Alexander Twerdahl: Okay. Thanks for taking my questions.
Ignacio Alvarez: Thank you.
Operator: Thank you. [Operator Instructions] Our next question comes from Kelly Motta from KBW. Kelly, your line is now open. Please go ahead.
Kelly Motta: Hi. Thank you so much for the questions and good morning. I thought I would just close the loop on the capital discussion. I appreciate the commentary that you’re reviewing the dividend now. Can you remind us what you guys can sort of target in terms of your dividend payout ratio? And how we should be thinking about that as we review the dividend here?
Carlos Vazquez: Yes. There is – what we target is what we hear from regulators, which seems to be something ordering around 30% of income. So that’s what we’re trying to target. A couple of recent announcements have taken banks slightly above that. So we are attentive to that. We also don’t know what their forecasts are. So they may end up at 30% depending on what they have – how they’re looking at the year. But that’s the broad guide is what we understand to be the regulatory preference that dividends be around that level.
Ignacio Alvarez: Yes. And this is Ignacio. We try to make the dividends to a little bit every year. So that we don’t have a big ramp up in one year, so we try to do it incrementally. And I think we’ve been very successful in the past in doing that.
Kelly Motta: Understood. Appreciate the color. I did want to flip to the deposit base specifically the core deposit base, excluding the government deposits. It looks like there, most of the growth came from the U.S. Can you kind of walk us through your strategies there? And any deposit campaigns are running. And as we look ahead with excess liquidity, Puerto Rico is still high, but – and really money coming in. But obviously, where we are in the cycle, just kind of outlook for how much higher liquidity balances or whatever you want to call it, is left and what we should be thinking about the deposit outlook putting that – those dynamics together?
Carlos Vazquez: Yes. As I mentioned in the earlier question, I think it’s fair to assume that our cash balances will be coming down in the rest of the year from where they are today. The biggest part of the deposit increase this quarter was still public sector deposits in Puerto Rico and then there is a good chunk at Popular Bank. We continue to try to strengthen the deposit business of Popular Bank. So that is a focus of the company. The efforts actually – the most obvious efforts are the increase in deposits through our online channel because that reacts quickly but there’s another – a bunch of other business efforts intended to actually improve the deposit business of Popular Bank as well. The problem with those is that they are less visible because they move slower.
So that is not the only tool we have to improve the deposit business, which is our goal. We are moving different levers. This lever happens to be the most obvious one obviously because it’s the one that moves the quickest.
Kelly Motta: Got it. And…
Ignacio Alvarez: Yes. In terms of Puerto Rico, while deposits have gone down somewhat. The average balances of our retail and small business clients, especially are still way above pre-pandemic levels. So we don’t – I don’t think we view the necessity of starting aggressive marketing campaigns in Puerto Rico at this point given our deposit levels.
