Meny Grauman: I think in terms of your commentary on expenses coming from Bank of the West. But I’m curious — I apologize if I missed it, but just talk about the outlook for revenues specifically in the context of a tougher U.S. operating environment. I think it’s clear that what’s emerging. So I’m wondering, if there’s any impact there on your ability to deliver on the revenue synergies that you’ve guided to?
Tayfun Tuzun: Good question. Look, I mean, we acknowledge the environment. It impacts all banks that are operating in the U.S. But overall, our expectations remain intact, and although the timing may change a little bit, we are still — we are still of the opinion that our financial expectations remain well grounded. We have an important weekend coming up with conversion, as I said we are also doing more work on potentially identifying additional expense saving opportunities. We plan to update you with all these metrics once we get to the end of Q4. But broadly, our expectation is that we are still in the same range in terms of our expectations. That sort of is not necessarily denying the current environment, but I think our expectations and optimism remains the same.
Darryl White: It’s Darryl, Meny, just to complement that, I agree with all that. I think the thesis is holding completely. In fact, as days go by, we’re getting increasingly encouraged by the thesis on the customer side, and you asked about revenue synergies while Tayfun is right, we will give you all an update at the end of the conversion quarter, which is the one that’s coming. In the meantime, we can tell you that the acceleration on new accounts, new customers, the crossover between the commercial business and the capital markets business. We talked to you about that last quarter, continues to increase at a healthy rate. And we’ve even observed early days even before our pretty substantial marketing push, which will begin in about 10 days from now, a real activation at the branch level with the digital platforms as well. I don’t know, Ernie, would you complement that with some specificity.
Ernie Johannson: Yes, definitely. As Darryl pointed out, we have not launched the capabilities of tools, financial planning, et cetera, in the market, yet nor our big brand campaign or major offers that we’re going to introduce over the next couple of weeks. Having said that, those — the performance of our branch network, just being allowed to be able to have different offers and campaigns, we’re already seeing a lift overall about 20% overall in terms of performance. And that’s a function of them reaching out to customers and having great conversations. So the colleagues are ready and the customers are extremely open to these conversations and receptive to what we have to offer. And we haven’t brought the full product as we mentioned earlier, to them.
As well, our digital capabilities are performing. We’ve taken the Bank of the West digital capabilities out of the market and put BMOs in, and they’re actually performing at parity, which says even without the brand advertising, we were able to deliver the same sort of list. So these are all promising indicators of the future ahead after we get through the next weekend.
Operator: [Operator Instructions] Following question is from Gabriel Dechaine from National Bank Financial. Please go ahead.
Gabriel Dechaine: Yes, I want to continue on that line of questioning. And just — I’ll use my words you can tell me if I have it right or not. But the sense I’m getting is maybe there’s some revenue shortfall versus expectations related to the Bank of the West acquisition because the margins, maybe the loan book and deposit book are both smaller, but you still sound pretty confident in your accretion targets, and I’m reading through the — into the expense management commentary that you might find some of the cost savings to keep you on track. Is that a fair interpretation or…
Tayfun Tuzun: Well, first of all, I don’t think that we’re stepping back from our overall revenue synergy expectations. I don’t think that we’re necessarily changing that. Ernie mentioned some of the more promising signs of how we are getting there. Again, as I said, once we finalize our saving assumption targets, which we expect to be higher than what we shared with you before. We will also update the accretion numbers. But as I said, overall, we believe we are still intact with — largely intact with our expectations that we shared with you earlier in the year.
Gabriel Dechaine: Okay. So one question, one follow-up. I think that works. I just push the comment you made, the customers renewing at higher rates in the mortgage book. They’re absorbing it or adapting well. Can you quantify that? I mean, I don’t know what I know what the adjectives mean, but what does that mean from your perspective?
Piyush Agrawal: Sure. So I think the Canadian residential secured book remains high quality because, again, the customer base has an average FICO of 790. When you’ve got about 10% renewals a year and if I go back to the last four quarter data, we’ve had significant success in those renewals. They are at about a 10% to 20% increase as they come up for renewal, and all of them have successfully renewed and the performance has been stellar. In addition, I’ll give you the fact that — for those that are even not due today, you’ve got programs underway to reach out to customers. We reach out about 40% of the customers, and we are getting very good positive feedback. So voluntarily, customers have come up and either top tough payments if they’re a negative M or increase their payments as they’re going forward.
So even though the back book, the big maturities are 25, 26, the early success you see from anecdotal the data of four quarters and our expectations because of the strength of the Canadian customer in the secured portfolio gives us a very high level of confidence.
Operator: Our following question is from Doug Young from Desjardins Capital Markets. Please go ahead.
Doug Young: Just maybe to drill down on the U.S. commercial loan book. Obviously down sequentially. It seems and you can correct me if I’m wrong, but maybe it’s down a little bit more than what we would have seen some of your peers. I’m just trying to understand a little bit more, and I understand the economic side of it, is there any particular part of the book that’s contracting more or where you’re seeing less retention, just hoping to get a little bit more color and then maybe just kind of weaving that in to the NIM discussion? Is the loan balance movement have a positive negative impact on your NIM and your NIM outlook?
