Bank of America Corporation

If everybody could take their seats, we are going to get started with what is going to be the final presentation at this conference. I do think we have kept the best to last. So, Brian, thank you very, very much for joining us. It is actually the 16th consecutive.

year. That is definitely a record. So thank you very much.

I look exactly the same as I did 16 years ago. So do you. You actually look younger. Anyway, so let's start off with just your take on the macroeconomic backdrop. We've obviously just had the Fed just came out. but I'm curious about how you're thinking about the path for the economy next year what you're seeing in terms of consumer and corporate engagement heading into 2026 and I think you have some of the best spending data and I think you do some of the best analytics around it what have you seen over the fourth quarter and what does that tell you about the outlook for next year well I

So, thanks, Rich, for having me. The first thing is our team had the Fed cutting rates today, so I guess they got that one right. I think there's a little surprise about the dot plots and what happens next year. But if you look at, you know, our team has the economy in the U.S. growing 2.4% or so next year. That, from this time last year to now, isn't a lot changed. But in between, they dropped 100 basis points off the growth rate liberation rate. day, all that stuff, and then put it back. And so he kind of got around this trip. I think the certainty that passed forward from six months ago to now is higher because trade and tariff has largely worked through the system in terms of people's understanding of what will happen. I think taxes is done. So I think You know, immigration deregulation are the issues that are still working through, and I think business looks at that and says, I've got some basics right now. I can invest. They're still worried about making sure the immigration gets settled down so they have the workforce they need to do their work. It's what the clients tell us all over the country. And our small business surveys show that Labor availability is becoming a bigger issue. It was that a few years ago, then inflation, and now it's back to that. And that's just if you're a lot of the services-related business or construction business or things like that, getting workers. Our consumers in the month of November across all different things. So Liz Everett was on CNBC today. She talks about the credit and debit card because they can track that most carefully. But if you look across the whole platform, that's about 20%, 25% of the money movement. If you look across the whole platform in a year, it's about $4.5 trillion, 70 million consumers putting money in the economy. That is up 4.3% November this year versus November last year. If you think of that in a historical context, that's consistent with a 2% plus growth rate in the economy. The way they're spending the money has a little bit of the elements of a K economy to it, not as much as people think if you actually watch what's happened over the last few months. in three tercials. The bottom tercile has been growing at a slower rate, still growing. The top tercile growing at a faster rate, it's been keeping that rate. It's the middle one that's moved more, a little bit less to the higher growth rate of the upper end and above the lower. And that's just a recent phenomenon. So that number was 5% in October, 4%, 4.5% in November. But I wouldn't overly read into a half a percent movement because weekends how the calendar works can affect all that so consumers in good shape our credit quality improved in the quarter last quarter it's still there it's good small businesses are fine they're making money middle-sized companies credit quality is strong they're still using their lines at a lesser rate than they did pre-pandemic and you know that that's probably an indication of you know it costs more honestly the biggest beneficiary of a lower Fed funds rate is a lower SOFA rate and therefore a lower rate for middle market and small business borrowers. It's counterintuitive to the consumer because the mortgages are locked in. It's really more beneficial to that group. So we'll see if they start using our lines a little more aggressively. But they're all fine. Credit quality is good. So we're very constructive. And in the capital market side, all of you participate in that. I think as you look, we think it's a constructive time and deals are getting done and people are out there bidding on stuff. It's all pretty good. The derailments are all the... Existential issues you can have, kinetic wars, the rate structure not getting, people not getting the Fed rate path right, the Fed not getting it right, hyperinflation, all this debt and all that stuff. But over in 26, we see pretty good shape.

And then just from a consumer balance sheet standpoint, anything to note in terms of normalization of cash levels? You know, and how that looks relative to history.

Three years ago, people said they're going to spend all their money and they're going to be out of money. If you take the cohort of customers from early 2020 and look at them six years later, almost six years later now, they still have a lot more money in their accounts, except for the highest balances in that time, like more than a quarter million in there. They move the money into money market funds and stuff. Everybody else is up. SOMEWHERE BETWEEN A MULTIPLE TWO AND A MULTIPLE THREE. NOW, REMEMBER ACROSS SIX YEARS, PEOPLE GET JOB PROMOTIONS AND STUFF, SO YOU GOT TO BE, THERE SHOULD BE A NATURAL PROGRESSION TO ALL THAT, AND CASH, INFLATION WENT UP, BUT THERE'S NO INDICATION IF YOU LOOK YEAR-OVER-YEAR AT THE COUNT BALANCE, THE CONSUMER CONTINUE TO PUSH FORWARD. AND SO THERE'S, IT'S REALLY, THEY'RE NOT SPENDING THE MONEY DOWN, THE CREDIT QUALITY'S GOOD, THE FICOS AND THE PORTFOLIOS ARE VERY STRONG, LIKE YOU'D EXPECT. Then, you know, the housing, it's going to be slow just because of rate structure. But that's not a credit quality and it's not an issue for the consumers that are locked in the mortgages. They're in good shape.

Okay. So you just had the investor day. I think it was a month, pretty much a month ago, right? Just over a month ago. You set out both broader targets for the firm. You gave a very significant number of KPIs by business. From your perspective, what are the two or three main points coming out of the investor day that you want to reiterate? But the other thing I wanted to ask is I know you've spent time with investors since the investor day. What do you think is most underappreciated in terms of the message that you wanted to get across?

So I'd start from the point was to say we have an organic growth engine, which has a competitive position. And around that competitive position, there's some serious moats. that are hard for people to discern in sort of the day-to-day flow of the world. And it's been growing organically, and with all the things on an industry income, you'll see it even grow faster from earnings perspective. So we came off a quarter with EPS was up 30 percent, operating leverage was 600 basis points, et cetera, et cetera. Revenue growth 10%, expense growth 4%. You came off a good quarter and you said, this is because of all the work we've done organically growing this franchise in a product quality, et cetera. We want to make that message understood. That's number one. The competitive modes by showing how much the technology spend, the complexity of running a markets business on a global basis with 50 regulators, those types of things. We want to make sure people saw that. And then they saw where we had unique programs that we could grow. employee banking investments program, our local markets capabilities, the way businesses work together, our international capabilities, which is critical to the middle market business in the United States nowadays, and even business banking, which is 50 million revenue companies and under. Those three ideas, organic growth engine, already doing it, returns increasing, efficiency increasing, because the NII kicks in. That was it. And that's what the investors see and say, we got it, you know. We've probably talked to investors a whole 25% or 30% of the stock since then because we have a routine that we go through every fall.

Okay. So the plan does incorporate a significant pickup in growth rates and market shares in a number of businesses. So a couple of questions here. I mean, the first is, do you feel the current distribution footprint and platforms are set up for the growth from here? And then secondly, look, a lot of your peers – do seem to be leaning into growth obviously one of your peers announced a step up in terms of strategic investment spend yesterday can you talk a little bit about the competitive environment what you've seen in the competitive environment so far this year and how you're expecting that to unfold next year right so if you look at you know the market share of consumer banking

We have grown that consistently. But the difference between us and others is we've grown primary checking account deposit holes for the mass market consumer. That's the place where you're going to be in the middle of the finances in the household and where you're going to make the most money. And so the $950-odd billion in balances they have is a substantial part of the total rate paid in 50-odd basis points or 60 basis points. That's because the mix of deposits is all core. Average deposit in our checking account is 9,000. The industry is three. That difference is immeasurably different. And that's because we're not just trying to sell things. We're trying to sell stuff that sticks to the ribs. And so we had a time in this company when we sold 10 million checking accounts a year. And we grew a million checking accounts. Today we sell four and grow a million primary checking accounts. Think about the difference in terms of amount of work that goes on for those two dynamics. And that just kept kicking, 27 straight quarters of growth. Those types of investments in organic growth are there. And organic growth in commercial, we're up 8% year over year. The market was up half that or something. You know, we're seeing the numbers of what we call logos of clients we had in the mid-sized business, the 50 new bankers we put the work across, the private banking. I'd say wealth management, we pointed out to the group that we need to, we'd taken them out of the recruiting of experienced advisors for a bunch of years just because the economics weren't there. We've now gone back into that to where we need advisors plus the training program. So that's probably the most aggressive, you know, Eric and Lindsay put the most aggressive targets on the table from going from 2%. to 3% net new flow assets to, you know, 4%. And they've worked it out. They got the plans. Everybody else, frankly, what people saw as growth rates were just a compounding of all the work they'd done and really a continuation of the growth they'd been seeing. You go to markets, we invest a lot, $300 to $400 billion in balance sheet, letting the G-SIB move up because that's what is required. And Jim and the team have done a good job. The place is growing organically and now we just got to keep hammering home. And the investment rate is interesting and we can talk more about that when we talk about expenses because, if you're going to talk about expenses. We'll talk about expenses. Because what we've been able to do for a number of years is consistently take money out of stuff we didn't want to do and put it in the stuff we want to do. And that number is staggering and that's what we tried to, we showed that slide in Investor Day. 285,000 people coming down to 203,000 people. And we were setting up two points. When you go from that period of time to now, we added 4,000 more coders. We've added 2,000 more client-facing people in the correlation business and the American business. We had another 1,000 people in the markets business. Yes, we've been adding people all over the world to support that. Meanwhile, the headcount's been basically flattish since 2022. It went low point at maybe 208, high point at 216, but basically the last three years, 213.1, 212.9, 213.1, and 213.1. Meanwhile, you're putting tons of people in, and you're taking people off the back end, off the process. What AI gives is different, and that gives us a chance to attack a different group of people. The point of that slide was of the 80,000 people that came out, 80,000 came out of retail and operations. That's not really – we'll do that, but there's only 50,000 people left in retail, so there's only so much you can go. What you're really going to do is take it out of place that you haven't been able to do.

Yeah. And then on the competitive environment, I mean, what have you actually seen and what are you expecting? And then I guess, look, added to that, obviously regional bank consolidation is obviously a big theme. Is that an opportunity for you because those organizations become inward focused as they integrate or is it a threat because they actually have more scale? How do you think about that?

So a couple things. One, when stuff goes on, people have to switch banks, switch names of banks. the client-based churns, and that's an opportunity for us. How do we know that we did it? Literally, if you go back in the history of the company, probably you could count up 1,000 of them. So this is not new to us. We've been on the other side of the trade. We know what happens, so we do. The second is talent comes to us, because if you're covering middle-market companies and market, and I'm covering middle-market companies, and we're two competitors merging chances of us having an overlap are high so we don't need two of us to do it and then talent comes available so we go in and and take advantage that will that consolidation continue absolutely we run our consumer business at um you know at a cost of a good soul which you take the cost of pay on deposit plus all the operating costs of all the platforms you get into 150 whatever it is today you know that is Several hundred basis points off a lot of the competitors. That allows you to have a low fee structure. It allows this turn to not take place. It allows you to invest in the competitive advantage. And that's what you're doing. As NI picks up that business, we'll go from earning X to almost double X in the next few years. So that's going on. Mid-market space, we'll take advantage of it. We'll keep happening. It has to because as much as people debate about scale in our industry... The industry, if you look across many years, the ROA, the industry keeps inching down. And so what we've done is taken the expense out to keep below that and get a constant sort of return on tangible common equity. So we're good in a 4,000-person competitive market to pass through the benefits to the market on a lot of that. But if you aren't doing it, you can't do that. And that's where... You know, that's where the fees and other things and the churn and the customers, we just don't see in our customer base. And that allows us to price well and grow and get the core household. And meanwhile, it also gives us the right to invest a lot.

Okay. So let's talk about efficiency. It's everybody's favorite topic. And you gave a lot of data around this, and I think it's very encouraging. You know, you talked about getting the efficiency ratio back below 60% near term into the high 50s. sustained operating leverage of 200 to 300 basis points. Talk us through what the efficiency agenda looks like from here, where you see the greatest opportunities. And obviously, look, AI is still a very, very dominant theme. I mean, do you think that AI will allow you to reduce the expense base in absolute terms, not necessarily in the next one to two years, but as you think out over the next three to five years?

The very last part of that is it will absolutely allow us to reduce the expense base of a particular service or capability. The question of what you do with that money is going to be based on all the other things we talked about, competitive concerns, need to invest and stuff. So let's back up. Our efficiency ratio was overstated because of a way versus other people's efficiency ratio for two basic reasons. is three basic reasons. One is the NII is still kicking in, so that basically all goes to the bottom line. The second was we have a higher percentage of our business in the least efficient business, which is a great business, which is a wealth management business, but that's a higher percentage of our revenues, and so until the NII kicks in, that all salutes it down. We're more efficient than anybody in the business. But the third reason is the way we accounted for these tax credit deals, which goes away. And so that was 200 basis points. So whenever they said you're operating at 63, we're actually at 61 on apples to apples before you make anything. So we forget about getting it below 60, because frankly, what happens over the course, you get the, growth rate in the NII, which basically pours the bottom line. The fee-based businesses bring a lot of expense. Obviously, the wealth management business brings $0.50 on the dollar. Investment banking brings another chunk, and the market's the same. So you'll see that as that pours through, that's what drives it, and that's what you've seen so far. We had years we operated with operating leverage every quarter, efficiency ratio in the mid to upper 50s. in investing, and you'll see that come back, and that's largely really, all things being equal, it's just largely due to the NII rolling over and going the other way from eight quarters ago, whatever it is now.

Okay. So 16% to 18% ROTC, I think you said you plan to get to the lower end in two years, the higher end in three years. How should we think about the improvement in returns from here? I mean, is it linear over that time period or is it more back-end loaded? So maybe talk a little bit about the nearer term versus the longer term.

I'd say that be careful if a particular quarter generates different activities. And so this quarter marks a little lighter than the first quarter and, you know, that stuff happens. But generally you'll see a progression year over year in the current. We put together a multi-year plan. You basically see it break through towards the middle end of the second year, breaks in, and then it breaks to the higher, towards the 12th quarter. So I actually said, you know, 7, 8 quarters and 12 quarters, 8 to 12 quarters. It's really kind of rolls into and then rolls out. You know, it's a three- to five-year target. I just told you we should hit it in the third year, and it would be pretty rateable, although a particular quarter could go up and down depending on how the markets do.

Okay. So, Neera, Tim, can you just give us some high-level thoughts on the fourth quarter? Has anything changed since you last spoke, either in terms of NII or trading? Is there anything we should be aware of in terms of credit and expenses? You know, how is the fourth quarter shaping up?

Do you want me to do your work for you? Look, so on NII, there's no new news. That's good because we keep – hitting that progression. In credit, we're seeing charge-offs basically flatten out, so we don't see any news there. I think the two or three things, just to make clear, if you look at investment banking fees for the 25 or 24, we expect it to be up about 4%. That number would mean the fourth quarter impliedly sort of flattished a little bit down from last year, 1.5, 1.6. We did $2 billion last quarter. It's largely just deal flows and timing and stuff, so we feel good about that. Markets, we think, if you look at it year over year, as we think the fourth quarter finishes up, we'll be up 10% year over year, and the fourth quarter will be up high single digits or close to 10%, and that's pretty good. That would be the 15th, 16th consecutive quarter of linked quarter growth, so we feel good about that. So now I have what we told you, those two items. Everything else, expenses, look, the thing on expenses is that from 24 to 25, you'd look at it, we're up 4-ish percent, four and a quarter, four and a half, four-four, I think it is, if you come in at the year end. Last year's fourth quarter, this year's fourth quarter, you're going to be up four and change. And the pressure on that is all due to the wealth management business, and that's incremental on some of what they call BCE, the clearing expense markets. But if you look at that, look at it fairly last year, we had the credits in the FDIC, so it's up about 2.5%, 3%. And so we think it'll be, we said it'd be flat, it should be bouncing around that, maybe $100 million either way, but it's pretty good expense growth control year over year. That's come from headcount. That goes back to what I said. The headcount is basically being able to manage flat headcount in the aggregate with redeploying a ton of people going different directions. And that brings you to the question of AI, which in the end of day, AI Today at Bank of America, and Erica in the consumer business. In the month of November, we had 1.4 billion digital connections. with our customers. Erica's 20 million customers, about 200 million times a quarter. We think it saves today about 11,000 FT equivalents. Now, the big debate of that is, does it atomize behavior? And what I mean by that is, do you touch it three times a day where you wouldn't do something else three times a day? So you've got to be careful about that. But the numbers of touches would equate to that. And that's today. Yesterday, the 24-hour period, it has 2 million interactions. So we feel very good about its impact. We took that same thing, to give you a completely starkly different example, and put it into the break-fix technology widget. So when you go in and say, I need to change my password, my computer, I need something done, whatever, we went from people answering that, or one-to-one chat, you know, to this bot answering half the questions in 60 days. So you can see how it can affect process. So we still have a lot of places where we think an audit, which is 1,200, 1,300 people for us, and risk, which is 8,000-plus people, and financial, which is 5,000-plus people, where you have not had a tool that could change process as much as this tool has the potential. And so that's where we think the upside comes from. We've been taking out costs years and years and years out of the – operations processes out of that, investing in technology, probably doubled the amount we spend every year on technology initiatives, and we spend another $10 billion to just run the platform and keep it secure and all this stuff. And we invested in new branches and all that stuff. But the gig is, you know, this is different because what you did there was a lot of process reengineering that you didn't have this tool for. So even on those, you can go back and get more. credit officer memorandum preparation, pitch book preparation. These are all operating. So the debate we have is, you know, how precise you can be in the very near term. We just rolled copilot with the whole 365 copilot. We'll be through 200,000 people using it by the end of the year. And then roll additional feature functionality. How do you say what you get out of that? And that's the question. Do you just have to focus people on that you ought to be X percent more efficient over two or three years to pay for the amount of time and effort you're putting in that. That's a tougher question because it's not a process. We're applying a technology, even an AI technology, and saying five steps, three steps, the three steps are enhanced this way, and you save money. So it's going to be a little more interesting than that. But right now, we've been able to keep the headcount flat. So all the expense growth is really inflation around people cost, incentives for the wealth management business, and then transactional costs. And Inflation around people costs, the only way you're really going to manage it is to continue to drip the heads down. And that's where a couple years ago we said we had to get back on the other trail, and we've done it. Meanwhile, you're putting tons of people out to the front. And we think our commercial bankers will get a 10% efficiency out of the tools we gave them this year and next year, which means they can do more logo development with the same number of people than they would have otherwise done.

Okay. So you mentioned the credit picture, but anything that you've seen of note in terms of early delinquencies, you know, and I guess, and I think the bigger picture question here is on the consumer side in particular, you know, asset quality has improved despite some of the weaker data from retailers and restaurants. Why do you think we're seeing this divergence between the banks and some of these other data points?

I think the How a person spends money is a different determination whether they pay their credit, because if they don't pay their credit, they get, you know, delinquency and a FICO, and, you know, that just changes their life, whether they decide they have to go out to dinner one time less or not. So the rate of spend at restaurants and stuff is growing. It's just not growing at the same rate spending, like on cruises, was growing double-digit, so you'd say. So we don't see there's indications of consumer stress. All the spending is growing. The credit quality is good. The charge-offs in our consumer business came down. They're just basically plugging along at a level that is 3.5% in the credit card business, which 20 years ago I thought that would be nirvana. Would you expect it to decline from those levels going into next year? I don't think so because we take risk, and so you've got to take the risk. So we underwrite 100 people. Some of them are going to not turn out to have a – They're going to get divorced, they're going to get sick, they're going to lose their job, et cetera. So that's, even with a prime business, you're taking that risk. So we expect to have that rate or a little bit higher, actually. So it's performing about as good. Will there be times when it will go up and be a little better or not? Yeah, but sort of structurally, if we were much below that, I'd be worried we weren't taking the risk. And so, but we just don't see it going anywhere. And our mortgage book, The LTV is 50 or something like that. The home equity book, the combined LTV is around the same. The FICO is 700. We've had credits, so to speak, recoveries in the home equity book, which is really old loans that keep drifting through the system from years ago. It's all prime books. We don't see any deterioration at all. Now, we're not in a subprime space, so you've had other people who could talk about that. So the prime credit we're seeing. And remember, that's one of our strategies is, we don't go seeking standalone credit. You know, we really go after the combined relationship, what we call the stair step on the consumer side, which is operational account, first borrowing, second borrowing, credit card, home equity, or car, and then home or home equity. That's the travel and investment. And so it's a very disciplined process. So you're anking off a good customer you've actually seen in action, stuff like that. And on the small business side, You see the normalization, the small business cards charge us, which are higher than the four and a half, I think, or something like that. But that's just nature of small business, success or not success. And then commercial, really, we all talked about commercial real estate two years ago. That's run through the system and it's on its way down. And then really not a lot else. Episodically, you get one of these things and one of those things, but you're seeing no deterioration of the core portfolio.

Okay, so I'm going to talk about a couple of your growth initiatives in a second, but just on the loan growth side, can you just touch on what you're seeing on the commercial side and the commercial real estate side? It does seem some of your peers are talking about that inflecting heading into next year. And then the other thing I'd be curious in getting your views on is the OCC rescinded some of the rules around levered lending. Does that in any way impact how you think about the opportunity set?

commercial lending over the next few years so if you if you've taken the last part first yes the it does help because the statement was you know you could do a handful outside of that guidance and the guidance wasn't rule but you could do a handful so let's define a handful you know let's define a handful when you have you know ten thousand you know, mid-market, 20,000 mid-market clients. Let's define a handful when you have, you know, several small, a million small businesses. Let's define a handful. You know, that's like in the beauty of the eyes of the beholder. So what happens when you did one, you know, get your head beating around to do it. So getting rid of that as a principle is a good principle. Let us make credits. We're pretty good at it.

It just improves simplicity. Yeah.

It also just says if this deal is a deal you want to do, go do it. So I think that will help because you could never be right. It was only looked at after the fact. So we went through SNCC exam after SNCC exam, except we were all fine. You look at the credit portfolio, you're saying, so why do you, you know, so I think what they realized is let us underwrite the credit, and if our credit process doesn't work right, if we have an adverse amount of hits, you know, talk to us then, but don't over-prescribe, you know, the precision of which you see a credit versus what our experts see. By the way, we got people, this is all they do 24 by 7. I couldn't tell them how to do it either, so... We feel good about it. It's more the spirit of doing that. It lets us compete in the market. And when you come to the private credit side, which is one of the difficulties competing in private credit has been that implied constraint or explicit constraint in the application of that, that now lets us look at a middle market company that's going, you know, doing a recap with a private equity firm or a large that they're selling or one of our clients is buying them and they want to borrow, you know, at five times or seven times or six times in the right industry and believe the cash flow and they have a good plan, you know, we can do it. And so that's what the constraint was. The rest of the commercial loan growth, largely, I think we're up 8% year over year, third quarter or something like that. And the markets business has grown, but also the core, you know, Small business has grown. I think they're up mid-single digits. That's good. And then the commercial credit to wealthy people has grown very nicely. That really comes from wealthy people putting more in the market, and it's commercial credit because of the structure of it. So we feel good about the commercial loan growth. Now, commercial real estate, I would say, after years of it kind of bumping along at the same level, you're seeing some life to it and well-structured deals. But that's a to-do for next year. Right now, you're just seeing the start of it.

Okay. So credit card and growth in the card business is one of the drivers to the improvement in the return to the consumer business. It does feel like that is a particularly competitive space. Obviously, you've had a number of refreshes, a number of people looking to grow that. What do you think is your key differentiator in terms of growing the card business from here?

So if you look at the business we had from three or four or five years ago to now, it's actually grown at 5%. What we did is we sold off some portfolios in that time frame. And so we can see the way we operate the business, Bank of America branded cards, few key co-branded partners, driving that growth. Yeah, origination practice, we can get 5%. And so it's kind of embedded in there, and it has to net come out the other side, and that's the challenge for us. So Holly and the team that run the consumer business, David Tyree that runs marketing, Mary Drozd runs products, we just announced this product for her. World Cup, which is, you know, a chance to get tickets and things like that. All this is just to get people's attentions on in a brand of World Cup card, and we got a lot of uptake compared to our usual promotions and stuff. So they're out there driving it. We spend the money in advertising. We have some limited-grade affinity partners, but the affinity we drive into is Bank of America, and the combined rewards program is why our consumer business stability is different than anybody else's. And so if you look at our consumer business, The piece we call preferred, which is a higher in the consumer business, a third of the customers, 80% of deposits, but also has a deep penetration of cards in a combined rewards program. That is the competitive advantage, that nobody can do that across multiple products. And so that's the way you play games. So we think we can move that from basically a 1% type of growth rate up to 5%, but it's more by taking away the negative in the near term than it is changing the growth rate on top. That's been going on, so to speak.

And then a similar question on the wealth business. I mean, you've obviously got great brand, great franchise, but it is a step up in growth relative to the past. Again, what is it that you're going to do differently?

It really comes down to two or three things that they described. One is that we started recruiting in experienced advisors because we just have tremendous client opportunity referrals from the commercial business to them and the consumer business to them. We just didn't have the capacity, so we're bringing in advisors. uh, retool part of their book and then drive it. The second is we've created capacity and advisors, not only automatically, but also by household levels and things that they, Lindsay and Eric have worked on. Uh, and third is the training program. We're maturing into the training program that we started, that we reinvigorated four or five, seven years ago, that those people getting more productive. Um, and then we got the Merrill edge piece. And so that also is growing, you know, it's, uh, it's accounts and structures. It's a, well over a half trillion dollars in, in, and client assets. And so that's a starter case that we can use for people. And Maggie, with its $40, $50 billion of completely robot-managed, so to speak, that we all talked about, robo-advisors five years ago. It seems trite now, but that was a big new thing. We actually do it, and we have a book, and it runs, and it grows. And so we feel good about that because you can't forget that continuum piece. And then the private bank, Katie's put out 50, 60 more private client advisors over the last, 24 months from other firms. They've gone through all the things that you're talking about. And so we feel good about that. So, you know, you put that all together, it's really going to come down to the execution of the field by Lindsay and Eric's team to drive it. And they're confident they can just keep incrementally. They've seen it move up and they just got to push through.

Okay. So we've got a couple of minutes left. Let's talk about capital. You set out a 10.5% CT1 target. A couple of questions here. I mean, the first is, can you talk about the path to the 10.5% in terms of increased deployment versus capital returns to shareholders? Second, look, there's obviously more regulatory reform to come. So do you think that 10.5% could change after we get the Basel III endgame G-SIB recalibration? And then lastly, can you talk about your appetite for inorganic growth, for acquisitions as a way of accelerating what I think is a really good organic growth story?

Yeah, so I think just on the inorganic, remember that there's no legal way we can acquire a franchise that has deposits in it. So that takes off the table most of what would be interesting, except in a failed deal. So we'll see if people get bumped up or something like that. And then outside that, it's line of business oriented. And so we've acquired various payments firms. We keep doing that. Smaller ones that you wouldn't see, so to speak, they just get absorbed in. So we'll continue to do that. I think we've made a decision in the wealth management business how we're going to operate, which is the asset management is a different business. And to make that have any kind of impact on us, we'd have to do something. So we look at it and say, then it's just people and hiring people. So we're in every market around the world for markets and and commercial banking and treasury services and investment banking. We just keep adding people and adding expense and then making that more efficient. So that's sort of off the table. On capital, if you think about our nominal amount of capital, if that capital counts for more under the G-SIB recalibration, which is, I think, most important to us as an industry and is also, frankly, the thing that has gotten most wrong, frankly. You know, so we can debate advanced, standardized, and all that stuff. What happened with G-SIB is you think it hasn't been calibrated since 12, off of 12 data, and then you had this massive nominal growth rate in the economy from 19 to now, and they didn't change any of the stuff. So what's happened is we have actually grown our G-SIB number from 250 to 350, and you're saying, but guys, we're not taking any more risks with all this side of the economy. So the whole thesis of it, has been polluted by them not recalibrating. That helps us. And the question, but it's got to be a rule. It's got to be passed. We've got to understand the dynamics of it. And so with that comes Basel III finalization. But that's the most beneficial thing to us. So I don't know until I see that. You see some of the outlines of it, but then they say, well, there'll be stuff over here and stuff over there. We've got to get a set of rules on the table that we agree with. We do that. I think that'll allow us to have more excess capital. And we'll probably use that to grow into it while we take 100% of the capital or more is going out in earnings, excuse me, in dividends and buybacks in this quarter. We'll buy back a little bit more as we go through the quarter because largely we earn more than we had in our capital plan last quarter. So we'll continue to do that. But that then keeps capital from building for lack of a better term. And then what you do is you grow into that. And if we got a step change of relief on the G-SIB, then you can make another decision whether you can step up the buybacks more. But right now, you know, there's a glide path. I don't want to constrain markets' ability to grow. We don't want to constrain markets' ability to grow and things like that, and that's the major uses of G-SIB. So if you look at it year to year, they're 75%, 80% of the points usage. That's letting Jimmy keep pushing that business out there. Okay. I think with that, sadly, we're out of time, but pleasure as always.

Look forward to seeing you again next year, Brian. Thank you. Thank you.