Paul Reilly: And we’ve heard a lot of people speculate over at the top rates, but we went from no rate cuts to three [ph], to people speculating six, speculating, well, maybe we won’t get one per month. So we just don’t want to really play that game. And I think one of the keys to our consistent performances, we are not making bets, we are just consistently running the business. So we really don’t look at locking in rigs like that. And right now, the spread on the sweep rates was very, very good and compelling anyways.
Kyle Voigt: Yes. Understood. Maybe just a question on the non-comp expense guidance of $1.9 billion. I think that implies a 10% increase or so in the average non-comp expenses for the remaining three quarters versus the first quarter run rate. I know there’s some variable expenses that you laid out in terms of the investment advisory fees, but just wondering if you could expand a bit on some of the other areas where you may be ramping investments through the remainder of the year.
Paul Shoukry: Yes, this quarter was pretty low, almost across the board. IT, the technology expenses, we typically pull back on external support during the December quarter just because it’s a little bit slower for those vendors as well even to bring people in. We — it’s a relatively quiet quarter for conferences and trips and — and so we — and it was also relatively favorable quarter for legal and regulatory. And so I think as the year progresses, we should expect to see growth to get to that $1.9 billion sort of guidance. And then as a reminder, that excludes some of the non-GAAP items, which most of you exclude as well as the bank loan loss provision, an unexpected legal and regulatory reserves because it’s just — it’s impossible for us to try to forecast those over the next three quarters.
Paul Reilly: And that was kind of our initial guidance was the 1.9%. So we are just — it is lumpy, but we still think that’s a good number.
Operator: Your next question comes from the line of Brennan Hawken from UBS. Your line is open.
Brennan Hawken: Good evening. Thanks for taking my questions. Curious if you could maybe disclose what portion of your client asset base is in retirement accounts. And also when you think about recruiting, typically, how much of those assets tend to come in, in the form of retirement accounts, IRAs and the like?
Paul Shoukry: Yes, we will provide more of that breakout at our Analyst Investor Day in May. When we went through this in 2016, last time we disclosed this metric, it was about a third of the assets were in IRAs and retirement accounts, but we haven’t provided any real disclosure on that since then. So we will plan on doing that at the Analyst Investor Day.
Brennan Hawken: Okay. Thanks for that, Paul. And then when you think about NNA, it had a nice jump here this quarter, was there a bank activity within the bank channel here in the quarter that might have caused some of the significant quarter-over-quarter changes. And generally, what’s your outlook for growth coming from that channel in the near-term?
Paul Reilly: There wasn’t anything lumpy in the bank channel. We — that tends to be a lumpier one just because of the — with advisors, there’s many, many. So they average out with the banks. We don’t expect anything lumpy. It’s part of our growth platform and I think our NNA has continued to be very, very solid. So we like the trajectory. And this is, I think, a very strong number, both given the environment and giving our competitors this quarter and still believe we have opportunity to keep — we don’t forecast a number, but I think we can be right at the top of NNA.
Brennan Hawken: Okay. Thanks for taking my questions.
Paul Shoukry: Thanks, Brennan.
Operator: Our next question comes from the line of Bill Katz from TD Cowen. Your line is open.
Bill Katz: Okay. Thank you very much. Good evening, and I appreciate taking the questions. Maybe to mix up the topics a little bit, I was wondering if you could circle back to capital return. Just given the fact that you have a very strong capital position, you mentioned sort of mix dynamics on the loan side or lending side. Why not pick up the pace of capital return through buyback? And then maybe as a subsector that subset to that, what’s your incremental thinking of inorganic opportunities at this point? And what might you be looking at? Thank you.
Paul Reilly: So we think, first, we were a little late into the quarter because we had a soft inflows [ph] blackout given an accrual for our off-platform communications. So we get a little late jump. And so we weren’t in a rush we had a good period in that market, so we didn’t try to catch up. But we are committed to next quarter, the $200 million, which I think will catch us up on the TriState commitment and continue on our dilution and as we go forward, to be opportunistic, we are trying to balance, as we’ve said, we’ve put a new Head of Corporate Development. We are seeing a lot of opportunities in the market. We want to make sure that — just like — I remember timing 2 years ago, [indiscernible] we are going to spend the cash when we got over 12%.
And we did 6 acquisitions in 18 months, right, and got our ratio down to 10%. So — and the reason we could do them is we have capital on the balance sheet. And we think there are opportunities. The problem is you never know if they’re actionable. You can talk a lot, but we are certainly out in the market and looking and so we just try to balance those two. The good news is we have strong earnings, so we understand we’ll keep adding the capital base. But we were just trying to balance the two of them. We think $200 million is a good target. And if we can get — if we get to the point where we don’t think there are accretive acquisitions that would be accretive to the positioning of the firm, not just earnings. We will buy back stock. We are not trying to hoard capital.
Our RSUs at least half of them are ROE [ph] and TSR base, so we are not trying to work capital just for fun. We just think it’s the right thing to do, looking at the potential opportunities.
Bill Katz: Okay. Just a follow-up. Maybe talk about margins for a moment. I appreciate we look forward to the Investor Day in the spring. Just conceptually, though, to the extent that the investment banking backdrop were to pick up, how do we think about the incremental margin in both the segment and how that might translate down to the holding company at this point in time? Obviously, you’re running about breakeven if you will. I’m just trying to think through the puts and takes of some pressure on NII offset by maybe a little bit more countercyclical pickup in the iBank and then how that might fill it down to profitability.
