Good morning, and welcome to the Veritex Holdings third quarter 2023 earnings conference call and webcast. All participants are in listen-only mode. Please note this event will be recorded. I will now turn the conference over to Ms. Susan Caudle, Investor Relations Officer and Secretary of the Board of Veritex Holdings. Thank you. Before we get started, I would like to remind you that this presentation may include forward-looking statements, and those statements are subject to risks and uncertainties that could cause actual and anticipated results to differ. The company undertakes no obligation to publicly revise any forward-looking statement. At this time, if you are logged into our webcast, please refer to our slide presentation, including our Safe Harbor statement, beginning on Slide 2. For those of you joining us by phone, please note that the Safe Harbor statement and presentation are available on our website, veritexbank.com. All comments made during today's call are subject to that Safe Harbor statement. Some of the financial metrics discussed will be on a non-GAAP basis, which our management believes better reflects the underlying core operating performance of the business. Please see the reconciliation of all discussed non-GAAP measures in our filed 8-K earnings release. Joining me today are Malcolm Holland, our Chairman and CEO, Terry Earley, our Chief Financial Officer, and Clay Riebe, our Chief Credit Officer. I'll now turn the call over to Malcolm. Good morning, and welcome to our third quarter earnings call. We certainly find ourselves in challenging days in our industries and markets, but we here at Veritex continue to focus on building long-term value for our shareholders. Q3 was a transformational quarter for Veritex in many areas. First, I'd like to formally welcome Dominic Karaba as our new President and Chief Banking Officer. Dom's a 28-year banking veteran, with the majority of his experience in leading and developing teams in a commercial bank space. Even though he's only been here for 6 weeks, he's already making a difference at our company. I look forward to you all meeting him soon. Second, I want to talk about our continued commitment and efforts to reposition and strengthen the Veritex balance sheet. Over one year ago, our team stacked hands to build a stronger balance sheet that could withstand all economic environments. We've always been a very profitable bank, shown by our historical PPNR, ROAA, and efficiency ratios, but our balance sheet did not project the strength that is highly valued. Let me discuss four balance sheet ratios we've been keenly focused on: loan to deposit, dependence of wholesale funding, CET1, and our real estate loan bucket concentrations. I'd like to remind you, these efforts were not as a result of March 8 SVB crisis. These efforts have been in our major focus and strategy for the last four quarters. I'm happy to say we're making progress, candidly, much quicker than we planned. Our loan deposit ratio has come down from a high of 108 at 3/31 to 95 at 9/30. Our dependence of wholesale funding has come down from 32% at 3/31 to 21 at 9/30. Our CET1 now exceeds 10%. Our CRE portfolio continues to decline despite continued ADC fundings of approximately $400 million a quarter. Total CRE to risk-based capital has declined from 335 on 3/31 to 317 at quarter end. ADC has declined from 129- 116 during those same dates. All of this positive momentum towards a stronger balance sheet takes the work and effort of our entire bank. It requires a mindset change to add full client relationships, not just borrowers. It requires disciplined efforts on the deposit gathering space that comes in many forms: better client selection, digital banking, direct marketing, MSRs, HOAs, family and friends promotions, commercial and community bank focus, et cetera, et cetera. It takes everyone working together with a common goal. That's how we've increased our deposit balances over $1 billion since 12/31/2022. I couldn't be prouder of our company and teams to embrace the changes we all felt had to happen. There is still much to do and much to accomplish. With all the great progress on the balance sheet, we understand that in these cycles, earnings will be under pressure. For the third quarter, we reported net operating income of $32.6 million or $0.60 per share. Our pre-tax provision income for the quarter was $50 million or 1.62%. Terry will provide some details shortly, but the main three drivers of our slight earnings decline were NIM pressure, continued lack of government loan fees, and increase in operating expenses. In these cycles, loan growth and credit are always at the top of everyone's mind and concerns. For the quarter, loans decreased and are only up $137 million or 1.4% for the first nine months of the year. We've been able to do this with a focused effort on pruning away loan-only clients and payoffs, mainly from the CRE sales, mainly from CRE sales transactions. NPAs for the quarter did increase $11.5 million to $80 million, or 0.65% of assets. This increase was solely from a C&I shared national credit that Clay will discuss shortly. Net charge-offs were minimal at 8 basis points. We also increased our ACL from 105 at 6/30 to 114. Looking forward, our growth profile for 2024 will continue to be in the low to middle- single- digits. Our pipelines are off over 80%, and candidly, the demand from our clients has been muted. In our opinion, this will continue until some economic and rate certainty is established. I'll now turn the call over to Terry. Thank you. Malcolm has covered the progress we've made in strengthening our balance sheet. I think it is fair to say that we've made more progress and in a quicker timeframe than I ever expected. I want to spend some time drilling into the results for the third quarter and the year-to-date numbers. I think this is important because some of our businesses are seasonal, and we think about them on an annual basis and not just quarterly. Starting on page four, Malcolm mentioned that operating earnings were at $0.60 per share. This is down slightly to $32.6 million. Tangible book value per share was also up slightly to $19.44, even with rising rates impacting accumulated other comprehensive income, AOCI, by approximately $0.45 per share. Focusing on year-to-date results, pre-tax, pre-provision operating earnings increased 14% from 2022 to almost $175 million. Pre-tax, pre-provision return on average assets is flat year-over-year at 190 basis points. Veritex continues to be one of the more profitable banks among the peer group. Consistent with our intent to strengthen our balance sheet, we've only grown loans $615 million in the last year, while growing deposits $1.4 billion on a year-over-year basis. Year-to-date, annualized charge-offs have been 20 basis points. Finally, we've grown CET1 by 102 basis points over the last four quarters to 10.11%. We achieved this target of being over 10%, one quarter earlier than forecast. Moving to Slide 5, Veritex made meaningful progress improving its liquidity and funding profile over the third quarter. Since June 30th, Veritex has grown deposits by $963 million, and only $192 million of that was in the brokered category. The deposit growth, coupled with some reduction in earning assets, allowed us to reduce Federal Home Loan Bank borrowings by over $1.1 billion. As we've said before, Veritex shifted its focus to the right side of the balance sheet late in Q3 of 2022. We started slowing loan growth. We shifted our loan production focus away from commercial real estate and ADC to C&I and small business. We changed our banker incentive program at the beginning of 2023 to give deposits a higher weighting. We reallocated marketing spend to deposit products and launched a multi-wave direct marketing campaign in February. Additionally, our digital bank, which we started in the second quarter, is having a meaningful impact on our deposit growth. Success on the deposit front for Veritex has three components: growing deposits, increasing our client acquisition rate, and increasing net client growth. I'm pleased to note that our net client acquisition rate in the third quarter was a little more than double what we saw in the first half of the year. Similarly, our net client growth in the third quarter was up more than 4x over the levels we've experienced in the first half of the year. The effect of the Fed's interest rate hikes on deposit mix stabilized in the second quarter, and our non-interest-bearing deposits to total deposits remained in the 23%-24% range. Deposit pricing competition continues to be intense, resulting in a total deposit beta of approximately 57%. Finally, uninsured and uncollateralized deposits are 31.5% of total, and our liquidity capacity is 2x of the uninsured deposits. In thinking about the loan portfolio, the shift away from ADC is showing progress. Our concentration level in CRE moved down during the quarter, and the goal is to continue to move these levels down below the regulatory guidelines. The payoffs in the CRE portfolio remain strong and should range between $800 million and $900 million for 2023. A sure sign of strength in the Texas economy. Unfunded ADC commitments continue to drop at the rate of $300 million-$400 million per quarter and are now well below total capital. Looking forward into 2024, we forecast ADC fundings to decline by 75% as compared to 2023. On Slide 7, we're frequently asked about our out-of-state loan portfolio. As you can see, our National businesses and mortgages comprise 13% of our total loan book. Our true out-of-state portfolio is about $1.2 billion and makes up about 12.5% of the total book. 2/3 of the out-of-state portfolio are loans where we have followed Texas developers. The rest are SNCs, syndicated loans, and C&I. A breakdown of the out-of-state commercial real estate portfolio is shown on the bottom right of the slide. Moving on to Slide 8. Net interest income decreased by $1.5 million to just under $100 million in Q3. The biggest drivers of the decrease were higher earning loan yields, day count, and lower volume, i.e., primarily FHLB volume, offset by increases in rates on deposits. The net interest margin decreased 5 basis points from Q2 to 3.46%. The NIM was helped by the increase in average non-interest bearing and the drop in volume and yield on our FHLB borrowings. Given the deposit growth through the end of August, we were able to pull back on deposit pricing in September. This resulted in monthly deposit production rates falling for the first time in 2023. All this to say, based on our current internal forecast, the net interest margin is nearing the bottom, assuming our deposit mix remains stable from here. On Slide 9, please note our loan yields were up 7 basis points to 6.92%, while deposit rates increased by 42 basis points. Q3's new loan production had a production rate of 8.06 and a spread of 330 basis points. Slide 10 shows certain metrics on our investment portfolio. The key takeaways are, it's only 8.6% of assets, the duration is 4.3 years, and 83% of the portfolio is held and available for sale. Overall, the mark-to-market on the portfolio has a minimal impact on tangible equity and doesn't have any impact on our capital ratios. Non-interest income decreased by $4 million to $9.7 million. These declines were generally across the board. Thrive's production volume increased 1% to $564 million, while its gain on sale margin declined by 43 basis points to 257 basis points. To maintain volume, Thrive had to sacrifice rate, and therefore, gain on sale margin. Moving to Slide 12 on the USDA front, we've always said you need to think about this business on an annual basis. It's been a record 12 months for this business. They've produced over $21.6 million revenue over the last 4 quarters. I was happy to get any revenue in Q3 of 2023, given the funding situation to be in our vertical at the USDA, but we could only get one loan closed in Q3. Our pipeline is at record levels, which bodes well for future revenue, and Q4 revenue should be meaningfully higher than Q3. But given the potential government shutdown and funding the government with continuing resolutions, make it highly unlikely that Q4 will be as strong as Q4 of 2022. Non-interest expenses increased $2.2 million, driven by higher personnel costs and regulatory fees. The increase in personnel cost is a function of hiring bonuses, variable compensation for deposit growth, and lower loan production cost deferrals. Salaries are up slightly, but this was not the driver of the increase. On Slide 13, total capital grew approximately $35 million during the quarter to almost $1.5 billion. Our CET1 ratio expanded 35 basis points for the quarter and 101 basis points year-over-year, and now stands at 10.11%. A significant contributor to the expansion of the capital ratios has been the decline in risk-weighted assets. It's worth noting that since Veritex went public in 2014, it has compounded tangible book value per share at a rate of 10.8%, including the dividends that have been paid to our shareholders. Finally, on Slide 14, note that we continue to build the ACL. Since the beginning of 2023, we've grown it by $19 million or 21%. These additions to the allowance have increased it by 18 basis points to 1.14%. Given all the uncertainty facing the U.S. and Texas economy, we decided to allocate more weighting to the downside scenarios in the model. Two factors continue to make up a sizable part of our ACL. With that, I'd like to turn the call over to Clay for some comments on sale. Thank you, Terry, and good morning, everyone. As Malcolm mentioned, our NPAs are up for the quarter, driven by a downgrade of a shared national credit in the most recent SNC exam performed by the regulators in August. Our portion of the loan is $18 million of a $157 million total facility. The company is in the defense, space, and government sector, and the company suffered from supply chain issues and inflation impact that significantly lowered the company's financial performance. The credit was restructured in the third quarter with additional capital contributed by the equity sponsor, and is currently performing under the restructured terms. Past dues for the quarter increased $2 million, mainly due to three commercial credits. There were also a group of single-family mortgage loans in the amount of $4.4 million that were transferred to a third-party servicer, which created some administrative past dues, and we expect those issues to clear this quarter. Moving to criticized assets. Classified assets were relatively flat for the quarter, while total criticized assets increased by 3%. Our surveillance of the portfolio continues to be strong, and we're removing risk grades as we see issues arise. I've been encouraged by the level of payoffs that have occurred this year in the amount of $932 million, with $645 million of that in the CRE book. $62 million of year-to-date payoffs have come from the criticized asset books. We experienced full payoffs of $10.4 million of classified credits just in the last quarter. With that, I'll turn it back over to Malcolm. As you can see, Veritex has made significant improvement on our strategy to build a sturdier balance sheet. Our focus on granular, stable funding will not cease. Terry mentioned, but I would like to mention again, just the new client acquisition is on the front of our minds every day. For the third quarter, client acquisitions growth was almost 2,700 new clients, which is more than the first two quarters combined. It's working, and we recognize we still have more work to do. Finally, I'd like to thank the many phone calls and comforting text messages received from many of you concerning last quarter's earnings call. Everyone involved is doing quite well. Thank you, and operator, we'll take any questions. Thank you. Again, ladies and gentlemen, if you'd like to ask a question, please press Star one one on your telephone. To ask a question, please press Star one one. One moment for our first question. Our first question comes from the line of Steven Scouten of Piper Sandler. Your line is open. Hey, good morning, everyone. Hey, Steve. I guess one of my questions is maybe around capital and what you could do with your capital today. You know, strong profitability, good capital, but you know, the stock's obviously not trading where you'd want on a tangible book value basis. So I'm just wondering if you guys would think about a share repurchase here today or kind of what your capital priorities would be at this point? You know, it's, listen, if you keep making money, adding to capital, you're going to have options. Our thinking right now with the environment that we're in is just to continue to add capital. You know, we know there's potential options down there, but we don't see a buyback in our immediate future. You know, I think it's just wise to build the capital base a little bit more. Again, the options are always there. Okay, fair enough. And then just thinking about the NIM and Terry, you said you think it's kind of nearing the bottom. How should we think about loan yields moving forward and just any portfolio churn? And just kind of remind me the fixed versus floating, so we can think about where kind of the loan side of the balance sheet can go. Well, loan yields, since we have so much floating, you know, 75%-76% of the portfolio, 76% of the portfolio is tied to SOFR and Prime. Loan yields are going to be contingent on, you know, they're going to move in correlation with what, you know, the Fed does on rates. Are they done? Are they going one more time? I don't know. It's a coin flip in my mind. I don't think they're going at their next meeting, but we'll see what happens on out there. Yeah, you know, we certainly have some fixed-rate loans that are... You know, I was working with a banker on one earlier this week that's in mid-3s, that's up for renewal. And so it's a, you know, so we're going to have some of that, Steven. But given that so much of the portfolio is floating, I think it's going to be helpful when it occurs, but I don't think it's going to be a big enough number and change to really change the dynamic of what the NIM is going to do. You know, look, I was really happy with how the NIM performed in the quarter, especially as I look across the industry. But, you know, as I said, pricing competition on the deposit side is pretty intense, but we were able to pull back meaningfully on ours in September. We can see it in the data. So I'm hopeful that, I think, there's going to be some, especially as CDs roll, there's going to be some NIM pressure, but you know, it looks like in our own internal model, modeling that, you know, you know, we're getting near the bottom anyway. Got it. Okay. And then just maybe last thing for me, I know you've talked about that USDA business that, you know, think about it more annualized. But I'm just kind of curious what, what you're seeing from a funding perspective, if that's kind of, that vertical is kind of back open for business. Obviously, the pipeline looks really strong, and so if that was a, I don't know, $14 million or $19 million line item last year, is that, you know, think about still that range, or because of some of the government issues, is that going to be, you know, lower year-over-year still? No, I don't think it's going to be lower year- over- year. You know, but I think the timing is. I thought Q4, 90 days ago, I would have thought Q4 was going to be a really strong quarter with a new fiscal year for the federal government. Now, now that they're doing it on continuing resolutions, there's just the level of funding and the certainty of funding is what's lowered my view of Q4. I mean, we have specific loans we believe we're going to get closed, but, you know, this getting a little bit of allocation out of continuing resolutions, it's hard to manage your business that way. And it's what some say differently. They're managing their business just fine. It's hard for me to give you clarity in terms of what I think revenue is going to do. So that's why I tried to say, I think it's going to be meaningfully better than Q3, but not nearly as good as last year's Q4, unless something really pops and they get a budget passed. But, but I feel really good about 2024. I think it's going to be in line- Yeah with what we're seeing, and, you know, would love to see it be a little bit better. Pipelines are better today versus where they were going into 2024. So if the funding is there, we could do better, but there's that macro circumstance there that's really outside of our control. Sure. That makes a lot of sense. All right, guys. Thanks for all the color. Congrats on all the progress. Thanks, Steve. Thank you. One moment, please. Our next question comes from the line of Brady Gailey of KBW. Your line is open. Hey, thank you. Good morning, guys. Morning to you, Brady. I mean, you talk about all the progress that's been made over the last years. I think you've called out kind of four or five different areas that have seen some pretty nice improvement. So are we done at this point with kind of the things that you all are focused on, on improving internally? Or, you know, is there more work to be done on, like, the loan or deposit ratio and capital? And I think you mentioned you still wanted to get below the 300, 100 CRE A& D thresholds. I'm just wondering, you know, in what inning are we in? And is there a lot of work left to be done to get the company where you guys would like to see it? So the easy answer is no, we're not done at all. Internally, we called what we accomplished in the third quarter phase 1. Phase 2 is a continued effort to strengthen the balance sheet in a whole bunch of areas, the ones I've mentioned and a few others. So we don't believe the definition of fortress balance sheet runs at 95% loan deposit ratio. So we will continue. One of the things in the hiring, Dom, is that that's his focus is to help us to continue to do that. And really, I think I said it, but it's the granular side of the business, which I told my folks at our strategic planning session, phase 2, we'll never be out of. That's, that's our work to really, you know, support our funding levels in smaller, more sticky business funding areas. And so we still have more work to do, Brady, and we're not, we're not gonna stop. And so I wanna be real clear that we are—we, we do feel like we accomplished phase 1 about a year or more ahead of time, but now we're into phase 2, and that's the real heavy lift and the hard work. But that's what we intend to do. The progress of change will probably slow. Yeah. You would not expect to see Q4- Yeah. look like Q3. Absolutely. Yeah, don't think I'm going to have 85% loan deposit ratio by the end of the year. You know, we could, we could do that because as Terry always says, you, you misprice your deposits, you can get all you want. And we're not doing that, shown by us lowering rates in September. So we're. We feel like we're in a comfortable place right now from a balance sheet strength standpoint, but we still have more to do. All right. And then on the expense side, you saw some expense growth quarter- on- quarter. I think a lot of it was in compensation. But, you know, compensation is kind of back at the level that you saw in Q1 of this year. So I was just wondering, you know, as, as we look forward, I think the expenses were a little under $60 million in the third quarter. How, how should we think about that expense run rate in the fourth quarter and, and maybe more importantly, into 2024? I think in Q4, you know, I would be - I think it's gonna be 60, maybe a tad over, just, you know, but not so up a little bit, but not tremendously. You know, up 1%-2%, I would say. I think as we look into 2024, you know, I think it's - I don't see the efficiency ratio for the year getting much better than where it is today, because I'll tell you one thing. Two, let me tell you two things. Benefit costs are going through the roof. Two, FDIC insurance premiums as they rebuild the fund. And those things, there's, you know, they're largely outside our control, and so that's, you know, in terms of - that's where I expect to see the most expense pressure, generally speaking, going into next year. Okay. All right, great. Thanks for the call, guys. Thanks, Brady. Thank you. One moment, please. Our next question comes from the line of Gary Tenner of D.A. Davidson. Your line is open. Thanks. Good morning. I was curious if you could talk a little about kind of the success on the deposit side, you know, and, and, you know, maybe plans to expand what you've already done in terms of the digital bank, you know, direct marketing channels or, or otherwise. Are you slowing the spend on the direct marketing at this point and kind of relying more on the, on, on standing up digital banks in kind of local areas the way you did, to the degree a digital bank can be local, of course? So just curious for any color on that. Yeah, I think we're always going to have the digital bank direct marketing lever. We'll always play in that arena. We had to get digital banking going, so, I mean, that took a lift just to get into the areas that we want. We could always go into new areas. You know, most of all of our digital banking went outside of our current markets, and we identified certain spots in Texas only, that we wanted to be. There are many more markets that we could tap into that area. You know, direct marketing, that's gonna be something that we do, but we probably won't do as hard as we did in the third quarter, but it's always gonna be there. Again, I think this is not. It's not a one event is gonna cure this thing. It continues to be a lever of six, seven, or eight different places where people have to pull from. Now, the reason I think it gets a little slower and a little bit harder going forward, is now we're moving into, you know, more of the, the commercial bank space, the community bank space, the business banking space, the private banking space, where those become much more granular things that have some lead times in order to get them closed and getting them moved over. But those are the ones that are harder, but are much more valuable from a treasury management standpoint, from a granularity standpoint. And so, I think we continue all efforts. We may put more emphasis on different areas, depending on what the balance sheet needs. Yeah, let me, let me add two things. One, on direct marketing. Gary, I think you'll see us move from more product-specific to direct marketing, to more small business-focused direct marketing to help drive more new client acquisition, specifically in that space. And I had another. You know, that's what happens when you get old, you forget things. Anyway- Yeah, I appreciate that. And maybe this is a question for Dominic to a degree, but is there, you know, the customers that you're acquiring through the digital bank, are these, you know, they're in-state, are they customers that you think you would have an opportunity to do, you know, more business with other than just the depository side? Absolutely. I mean, that's the whole goal. If it was just a one CD client or a one money market client, that doesn't really do much for us. And I think the metric that Terry mentioned, and I gave you at the very end, was our new client acquisition just shy of 2,700 in the third quarter. That's double the first quarter and second quarter. Combined. Combined. And so what that does is, I now or my folks in the branches and my folks have the opportunity to cross-sell. And today, I believe we have 68% retention ratio of those clients. And so if you can, all you gotta do is get them in our company, and they ain't leaving. Our service levels at the branches are incredibly high. If you look at our ratings and all that, they're just incredibly high. So we, if we can get them in, they're not gonna leave, and we can sell them other stuff. Appreciate that. And then just really quickly, in terms of that credit, the shared national credit that was downgraded and restructured, was there any previous interest reversed related to that credit? There was $1.2 million. Great. Thank you. Thanks, Gary. Thank you. One moment, please. Our next question comes from the line of Michael Rose of Raymond James. Your line is open. Hey, good morning, guys. Just a couple of follow-ups here. So obviously, a lot of progress on the deposit front, a lot of that's been discussed. The, the mix of, of non-interest bearing down to about 23%. Terry, you'd kind of, you know, it's a coin flip in your eyes between, you know, kind of what happens with, with rates here, but, where do you think that could, could fall through? And if you could give us any sort of updated, beta expectations, it would be appreciated. Thanks. Yeah, I mean, I think, I mean, look, we grew DDA. You know, so even though the mix went down, it's a function of the overall growth and the total deposits. You know, so, I think it's, you know, I think the mix... Look, for two quarters we've held in. My belief is DDA is gonna continue. You know, internally, I'd say we view it as more likely than not to continue to hold in this range. It may be, depending on how successful we are. Over time, I would expect it to grow, as with all the work we're doing in the small business and low to middle market, et cetera. But in the short run, I expect it to stay stable through Q4, and as far as I can see, into 2024. One thing I would note, you know, the rate of migration, and then as we analyze pretty granularly our deposit base, the level of migration for the last 250 basis points of move has really, really slowed down. Meaning, take out new customers, just look at the existing customers that we started, say, Q2 with. The rate of migration for the last two moves has been way less. We've been able to offset it and grow this quarter, but still, it seems like customers, obviously, it's just not having as much of an impact. Those people who are, and customers who are aggressively managing liquidity, seems to be not as high a priority, I would say. Oh, yeah, and certainly didn't mean to discount the fact that you're one of the few banks that's actually grown DDA this quarter. So certainly appreciate the progress and a lot of stuff that you can, you know, that may not be apparent, kind of, that's under the hood. So a lot of good stuff there, so... But the deposit costs continue to increase. Obviously, you guys added some higher cost deposits this quarter. You know, are we getting closer to a peak in deposit costs in your eyes? Not with the way I think CDs are gonna roll. I don't think we've hit a peak in deposit costs. We've lowered production rates, but just as we've got fixed rate loans I talked about at 3.5% being renewed, we've got some earlier dated CDs at lower rates that are gonna roll, too. So I think it's gonna. That's why I think we're near the bottom, not at the bottom on them. Okay, helpful. And then maybe just last, for me, you know, through the pandemic, obviously, you guys hired a lot of producers, got a lot of growth during that period. Now, the funding's increased. It seems like, you know, growth is kind of poised to kind of pick up. And, you know, just wanted to get some kind of initial near-term thoughts on what the drivers would be. And then, obviously, you're trying to bring the CRE and A&D concentration, you know, down. Where would you expect kind of that growth to be? Just trying to get the puts and takes as we think about next year. Thanks. Yeah. So the growth is gonna be largely dependent on payoffs, and then, you know, the FHLB funding outlook, which we have some really good vision into, is by the second quarter of next year, it basically falls off a cliff. And because we've been funding $300 million-$400 million, closer to $400 million a quarter, by the time we get to Q2 next year, that falls off. And so you're funding—some of the funding that's already in the book is gonna stop. If payoffs continue, then growth's gonna be a pretty good challenge. But some of the things that we're doing here, and we are focused on growth, but we're focused on growth on what the market's going to give us. We don't not outsized growth is what we're looking for, and we're still trying to determine what that looks like. I mean, candidly, our clients have not asked for a lot lately, but I do see some things getting a little better. So overall, I think I would tell you it's low to single, low to middle- digits on growth for next year, but depending on payoffs, that could be a challenge. Totally understand. Thanks for the color. Appreciate it, guys. Yeah, let me. I remember, and my memory came back, and I remember my other item in Terry's. I just got to make a comment, that if you look at our deposit pipeline to our loan pipelines, it's 4x today. Yeah. Deposits to loans. Deposits to loans. Yeah. The deposit pipeline is 4 times greater than our loan pipeline today. So, yep, that's just... Anyway, operator, next question. Thank you. One moment, please. Our next question comes from the line of Matt Olney of Stephens. Your line is open. Hey, thanks, guys. Appreciate all the good commentary this morning. I apologize if I missed this, but want to ask about the overnight liquidity levels, cash balances. I think, with the third quarter liquidity build, I think cash balances are now 6% of earning assets. Where are you looking to maintain these levels in the fourth quarter into 2024? I would like for cash levels to be a little lower. Actually, we've started investing excess liquidity this quarter. You know, cash balances, you know, I would like for this to be, you know, 5%-10% lower. But the important thing is just, you know, when this whole thing went off the rails with Silicon Valley on March eighth, the available liquidity to the bank right now is double what it was. We've got $6.25 billion cash in available cash. So the team's done a good job in getting everything pledged in the right place, etc. But I do want to see us manage cash a little tighter, and depending on what loan growth does, start to invest in excess liquidity in a very capital-efficient way. And, Terry, just following up to that, you say in invest that, are you talking about maintaining the investment securities portfolio, or are you talking about building that from here slightly? I'm talking about growing the portfolio over the course. To, if, you know, if we're going to continue to make progress, as Malcolm talked about, on the overall strength of the balance sheet, we've got to put more liquidity into the investment portfolio. The other good thing it does is it can help protect for down rates, given our floating rate loan book. So, to the-- I'm not going to leverage to do it. I'm not looking immediately to do a loss trade to do it, but as we have excess liquidity, we are investing, locking in spreads, and we'll build that portfolio over Q4 into 2024. Yep. Okay, that makes sense. And then, I guess, shifting over, a different topic on the out-of-state loan portfolio. I appreciate that disclosure in the deck there. As we think about next year, is there a strategy to change the amount and to shift that at all, of the out-of-state percent, or are you just trying to update us, the community here, in light of some of the questions you've gotten on that topic? I would say the latter to start. There's been some confusion and, and frustration, and I understand, and that's why we just got really, really clear and granular. I would see. So just, just as a function of the, the property type, you're going to see that out-of-state number come down fairly drastically, with, almost $500 million in that $800 million in, warehouse and retail, multi-tenant. Actually, it's more than that, much closer to $600 million. A lot of those are construction deals, and they're, they're going to be paying off. The payoffs are going to come out of those books, so you're going to see that number come down. Okay, perfect. And then I guess for Clay, on the office portfolio, that disclosure this quarter in the deck was a little bit different than last quarter. So I can't tell if there's any migration in office. Any just commentary on the office portfolio? We had one loan in the portfolio that moved to criticized assets during the quarter in the office portfolio. But since June 30, the portfolio is down $30 million. Got it. Okay, that's helpful. Then just lastly, as we take a step back and think about just general profitability, I think you disclosed in the deck the PPNR ROA this quarter was around 1.160%, I think. If we focus- 160. I was going to ask, if we think about just profitability, in terms of the next year, as far as balance sheet management and all the things you're focused on, how should we think about that PPNR ROA level? Probably pretty similar, is what I would say. So somewhere in that, you know- Give or take 10 basis. Yeah, $150-$170. Yeah, that's, that's what I would say. A lot of it has to do, Matt, with some of this USDA income and, you know, whether or not- at what levels they perform, but I think it's fair to say between $150 and $170, you're going to see us- Okay ... sitting in. Okay. That's helpful, guys. Thanks for taking my questions. Yeah. Thanks, Matt. Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, this does conclude today's conference. Thank you all for participating. You may now disconnect. Have a great day.