Thank you for the question, and thank you for the positive feedback on BDC. It's very nice to hear.
Again, I wanted to make sure that we were organized from our end to properly answer all your questions so we brought Paul Buron who is our CFO and Jérôme who is our EVP for BDC Capital, which is where our venture capital and subordinated financing exists. I hope that with the three of us here we can answer all your questions.
Your question relates to innovation, productivity, and exports, and specifically how we track the performance of our clients vis-à-vis innovation, productivity, and exports. Again, with 45,000 clients in total it's hard to get an aggregate picture of their performance.
I have two answers to your question. First, one thing we do look at as a source of input is the amount of loans and consulting mandates we do to support innovation, productivity, and exports. On our balance scorecard, one of our closely watched numbers is the combined total of those activities.
I know this doesn't answer your question directly, but we're tracking the activity we have under way to support clients in these regards.
On aggregate we don't have the data we'd like to have in how innovative our 45,000 clients are in the productivity improvements that we're affecting across those clients as well as the export. But on a case-by-case basis we're involved in working with them. We do have regular dialogue and follow-on work, especially around consulting on the extent to which our support has moved the needle on those three fronts.
We don't have the aggregate picture yet. We'd like to get it. We're working on it.