Continuing along with their presentations, very pleased to have M&T Bank. From the company, Chairman and CEO, René Jones. Morning, René.
Morning, Jason.
Maybe the best place to start, I've obviously covered M&T for a long time, and I think-
How long is that?
Long time. I guess one of the things that I think differentiates the company and allowed it for a long-term track record is the combination of conservative credit underwriting, relationship-driven banking, very disciplined capital allocation, and customer selection. Just as the company has grown significantly over the past decade, just how do you preserve that culture and operating philosophy in a banking environment that seems to be ever-increasingly competitive?
Yeah. It is interesting. I might think about it, to say it a different way, which is that if you go back over time, I think that one of the biggest assets we had in history was this large ownership base. 20%- 25% of the shares were owned by Bob, by the board, and employees. And of course, Warren was in for 30 years. You had this ability and this desire to think about long-term decision-making. Even though it took a long time for anybody to realize that Bob was actually really not about banking, he was about building communities, and he thought it was one of the best seats you could have. All of that produced this, I would call it patience, but persistence, right? So that you could think about what the right thing was to do over a long time.
You repeat those behaviors over time, and even though we don't have that same ownership structure, that's what we're trying to actually do. The result is what you're talking about. You could almost make, and still have a desire to make countercyclical decisions. A great example would be when a recession comes, everybody's cutting staff, and we take our talent programs, and we say, okay, let's double them. Right? As Bob would say, that's the only time we get anybody to move to Buffalo. That patience, I think, has allowed us to move through cycles, allowed us to be healthier than average when things aren't going well. We try to preserve that, and the best way for us to preserve that is through talent and our talent programs. We used to have one or two. Now they've sort of proliferated.
We have specific programs around credit, and we're basically just teaching the fundamentals. If you bring an employee in, they don't necessarily have to know a thing about banking. But if they're bright, smart, particularly if they have a liberal arts education, we can teach them banking, and we can teach them the fundamentals, and that's what allows us to endure.
I guess another thing that kind of differentiates, in my mind, M&T Bank is just willingness to prioritize long-term returns over short-term growth on top of relationship banking, local market density, willingness. When you think about the model, which parts of the model are maybe timeless, and just where does the model need to evolve as we look out into this new world?
Well, yeah. I think you sort of get there if you go to the tech world. I just mentioned talent. We had very specific talent programs. One of the things that helps us transform our tech and the way we think about tech over the last six or seven years has been started, again, with talent. One of the first things we did is start talent programs. So we have a management development program. We used to do a tech development program. We started hiring people from the outside. We changed the environment. We brought in our first set of engineers. Before Mike Wisler was with our company, there was not a single person in the company with the title of engineer. So it all kind of comes back to talent. So that's the thing that is the constant, right? But the question is where?
Where do you need it? That's evolving so fast. One of the biggest threats is simply anybody who doesn't think about tech as the center of their strategy is probably going to have a very difficult time in the future. So most of those things that you've talked about are enduring. Credit is enduring. I'll tell you a quick story. So it's like the Tuesday before the bad Wednesday and Thursday with Silicon Valley Bank. We're at the board meeting. We happen to have a board meeting, and we're going around, and we're talking about liquidity. Someone in the room says, we've talked about this the last five meetings. Why are we talking about it? So I left. Someone was presenting, so I was able to leave and go upstairs and grab a poster and brought the poster down.
The poster had all of the banks that have failed since 1850 and why. It passed around the boardroom table. We looked at it and said, okay, great. Then two days later, huh, liquidity. So tech changes, people change, but the fundamentals of an intermediary, I don't think really change. They may get more efficient, more effective, which is happening today, but the fundamentals are all the same.
We can maybe pull up a bit, but your customer base kind of sits at the heart of the real economy. Just maybe talk to kind of what you're hearing and seeing from your customers and maybe frame it around C&I, CRE, consumer, and just how that translates into loan demand, competitive landscape, underwriting standards, et cetera.
Yeah. 2026 is very different from 2025. 2025, we were still peeling back on and being reserved on commercial real estate. Utilization was down. Most of the C&I loan growth you saw was NDFI, data centers, and things that we didn't do. So we looked like, when you look at the top line, like we were underperforming. Consumer stayed, has always been pretty steady. Was the only thing sort of really growing in 2025. Now everything you look at is growing in concert. It really strikes me. If I were to guess, year-over-year, we've probably had 6% loan growth, somewhere in that range. Most of my career, we've not had since you started banking.
When you started banking, you always had high growth in the balance sheet and so forth because you were smaller. Other than that, it's been one of the most robust markets that I think I've seen in a long time. If there's things that it was soft, maybe a little bit of softness in auto. But pretty much everything else is moving. Not just large corporate, like middle-market companies are spending money.
I guess CRE paydowns is something that has kind of constrained growth over the last few years. Has that kind of ebbed, and just how do you see that transpiring?
I think we keep talking about it, but I think it might be one of the most misunderstood things. I have to tell a story to do that. We write the letter every year, and I'm working with Brian Klock, who you know. I've gotten seven emails from him in the last two weeks on this. Seven emails. I'm working with Brian on the letter, and I don't know. There's something in the draft in the financial section of the letter that I just basically said, why is this so boring? We were keeping the same structure and format that we had.
We just start with the balance sheet, what happened with the balance sheet, whatever. The question I asked is, why did we do so well last year? He said, oh, the fee income. What you saw was all of the decisions that we made over the last five years on investing in fee income businesses. We reduced our balance sheet exposure, but we increased the number of capabilities we had to do real estate for our customers. Those became really robust.
You're seeing that if you look at the performance in 2025, you see that for the first time. It's really solid. That continued into 2026. I think Daryl is thinking about making more transparent disclosure because it's actually changed the profile of the bank. The real estate side helped us really think about how we wanted to play in the segment, and we needed to do a bit of a pause. Mostly because you've got to change your behavior of your teams, and that just doesn't happen overnight. But I'm really pleased with it. I don't know a lot of other places that were able to sort of reduce real estate concentration and actually not have it really affect their bottom line.
You mentioned the importance of liquidity. Deposits have gotten a lot more attention of late. Maybe just talk to what you are seeing in terms of growth, customer behavior, mix, pricing. Just how the current environment compares to what you have seen previously. I am hearing the Fed is going to hike tomorrow, just how that impacts things.
Yeah. Underlying, if you think long term, accounts are growing. We are growing checking accounts on the consumer side. Most of our balance growth is probably dominated by the commercial side today, which is a little bit rate driven. I think long term, we feel really good about growing checking accounts, which is the base that grows the long-term health of the bank. It is not a surprise. We have got good, solid loan growth, so that is going to drive higher pricing on deposits. I do not see anything unusual there. We are just paying up a little bit on our deposit base outside of DDA to make that happen. It is worth it. If you are disciplined, you are looking at the returns. You are bringing on relationships that have high returns in total with all the services you are doing, then you should be fine.
I guess despite paying up for deposits, you still feel good about a high 3.6% NIM for the full year?
Whatever Daryl says is what is the truth. I think if you step way back for a bit, we have one of the higher margins. We also have one of the higher expense bases. Part of that expense base is really driving spending around re-engineering processes and around tech. Some of the numbers are like $300 million or so six years ago. Last year, $1.2 billion. We have to be able to keep doing that in order to sort of keep up the speed and the competitive nature of the institution. As you think about that over time, one of the things that I worry about is the acceleration of things like AI. Not the coming of AI. That does not bother me at all. But the speed.
If we wake up one day and find out that you can run a bank 20% more efficient, and it kind of feels like that could happen, right? You could wake up and find yourself that you could run a bank 20% more efficient. Most likely, that goes to the customer. Because everybody can do it becomes a commodity. So at that point, you would begin to see margins actually shrink for everybody. How do you get margins to stay wide or stay top of the peer group? It has to be value-added tertiary services that somebody's willing to pay for beyond rate. Right? That's what drives this idea that we really have to spend money on tech and innovation and understanding our customer because that's the only thing that actually can maintain a margin advantage over a long period of time.
Got it. I guess maybe just staying on deposits. A lot of talk around stablecoin, digital wallets, automated sweep technologies, just other innovations that could reshape it. I'd just love to get your perspective. You've been around the block like me. Just how you think deposit gathering changes or not, and just the role that banks will continue to play in that.
I think it's logical that the deposit gathering changes. I think that more transparent discovery of rates is probably going to make deposits a little bit, particularly deposits where you're paying interest, a little bit more commodity-like. I don't know when that would happen, but that seems really logical. So the question is, how do you play in that space, and how do you make sure that you don't have a disadvantage? If you think about prior to the GENIUS Act and all the things that are going on today, basically, most of the banks were prevented from using any of the new technologies. That's why we felt 10 years behind some of the new entrants that have come out over time. What we found, though, and one of the things we're doing is we're working on different projects with people. One of them is Carrie.
One of the things that we've learned is that these decisions that we made 25 years ago, like don't keep two deposit systems or don't have three treasury management services that feed into the one deposit system, have become real assets because you've got less technical debt and you're rewiring the firm and providing services that are new with all these new payment capabilities. Your ability to do that has a lot to do with how simple your structure is in the first place. If you think about it, the people who are having the most fun are the people who are building a bank from scratch, right? Because there's just no technical debt in that space. I would say the range of banks and institutions that have low complexity to high complexity is really wide.
It is one of the reasons why we are leaning into operational excellence, because we have realized in order to use things like tokenized deposits and to have that interconnect with partners, the journey is different for different banks based on how much spaghetti they have underneath. I feel pretty good about that. We are positioning ourselves to be able to be really nimble as that evolves because I think the services, it is hard to tell which ones are going to survive.
Got it. I guess you touched on fee income earlier, but it has certainly been a source of strength last year, this year. I think you have guided up multiple times, including Monday night saying the 2026 is once again going to be the higher end of the higher range that you have laid out. Maybe talk to kind of what is driving that continued upper revision.
Upper revision of?
Fee income.
Typically, when you think about regional banks, you don't think about the capital markets. But one of the biggest shifts that we have is that we're much more tied to the capital markets, and the capital markets are robust, right? Think about our Wilmington Trust Institutional Client Services. You're basically getting paid for every securitization that happens. The fees aren't huge, but the volume of what we do is pretty significant. We mentioned the capital markets. Our M&T Realty Capital Corporation businesses are really robust. We've got partnerships with the private loan markets where we might be taking a loan on board and not keeping it on our balance sheet. That's shifting to fees. What you see as a robust loan market is actually also affecting our fee income.
If you look at commercial mortgage underwriting, last year we did $6.5 billion that we put on our balance sheet and $6.5 billion that we put into the market. The profile is really different. Some of it is just the robustness of the capital markets and the health of the markets, and some of it is literally the change in business model that we've had.
Got it. And just maybe one.
You'd say you guys all discount every time we get some sort of a payment from Bayview. It's like, well, excluding that. If you add up the money over time, we shouldn't be excluding that because it's an extraordinary asset manager that we have a profits interest in.
Yeah. No, fair. I guess Wilmington Trust, just how do you think about where that fits longer term? What needs to happen to that make it maybe a bigger component of the overall franchise?
Yeah. I would start with I love what we are doing today. The ability to add that capability into our suite of services for customers is fantastic. We are talking a lot about this teaming together, which is basically using the bank to get at all of a customer's needs. So the private banking components there, the wealth components, the trust components are extraordinarily beneficial to us. We are spending a lot of time as we look at this thing that has, in its current state, has been maturing and is doing really well. The question is really, are there other segments that we are not getting access to that we should be targeting and thinking about? Not all wealth is created equal. It always drives me nuts when someone says we focus on high net worth individuals. Have you ever introduced yourself as a high net worth individual?
If I was, maybe I would, but I am not. People run businesses. They have historically industrial companies, which is what the duPont family built Wilmington on. They have had, obviously, the tech run. But you think about what is going on today. I mean, you are creating wealth at much earlier ages, and the needs of those clients are really different. The history of Wilmington Trust has been built for preserving wealth.
But there is an entire market now today where people are not really concerned about preserving wealth. They are concerned about what do I do? Can I do it a second time? Can I do it a third time? I think our job is to kind of look through and see if we can add capabilities that allow us to tack different segments. We are thinking about that. We are really early in the stages, but I think there is an upside there.
Maybe just talk to expenses. I think kind of running at the high end of the range that you laid out for the year. Just where are you investing across the franchise? Where do you need to do more to kind of compete in the competitive landscape?
Yeah. The way to think about what we're doing is we're revisiting all of our processes in the interest of speed, in the interest of simplicity, in the interest of the customer. So re-engineering area by area. One of the big opportunities for us is as we look at how do we look at credit, and you think about credit underwriting. You would say, okay, well, you guys have a great track record. What are you trying to do there? It's really about actually speed to market. How fast can you make a credit decision? How fast can you react on the front end? On the back end, are you using the current capabilities like AI and re-engineering your space so that you can do anomaly detection to understand something's happened in somebody's checking account in one of your commercial customers?
What does that mean for a credit event? You'd be finding out about credit events much faster, which of course allows you to actually address problems that exist. You'll begin to see, we used to be very siloed, so we had great expertise in credit in indirect auto and some of the national businesses. We had great credit around home equity and mortgage. Separately, we have private banking, and then separately we have commercial. But if you think about it, while those are all different, the themes of speed, anomaly detection, and those things cut across all of them. What you're seeing happen at M&T Bank is a modernization of all of that stuff under a set of principles, which is what we call operational excellence.
We think if we can do that, we can simplify it, we can do a better job for the customer. Six years ago, five years ago, we probably did 15,000 releases, new releases of things that affect the customer. This past year we did 65,000. The productivity of the change is really, really high. You'll see that cut across most of the major operations of the bank. We'll save a lot of money. The question is, how much do we plow back into new investment?
This question, what's your 17%, 18% return? At some point, you start to get a little bit worried that the return is so high that you might be under-investing in the franchise. We talk about 17%. It sort of is a bit of an optimal for us. But when we talk about would we want to be 20%? Well, the first question is how much do we want to plow back into the organization? I think that number's high for a bank our size competing with very large national banks.
Fair. I'd love to hear how you think about how M&T is kind of approaching AI. What are you doing there, and what do you think the biggest use cases are in terms of is it lowering cost, improved service, enhanced risk management, or something entirely different?
Direct AI, we have three sort of things we're focused on. We have awareness of AI. We've got 22,000 employees. 16,000 have become proficient in using some form of AI. And we create environments to continue to make that happen. But relatively very controlled environments. This is what Mike Wisler calls we go really slow to go fast. The second third of that is we're looking at all of our outsourced technology and making sure we have our arms around what that is doing for us. That's probably one of the fastest-growing channels because they're issuing lots of products and services that we will logically absorb without necessarily having to use our engineering capacity to do it. The third thing is our experimental work around our own development using large language models. And there you would see things like the credit.
You'd actually see in the second category and the third category things like credit. How do we speed up in those? Everything we do would be fundamental. If you think AI today, we're using it in cybersecurity, we're using it in fraud, we're using it in credit. Just pick a fundamental. That's where we're concentrated. Maybe a little less customer-facing today, but I don't think that matters. I think we'll get there.
Got it. Maybe shift gears to capital. You're approaching your 10% CET1. Just how do you think about redeployment from here, whether it's supporting organic balance sheet growth, returning capital to shareholders, even buying back dramatic stock, maintaining flexibility?
Yeah. Last year, 2025, we bought back 9% of the bank. Kind of crazy. I think we did that at $183, $184. That was just discipline of if you can't make loans at the right returns, you just need to slow things down and just not make the loans. That changed. First and foremost, we're trying to grow our business. We got into a situation where loan growth has moved up significantly. The thing that we keep talking is we're generating a lot of money. You got to step back and think about it. We think about returns, but just absolute dollars as well has allowed us to actually do both. Grow the balance sheet and give back capital that is in excess. That capital generation rate I think sort of forces us in this place of doing something.
The capital generation is growing faster than the bank opportunity growth has been. I don't know. It's not any different than we used to think about it, ever. I do think that people underestimate the power of that capital deployment. We talk about. What does Brian Klock talk about? The tangible capital growth plus the dividend, right? You look at those numbers over time. That has been extraordinary, really extraordinary. If you think about it's way undervalued in my mind, not just for us. Everybody is looking for growth stocks, has been forever. We're not a growth stock. We're boring, but we're generating massive amounts of cash.
I guess, on top of that, we're going to get this regulatory update with Basel III Endgame and the like. At some point, you guys will actually pick up a fair amount of capital.
Yeah.
Because of that. Just how do you think about kind of deploying that pickup that you're going to get, and when do you deploy it?
How do we think about deploying? Well, I think our capital levels are. We don't need to actually raise our capital levels. My sense is all of that will be deployed one way or another, whichever is the most positive economic value that we can get from it. I think that is all upside. I do think more so about tangible capital and where we want to position ourselves. I wouldn't say I'm worried, but what I would spend most of my time watching is how much leverage is in the system, and I think the leverage in the system is high, and I think if you're using old traditional measures to look at that you might be missing something. You think about somebody has an account, and they're invested in industrials, and they decide to lever it. Okay, you get that result.
But now someone says, well, I'm going to put 50% of my stuff in loan funds. So you're actually investing in debt, right? And then I'm going to put my margin on top of it. I don't think the world is wired to think about that level of leverage. And so one of the most difficult things is hidden leverage. It's probably the number one thing that I watch for and try to learn more about as I think about our capital levels. I think we're high a little bit today. I think we have excess capital still. But the question is timing.
What do you think about the economy? Because I just wouldn't want to end up with having any low capital, right, when there was an opportunity set. And you know, most of our expansion has happened, right, when there's been a slight downturn or some uncertainty in the market. We tend to be a safe haven, and it's where we grow.
I guess, maybe dovetailing on that, right, the environment from an M&A standpoint and a regulatory standpoint certainly feels a lot easier, and I think a lot of us came into this year thinking we'd see a pickup in just bank industry consolidation. We haven't. I guess, big picture for the industry overall.
Yeah.
Why do you think we haven't seen more activity?
I think it's a catch-22. We're dealing with humans, right? They say, well, okay. Regulation is going to be easier. It's easier to get your application in. And everyone says, okay, well, this is going to be great. But if you're a seller on the other side, you're thinking to yourself, wow, this is an easy environment. I can make a lot of money. I'll go another two years, right? I really think that if you're going to predict which institutions are going to be around and which ones will take a path of not being around, it's probably the amount of investment they're making in new technologies and systems and those types of things. I would be surprised.
People are sitting around probably looking at the midterms and trying to think if there's another two or three years of good growth and increases in the stock price. Everybody, I would presume, wants to sell at the high. Right. That would be my guess, right? That the runway is sending two signals, one to buyers and one to sellers.
I guess you guys in the past have been very successful buying banks and adding them onto the platform. I guess, how's your appetite at the moment?
Yeah. We're in very good shape, not only in terms of the numbers but in terms of where we are operationally. We've been talking about the boring stuff now for five years. We've done a tremendous amount of work all the way through our general ledger to our digital assets. So we're in a good place. If there's an opportunity to come up, it would not be hard to absorb a bank.
I guess when you think about it, kind of what fits. Is it in market? Is it out of market? And kind of what strategic and maybe what financial metrics kind of matter more to you?
Yeah. You know them all. Ideally, in market would be fantastic. It would be in markets where we don't have number one, two, or three share. Those are places that are very attractive to us, and they're attractive because it helps us with local scale, helps us with advertising, going further, brand recognition. What's happened over time as the franchise has grown, there are more of those places, right? In the Northeast, in the Southeast, Mid-Atlantic areas. There are ample opportunities for us to actually increase our density. It's really important to us because I think that's what you're seeing on the balance sheet when you talk about our higher margins and those things. It's a reflection of how important are you and how dense are you in the markets that you choose to be in. We look at everything, but most likely, those are the easy targets.
You mentioned hidden leverage earlier. I feel like that's a topic from upcoming annual letter. In prior annual letters, you talked about this whole NDFI s ituation and expressed concerns. What are you thinking about that currently?
Just to refine it, I think the private loan markets have been extraordinarily beneficial to banking. Go back to when you started and in my early days, we couldn't securitize a commercial real estate loan, right? There were no middle-market loan funds. There was nothing like that existed. So we've got lots and lots of liquidity. That's a big plus for the banking industry. The one I worry about is the spots where you can't see what's actually happening. So my concern is lack of transparency more than anything else, and complexity. So you're always looking around corners to understand who's being really transparent. Who really understands their balance sheet? That would be the way I would think about it. When we talk about hidden leverage, the hidden part is really important.
Got it. So maybe just credit quality more broadly. I think criticized assets continue to come down for you guys. Charge-offs are at the low end of what we'd expected, yet you've kind of built reserves the last two quarters, I think more so than most other banks. So, is that conservatism? Is there something directly in your portfolio you're kind of concerned about? I mean, your full-year charge-off guidance implies an increase in losses in the back half of the year. I'm not sure if that's the right way to think about it.
Mm-hmm. I mean, credit is good. I mean, I don't have any more information than you have. I do think this increase in rates thing is really interesting. If the Fed is going to increase interest rates, it's because they want to slow inflation, which means they want to slow the economy. And so there's been so much robust growth across lots of industries, right? That you've got to be careful because it's going to emerge, and it won't be one of these sort of very direct things. People say, do you have data centers and things like that.
There's always the indirect issues. Like several years ago, it was natural gas in PA. And you'd be like, well, I don't have any of that. But yes, you happen to have all the trucks that carry the water to do the fracking. Right? It's these indirect benefits. Everything has been so healthy that I think you need to be a little bit conservative because when that does slow down, in fact when the government tries to slow things down, there will be an impact, right? You just don't know where it's going to show up. So I'd call it general conservatism.
Yeah. I guess when you look at your C&I portfolio, any particular industries relatively more worried about commercial real estate? Any particular segments that you're paying particular attention to?
No. I now have a weekly meeting where the credit guys take me through a different portfolio every single week. What that used to look like was we'd do what you said, which is, what's going on in NDFI? What's going on in this particular segment? We'd pick the ones that we were more concerned about. Now we're just going through, as a routine, everything. Just looking for a change, looking for something that's different than what we've seen in the past couple of years. But things seem pretty healthy today.
Got it. I'm not sure if you caught the presentation of the bank before you, but they spent the bulk of it saying how the competitive landscape among banking has just gotten a lot more intense lately, whether it's deposit pricing, whether it's loan pricing. You've been around this a long time. How would you characterize the competitiveness today, both within the banks and then kind of feeding in from non-banks, kind of relative to where it's been historically? Is it accelerated in the last year or so, or kind of just always been competitive in your view?
I think the biggest change has been the private loan markets going from very competitive in 2025. After those liquidity scares, funding withdrawal scares they had, pulling back and getting more conservative. I haven't heard a lot of them getting really aggressive. But if there's aggressiveness in the market, I wouldn't be surprised if it's there as people get more comfortable.
One of the really interesting things is when we had those nervous points around withdrawals, the capital markets were so strong that they could actually go outside and get funding, right? Which is healthy. So that actually reduced that risk. The question is that change in underwriting that we saw, which was dampening late 2025, has that been a permanent effect on them, or are they actually pushing price? I mean, the banking industry's always competitive. You talk about it when you're bummed that you can't book loans over the cost of capital. We complain a lot about that. But the discipline is just trying to not do that, right?
Right. Before you touched on kind of a longer-term target of a 17% ROTCE. How do you balance kind of profitability versus growth? Just how does you think about it?
I think there's two kinds of growth. What's going to happen tomorrow, right? Am I going to make a loan? Is someone going to draw down on their lines? Whatever. That's fine. The longer-term issue on growth is are you going to be able to take share? Which means are you going to be able to have capabilities? All that investing in either infrastructure or technology solutions closer to the customer. You think we've had it now for years, it's just been wildly successful. But our Nota thing that helps sole proprietor lawyers get around the risk they have of managing these Nostro accounts. It's probably the fastest growing deposit generator in our bank because it solves a problem for the customer.
Interesting.
You are looking for those types of things, and they are not things that everybody can have. They are things that have to be really focused on the outcomes for your customers. That is going to be our biggest demand for resources. Daryl runs a very interesting type shop where everybody comes in and says, here is all the stuff that I want, and then we make them talk about. We basically make them do a pitch to talk about, okay, well, who is it going to affect and what is it going to. The biggest place where the demand is there. Think about cash management services on the commercial side and embedded banking, right? How do we actually allow that customer to do business with us but not get in their way? We are making some investments in those spaces.
Got it. Then as we sit here today, two weeks to go in the quarter. Back in July, you were thinking about the world runway. Kind of fast-forward to today, any trends that may be different from what you thought?
Economy is strong. Nothing more to say. I cannot explain why the economy is so strong, but it is very strong on all fronts.
Does the Fed hike today change that?
I bet you it doesn't. I bet you it doesn't. I mean, the thing that's long proven, long studied, is it takes 12 - 15 months for an interest rate impact by the rates or movement by the Fed to make its way into the economy. So you still have some time to think about it. Even if they changed their posture and they were raising rates, you might get an initial reaction by the stock market, but you won't see it in the companies for 12 months. And so then your antenna is up and you're trying to look for where the problems might be.
Perfect. On that note, please join me in thanking René for his time today.
Thanks, Jason.