Paul Lorentz: Yes. Thanks, Tom. It’s Paul here. So you’re right. We did have some onetime items in Q4 as well as Q3. And so quarter-over-quarter, I’ll kind of just go through that with you and then give you kind of a perspective of how to maybe look at it. In Q3, there were 2 items that were favorable to the core earnings. One was a tax benefit. We tend to see every Q3, particularly in our U.S. Retirement business. And then we also had an adjustment to our compensation expense in Q3 that was lower, so a negative adjustment. The combination of those 2 in Q3 was about $37 million of core earnings. If I look at Q4, there was also some onetime items in Q4, but they were going the other way. We tend to see seasonal — higher seasonal expenses in our Retirement business as we gear up for the next year.
And again, that typically happens every Q4. But we also had incurred a restructuring charge in the quarter as we made some changes with the GWAM to drive efficiencies go forward. The combination of those 2 was about $34 million. So if you look at the quarter-over-quarter, that’s about $71 million of the $86 million change. The rest is really the average AUMA movement and the fee income on that. So the way I would look at it is, is really look at full year 2022 versus 2021. That will automatically adjust for the seasonality of the tax benefit in Q3 and the seasonality of expenses in Q4. And just smooth out any onetime that may happen from quarter-to-quarter. If you look at that, I would really look to the overall AUMA as the driver, the core EBITDA margin.
And then the stability of our net interest fee yield on the assets as well as our expense management over time. So if you look at the EBITDA margin, an example ’22, there was a little bit of compression from 2021. And that’s really the average AUMA movement and fee income. And while we were able to manage expenses and keep them flat, including that restructuring charge, we can’t completely offset the total decline in down markets, but the opposite is true in up markets. And you would have seen that historically over the last 3 years as we’ve driven margin expansion as markets improve and we manage our expenses. So that’s how I would think about the business. And I wouldn’t look to Q4 as really an indication of any change in terms of the underlying earnings power of the franchise.
Tom MacKinnon : So we had 30% in 2022 or 29.9% and that was a down market, if you will. And then 2021, up market, we had 31.5% in terms of core EBITDA margin. Should we be thinking that, going forward, it would be somewhere between those 2 if we got more stable markets?
Paul Lorentz: Yes. It’s really dependent on the markets and average AUMA. What I can say what I reiterated before is we try and manage our expenses to about 50% of revenue growth over the long term to help drive that expansion. So I would just look at what’s typically happened. And again, you would have thought about 110-basis-point last year decline based on that market. And again, we would see the opposite. If we saw markets improve as we would expect some leverage on our fixed expense base.
Operator: The next question is from Scott Chan from Canaccord Genuity.
Scott Chan: Maybe going back to Asia, Damien. I see that core expenses were up in Q4, and I assume that’s because of the ramp-up and you called out agents. And I noticed your agents were increased a lot, and I see that with peers. But as you head into 2023, like from the ground level, can you give us a sense of competition that you see is kind of more or less or if there’s any certain Asia regions that you could refer to that might have that dynamic?
