Dave Brager: Yes. I mean look, we’ve had a very good relationship with our regulators historically and we continue that good relationship, today. We’re always upfront with them. If we’re looking at something or something sort of maybe getting closer to fruition. And the only thing I would say, they haven’t given any specific and we haven’t asked any specific questions around that. But there’s been a number of proposed rules that have come out from those OCC as well as the FDIC, which does add some complexity to the process. But outside of that, we haven’t had really any specific conversations around “Hey here’s an opportunity, what do you guys think.” But I do think there’s a number of things that have been added also to their checklist of what they’re looking at. And so we just take that into consideration, if we’re getting closer to looking at something.
Q – Gary Tenner: Thank you
Dave Brager: You’re welcome.
Operator: Thank you. [Operator Instructions] One moment for our next question. And that will come from the line of Matthew Clark with Piper Sandler. Your line is open.
Q – Matthew Clark: Hi. Thank you. Good morning
Dave Brager: Good morning, Matthew.
Q – Matthew Clark: Just first one for me on the NIM and NII, do you have the average margin in the month of March and then the spot rate on deposits at the end of March. And then, as a follow-up to that what’s your expectation for when you think the NIM and NII bottom start to inflect?
Allen Nicholson: We can answer part of your question. I think the spot rate is in our Investor deck. Now in terms of the cost of deposits, we don’t have NIM in there. We don’t disclose that. As you know, we don’t really provide forward guidance. I would say Matthew, that the main variable that will continue on next quarter is really going to be the funding side, and what transpires there between — as Dave alluded to earlier, we typically see deposits naturally grow in the second quarter. We have a good pipeline, to the extent we’re able to execute on that and minimize the wholesale funds that will be positive but we’ll see how that plays out. And that’s you the spot cost of interest-bearing deposits and repos was 1.95% march.
Matthew Clark: Got it. Thank you. And then just on the securities portfolio, I mean CET1 up another 30 bps to 14.9%. Why not bite the bullet and just restructure the AFS book you can clearly afford it and move on and improve the profitability from here? Any change in appetite there?
Dave Brager: Yes. Look we still continue to evaluate a lot of different options relative to restructuring. There’s other things that we could we could look at do it as well. We will — at this point we haven’t made the decision to do anything, but I do think we’re continuing to evaluate it. Like I said there’s some other things we can do around it. And we’ve made the decision not to do it yet, but it doesn’t mean we never will do it. And we’ll just continue to evaluate it. So I think as we get through the next couple of quarters and the next couple of quarters we’ll see what rates do, we’ll see what happens as far as our deposits. I think like I said historically we basically as I say gotten rid of the excess deposits at this point, but we historically have seen some growth. So there’s a lot of different things that we can do from the funding side to improve the NIM. And we’ll continue to evaluate that. I don’t know Allen, if you have anything you want to add to that?
Allen Nicholson: No, no I don’t think we’ll it’s something we you know we’ve talked to you about before and we’ll continue to evaluate more. We have nothing imminent or.
Dave Brager: Yes. And look I would say part of that decision-making is not all just math, right? I mean it’s the perception of our customers or customers have been very satisfied with us. The deposits the relationships have been stable albeit you know some money has moved to higher yielding stuff. We haven’t lost relationships through the fear of anything. But if you if you did a big restructure and you had a loss in a quarter that could spark more fierce than we need to fear. So that reputational headline risk is something that we also evaluate in that as well.
Matthew Clark: Got it. And then last one for me just on if it’s likely you’re not able to get an M&A deal this year. Is it fair to assume you’ll get active buying back stock at some point this year?
Dave Brager: Yes. I mean look we’re going to have to evaluate every situation, but we do have a lot of capital. And you know it’s really driven sort of I’d say one of the limiting factors on that is just the TCE. We want to make sure we maintain a solid TCE. That allows us to do a deal if it were going to impact that. So there’s a lot of different aspects there. But yes, I mean that’s something that we also discussed pretty regularly and we are building capital and we do have you know cost 15% CET1. So we have good regulatory capital, but we’re also sort of managing to that TCE ratio as well. And so wind down a little bit because of the movement in interest rates. But as we get through the year that’s definitely something that we’ll continue to look at.
