I know in the past, you talked about being a targeted marketing strategy. How has that evolved recently? And is the pullback in advertising just a result of the environment or just a lower opportunity set?Thomas Peterffy So, you will see that – maybe you notice our heads cropping up all over the place. We’re trying to advertise our 4.33% interest that we pay on instantly available cash. We roughly have doubled our advertising spending a month ago. So, you will see a much larger advertising spend in the next quarter.Chris Allen Understood. And then just one more quick one. On headcount growth, the pace of growth has been moderating in recent quarters. Is that just because you’re reaching scale in certain areas, whether it’s from a country or regional perspective or just the near-term opportunity so just you don’t need to grow as fast as you have in the past?Thomas Peterffy I think this is a CEO question.Milan Galik So, we are obviously paying a lot of attention to our expenses.
The human capital cost is significant. What we have seen is – if I compare our numbers to the one-year-ago quarter, the customer service personnel has decreased by 3%; our compliance team has increased by, let’s say, 10%; and our information technology personnel, which is programmers, technicians, system administrators and similar, that number went up by 16%. So, these numbers are not bad.The fact that we are increasing the size of our information technology team just signifies our commitment to being a leader in financial services technology tools for our investors. So, you can expect us to grow the team as we have increasing amount of work.The customer service, I think that team is at a good level. We are closely paying attention to the wait times of our customers calling us– how long they have to stay in the phone queue, and that number is very low single-digit minutes.
We like that. So, the size of the team seemed to be appropriate to the level of business that we have and the number of accounts that we have. One of the reasons that we do not have to grow that team has to do with the fact that our platform is over time becoming more user-friendly, and we have done a very good job in providing self-service customer service– to various FAQs and chatbots and that type of technology.As far as the compliance staff, we had to increase it because there is a lot of surveillance that we have to do on both cashiering transactions that our customers perform as well as trading activity. The operators that we have, there is a few hundred of them, pay attention to the various alerts that our systems generate and then they check whether those alerts signify a problem or if they’re just false positives.We are putting a significant amount of energy into making those alerts more targeted, decreasing the number of false positives as well as making it easier for the operators to service those alerts.
So, I would like the size of that team– the growth of that team to slow down as well, and I believe we will achieve that. So, these numbers, I think, are good. The team is at the right size. Obviously, if it was smaller, our profit margin would be greater, and that is what we would like to deliver to our investors.Chris Allen Great color. Just one quick follow-up. On the IT personnel side, has the cost of talent moderated at all as there’s been more pressure in the tech sector?Milan Galik So very lately, it has become easier to hire good technologists. So obviously, there have been layoffs. We all can read about them in the news. So that made it easier. We now don’t have to kill ourselves in making oversized offers, including the sign-up bonuses.
So yes, it became easier. And we are taking advantage of that. Some of the talent that is available is very good, and we would obviously like to get a hold of that. So, we can do that.Operator I am showing no further questions. I would like to turn it back to Nancy Stuebe for closing remarks.Nancy Stuebe Thank you, everyone, for participating today. As a reminder, this call will be available for replay on our website, and we will also be posting a clean version of our transcript on the site tomorrow. Thank you again, and we will talk to you next quarter end.Operator This concludes today’s conference call. Thank you for participating. You may now disconnect.
