Brian Klock
Analyst · Keefe, Bruyette, & Woods
I know, I'm sorry about this. So the cash expenses in the quarter, right, $648 million, and you mentioned with the previous questions that, obviously, a lot of the expenditure is BSA/AML, the CCAR and regulatory-related stuff that's going to stick around for a while. I guess is that -- is there anything in there though that we could start seeing some small savings coming out? Or do you think that around this kind of cash basis, somewhere around $650 million is where that's going to be on the next couple of quarters?
René F. Jones: Okay, that's a great question. So I think it's 2 things, 2 things. First of all, because of the earlier question and the fact that we're trying to do -- we're trying to get a lot done relatively quickly, we're using a lot of outside services. So I mean, that and you can pick your time horizon for how long you're off and running on your own. So quite frankly, a lot of the requirements under CCAR and those things are that you actually -- you're not really in a solid position unless you are doing all that stuff on your own. To us, that's a shorter time frame. I don't think we're going to see much of a reduction in the next couple of quarters, but you can see where you'd see some benefits and not necessarily having all that outside services helping you as you stabilize your processes. But the flip side is, as you think about it, and we think about the total expense base, if you look back to times when we had decline in mortgage volume, we tend to focus very heavily on rightsizing and rationalizing the mortgage business. But in the way M&T works, you actually tend to look at the entire bank. And what is logical that will need to happen over some time, we're still scoping it all out, is that while we're spending a lot more on regulatory compliance and the control structure is that we're going to have to begin to rationalize the expenses in other areas, right? So in terms of is $648 million our forever run rate? No, not at all, nor is 56% or 58% efficiency ratio. That doesn't make sense much to us. But we've been at this in attacking it so directly, that we haven't spent much time rationalizing. We've just been spending time building, right? So there will come a time -- not that far away, where we will be able to begin to think about where we can manage the expenses a little bit better. $648 million is not a run rate.