Dan Rees: Look, there’s just a lot of moving parts, Ebrahim. Certainly, we did see in Q4 the movement to fixed in mortgages occur as we have been indicating for some time. So that would have been a component the movement out of low pay deposits into term as consumers were anxious about equity markets, that would have been a component. There’s a lot of moving parts in margin, where we ended in is about where we expected. We gave back some of the expansion you saw in Q2 and Q3, and we expect to be growing through the course of next year in the aggregate.
Ebrahim Poonawala : Got it. And Brian, congratulations on your retirement and good luck.
Brian Porter: Thank you, Ebrahim.
Operator: Our following question is from Paul Holden from CIBC.
Paul Holden : So there’s a lot of questions popping up around variable rate mortgages. And obviously, Scotia is one of two banks that offer variable payment, variable rate mortgages. And you addressed it a bit in your prepared remarks, but wondering if you can dive down a little bit deeper just in terms of how those higher interest payments are impacting consumer behavior if at all, sort of give us a flavor maybe for what proportion of converted to fixed payments or again, any kind of pressure or payment behavior you’re seeing?
Dan Rees: Sure, Paul. It’s Dan here. I’ll start and maybe Phil could add if he would like. We really appreciate the question. We believe strongly that a variable rate mortgage should have a payment that varies. We are not seeing credit pressure in that category during Q4, full stop. We are certainly preparing for and are having lots of conversations about cash flow management at the customer level. But big picture, the creditworthiness of the variable customer is higher than fixed. And as Phil would have mentioned in his remarks, deposit balances are substantially higher. And as we look at the liquidity position of checking and savings accounts combined in the variable customer balances that are with us, we see well over a year worth of excess liquidity to absorb payment increases of $200, $300, $400 per month.
So we’re not concerned about the credit side of the mortgage position. And on the other hand, we’re not seeing tremendous pressure on payment levels. In other words, credit card balances expanded this quarter, as you will have seen, and our personal deposits are holding in on the non-maturity side. So from a consumer behavior standpoint, the variable customer is in good shape. I think our proportion of mix there is not showing up in the credit line, and we’re confident with the transparent structure and the conversations with that we’re having with customers to date. The final thing I would say is on a big picture basis, strategically, we’ve been focused in the mortgage business at cross-selling into the deposits. We’ve been doing that year-on-year now for the last three years.
50% of our mortgage holders have a deposit account with us. And within the first six months of opening variable rate mortgage, customers now have three or more products, so are the into there health and strength is good, and we’re comfortable with our position, as we said last quarter.
Phil Thomas: Just to add to that, and Dan added a lot of comments that will be consistent with mine as it relates to the credit performance. But just speaking in generally, we’re not seeing any sign and do stress across our portfolios, whether in Retail or in our Business Banking segments right now. And we continue to monitor — as Dan mentioned, we’ve made significant investments in our ability to looking and see how our consumers are behaving and the type of performance they have both in retail and in Business Banking. And we’re not seeing any signs of liquidity pressures in our Business Banking book. And certainly, we’re seeing the health of the Canadian consumer considerably stronger than they were pre-pandemic and holding.
