Earnings Labs

NewtekOne, Inc. 8.00% Fixed Rate Senior Notes due 2028 (NEWTI)

Q2 2015 Earnings Call· Sat, Aug 1, 2015

$25.23

-0.90%

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Transcript

Operator

Operator

Good day, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the Newtek Business Services Corporation Second Quarter Earnings Conference Call. [Operator Instructions] As a reminder, this call is being recorded. I would now like to introduce your host for today’s conference, CEO of Newtek Business Corporation, Barry Sloane. Please go ahead.

Barry Sloane

Analyst

Thank you, everyone, and truly appreciate everyone joining us for our second quarter 2015 financial results conference call. I am Barry Sloane, Founder, President, CEO of Newtek Business Services Corp. NASDAQ stock symbol NEWT. And here with me today to present our results for the second quarter is Jenny Eddelson, our Chief Accounting Officer. Jenny, would you like to read the Safe Harbor statement?

Jenny Eddelson

Analyst

Sure. This presentation contains certain forward-looking statements. Words such as believes, expects, plans, anticipates, forecasts and future or similar expressions are intended to identify forward-looking statements. All forward-looking statements involve a number of risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from the plans, intentions and expectations reflected in or suggested by the forward-looking statements. Such risks and uncertainties include among other things intensified competition, operating problems and their impact on revenues and profit margins, anticipated future business strategies and financial performance, anticipated future number of customers, business prospects, legislative developments and other similar matters. Risk factors, cautionary statements and other conditions which could cause Newtek’s actual results to differ from management’s current expectations are contained in Newtek’s filings with the SEC and available through https://www.SEC.gov.com

Barry Sloane

Analyst

Thank you, Jenny. And we are very pleased to present our second quarter financial highlights, our second full quarter reporting as a business development Corporation. Net asset value for the quarter ended June 30, 2015 equaled $169.6 million, compared with a NAV of $169.6 million at the end of the prior quarter and a NAV of $16.31 at the end of the prior year. I would like to remind everybody when we were doing our road show prior to becoming a business development corp, we were out with a $16.65 NAV based on a 7.8 million share count. When we actually raised our shares, we went from a 7.8 million share count to a 10.2 million share count, so the minute the money hit us as a BDC, our NAV was effectively $12.73. So we’ve had a fairly significant increase in NAV from the time we raised money on November 12 from $12.73 effective to $16.62, which is where we are today, almost a 30% increase over the course of eight months. Adjusted net income for the period was $5 million, or $0.49 a share. And for the six months ended June 30, 2015, adjusted net income was $10.3 million, or $1.01 a share. Newtek Business Service Corp. in the quarter restructured it’s $50 million revolving line of credit with Capital One Bank to remove the guarantees from all the other portfolio companies as well as the stock pledges, and we were able to extend our line of credit to finance SBA 7(a) loans with Capital One Bank an additional year. We also signed a lease for 34,000 square feet of office space in Lake Success, New York, which is on the Long Island-Queens border, that we should be into that space in 2016. We anticipate that moving a lot…

Jenny Eddelson

Analyst

Thank you, Barry. Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining today’s call. I’d like to start with some financial highlights from our second quarter 2015 consolidated statement of operations. As Barry mentioned earlier, this is our second [Inaudible] reporting as a BDC, so there are no consolidated BDC financial statements to refer to for the comparable prior period. Please turn to slide 22. We had investment income of $5.6 million, which included approximately $2.2 million of interest income. Substantially, all interest income for the three months ended June 30, 2015 and June 30, 2014 was derived from our SBA loan portfolio, which generated $2.2 million and $1.6 million of interest income, respectively. The increase in interest income can be attributed to the increase in the average outstanding performing loan portfolio, which went from $102 million at June 30, 2014 to $132.6 million as of June 30, 2015. The increase was the result of new loan originations over the 12-month period. Servicing income, which is recurring revenues that we earn from servicing the guaranteed portions of loans originated and sold by Newtek Small Business Finance, increased $153,000 for the three months ended June 30, 2015 compared to the same period in 2014. The increase was attributable to the growth in the size of the total SBA loan portfolio for which we earn servicing income of approximately $144.2 million period over period. Dividend income was approximately $1.8 million for the three months ended June 30, 2015 and represents dividend declared from our controlled portfolio companies. Our expenses for the quarter totaled approximately $7.9 million and include salaries, interest expense and other G&A such as rent, marketing and referral fees. As an internally managed BDC, we do not pay any incentive or base management fees to an external manager. We believe the…

Barry Sloane

Analyst

Thank you, Jenny. Operator, we would love to take questions from the audience.

Operator

Operator

Thank you. Ladies and Gentlemen. [Operator Instructions] Our first question comes from the line of Chris York with JMP Securities. Your line is open, please go ahead.

Chris York

Analyst

Good morning, Barry and Jenny.

Barry Sloane

Analyst

Hi, Chris. How’re doing?

Chris York

Analyst

Good, thanks. A couple of question to begin this morning, on the acquisition of Premier. So it’s my understanding that Premier will be treated as a wholly owned portfolio company. So is it correct to assume that the income will be in the form to the BDC in dividend income? And then do you guys intend to distribute all earnings at Premier to the BDC?

Barry Sloane

Analyst

We do, Chris. The portfolio companies don’t need much of any CapEx to run their business, and we see that being distributed straight up.

Chris York

Analyst

Got it. Okay. And then could you elaborate a little bit more on the 25% year-to-date revenue growth at Premier? What was driving that? Was that a – did the company invest in more sales people? Was it new product driven? Maybe just a little bit more color.

Barry Sloane

Analyst

One of the attractive aspects of Premier, which was created and established by former founder Jeff, is their operations and methodologies to how they handle clients. They do a great job in the growth aspects of the payment processing space, which is mobile payments and tablet based integration as well as integration into point of sales terminals that are non-tablet based. I’d non-tablet base say the fourth area of growth relates to payment processing for educational institutes and municipalities where visibility to do convenience fees and surcharging. In the payment space today, the old how you got them business of walking in with a statement and a rep, saying I could beat your pricing doesn’t work anymore. Premier has developed what I would call a front-end technology to be able to consultatively talk to the customer, book and bind the customer, and put them on multiple platforms. So from our perspective, in addition to acquiring a great team of people, great cash flows in the right space, good distribution channel we also picked up a relationship with Elavon, which is owned by US Bank. That’s a top five processor. So we’ve got more processing platforms to be on. Those things all reduce our costs. And although we’re going to keep Premier as a separate segregate portfolio company based in Long Island, which should fit well into our Queens-Long Island strategy of growing under one roof, we believe that premier has a business methodology and technologies that will be able to migrate to UPS Wisconsin as just better business practices. So when we look at the two books of business with customers coming into us looking for solutions, not only do we think we’ve got a great opportunity with premier in terms of its cash flows and its methodology, but we believe that the things that they’ve perfected we’re going to be able to migrate over to UPS list to get that hyper growth out of that entity as well. So when you combine these entities, you’re looking at probably $13 million of EBITDA. So as we continue to grow and do acquisitions, we would love to get that $13 million to $23 million to $33 million to $53 million. Now you’re looking at a business opportunity where you could maybe spin it off and get that big public multiple that the Heartlands and the Vaniffs enjoy. And we also think about our overall strategy and customer count, cross selling, driving into the customer. By the way, none of this is going to happen in the next quarter. So - my investor base always wants to know, but it just takes time. And we’re excited about what we’re doing. We’re excited about that acquisition. These are the kinds of acquisitions that we need to do.

Chris York

Analyst

[Inaudible] for all that color. Elaborating on the vision is very helpful. You know, you had 40% EBITDA margins in that business, or Premier did. Would you predict or assume that that could be potentially sustainable? How should I think about that from a modeling perspective?

Barry Sloane

Analyst

From your mouth to God’s ears, I just don’t see that being sustainable, particularly as the business grows and we look to reinvest and to get it onto a bigger platform. So typically these businesses are – they’re barely double digit margins. So I think that as we grow, the nice thing is we had a pretty big gap between 40% and 10% or 12%, which is considered good in the business. So all of our shareholders, God willing, should be able to enjoy that over the course of time. I think as you model it, you kind of – maybe you want to gradually straight-line that. Over the course of three years or five years, it shrinks to a more normalized approach. But at that point, hopefully Premier is $20 million of EBITDA and not $2.5 million of EBITDA.

Chris York

Analyst

Sure. Thanks for that. Switching gears a little bit, so jumping to 7(a) loans. I missed in Jenny’s comments how many you guys originated in the second quarter and sold. So you could you just refresh me on that real quickly?

Barry Sloane

Analyst

Yes, we funded $53 million; we funded $50 million in the first quarter. Jenny is thumbing through her documents for the actual amount of loans that were sold. We typically look at the first half of the year as 40% of our originations and the second half as 60%. And if you look at those numbers, we are probably 255, 260. We did change our 7(a) guidance from 230 to 270. 504 will be outside of that. We haven’t forecasted that yet. Maybe do that on the next call. Right. Originations and sold, $53 million for the second quarter originated [multiple speakers] – originated $54 million and sold $52 million.

Chris York

Analyst

That’s helpful. And then maybe a little context in regards to I mean you only trimmed your guidance by $10 million on both the lower end and upper end. But maybe just kind of qualitatively, what’s going on there?

Barry Sloane

Analyst

I don’t know. I think that we always want to make sure we over-deliver. And we just thought it was prudent to make a $10 million midpoint adjustment. We didn’t adjust the dividend number because, based on where pricing is and our mechanics and the room we have in the model, we’re good on the cash flow. So I do think that I always try to be fair and forthright. The reality of the lending market is it is getting more competitive. There are more people trying to get into just small business lending in general, let alone 7(a). So I just think it’s prudent for us to adjust to market conditions, and we see there being more competition, so we made a slight adjustment.

Chris York

Analyst

Got it. Then one last one here and then I’ll jump back in the queue. So we know investors tend to appreciate the internal management structure, which many of the reasons were highlighted in slide 19. With some investment in the business in the first half of the year, what opportunities do you guys think exists for operational leverage potentially over the next 18 months?

Barry Sloane

Analyst

Well, I think that clearly if you think about operational leverage, if we could do acquisitions and insurance agency and payroll and cloud, we’re going to experience really great operational leverage in those particular segments. From a lending perspective, if you look at what we’re doing in the financing side of things, our cost of capital is coming down. Our equity cost of capital has come down significantly. Look at what we’ve done on the debt side. We’ve got a 7(a) loan only. We have been able to borrow far more significantly on portfolio companies. We had $8 million of debt prior to the Goldman facility, and now we could – I guess at current EBITDA numbers, we’re up to $33 million without having to issue shares. So we see ourselves operating at a much higher level. It’s a lot easier to make money with $0.5 billion BDC than a $100 million BDC. And we plan on getting there through organic growth. There’s also prospectively portfolio acquisitions that we could do in the small business lending space. We’ve had lenders come to us looking to participate in that and give us some leverage. Mind you, it’s really hard to get a 30% equity risk-adjusted return that we currently get in our originations businesses. So in a perfect world, I just snap my fingers, ramp it up by 100% and call it a day. It’s just not realistic. I think that when you look at our Company, we are a 40s net Company. We are an asset allocator. And we want to be very thoughtful as we look at things going forward to make sure that we’ve got multiple businesses that generate really high cash flows. And a lot of people in the space do invest with the dividend, which is important. We want to make sure we return that dividend it’s a high dividend, it’s a stable dividend and also attempt to get higher NAV and share price appreciation. Now, when you look at our share price appreciation, we were up 17% from November 12, 2014 through the end of the year. And I think by July 24 and the beginning of this year, we’re up 38% given the dividend. So we’ve clearly been able to return to shareholders so far as a BDC. It’s tough because those are tough numbers to maintain. But if people really like this business model and actually believe that we can continue to execute at this high level, then I don’t see any reason why we shouldn’t. Maybe we have a lower market-clearing yield for our dividend versus other stocks. Anyway, that’s our thought process on that.

Chris York

Analyst

Yes, it makes sense. Thanks again for all of that color. That is it for me. Congrats on another good quarter as a BDC.

Barry Sloane

Analyst

Thanks, Chris. We appreciate your early call from San Francisco.

Chris York

Analyst

Thanks.

Operator

Operator

Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Robert Brock with West Family Investments. Your line is open. Please go ahead. Okay. It looks like he removed himself from the queue. Our next question comes from the line of Mickey Schleien with Ladenburg. Your line is open. Please go ahead.

Mickey Schleien

Analyst · West Family Investments. Your line is open. Please go ahead. Okay. It looks like he removed himself from the queue. Our next question comes from the line of Mickey Schleien with Ladenburg. Your line is open. Please go ahead.

Yes, good morning, Barry and Jenny. I wanted to start with a question about the process for Congress approving funding for SBA 7(a). I noticed that the Senate recently increased that. Given that many of us are unfamiliar with that process, could you just walk us through how that works and whether there’s any risk to your funding process given that Congress is so unpredictable?

Barry Sloane

Analyst · West Family Investments. Your line is open. Please go ahead. Okay. It looks like he removed himself from the queue. Our next question comes from the line of Mickey Schleien with Ladenburg. Your line is open. Please go ahead.

Appreciate that, Mickey. You know, we’re in an unusual position that we participate in a government program that, with respect to the 7(a), actually returns money to the U.S. Treasury and historically has. It is looked at as a zero-budget item. However, there still needs to be an appropriation of guarantee. And what the SBA does with members of the Senate banking committee and House small business committee, they work on creating appropriation every year as part of the budget. We recently saw that the amount of allocation for 2014 was running out; I think it was $18.5 billion. And what that means, Mickey, was as of, say, some point July I don’t know the exact date you couldn’t go to the SBA and get any additional guarantee numbers from pipeline. We typically get guarantee numbers as somebody who has been doing this for 12 years. As early as the SOP, which is the SBA’s term for their policies and procedures, allows us to do so. So the pipeline was covered, and the House and Senate on a bipartisan basis which I’ve got to tell you, in this world to get Republicans and Democrats to actually agree on something quickly is a miracle and to put it through. So I think that the fact that in a very short order both the House and the Senate, Democrats and Republicans, came by and increased the funding amount this year which arguably wasn’t necessary because most people had their pipeline covered or at least people that have been in the business to $23.5 billion. So there’s plenty of availability. If you look at it as a percentage basis, which I haven’t done, that’s probably like a 20% to 25% increase. So, I think that it is a government program. We have got a lot of risk factors in our documents with the fact that we are involved in a government program and requires funding. The government can change rules at any time which is frankly true of private enterprise as well. But I think the most important fact is bipartisan program, real quick change. Obama actually signed the bill with an auto-sign technique overseas, which I’m told he’s only done six times in his presidency. It was important. We paid attention to it. We are plugged in. And it was important for us to follow, and we appreciate your bringing that up on the call.

Mickey Schleien

Analyst · West Family Investments. Your line is open. Please go ahead. Okay. It looks like he removed himself from the queue. Our next question comes from the line of Mickey Schleien with Ladenburg. Your line is open. Please go ahead.

Thanks for that explanation, Barry. I know that Newtek follows a variety of indicators from the small and medium-size businesses you lend to. And from our perspective, there’s just a lot of mixed messages out there given prices for commodities, the volatility in stock markets around the world, currency volatility. Can you just give us your 30,000-foot view level of where you think we are in the economic cycle and what risks that might pose to lending in general and Newtek specifically?

Barry Sloane

Analyst · West Family Investments. Your line is open. Please go ahead. Okay. It looks like he removed himself from the queue. Our next question comes from the line of Mickey Schleien with Ladenburg. Your line is open. Please go ahead.

Sure. Mickey, one of the things that we do in our servicing department in addition to talking to all of our borrowers, one of our senior members of our loan committee Dave Lyons who heads up capital markets, directly speaks to our 25 largest borrowers in our portfolio. And those conversations, frankly, are consultative. Dave is a CPA and CFA and quite knowledgeable. And the conversations he has relate to how are things, what do you see in the economy, what do you see in revenue trends, expense trends, how are your cash flows? When he was speaking to Peter Downs, Chief Lending Officer, this morning, the reports that we’re getting back from our top 25 are business is doing very well, there’s no strings and it’s probably the first time in many years that people are optimistic. Now, I would say that this is a tough market for marginal businesses, but there are expenses creeping up. So you want to be careful as a lender. If the businesses are on the bubble, you want to be a little cautious now. Net asset values have increased; that is very important for businesses because they can tap it to equity in their homes. There’s more availability of credit. That’s very, very constructive. We have a very modest constructive outlook on business going forward. We think that most of the strains are behind us. Banks are significantly healthier. They are lending again. And I guess the biggest problem really is cost control, and that’s where businesses have got to keep making investments in technology. Which, by the way, was making it difficult in the area of jobs because software and technology is replacing headcount. And those are some of the trends that we see.

Mickey Schleien

Analyst · West Family Investments. Your line is open. Please go ahead. Okay. It looks like he removed himself from the queue. Our next question comes from the line of Mickey Schleien with Ladenburg. Your line is open. Please go ahead.

Very good. My last question, Barry if I’m not mistaken, Jeff Rubin will now be your Newtek’s single largest shareholder. Can you just walk us through potential for him to divest some of his holdings given how significant they’re going to be?

Barry Sloane

Analyst · West Family Investments. Your line is open. Please go ahead. Okay. It looks like he removed himself from the queue. Our next question comes from the line of Mickey Schleien with Ladenburg. Your line is open. Please go ahead.

I think it’s a fair question. Jeff has been the second largest shareholder for, let’s see, September 2000, or 15 years. So if you look at the history, it’s pretty good. If you look at my [Inaudible] four filings, I’ve always been a buyer despite not having a tremendous amount of liquidity. I don’t see any changing in Jeff’s dynamic. He gets very healthy dividend. He likes what we’re doing. He’s close to us. He’s going to serve as an advisor to me to help continue to grow the trajectory not only in Premier but also in UPS Wisconsin. So I’m not totally concerned about Jeff divesting of his shares. And in the past, clearly someone like myself or Jeff divesting of shares would’ve been really problematic. But you look at our share volume, it’s doing well. But I’ve just got to be honest with you: anything can happen. I’m not Jeff’s financial advisor. I just don’t see him doing any divesting in the near future. I have no knowledge of it, and I’d be very surprised with it. If he said I’ve got to take all cash in the deal, we would’ve done it. But it’s [Inaudible]. Yes, he took $2.5 million of stock, which is restricted.

Mickey Schleien

Analyst · West Family Investments. Your line is open. Please go ahead. Okay. It looks like he removed himself from the queue. Our next question comes from the line of Mickey Schleien with Ladenburg. Your line is open. Please go ahead.

Right, right. I appreciate that. Those are all my questions for today. Thanks for taking my questions.

Barry Sloane

Analyst · West Family Investments. Your line is open. Please go ahead. Okay. It looks like he removed himself from the queue. Our next question comes from the line of Mickey Schleien with Ladenburg. Your line is open. Please go ahead.

.:

Operator

Operator

Thank you. We do have a follow-up question from the line of Robert Brock with West Family Investments. Your line is now open.

Robert Brock

Analyst

Hi, Barry. Thanks for taking my call. Two questions. Could you talk a little bit about the 504 business? Since you don’t hold the loans for very long could you talk about the risk of the 504 program and how big you think it could be? And related to that, are there other SBA programs other than the 7(a) and the 504 that you’re looking at getting into? Thanks.

Barry Sloane

Analyst

Appreciate that, Rob. In 504, let’s sort of use the business owner, the leasing is manufacturing company is leasing the real estate for his manufacturing company for years. He looks at it with his accountant and says, you know what, I’m much better off buying the building, not paying rent and depreciating real estate. So the building appraises at $1 million, he takes $100,000 out of the CD and he starts [Inaudible] making the 504 loan, which is strictly against the value of the real estate. And we charge him a couple points, we have a servicing fee, we price it fixed versus floating, and we create a $900,000 loan of which $500,000 is a conventional first; $400,000 is a second, which we have to hold for 90 days in what’s known in the file core business as the bridge. And then after that the government takes it out of the bridge. So you have a modest amount of risk. And I say modest, it’s fairly small, that for some reason the loan doesn’t perform or gets hung somehow and you can’t get it taken out. With our experienced staff, I look at that risk as extremely de minimis. As a matter fact, the advanced rate on that business from our prospective lender is 90%. So it’s 90% of the full value of the loan. So you can see even our lender that you’re familiar with realizes this is not tremendous on risk. So the government takes it out and then you have got the ability to sell the conventional first into the secondary market, and there’s an insatiable appetite from investors to own a 50% value on a piece of commercial real estate. We also can take that and hold it if we choose to and put it into our 7/8 securitizations. Once that’s sold, we’ve made a $900,000 loan, and we have gotten $900,000 back plus a premium plus fees from the borrower plus the servicing income and we’re back out on the street making those loans. I think in a full-year in 2016, I’d like to believe that we can do $50 million of loans conservatively. It’s not out of the question that that could be $100 million or $200 million. I don’t have good visibility on that at the moment, and I don’t want to pump up the number. But 504 loans are typically larger, and the number I threw out was the whole loan, right? So it’s not inconceivable we could do $200 million worth of loans, of which $100 million are conventional firsts that we get a premium on. Particularly with our distribution channels. So I would hope that we would get there in short order. Too early for me to determine what short order is, but I guess I’m going to get some pipeline guidance from Gary Taylor and I’m going to make sure he thanks you for having me ask him that question.

Robert Brock

Analyst

Thanks, Barry. One other question. You had talked about on previous conference calls and when we talked about having to have an equity raise possibly the fourth quarter this year. Has that changed given the fact that you now have such a line of credit or term loan with Goldman Sachs?

Barry Sloane

Analyst

You know, Rob, I think that it’s a good question. What we do here, Jenny, myself, the Board, we’re looking at opportunities regularly. So our job function is to look at a great opportunity like premier, seize it, fund it and put it in the portfolio. So – and I’d like to attempt to try to change the mindset of investors on this call and investors that typically look at BDCs and think that equity raising is bad. In our case we raised equity at $12.5 in November, and now look at the stock price. And the only reason why the stock price is up is because the market believes we can take it, put it to work in these businesses and get higher returns, which are attractive to the instability of the dividend as well as NAV. So the timing of a capital raise can be based upon what acquisitions we have in the pipeline or constantly looking at things, what our loan business looks like and the timing of special dividends as well as securitizing uninsured pieces of our SBA portfolio. So if I had to make a guess, it could be fourth, it could be third, it could be first quarter of 2016. We have filed a shelf. The shelf enables us to do debt and equity. And we are pretty excited about where we are because our cost of equity capital with our stock price going higher has gone down. Our cost of debt capital has gone down because our lenders have given us more generous rates; we’re getting more leverage out of our other properties like our portfolio companies. There was a securitization done in the market by one of our competitors, ReadyCap, that did a [Inaudible] $100 million [ph] seasoned uninsured 7(a) securitization. It cleared the market at 1.8%. We our last transaction cleared at 3.5% single-A. It was smaller. So as we move toward the $100 hundred million dollars-plus, we might be able to add seasoned loans, our execution on securitizations will get better. So I know I just sort of filibustered a little bit on the question. I think it could be anywhere from - it could be anywhere, from – it really depends on the opportunities and I think that’s the best way to answer that question.

Robert Brock

Analyst

Thanks a lot, Barry. Appreciate it.

Barry Sloane

Analyst

Thank you, Rob.

Operator

Operator

[Operator Instruction] Our next question comes from the line of Marc Silk with Silk Investment Advisors. Your line is now open.

Marc Silk

Analyst · Silk Investment Advisors. Your line is now open.

Hi, Barry. How are you?

Barry Sloane

Analyst · Silk Investment Advisors. Your line is now open.

Good, Marc. How’re you doing today?

Marc Silk

Analyst · Silk Investment Advisors. Your line is now open.

Good. A lot of information to digest. Maybe I’m naive, but I’m surprised that I’m the only one who’s bringing up well, besides you that one time $3.29 dividend. I really had no idea what to expect. And I just want to say for my client base, thank you. So let’s see, I saw that article about Congress, and I agree with you, it shows you how important this is the SBA program to have bipartisanship support. But I was really impressed that I guess three quarters of the fiscal year not even have already surpassed the amount that’s being loaned out, which just shows you that there is just incredible growth in this area, which should be definitely exciting for you I would think.

Barry Sloane

Analyst · Silk Investment Advisors. Your line is now open.

Clearly, utilization guarantee shows that there is greater borrower demand. People are getting more optimistic off of very low levels. So there’s no question; the economy is better, the capital is better. From our standpoint, we still want to make sure we pick really good credits. So, we’ll let others be involved and get the weaker credits. We want to make sure we are selective and get the good credits. You know, extending credit is an important aspect the important aspect to extending credit is not to try to make loans from making loans safe, but you really want to make good loans. So we want to be really prudent and have prudent growth versus explosive growth. Beware of lenders that are growing 50%, 100%, 200% a year because it’s I don’t care how much capital you have; you’re not being too choosy.

Marc Silk

Analyst · Silk Investment Advisors. Your line is now open.

Well, you know I’ve been a shareholder since 2006, and that’s the one thing that I really respect about the Company is that you’re not going to do a loan just to do loan. You have had a fantastic success rate, and I know that’s the key to your business. I thought it was interesting where you said now a lot of people try to get in this business. And as a long-term shareholder, I’m in this for the long haul. But it wouldn’t surprise me if someone wants to be the number one SBA lender and look at Newtek and see there’s some interesting things going on there. So I actually prepared this question before your recent purchase of Premier. But where have you I guess I can still ask it and where were you kind of seeing, besides the lending or where were you anticipating to see more organic growth going forward over the next few years?

Barry Sloane

Analyst · Silk Investment Advisors. Your line is now open.

Subject to our ability to execute the cloud businesses – and I know people are looking at me like, are you wacky? The cloud business is the single biggest growth opportunity. It’s currently one of our underperformers. But when you think of the amount of businesses out there that have their data not in the data center, in a closet, we are the local IT provider without hot backup, which is not that expensive anymore. Having an internal IT person, which is a waste of money, you should be leveraging having managed technology 24/7, pay for it when you use it versus paying $4,000, $5,000, $6,000, $7,000 a month to somebody that’s not utilized all the time. So that’s the growth. We’ve got to figure out how to exploit it. And even though it doesn’t look very pretty today, it’s an investment and we think that’s the most prudent investment that we have. I will tell you one thing is for sure: credit markets are going to cycle in and out. And you know, I question whether the lending business can return 60%, 70%, 80% on equity. Do you follow what I’m saying?

Marc Silk

Analyst · Silk Investment Advisors. Your line is now open.

Yes.

Barry Sloane

Analyst · Silk Investment Advisors. Your line is now open.

I do not question whether the cloud business can grow explosively without any credit exposure just by being it. So when I look at things, I’m looking at risk reward, I’m looking at capital allocation, I’m looking at positioning the business not for the next quarter but for the next three, four or five years. We’ve always been a business builder, which is hard to do in a public setting. I think the BDC model works very well for us because investors can get a very generous dividend while they wait for the things that we are working on, which has historically turned out to be good things, to be successful.

Marc Silk

Analyst · Silk Investment Advisors. Your line is now open.

Well, I’m glad you brought up the cloud because I had a few interesting thoughts. Number one is you are very unique where you have clients, customers that do other stuff small business loans, payment processing, et cetera. And I know a cloud customer is a very sticky customer. So one thing you can offer and I know my brother Steven has always asked you about cross-selling, and I know you have always been trying to do that. And your move to near Long Island shows that. But what you can also do is say, listen, okay, you’re a customer of the small business model. We can offer you a one-time maybe discount to getting you set up on the cloud, and then you have that customer forever. Number one. And then the other thing is and we can talk off-line – with your newest hire is that – so I think Microsoft 365 they’re going to start offering through a company called I-PASS exposure to 20 of their hot Wi-Fi hotspots which is probably going to go 40 or 50 million Wi-Fi hotspots. Which if you can access Wi-Fi instead of 3G and then you’re bringing your cell phone bill down, or even if you travel and you’re going to Wi-Fi, you can package that whole thing together. So you’re not just offering cloud but you want to be able to offer something else, right? Because I know cloud is very competitive, but those are just my thoughts on cloud and I’ll let you go there. But I needed to make a comment but I just want to thank you for all of you - what you’ve been doing and continued success.

Barry Sloane

Analyst · Silk Investment Advisors. Your line is now open.

Thank you, Marc. I appreciate it.

Operator

Operator

Thank you. I’m showing no further questions. I would now like to turn the call back to Barry Sloane for further remarks.

Barry Sloane

Analyst

Thank you very much and truly appreciate the analyst and investor participation in the call. I also want to thank obviously our accounting and legal staff. When you look at this quarter, we cranked out significant acquisitions. Goldman Sachs line of credit, producing the Q, and the adjustment on the Capital and Bank line. We have another line of credit in the pipeline. We have a few things going on. Tremendous team effort between legal and accounting. I also want to thank our new Treasurer and Senior Vice President of Finance, Dean Choksi, he was immeasurably helpful in making the presentation and a very successful quarter. Worked well for us. So thank you, everybody. Look forward to reporting our third-quarter results.

Operator

Operator

Ladies and gentlemen thank you for participating in today’s conference. This does conclude this conference call. You may disconnect at this time. Have a wonderful day.