Operator: Thank you. Before we take our next question, I would just like to remind everyone, to register a question, please press star followed by one on your telephone keypad. Our next question is from Christopher Marinac from Janney Montgomery Scott. Christopher, please go ahead, your line is open.
Christopher Marinac: Thanks, good morning. Nicole, just to kind of continue on the same points you were making, what is the cash flow from the securities portfolio, and how much of your funding can you do internally just from that alone?
Nicole Stokes: Give me one second. Sorry for the dead silence for a second. I want to make sure I’m giving you–. Chris, I apologize. I thought I had it right here at my fingertips, and I don’t want to give you the wrong number, so I’ll get back with you on that. But I would say at this point that anything that’s cash flows off the bond portfolio, I would consider reinvesting that into the bond portfolio to kind of still keep it at that 7%.
Christopher Marinac: Okay, that’s helpful.
Nicole Stokes: Yes, and because we had moved our bond portfolio down to less than 3% of assets and we’ve really added that bond portfolio back in over the last six to eight months, the cash flow on that is not as aggressive as you might expect.
Christopher Marinac: Okay, not a problem. Thank you for that, that’s helpful. Then outside of the purchase–
Nicole Stokes: Sorry, I was going to mention, the duration on the portfolio is about three years.
Christopher Marinac: Good, okay. Perfect. Then outside of the purchase portfolio on loans, is the pace of commercial loan expansion this year going to be similar to what we saw in the fourth quarter, or would that be different? You had a very successful last year from Balboa and all the other organic sources, so just want to kind of understand if that pace is similar or if it may slow down.
Nicole Stokes: Sure, so we would consider growth kind of among the category split. We still see growth opportunities in CRE as well as our C&I, and as well as our premium finance, FDA. I mean, we really have it diversified across all of the verticals there.
Palmer Proctor: And Chris, you know, one benefit from this cycle, if you want to look at it glass half full, is that it’s allowed banks to kind of step back, obviously be more selective, and we have all intentionally pulled back on CRE. But when you look and you’ve got–you’re limiting how much powder you want to put to use in certain asset classes, what it allows us and all banks to do is kind of have a focus on what they’re going after. Our continued focus on obviously deposits, but more importantly on C&I kind of growth too, is that we’re getting a lot of really good opportunities on the C&I front, so I think you’ll continue to see strong growth there on core organic kind of C&I, in addition to the equivalent finance type of activities.
We’re really encouraged by that. The other reason and benefit in doing that, as you well know, is from the deposit front, so the deposit side of it, we’re really excited about it because a lot of these operating companies are bringing material deposits over to the bank, which includes all of our treasury management services, so that’s really been a bright spot. That’s the focus. We’ve kind of got three pillars for 2023 that we’re focused on, with the first one being deposits-deposits-deposits, and fortunately for our company that’s nothing new, but all our incentive plans have been adjusted to reflect that across the board at a more intense level. They’ve always had a deposit component, which is really the result of that 41% core funding that we have on DDA.
