Jose Rafael Fernandez: Yeah. So let’s split the answer in two. Let’s start with the retail side, on the consumer side. What we’re seeing is lower non-interest-bearing deposit balances on the retail side. And that’s a direct relation to what I mentioned in my prepared remarks in terms of customers using their money to improvements at home, buying furniture and et cetera. So they’re deploying that liquidity, and that’s item number one, right? And also, what we’re also seeing is moving some funds to higher-yielding vehicles. And some of it is coming through to our wealth management unit. This quarter, we had close to $30 million that were customer deposits that were moving their monies to our broker-dealer, and so that’s good. But we’re really not seeing much from the competitive side.
We definitely see a competitive environment but we don’t see any rational environment. And given the Puerto Rico market, right, it might be called that way because Puerto Rico has a different dynamic in terms of the banking competitive landscape versus the mainland. So given who we are in Puerto Rico and the banking industry in the island, I think the competitive forces are really competitive, but at the same time, not irrational. So that’s kind of how it’s playing out on the consumer side. On the commercial side where we have a higher beta, it’s really driven by relationships, and we have very strong relationship with a segment of our commercial clients, and our team is working very closely with them. And we just make sure that we take care of them.
And I think we’re well positioned to not only take care of our customers but also be able to attract new customers on the commercial side, small and midsized companies, that is kind of the areas where we are most focused on the commercial side. So that’s a little bit of an overall on our deposit landscape and how we’re seeing it. Into the next second half of the year, I think we’re starting to see a slowdown on the outflows on the retail side. And we see the same kind of behavior on the commercial side, pretty steady and managing our primary relationships.
Alex Twerdahl : Great. That’s good color. And then just as you kind of think about level of deposits and overall balance sheet management and obviously, the strong loan growth you’ve had this quarter and that you sort of alluded to hoping to have in the second half of this year. Is it fair to assume that maybe we see stable deposits but that most of the balance sheet growth — the loan growth actually will be funded with the securities portfolio like you did in the second quarter? How should we think about the overall balance sheet management?
Jose Rafael Fernandez: There are a couple of levers there, right? Yeah, the securities portfolio, we have some short-term maturities early next year, and that’s one way. We also do have excess wiggle room with the loan-to-deposit ratio as I alluded earlier. So we can still kind of grow our loan book and fund it with our deposits. So those are the two main drivers. But if we need to go and if growth is — it’s really hard to sustain the level of loan growth that we had this quarter. So our expectation is that we will be able to manage it with our current deposit balances. And if need be, we can use some of the securities side to fund that.
Alex Twerdahl : Okay. And then I wanted to ask, on the new loan production, you gave us the average new production yield for the auto during the quarter. I was wondering if you had that for the commercial as well.
Jose Rafael Fernandez: On the origination side?
Alex Twerdahl : Yeah.
