The second criteria is financial. We’re looking at the overall return on that relationship and on that transaction and for lower ROA loans, those are the ones that we would tend to look at first.
So in the context of our overall strategy, which is the optimizing the entire balance sheet, looking at the risk profile of those loans and our balance sheet, think of this as sort of a continuation of the approach we’ve actually taken over the last couple of years to continue to grow in terms of meeting all of our clients’ needs and also improve the financial performance and returns of the Company.
Matt O’Connor
And I guess segueing into just net interest income overall, you gave pretty explicit guidance for 1Q but as we think about all the moving pieces including potential loan sales and obviously lower rates here, how would you think about the trajectory off of the 1Q level for the rest of 2015?
Bill Rogers
For net interest income overall, if I think about the year, I think we’re going to be treading water around that $1.2 billion type number.
We continue to add terrific new business. We continue to grow the balance sheet with both new loans and getting deeper with our current clients.But the rate environment just continues to grind down and offset all of the benefits. So I think for a while we’re just going to with treading water around that $1.2 billion level.
Matt O’Connor
Just last follow-up. You talked about plans to grow revenue in your prepared comments. So obviously if net interest income is relatively flat you’re counting on fees. Which categories or businesses do you think will be the key drivers?
Bill Rogers
Matt, the good news is we’ve been making investments so this is not sort of starting from sort of a flat surface.
And the places where we’ve been making investments and we’re seeing the results and I’ll name them sort of not necessarily in order but sort of go around the horn, what you’ve obviously seen continued progress in the investment banking part of our business. And we’ve added more capability there. But we’ve also expanded that reach within our company. So we’ve seen now much more expanded fee generating capability out of our commercial business and out of our commercial real estate business.
The investments we’ve made in corporate banking sort of around the country, you’re starting to now see some of the fee generation that comes from that. So there are a lot of momentum builders in that business.
Everything on the private wealth side has continued to have momentum. We’re up about 6% there. We’ve continued to invest in people. We’ve continued to invest in technology. We’re sort of net in a hiring mode in that business. But we’ve also done things like put premier bankers in our branches and they’re going to really help — we’ve given them a lot more data and a lot more analytics and they’re really going to help us mine what we have as an already sort of bias to the affluent in our retail system and we’re going to mine that better.
And then mortgage. So isn’t it great to mention mortgage on the positive side. We’re going to see some movement there. We’ve already seen here the first couple of days some re-fi activity. I’d love to extrapolate the next two days across the rest of the year. I’m not sure we can do that.
But we’re starting to see some activity not only in the refinance side but just sort of the core basic business in our retail markets as our markets improve. There are a number of things. Those are sort of just three. But there are a number of things that we’re investing in. Credit card would be another on the smaller side in terms of fee generation.
