Douglas Shulman
Analyst · Wells Fargo
Thanks, Rohit. And good morning, everyone. I’m really pleased to be with you today. Let me start with a review of the highlights for the year and then I want to share some high level thoughts on our future direction. We had a great fourth quarter and full year in 2018 with some important milestones for the company. We earned over $5 a share in our Consumer & Insurance segment and ended the year with over $16 billion in receivables. During the course of the year, we executed on our strategic priorities, including shifting our portfolio towards more secured lending, delivering strong credit performance, strengthening our balance sheet and executing expense discipline. Going into a little more detail. Portfolio yields remained stable at nearly 24% through the year. We continued to focus on efficiency and expense discipline, reducing our operating expense ratio by 50 basis points for the full year. On-credit, a larger secured lending portfolio and increased collections effectiveness helped us drive a 50 basis point reduction in net charge-offs for the full year. All of these factors, along with the impact of Corporate Tax Reform helped us to expand our return on receivables by 100 basis points in 2018 reaching 4.5% for the full year. We also continued to strengthen the balance sheet through - through further reducing our adjusted tangible leverage ratio to 6.9 times at year end. That was down from 9.4 times at the end of last year. Looking forward to 2019, I expect continued positive momentum on credit performance, deleveraging, operating efficiency, which will further support capital generation. In addition, we will continue to invest in data, analytics and technology to drive increased efficiency and profitability in our business. We'll talk more about our 2019 outlook and our capital policy later in the call. I want to make a few observations about the strength and resiliency of our business. I want to note and emphasize that we are focusing on managing our business for the long run. We're not currently seeing any signs or leading indicators of strain in our customer base. Nonetheless, regardless of economic cycles we are in a great position given our secured loan portfolio and conservative balance sheet. We've executed a significant portfolio transformation over the past couple of years. Since the end of 2016, all, let me repeat, all of our net portfolio growth has been secured by collateral, improving the overall credit profile of the business. In addition, we have significantly enhanced our funding, capital markets access and liquidity. In 2018 we reached our near term goal of 50 % unsecured funding through the issuance of nearly $3 billion of unsecured bonds at attractive rates. We've also continued to develop our ABS program, becoming the first issuer with a AAA rating in the personal loan space. At the end of 2018, we also had $6 billion in committed conduits up from $5.1 billion a year ago and we had $7.6 billion of unencumbered assets, up from $5 billion a year ago. This gives us over 24 months of liquidity runway even if we had no access to capital markets, which puts us in a very, very strong position. Overall from a portfolio positioning, liquidity and capital perspective the business is in fantastic shape. And yesterday, as I'm sure you all have seen, our Board approved a dividend, which I will discuss later in the call. So with that, let me turn it over to Scott.