Christopher Maher: I would underscore that, Frank. This is an opportunity for us to try and minimize the risk to future margin compression, should rates begin to change in the back half of the year and going into 2024. So in the period of zero interest rates, we were comfortable letting the bank get pretty asset sensitive. We’ve seen that positively affect our margin in the last year. Now as — who knows where terminal rates will go. But as we start to get closer to terminal rates, we want to make sure that we’ve got kind of reduce some of that volatility that you might see in spreads. This is very much about how we are going to look in 2024 and on ’23.
Frank Schiraldi: Got you. Just — but thinking about maybe additional purchases, is just for modeling purposes, is there any sort of securities to assets, maybe ratio we should think about? Or is it not expected to change much from what you did in the first quarter?
Christopher Maher: I don’t think you’re going to see a material change in that kind of outlook. And this is a very tailored approach. So we are dollar averaging into a few positions, we are going to watch the market, watch what rates do, watch what our own interest rate sensitivity evolves to be, and also look at the peer group and make sure that we kind of stay in the band of folks that we want to be in with. So I don’t think you’re going to see a very different structure to our balance sheet. It’s just kind of around the margins.
Frank Schiraldi: Okay, great. Thanks for all the color.
Christopher Maher: Thanks, Frank.
Operator: Thank you. Our next question is from Daniel Tamayo from Raymond James. Daniel, please go ahead. Your line is open.
Daniel Tamayo: Thank you. Good morning, everyone.
Christopher Maher: Good morning.
Daniel Tamayo: starting on the expense base. Just wanted to see if that fourth quarter seemed to be about in line with what you were thinking if that remains a good jumping off point. And then as we see the increase in the FDIC assessments to take place in the quarter, just wondering what you guys were thinking, how that impacts that line item?
Pat Barrett: Right. Hey, Danny, it’s Pat. So, yes, I think fourth quarter is a pretty good jumping off point. First quarter will always have the impact of merits and related staff costs comp costs that come towards the tail end of that. So it will insight a little bit. And in this environment, that might be a more permanent inflation. So we might see it tick up just a little bit with merit increases, but the run rate on most of our line items is pretty solid right now. We are — you should assume looking across all of our expense base as well as our revenue productivity. That will take a little bit of time working to make sure that we are kind of optimizing for the businesses that we do. So that will be a theme throughout the year for us.
So that — that’s kind of underpins the professional — some of the professional fees and other costs will remain kind of elevated at least for the near-term. The FDIC assessment will hit us like everybody else to the tune for us, it will be about $2 million on the new rate scale.
Daniel Tamayo: For the year?
Pat Barrett: Yes, for the year, sorry.
