Jennifer LaClair
Management
Yes, I appreciate that, Moshe. We’re optimizing both sides of the balance sheet, and I think steady earning asset yields are really important; but on the liability side, you’re absolutely right - we have a wide variety of opportunities to continue to optimize, the most obvious and impactful one is on the deposits. Take OSA - we dropped OSA rates 50 basis points this quarter down to 60 basis points, and that was in record time. If you look at the great financial crisis, it took some 35, 36 months to get to this point, and the industry kind of came down in a couple of months, so just a very accelerated decline in OSA rates, so you’ll see that roll forward from partial year to full year as we head into 2021. Then you also see CDs re-pricing down, so CDs will re-price from over 2% down to less than 1%. That creates a nice tailwind for us. Then as we’ve continued to see flows, we continue to replace some of the brokered deposits with retail deposits, and if you look a year ago, brokered deposits were about 15% of our deposit stack - that’s down to 10%, so we’ll continue to let that flow. Then in terms of the other liabilities, unsecured, we had about $2.2 billion in unsecured roll-off in 2020. We’ll keep kind of the volume the same but the rate will be better, so we’ll be bringing down cost of unsecured. It gets a little bit less of an impact in 2021, but we’ll have a nice roll forward there. Then in terms of other liabilities, you saw exactly--or I pointed out, the FHLB early retirement, we’re going to continue to look for ways to take down some of this more expensive debt because of this really strong tailwind we have from both deposit flows and pricing. Then last but not least, it gives us such a strategic advantage because while we have this cash, we can use that excess cash to replace higher cost liabilities, and we’re not forced to invest into putting duration in our securities portfolio of less than 1%, so we feel just really great about dynamics on both sides of the balance sheet and the ability to continue to optimize liabilities and take down that funding cost for several quarters to come.