers involved on our end. We have to hammer out the contract in a way that is acceptable to both of us, what the liabilities are, what the economics are, et cetera, et cetera. That's on the legal side. On the technology side, two things have to happen. First, the i-broker has to choose the way they're going to interact with us, how they're going to integrate. Are their clients going to use our platform, or is the i-broker going to provide theirs?
Is there going to be fixed connectivity involved? How are the accounts going to be opened? All these details first have to be figured out. They have to choose the right solution for them. The integration work starts. We have to do some software customization for them. They have to do a lot of interfacing work on their end. This typically takes a while.
Got it. Thank you. That's very helpful, Milan and Thomas. I guess a follow-up question for Paul would be on this stock loan. Like I'm trying to understand what you meant, the $24 million that was paid on segregated cash. Is that really a subtraction, you know, of what would-
The revenue allocated to securities lending. Is that what you're trying to communicate?
It's purely a matter of which line item the income is reported on. As rates go up, when you lend stock and take in cash collateral on behalf of the customer, that cash gets put into segregated bank accounts and treasuries and so forth. That simply gets the interest earned, is reported as segregated cash interest. As the rates go up, more interest goes there, and the stable amount of securities lending revenue stays in securities lending.
Okay. It actually would be like, if you just had to net out the revenue from securities lending, whether it be paid in interest on segregated cash, it would possibly be. It's not, you know, it's not up $114 compared to, I think it was pretty flat year-over-year. It would be down. Is that what you're saying? I mean, it makes no difference because it.
Yeah. Think of it this way. When you lend stock and take in cash collateral, there's a base interest rate, a benchmark rate. Should call it federal funds rate, right? There's a fee for borrowing the stock that the borrower pays to the lender. We're the lender. The fee is always reflected as securities lending. In the U.S., however, the fee is embedded into an all-in rate that includes interest paid on the cash collateral and the fee charged to the lender. Only the fees should show up in securities lending. It's an accounting convention, if you will, but in reality, because the cash side of the transaction must go into segregated cash, as the rates go up, the interest income, in a sense, migrates from the securities lending reporting line to the segregated cash reporting line.
Got it. Understood. It's really your net interest income definitely showed the sensitivities that you put out. So it's not really material, I guess. Thank you.
Thank you. One moment for questions. Our next question comes from Craig Siegenthaler with Bank of America. You may proceed.
Good evening, Thomas, and congratulations on eclipsing two million accounts.
Thank you.
For the 30% account growth target over the next 12 months, roughly how much of that do you see coming from the three large introducing broker wins? Are they driving 75% of that?
They have 65%-75%. Yes.
Got it. Just to confirm, I think Nancy said no account inflows from those before the spring, so April. I'm guessing we'll see none of those.
Well, we're not sure about April. I mean, maybe, you know, at the beginning, maybe they will open some accounts for the employees themselves to. Then, you know, one of these banks is going to bring up accounts country by country, and we don't exactly know in what order that is going to take place. What I would say is, you know, the earliest may be February and the latest may be April.
Great. Thomas, thank you for taking my questions.
Thank you for asking them.
Thank you. One moment for questions. Our next question comes from Ben Budish with Barclays. You may proceed.
Hi, guys. Thanks so much for taking my question. I wanted to kinda follow up on the introducing broker topic, but maybe instead of talking about kind of the pipeline of new accounts, could you perhaps talk a little bit about the pipeline of introducing brokers? You mentioned that, you know, retail investors may be reluctant to open a new account in this environment, but are you finding the same sort of sentiment from potential new partners, you know, banks and other, you know, financial institutions that maybe, you know, a year from now you may be telling us about the next wave of introducing brokers? I guess the question is how's the sentiment with that, you know, customer group?
Obviously the sentiment is probably very similar across different brokers. When we're talking about onboarding large introducing brokers, we're basically talking about their existing accounts.
Okay. Makes sense. Maybe one follow-up if I could. Could you maybe talk a little bit about the hedge fund business, since that seems to be where you're gonna be a little bit more focused kind of in the near term? Maybe just kinda help us understand a little bit the cost structure. I think you gave some helpful stats around the, you know, average revenue for your hedge fund and market-making clients. But is it, you know, in terms of the kind of net margin there, is it more costly to serve or is it, you know, a kind of a higher margin group just given the, you know, individual-
I was not talking about the cost. I was talking about revenues. I took the revenues and, you know, coming from hedge funds and took the revenues coming from individual customers, and it is true that, you know, 67 individual customers accounts generate as much revenue as an average hedge fund account in our case, right? You know, in our case, among the individual accounts, there are small accounts and large accounts, and among the hedge funds accounts, there are also small accounts and large accounts. I'm just working with the averages here.
Okay, great. Thanks so much for taking my questions. Thank you. One moment for questions. Our next question comes from Daniel Fannon with Jefferies. You may proceed.
We can't hear you.
Daniel Fannon, if your line is on mute, please unmute. You may ask your question. One moment for questions. Our next question comes from Craig Siegenthaler with Bank of America. You may proceed.
Great. Thanks for taking the follow-up. I had a follow-up on the hedge fund prime commentary that you gave earlier in the call. Are you starting to win business more from larger hedge funds, or is the growth mostly from kinda smaller funds where I believe most of your business sit? And also, you know, where are you stealing this share from within the prime industry? And also, can you just comment on in terms of how this is gonna drive earnings growth longer term, just given the size differential?
Yes. We have almost all smaller hedge funds come to us now and, as far as we believe. Larger hedge funds are beginning to look at us and they, you know, usually work with two, three, maybe even four, different custodians, or at least executing brokers. You know, the larger firms are talking to us more seriously and are giving us a little bit of their business. But we're very happy to take a little bit because we, you know, figure that as they begin to use us, they will see the advantages that we can offer relative to the other custodians they are using.
Thomas , and it sounds like since you're very focused on growing this business, I believe it's they're somewhat sensitive to the amount of capital you have. Maybe can you talk about when you'll feel more comfortable. You know, I know probably not buying back stock just given the stock liquidity, but maybe raising the dividend or returning more capital to shareholders, just because I believe a lot of those hedge funds are sensitive to how much capital you have.
I completely agree with you, and we are not going to increase the dividend. We are just going to grow the capital.
Thomas, thanks for taking my follow-ups.
Thank you.
Thank you. One moment for questions. Our next question comes from Ryan Bailey with Goldman Sachs. You may proceed.
Hi, everyone. Paul, in the rate guidance for a few quarters now, you've mentioned that the guide is based on no change in strategy to take advantage of higher rates. I was wondering, is there a consideration to change some of the strategy around rate sensitivity?
We don't have any immediate plans. We have stayed short term because of the uncertainty in the markets, and certainly with rates going up, we're able to capture that, you know, the upswing, much quicker than had we been invested further out. There wasn't a yield curve for a long time. It's sort of developing, but it's still only developing out to a year. I think, we're unlikely to, make any meaningful changes there. Thomas, if you'd like to add anything to that, please feel free.
Yeah. I like to point out that we pay our customers interest on the idle cash of our customers more than anybody else that we know. We basically have a half a 50 basis point spread that we earn on customers' idle cash. That puts us into a position where we have to be extremely careful about how we invest this cash because, you know, when interest rates go up, we immediately raise the amount that we pay to our customers. If we were invested, say, two years forward, and suddenly interest rates went up, we would immediately have to increase the cash we pay out, but the amount we take would not increase immediately, right?
We cannot put ourselves into a position where we are very much mismatched. Right?
Understood. Thank you for the color. Maybe sort of taking that last point, I apologize if I missed it, but can you give us an update on where the sort of non-rate sensitive cash sits today, what that balance looks like? As we get through some of these introducing brokers, does that have any impact on what those cash balances could look like?
Well, I don't know if any of you understand, but please explain. I do not.
Ryan, you're asking about the fully sensitive balances?
The other side of it. The balances where I think it's below $10,000 in cash per account that you're not paying rate on.
Right. That's certainly the bulk of it, and there are a few other categories there, totaling about $20 billion, out of our total, which allows us to earn rate increases. On the rest, we're locked into our spreads. The net interest income increases will come from growing balances, but not from growing spreads.
Understood. Okay. Thank you.
Thank you. One moment for questions. Our next question comes from Chris Allen with Citi. You may proceed.
Afternoon guys, appreciate taking the questions. I guess just following up a little bit on the introducing broker, the ones that are coming over next year. Are these gonna be fully disclosed or omnibus? I'm assuming fully disclosed given the account impact.
Yeah. They are going to be bringing us individual accounts. It's going to be a structure with a master account at the top and lots of sub-accounts underneath. As to fully disclosed, it's not going to be a fully disclosed relationship, so the end client will not know unless they try to research it, who the ultimate provider of the services is. They will have the contract with their introducing broker. To answer your question most directly, it's going to be lots of accounts, not an omnibus.
Got it. Understood. Just on the outlook for hedge funds moving up to number four, is that something else? Is it you've done or is this based on kind of industry stats? Just trying to understand, just to dig a little deeper. It seems to be a real nice opportunity moving forward.
Yeah, it's industry stats, and we see the rate at which we're gaining in new funds.
Understood.
We're doing very well getting the new funds currently.
Got it. Thank you. That's it for me.
Thank you. One moment for questions. Our next question comes from Daniel Fannon with Jefferies. You may proceed.
Thanks. Gonna try this again. Can you hear me?
Yes.
Great. Question just on expenses. Came in a little bit better in this quarter, and thinking about the fourth quarter and into next year, just the progression of, you know, spend if there's, you know, as you bring on some of these larger introducing brokers, should we anticipate some, you know, additional expenses, for that process and/or any change in priority as you think about spend in the next year that you're contemplating at this point?
No, these introducing brokers are not. Can you hear me?
Yes.
These introducing brokers are not expecting to. I have a terrible echo here. I'm sorry. I will try to remove my headphones so that I do not hear myself. What I was going to say is that we do not expect to hire a large number of people to service these i-brokers. We are going to use the technology that we have been developing over the past three decades. To the extent that we have a very large number of sub-accounts that we are to service, the number of customer service representatives will have to increase a little bit, but we expect the i-brokers to provide the customer service themselves. On the compliance side, the situation is a little different because we are responsible for doing the surveillance of their money moves as well as the trading activity.
There is going to be some number of surveillance analysts that we will have to hire. That number of analysts would be required whether we grow the number of accounts as direct accounts of our clients or i-broker clients.
As far as expenses, I would like to add the fact that you are aware of the high rate of inflation, and we have to increase our compensation to keep them in line with inflation rates.
Great. Then just in terms of broadly account growth in the regions, you mentioned the sub-segments of your customer base. Is this from a geographic perspective, are there areas that you are having greater success or you're seeing, you know, more pullback, understanding that, you know, broadly, as you said earlier, the sentiment isn't great for new account growth?
Yes, I mean, Asia fell off the cliff about a year ago, and Europe joined soon after Russia went into the Ukraine. Yes, the slowdown is. As we go along, European slowdown is becoming more and more apparent. In the United States, it's in the Americas in general, the slowdown is less apparent than in Europe and Asia.
Great. Thank you.
Thank you. One moment for questions. Our next question comes from Kyle Voigt with KBW. You may proceed.
Hi. Good evening. Thanks for taking my question. Maybe it's one for Paul, and sorry if this was addressed earlier. I dropped off. The other net interest income increased to $65 million in the quarter. Was just the majority of that increase driven by higher interest on corporate cash balances? I know there's some other items in there too, including the FDIC sweeps. I just wanted to get some clarity there.
Yeah, that's right, Kyle. It's primarily the corporate cash, which, you know, as you know, when with rates near zero, it was earning near zero, so therefore we're now earning commensurate with the current benchmarks.
Got it. Is there just any update you can give us on the percentage of your balances or just the absolute level of the cash balances that are, or the credit balances that are non-rate sensitive or I guess non-interest bearing?
Yeah. Actually, we did mention that before. It's about $20 billion out of the total.
Okay. Perfect. Thank you.
That, that's a combination of fully rate sensitive and partially rate sensitive.
Perfect. Thank you. Then I just wanted to ask a clarification question regarding the introducing broker onboardings. I think last quarter you mentioned several relationships that you expected to begin onboarding. Thomas, I think you mentioned two large IBs specifically. I just wanted to clarify, was there any potential introducing broker clients that decided not to move forward with the relationship, or is this just purely a timing issue and the pipeline hasn't changed at all in terms of number of clients?
There is no change in terms of number of clients.
Okay, great. Thank you very much.
Thank you. One moment for questions. Our next question comes from Richard Repetto with Piper Sandler. You may proceed.
Yeah. Hi, Thomas. I was just gonna quickly follow up. I know you're very conservative on the account growth, and if I just did the math and if the introducing brokers are 65%-75% of, you know, your goal of 30%, account growth overall, it just puts your, I don't know what you would call it, your organic account growth, you know, at numbers that certainly lower than what we've seen since the pandemic started. I guess the question is that how you see the sort of the near term year to next couple or year or two account growth slowing, you know, back to 2019 levels? The introducing-
Yeah.
Okay. Good. Sorry.
Yeah. I think that because as I said, I expect the market not to be very buoyant. You know, I think that individual clients are going to dry up more and more as we go into next year.
Got it. Understood. Thank you.
Thank you. I'm not showing any further questions at this time. I would now like to turn the call back over to Nancy Stuebe for any further remarks.
Thank you everyone for participating today. As a reminder, this call will be available for replay on our website, and we will also be posting a clean version of our transcript on the site tomorrow. Thank you again, and we will talk to you next quarter end.
Thank you. This concludes today's conference call. Thank you for participating. You may now disconnect.