Hratch Panossian: Yes. Thank you, Sohrab. I did mention inflation in the prior year in ’22 as having been a driver. So if you look at our expense growth last year, right, half of it was roughly our investments. The other half was our sort of other core operating expenses and a good portion of that was the impact of inflation. What we’ve assumed going forward is pretty in line with what you’re seeing, some normalization through 2023. And so you are seeing inflation starting to come down. We’ve been a bit more scientific than just looking at headline numbers. We’ve looked at our expenses. We know what’s already been adjusted for inflation and what may be adjusted coming forward. And so, based on what I see right now, I don’t think that’s a material plus or minus.
And so overall, we’re still confident with that in mind, we will stabilize expenses around these levels. We are continuing to invest on a sequential basis as revenues grow and expenses stay stable. That’s a positive result, and that’s what will allow us to get to our positive operating leverage over time.
Sohrab Movahedi: Okay. And then maybe I’ll just come back to Jon now. Jon, I think it’s been less than a month, maybe that you’ve got the official Canadian Banking kind of segment seat. Any early impressions worth kind of sharing with us right now with just a certified, albeit less than a month?
Jon Hountalas: Thank you for the question, Sohrab. Yes, I do have some first impressions. First on strategy. We outlined it on Investor Day, early days for me, but I don’t see major changes. We’re focused on execution. And when we think about execution, it’s kind of in three key themes. First, segments. You will see us push much harder in Imperial Service. I think that’s a big differentiator. To win in mass affluent, we have to leverage Imperial Service. So more on that down the road. Two, we need to get better at small business. We’ve made big investments over the last two years, both people and in technology. And again, to win in mass affluent, you need to be able to deal very well with small businesses and the entrepreneurs.
So more to do there. On the strategic investments, I think both Hratch and Victor have spoken to it. We’ve made some important investments over the last couple of years. There’s financial planning, there’s investments in CRM, we bought a co-brand — we invested in our co-brand card but we’re going to harvest those investments. Every one of those business cases had strong financial metrics against them. It’s our job to deliver those metrics and I think we can. And finally, we’re going to — how to operationalize this is always kind of tricky. There’s more heavy lifting to do. There’s more investments to make, but we’re going to pace ourselves. We’re going to focus on margins. We’re going to focus on expenses. And I think what you’ll see in the pretty short term is improvements on both fronts.
So to conclude, first 30 days, if it’s not obvious in my voice, I’m pretty excited.
Sohrab Movahedi: Thank you very much.
Operator: The next question is from Darko Mihelic from RBC Capital Markets. Please go ahead.
