David A. Fisher
Analyst · JMP Securities
Thanks Monica and good afternoon everyone and thanks for joining our call today. We’re going to start-off today by giving a brief overview of the quarter and I’ll spend some time updating you on some of our initiatives and finally I will share our perspectives looking forward. After my remarks, I will turn the call over to Rob to discuss our financial results and guidance in more detail. We had a good first quarter and we’re happy with the continued momentum we’re seeing at Enova. In addition to strong financial results, we achieved a number of milestones that position us well for future growth. We received four authorization for all of our businesses in the UK, we completed our first securitization and we launched a partnership with Republic Bank. I will discuss this partnership in more detail in a few minutes. But first, for the quarter, revenue was a $174.7 million, an increase of 5.4% from Q1 of last year and above our guidance range of $150 to $165 million. Our U.S. business was again a strong contributor to our results. Q1 is generally a slower quarter for U.S. lending but we saw strong demands especially for installment loans and line to credit. Solid credit performance was another highlight of the quarter as we were able to buck any larger macro economic trends that it seems some other vendors are experiencing. We were also very pleased by the continued growth of our new initiatives particularly in net credits our U.S. near prime products as well as our Brazilian operations and our two small business offerings. Adjusted EBITDA for the quarter was $37.8 million, which was also above our guidance for $25 million to $35 million. The higher than expected EBITDA was driven by the good loan performance I just mentioned, as well as more efficient marketing spend across most of our products. We believe that our Q1 performance is conformation that our strategy is sound and our talented team is doing a great job of executing. This is not new, but it has been difficult to say that last several quarters with all the changes in our businesses. For example, the rapid growth in net credit last year matched its true profit potential based on this strong unit economics we’re seeing in net credit lines. In addition, the drop in UK originations early last year and the wind down of the UK line of credit portfolio both as a result that changes in regulations and process in 2014, but it is difficult to see the successful adjustments we made in the UK market. As we execute on this strategy, our business continues to become more diversified which gives us multiple opportunities for growth and significant hedges against regulatory changes. Our large sub-prime U.S. business generated another strong quarter of profitability. Even within this business, we’re becoming much more diversified with 25% of our U.S. sub-prime loan portfolio consisting a single pay product, 31% installment products and 44% from line of credit products. Our UK business continues to recover and net credit has become a substantial business for us generating significant growth targeted at different credit segments of consumers and we are successfully developing our new initiatives into real and long-term opportunities highlighted by Brazil and small business financing. With total company wide originations up over 11% from the prior year, our diversification strategy is working. This marks the third sequential quarter of year-over-year growth and the strongest growth we’ve seen in total originations since the fourth and new UK regulations went into effect in 2014. The growth in our revenue and originations continues to be led by our installment loan and line of credit portfolio and reflect our focus on creating alternatives to our short-term single pay products. During the quarter, our total loan book grew 47% year-over-year, the largest contributors to this growth were net credit and our small business products, which led to a 44% year-over-year increase in U.S. installment loans and finance receivables revenue. In addition, installment loans and lines of credit now comprise 72% of our total revenue and 86% of our portfolio. Net credit growth has continued at a rapid pace. With originations up 22% from the first quarter of last year and loan balances up 67%. Due to the sustained growth of our U.S. near-prime offering, more than 45% of our total U.S. loan portfolio is now near-prime loans and 46% of those loans have an APR at or below 36%. In order to take advantage of the large market opportunity we see in the U.S. near-prime space, late in the first quarter we launched a net credit program with Republic Bank and Trust Company. This program leverages Enova’s online lending platform by providing technology, loan servicing and marketing services to Republic Bank with the objectives of expanding their online consumer lending. The loans originated by Republic will have an APR below 36%. We launched this program with a pilot in a single state, so wasn’t material during the quarter. However, we continued to rollout in early Q2 and expect being over 10 states by the end of quarter. From there we intend adding additional states throughout the year. Under the program, Republic has the ability to sell the loans and originate two net credits. As Rob will discuss in more detail shortly, our recent securitization positions us well to support this growth of the net credit portfolio. For those of you not familiar with Republic Bank, they are a state chartered commercial bank with over 4 billion in total assets supervised by the FDIC. Turning to the international front, we are pleased with the progress we’ve made in the UK since the drop in originations in late 2014 and early 2015 from the changes we implemented there to comply with new regulations. We believe that business is now on stable footing and looking forward we expect to see meaningful growth. In addition, the business is solidly profitable and should provide over $20 million of the EBITDA contributing this year. During the quarter, we made a decision to exit Canada and Australia as a lender due to the limited market opportunities we see in those countries. As a result, we have slowed originations and we’ll soon begin to wind down our loan portfolios. These businesses never became significant drivers of our growth or significant contributors to revenue and given the relatively small size and each of their challenging regulatory environments, we didn’t see this changing in the foreseeable future. To give you a better sense of their size, Canada and Australia together comprised less than 2% of or Q1 revenue. While our operational cost there have also been relatively small, we want to focus all of our resources and our people and our highest growth opportunities. Turning to our new initiatives, we’re making good progress with our installment loan product in Brazil. We’ve been aggressively ramping up growth in Brazil and the gross AR is up 91% just from the end of Q4. In China, we still see a significant opportunity there given the sizes of market and the proliferation of online lending, but we've remained cautious due to challenging regulatory environment and uncertainties around repatriating capital from China. To address these issues, we have shifted our model from direct lending to providing services through Enova Decisions our analytics as a service business. In late March, we signed a two-year agreement with a former China joint venture partner for these services and a see great opportunity to address the growth in this market and deliver value at a relatively low cost. We are also pleased with the growth of our small business financing initiatives, which include two complementary products. Our receivables purchase agreement product under the Business Backer brand and a line of credit product under our Headway brands. We grew small business originations sequentially in the first quarter despite a typically seasonal softer loan demand at this time of the year and businesses regroup from the holiday season. As a result, our portfolio increased by more than 20% from the fourth quarter and our small business offerings now represent 13% of our total portfolio. Now we want to turn briefly to the ongoing CFPB rule making. Our mission at Enova is to help hardworking people fulfill the financial responsibilities with fast, trustworthy credit. As detailed in a recent survey by the Federal Reserve Board, 47% Americans so they didn’t have sufficient savings to cover a $400 emergency. We believe that CFPB recognizes this need and we remain convinced that the CFPB will maintain access to credit for the many millions of Americans who need it, allowing us to continue fulfilling our mission. As we’ve discussed in the past, we are confident in our ability to manage though the forthcoming regulatory changes in the U.S. and continue to believe that Enova will thrive under any likely regulatory construct and remain a large and profitable player in the industry. Over the last two years, we have successfully managed through substantial regulatory changes in the UK, our sophisticated analytics with more customer history than any other online lender will also be extremely valuable in addressing any required changes and our diversification efforts position us well to mitigate the impact from proposed rule changes on our overall business. In terms of the CFPB’s process, the current consensus is at the proposed rules will be published in the next few months possibly as early as mid May. As a reminder, following publications of the proposed rules, there will be a common period followed by a CFPB response. Once final rules are published, there will be an implementation period of up to a year. This makes it likely that the new rules will not take effect until late 2017 at the earliest. We’ve done significant preparatory work to be able to quickly access the impact of the proposed rules on our business. Accordingly, once the rules have published and we have an opportunity to review and evaluate them. We intend to properly communication assessment of their potential impact on our business to you. To summarize, we are very pleased with our strong performance both from a financial standpoint as well our ability to achieve important milestone. And so far Q2 appears to be off to a good start with demand picking up earlier following the tax refund season than we’ve seen in recent years. Enova was one of the earlier entrants of the online lending market and has more than 12-years of lending experience. Our success is the testament to the strength from proprietary technology platform our advance analytics and our very talented employees. We have succeeded during significant changes in regulation and drastic changes in the economy including the great recession. We believe that our strategy to grow our core offerings while diversifying it to new profitable products that is working we know regulatory changes are coming in the U.S. and we believe we are well prepared and will emerge a winner. In the meantime, our UK business is doing well and our new initiatives are driving growth and beginning to contribute meaningful to our bottom-line. Now, I will turn the call over to Rob Clifton our CFO to go over the financials in more details and following Rob’s remarks, we’ll be happy to answer any questions that you may have. Rob.