John McDonald : Okay. Got it. And then, Charlie, maybe a bigger question, just kind of where are you on the efficiency journey when we think about 50 billion of core expense for this year. And the timeframe for ROTCE, what will it take? Is there an efficiency ratio we should keep in mind? Or is that too hard to forecast? Maybe a little bit on that would be helpful.
Charles Scharf: No, it’s a good question. I think — so, first of all, I think when — just make a — just a couple of comments around the expense guidance we gave. Embedded in that expense guidance, we’re still continuing to reduce the core expenses of the company. But as you can see on that slide, we’re anticipating that we will spend more money on investments that are around technology, digital, building out products, and things like that, that offset that some extent to get to an overall flat expense base. Mike did say in his comments, and I just want to repeat it, that we’re not going to spend this money at all costs. We’re going to see how the year continues to pan out. It’s money that we would like to spend. We’re planning to spend it, but there’s a lot of discretion in the expense base.
So, we think it’s prudent, as we sit here today, to plan to spend it, but we’re going to constantly be looking at our performance and make judgments on what that should be. And so, as we look at the efficiency of the company, we do expect to continue to get efficiency ratio improvement in the place. And if we don’t see revenue growth and if we don’t see payoffs from the things that we’re doing, then we will spend less money. And so, that’s the way we’re approaching it. We’re either going to get the efficiency ratio to continue to improve because we’re getting real payoff on some things, or we will reduce on a net basis. But overall, there’s still gross expenses that should come out of the company, which gives us the latitude to continue to grow the investments inside the company.
The timing to get to 15%, listen, it’s a great question. As we talked about it, it’s medium term, which is obviously not long term or short term. But I would say it’s — without putting a specific time frame, it is — it should be something that we have in our sights as we look out over the future. It’s not something that’s theoretical. It’s something that we believe we should get to. And just the problem and we’re just trying to stay a little bit away from, quantifying exactly where we’re starting from just because everyone will make their own adjustments. And it’s just — I think what we’re just trying to do is be really clear that we don’t want to take credit for the outperformance in NII. We don’t want to take credit for the outperformance in charge-offs, and that we still have to continue to drive improved performance each and every year at the company.
Operator: Thank you. The next question comes from Steven Chubak of Wolfe Research. Your line is open.
Steven Chubak : Hi. Good afternoon. So, Charlie, I was hoping to ask a follow-up to that last line of questioning around expenses. You indicated that the expense work, it’s going to continue beyond 2023. And the one metric that we’ve been tracking is headcount. And in terms of the benchmarking analysis that we’ve done, headcount is down more than 10% since the 2020 peek or roughly 30,000, but it’s still elevated versus your money center peers. I was hoping you could just speak to what inning you’re in currently in terms of optimizing headcount. And whether — as we look beyond ’23, whether there is a credible path to actually driving investments lower, you had talked about balancing investment with the need to drive those efficiency gains. I just want to think about the expense trajectory beyond ’23, whether further reductions are achievable given some of that inflated headcount still?
