And then also last year that we actually have, surprisingly, pretty decent growth from our Greater China region and so despite the pandemic, and so, we expected that they may be able to continue to do quite well. Now, obviously, they have a much smaller balance sheet, but as a percentage growth, they’re doing pretty well. So, we may have a few other different areas that we’ll be able to step-up because we also have a very strong competitive teams within the organization, everybody wanted to do better. So, we just expect that different team will step up in different quarters.
Operator: The next question comes from Brandon King with Truist Securities. Please go ahead.
Brandon King: Hi, good morning.
Dominic Ng: Hi, good morning.
Brandon King: So, I wanted to kind of touch again on the NII guide and in particular your outlook for the trajectory in the HS margin. It appears if the margin stays flat from 4Q levels, you could potentially hit the guidance just from that. I’m curious what your assumptions are, as far as the trajectory of NIM going through the year and also your €“ with the forward rate curve assumptions?
Irene Oh: Yes. I think at this point, my focus is really more on the NII, Brandon. We do expect when we look at our guidance, you can tell, you can do a math of our guidance as well, that we do expect the NII to grow from the fourth quarter level. Then it depends really more about the fluctuation of what happens per quarter, but both, we expect to be positive in 2023.
Brandon King: Okay. And then in regards to your outlook for deposit growth, what areas or what categories of deposits do you see most of that growth coming from? And could you talk more about your ability to, kind of mitigate losses in DDA?
Irene Oh: Yes. Great question. When we look at our deposit portfolio and our customers, one of the things that we benefit from is just the diversity of customers we have. Certainly, in order to candidly remain competitive, we have these deposit CD campaigns in the fourth quarter. And we have one right now priced below market, but attractive enough rate and also six month duration. We don’t want that to go too long. And so that is something that we continue to do relative to other, kind of funded costs right now. We think it’s attractive. It’s also a customer base that stays with us and has a larger relationship with us. When we look for 2023 and where we think deposits are going to grow, I’d say across the board. Although realistically, in this kind of rate environment, it’s hard to maintain the deposit balances in the DDA accounts at the level that we have pre-rising rates, you know we are still onboarding new customers all the time.
Pipelines are strong on the deposit side. So, we are very, kind of positive about what we’re doing. The investments that we’ve made in treasury management, cash management, product services certainly are something that we’re seeing a benefit today.
Dominic Ng: I wanted to highlight also, I think at the height of excess liquidity, which is during PPP time, back in late 2020 because of COVID, we had like maybe went all the way up to close to 43% as a percentage of DDA to the noninterest-bearing deposit to the entire deposit portfolio, 43%. Today, we’re down to 38%. So, as you can see, there was a lot of liquidity there, but by nature, even if the interest rate rising and so forth, you will expect that the success and liquidity would not be sustainable. So, we are actually very, very pleased throughout the last few quarters, watching our noninterest-bearing deposits and see what the percentage , and it’s kind of each quarter drop 1 basis points and so forth. And then so far, so good.
