Scott Parker
Analyst · Agee CRT
Thanks, Jay and good morning, everyone. Let’s turn to Slide 7 and review the highlights of our first quarter performance. On a GAAP basis, we earned $1.13 this quarter and $1.05 on a core basis. GAAP basis results included a pre-tax gain of $230 million on the sale of our SpringCastle investment, which closed on March 31. Our Core Consumer insurance segment earned $0.94 per share. On the right side of Slide 7, we are providing a summary P&L analysis for the first quarter, walking down to a 3.7% after-tax return on receivables. Of course, this is a touch below the 4% return on receivables that Jay just reviewed earlier. But as we said, the first quarter of the year is seasonally our highest loss quarter and our outlook is for improvement in quarterly charge-offs similar to past years. I will discuss our credit metrics in greater detail in the call – later in the call. Turning to Slide 8, I want to mention some of the more significant opportunities to leverage the strength of each of the two companies. First, Springleaf had tremendous success in growing its secured portfolio to 55% of receivables while OneMain has historically on unsecured lending. Secured loans typically have larger loan amounts and better credit performance. So, as one of our first major initiatives, we move quickly to rollout our auto-secured lending across OneMain’s 1,100 plus branches. Over time, we expect this effort to result in strong growth and lower credit losses. As you will see in a minute on Slide 9, gross charge-offs in the Springleaf secured portfolio are significantly lower than on the unsecured portion and we expect to see similar performance on the OneMain side. Some of this benefit comes from better recoveries on secured loans, but the loss benefit is most importantly driven by the reduction in the frequency of defaults. We also expect the integration of the two companies to lead to a meaningful improvement in operating expense ratio. As we move towards the levels achieved historically at OneMain and potentially beyond that, the drivers of this improvement will be headquarter cost synergies, the branch sales we announced yesterday and by realizing the continued benefits of scale as we grow receivables against our largely fixed cost branch network. Looking ahead to 2017, the principal areas of cost saves will be our exit of the services provided by Citi under the TSA, some marketing synergies and additional headquarter synergies post system conversions. Turning to Slide 9, the acquisition of OneMain has given us a host of opportunities to create greater shareholder value that would not have been possible without the combination. First and foremost, we are beginning to accelerate growth in the former OneMain branches with total origination volumes up 25% year-over-year, very positive month-by-month trends. Importantly, secured loan originations at the former OneMain were up 75% versus last year’s first quarter as we rolled out the secured installment loan product across the OneMain network. To give you some color on this, in this first quarter – this year’s first quarter, total originations at the OneMain branches have accelerated from $1.1 billion in last year’s first quarter to $1.4 billion this year and secured originations have grown from about $150 million last year to $264 million in this year’s first quarter. And while not on the chart, secured originations at OneMain have grown from 15% of total originations in January to 23% in March and we are already up to 30% in April as we rolled out the programs to all branches. From the time we first announced the acquisition last March, we have talked about the great opportunity we have to ramp up originations at OneMain, including secured lending. We are really pleased with the response to the new offerings from the OneMain branch team members, who appreciate being able to offer customers choices and options that were not previously available. These improvements in origination activity, reflects actions we took immediately upon closing. In addition to setting up secured lending, we move quickly to implement targeted changes in direct marketing at OneMain and increased the use and effectiveness of e-mail and online lead generation programs, leading to significantly more high-quality applications. That consolidation is the principal use of proceeds for our secured loans, so I want to focus for a moment on the very meaningful benefit of secured loans to our customer. The chart on the right side of this slide lays out the average loan amount, cash out to the borrower and monthly payment reduction along with the average coupon for our unsecured and secured loans. First, the average loan amount for the secured loans is significantly higher and the customer walks away with more cash in hand after paying off other debt. The average coupon on our secured loans is about 500 basis points below our unsecured loan. And importantly, the borrower sees an improvement in their available monthly free cash. Given that so much of America lives paycheck to paycheck, free cash and total monthly payments are total monthly drivers of customer financial decisions. This demonstrates how secured loans can drive a significant balance of benefits for our customer while generating lower losses and more profitability for the company. Let’s turn to Slide 10. We also continue to target reductions in our operating expenses as the integration progresses. So far this year, we have completed the realignment of the headquarter functions, generating about $40 million of run rate cost savings and the recently closed branch sale to Lendmark will generate another $50 million in run rate cost savings. We expect to achieve an additional $10 million in saves over the balance of this year bringing us to our original projection of $100 million in annualized cost saves by the end of this year. Overall, we look for a total of $275 million to $300 million in run rate savings based on the standalone pro forma business plans for the two companies, with about two-thirds of that being expense reductions and one-third cost avoidance. As recapture these cost saves and continue to drive lower OpEx, the scale benefits result in a meaningful improvement in operating leverage. Working from a 2015 pro forma operating expense ratio of 10.6%, we are projecting approximately 9% for this year, dropping down to approximately 8% in 2017. Turning to Slide 11, let me begin with a comment about our year-over-year increase in charge-offs, which was about 40 basis points. As I mentioned on our fourth quarter earnings call, we anticipated higher charge-offs in the first quarter due to a change in collection strategy implemented in mid-2015, along with the seasoning of our new customer volume. In addition, first quarter net charge-offs were impacted by the timing of a sale of charged off account that slipped from the first quarter into the second. We are maintaining our outlook for full year charge-offs in the range of 6.8% to 7.3%. This would represent a decline from our first quarter charge-off rate which is to be expected given that first quarter is the highest loss quarter for the year. You can see from this pretty clearly on the chart on the left hand side of the slide, where we show the improvement in charge-offs from the first quarter in 2015 to the full year and again from the first quarter of the current year to our projected range for the full year. As you can see, a seasonal improvement is consistent. Overall, we do not see any deterioration year-over-year in the underlying credit performance. The increase is primarily due to the factors I just described. Supporting our view on charge-off improvement is a very positive trend we are seeing in early stage delinquencies which is demonstrated in the chart on the right hand side of the slide. We have laid the actual net charge-off rate for each quarter beginning from the first quarter of 2015 with an overlay of our 30 day to 89 day delinquency rates on a two quarter lag basis. Each stage – early stage delinquencies are a leading indicator of future charge-offs, so you can see how the sharp decline in early stage delinquencies support our confidence in the outlook for charge-off improvement over the remainder of this year. If the current trends continue, we feel confident in achieving the midpoint of the 6.8% to 7.3% range for net charge-offs this year. In addition to seasonality, the steps we have taken since 2014 to grow our auto-secured receivables at Springleaf and now at OneMain should contribute to better credit performance in our portfolio with the benefits starting to show up in 2017 and beyond. I want to be clear that the performance enhancements that we see from our secured lending are primarily driven by lower frequency of loss and the benefits are not dependent about future path of used cars – used car pricing. Turning to Slide 12, I would like to review our funding and liquidity. Our objective is to maintain a well-balanced funding profile reflecting regular issuance in the term ABS and unsecured debt markets and the maintenance of significant undrawn conduit capacity. We plan to access the ABS market on a routine basis as already demonstrated this year. Despite choppiness in the debt markets, we launched three very successful deals in the ABS and the unsecured markets in just the past few months. The success of our recent unsecured debt issuance allowed us to level off our debt maturities, which is an important accomplishment for us. Our guidance update, which I will address on the next slide reflects assumptions on funding costs that take into consideration today’s market environment versus what we were looking at when we announced the acquisition late last year. Key components of our liquidity strategy include targeting $300 million to $500 million of operating cash, along with maintaining significant undrawn committed conduit capacity, which is currently around $4 billion. Turning to Slide 13, I would like to review our core EPS guidance for 2016 and 2017 and illustrate the positive operating leverage in our model. First, for 2016, we are maintaining our prior guidance but adjusting it by $0.30 to reflect the sale of SpringCastle and the impact on earnings for the last three quarters of the year, which bring us to a range of $4.20 to $4.70 per share. For 2017, we are following the same approach with about half the change in the guidance coming from the SpringCastle impact and half due to the higher expected funding costs as I just explained. This brings us to a range of $5.60 to $6.10 for 2017. To illustrate the tremendous operating leverage in the business, we are protecting about a 10% to 15% growth in receivables from 2016 to 2017 and with the benefits of scale, we expect this to lead to even greater than 30% growth in earnings per share using the midpoint of the guidance ranges. Now, I would like to turn the call back to Jay for his closing comments.