Mark Casale
Analyst · JP Morgan. Your line is open
You're going to hate this answer, it's too early to tell. Just again given the relative, kind of aging of our portfolio. I think you make a good point. We do believe, there's structural changes and we thought that for a while, given again I'll go back. We talked a lot about it on the road show with QM, which we felt was a structural change. And again, just given people history around the mortgage insurance business. Overtime there's been a downturn. The industry has emerged stronger. Back in the 80s, most of the mortgage insurers were regional based and the state requirements around capital were actually quite in terms of reserves was quite small and that got corrected. Going into the 90s, where you had geographic dispersion in the portfolio amongst all the MIs, you had much stronger capital standards at the state level. And it led to 17 straight years of profitability. So I think, that gets lost in people and obviously, the industry. In addition to most financial services, companies went through the great recession that we've had and I think from an industry standpoint, all else being equal, it came out of it okay and I think it gets. I think the reputation of the industry is not warranted in terms, an industry that paid $50 billion for the claims through all that stuff, but again coming out of this downturn. What happened again, strengthening PMIERs, clear transparent capital standards, for the first time ever. So I think that's structural change a long way of QM that you're going to see over the coming years and then, just back to the credit side. We mentioned this in script, but the QA, quality assurance that we're seeing at the GSEs. I think BMI quality assurance has gotten better. Lenders has gotten better. All that bodes well for - to what you say is the structural change. And then add on top of that, the portfolio is a higher FICO than it did. I mean in the downturn probably pre-crisis, the average FICO was closer to 715 and also again jumping back to pricing. In 2007, there wasn't any FICO breaks. Everything was priced the same. So the mortgage insurers were not prepared, enable to price the risk as FICO started to migrate down with the advent of PMIERs and what we're seeing. We actually started seeing risk-based pricing post crisis. And PMIERs is really just a continued transition to that, when you put that up. I think the industry is better positioned from a pricing and credit standpoint than it has in the past. I think your idea around structural change is actually a very good one.