Barry R. Sloane
Analyst · Raymond James
Thank you very much, operator, and good afternoon, everyone, and welcome to the third quarter 2026 financial results conference call for NewtekOne, stock symbol NEWT on the NASDAQ. Joining me today on today's call is Frank DeMaria, the Chief Financial Officer of NewtekOne as well as the CFO of the Newtek Bank National Association. I wanted to thank Bryce Rowe, in charge of Investor Relations for NewtekOne, for helping put the presentation together and also the management team of all the Newtek entities for helping deliver a real solid quarter for us. For those of you that want to follow the PowerPoint presentation along, please go to newtekone.com, go to the Investor Relations section, and you'll be able to follow along with this presentation in that particular area under Presentations. I'd like to bring everyone's attention to Slide #2 in that presentation. Please note the note that is in the document regarding forward-looking statements. Let us go to Slide #3. Third quarter 2026 highlights. We delivered basic and diluted earnings per share of $0.34. We are able to reiterate the 2026 earnings per share guidance range of $1.70 to $1.80 for the full calendar year that is maintained. Important to note, up and to the right pattern in growth in book value and tangible book value continues to be maintained intact. As a matter of fact, our book value came in at $12.80, tangible book $12.30, respectively. The tangible book value growth was up 10% year-over-year and 78% since we took over the bank in January of 2023 and converted the publicly traded NewtekOne into a financial holding company. Also important to note that we are able to continue to grow earnings with real good operating leverage. On a year-over-year basis, our Q3 2026 operating expenses were flat and at 3.7%, respectively, on asset growth of 47% and 3.7% is on a year-over-year comparison. Important to note, the company, since acquiring the nationally chartered bank has had good experience in growing deposits, and they have more than doubled for the second consecutive quarter. In 15 quarters, we have grown Newtek Bank's deposits from $142 million when we took over the bank to $2.6 billion. Non-affiliate business deposits increased quarter-over-quarter and year-over-year by $13 million and $109 million, respectively. And core consumer deposits climbed $231 million quarter-over-quarter and $1.1 billion year-over-year, with loan originations also growing with deposits fueling that growth and year-to-date loan originations of $1.2 billion were up 12% year-over-year. Also important to note, for the SBA's fiscal year ending September 30, 2026, Newtek Bank ranked #1 by volume -- excuse me, #1 in units of SBA loans approved and #2 by dollars. Slide #4. In focusing on NewtekOne, I think the important aspect of our organization, as we look at the market and the economy, clearly, the concept of how our business is going to grow going forward with the marketplace really embracing artificial intelligence, or as the President calls it, super intelligence. We have built one integrated platform over the course of 28 years to serve the 36 million demographic that are defined as U.S. SMBs through 5 digital solutions without the use of traditional bankers, brokers or BDOs. We think this is extremely important because as the marketplace starts to move towards the use of super intelligence or artificial intelligence, organizations that embrace that, particularly financial institutions and banks, are going to be extremely important and viable going forward. We do have concerns over industry that is primarily focused on traditional bankers and traditional branch network to acquire customers. On Slide #4, our NewTracker system, you could see, is able to acquire 600 to 800 unique business referrals per day and the cost per referral is $0. We manage that through alliance partners. It's all in our public documentation and our Ks and Qs. Organizations like UBS, Morgan Stanley, and Raymond James, One came up a trade association that don't make these types of loans, aren't depositories, don't do payroll, don't do insurance, don't do real-time payments for their customers to us to provide them solution and enhance the overall benefit to the relationship they have with the customer. So I think it's important to note over 28 years and 3.5 years operating as a digital direct bank, we have excelled in banking, lending, insurance, real-time payments, and payroll. The patented NewTracker system, which I think is extremely important to our business model and its proprietary capabilities are extremely valuable. The Newtek Advantage, which is the business portal, which is on our website that gives the client a real advantage of doing business with us over other financial institutions, offers a single pane of glass, delivering a full product suite to the customers. It gives them transactional capability, analytics, and data that our competitors simply do not. Looking at our organization further, we are an S&P-rated servicer. We're currently servicing over $5 billion worth of loans. And this is a business that we excel in. We service for the FDIC. We service for NCUA. NCUA is the credit union regulator. We have a nice reputation in servicing small- and medium-sized business owners and loans that are made to that particular investor group. Also important to note, we have a frictionless digital account opening infrastructure that continues to gain momentum. Now a lot of banks have digital account opening, but it's primarily for consumer checking or consumer high-yield savings. There are very few financial institutions and in particular, even the biggest banks in the United States, in order to open up the banking account for business, you have to go into the branch and fill out the paperwork. We've done a very good job in this particular area. We have approximately 47,000 depository accounts with no traditional bankers with 0 branches that basically are assisted by business service specialists on camera in the United States 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. We're very proud of our operating history and have really delivered robust, flexible, and financial returns, both for ROAA, ROATCE, revenue growth, and our last 12 months of trailing net income. On Slide #5, we talk about our ecosystem for the customer with our five solutions built around the SMB, banking, lending, insurance, payments and payroll, all necessary and important functions for business owners that instead of dealing with us, if they don't deal with us, they're going to ADP and Paychex. They're going to a local insurance agency, they go to a fintech for their loan and their bank for deposits. And regarding real-time payments, they just don't have it. So we're very proud of the ecosystem that we have built for our customers and think it is very much of a hidden value in our organization. Historically, we have expensed the intellectual property and the IT off of our balance sheet and income statement. Slide #6, NewtekOne's ecosystem, once again, focusing on that SMB value proposition. It all relates to the customer, helping them grow their business and their revenues, reduce business owner risk, reduces business owner expenses and give them one platform, the Newtek Advantage for real-time data, which enables us to onboard them in a frictionless manner very quickly, give a customer a real-time view of their balances, card batches, chargebacks, ACH, Fed wires visible in the Newtek Advantage as well as an invoicing system, as well as full analytics, capturing historic transaction information and a lot of information that exists in the Advantage, including document storage and QuickBooks integration, as well as QuickBooks Analytics. On Slide #7, there's a nice diagram on Slide 7, which really discusses how clients approach us with a referral through the NewTracker system. So you have this very big funnel, some coming from financial institutions for referrals, trade associations, CPAs, law firms, and alliance partners. And we get these unique referrals. We don't pay for them. We do pay a success fee if we provide a solution, some upfront in the case of lending and ongoing reoccurring income usually on the other solutions. And we're able to do this without branches, traditional bankers or brokers. We have -- we say hundreds of alliance partners. It's actually in excess of 1,000 that we have contracts with. And these referrals come in on a regular basis. But when customers come to us for a loan, we don't look at the client saying, you're applying for an SBA loan, you're applying for commercial and industrial loan or a line of credit. We look at the customer and fit them with the best solution. So if we actually go to our website, we don't advertise on the website, we're an SBA lender. In many cases, they get an SBA loan, but we wind up giving them the best product at an attractive price and a low monthly payment to fit their needs. NewTracker is our patented engine. It's one application. It's one CRM. It gives us tremendous intake, particularly using artificial intelligence to examine tax returns and spread financials, to examine lease agreements, to examine operating agreement as well as using AI to go to municipalities and get liens. This is how we're able to make loans on a completed loan package within 7 days from having all the information in one particular area. We also offer real-time tracking to our alliance partners, 24/7, 365 as well as giving them nightly reports. Underwriting and compliance check, it's terrific. We have complete data on the interaction with the customer, whether it's a text, whether it's an e-mail or a telephonic conversation. Let's go to Slide #8. The Newtek Advantage: a single pane of glass. Extremely important is the quality of service. Matter of fact, when you look at our Trustpilot scores, NewtekOne on Trustpilot, 4.9 out of 5. Newtek Bank, 4.5 out of 5. When you go to entities like Deposit.com and you compare us against some of the top banks, which are below 2. They're like 1.8, 1.7, 1.6, we're 4.0 on Deposit.com. We're very proud of the fact that Trustpilot has us positioned as the #1 payroll provider for service and #2 in real-time payments. The Newtek Advantage snapshot on Slide #8 gives you an idea of the view that the client gets when signing up for one or many of our Newtek products. It's a digital-first entry. It gives them real-time payments clarity, whether it's a wire, whether it's making payroll with the money going in on Monday and paying employees on Monday, whether it's having a batch of a Visa, Mastercard receivable actually hitting the same day that we're able to process the transaction, showing the client in the banking portal, what their batches are, refunds, chargebacks, everything right in the portal. We really give the client a live view of cash flow, payments, loans, banking, and payroll. And importantly, it's on demand, on camera access 24/7 individuals in the United States that can help the customer. It's really tremendous value beyond traditional banking, particularly when we give clients unlimited document storage, web traffic analytics, and 2-way QuickBooks integration. On Slide #9, this is what NewTracker does. It does many, many things, not only for the client, for the alliance partner, but for our organization. And those Trustpilot scores that we get are not by happenstance. It's a live check on the operational efficiencies of our business service specialists and our CSRs in the field each and every day, every a.m., every p.m., every day, every week, and every quarter. Slide #10, which we talked about a little earlier, demonstrates the tangible book value per share, has a nice depiction of the dividends on top. It shows the growth from the time we bought the bank to today, $12.30 in tangible book with dividends $15.11. Slide #11 shows the deposit growth and the success that we talked about, 11,646 business accounts for checking and business savings, core deposits, 35,000 accounts. Slide #12. We talk about this product quite a bit. It's an important product to us. It's a growth product for us. We refer to it as commercial and industrial, acronym C&I LA, LA standing for long-amortizing loan securitizations. What we've learned over the course of 23 years is clients strongly prefer amortized loans without a balloon payment over 10 to 25 years. We do require personal guarantees joint and several and every 20% equity owner or greater at a minimum. And we also lien personal and business assets when obviously, the business assets are required, personal when applicable. But you could see when we put these loans on our balance sheet, we then put them into securitization. We're now doing these loans out of Newtek Bank National Association. So we talk about initial overcollateralization and current overcollateralization. That is the ownership certificates in these securitizations as they're done off balance sheet. Important to note, look at the current OC versus initial. So you could see the excess cash flow that we get from these loans is amortizing the senior debt in the securitization. So it grows the ownership certificates and the book fairly rapidly over the course of time. I think this is indicative of the power of the excess cash flow coming off of loans that are put on the books at treasuries +950 over the 5 years. When you look at our securitization spreads, which are things that we've talked about in past presentations, they're typically 660 off the 5-year treasury. The loan is typically fixed for 5 years. There's 100 basis points of servicing, which we keep. And then we have a spread historically of 560 to where the bonds are yielding in the marketplace. Slide #13 is an important slide that's Newtek Bank, N.A. You could see that at the Bank, and we're looking to do more and more of our business at the Bank and less and less of our business at the holding company. We have fairly high ROAAs, ROEs, efficiency ratios are low. NIMs are high, cost of deposits. It's market rate. I continue to say this on conference calls. If you're paying the consumer 1% or you're paying them 3.8% -- and I use the consumer, whether it's a business or whether it's actually an individual, what's more likely to move? Paying them a market rate of interest or a rate that is materially below what the 2-year treasury or T-bills are currently paying? We think it's the latter. We think we give our customers a good deal. And through the Newtek Advantage, we actually are able to do more things for the customer where we're typically able to pay them 1% for business checking, 3.5% on savings. And so why should they give us their deposits below the risk-free rate? Because we give them value, because we give them real-time payroll, because we give them real-time payments, because we give them analytics and transactional capability and data that they simply can't get at the top-4 big banks who historically love this customer base because they can grab their deposits at 2% to 3% below the risk-free rate. One other important note when you look at our organization relative to capital and credit, we're utilizing more of our capital at the Bank and at the holding company. Nonaccruals, and I think this is extremely important, excluding government guarantees that the SBA prefers in SOP that we buy out of the secondary versus them, 3.9% nonaccruals. Obviously, when you include the government guarantees and the guarantees are still intact, it's a much higher number. So as market participants and analysts take the call report data, jam it into the AI models and they come out and go, wow, this is really high, that's where we're running into issues. For those of you that are following the company, paying attention to what we're doing, we believe we've historically done a good job over 23 years, managing risk and reward and you're getting compensated for the risk that's being taken. Slide #14 provides further evidence of the fact that we are working very hard in improving the quality of the portfolio with enhanced hires in the servicing department, managing our ACL to loans held for investment, excluding the guarantees. And this is important data and statistics that we look at and manage on a regular basis. Slide #15 addresses our returns that we're providing our shareholders. With that, I'd like to turn the presentation over to Frank DeMaria and then we'll go to Q&A. Frank?