By the end of the quarter, we were back up to where we wanted to be. And in fact, at the moment, we’re probably a little bit ahead of there. So that which is fine with that. If I look at customer repayments, we have seen our increase in terms of the customer repayments, what we work with our customers is, since mortgages have started to rise at Q4 last year, more than 70% of eligible customers have taken the opportunity to refinance early in the six month window that we give them. So that they can take advantage of those lower those lower rates by securing them early in the process. We can see that about 35% of customers are making an overpayment at the point of refinancing. In absolute terms, we saw lump sum repayments in Q2 of about £500 million, which just to give you a feel for that would be about double what we would have seen in Q2 of last year.
So people are definitely looking to pay up a little bit more on that. But I think it’s also important to know that mortgage balances grew by 1.9 billion in the quarter net of this elevated lump sum repayment number. A bigger factor for the overall mortgage balances from here, I think, is the macroeconomic outlook. And then, we do see that people are using some of their deposits to make that payment. Incredibly logical thing for people to do, as we move on from there. And then in terms of NIBS and IBBS. We do expect the NIBS to reduce a little bit further, it’s very hard to be definitive of where they settle. I think there’s not really a historic narrative that we can look at to help us guide that. So we are watching different customer cohorts very closely, a couple of kind of supporting factors on them, we do see wage inflation.
And we do see people reengaging with savings of course, which kind of makes that move and as well as the deleveraging of growth. But at the moment, we’ve made some assumptions as to where it will go from here. But we’re comfortable with in terms of that 14.8 million income that we’ve guided for this year and being at the upper end of that 14% to 16% royalty as well. But I think there’s a lot of different moving parts, but hopefully that Slide eight is helpful to you. So I’m glad you like it. Thanks very much Guy.
Operator: Thanks. Our next question comes from Andrew Coombs of Citi.
Andrew Coombs: I had one question for Howard, and for Katie, please. Just for Howard, just on permanent CEO succession planning? How would you envisage the process playing out from here and any thoughts on timing? And then for Katie, as someone asked about liquid asset buffer, given that the AIEA is excluded from the bank NIM, [indiscernible] it’s gone from 162 to 152. So any thoughts on the trajectory there going forward as well, please? Thank you.
Howard Davis: Yes, thanks, Andrew. Let me take you through it as clearly as I can. And I’ve been here for just over eight years. So if you look at the corporate governance code, which says that nine years is pretty much effectively the maximum norm. We decided to begin the search, we announced in April, the senior independent director would begin the search. So they appointed headhunters then. And that’s a matter for them. I’m not directly involved in that. So that’s underway. This, of course has come in the middle of that period. Therefore, since I think the replacement for me in due course will need to be behind a choice of long-term CEO. We decided that we would implement what was already our contingency plan and asked Paul to take over as Chief Executive.
