Thank you for standing by, and welcome to the SVB Financial Group Third Quarter 2021 Earnings Call. All lines have been placed on listen only to prevent any background noise. After the speakers' remarks, there will be a question- and- answer session. If you would like to ask a question during this time, simply press star, then the number one on your telephone keypad. Thank you. I would now like to turn the conference over to Meghan O'Leary, Head of Investor Relations. Thank you, Paula, and thank you everyone for joining us today. Our President and CEO, Greg Becker, and our CFO, Dan Beck, are here to talk about our third quarter 2021 financial results, and will be joined by other members of our management team for the Q&A. Our current earnings release, highlight slides, and CEO letter have been filed with the SEC and are available on the investor relations section of our website. We'll be making forward-looking statements during this call and actual results may differ materially. We encourage you to review the disclaimer in our earnings release dealing with forward-looking information, which applies equally to statements made in this call. In addition, some of our discussion may include references to non-GAAP financial measures. Information about those measures, including reconciliation to GAAP measures, may be found in our SEC filings and in our earnings release. Now I will turn the call over to our President and CEO, Greg Becker. Thanks, Meghan, thanks everyone for joining us today. It's great to be here with you to talk about another quarter of exceptional growth and profitability marked by continued strong balance sheet growth, strong net interest income, robust fee and market-related income, and solid credit. Our earnings release, presentation slides, and CEO letter, which we filed this afternoon, are available on the investor relations section of our website. Before we start the Q&A, I want to call out that we raised our 2021 growth outlook for the third time this year. We also introduced our preliminary 2022 outlook, which calls for continued strong growth as well as further acceleration of key investments in our business. We believe the additional net interest income generated by our larger balance sheet will more than offset this additional investment, while the investments we're making will drive increased growth and improved operating leverage. With that, I'll ask the operator to open up the lines for questions. Thank you. The floor is now open for your questions. Again, as a reminder, to ask a question, please press star one. If at any point you would like to withdraw yourself from the queue, you would simply press star one again. Your first question comes from the line of Ebrahim Poonawala of Bank of America. Hey, good afternoon. Hey, Ebrahim. Two questions. One, Greg, your letter sounded extremely bullish, and you mentioned about the 2022 outlook being stronger than any preliminary outlook in years. I guess just unpack that for us in terms of how much of that optimism is built on what's purely happening in markets, and how much of that is tied to SVB having a larger balance sheet, a larger investment bank, a more global presence? To the extent you can, give us a breakdown between those two components that informs your outlook. Yeah, it's a great question, Ebrahim. I'd break it down this way. Clearly, the growth that we've had in 2021 so far and what we'd expect to finish the year based on the guidance that we've given creates a lot of momentum into 2022. There's a huge amount of benefit to the expansion of the balance sheet, the growth of core fee income, the investments we're making in investment banking and head count, private banking and wealth. All that momentum clearly carries forward, there's kind of a tailwind, number one. Number two, we certainly expect the markets that we serve in the innovation economy to continue to perform well, although not quite at the accelerated pace that we see right now. Nothing that we're seeing is causing that point of view. It's more of just it's hard to fathom that it will stay at this pace. Maybe a third category is this. I'm more convinced than ever that the strategy that we've laid out over the last couple of years, these four pillar businesses, the commercial bank, the private bank, SVB Capital, and the investment bank all working together is incredibly compelling for our clients. I'm hearing that firsthand. Our teams are hearing that. Just having that broad product set just becomes really compelling, and being the only player in the market who has kind of all four of those capabilities exclusively focused on the innovation economy. It's a combination of those three things, Ebrahim, that's giving us kind of that optimistic view rolling into 2022. Got it. I guess just a separate question. I'm trying to really get to how you're thinking about Boston Private here. When you look at your loan growth guidance for next year, fee guidance, how are you thinking about the contribution, just the mix of that loan book and how that loan growth looks looking out, and where do you think assets under management grow in 2022? Yeah. I'll start, and Dan may want to add some comments to it as well. I guess the most important part is it's really early days, right? We closed the acquisition July 1. Really, this last 90 days has been all about making sure that we're syncing up the teams, we have the right plans in place because as you know, there's only so much you can do before the deal is actually closed to really sync up. I will tell you what I have found, what the team has found, is a lot of positive, I wouldn't call them surprises, but validation of what we assumed was going to play out, both on people and technology, and so many other things. I'm, again, going back to your first question, that causes me to be bullish. What we always believed was the case, the reason that we wanted to bring Boston Private onto a platform, because the opportunity was so great. That I would say has shown up in spades. The excitement, the energy from the teams on the commercial banking side and the private banking side, and basically saying what the opportunity is truly incredible. We haven't got to a place yet where we forecast exactly what that assets under management will be like for 2022. You should expect to see when we get to January, when we release our numbers there, that we're going to give you a lot more details, as we usually do, across our guidance levels. That'll be one of those things that we comment more. I would say it's early, but feeling very good about where we are and definitely where we're headed. Understood. Remind us. Dan, another few. Go ahead. Yeah, sorry. Go ahead. I was going to say, Dan, had anything to add to that? The only other thing to add is we are seeing some positive momentum. You'll see it in the materials. We've added 10 advisors since the closing of the deal. We're already off to a good start based on the attractiveness of the platform. That's a positive fact, and I think as we get into, as Greg mentioned, the more detailed guidance here in January, we'll start to talk more about building out the private bank, see more from a mortgage lending, and some to a private stock lending perspective as a part of the growth. It won't clearly get to a level of private equity global funds banking. You'll start to see the green shoots of growth in that guidance. Just remind us, Dan, what's the timeline for systems conversion when you get all the tech infrastructure kind of on board and one? Yeah. Ebrahim, the vast majority of the systems conversions that need to occur are going to occur in 2022. The vast majority will be done, let's call it, Q3. Into Q4, in terms of the transition. You'll have some stragglers, the things that we need in order to manage the enterprise, to manage the opportunity across our businesses, Q3 is the target. Does that restrict your ability, Dan, to really go to market in terms of how you would like to penetrate that $400 billion opportunity? No. I think it actually allows us to take a step back and understand the information that we're going to need to understand how to manage those opportunities and to do it in the best way. We're working, as Greg mentioned, we're working through that right now. With that, can build out the platforms to scale it. I don't think that gets in the way of us making progress towards that objective. I would add on to that part. Let me just add onto that part, because I actually think that the technology side is one of those areas that we were pleasantly surprised how strong the technology was at Boston Private. It actually doesn't slow us down at all. In fact, new clients, as they are added, we're adding them on to the legacy Boston Private systems. Actually, that will be the main client-facing systems that we engage in the market. I feel really good that it's not going to slow us down. In fact, I believe it's going to actually enhance our ability to add clients onto the platform. Noted. Thanks for taking my questions. Your next question comes from the line of Casey Haire of Jefferies. Yeah. Thanks. Good afternoon, guys. Hey, Casey. Question. Hey. Question on the deposit growth guide. If I layer in 2021 and 2022, it looks like it's about $10 billion a quarter, which is obviously very conservative relative to what you've seen this quarter or this past year. I'm just wondering, the distributions which happen at year-end, is that something like after a banner year, you're expecting an outsized distribution at the end of the year this year? Hey, Casey, it's Greg. I'll start. I'm sure Dan or Mike will want to add to it. I would say that's a part of it, but the main part is what we've been adding this year roughly is $20 billion a quarter. What our outlook says is that we just believe that it's a reasonable assumption that it's going to be tempered from the incredible growth that we've seen quarter-over-quarter. We're not seeing anything that really indicates that. Our teams are still bullish. I would say we've kind of sat back and said, just from our own standpoint, continuing with that pace seems overly aggressive. Our outlook, we brought back to the range that you just described from a deposit growth. We have a high confidence in that. Is there upside? Sure, there is upside. It's preliminary guidance, and we'll clearly be able to give you a lot more color as we cross the year. We'll see if there are higher levels of distributions than we've seen in prior years or anything else that would maybe be a little bit of an anomaly. I'll see if Dan or Mike wants to add anything to that. Yeah, Greg, this is Mike Descheneaux here. When Greg was describing it, we can kind of break it down into two areas, the macro features as well as what we're doing to execute. When you look at the macro pictures, the fundamentals are still extraordinarily strong. I mean, we see the flows of funds come in. You see the amount of dry powder that's out there. In some accounts it's $2 trillion, $2.5 trillion, $3 trillion. Just a tremendous amount of money. The amount of money being deployed into the space from VCs continues to grow. The sizes of funds are growing, multiple sources. Those things just have not changed. On the execution front, I mean, if you look at our client acquisition count when you go into the deck that we have here, we continue to bring those on, increase record numbers of clients. What happens is it takes some time for them to get funded, and so you're seeing its accumulating effect. We all believe that the fundamentals are in place, but as Greg says, I mean, what we've been growing at is just such an extraordinary high pace. I'll tell you, I'm really, really happy with kind of what you implied there in terms of we can grow $10 billion, $11 billion per quarter. I think that's just sensational growth as well, too. Again, nothing fundamentally changed in our outlook. Great. Thanks. On the liquidity deployment, just slide 24. Looks like you guys are expecting new purchase yields at around the 150 level. I'm just curious what kind of the 10-year up 20 basis points from last week. I'm just wondering how up to date that number is and what kind of rate backdrop you guys are assuming on reinvestment rates. Yeah, Casey, it's Dan. Yeah, those reinvestment rates were based on forward curve at 9:30. You're right, we've obviously sold off from there. I think the way to look at it is in the three to five-year part of the curve for every, let's call it 15 basis points on an annualized basis we should get about another percentage point annualized of net interest income. That's just our rule of thumb. If we see that three to five-year part of the curve increase by 15 basis points, that's about a percentage point of pre-tax net interest income. Since September 30th you've seen a sell-off in that at a 15 basis point range. Now we'll see how that's sustained, again, that's annualized and is upside to the guidance. Okay, great. Good rule of thumb. Last one from me. Capital management. You guys have lived at the Bank Tier 1 Leverage ratio at seven to eight forever. As you guys get bigger and hit that $250 billion mark, what's your confidence level that you'll be able to continue to live at that capital floor going forward? Yeah, Casey, as I think we'd look at the requirements of capital planning and stress testing for a Category IV, Category III bank. We fashioned those original capital targets based on what we'd anticipate. I think number one, we'd already built the structure based on that. Number two, if we just look at the overall risk in the balance sheet, more than half the balance sheet is being investment securities, and we've got a substantial amount of high credit quality lending. How that translated into the stress test is to some degree, lower credit losses. We do not see incremental pressure to that Tier 1 Leverage target as a part of moving into the Category IV, Category III from a capital perspective. Great. Thanks. Thanks, Casey. Your next question comes from Ken Zerbe of Morgan Stanley. All right. Great. Thanks. Definitely no question, your guidance was incredibly strong, so I'll definitely give you kudos for that. Just let's flip it over to the other side. If things do go awry, where is the biggest risk factors to your guidance? What could be the areas where we see the most potential downside volatility if things don't go as planned? Ken, this is Greg. Again, I'll start. I think valuations and just the flows of venture capital and some disruption occurring where things have a dramatic slowdown. That's probably the biggest ripple effect that you would see. You could see at that point investment values, warrant values drop. Credit quality may be challenged. If you see a true economic change, that's really the biggest driver. That's the risk. Let's talk about Mike did a great job of describing the things that are kind of push against that risk. The one place that is we're out in the market, and it's both in the U.S. and it's also international. If you go to the U.K. and you're in Europe, and you're in South America, or you're in Asia, there is such momentum around the innovation economy in every market. That to me, what we've seen, even when there's a slowdown. Even when you go back to 2015 or 2016 and there was a temporary slowdown, even when you saw at the beginning of the COVID crisis last year, you saw a quick downturn, but the return was incredibly fast. People looked at it as an opportunity to say, "Gosh, I was hesitant to jump in at these valuations, and now I want to come in because I want to be in the innovation economy." That's the risk, but there's so many things that are tailwinds to offset that risk that we certainly see on a daily basis. Understood. Definitely understood. Yeah. The tailwinds are very positive. I agree. I guess maybe just a separate question. In terms of expenses, you guys have done, I'm going to say, a great job of investing your, let's say, excess revenues into growing the business. I don't want to imply that 20% expense growth is not reinvesting in the business, but it feels like there's a lot of revenue growth coming over the next couple of years, and you are slowing the expense growth. Is that just a function of not having, how I'm going to say, additional opportunities to invest in new verticals? I'm trying to make sure I understand why revenue growth so vastly outpaces expense growth, because presumably there's still opportunities for you to grow or reinvest in the business, if that makes sense. Thanks. Ken, I think I've been on 56 straight earnings calls, and that's the first time I've ever heard somebody say that your expenses may not be growing as fast as I'd like them to. Let me take a stab at it. As we look at this, there's a couple slides in here. There's slide 12, and I want to say it's slide 35. What they talk about is where we are investing in investments across the platform. You can look at breaking down the expense growth. I would say we feel good about those numbers. Clearly, as we roll into next year, if the numbers start to play out as good and maybe even better than what you see, we're certainly going to look at putting more money into those investments. I agree with you, and I know the team agrees, that we have lots of opportunities. We're trying to balance as you would expect us to always do. What's that operating leverage? What's the right investment level for the growth? We've done a good job of that historically, and we'll take that same approach as we go into 2022. If we feel good about the revenue and the growth and the outlook, or even better than what we have in our forecast, don't be surprised if we continue to add more to the investment portfolio. All right. Thank you very much. Yep. Thanks. Your next question comes from Steven Alexopoulos of JPMorgan. Hi, everyone. Hey, Steve. Not to beat a dead horse on the preliminary 2022 guidance. Greg, one thing I wanted to flush out with you, I know it's not the situation that X dollars of VC investment equals Y dollars of financial results. From a big picture view, it's still not clear to me, what type of year are you assuming with this guidance? Is it a more normal year, call that $100 billion, much better than that? I'm trying to get a sense if things do continue as we see them, what does that mean for the outlook? Yeah. Here's how I would describe it, and Dan or Mike may want to add. Prior to, I would say, 2020 and 2021, where we've seen truly incredible growth, and I would say the second half of 2020, let's just kind of start there. We've had, as you know, incredibly strong growth. It's just been outsized the last really five quarters. What I view is the outlook we have for next year as being somewhere in between the two. At a faster pace than what you'd historically see from an average, but not quite as fast as you would see this year. Mike went through and described the reasons why it could be at the same pace. We're trying to be, I would say, a little tempered in the sense of it's been so incredibly strong. Again, this quarter, $80 billion of venture capital flows. If it stays at that pace or accelerates, you could clearly see higher deposits and total client funds growth. I wouldn't call it conservatism. I would say it is what our crystal ball says, just based on how long that period of exceptional growth could continue at that pace, and just the belief that it will temper. Okay. Said another way, you are assuming a fairly material step down in what we're seeing right now with the preliminary guidance. Yeah. Right. I think an earlier question is, if you go back and look at the last several quarters, we were at about a $20 billion deposit growth rate, and now it's in that range that was articulated roughly 10. If we stay at the pace we are, clearly there's going to be material upside to what you see in the forecast. Yep. We haven't seen anything that would cause us to say it. I just would say the belief, I've been doing this a long time and so has Mike and others, that it rarely stays at that pace for an indefinite period of time. Usually it's four or five quarters, it goes back to what I'd say is more of a normalized growth rate. Yeah. Certainly hoping that it stays at this pace. Okay. Maybe one thing to. Go ahead, Mike Consider, Steve. Look at some of the numbers coming out here. Venture capital did what, about $83 billion in capital deployed in Q3. Huge amount, that's just one quarter. Yeah. When you look at exits, it's just massive exits of something like $187 billion in Q3. The fundraising, I think this is a really important point to kind of digest in the fundraising. VCs are at $96 billion year to date, which is a record for a full year. It's already exceeding. Just the nine months to date has already exceeded the record that we already have. When we look at, again, coming up, we talked about earlier the fundamentals and the sources of capital going there, those are going to get deployed. The war chest are certainly there. Again, as Greg Becker says, I think we're being very sensible at this moment because again, it should revert back to means. We're still at extraordinary levels here, for sure. Yep. Okay. Greg, regarding the line in the CEO letter where you say the balance sheet has reached a size where you can generate strong, sustainable NII growth without the help from rates. Typically, a larger balance sheet stunts growth potential at a bank. It doesn't make it better. How does this create a more sustainable NII growth outlook? Yeah, it's a great question, and maybe that should have been worded the growth rate of the balance sheet, and that's what's driving it. To your point, if you just have a static size balance sheet and it doesn't grow in a low rate environment or a flat rate environment, you're not going to get a lot of lift out of it. I think the point is, we've seen, and that's what's created the massive tailwind going into 2022 for net interest income. It is the acceleration of the growth of the balance sheet that we've seen. It's really the combination. It's really that is the way it should have been worded. Now, what you didn't ask, but I will answer is this, which is what we're really excited about is at some point, we certainly believe that there will be some rate increases. We have a slide in the deck that goes through and talks about how spring-loaded the balance sheet actually is for additional NII if we do see rate increases. It's slide 19, and you can go through that and look at every quarter percent increase. The balance sheet, the way it is right now, is $106 million, again, modeled in on an annualized pre-tax basis for each 25 basis point increase. In addition to that, with the first 25 basis point increase, we also expect somewhere between $195 million and $225 million of increased core fee income generated from the large off-balance sheet funds that we have. Again, one 25 basis point increase, you could see revenue growth of roughly $311 million to roughly $325 million or $330 million. It'll normalize when the second rate increase happens, but the balance sheet is clearly spring loaded. We're happy that we can continue to grow NII in a low rate environment, but we're even more bullish when we do start to see some rate increases. Okay, final question. The inclusion of the long-term targets in the CEO letter, including 10% EPS growth in a low rate environment, has definitely caught some attention. I think we last saw that in 2019. What was your motivation to reintroduce that at this point? Well, a lot has changed, Steve. I think one of the things we wanted to go back to is kind of how we think about what we're driving to over the long run. As we sat back and looked at where we are with rates, looked at where we are with the size of the balance sheet, looked at kind of a bunch of different things, and building these kind of four pillars together, we wanted to give some long-term guidance. I think everybody is very focused on the next quarter or the next few quarters. What we wanted to do is say, what we're driving to over the long run, and that's why we put them in place years ago, and we just felt it was time to kind of bring them back so that everyone knew what we were headed to, where we were headed over the long-term. Okay. Fair enough. Thanks for taking my question. Dan. Yeah, I think Dan may want to add something onto that as well. Go ahead. Steve, the other thing to think about is as we had a larger balance sheet, we're growing net interest income. We wanted to reinforce the fact that profitability is really important over the long-term. You see the addition of the businesses in SVB Leerink, in Boston Private, and the investments there. We believe that's going to continue, even at the size and scale of the balance sheet, to generate that strong return in both a flat rate environment as well as a higher rate environment. We just thought it was time to reinforce that profitable growth, and strong growth is important to us. Okay. Thanks for the follow-up, Dan. Your next question comes from Bill Carcache, Wolfe Research. Hi, everyone. Thank you for taking my question. I wanted to ask a clarification on the long-term financial targets for growth and profitability that you laid out. Do those ROE targets contemplate core fee income only, or do they also include non-core fee income as well? Curious how to think about that. Yeah, Bill, this is Dan. That incorporates really all of our revenues, including some of the non-core items. I think the reason for that is as we move forward and go ahead, private bank wealth management, what we're doing in SVB Leerink, plus some of the benefits that we continue to see in investment and warrant gains are really a part of the story. It's meant to be a more inclusive measure on a go-forward basis. Understood. That's a helpful clarification. Completely separate topic. On the Plaid announcement, can you frame what client pain points you're addressing through that partnership? What's the key value add for your clients, and should we think of that as an incremental service that just enhances the stickiness of the relationship, or is there also a notable revenue opportunity? I'll take that. This is Mike Descheneaux. It's a little bit of everything, right? The partnership arrangement or utilization of Plaid enables our clients to be able to use this service there and connect into SVB systems. Again, connecting with us is really important. Clayton, once you're able to do that and capture that information together, there certainly can build some revenue opportunities that we'll work with. Again, still very early, but again, we are very proud of our ability to partner with Plaid. Understood. I guess maybe as an extension of that, can we expect to see you guys participate more broadly in the payment space through the addition of the technology investment banking team? Would that be sort of under their umbrella? Just curious if that's an area that we could see you expand into as well. The way I think about it, this is Greg. Our product team which is under Mike, they have an entire strategic plan around payments, and it's very broad-based. You'll see additional partnerships like Plaid. You'll see additional capabilities that are built in-house without partnerships, and I feel really good about that and really focused on delivering for our clients. On the investment banking side, for technology investment banking, as we add more capabilities, it's going to be very broad-based across really all categories of innovation. Will they be able to add value to our payments team? Yeah, probably. I think they will. They are distinct in the standpoint of what they're focused on. As you can see on slide 13, it kind of goes through the different categories we have in investment banking on the technology side. We expect to be making some near-term announcements on the fintech capabilities. The payments business, the product is in one category, one area, and then investment banking is another. I see. Okay. No, that's very helpful. I guess maybe, Greg, as a follow-up on, final one from me. Have the new investment bankers that you hired have they joined the platform at this point, or are some of them still on garden leave? Maybe could you frame how conservative or aggressive that $150 million-$250 million of incremental SVB Leerink revenue is in terms of how soon they'll be able to hit the ground running and impactful after they join the platform versus does that contemplate giving them a little time to ramp on the new platform? Just how you're thinking. Yeah. Maybe I'll start with the second question first, then go back to the first one. We feel good about the numbers that we talked about in the deck as far as the guidance for 2022. You clearly see a significant uplift in those numbers, and it's a combination of we have a world-class biotech healthcare team, ECM, and building out M&A capabilities. We have a world-class healthcare services team in health tech, and now have and are building out even more of a world-class technology investment banking team or innovation investment banking team. They're hitting the ground running. We have hired 43 technology and 44 healthcare services and health tech investment bankers year to date, which is effectively doubling the number of investment bankers we had on the SVB Leerink platform. They are already on the platform and winning mandates. Those mandates, as you know, especially for M&A and even for some of the IPOs, they take a little while from agreeing, from signing something up until it closes. Some will happen this year, but we'll start to see that rolling into 2022. Feel very good about the outlook for next year. As we've said, we still expect that next year we'll be adding somewhere between 35 and 50 additional hires in technology, equity capital markets, fintech, equity research, et cetera. We are still looking to add to it. By the end of next year, we'll be more doing what I'll call incremental adds as opposed to what we've done last year or this year and next year. Really feel good about it where we are. I've been on some client calls with some of the investment bankers, and they're just being incredibly well-received, landing new deals already, and feel really good about the outlook. That's super helpful color. Thank you for taking my questions. Yep. Your next question comes from Chris McGratty of KBW. Hey, good afternoon. Hey, Chris. Regarding the growth that you've laid out, the $10 billion a quarter roughly on balance sheet, what are your assumptions within your fee guidance of the off-balance sheet relative to 2021? Dan, do you want to cover that? Yep. Hey, Chris. We don't guide to off-balance sheet, but I think what we have been seeing in terms of overall liquidity growth is roughly, let's call it, 50% of liquidity ending up on the balance sheet, and then the rest of the liquidity going off the balance sheet. Around the margins, I think that's a pretty good assumption. Again, we don't guide specifically to the off-balance sheet client funds. Okay. That's helpful, though. Maybe the follow-up would be regarding capital with the momentum and earnings, the downstream that occurred in the quarter, the raise in August. How are you guys thinking about just capital levels given the guide that you've given? Chris, we come out of the quarter in solid shape from a Tier 1 leverage perspective, sitting at 7.3% at the bank. Feeling good about exiting the quarter. That being said, we do have the growth forecast and the preliminary guidance heading into next year. As we did in the previous quarter, a common equity raise. What we've done after those common equity raises to be able to support growth is to go back to preferred, to go back to senior debt to be able to support Tier 1 leverage. We did, obviously, in the third quarter, do a common equity raise and feel good to the extent that growth continues, that we can go back to the market and potentially look to preferred, look to senior to the extent that we need to bolster the capital position. That's the way we're thinking about it. All right. Very helpful. Thanks, Dan. Thanks, Chris. Your next question comes from John Pancari of Evercore ISI. Good afternoon. Hey, John. On the long-term financial targets, I wanted to see if you could maybe help us with some of the other assumptions behind that, because just knowing that in a higher rate environment, certainly there could be different balance sheet dynamics that we're looking at. We could be looking at balance sheet growth slowing in an environment like that. We could be looking at credit costs higher and then possibly lower warrant gains, et cetera. Just wanted to see if you could maybe help unpack that a little bit. Thanks. John, it's Dan. Again, when we look at these targets, these are obviously not sitting in the annual guidance for the year ahead. These are just more generally speaking, as we've seen the franchise over a long period of time be able to produce these returns. When we think of a higher rate environment, and when we think of the returns and the EPS growth, to the extent you see some less liquidity in the market, we've traditionally been able to continue to grow core fee income. At the same time, we have these alternative businesses in what we have acquired in Boston Private and Wealth Management and Private Banking, as well as the Investment Bank to continue to support the earnings growth rate. Looking ahead, we think that we've got the earnings power and the balance sheet growth in a higher rate scenario to be able to continue to support the strong EPS growth and ROE target because of these tools that we've been able to generate in the past in terms of profitable growth and these additional capabilities to be able to support clients across Private Bank, Wealth Management, as well as the Investment Bank. That's generally speaking. Obviously, these are not forecasted targets. These are how we're thinking about the business over the long-term. Got it. Okay. Thanks, Dan. Then on the comp expense this quarter, the linked quarter increase in the comp expense, can you help us size up how much of that is performance related and tied to the better core fee and possibly warrant performance versus headcount growth or hiring, for example? Yeah. In terms of comp, I think you could break it into two pieces. One, let's call it in the 60%-70% range being incentive driven, both from better performance and warrants. Then the rest as we continue to invest in the technology investment banking initiative and add these great group of bankers on the SVB Leerink side, adding additional compensation there. I'd say the two really make up the largest components of the increase. Got it. Okay. All right. Thanks. In the investment banking business, as you're building out the business and certainly see the long-term opportunity there, what are the long-term returns that you're expecting for that business in terms of ROE? And then what is the efficiency ratio that you're seeing in the business now, and what are you forecasting longer term? Yeah, John, it's a good question. I think as we look at the business and you think about what we've been doing in adding a world-class healthcare services team, adding technology investment banking, that's starting to shift the revenue more to advisory over the long-term versus equity capital markets. With that comes some better margin opportunities. The way to think of the business, I think over the long-term, is less from an ROE perspective, more thinking about it in pre-tax profit, and thinking about it kind of range 18%-20%, maybe a bit more than that on a pre-tax basis for the business. I think that's a good place to look. We'll see how this continues to evolve with the addition of advisory business for SVB Leerink. Okay. This is Greg. Let me just add onto it. What I think is important, so Dan gave you the standalone business metrics, but what we're building here, and this is the power of it, is when all the pieces work together. I'll give you an example. Having the investment banking capabilities in healthcare, life sciences, and technology, that technology investment banking allows us to retain clients longer, to add more value to existing clients, and it also generates additional client activity for the private bank. When you think about what we're building and we're seeing it's early, but you certainly see the power of where it's going is when all four of those businesses work together. To me, each one of these businesses on a standalone basis is exciting. They're all doing really well. What really gets me excited over the long run is when they all work together, right? We're the only institution that has these four businesses that are exclusively focused on the innovation economy, and you see how well they're working together and the potential. That to me is where the real upside is over the long run. Got it. All right, Greg. Thanks. I have one more question, and it's on competition. I guess if you compare where you're at now in your business dynamics versus maybe even not too long ago, maybe two years ago versus now, what are the changes you're seeing in competition? How has the competitive landscape changed in terms of are you seeing new players digging deeper into capital call lending, or are you seeing new entrants from any of the bigger money centers? Can you just help us understand the more recent competitive dynamics and how they've been changing? Yeah, I'll start, and I'm confident Mike will want to add to it. How I think about it is the short answer is yes. We're seeing competition increase across all different areas. Here's the part, and I've been asked this question, which is how are you building the moat? What are you guys doing to protect against this franchise that you have? How I answered is a little bit differently, which is we have been going on offense of building out our capabilities to not play defense, but to actually add more value to our clients. I'll go back to what I just kind of answered with. That's the main reason why we've been pushing so hard to create all four of these businesses, and build them out, and have them scalable and competitive in the market. When they all work together, that is hard to compete with. There's still competition. We wake up every day realizing that, and it's only getting more competitive. Our ability to compete has never been stronger. I think that's a really important message to deliver. We're also spending more money, as we talked about on the call earlier, in digital transformation, which is a requirement. We're spending more money on, again, helping our teams become more efficient. We still have a long ways to go, which is why we're continuing to accelerate that investment. We're definitely, I believe, in the best competitive position we've ever been. Mike, anything you'd add to that? No, Greg, I think you summed it up quite nicely as well too, as you alluded to and talked about. We have expanded our capabilities so much. As you know, we've been around for many, many years at this bank. To now see all the capabilities and the tools and the platform that we have to bring to our clients, there's no one else out there that can bring all this together for our clients, at least in the innovation sector as well too. It's only opening up even more possibilities for us to go out there and be extremely competitive. Again, having said all that, yes, there is competition in various segments where you have a lot of debt funds as well too. People see it's a very attractive area to lend to as well too. No doubt those have been proliferating as well. Some of these big box banks are coming down into trying to get smaller as well because they know that we are going even more upmarket in terms of size as well too. It's there. Again, we have never been better equipped today than we have ever been before. I can tell you going forward, it's only going to get stronger from our competitive position. Got it. All right, Mike. Thank you, Greg. Thank you. Dan, the same thing. Thanks a lot. Yep. Again, as a reminder, in order to ask a question, please press star one on your telephone keypad. Again, that's star one. Your next question comes from Jared Shaw of Wells Fargo Securities. Hey, guys. Thanks very much for the insight you've given us already. Just maybe a couple of questions. How should we be thinking about the pace of incremental securities purchases or cash deployment from here? I know you were pretty aggressive this quarter. Are we at a good level, or should we still think cash can come down? Hey, Jared. It's Dan. I still think we've got opportunity. In the materials, we talk about a target in the $8 billion-$10 billion range. We've got opportunity to continue to put money to work based on how we ended the quarter and obviously with the liquidity and deposit forecasts included in the guidance. Will the pace be the same as what we saw in the last couple of quarters? Obviously, the guidance would imply slower investment rates, but we have opportunity with what's on the balance sheet and with the deposit guidance to continue to deploy liquidity. The rate environment's in a good spot for us to continue to do that with the recent sell-off. Great, thanks. Then, looking at the Boston Private addition, any additional thoughts or any updated thoughts around your view or approach to crypto? Is there an opportunity there to be more active in that space, and would you ever consider, I guess, lending against crypto positions through the private bank? Yeah. This is Greg, I'll start. Obviously the crypto market is getting more and more attention, we're spending time on it. We do obviously have some clients that are involved in the crypto space, but on that part, the bar is pretty high. As you know, and you read about, we certainly pay attention to compliance issues around crypto companies. We want to make sure that any clients we do bring on board are ones that are at that high bar level for compliance, and we are all on the same page on that. At the same time, in our strategy and innovation team, we're spending time figuring out what is that game plan to approach that market, and how do we want to invest and how do we want to play. We're certainly looking at that. There isn't anything imminent to announce. Certainly at some point we're going to be leaning in more in this space, given the attention that it's getting in the market. Great, thanks so much. Yep. At this time, there are no further questions. I will now turn the floor back over to Greg Becker for any additional or closing remarks. Great, thanks. Just want to thank everyone for joining us today. We're obviously really happy with our continued growth and excited about the opportunities ahead. We're making real incredible progress on these four businesses and how they all work together, and I just couldn't be more proud about how the teams are working together, the strategy build-out, the execution, the commercial bank especially, and what we're seeing from the investment bank. Not only just in the investment bank, the biotech team, the healthcare team is doing so well, but the addition of the tech team, really across the board, the integration of Boston Private. I'm certainly optimistic, as you can tell. As we bring people on board, we're committed to keeping the culture that we have at SVB, which is incredibly client-centric. That is a culture of really embracing the innovation economy and helping those clients be successful. It's all part of what has made us successful to date, and certainly what we believe is going to continue to allow us to be successful in the future. As always, I want to say thanks to our incredible employees, in my view, the best in the industry. They do such an incredible job taking care of our clients and thinking about the future and collaborating with their colleagues. As you can tell, we've added a lot of new colleagues in different businesses, and that collaboration has been exceptional. I couldn't be more pleased with their dedication and inspiration they give to all of us every day. Clearly the clients, we wouldn't have a business if it wasn't for the most interesting, compelling, fastest-growing companies in the entire world. We all certainly appreciate the fact that they trust us to partner with us. Thanks to all of you guys for joining us today to hear our story and the continuation of the strategy that we've been building. Thanks to everyone, and have a wonderful day. Thank you. Thank you. This concludes today's call. Thank you for your participation. You may now disconnect.