Good day, everyone, and welcome to the Consumer Portfolio Services 2019 First Quarter Operating Results Conference Call. Today's call is being recorded. Before we begin, management has asked me to inform you that this conference call may contain forward-looking statements within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Any statements made during this call that are not statements as historical fact may be deemed to be forward-looking statements. Such forward looking statements are subject to certain risks that could cause actual results to differ materially from those projected. I refer you to the Company's SEC filings for further clarification. The Company assumes no obligation to update publicly any forward-looking statements, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise. With us here now is, Mr. Charles Bradley, Chief Executive Officer; and Mr. Jeff Fritz, Chief Financial Officer of Consumer Portfolio Services. I will now turn the call over to Mr. Bradley.

Thank you, and thank you, everyone, for joining us on our first quarter conference call. The quarter was a little different than what we might have expected. I mean, overall, we're very satisfied. The earnings were not quite where we had hoped for. Good news is, probably that will correct itself. First and foremost, I think tax season, as we've always known, it probably doesn't exist anymore. The tax season now tends to be much more drawn out, much smaller. So, you don't have that big first quarter impact we've had for years, and over the last couple of years, it has diminished, and this year probably was the least existent or – the most non-existent tax season we've ever had. And so, that coupled with the fact that we're not growing at some outstanding amount is going to – is what caused sort of the lower revenue, and therefore, the lower earnings in the first quarter. And there's another part in the accounting. We've switched to fair value. I'll let Jeff walk through that but – so we're almost sort of at the low point in terms of where we would be as we switch. The fair value accounting tends to push the earnings out into the future. And right now the portfolio is in the process of switching to fair value. It's almost 50:50. And so, that again has had a negative effect on the earnings. That would be the bad news about the first quarter. And again, most of that is one-time and shouldn't affect the future of the Company at all. The good news is the paper is really starting to perform. The 2017, 2018 and 2019 vintages are all doing great and they're beginning to make the 2015 and 2016 vintages pale in terms of…

Thanks, Brad. Welcome, everybody. Let's begin with the revenues. Revenues for the quarter were $88.2 million. That's down 3% from the fourth quarter of 2018, and down 15% from $103.6 million in the first quarter of 2018. And right there, you can see really the impact of the transition to fair value accounting on the revenues side of the business. Anyway, remember that, the traditional portfolio, the legacy portfolio, as we call it, accrues interest at the gross amount that's on the coupon of the receivables approximately 18% to 19% for those receivables. But the fair value portfolio, which is everything since we've originated since January of 2018, is sort of a net revenue, where the losses are baked into the revenue number. And so that portfolio which represents 43% of the business now, the whole portfolio is merrily accruing along at about 9.5%, while the big portfolio continues to amortize off rapidly at the bigger number. The offset to that I'm going to skip to the provisions for credit losses, provisions for credit losses were $24 million for the quarter, that's down 4% from the December quarter, but down 41% from the year ago quarter. Now, the provisions you'll remember for credit losses only apply to the legacy portfolio. And you can see the drastic year-over-year reduction, but in spite of that significant reduction, the credit performance of the 2015 and 2016 vintages has dragged down and increased the provisions for credit losses somewhat. And so we're a little bit in this kind of crosshairs, where we're in the transition to fair value accounting, we start provisions for credit losses, they will continue to decrease, but we didn't get maybe quite as much of a decrease as we'd hoped for this quarter. The broader expenses, $85.6 million for the…

Thanks, Jeff. And walking through some of the departments, marketing, we've really tried to turn up our focus on capture. We don't – lots of dealers can press buttons and send you lots and lots of applications. It's an expensive process. We really want to get the applications we're going to be able to fund loans on. And so we've had a focus in the marketing department on getting the capture up in terms of the deals we capture from the dealers rather than just getting them sort of in their system and sending us apps or applications. Also, we continue to work on our flow programs. They're going very well. We have one that's working primarily right now. We have a couple more in the works. And that flow program is basically working with banks or bank type lenders who don't want to lend to sub-prime and you work out a deal where you get to look at their turn downs. And then for us that's actually a slightly better grade of paper and so the whole process has worked rather well. And we're continuing to focus on that given that the market is still very competitive out there and with – amongst our friendly competitors. Collections, excuse me – in originations, we have a new scoring model working and it's working very well. Our focus now there is to sort of look for those nooks and crannies where we can get good performing paper at good prices. That's really been a process and it's working very well as well. So we expect the results there to continue to improve. As I said, the paper from 2017, 2018, 2019, is all very good. The 2019 paper, hopefully, will be the best of all and that trend will continue. And…

Thank you. The floor is now open for questions. [Operator Instructions]

Thank you. And I am showing no questions from our phone lines. I'd now like to turn the conference back over to Charles Bradley for any closing remarks.

But I will highlight that it's a little unfortunate we've done the call on Good Friday, but nonetheless, we appreciate the folks who did listen. And it's recorded, so you guys can hear it next week. Again, I think the quarter went well and we expect to build off of this quarter as we go forward in 2019. Thank you all for attending our call and Happy Easter.

Thank you. This does conclude today's teleconference. A replay will be available beginning 2 hours from now until April 26, 2019, at 3:00 PM Eastern Standard Time, by dialing 1855-859-2056 or 404-537-3406, with conference identification number 3479959. A broadcast of the conference call will also be available live and for 90 days after the call via the company's website at www.consumerportfolio.com. Please disconnect your lines at this time and have a wonderful day.