Jason Tyler: It is. And we didn’t give a number on the expense growth, just that we want to do better than what we did this year. And so with that backdrop, the growth in the asset servicing business, in particular, it’s come with expenses. It’s a less scalable business relative to wealth, which is obviously highly, highly scalable. That said, we were focused, as you can tell from what we’ve done this year, not just on top line growth but on managing the type of business that comes in. And so head count was such an incredible focus for us this year, the compensation line, an incredible focus, and so as we look at what business to bring on board, there’s going to be a very strong scrutiny on looking at what expenses come along with it. The business is committed to do that. They’re — it’s they’re leading that effort saying that they’re going to be very diligent about identifying what business to bring on.
Michael O’Grady: Yes. And Alex, I would just add to what Jason is saying there is that’s why we’re driving so hard on productivity as well is because we have to have the capacity to invest in the foundation of the business and what we’re building out, the investments we need to make. But then also, to your point, if you’re going to bring on new business that has resources, you have to be able to offset a portion of that as well.
Alex Blostein : Got it. Okay. That all makes sense. And so I mean to put words in your mouth on the 3% to 4%. It just sounds like less than 5%. So maybe you’re thinking, okay.
Operator: Our next question comes from Brennan Hawken with UBS.
Brennan Hawken : I would love to unpack a little bit because — you walked through some of the — it sounds like you walked through some of the underlying assumptions behind the $430 million to $440 million expectation for 4Q. It sounded like you were saying that it predicated a deposit base of 93% to 95% and NIM flat. Did I interpret that correctly? And does that suggest that you’re sort of girding for further deposit declines even though they’ve been stable quarter-to-date?
Jason Tyler: Just to tweak the words. I mentioned that implies NIM would be up a few basis points, but the deposit levels you mentioned, are accurate. And so coming last quarter, we came into it thinking we were going to be down 5%, the market ended up being more competitive. And again, we’ve got we’ve got to react to what the market is doing. We don’t set it. And so coming into this quarter, we just — we did prepare for a further decline in deposits. And that could easily still happen. So not walking that back, which is saying that early stages of the quarter are indicating the deposit levels are higher than that. And we’ve also got — even as we look out to next year, we don’t think about this $430 million to $440 million as the run rate of there’s reasons for us to believe that NII is going to go up from there.
And just if you look at the runoff in the securities portfolio, and we’re still trading securities that are yielding to and reinvesting at 5% and security is yielding in the 2s and reinvesting it above that. And so without taking more risk or duration. And so there are things that we can continue to do. We’ve also had the balance sheet positioned very defensively. We saw the decline in deposits that was happening and frankly, the stress in the banking industry in the spring and in the summer, and we positioned very defensively. We wanted to — we have the ability to do that based on the strength of the balance sheet. We can stay short, we cannot stretch for NII. But as we feel more confident about the stability of deposits, the stability of the industry, we can use non-HQLA capacity.
And so there’s multiple levers we have to work on NII. So although we’re trying to give you as much color as we can about fourth quarter, the interpretation shouldn’t be that that’s necessarily something that you should annualize thinking about 2024.
