Lemar Persaud: Yeah, that’s helpful. And then maybe if I could switch gears over to Dave Casper on commercial loan growth. One of the things we’ve seen coming out of the pandemic is that BMO was able to maintain above-market rates of commercial loan growth, particularly in the US. Could you remind us of what drove that outperformance versus your peers? And then secondly, are those factors still present in the current environment? Thank you.
Dave Casper: Well, first of all, we have grown really well in the US as we’ve expanded both geographically and some of our specialties. So I’ve talked about some of the specialties, and Darryl mentioned some of the geography whether it’s Florida, whether it’s Texas, whether it’s expanding, just we have a very strong franchise. And frankly, we have an excellent record of getting referrals from our existing customers. I expect that will continue. And I’m particularly excited as we move into the New Year what’s going to happen with our Bank of the West colleagues. These franchises together, they’ll both be better. We’ll expand geographically. We’ll expand through our existing specialties into the West Coast. The momentum that we have right now, I just feel so good about it is it’s going to move into the Bank of the West.
So I expect the continued growth in our client acquisition, whether it’s loans or deposits. And as I mentioned earlier, our ability to cross-sell into commercial, into our capital markets business and our wealth business and those businesses referring back into commercial. It’s a very, very positive story.
Lemar Persaud: Okay. So it sounds like you think you can continue to outpace your US bank peers. Is that a fair statement?
Dave Casper: Well, I expect we’ll continue to grow new clients. And one of the key parts of our business is the clients were growing almost 90% of those are existing and are new are either our sole — where we’re the sole bank or we’re the lead bank. And that’s where the actual profitability comes from. Just as Ernie talked about in her business, we are the sole or the lead bank. You’re not going to have to fight over all the ancillary services. And I think that’s where we will continue to do well given our offering.
Lemar Persaud: I appreciate the time.
Darryl White: Lemar, it’s Darryl. If I may just compliment Dave’s answer just now provokes a thought for me, which I think might be helpful to your question, which is when you think about the franchises, the fact that 90% of the clients are sole or lead, that’s a very deliberate and unique strategy for us. We’ve talked about that for years. This builds a premium franchise in commercial banking in Canada and the US. When you put them together, they’re the fourth, fifth largest commercial bank on the continent. That has important advantages because the fragmented market in the United States that you’re questioning Dave on is a really interesting one where we’ve got a lot of capabilities there for relative to hundreds and hundreds of players in that market structure who arguably don’t.
And so the share can come there and the ability to have positive client selection as you go through that and add clients, so add capacity through the pandemic and today, not just rely on your existing installed base to do more or borrow more is very important. So that’s a very deliberate strategy, and it couldn’t come at a better time, frankly, because here we are about to add the franchise from the Bank of the West as well. So I think it’s really important to acknowledge the job the teams have done in both personal and commercial, but also the market structure that we’ve quite deliberately decided we wanted to take advantage of.
Lemar Persaud: Thank you.
