Brad Nordholm: Probably two factors, Brendan. And by the way, thank you very much for joining us today. Probably two factors. One is that we have Zach Carpenter and our business development team have been much more active, that team has really been built out significantly in the last couple of years. And the — that includes the build out of the Rural Infrastructure team, which is now what I would describe as in place and mature. And so they’ve been reaching out to institutions — keep in mind we’re in a secondary market, so we’re always originating with or from other financial institutions. They’ve been reaching out much more consistently and aggressively and credibly, I would also add, to originate that business. So for example, there’s one institution, a prime credit institution that with which we’ve been doing a significant amount of telecom over the last year.
So that’s been a positive. The other I think factor is that for those telecommunications firms that are predominantly focused on rural America, which of course is where our interest is, there’s significant capital investment going on, there’s investment in broadband, there’s investment in other forms of communication, and that’s all a part of improving rural infrastructure, some of it’s stimulated by government programs, some of it by new technologies. But there’s real capital investment going on out there and that leads to opportunity for us.
Brendan McCarthy: And then a follow up to that, are you able to disclose the spread figure that telecom typically generates on average?
Brad Nordholm: Yes. I think we do break out our business segments by average spreads. Don’t we Aparna?
Aparna Ramesh: We do. But it’s really meshed into the Rural Utilities segment, but I’ll just give you perhaps some averages here. But if you just look at, where we were just about a year ago, our Rural Utilities segment you see as a result of telecom has on average gone up about 13 basis points, right? So when you think about that, those spreads tend to be — our Rural Utilities segment on average is about 36 basis points today. It was in the 20s about a year ago. And with this increase in telecom, which has been a small amount, telecom tends to be in the mid-100s, so about 150 basis points. So when you think about a change in business composition towards telecom, that Rural Infrastructure segment is where you can really track it. And you can see a fairly notable double-digit increase in basis points spread on average across the portfolio.
Brad Nordholm: Yes. Aparna mentioned 150 basis points. On the telecom, I’ve seen a few of the telecom deals going through here that have been even materially higher than that, Brendan. We also have — if we look at project finance, we have mentioned that as an area where while the numbers aren’t large, the percentage increases are. And there just as an example, the NES on those deals will be 150 basis points to 250 basis points compared to 100 basis points to 115 basis points, which is what we have been talking about as our average right now. So we talk about telecom or we talk about project finance for Renewable Energy projects being highly accretive, we are talking about factors of 1.5x to 2.5x.
Brendan McCarthy: Great. Thank you. That’s helpful. And I guess lastly, as a quick follow-up, given the diversification of the loan book in Rural Utilities and Renewable, do you still feel that an NES target range of 90 basis points to 100 basis points is a prudent measure going forward?
