All right. Up next, we are pleased to have Webster Bank joining us for the first time. I'm sure many of you are familiar. Webster's an $83 billion balance sheet bank, headquartered in Connecticut, in a footprint that spans the Northeast from New York to Rhode Island and Massachusetts, and has certain national businesses. They focus on three lines of business. Commercial Banking, Healthcare Financial Services, and Consumer Banking. Joining us from the company is Chairman and CEO John Ciulla. Welcome, John.
Thanks, Ryan. Great to be here.
Thank you. Thank you for coming. Today's discussion's gonna be a fireside chat, so maybe, John, kicking it off, this is obviously your first time being at the conference. Again, thank you for joining us, and well, I think most people know you guys to the extent maybe some attendees could be less familiar with the company. Do you wanna just provide a quick overview of the bank?
Sure. I think you hit the fun facts. We're an $83 billion bank, headquartered in Connecticut. Our branch footprint runs really from Boston to New York City. Our middle market and commercial kind of in-footprint is extended down to Philadelphia, and then we've got a number of national businesses, on both the lending and the deposit gathering side. I think our real competitive advantage, and we talk about this a lot, in our investor communications, is our diversified funding base. We have traditional bank deposits throughout, and then we've got a really neat healthcare financial services vertical that includes HSA Bank, and Ametros. In aggregate, we've got about $10 billion in low-cost, granular, long-duration deposits.
We also have a company that we acquired a couple of years ago, right before the financial crisis, called interSYNC, which provides low-cost of acquisition deposits, although the deposits are sort of priced at Fed funds plus or minus. So we've got, I think, a competitive advantage. We've been able to, with respect to other mid-tier banks, keep a lower loan-to-deposit ratio, more flexibility in funding market, or slightly better loan growth. The result, I think, of all that is we have, over the last three years, delivered top quartile returns. We have a very efficient operating model, and we've shown good growth. So we generate a lot of capital. We've been able to return capital to shareholders, and I think we feel like we're in a pretty good position from a competitive perspective.
So, you talked about the healthcare businesses. You know, I think a unique attribute of your franchise is the Healthcare Services segment. Maybe just talk a little bit about the strategic value of those businesses, how it fits into the broader company.
Yeah, sure. So HSA Bank, as I mentioned, is the largest bank custodian of health savings accounts. It's a relatively consolidated industry. The top five players own about 70% of the market, and for us, where we have about 3.5 million account holders, it's given us the opportunity, as I said, to have a very low cost, around 15 basis points on average, $9 billion in deposits, along with some other investment assets that our account holders hold, and it also generates a decent amount of fees for us each quarter. Ametros is similar. It's a workers' compensation settlement business. It's about $1 billion in single basis point cost deposits, growing at about 25% per annum, and so we think that might be the next HSA Bank, if we can continue to take advantage of that market.
We're the market leader in a relatively unconsolidated industry with a lot of mom-and-pop. So we've put a lot of focus on that, on that industry in terms of growing deposits, growing fees, and, as we may talk about later, also providing us an opportunity to cross-sell traditional banking products into those 3.5 million account holders.
You know, as we're here, you know, wrapping up 2025, maybe just spend a minute talking about some of the notable accomplishments for the year. You know, what are areas that could have gone better, and what were some of the key accomplishments for the bank over the course of the year?
Well, I think we delivered on the promised financial performance, which I'm proud of. Obviously, the operating environment's been a little bit volatile over time. So I think our consistency of financial performance has been great. We've also spent a lot of work, and we can talk about this later, obviously, building resiliency into an $83 billion company, in part in anticipation of enhanced prudential standards, Category IV at $100 billion. That seems to be changing a bit, but we're also, as we've told all the people in this room and other interested parties, a lot of what we're doing there we would do anyway in terms of making our liquidity and capital management resilient and strong. So I think it's been a good year. We've grown loans better than the market. We've grown deposits better than the market.
We've delivered good financial performance, and we've invested in the organization and technology. On the side, I'm always pretty honest, on the side of what we could have done better. We had a couple of discrete portfolios at the end of last year and the beginning of this year, namely office and healthcare services that gave us a little bit of credit challenge. And I think the market reacted to that. As a former Chief Credit Risk Officer, I still think our credit metrics and stats are completely in line with our peer group, but we spent some time resolving that, and credit has stabilized, which is good. And I think the other opportunity we have is to be a little bit more aggressive on deposit pricing, and hopefully that will help our NIM over time as well.
You know, we're gonna round out 2025 in the next couple of weeks. We're obviously two-plus months into the quarter. Maybe just talk a little bit about how 4Q is shaping up relative to the expectations that you had discussed on the fourth quarter earnings call.
Yeah.
Third quarter earnings call.
Yeah.
That we haven't hit the fourth quarter yet.
Not much of a material change, I will say, on loan growth. We had started the year anticipating 4%-5% growth. At the end of the third quarter, we increased that to an estimated 6% growth. We have continued to see robust loan growth, and so our expectation is we may come in closer to that 7% level. I would say on credit, on fees and expenses, we're pretty much in line. We still are dealing with some headwinds on margin, and so my guess is we had guided towards a 335 exit NIM at the end of the year. We may be one or two basis points short of that, but otherwise, our guidance remains intact.
Maybe just to follow up on one of the points that you made, you had spoken about the NIM coming down in the back half of the year, including some softness. Maybe just talk a little bit about what are some of the key drivers that are driving the softness, and how is that impacting your thoughts as we look towards 2026?
Yeah, I think there are two categories. One, I'll use Fed speak and say that it's transitory, and I would say that we've got seasonal outflows of government deposits in the fourth quarter, which puts some pressure on our funding costs. We also issued some new debt, and we have in the process of redeeming two existing debt issuances. So we're carrying extra sub-debt now, and that's worth a couple of basis points. On a less transitory and more structural basis, and we've been talking about this with investors, we've been growing loans a little bit faster than market. We've been funding that growth with a little bit more of interSYNC and some high-cost deposits, which has an impact.
I will also tell you that our loan yields have not expanded because we've done less with respect to origination in our higher-yielding Sponsor & Specialty business and more in higher credit quality but lower-yielding loans, and all of you know, too, that credit spreads are as tight as they've been in a while, so I'd say that, and then that's why I talked about our focus on deposit pricing and trying to accelerate our beta on the way down because we think that can help us as we move in. In the first quarter, we generally see a tick up in NIM, or at least a stabilization because of the inflow of government deposits, and that's our big HSA quarter, but we're working diligently with our Board next week to make sure that we can stabilize our NIM as it moves forward through 2026.
So, if you think about the balance sheet positioning as it's evolved over time, I think Webster historically had an asset-sensitive balance sheet. Maybe just talk a little bit about how the balance sheet's positioned today, what's changed, and how it's positioned for the environment that we're in and are gonna continue to be in, in a Fed easing but, you know, steepening yield curve?
Yeah, it's a great question, and I think it's an understatement that we were asset-sensitive. 2019 was difficult for us to manage because we were funding variable rate in an increasing interest rate environment. We were funding very a lot of variable rate Sponsor & Specialty loans with 15 basis point HSA loans. And when everything kind of shifted, it was very hard to inorganically stop that. The great news is when we did the big MOE in 2022, that really organically shifted the makeup of our balance sheet. We had significantly more fixed-rate loans. And then subsequently, we have now interSYNC, which is 100% beta. So on the way down, we get that benefit. We extended duration in the securities portfolio, and we have about $5 billion in notional swaps.
If you look in our Q now, with respect to shocks on the short end, we are relatively neutral from an interest rate perspective, which, believe me, makes me a lot happier than 2019.
So maybe let's shift gears and talk about, you know, expectations as you look into 2026. I guess maybe to start, you know, what type of operating environment are you planning for? And how does that, you know, that type of environment inform your strategic planning? And, you know, what are those implications for how you're thinking about balance sheet growth?
Yeah, I think it's a great question, and there's a lot of inputs there. You know, I was pinned down at a conference earlier in the quarter about industry growth 'cause I am not gonna give 2026 guidance for Webster. We're meeting with our Board next week. I thought kind of mid-single digits from a loan growth perspective. I would say I would stick with that thought process just as kind of a natural impact. I think we could, as an industry, outperform that. There's gonna be a little bit more M&A activity as far as I see. I still think, and I think that people are constructive. I know our clients are that. You know, the base case is no recession and tariff impact being relatively modest, so could the industry outperform that? Yes.
I think on the other side of that, you have continued proliferation of private credit, which continues to take some share from the bank. So I think as we go into our planning session, we think about always at Webster kind of meeting or slightly exceeding industry growth targets. But one of the inputs this year, and we talked about NIM earlier, is making sure that we're really focused on delivering mid to high teens ROATC. So what we wanna think about is we wanna grow, and we wanna grow with the market so that people know that we've got good growth potential. We also wanna grow very profitably.
Mm-hmm.
So I think we'll talk about on the January call what that means for, you know, the categories we're focused on and what we think growth's gonna be.
Gotcha. So you talked about earlier about becoming Category IV compliant. You know, what does your 2026 outlook anticipate in terms of regulatory developments, particularly the Category IV threshold, and how might any changes play into you know, your strategic planning?
Yeah, you know, I mean, I'm sure all of you are reading the same thing I have, and I've spent a lot of time with the new regulatory agency heads. It is clear, first of all, just start by saying regulation is changing, and it has changed. The supervisory attitude at the ground level with the troops has improved dramatically and is much more constructive. You know, this idea of a focus on material financial risk and not focus on necessarily process or political platforms obviously helps bank managers have more flexibility in how they run their bank and how we can compete. So that's great. And I could go down a laundry list of rulemaking that's been rescinded on brokered deposits, 1071, everything else. So I think that's important to note that that's really happening on the ground and will continue to happen.
I think with respect to some of these bright line tests, I think heightened standards at $50 billion, Category IV to $100 billion, they're gonna move, and you know, everybody's talking about it. I'm not, this is, again, this is more listening to John editorialize, but I think the FDIC and the OCC are already there. I think Miki Bowman at the Fed feels that that's the right direction to go, but the Fed takes a little bit longer given their approval process, but we anticipate that Category IV level to move up. I can't promise it, but I think that most of the industry think that's gonna happen, and then the question is, is it just indexed up, or is it gonna move to $250 billion? In any event, that entire package of kind of regulatory constructiveness does help us.
And you've heard our CFO, Neal, who's here, talented CFO, talk about $60 million in aggregate expenses over three years. We spent $20 million this year. We expected to spend $20 million in 2026 and $20 million in 2027 specific to lead to be Category IV compliant. We have mentioned that every, not every single one of those dollars was simply to get regulatory compliant, that a lot of it was making us a better bank. Think liquidity management, capital management, data. And we'll still make some of those investments, but there's no question that the $40 million in front of us will be less than that for regulatory compliance. Some of it we'll be able to avoid. Some of it we'll spend as originally scheduled, and some of it we'll spend in a longer time frame, so it'll be less.
We'll extend our projects because we don't have to get them done with a gun to our head, and then what we'll talk about in January is how much of the avoidance and deferral and expense goes to the bottom line to try and achieve operating leverage, and how much do we deploy into things that our shareholders want us to invest in, which is more teams and technology and HSA growth, so it does give us more flexibility going forward and more to come.
John, you talked a little bit earlier about credit, you know, problem asset migration at the tail end of last year was a big focus. I guess, you know, what do you anticipate as the trajectory of asset quality, whether in the fourth quarter or into 2026? And you mentioned a couple of portfolios that had generated, you know, disproportionate share of migration. You know, what are some of the other pockets of credit degradation that you're seeing?
Yeah, I mean, it's fascinating for us, and I know that I'm always fighting a battle, I think, into a perceived credit sensitivity at Webster. And I don't know whether it goes back to the great financial crisis or, you know, obviously we've had dealt with some office. If you look at our actual statistics in terms of credit metrics and you compare them to our OCC peers, we're not out of line. But I understand that we had two pockets that created a significant jump up in classified and non-accrual assets towards the end of 2025. And those two portfolios are significantly ring-fenced and very small as it relates to the overall portfolio. We've identified the problem loans we think are there, and now it's just a question of working through resolution.
We have not really seen pockets of poor credit performance, correlated poor credit performance in any other category, geography, or business line to date. So I feel good about that, and we portended that, you know, in the second half of the year, we would see stable to improving credit. We posted that in the third quarter. We anticipate that to continue, and so it may take a while to resolve some of those, and there may be lumpy charge-offs, but we still think that 25-35 basis points annualized charge-off rate is within striking distance, and, you know, we'll continue to work through those.
Interestingly, you know, I think people, it's funny, depending on how long you've been around and following, there are some people that are still saying, "Hey, when is credit gonna be more benign?" Credit's been really benign since the great financial crisis. And I liked, you know, one of your competitors put out a note that said, "We think credit will normalize, but normalization means back to historic charge-off rates and higher levels of classified." So I think we're in that interesting position now. I feel really good about our portfolio. I don't see any pockets of deterioration that are correlated, but, you know, we're obviously very diligent around managing our credit book.
I may have made a joke about the competitor, but you don't know my sense of humor yet. So we'll limit it.
Not a real competitor, you know. Someone who claims to be a competitor.
But no, that was a helpful answer. You know, you referenced earlier, you know, competition from private credit across the industry, and in and obviously you probably see it in certain of your businesses. You know, at the same time, you entered into a partnership with a private credit provider. I think you talked about a lot on the earnings call. Maybe just talk a little bit about the rationale of that partnership, you know, and how and when does that partnership start to impact Webster's financial performance? And maybe just talk through some of the moving pieces behind it.
Sure. It's interesting. It's always a loaded question because there are those that are really glad we're in the Sponsor & Specialty business and those that are a little bit more concerned. I always start by saying that was really a defensive move to go on offense, right? It's a risk management move. We are not sort of jumping into private credit structures. We're not putting on our balance sheet loans that don't meet our strict bank balance sheet hurdles. So the reason we did it, and people have heard me say it before, I'll give you kind of just an easy example. We have great private equity relationships going back 25 years, great performance throughout cycles, the GFC, the pandemic. And we used to do the first platform financing at $35 million back before the proliferation of private credit and the pandemic.
That company would do another platform acquisition. It would be a $75 million loan. We would underwrite it, make syndication fees, and sell that down to $35. Right now, that's not really feasible because most of the private credit folks will come in and take it all down. So what this allows us to do is to be able to structure loans, have a higher implied balance sheet, but take portions of that exposure and put it into the fund. At the same time, we have management fees from the fund, and we're an LP in the fund. We have no credit clawback or any risk to us, but over time, it should allow us to be more competitive in Sponsor & Specialty, continue to maintain our deposits and our cash management fees, ultimately be more profitable, and have this nice source of non-interest income back coming back to us.
We've validated the model. It works. We're originating loans. There are loans in there. I'm happy to report that we actually have won the cash management business for a loan originated by the Marathon folks, which gives us another opportunity. They're not a bank for us to do treasury management services and generate other fees. As it relates to financial impact, we're hopeful that it'll have an impact on our ability to grow balance sheet loans. Certainly, toward the second half of 2026, could be meaningful. But we don't think it's gonna have a meaningful impact on expenses or non-interest income in 2026. I think I'd look out beyond that. We'll provide more detail on the January earnings call.
So, John, obviously you have a geographic focus in the Northeast, including a presence in and around New York City. You know, maybe talk a little bit about how you think the recent mayoral election impacts the operating environment for banks that do business around here, both in terms of the business climate and also overall asset quality.
Yeah, it's a great question. You know, I'm really happy we have New York exposure because I think it's the greatest city in the world. I think it's incredibly resilient. I understand unique dynamics. So we've spent a lot of time pressure testing our portfolio, and we don't think that there are any short or medium-term impacts on things like rent freezes and other things on our portfolio. So if you look at our rent-regulated multifamily, which is just above $1 billion, it's incredibly granular. Average loan size is $3.5 million. Like some of our other competitors, we don't have $200 million single-point exposures. They're much easier to right-size and work with borrowers. And 70% of that book was underwritten post-rent regulation, meaning we didn't underwrite into an assumed increase in rents. We underwrote in rents in place.
Input costs have gone up, yes, insurance and other things, but our debt service coverage ratios have maintained, and we haven't seen material deterioration in that portfolio. And I use that as an example, and you can think about anything else we have there. So I think our best estimate is nothing to see here from an immediate short or medium-term credit performance. I think I do have to acknowledge that I worry about public safety, and I worry about just the overall business climate. That's not gonna change in the next year, but over time, right? That could be an issue. I think that's more an impact on new business origination and economic activity than it is on, in-place credit portfolio performance. So, you know, I'm not panicked.
And I think, you know, if you talk to our clients on the ground and you talk to our commercial real estate lenders, our small business lenders, our C&I folks, they're not seeing changes in client behavior related to the mayoral change.
Maybe hitting on another area of policy, this one national, you know, current Congress and President and Presidential Administration have been proponents of consumer-directed health and HSA accounts specifically, which I think, as we talked about earlier, comprise a decent fund amount of your funding. How do you foresee these legislative actions impacting HSA Bank?
Yeah, we spent a lot of time in our first four meetings this morning talking about this, and it's tough because there are some things that have reasonable probability. There are some long-shot unicorn big wins that we could have if some of what's being talked about could happen, and I don't wanna go down that path because I don't wanna set expectations. Let me just say, it's for the first time in my life, I turn on CNBC in the morning. I don't know if you guys watch that or, or something else, but I'm amazed that every morning there are senators and congressmen using the term HSA accounts on TV, which I think is great, and so we did see the one big beautiful bill have a provision that allowed Bronze participants in the ACA Act to become HSA eligible.
We have talked about that and sized the TAM. It's about seven-10 million potential additional account holders. We anticipate if we can keep our market share and execute, and we need to execute, it could mean another $1 billion-$2.5 billion in deposits for HSA incrementally over the next five years, $50-$100 million in 2026. Among a hundred bills, literally among a hundred bills that are floating out there, there are things like, working Medicare seniors that could be eligible, decoupling, HSA accounts from high-deductible health plans. We've even heard talk about, the, Obamacare subsidies going directly into consumers' HSA accounts, which, again, we're not counting on. We don't think there's a high probability of that, but that would be terrific for our industry.
So the one thing I would say is we are putting a lot of our effort on marketing, user experience, and the whole process around HSA because the addressable market is increasing. We don't know the extent of it, but never in my life, having owned this business for a long time, have we seen sort of 100% of what people are talking about from a policy perspective being constructive i n HSA, so we think it certainly will give us some tailwinds as we move forward.
John, we talked a little bit about that healthcare segment, and maybe outside of that, you know, as you look ahead to 2026, where are you expecting to see the most appealing growth opportunities across the bank?
Yeah, I would say our initiative center in some of the things we do really well in market and business banking and middle market and commercial that we do in footprint. We've got some opportunities to move outside of footprint, not to take additional risk. Most of this is on the deposit gathering side 'cause that's really our focus. We've got enough levers to pull on the asset origination side that I don't think we need to expand the risk box or be particularly aggressive going outside of geography. We're adding middle market teams to continue to grow in market and take share from a C&I perspective. We're investing a lot in our treasury management capabilities, because we think that matters, and we wanna grow fees and have a higher proportion of fees to total revenues than we do right now.
And then I'd say, while not in the financial services area, 'cause that's the question you asked outside, we do have 3.5 million HSA account holders, and we've got about 50,000 Ametros clients. And we are right now trying to operationalize the use cases for checking accounts, debit cards, mortgages, savings accounts, and other products to cross-sell into an embedded big customer base, client base that we really haven't, we really haven't penetrated to in any material way to date.
Let's maybe switch and talk about capital priorities. You know, your near-term target is 11. I think you're operating around 11.4. You know, how do you think about the role of, you know, organic plays versus strategic opportunities, you know, to return capital to shareholders? How do you think about the balance of those in the near term?
Yeah, I think we've been pretty disciplined and said the same thing. So I'll bore everybody again. If we have outsized profitable loan growth to support, that's our first priority. If we have an opportunity in a very economically effective way without tangible book value dilution or significant tangible book value dilution to enhance our healthcare vertical through a tuck-in acquisition, a small acquisition where we can generate low-cost deposits or fees, that would be a use. If not, we look at our payout ratio, and as you've seen this year, we've been our most aggressive with respect to share buybacks. We talked about in our Q our share repurchases this quarter, and we continue to think that that's part of the game plan. We still think we're undervalued, even though the stock has had a nice run recently.
And I still think that we'll continue, if we run high capital levels and don't have other organic uses of capital, we'll continue to return capital to shareholders.
Maybe just to follow up on that, like, what factors would lead you to getting to your long-term target of 10 and a half? Obviously, you know, you talked about better growth. I'm assuming that's a big part of it, but maybe you could just talk about the bridge from where we are today to the longer term.
Yeah, and it's a great question and a lot of good questions this morning, and I'm not sure my answers always satisfy everybody on the question 'cause I think it is a bit of a triangulation of factors. I wanna make sure the market feels confident that our credit trajectory is in a good fashion. You know, I think we're all feeling really good about this particular point in time, but I think there's also this sense that there you know is still uncertainty out there from the economic environment, from an employment perspective. So I'm not hesitant, and we're clearly looking to move our C21 capital level down to 11%. We do think we're much closer to the 10%-10.5% target level, and I think that's gonna be important.
We think that's the right place as a disciplined management team to operate. There definitely are competitive factors. I think everyone at your conference has now talked about 10.5 and then 10.
Yeah.
I think we need.
We've been lining up.
Yeah, I think we need to make sure that we continue to be competitive there, so I think we're looking at it. I got a couple questions today from, I don't know if anybody here's in the audience about whether Moody's is driving midsize banks to keep higher capital levels. I think it's not a secret that they would like higher capital levels than lower capital levels, but I don't think they're a gating factor. I think if you've got a good, well-managed company with a strong balance sheet, you know, I think we'll be able to operate back to our long-term 10.5% target shortly.
So across the conference, there's been a lot of talk of strategic activity, mergers and the like. You know, obviously this has been very topical amongst regional banks given the flood of deals that we've seen recently. I guess, you know, obviously you went through a big merger of equals, but where do acquisitions fit into your strategic priorities? I know you talked about some healthcare tuck-ins, but what about more traditional bank deals?
This is the trap question, isn't it, Ryan? You know.
You know, that Emlen's question.
It's pretty easy, right? And we continue to answer the same way in the short and medium term, and given where we're trading and our opportunity in front of us and the strategic opportunities we think are contiguous to our market, whole bank acquisition M&A is not a priority and not something that we're focused on and something that I don't think we would do in the short and medium term. As I mentioned a minute ago, I do think that we would still look at franchise-enhancing fee- and deposit-gathering opportunities inorganically as long as they're small and they make sense economically and don't restrict otherwise our capital priorities. We would do something like that.
Otherwise, I would say, and I think I answered the question on the earnings call with respect to upstream partnerships, that's not on, you know, our top 20 items when we're talking to our Board next week about strategic opportunities. But if there was something really compelling to shareholders as a fiduciary, we would have to evaluate that.
Absolutely. If you look across the banks, we've had a lot of banks come out with return targets over the last quarter or so. You guys have obviously continued to post really strong returns. Maybe just talk about what you consider to be a longer-term profile of return profile for the bank and what is allowing you to sustain such high levels of return relative to the peer group.
Yeah, so I'm gonna be careful. I'm not gonna set targets, but I think I've said many times publicly that we think that we have the right efficient operating model and business mix and efficiency ratio to continue to generate mid to high teens ROATC. And so when we go into our planning session, our goal, we don't solve for efficiency ratio. We don't solve for NIM. We try and solve for continuing to deliver, you know, top quartile peer returns. I would say that's the ratio that we plug in to try and continue to grow the bank smartly but profitably over time.
When you were talking about the stock before, you mentioned that it had gone up a bit but remains undervalued. I think when I looked, it trades at a discount to some other banks, at least on earnings. As you go out and talk to investors, you mentioned you had four meetings this morning. What continue to be the themes that you hear as to why that it's trading at a discount?
I think if I had to answer the question just flat out, it would be credit sensitivity, followed maybe a little bit down the road by Category IV and what that means with respect to expense trajectory and operating leverage, and you know, I've had lots of theories. I've been asking this question for longer than I've wanted to because I think we run a really high-quality, very profitable, consistent delivery franchise, but I think, you know, credit is on people's minds, and the idea that we're in some businesses like Sponsor & Specialty, I think we have a higher bar to continue to show that our credit profile is not any riskier than anybody else's. That's, you know, what I truly believe, and I think only time and continued performance alleviates that.
We're in the last minute here of the presentation. And I wanted to close with, you know, we obviously covered a lot of ground here, but as you look ahead, you mentioned that you're meeting with the Board and you'll have a more formalized guidance as we get onto the earnings call in 2026, in early 2026. But what do you expect to distinguish Webster's performance for investors as we look into next year?
Yeah, you know, I think for us, I think we've learned we're gonna keep our heads down and continue to deliver consistent performance. I think that's the most important thing. With respect to how we do that, I do think our differentiated deposit franchise is really critical, and if we can continue to execute and take advantage of some of these tailwinds in HSA and continue to accelerate growth in Ametros and have a lower cost of deposits, and as I mentioned earlier, you know, in self-evaluation, I think we can be more aggressive on our deposit pricing, which I think is important to us as we move forward, so I think being a great fund, having a great funding profile ultimately distinguishes what makes a great bank, and I think we have it.
That was great. I appreciate you coming. Hopefully, we'll have you back here next year. Please join me in thanking John.
Ryan, appreciate it.
Thank you so much.