Eric Lemke: Yeah. So we’ve worked pretty hard this year sort of laying the foundation, both on the technology side and sort of the, I’ll say, the risk management compliance governance side here, lots of sort of meetings. The key for us is to do this right. So slow is good. And we’ve looked at a fair amount of partners at this point and haven’t sort of got to the — we’re going to do one of them yet. So it’s like sales, right? You got to look at — or it’s like M&A. We got to look at a lot of banks before you buy the one that you’re going to buy. So it’s really important for us to get the first partnership really right with the right partner, and make sure that’s going well before the next partner comes on. So this will be sort of the year where I think we can bring on a partner or two, and make sure that’s going really well.
We are focused solely on deposits at this point and partnerships that are deposit driven. In this rate environment, you can imagine that there’s some rate involved here. It might be to the end customer. These are non-interest bearing accounts, but then there’s some fee share or if you will, deposit placement fee arrangement from that fintech partner that is being negotiated on a lot of these, but I would say our position there is, we will not — it will be at some margin less than Fed funds. And I think where we’re targeting mostly now is like half of that number. So if we brought some of those funds on today, it would be materially cheaper than wholesale today.
Unidentified Participant: No, that’s very helpful. Thank you. And if we could just go to the loan-to-deposit ratio here, it ticked up a little bit, just sitting just below 100%. Could you just remind us around where you could see that going or you’re comfortable with that trending up towards?
Jeffrey Ludwig: Yeah. I mean I think that’s as high as we would like it to be. I mean, ideally, we would like to be probably closer to 90%. But banking is about cycles and there’s — we talk about our management meetings all the time. There’s times where loans are coming in faster than deposits. There’s times on deposits coming in faster loans. And unfortunately, they don’t come in at the same rate all the time. And right now, loans have been coming in faster than the deposit side. So we’re really focused on, as I talked about earlier on deposits and deposit gathering and that will continue as we move into the year — into this year. We do think the loans are going to slow some, and that’s going to sort of help us — sort of move that loan to deposit ratio down.
The unwinding of GreenSky is also going to help, and as we sort of unwind that cash flow, as I talked about, that — those cash flows will either go into the investment portfolio or take some of this sort of higher cost non-core funding off the balance sheet at very frankly, minimal impact to the income statement.
Unidentified Participant: Now I appreciate the color there. And then just one more housecleaning item from us here. Tax rate kind of jumped around a little bit over the past few quarters. Any additional color on where that could shake out for 2023 would be helpful.
Eric Lemke: Yes. Good question. I think it’s going to be relatively stable where it was in the fourth quarter going into 2023. The tax rate jumps around a little bit as we’ve grown our revenues fairly significantly in 2022, our percentage of tax exempt income, say, from like a portfolio dropped as a percentage of that total revenue or that total income. So I think the fourth quarter is probably a good measure going forward.
Unidentified Participant: Great. Appreciate that. That’s all I had.
