Vince Delie
Analyst · Truist Securities.
Yes, I would say, I mean, we continue to have some strategic initiatives that we've been working on during the year, upgrading our teller platform and the system in the branches are fixed -- [indiscernible] our initiatives. So I think that the kind of cost savings goal for next year would be to mitigate any increase in expenses with the goal of getting back to generating positive operating leverage, like you said. I think that's a key goal for us, it's been in the past and the goal is to return to that. So, I mean, it clearly goes to the bottom line, right, because it's going to offset other costs increases. So there's clearly an EPS benefit to that. And like we're in the early stages of our budgeting process, Michael. So it's -- we are going to be talking about it in detail and help with kind of list of the items that we have in the past. So -- well, in January, we're refreshing up, I guess, the outlook for next year once we finish that process. But there's a goal to, like I said, get a 3-year level with 60 and then we'll finish the process and share any more information we have in January. And I think it's important, too, that we've mentioned in my prepared remarks, we closed 95 branches over the last five years, 25% of the network. And we'll continue to look at optimizing the network and customer behaviors have changed as we are in this pandemic. And some of that will be permanent, some of it may not. We don't really know yet, but we'll continue to look, still have a lot of branches. We continue to look at opportunities there, kind of optimize the overall network and see how customer behaviors come out of the pandemic.