Jay Levine
Analyst · Sanjay Sakhrani of KBW
Thanks, Craig and thanks for joining us this morning. 2016 was an incredibly important and transformational year for us. We began having just closed on the OneMain acquisition, and over the course of the year we made significant progress in bringing the two organizations together. The new OneMain is the leading provider of responsible loan products to working Americans, positioned to drive very solid returns and build meaningful shareholder value. As with any combination of two large businesses, the process of bringing together Springleaf and OneMain was not simple, but I'm really happy to report that the integration activities are now behind us. Turning to Slide 4, let me touch on the key topics that we will cover during our call this morning. First our overall financial performance. For the full year, on an adjusted basis, our Consumer and Insurance segment earned almost $500 million after-tax or $3.60 per share versus $227 million or $1.77 per share in the prior year, which included two months of results for the former OneMain. For the quarter, our Consumer and Insurance segment earned $108 million or $0.80 per share on an adjusted basis, versus $89 million or $0.66 per share last year's fourth quarter. Scott will take you through the financials in greater detail later in the call. The second key topic is recent credit performance. Charge-offs for the quarter and full year 2016 came in as we expected with the important metric of early-stage delinquency showing a nice improvement at year-end from the September 30th level. As we said during our third quarter update, early-stage delinquency in the third quarter was affected by the large number of integration activities and in response we placed significant focus on making sure we reversed this trend. This drove a meaningful improvement in early-stage delinquency throughout the fourth quarter, and importantly delinquency in January and early February has remained stable. Third, I will discuss receivables growth in the fourth quarter, along with some comments on our plans for enhancing growth beginning in the second quarter and finally capital and liquidity, which Scott will cover in his section. I just want to say that I am pleased with the meaningful progress we made in 2016 to significantly reduce tangible leverage and we continue to track well towards our goal of approximately seven times by the fourth quarter of ’18. Let’s turn to Slide 5. As we discussed, our business generates an unlevered return on receivables in excess of 10%, which we believe is unequaled in the lending sector. As we continue to build our business, we are committed to driving growth in a manner that supports this objective. Over time and again in the fourth quarter we have demonstrated that our model can effectively manage the most critical variable, credit risk, allowing us to achieve consistent profitability. We believe that our market opportunity is significant with consumer demand remaining strong supported by the strengthening U.S. economy. We have seen positive trends in employment, witnessed the 227,000 increase in non-farm payrolls in January, and average hourly wages recently climbing to a seven-year high. These are both very positive indicators for the financial health and borrowing capacity of our customers. These factors combined with the reach and effectiveness of our extensive branch network should drive healthy receivables and earnings growth over time. Our focus on unlevered returns is also important because maintaining a strong and consistent level of risk-adjusted profitability helps ensure access to low-cost funding in the capital markets. Most importantly, not only is our loan spread attractive in and of itself, but with modest leverage that generates ROEs in the 20% plus range. Let’s turn now to Slide 6. Over the long term and across multiple credit cycles, our proven ability to manage credit risk has been a major differentiator and when we look back over longer periods, we believe our credit performance holds up extremely well. Going back almost 20 years, Springleaf has performed strongly against other comparable sectors, such as private label credit cards and sub-prime auto, reflecting our conservative underwriting, emphasis on secured lending and the local and personal relationships that are the key advantages of our branch model. Let’s turn now to Slide 7; I am pleased to report that recent conversions of over 1000 branches are complete with minimal disruption to branch operations. With that significant undertaking now behind us, I want to take a moment to thank all our key members for the tremendous effort they put into making these conversions occur seamlessly. Their dedication and experience were invaluable. Second, and very importantly we have received positive feedback from our OneMain branch team members on their experience with adopting the new system. Features such as greater flexibility, more effective handling of online applications and their new ability to document and close loans without paper are some of the key highlights. We expect to see benefits from these additional efficiencies in terms of branch productivity and receivables growth over the coming months. Overall, our team has met the challenges of this process with great success. Now the heavy lifting of integration behind us we are placing an even greater dignity of focus on enhancing receivables growth. One of the unique and powerful aspects of our branch operation is the level of commitment of our team members to getting the job done. In the fourth quarter, we asked our branch team to deal with the temporary blip in delinquency and they did. We asked thousands of team members to learn the new system and they did. Now, looking ahead to the rest of the year, we are equipping them with the products and sales tools to reinvigorate growth and we expect that once again they will produce the results we know they are capable of. Let us turn to Slide 8 and cover credit performance. Charge-off performance in the fourth quarter was consistent with our expectations with net charge-offs at 7.5%. For the full year 2016, our net charge-off rate was 7.1, right at the midpoint of what we previously projected. Digging into credit a little bit more, I'm particularly pleased with our performance in the fourth quarter as we saw the benefits of focusing our 1700 plus branches on reducing early-stage delinquency. As you can see, early-stage delinquency actually fell sequentially improving by 30 basis points quarter-over-quarter counter to the normal seasonal trend. For full year 2017, given the recent positive trends in early-stage delinquency and the increasing mix of secured loans, we now expect the net charge-off rate to be in the low 7s versus our expectation of 7.2 to 7.6. Let us turn to Slide 9, consumer and insurance average net receivables reached 13.5 billion in the quarter, up almost 6% year-over-year. The growth story was mixed in the quarter with average net receivables at the former Springleaf branches up 14% year-over-year, while growth in the former OneMain branches was up about 1%. Looking at the first-quarter, we expect to see the typical seasonal slowing in receivables growth, which is likely to lead to a decline in receivables for the first quarter. Growth is expected to turn positive beginning in the second quarter as all 1700 plus branches and become fully [Indiscernible] to working with the new system and grow increasingly comfortable with the enhanced product suite they can offer customers. An important part of our growth strategy is increasing originations of secured loans with the former OneMain branches. As a percentage of production, secured loans were 36% of originations at OneMain in the fourth quarter, up from 13% a year ago. This percentage of originations is consistent with our expectation for secured originations at OneMain and puts us on track to reach our target of having 35% of the former OneMain portfolio secured by the end of ’17. Now I’m now going to turn the call over to Scott.