Laura Dottori-Attanasio: Sure. Thanks, Victor. And thanks for the question, Gabriel. As Victor pointed out, we’ve actually not just have we grown in mortgages, but we have grown across all of our products. In fact, our leading product for a while has been in the deposit side of the business everyday banking. And so that’s actually a really positive sign. And it’s worth pointing out like we had an incredibly strong year once again this year on all of client acquisition, retention and franchising. And so when we look at client growth, as I said, net client growth, we were at 4.1%. We’re told our peer average was only at 2.5%. So we did really well. And we had our best retention rates ever so above 95%. So I think that really speaks to how well we’ve been doing not just on the franchising front, but on the client experience front.
Franchising is going quite well. But the reality is, to your point on margins, I mean, mortgages is a large part of our book. We’ve done a great job growing. And again, across all of our products, we have delivered market-leading growth. But because mortgages are a large part of our asset base, when we go through some NIM compression there, it does affect our overall results. Now, we have shown leadership, and I am sure you have seen that on multiple occasions in mortgages when it comes to raising client rates. So, we did that to protect our margins and we did give up some near-term market share growth. However, as we have experienced, like many, the pace of market rate increases far, far outweighed our client rate increases. That, along with the slowing mortgage market and really intense competition, saw our inflow margins, I would say, come under more pressure than we have ever seen before.
And I tell you, notwithstanding how selective we were in the market. In that we focused really on our deeper client relationships. We had our lowest inflow margins in October. And we also had, as you saw, and this was probably a bigger impact, but we had a big drop in prepayment activity this quarter with the rapidly rising interest rate environment. Last quarter, we benefited from that, in this quarter, it fell. And if this can give you some comfort, if you will, into the future. And again, we have just started. But when we look at November, I would tell you that we expect our prepayment activity to remain low. So, we shouldn’t see as much volatility sort of next quarter as we did this quarter. And when we look into our November mortgage commitment pipeline, we are seeing much higher spreads than we saw in our October lows.
So, again, I think just given we have to digest the rapid increase in our cost of funding, it’s got to work its way, if you will, through the system that we are going to continue to see some margin pressure in the first quarter and into the second quarter of 2023. But I would expect our margins to gradually improve thereafter. And as I have said earlier, we are growing across all of our products in the bank, and we are doing really well in deposits, and we do expect to see continued margin expansion in those products. I hope that answers the question, Gabriel.
Gabriel Dechaine: It does go on. But in the interest of time, have a good day.
Operator: Thank you. The following question is from Mario Mendonca from TD Securities. Please go ahead.
