“When we started the year in our financial scenario, that operating leverage in that first scenario was 400 basis points. The updated scenario has operating leverage of 800 basis points.”

In context

“Mike Verdeschi: Hey, Bill. Thank you for the question. We have seen tremendous growth this year as you noted. Loan growth has been up. That's including margin lending as well as our bank product. The Pledged Asset Line up 59% year-over-year. That has been terrific and we are of course happy to support that. We're meeting a client need. Clients are deepening their relationship with us and obviously it comes with an incremental spread over security. You are seeing the year-over-year NIM expansion. Primary driver was that lending activity. Of course, we'll have to see where interest rates go from here. In the scenario we assume that one hike, but that's very late in the year, that's December. It doesn't impact the financials for 2026 if that hike occurred. You would see further expansion in 2027. Good expansion of that net interest margin, good engagement by our clients. When it comes to capital, same framework that we continue to think about where the resourcing of the firm first and foremost are going to support client needs, are going to continue to drive the expansion of the franchise. We feel very good about that use of resources. That is going to be our first priority. Beyond that, we continue to look to that capital framework and look to opportunistically return where it does make sense. We see value in returning capital in buybacks, we see even greater value of deploying those resources into the franchise like we've done this year. You can see as clients engage across our platform, that has been enormously profitable. When we started the year in our financial scenario, that operating leverage in that first scenario was 400 basis points. The updated scenario has operating leverage of 800 basis points. Quite good. I think the last point of your question was around M&A. Again, we're growing organically very nicely. Again, we'll always look at our capabilities. We look at scale, we never rule anything out. Again, we always think about that organic growth and continuing to deploy resources to carry out the firm's strategy. Thanks for the question, Bill.”