Next up, I'm very pleased to have M&T Bank Corporation with us. If you kind of put up the first ARS question. M&T Bank Corporation did post a slide deck last night, but you could take a look at that in your own time. There's some good stuff in that. I thought maybe better now just kind of, you know, jump right into it and maybe just start big picture. You know, you're kind of franchise spans Northeast, New England, and Atlantic from maybe a branch presence and obviously several businesses on a national scale. You know, maybe just kind of updates in terms of what you're hearing, seeing from your customers.
I think, you know, from where we felt customers from maybe six months ago, I would say things are more positive. I think people are addressing the tariffs and people are feeling more comfortable. I wouldn't say the investments are robust, but we are seeing increases now. Some of our middle market customers, utilization is going up a little bit, maybe in distribution, ABL. I think there's pockets where things are starting to increase and be more positive. Hopefully with the new tax bill that happened, that will give more security. As things continue to move and get better, we're hopeful that the economy will grow and be more positive and get more loan growth from that perspective.
Got it. I guess when we think about M&T Bank Corporation, you've been in kind of slower markets while many of your peers are focused on building a presence in higher growth markets. Let me just talk to you about your confidence in your strategic directions.
Yeah, so I think both of us have been doing this a long time and things kind of ebb and flow in the marketplace. I would tell you, you know, I've seen this story before sometimes with an institution doing that exact same strategy. Our strategy at M&T Bank Corporation is really to serve our customers and our communities. We really are big believers in growing and getting more density in the markets that we serve. We operate in 13 states plus the District of Columbia. I feel that we have more opportunities to grow and just get more density in those markets and do a good job making a difference in people's lives. We think that that's really key to how we operate. I kind of like being an outlier strategy, to be honest with you.
Everybody's chasing growth and we're just growing, operating accounts, checking accounts, and doing our thing. I think in the long run, you know, we will prevail really well.
Got it. Maybe the benefits are kind of against that backdrop, just running through the income statement, starting on net interest income, kind of one Q, two Q calls, your kind of temperature outlook. Look at the slides last night, your slightly temperature outlook. Maybe just talk a little bit and kind of what's driving those changes.
Yeah, from a net interest income perspective, you know, we started the year out very optimistic thinking we'd grow loan growth more robustly than it's actually come to fruition. There's some of it, you know, you can blame on maybe surprises on the administration and how aggressive that they came out with tariffs and all that. That said, you know, things are still progressing really well. We're on pace to have record EPS this year. I think we're doing some things right from that perspective. If you really look at the portfolios, we really thought our CRE portfolio would have bottomed out by now. We're still getting pretty high payoffs in that area. Our production is increasing. We have to remember we are a disciplined acquirer and disciplined in underwriting and how we basically make loans. We won't get every loan in the marketplace.
We support our customers that we've had for many years and we will continue to do that. CRE will grow. It's just a matter of time when the payoffs slow down from that perspective. Net net overall, net interest income is maybe a little bit softer, but the fee income businesses that we are having are producing much more revenue than we thought and really good growth in a lot of categories that we'll go into in a little bit from that perspective. Net net overall, we're outperforming our budget overall.
Got it. Maybe put up the first ARS question. I guess maybe we kind of delve a little bit more into loan growth. I guess earlier in the year, C&I was an area of strength. You know, looking at obviously with the C&I is a pretty broad term, but maybe within that, you know, where you're seeing strength, where's potential weakness, and maybe your outlook there.
Yeah, from a C&I perspective, we've done a good job in the last couple of years of growing that book. If you look at it, most of the growth is coming in what I would call our specialty businesses, which is large corporate, fund banking, mortgage warehouse. A lot of those categories are in the NFDI categories where you're seeing that growth. That's REITs, mortgage warehouse, and fund banking are in those categories there. That's really driving it. Starting to see some pockets of growth in middle markets. We're more optimistic there as the year plays out that we'll have more growth there. We have 27 regions. Some are growing, some are shrinking. Net net overall, it's slightly positive from that perspective. We'll hope to get more momentum there.
From a C&I perspective, I think we'll continue to penetrate that and do really well and serve our clients in those markets.
If we could put up the next ARS question, we'll get to that answer in a bit. Maybe shifting to CRE, you kind of talked about maybe taking a little bit longer to bottom out. You've also kind of mentioned it's maybe a bit more competitive than you would have thought. Maybe just talk to when do you think that book could start to grow again, what areas of it do you want to grow, and opportunities?
Yeah, so we've been open up for business for CRE since the beginning of the year. For the most part, almost all the categories are something we're willing to do. Probably shy a little away from office and major metropolitan markets, but we're open for industrial growth, multifamily, retail, construction loans. All those are available there. We still have our strict underwriting guidelines that we follow. We try to support our customers that we've had for long periods of time. I think in the last two months, we've seen really strong growth in July and August that basically has been the best we've seen in the last several years, which is positive. Payoffs are still pretty high.
Good news about payoffs, that's curing some of our criticized book, but we probably see that subsiding as the year kind of closes and probably production will stay where it is or continue to gain momentum and you'll start seeing some growth. Probably thinking fourth quarter will be the bottom and we grow off from that into 2026.
Lastly, on the consumer side, you know, recreational finance, indirect auto, were pretty strong in the first half of the year. I'm not sure if Tyrick Pollport played a role, but maybe just your outlook for the consumers.
Yeah, huge production that we had in the March-April timeframe in our indirect auto, marine, and RV portfolios. The lots have not filled back up since that purge of all that volume that we had there. We're growing in those markets, in those businesses, but not as fast a pace as we had earlier this year. Really good growth. I really want to say that the growth that was also in our consumer bank, we actually focused on and started to grow our home equity lending business again. I think given where mortgage rates are on first mortgages and all that, we were able to grow our home equity again, which is positive. We don't have a huge credit card, but that's also growing. Really good overall. The consumer bank really has performed really well the first three quarters of the year.
Got it. Maybe just shift gears to the deposit side of the house in terms of just what you're seeing in terms of mix, balances, and maybe just rate paid. The Fed's likely going to cut, you know, 25 basis points. How do you think that deposit beta, and the outlook for a year?
Yeah, so year to date, or since rates started to drop and all, our deposit beta has been in the low 50% pretty much as planned from that. We feel good about that. We've already started to cut rates believing that the Fed's going to cut next week. We try to get a little bit ahead of that and front run some of that so that that's actually happening in the marketplace. From a deposit growth perspective, I believe in the always on strategy, always trying to give competitive rates out to our business lines and to our customers. We don't want to give the highest rates, but not the lowest rates. We want to get our fair share of volume. Last quarter, you saw that we were able to get in some good interest-bearing funding sources.
They were priced at higher rates, but still at rates that we could still bring in funding and pay off non-core funding, which is positive. That will continue. As far as the disintermediation goes, I think disintermediation for the most part is gone. You might have one-off situations, but for the most part, I think with rates coming down, disintermediation is going to probably start swinging back maybe sometime next year if rates go down.
I think we've historically thought of M&T Bank Corporation as a fairly asset-sensitive bank. I feel like it's a different balance sheet construct today. Maybe just address that, and you know, what is the ideal environment for you?
You know, when you look at M&T Bank Corporation, we positioned ourselves really nicely, knowing not to deploy the assets into the investment portfolios when the rates were down to zero and all that. That was a great decision from the company's perspective doing that. As rates have kind of leveled off and started to come down in the last year or two, we've deployed some of the cash at the Fed. When I joined, we were probably over $30 billion of cash at the Fed. We're down to probably about $17 billion, $18 billion on average at cash at Fed. Our investment portfolio is up to about $37 billion.
We're kind of in a sweet spot where we think that's where we're comfortable, where we still have a lot of liquidity on balance sheet, but our investment portfolio, which is still all government securities and treasuries that are really pure liquidity, basically extends our duration out of our assets, just having a bigger portfolio there. Our duration of the investment portfolio is three and a half years, so it's not a long portfolio. We've made investments in securities such that we don't have a negative convex portfolio. We have a lot of positively convex vehicles like treasuries and agency CMBS versus agency MBS from that perspective. I feel good about that. We've also been able to grow our consumer book intentionally. That's fixed rate. That's also helping our rate sensitivity.
We have positive repricing going on in our swap book that's going to play out through into 2026 from that perspective. That's going really well. I think as loan growth continues to grow, I think you're going to see margins start to respond and maybe come up a little bit higher in the mid to high 360s and maybe get it into the low 370s sometime in the next year.
Okay, mid to high $360 million for this year, and then you think in low $370 million for next year.
I think that that's possible.
Makes sense. I guess as kind of tying the whole discussion together so far, you're obviously putting together your 2026 budget. As you think about kind of NAI growth, maybe what are some of the puts and takes, and considerations, and maybe look on the screen, that's the buy-side consensus forecast for NAI growth for next year.
Yeah, we don't want to really focus too much on 2026, but I don't think we're going to surprise you. I think what you see on there is very reasonable from that perspective. Our fee income has been really a great performer. We're going to have higher growth in fee income this year that will continue into next year. Our businesses are performing really well. I feel good about all the revenue production that we have.
Makes sense. Maybe turning to fee income, one of the takeaways from the deck last night was, you know, potentially exceeding the top end of the range. Maybe just kind of what are the areas of strength and kind of what's driving that outperformance?
You know, we're really fortunate to have a great mix of businesses that are performing really well in these times. I think they can actually get better as rates continue to fall. Where we are right now, our corporate trust and loan agency business continues to perform at record levels. We aren't cutting pricing. We're winning it on servicing. We've opened up offices in Europe in the last year. We're in London, Dublin, and Frankfurt. We're starting to grow and support our customers over there. They asked us to support, so we are doing that. You look at our mortgage business. We have a good relationship with Bayview, and we're able to get some more sub-servicing from that relationship. That has gone online, performing at 50% efficiency. That's performing really nicely as expected. As far as the commercial business, treasury management is up double digit year over year.
That's performing nicely. We're having good loan syndication fees as well as good customer derivative fees. That's performing really well. If rates fall, we've invested really well into originators in the mortgage area. Right now, they're originating more focused on ARMs, but as rates have come down, anticipate that volume to switch from ARMs into more fixed production, which would be more conforming and generate more fees from that perspective. That will be positive. Our RCC business in commercial real estate continues to perform really well. If you monitor what's been going on in the last couple of years, when rates get close to 4% or go under 4% on the 10-year, volumes really pick up. I think last time I looked, we're about 4.07% on the 10-year. We're getting close to that.
I expect fourth quarter and maybe early 2026 to have strong production if they stay close to these rates and all that. That's a positive. I think the gem out there that we have, that can perform in really any environment, is really the wealth business. We look at our wealth business and we break it into three broad buckets. The high net worth, ultra net worth area performs really well, competes against all the other large players in that space, and we're very successful there and do well. Over the last couple of years, we've done really well on the lower end, which is more the affluent category, $3 million and less. In the branch system, we have a partnership with LPL and had record production revenue last year, doing really well again this year.
I think that the sweet spot of where we really can make a difference over the next several years is the cross-sell that we have between our business banking customers. We have a lot of business banking that's kind of core to our company and our middle market commercial customers and get more cross-sell into the wealth area there. We'll continue to help drive the growth in that business. We are very optimistic about wealth and getting more assets under management. When you look at our product and service, it's not just managing the investments, it's the whole real deal. We look at helping with taxes, we look at financial planning, it's the full package. When you come to Wilmington Trust, it's one of the best packages that I've seen in my history working and all that.
It's a great product to have and we'll do a great job serving our customers and clients.
Helpful. Maybe up the next ARS question as we shift to expenses. I guess, Daryl, you kind of talk to the upper end, if not above your kind of fee income guide, yet you're also talking to the lower end of your expense guide. Most banks where they're kind of seeing fee income outperformance are kind of seeing expenses go higher to support that. You've kind of been able to maintain your kind of expense outlook or even point to the lower end. Maybe just kind of talk to the whole philosophy and the ability to do that.
Oh, I mean, a lot of the fee businesses we talked about, people that have businesses that are tied to more commission base. When rates fall, the origination fees, you know, revenue that comes with expense automatically because you're paying that. We have some of that there, but like the mortgage servicing businesses, you add expenses and that kind of stays flat for the most part, and you just kind of leverage from that perspective. From a corporate trust perspective, there are some commissions there, but it's not as noticeable as we have in other businesses. I think it's more of a mix in business per se. As we grow out some of our other businesses, whether it's originations or some in the commercial space, some of that will be tied to more commission base from that perspective. Net net overall, I think we're balancing out the expenses.
We have a lot of things going on in the company from a project perspective, and we're balancing all these investments that we're making. When you cut through and look at and adjust for all the adjustments we made in 2024 and 2025 because we had the extra FDIC charge in 2024 and all that, when you net through all that out, we're growing expenses about 3% year over year adjusted, and we feel good with that. I think we'll continue to have positive operating leverage because of that.
When you kind of plan the 2026 budget, which I know you're looking forward to, is 3% the baseline number you start with? I know you've talked in the past about several kind of big projects that I assume are expensive that I would imagine you're kind of coming to completion on. How does that inform that figure?
We got a lot of things going on in the company, you know, and we really have to manage to make sure we don't have too much change going on at the same time. We've been able to balance and do really well with that. We have three key projects that we'll be finishing up over the next year or two. One of them is what we call our CDA project. It's basically, you know, how you manufacture a loan, how you monitor and basically administer a loan production area. That should be finished at the end of this year. We put it in place early this year. It actually cost us some of our loan production, to be honest with you. We worked on it and smoothed it out. We're still working on that. We made a lot of progress.
This is why loan production is increasing from that perspective. I feel good that we'll finish out. In my world in finance, we are putting in finance transformation that includes putting in the general ledger. That should go in early part of 2026. Don't have to finish out profitability, but our burn rate right now in that project is about $7 million per month. That will come down dramatically post getting the general ledger in, which will alleviate and get redeployed in other projects in the company. The other major project that we have coming due in the next year or two is our data centers and putting applications into the cloud. We have three new data centers that are up and running. We are putting application systems in those data centers as we speak. We are also putting applications that are cloud-enabled up into the cloud system.
I think that will be finished out sometime in 2027. Those are the three that are what we call closest to graduating in there. Behind that, we have a lot of projects that we are just now starting up in our commercial servicing system. We're putting in a new version of AFS Vision that is started up. We are basically replacing and putting in new debit monetization in the commercial space that has started and producing. We are starting to invest in our corporate trust loan agency business, trying to digitize that offering for our customers and how we operate from an operations perspective. Those are really some key other initiatives that will help from a client perspective, focus on the client experience, but also help us from a control perspective.
A lot of these investments are moving us from what I would say manual controls to automated controls, which makes us much easier to manage as we get to a larger company. We can control the company and know what's going on as we get more scale.
Helpful. Maybe just think your credit quality. You know, we've seen criticized classified loans kind of continue to come down for several quarters now. Maybe just, you know, just talk to in terms of just your outlook in general, and then we can kind of delve deeper into stuff.
Yeah, so I mean, our guide right now for charge-offs is to be less than 40 basis points. We still feel good about that. Losses are coming in. There are some chunky losses in the C&I space. When you look at C&I, there's really not any themes of certain industries, but the ones that we do see that tend to have higher losses are ones that are backed by private equity, where private equity has failed to support their credits with the company and all that. That's where you're seeing a couple large losses. That said, it's still very manageable from that perspective. CRE losses are coming in really low. Consumer losses are coming in as expected or slightly better. Net charge-offs overall are good. If you look at our criticized book, we've made tremendous progress in moving our criticized balances down.
If you look at the way car ratio, if you go back a couple of years ago, our criticized book was about 12.5%. Right now, we're operating about 7.5%. We've made tremendous progress. I still expect to have continued criticized loans come down, seeing a lot of that in the CRE space, and feel good that we'll get to under 6% probably in the next year or so, which will be really good and much more manageable from that perspective. Credit trends overall going very positive and feel good about what's going on.
Getting criticized loans under 6%, how does that kind of inform your view on the allowance for reserves and what can we see on provision and the like?
Yeah, so when you look at the allowance for this next quarter coming up, we went through the macroeconomic statistics. Not much change from what we saw last quarter. That's one version there. You look at, you know, what's going on from a grading perspective. As there's less criticized, that means there's probably positive grading going on. You're upgrading more credits than you're downgrading net net overall, which is a good guy from that perspective. You have to provide for loan growth. That's how you got to balance it all out. I think you got C&I growth, you got consumer growth, a little bit of resi mortgage growth coming through. Net net overall, probably don't see a whole large change either way on the provision. We're still one month away, but don't see any big surprises. I don't think it'll come through pretty much as expected, from our forecasts.
Maybe, shifting gears to capital deployment. Last quarter, I think it was over $1 billion in stock you repurchased, which was $1.1 billion, a big number, up from what we've seen the prior quarters. You got a nice dividend bump over the summer. Just maybe talk to how you're thinking about deploying the capital you're generating.
Yeah, our dividend increase was 11% up to $1.50 per quarter. That was really strong as well. Our payout ratio still is around 33%, so we have a lot of ammunition there, and I think a lot of certainty that our dividends will continue to grow and be positive. You know, from a capital deployment perspective, we did say we'd bring down the targeting of a ratio from 11 to 10.75 to 11. We're operating in that range. One of the things that I tell when I talk to investors is we found a bank to buy. It's us, and we're buying back a lot of us right now. I really feel supportive of doing that.
With our criticized numbers doing better, the economy overall relatively good, we're a little bit ahead of what our projections were in capital deployment for this year and to our three-year plan that we presented to the board last year. I feel good about that. I think we will continue to take that posture. I think over the next year or two, you will continue to move down and probably get down to 10% at some point in the next year or two.
I guess we had you in London in May. You kind of mentioned for the first time, you know, 10% could be the number. Is that like a year-end 2026 target or how are you thinking about that?
Really depends on credit and the economy and everything going on. You know, we're very conservative and very cautious. You know, there's a lot of risk with not just the U.S. government deficit, but a lot of countries' deficits going on right now and really trying to monitor that going on and looking at the impact on all the other changes in the industry. That said, you know, I think we feel very comfortable. We're generating a lot of capital, a lot of earnings, which we feel good about deploying a lot of that. Our share repurchases are doing well and will continue to be very positive.
You mentioned you found a bank to buy and it's yourself. It does feel like the regulatory construct has improved. There seems to be a pickup in activity. M&T Bank Corporation has historically been a very good acquirer and is sometimes an acquirer of choice. Just how do you think about the current landscape with respect to inorganic growth?
The administration is definitely very positive, right? The people that they've put in the seats, Governor Bowman, the OCC, the FDIC, all those people are much more pro-business, growing the economy, which is really positive for our industry and really supportive from that. From an acquisition perspective, they also are all pretty supportive of supporting growth from that. We know that if there's partners that we can partner with in our footprint, we know we have the ability and thought that we can get deals done from that perspective. René's been in the job seven years. He did People's, was his first one as a CEO. He's very disciplined in how he approaches this. We know he has relationships with all the people in our markets and banks that we would like to partner with at some point down the road. It's going to happen when it happens.
We got a lot of positive things, momentum going on in the company today. We feel really good about that and want to embrace that. If we get an opportunity to partner with somebody that we think is going to serve our customers, their communities, and definitely be shareholder-friendly, we will consider and move in that space. One of the ratios that we really monitor and believe is important to us is tangible book value growth plus dividend. You look at that, we have a slide projection in there. If you look at our peer group, we're the number one bank in both five, 10, and 20 years with that ratio. We are very disciplined from how we operate the company, how we do acquisitions from that perspective. When we do an acquisition, I don't think it's going to be one that's going to surprise anybody.
It'll probably be in footprint, probably get us more density in the markets that we serve so we can serve our markets and our customers better. That will allow us to support our shareholders much more positively.
Earlier you talked about a lot of the systems work you're doing and where you are on those projects. Does that preclude you from doing something near-term, or could you do both at the same time?
It's possible. It's harder. I would say preferably we'd like to get the GL running in place first. If there's something that is able to get done and you still have the approval period and all that, it's doable from that perspective. Getting the GL in is critical because the first thing you have to do is you got to connect their financial system with your financial system and you got to have financials on close date because we have to sign off on those from that perspective. That's key, but it's not a have-to-have. It just makes it a little bit more challenging.
Got it. You mentioned kind of the easing of a regulatory M&A environment. Maybe talk to other pockets of either regulatory changes or supervisory changes that you're seeing that maybe make your life a little bit easier.
Yeah, I really, really am excited about their approach and basically focusing on the real risks of the company. You know, banks really get into trouble for credit problems, sometimes interest rate mismatches, liquidity issues. Those are really three big risks. Really haven't had a bank get in trouble with cyber, but cyber is really important. Risk, it's a big thing out there. It needs to be done really well. You get attacked constantly every day in that space, so you have to be strong from a cyber perspective and making sure you're managing your capital the right way, but also making sure the capital you have can also be deployed to help the growth of your customers, communities, and the economy. From that side, balancing that. Everything that we see in here, I think, is moving in a positive direction.
From a supervision perspective, I think the Fed that we have is much more focused on getting things through and addressing things and getting our responses back on a much quicker basis. From a responsive perspective, I think you're hoping to see sooner approvals from an acquisition perspective. That's positive. Things I think have been much more balanced out, but still focused on the real risks of the company and really how that should be managed and handled. I think we're strong with the fundamentals. That's kind of one of the strengths M&T Bank Corporation has and try to exhibit. I think the fundamentals that we play out tie really closely to how our regulators are wanting us to run the company.
Got it. Any questions from the audience? We could put up the last ARS question. I forgot to put this up when we were talking about acquisitions. Any questions for the audience? Just keep going ahead.
As far as to generalize, I'd say regional banks are often in the late stages of rebuilding capital, whereas the biggest banks have a lot of excess capital bringing it down, and it's just going to accelerate with deregulation. Doesn't that mean that you think that the biggest banks are going to compete harder on price compared to the regional banks?
One thing in your question, we're actually positive in our AOCI, not negative. We actually have positive capital if that were to get impacted. We're the only large bank that has positive AOCI. They're, I think, about 10 or 15 basis points right now to our CET1 ratio. We compete against large banks every day. JP Morgan, Bank of America, Wells, we respect them. They lead with digital first for the most part. Our business model is a lot different than their business model. We're much more focused on serving our communities and our clients within those communities. When we go to markets, we go there with a full scale, and we're all in in the community. Some of the things we focus on are meeting with government officials to help them drive and get things accomplished in their communities.
We try to network and get our key players in those communities supportive of our bank going into those markets. All of our employees have the ability, and most of them take us up on this, where they get 40 days of volunteer hours that we're seeing in the marketplace. We are trying to operate in our 13 states as a large regional bank, but we want to be seen as a bank with 27 headquarters in these 13 states. Every market that we're in, we want to have our regional presidents be decision makers, empowerment, and actually drive how we go to market with all the various businesses. Whether you're in your rural markets or metropolitan markets, you have different strategies of how you go to market.
Our regional presidents really need to help drive how that goes to market to be successful, to compete against the ones that we're competing against, which is a tough competition, whether it's smaller banks or the big guys. We feel that our model is different. There's really not many banks left that have a regional bank franchise so we can operate at scale, but still try to have the down-home feeling of how we operate in the community. That's our differentiating factor and feel that that's how successful we can compete against the big guys as well as the smaller players. We've been through cycles where they get more aggressive and is it consistent? I've been around long enough. Somebody might go in and be real aggressive. There's one big bank right now being super aggressive on certain CRE asset classes right now.
You know, that's more of a fad than it's going to stay there for long term. They go in and out if you've been around for a while. I don't think we worry about that. We stick to our game of how we operate, how we underwrite, how we serve clients, and that's really how we win the day in the long run.
Got it. I guess I'll give you the last word here. You know, I looked at your slide deck last night and, you know, on many, many metrics, M&T Bank Corporation seems to be outperforming the peer group kind of one, three, five years. You can kind of pick your timeframe. I looked at the stock, it's kind of underperformed, you know, the bank index. Maybe just talk to, you know, what do you think is driving that? You know, what do you think is kind of misunderstood about the bank?
I think it's two things for the most part. Obviously, people out there can have opinions too, but one is right now, marketplace is paying up for people chasing growth. You and I have been around a long time. We know there are fads where that happens. That, I think, is a strategy that may or may not work. I think we're comfortable with our strategy and feel good about that. There's also been acquisitions out there. Not all the acquisitions have been positively received. Since we have been successful in doing acquisitions since the early 1980s, I think we've done 27 acquisitions in that time period. We probably will acquire again, just a matter of when at some point. I think people might be a little bit concerned.
As much as I can say, I can't give you a sheet of paper like when people were concerned about our CRE and all of our CRE was going to blow up the last couple of years. I said they're assuming the worst, the investors. The only way I know how to do it is give them more disclosure, show them what we actually have, what we're doing. Lo and behold, we did that. Then we started to show the improvement and got better. Now we're performing really strong from that perspective. I can't tell you what the exact P&L is going to be when we do an MOE, so I can't do that. It's kind of a trust basis right now. I tell you, I've worked with René Jones now for about two and a half years.
He's very great, but very focused in how we do structure, really fundamental, very disciplined. We will do things that make sense for our customers, our communities, and our shareholders. He's very, very focused on making sure that we get all the constituencies and serve all that. You got to trust us from that perspective or wait until we do a deal and it's going to be a great deal and we'll move forward from that perspective. I think that's what it is. I know you've been doing this conference for a long time, Jason. We were talking a little bit before, 23 years doing this. You basically replaced Merrill Lynch in this space. I give you all a ton of credit on you having both the wherewithal and courage to start this conference up from you and the vision of what it could turn into.
I think you've done a tremendous job and made a huge impact. This is awesome.
Please join me in thanking Daryl N. Bible for the time and marketing time today.