Go ahead and get started for our first bank presentation for the day. I'm delighted to welcome Chairman, President, and CEO Kevin Blair from Synovus Financial. We also have Jamie Gregory, who's there, I'm told, for moral support. Jamie, thank you for being there. Maybe just Kevin, over the past day talking to management teams, clearly a lot of uncertainty around the macro outlook. Would love to kick it off in terms of your markets have been beneficiaries from some of the pandemic trends, move to the southeast. Give us a reshoring, manufacturing pickup, et cetera. Give us a state of the union for when you look across your footprint, client base, what are they feeling? Sure. Sure. Yeah. Well, let me start. Thank you for having me. It's great. Always see that we get to do a fireside chat. I'm still waiting for the fire, but I guess maybe that's the outside temperature today. First, you know, it's been about a little less than thirty days since we presented our earnings for the fourth quarter and gave our guidance for the year. Not a lot has changed in thirty days other than we continue to live in a highly volatile environment. I don't think that's gonna change over the next, you know, eleven months. We're gonna continue to see things change. For Synovus, part of what we shared in that presentation was our goal is to deliver double-digit PPNR this year despite all of that uncertainty. To your question, Ebrahim, a big reason for that is we believe we're in one of the best footprints in banking. When you look at the Southeast, the population growth over the next five years is 2x what the national average is, and household income growth is 30% higher. We feel that we're in a great position. Unfortunately, rising tides,, raise all boats. We're not the only one competing in the Southeast, and more banks continue to double down in that footprint. For us, it's about, beating our competition and getting better. Now, when you look at the sentiment that we're seeing, we do a survey, our market intelligence group, Cal Evans leads that as well outside of IR. We do it every quarter to ask our commercial clients what they're seeing in the marketplace from the perspective hiring that they'll be doing in the future, what their business pipelines look like, what the prices and their ability to pass on that increased cost to their clients look like. Really, you could argue that commercial clients are overly optimistic, but the reality is we've seen improving trends over the last three quarters on those surveys. As I said, the absolute number may matter less, but we look at the relative change. What we're seeing today in the fourth quarter survey is that those commercial clients actually feel a little more bullish as prospects of new business and prospects of future hiring in upcoming quarters as they plan out for the year. That bodes well. We haven't seen a decline. We have seen inflationary pressures on the price side start to abate a little bit, and that will allow them, obviously, to manage margins, because I think we all were worried about how long can they pass on these prices to the consumer. When you look at the consumer, obviously, you guys see the data. Consumer spending is declining, and I think we all expected that. When you look at consumer sentiment, it's actually started to increase a little bit. We were at a presentation a couple weeks ago in Atlanta with an economist, and he provided an interesting perspective on consumer sentiment. He said it's more directly correlated to the price of the pump. Most consumers go and see how much does that gallon of gas cost, and that's what determines how optimistic they are about how far their paycheck's gonna go. I think as fuel prices have come down, sentiment has retraced a little bit and gotten better. Overall, I would tell you that we remain cautiously optimistic, not just because of the economic trends that we're seeing, not just because of the population inflow, but as I've started, you know, we believe that our model is differentiated. Even during difficult times, to be able to produce growth, you've got to take share from competitors. Ultimately, you've got to have some new irons in the fire that produce growth. That's what we've been trying to do over the last year and a half is put some new businesses, new products in place that even if the underlying growth slows, we believe that we'll be able to grow at a faster pace than the underlying market. Got it. I want to talk about some of those irons in the fire, but just one follow-up around the survey. It's, the fact that it's been incrementally improving over the last three quarters, does that mean that higher interest rates are not having a negative impact in terms of, like, you would imagine that cost of equity's gone up for these customers? Like all of that's not playing out the way, I guess, you would've expected a year ago? Yeah. You know, it's an interesting question. I think it shows you that interest cost is going up, but it's not the biggest expense they have. It's generally their raw materials. As inflationary pressures on their raw materials have come down, they're more optimistic on that side, and they probably ignore the interest rate a little bit on the other side. It's hard to argue that over time, that is gonna create a headwind for their growth. I think the benefits of seeing a reduction in kind of their core pricing on their raw materials have offset the increase in interest rates. Understood. I guess maybe pivoting to Synovus, you talked about great markets, but extremely competitive markets. Synovus obviously over the last decade has gone through a transformation in and of itself. Give a sense of the competitive positioning, right? You're in a market where you've got very, very large banks, a bunch of regional and a ton of like-sized competitors going for the same business. Yeah. Would love to hear from you in terms of competitive positioning, how you are strategically looking to grow, and where you're investing. Yeah. Well, look, it's no secret that there's $4 billion of disruption happening in our footprint with mergers happening. Anytime there's a merger, that creates an opportunity because you're migrating clients from one platform to another. I don't know of many migrations that doesn't have some issue or just require retraining of clients because they're on new platforms. That in and of itself has created opportunities not only for clients but for talent, because folks in many situations don't wanna work for the acquiring bank. More importantly for us, it's focused on the things we can control because those things are gonna happen, and we wanna be the bank of choice. To be the bank of choice, one of the things that we've tried to focus on in the last three years is really being everything to only some. You can't be everything to all. Sure. You've gotta, you know, be more surgical at where you spend your money. As a $60 billion bank, we can't go out and be everything to every segment and provide every product and try to be the best at everything. One of the things we said is we have the right to win in the commercial banking space. We've doubled down in commercial. We've expanded our geographic banking practice across our five-state footprint. We've added specialty units. We've doubled down in our middle market space in adding new talent from some of the institutions that are going through change. The specialty businesses that we're adding, whether it's CIB or restaurant services or expanding things like senior housing, those are now becoming national businesses. I believe in the commercial space, not only do you have to provide a great deal of service, you have to be proactive and provide advice, but they want expertise. That's where we've tried to bring in, whether it's from an industry perspective or an asset class perspective. One of the things that we're not walking away from is our expertise in CRE. If you go back to transformation in 2008, we're almost 50% CRE. You look today, we're a little less than 30%. We've rightsized the balance sheet. We, you know, CRE was probably too much, but we've also changed the asset classes. We believe that we're really good in that space, and we're not gonna walk away from it, and we're gonna double down there. The other thing that was important to us if you're gonna be good in commercial banking is you've got to have a great treasury platform. Today, you know, access to capital and when rates were at zero, it was pretty easy to get capital. The one thing that we believe, and maybe it's the Goldilocks principle, is we're small enough to provide a level of service that maybe the larger institutions have forgotten about. We're large enough to provide the types of functionality capabilities that the smaller banks can't provide. It all starts with that portal that every commercial client uses. Last year, we rolled out our new Synovus Gateway platform, which is the commercial portal that allows them to access all of the cash management services that we provide. That's been, I think, a game changer because we've added functionality to a lot of our clients. It's API enabled, so we can continue to add new solutions. We've added an FX platform, export trade product, accounts receivable product, and in the coming year, we'll add an accounts payable product. You can't do that if you're on an old legacy mainframe platform. Having a API-enabled platform is important. Two, you know, we've added a tremendous amount of talent on the treasury side. Sales folks, both on community bank, wholesale bank, and now CIB, and technical expertise. It used to be a function where you could go out and sell products. Today, everything has to connect into the company's ERP. Mm-hmm. connect into their system. You have to have technical expertise at the same time. When you look at our trajectory of our sales and treasury since 2018, we've had a 70% CAGR in growth. 70%. What we've monitored over time is what percentage of that sales, we call it P times V, price times volume, comes from existing clients. Sure. In the very beginning, about 90%-95% of the sales came from cross-sell. It says in the past, we weren't doing a great job of providing these services to our existing relationships. In 2022, that number was 60%. Still shows that we had opportunity to cross-sell into the existing base, but 40% of that sales growth came from new relationships. I think that's a little bit of the chicken and the egg. Before, we didn't have the products to entice people over from a treasury standpoint. Now we have it. We're getting full service, or the full wallet share of the clients when they come over. In many situations, we're winning the business because of treasury, not leading with loans. Okay. Our transformation on the commercial side has been something that not only focusing on the talent piece of it, but getting the capabilities and the products. The last piece is analytics. You know, for anyone, if you look at a bank, we are given a treasure trove of data, transaction data, client data. The banks that can take all of that copious amount of information and cull it down into something that's actionable because what your clients want today is not a fulfillment channel. They don't wanna have to come to the bank and ask for something. They want the bank to come to them and make a value-added recommendation to say, "This is something you need." If you're mining the data, you can do that on a more proactive basis. We've spent a lot of time and energy on that to make our bankers better. Then when things like our loan origination system, we've originated, we've just rolled out nCino. That's gonna make a better client experience. It's also gonna give our bankers more capacity to be able to go out and sell. Throughout our bank, the transformation has been built around kind of a diversification of revenue, and you'll see that when we talk about things like banking as a service in CIB, but it's also about those core businesses. If there's one thing I've probably not done a great job of doing is emphasizing that a big part of our growth are not these new shiny objects. They're important, and we like them. Sure. A big part of our growth are these core businesses that we think we have the right to win in, and we're actually growing at a good pace. Got it. All of that sounds pretty bullish when you think about the markets, when you think about what you outlined. When you think about more near term, your loan growth guidance feels like what would be the risk of why you would not hit the higher end of your range? I mean, to me, it feels like. Yeah. you might do better than that. Well, you know, 5%-9% is what we suggested for the year. Obviously, the exogenous factors of what happens in the economy is the biggest wildcard there. Sure. We shared on the fourth quarter call that our pipelines are lower, 30%-40% lower than where they were going into the fourth quarter. A large reason for that has been CRE. We've pulled back in the construction side a little bit. We're still continuing to allocate capital towards our best clients who have full relationships with us to do construction projects where it makes sense. You can see that our clients, their demand for capital has slowed because they're not out buying properties, and they're taking a wait and see approach on the CRE side. Where we continue to expect to see great growth is on the C&I side. It's gonna come in our specialty areas like SLD, it'll come in CIB, it'll come in middle market, it'll come in our senior housing area. It's very diversified. When we give you the wide range, the biggest variable will be kinda what the external environment is and demand from our clients. What gives us the ability to move towards the higher end of the range will be the productivity of some of these new businesses. Right. Being able to continue to grow there, like a CIB. Consumer is really not a big emphasis for us. We still provide consumer mortgages, obviously home equity. As we've looked at residential home prices, we've been a little more selective with our credit policy there. We've reduced the allowable LTV just to protect us in case we were to see housing prices decline. We've de-emphasized the third-party loan portfolio. Part of the reason that consumer loans- Right. You may end up a little lower on the spectrum is, as we continue to run down that third party consumer portfolio, it could put a little bit of a headwind on loan growth. Got it. So one of the things you mentioned, I think, you talked about this at the Investor Day around the CIB build out. Just give us an update in terms of where we are, hiring of talent, building out infrastructure. Like, is the business where you want it to be? What's the... any early signs of growth? Yeah. What it looks like? We're very excited about where we are because I think we just made our final hire this past week in the three verticals. Just to remind everyone, we're doing TMCs, so Technology, Media & Communications, financial institutions, and we're also doing healthcare. We have the managing directors all in place. We wanted to make sure that we had the credit products team in place as well, and to have some junior coverage bankers in each of the verticals. Now we've been able to fulfill all three of those verticals. The really, the last piece of it is bringing in some of the junior analysts to help with the sales enablement process. With the teams in place, we're now starting to have deal discussions. We've already, you know, surpassed $100 million in loans. We've booked our first capital market fee. We've booked our first deposit relationship. We've had a lead relationship. We helped to co-lead a syndicated transaction. So I'm very optimistic. The only concern I have is that as the capital markets have been a little less constructive over the last year, and as we look out into the future, there still could be a down year in that space. Our team says, "Look, we've seen a little bit of a slowness in the pipeline, but it, you know, given our newness- Right. we're still gonna have a lot of growth. The team that we've been able to bring over, the real value there is if they can go back through their Rolodex and be able to bring over some of the clients that they were able to bank at their previous institution. We remain bullish on our ability to be able to grow there. The big question will be, are you getting the right returns? What we wanna make sure is if we're out committing capital, that we're getting a depository relationship, or we're getting. Right. -fee income that comes with it, and ultimately gives us the opportunity down the road to participate in DCM and some of the other capital markets categories. Got it. Nick, The other thing you mentioned around lending was CRE. Seems it's been a concern obviously for investors when you think about higher interest rates, what that does, and, we've talked about that just over the last day. One, give us a makeup of the CRE book, right? I think there's just so much of subsector differentiation between CRE one. Then is there any particular subset where you're worried about B and C class office, I think has been talked about a lot, so. Yeah. Look, when you look at our book, you know, income producing properties we're really, we have a space. You know, office is the one that everyone wants to talk about. 50% of our office book today is in healthcare. Mm-hmm. It's a different, you know, asset class than your traditional office space. Sure. You know, people are still going into medical offices, and given the demographic play there. Right. I don't see that changing. You know, the, where Cal and his team have been able to dig in and see where there's been some pressure on the office space has been on older properties, prior to 2010 in Class B and C spaces and slow growth markets. We really don't have a lot of exposure there. Now, sure, there's a onesie, twosies here and there, and our team's gone through the entire office book and been able to monitor any performance degradation, and we really just aren't seeing anything. We read the same thing everybody else sees, and we see that vacancy rates have increased in certain markets. Right. I think what's important as you think about CRE in general is when you look at our footprint, our occupancy rates, our rent growth across all asset classes is exceeding that of the national average. Being in this footprint is gonna be an insulating factor for whatever happens in a national environment. Two, you think about multifamily. Multifamily is still a constructive asset class, and we've grown that. Obviously people need a place to live and rent growth has continued, but we're seeing markets and that's where we look at pockets where there's where we believe it's overheated, and there's not opportunity. Sure. There's too much supply, we've pulled back in certain markets. Generally, as an asset class, we continue to lend into. Hospitality has been something that from the pandemic, we really pulled back and we got into a mode of management versus growth. We'll still work with some of our hospitality clients if there's an opportunity, but that's continued to perform very, very well through the pandemic. Coming out of the other side the space that we're looking in, kind of the, the drivable resort destinations, those have performed very, very, very well. Retail, you think about retail, 75% of our portfolio is credit tenants. If they're single occupants, they're very strong credit tenants. That's performed. We're not in the mall space. Sure. We're not in, we don't have a lot of strip center exposure, in general. I think the key with CRE is what we've been able to do over the last ten- years in changing our portfolio from being one that had a lot of raw land. Right. C&D lending into being income producing properties with very good sponsors at very low LTVs. That's the real, I think, mitigant to what we're facing here. It's not to say that we won't have some losses, but I think they're gonna be very contained, and it would be idiosyncratic versus something that's systemic across an asset class or portfolio. I know I asked about CRE, but anything on credit across the loan book which is showing any early warning signs? No, You know, in our decks, we try to put out those what we call recession sensitive. Right. They used to be pandemic sensitive, and there really hasn't been anything on the credit metric side. There's not a lot of risk rating downgrades. There's not a lot of delinquency or NPL inflows. We're still not seeing that. I think it just speaks to the strength of our borrowers. They have a lot of cash on their balance sheet. They, you know, I think people learn from the global financial crisis to keep a little dry powder, and I think that's helpful. When you look at the underwriting standards and the amount of equity people are putting in deals, it's just, we haven't seen, someone's not willing to flip the keys to us. Right ...when they have that much equity in it. We haven't seen anything at this point, but we're also not wearing such rose-colored glasses that we're not looking for that. Cal and his team has an analytical platform that looks at cash inflows, outflows. Every month, we're analyzing our clients to see if there's been a change in their cash inflows situation and relative to their cash outflows. Although we do see variations by industry in certain quarters, we haven't seen anything that's give us great concern. It's a cautiously optimistic story today. We'll continue to proactively monitor. We haven't had to change a lot of our underwriting guidelines. We felt like they were prudent to begin with, so we haven't had to adjust them. We'll continue to look for anything that gives us concern. The area outside of CRE that people ask and we've talked about is just small business. Sure. That's just a factor of their balance sheets are smaller. They have less cushions of protection. If something were to happen from a client demand standpoint, you know, they're more suspect in terms of their ability to weather that storm. Again, we haven't seen it in our underlying credit metrics to this point. Got it. I guess maybe the other area of focus or concern for investors obviously around deposits, not unique to Synovus. Just talk to us in terms of when you think about the deposit base today, the stickiness of that deposit base in this rate backdrop, and like, what's embedded in your expectations on growth, the mixture from DDA deposits? Yeah. you know, Ebrahim, the first thing, we talk a lot about the excess deposits that were raised- Sure During the pandemic. Look, we had that as well. You know, there's some positive stories of that. You know, when we provided PPP loans to non-customers, we required a operating account. So those clients, we had over 2,000 that were new to the bank. The majority of those, vast majority of those are still with us, and they're operating because they were thankful to be able to get that important loan back when they didn't know whether they would be able to make it through the pandemic. If you think about what's happened at Synovus really over the last four years from 2018 to today, we've basically doubled the amount of deposits that we have in account analysis, non-interest-bearing deposits. When most people look at that, they think it was just the fact that interest rates were zero and people put their money in non-interest bearing. It's actually the opposite. We were able to go out and sell these treasury solutions, as I mentioned earlier, 70% increase in sales, and people would put their money in those NIB accounts to offset the fees that they would incur for using those treasury services. Now, we're not immune. We saw in the fourth quarter, predominantly in December, we saw some of that NIB run out. We believe that we're in a good position going forward to be able to maintain a good percentage of NIB to total that's been increased over the last four years because of that treasury focus. Sure. People will continue to leave it there. The wild card is as you increase ECR, the earnings credit rate, it means you have to have less balances there. Right. That's why some of it has moved out. You saw over the last two and half years as we were flush with liquidity, we did run off a large portion of high cost CDs that really came from that FCB franchise. We're back in the time deposit market today. We have promotional rates just like everyone else. I think you'll see the percentage of CDs increase, but not to the level they were prior to the pandemic. For us, we said it in the fourth quarter, we can't control the diminishment piece. QT is taking money out of the system, and we can't stop that. You know, we obviously have retention efforts underway with all of our lines of business, and we're addressing the price. We've been able to keep the beta fairly low below kinda where we had projecting, last year. We still think it's gonna be in that mid- 35, range going forward, through the cycle. When you think about our ability to generate deposit growth, it comes from production. Can't control diminishment. Sure. Can't control augmentation. When we go back to the fourth quarter, our quarter-over-quarter increase in production was up $900 million. That shows that our teams, when we focus them on deposits, which again, you could argue maybe we should've been focused on it a little earlier, again. Yeah We were pretty flush with cash. At an 89% loan to deposit ratio, you know, we could tick up a little bit from there, but we're not gonna go back to the 99%, 100% that we had five to ten years ago. We've got to focus on production. We've changed incentive plans for our commercial bankers, and so they're a little more focused on the value of those deposits. We've kicked off new promotions, adjusted the incentive plans in consumer, and we focused on new industries that we think are deposit rich, like money service businesses, and we're evaluating some other opportunities there. You know, deposits are the wild card, and it's gonna determine our cost of funds that we have to bring in to fund all of the loan growth we were talking about earlier. That will help determine where we end up in that guidance for revenue range. Right that we gave, 8%-12%, is that low cost funding production. At the end of the day, as the Feds, you know, gets to a point where we can pause for a second and maybe QT becomes less of an issue, if that diminishment stops and we keep the production at a higher level, that's what's gonna translate into deposit growth for us. Great. Got it. I, when I talk to a lot of banks, it feels like everyone was taken aback by the during the summer, rates were going up 75 basis points up per meeting. If you think about it today, have you seen at least a leveling off in terms of the trends you're seeing in deposit pricing, deposit mix today versus let's say back in November, December? You talked about the runoff in NIB in December. Yeah. I'm just wondering, is all that already beginning to stabilize, or are we still kind of wait and watch? We expect, you know, the first quarter, we were saying in the fourth quarter call, you know, we expect the first quarter to look a lot like the fourth quarter. That's because there's seasonality. Sure. A lot of the public funds deposits that you raise in the fourth quarter, you know, get paid out in the first quarter. We had said we expected more deposit growth in the latter half of the year. We expect the first quarter to look similar. You know, the environment we have today with the Fed continuing to increase rates will still put some pressure on, and with QT, put pressure on deposits leaving the system. You know, the thing that we're optimistic, and we've seen this in January, is that our production still is very strong. Right. For all the factors we've talked about. We don't expect it to just stop in the first quarter or second quarter. I think it's gonna be a gradual improvement in things like diminishment. The question will be for things like augmentation is the faster that inflation returns to a normalized level, the more likely you are to get augmentation to get people increasing their balances again. Right. It's not just about the lowering of average balances. When do we get back to increasing average balances? Right. I guess two things there in terms of pricing, production. When we think about like new deposit growth in this environment, is that coming at a substantially below market rate? Or how do we think about pricing of those new deposits? I mean- How should we think about it? Yeah. Well, look, it's higher, right? Right. Because as you were doing things like CD promotions, and we're focused on generating deposits, you know, you're gonna see the cost of new deposits go up. To your point earlier on just, you know, the pricing pressures, there's gonna be a lag impact to how deposits continue to reprice. Right. As the Fed goes from 75 to 25, you're gonna get less, you know, increases on the floating rate loan book, and you're gonna see this lag impact, which is why we expect even though the betas have been in the 20% range... Right ... they'll get to the mid-thirties because that lag impact will pick up. I think you're gonna see deposit pricing on the book continue to increase despite the fact that the Fed is slowing the pace at which they're increasing Fed funds rate. Production, just because we're focused more on it and looking at it relative to what wholesale funding costs you'll see some of the production costs go up as well. Got it. Tied to that in terms of competitive dynamics, you have a couple of like larger banks, super regionals expanding and putting in a lot of branch locations in the Southeast. Like, has that also worsened today versus three, six months ago? You know, I don't know that the expansion of the branches are a real concern on our side. I mean, when you think about the real mechanisms that drive betas and pricing deposits, I mean, we're in an environment where there's pretty good market intelligence of what people are paying. Sure. These large banks have kept their standard rates fairly low. If you have a large portfolio that's in standard rates, and unfortunately we do have that, you've been able to keep some of those rates lower. It's if you have everything in exception price deposits that go up. Right. New branches, you know, look, it changes the economics of a new branch when you can look at a deposit worth 4% versus 1%. Right. We'll selectively look at that. You know, we believe that through things like Maast and other products, we can generate deposit growth without having to rely on going out and adding a bunch of bricks and mortar in. I don't think that we're at a competitive disadvantage by some of these banks going out and adding more branches in our footprint. Obviously, consumer for us, as I mentioned earlier, doubling down on commercial. Consumer for us doesn't mean we're not investing there. We're just not investing at the level we would on the commercial side. What we're trying to do in our branch network, we've been able to close 13% of our branch network in the last year. Mm. We're stabilized now. We wanna make sure the productivity of the branches we have are maximized. I think we can continue to grow consumer deposits with the network we have without having to add a bunch of new ones. Maybe you mentioned Maast, banking as a service player. You outlined a lot of detail at the Investor Day on this. Just give us update there and where that stands? Yeah ... in terms of pilot testing, what have been the results and what? We- Yeah. Yeah, we are live. We have booked our first revenue in January, so we're on schedule. As we had said back in Investor Day, we wanted to have a product that was accessible by ISVs in the first quarter. We have our first client on the platform. They are processing payments. They have checking accounts. They've issued cards. You know, for us, the reason why you say, "Well, that's one client." Well, we did that intentionally. We'll onboard our second client- Right ... in the next week or two, we'll onboard our third client next month. The reason for that is when you think about an ISV, it's 1 ISV, but they have hundreds, thousands of clients. What we wanna make sure is that the solution as we roll it out with these ISVs, that it's scalable, that both from a compliance standpoint and from a user experience, that this solution is meeting their needs. Right. Even though we're live today, it's still somewhat in pilot mode because we want to evaluate how this client is using the platform and any enhancements we'll make. When we add in the second client, different industry, we'll evaluate again. Third client, different industry, evaluate it with the goal of having a full rollout in July of this year, which will open it up to ISVs. We've hired a chief revenue officer. We've hired a sales team. We're not waiting till July to go out and do that. Right. We're out selling the platform today. We have a sandbox that they can go and look at the product. For us, you know, our initial thesis hypothesis has not changed. We think there's a unique marketplace for this. We don't believe that anyone is providing a full embedded finance solution that can be white labeled through ISVs. We believe that an ISV can improve their profitability 2x- 5x by using this solution. Sure by the revenue sharing that we'll do. Ultimately, we think the platform will be very successful. As you recall in Investor Day, we said all it takes is 30-50 ISVs for us to achieve our, you know, kind of three-year targets. We're not saying we're gonna go capture, you know, 80% of the market. We're talking about a very small share of the market, you know, 1%- 2% of the marketplace. The good news is some of the people we're talking to have higher payment volumes than we would've estimated, and they actually have more end users. If that plays out and you're able to get your representative share, then you don't even need 30, right? You may only need 20 because they're much bigger ISVs. Right. We're very pleased at where we are, but, you know, the final chapter of this book hasn't been written yet. We'll continue to monitor it, but we're in a good place relative to where we want it to be. Are there any industry, remind me if, any industry verticals where you're specifically focused on? Professional services is. Okay Is an area we like. Accounting services is an area we've looked at. We have an educational service platform that's on it today. It's things where you, we believe that the end user would be a good end user for us, and that would be good deposits and ultimately provide us with the opportunity down the road to cross-sell things like payroll, potentially have working lines of credit term facilities. Mm. That's all kind of down the road. The premise in the beginning was a PayFac tool that brings in deposits and fee income and. Right The product was predicated on. How quickly do we go from like one, two clients to like could be by this time next year, could you have like 10, 20, 25 clients? Yeah. Is that like a hockey-? Yeah. Okay. Got it. A few more minutes left. Maybe just moving to expenses. Okay. Right? Like I think you've done a lot in terms of Synovus Forward. Yeah. Like in terms of both, expense revenue synergies. Give us a sense of just the ability to drive positive operating leverage, your comfort level there, where the opportunities are, given all the work the bank's already done. Yeah. Yeah, we, Jamie Gregory reminded me as we closed out the year, I probably didn't do a good enough job on the earnings call. I mean, it's pretty awesome what we were able to do with Synovus Forward. $180 million of run rate benefit that we started prior to the pandemic back in September of 2019. We as a leadership team sat down and said, "You know, we've gotta come up with some initiatives that provide incremental lift to help us get to some of these financial targets." Over that, you know, two-year timeframe, it went from $100 million to $175 million. To be able to do $180 million, you know, about 45% of Synovus Forward were efficiency initiatives. We did vendor management where we went out and demand managed our third party services. We renegotiated rates. We closed branches, you know, 13% of the network. We looked at other real estate opportunities where we took 400,000 sq ft in Columbus, Georgia, and we're gonna be down to 180,000 sq ft. We rationalized the workforce, the back office by automating and reducing in certain areas. Those same things that allowed us to deliver on Synovus Forward have gotta be the same things we look at going forward. There's, you know, at a 50% efficiency ratio where we are today, I know business mix matters, but I feel like we're at a pretty good place. It doesn't come easy. You know, one of the things Jamie has impressed upon the leadership team is every year we have to find 1%-2% of expense savings that allows us to have a growth rate that gives us positive operating leverage. I look at the guidance we gave this year, you know, our guidance suggests positive operating leverage. A big piece of that 2%-3% of the growth in 2023 is from these new initiatives. Yeah. You can imagine as they come on board and start producing that is not gonna be the same level of expense growth. Right In 2024 and 2025, and you're gonna get the hockey stick on the revenue side. Right. We felt that it was important to lean in. We didn't want to go into this uncertain period and contract in a way that encumbered our ability to have a long-term growth rate and to generate top quartile performance. To be able to do that, you've gotta be smart and disciplined to find that 1%-2% every year that may be reinvested or may be dropped to the bottom line depending on what's happening on the top line. Given the success with Synovus Forward, is a Synovus Forward 2.0 coming? No, no. No. You know, Jamie said no more, no more 2.0s, 3.0s. It just has to be part of what we do. Sure. Yeah. I, you know, sometimes I don't want people to think it's not their job. What we're impressing upon people is every year when you go through the budget process, we do a bottoms up, we've got to identify these savings, and it becomes a way of doing business, a discipline versus being an outsized project. I never say never because if you entered some sort of economic environment that required a more accelerated way to do that, we would obviously do something like that. Sure. We've proven we can. I really like that we've embedded it into the culture, into the discipline around annual planning that will allow us to get those benefits each year. Makes sense. I just wanna take a minute and see if there are any questions in the room. If anyone has a question, raise your hand. If not, I can just continue with. Yeah Last couple of questions I had. One, just capital planning. I think the board authorized a $300 million buyback. Yeah. Give us a sense of just how you're thinking about building capital and maybe having some dry powder versus, opportunistically buying back shares and the pace of those buybacks that we should expect. Hey, Ebrahim, you know, it's funny, one of the things that we believe was a positive outcome of the global financial crisis was stress testing, right? Sure. Internally, you know, we're not a CCAR bank, but we run a CCAR process every year, and that helps us analyze what levels of capital you need during an economic crisis, whether it's severe or, you know, severely adverse or whether it's just mild. We believe the targets that we provide, 925-975 are more than sufficient. Mm-hmm T o weather another global financial crisis. Having said that, you know, what Jamie said in the past, our number one use of capital and our top priority is continuing to use it to help our clients grow their business. You'll see us, you know, loan growth is the number one determinant of that going forward. We wanna make sure we're providing a competitive dividend. The third becomes share repurchase. As we think about the environment we're in today. Now we've said that we would be inclined to manage our capital ratios towards the higher end of our range, just because I think the sentiment from investors would like to see a little more cushions of protection. Regardless of what our internal models say. Sure. that more is better. We're inclined to manage it towards the higher end of the range. At the end of the day, that $300 million authorization for us, gives us the ability to go out and buy shares, especially if the stock price remained, you know, at a depressed level, and we weren't getting the type of loan growth through the demand side that we were expecting. It gives us the flexibility. That's, you know, we have it out there for that reason, not because it's a number one priority to go back and buy back shares. Number one priority is to use that capital for our clients, and we'd love to use it all there, and manage our CET1 ratios, you know, towards the high end of the range just to give everybody a little more comfort that whatever this environment we're in. Sure. We have more than enough capital. Anything inorganic in terms of M&A, non-bank M&A or fintech or anything that, does that make sense? Yeah, Bank M&A, we're not in the market. Yeah. No one is. Yeah. We're good. We're not left out of the party. You know, and I'd say that, and not just because of why, you know, the regulatory environment and the like. I mean, we really are excited about the investment opportunities in Synovus. So why go out and take on a risk today. Sure. When you think you have a lot of opportunity to invest in yourself? The non-bank M&A is an interesting space because you hear a lot of banks that are doing fintech-type investments. We made a majority investment into a fintech last year to help us build out Maast. Those are the type of deals we like because it not only helps us roll out a new solution, but ultimately gives us the opportunity to take advantage of their merchant acquiring company of their growth. We'll continue to look at those, but I can be honest with you, there's not a lot of opportunities out there. Despite, you know, what's happened with valuations of some of those firms, you know, we wanna find, if we were to do a non-bank transaction, we want a functionality or capability that we could offer to our existing clients because that's what gives that exponential growth, what they're doing today, but then you could offer it to your existing clients. Right. Jamie has a corporate development team that looks at those things. We've looked at a lot of products and capabilities. We've looked at depository opportunities, and we just haven't found anything that made sense from a price standpoint. We're gonna continue to look, and I think it's, it's prudent to do that. I don't think you should expect to read a headline every week that Synovus- Right. Has done another deal. About thirty seconds left, I want to get an update on the Florida franchise. I think it's been a big push, the FCB transaction. Give us a sense of, investment-wise, Is, are you there where you wanted to be, and what the growth outlook looks like? I appreciate you giving me twenty-five seconds. 25 seconds. -to answer that. We're super excited that we did that deal. Number one, when you look at, you go back and look at what we paid for it, we basically paid what our price to tangible book value is today. Sure. If you can go out and buy a Florida franchise in South Florida and pay, you know, 1.6x tangible value, I think it's phenomenal. It's continues to be a great growth footprint for us. We continue to add talent in that market, and it's gonna be a, I think a continued growth engine for us into the future. Well, all right. With that, thank you so much. Thank you.