“approaching 3% by the end of 2025”

In context

“a company that recognizes that one of our biggest competitive advantages, as Walt mentioned, is our industry-leading cost structure, which is measured as EOCA. Achieving both of those requires careful balance and discipline. And in 2024, even as we're holding spending flat, we're still making significant investments that Rick talked about that will help sustain our long-term organic growth, boost our revenue, and increase our efficiency during 2024 and beyond. Our current revenue and earnings are being pressured, of course, by our utilization of the higher cost funding in the form of CDs and FHLB advances. Those are very much a temporary funding source. And as we pay off those, we continue to see a path towards a net interest margin in the 2.20% to 2.50% range by the end of this year and approaching 3% by the end of 2025 even if rates fall roughly 200 basis points from where they are today, as the dot plots would indicate, with a potential for it to expand further moving forward as we reinvest our securities portfolio at higher market rates than what we currently earn. Now while we pause our buyback in order to build our capital levels, capital return remains a very important part of our financial formula, given our very high return on capital and negligible credit exposure. Our capital levels have already reached the so-called well-capitalized threshold, even if AOCI is included. And we'd expect our consolidated adjusted Tier 1 leverage ratio to reach the upper 6% range by the end of 2024, at which point we'll be in a position to at least consider resuming opportunistic buybacks. Both Walt and I talked a”