Nora Mary Everett - President of Retirement and Investor Services and Chairman of Principal Funds
Analyst
Sure. Good morning, Ryan. So, again, total recurring deposits were up 7% year-over-year, that's $1 billion number that I think Dan mentioned in the script ahead of time. What you may be focused on is the quarter-over-quarter, which was up only about 3.2%. There's some noise there. We have some DB plan deposit noise there. If we strip that noise away and we don't expect that to recur, and we look at those core deferrals, so look at the core deferrals and match, that's actually up really strong quarter-over-quarter, closer to 11%, little bit north of 11%. So, both with regard to quarter-over-quarter and trailing 12 months, we're seeing very strong growth in those recurring deposits. We're also seeing very strong growth with regard to the number of participants that are deferring. That percentage is up over 8%. So, when you look at the fundamentals of this business, whether you're looking at plan count, again, we saw that increase across all of the segments; whether you're looking at startup plans in the industry, we're now seeing startup plans 17% above pre-crisis levels. So a huge opportunity in that part of the market that is completely underserved because 50% or so of those smaller employers do not today have worksite access to retirement. We play in that space extremely well and one of the leaders in that startup plan market. So the underlying fundamentals here are really, really strong. When you look at the fourth quarter lapses, handful of large cases, again, we're going to win and lose on an M&A basis, we happened to lose a couple where the plan went to the acquirer, but the good news there is the momentum we're seeing. I might add one other thing in Q4 that we saw is one plan that came in as a sale and a very large plan, north of $500 million, is not going to fund until 1Q. So, once in a while, as we've mentioned before, we're going to get those timing issues. But if you strip out those timing issues and you look into Q1, we're seeing very significant momentum there both with regard to our sales pipeline, good momentum in the pipeline and we're also seeing good momentum with regard to retention. So, as we look into 2016, certainly we don't want to get into the prediction business, but we would anticipate a pretty strong, positive net cash flow in Q1. And we would look, as Terry said, to be back in that range of 1% to 3% of beginning of year account values with regard to net cash flow full year.