It’s our customer remains different. We’re not sure exactly what happens. We do believe there will be some rotation from demand this year still to interest bearing. We’re just not sure how much. The internal debate we have here, because we already saw a lot of that last year, has it already happened, right? So that’s one of the budgets that we debate internally is as that shift taken place, has everybody who wants to move to higher interest-bearing deposits already taken that action. We don’t really know the answer to that. But that’s — so that’s some of the internal debates. But to be conservative, think about the last cycle I suppose.
Chris McGratty: That’s helpful. I really appreciate it. The last one I would have is just to be kind of zooming out, right? If I think about the bullish comment on loan growth, call it, stable comment on margin, it would feel like the net interest income for your company has yet to peak, because I think that’s a narrative that’s going around among bank investors where a lot of your peers are seeing margins and revenues top out. I guess would you agree or offer any thoughts on that?
Mariner Kemper: We expect to see net interest income continue to grow, because we’re a growth company. Like I said earlier, two things we focus on would be net interest income growth based on just growth period, as well as the growth of the balance sheet. And then the other thing we think we can do during this environment is produce operating leverage. So we’re less worried about the absolute expense levels of the company, because we’re investing in our business for growth. And then on the other side, because we have a long track record of building pipeline, we think we’ll continue to grow. We’ve been doing double-digit loan growth since 2015, and it’s — there’s nothing about our business model that would suggest that we can’t continue to do that.
We have new markets, great new markets we’ve expanded into, Utah, Minneapolis, Texas are our three young markets for us, so we have fabulous track records and great people on the ground. And we’re seeing really good traction there. And along with all of our other great markets, we see the same great opportunities and traction. And remember, we don’t project or predict our loan growth based on what’s happening in GDP anyway. We’ve — our loan growth is based on market share gains. So depending on regardless of what’s going on, economically, we think we can continue to deliver the same kind of loan growth that we’ve been delivering.
Chris McGratty: Great. Thank you very much.
Mariner Kemper: Thanks, Chris.
Operator: Thank you. Our next question today comes from Nathan Race from Piper Sandler. Nathan, please go ahead. Your line is open.
Nathan Race: Yes. Good morning, everyone. I appreciate you guys taking the questions.
Mariner Kemper: Good morning, Nathan.
Nathan Race: Question on just kind of the longer term or perhaps full-year margin trajectory over the course of this year. As you guys, kind of, think about what you’re paying on incremental deposits outside of the index deposits . Do you see some additional margin expansion potential in the back half of this year just given maybe some lagging repricing within the loan book relative to maybe kind of the incremental cost of deposits that you guys are gathering based on some of the initiatives that you guys outlined earlier in the prepared comments? Assuming the Fed policy, you know,
Ram Shankar: Yes. Yes, Nathan, this is Ram. Yes, definitely we’d see some opportunity for margin expansion, if the Fed does pause and hold, right? So the pressure on our index deposits and as Mariner said earlier, where we are being disciplined on the loan side and paying market rates on the deposit side, that will still be accretive to our margin. So that’s been our focus. So when you think about what happened last night, because the same thing repeated itself where our margin did expand when the Fed paused.
Nathan Race: Okay, great.
Ram Shankar: And some of the margin expansion benefit also — sorry, margin benefit expansion also comes from the rotation that we talk about from, you know, look at the next 12-months cash flows from the securities book that have the 2% exit yield and obviously our loan pricing is much better than that and we pick up yield on that.
Nathan Race: Got you. And within that context, you guys had the spot rate on deposits at the end of the quarter. If you can exclude or isolate the index deposits?
Ram Shankar: We don’t disclose that, Nate. We don’t get into that kind of the details.
Nathan Race: Okay, fair enough. And changing gears, Ram, I think in your prepared comments, you mentioned a starting point for expenses in the (ph) range for the fourth quarter, did I correctly?
Ram Shankar: No, $225 million to $227 million.
