Micah Conrad
Analyst · Wells Fargo. Your line is now open
Thanks, Doug, and good morning, everyone. We had another good quarter as demand for our loans was strong, and we continued to expand our customer value proposition with new products and distribution channels. The financial health of our customer has been solid, and net charge-offs for the quarter were well within our expected range, coming off the heels of historically strong credit performance in 2021. We earned $301 million on a GAAP basis or $2.36 per diluted share in the quarter. On an adjusted C&I basis, we earned $299 million or $2.35 per diluted share, down 30% on a per share basis from the first quarter of 2021. However, recall that the prior year results had the benefit of a significant loan loss reserve reduction of $208 million and historically low stimulus-driven net charge-offs of $205 million. Capital generation was $280 million in the quarter, down 6% compared to the prior year, primarily driven by the year-over-year increase in net charge-offs and modestly higher operating expenses associated with an increase in originations and continued investment in our business. Managed receivables were $19.5 billion, up $1.9 billion or 11% from a year ago, reflecting strong consumer demand and the continued positive impact from our growth initiatives. Our net interest margin was strong at 18.5% in the quarter. Interest income was $1.1 million, up 3% compared to the prior year, primarily driven by higher receivables and partially offset by lower yield. Portfolio yield was 23.1% in the quarter, as compared to 23.3% in the fourth quarter. As discussed on our last call, we expect our full year portfolio yield to be around fourth quarter 2021 levels. Interest expense was $217 million for the quarter, down 7% versus the prior year. Interest expense as a percentage of average receivables improved from 5.3% a year ago to 4.6% this quarter and also improved 23 basis points sequentially. Other revenue was $158 million in the first quarter, up 17% compared to the prior year quarter. The increase was primarily driven by economics from our whole loan sale program. As a reminder, our whole loan sale program comprises two year flow agreements with three select partners. As I've said in the past, these sales programs provide us with additional flexibility in our funding, but we intend to maintain the vast majority of our receivables on balance sheet for the foreseeable future. Finally, policyholder benefits and claims expense was $45 million in the quarter, up from $33 million in the prior year. The prior year result reflected a positive reserve adjustment related to favorable involuntary unemployment insurance experience, as expected losses at the onset of the pandemic in 2020 did not materialize as many customers got back to work sooner than we had originally anticipated. Let's now turn to slide seven to review our originations and receivables trends. Originations were $3 billion in the first quarter, up 30% year-over-year, leading to managed receivables growth of 11%. Receivables were relatively flat sequentially, as our new products and distribution channels helped offset what is typically a quarterly seasonal decline. Note that our managed receivables this quarter also include $50 million of credit card receivables and $528 million of receivables sold but serviced by OneMain for our whole loan sale partners. Turning to slide eight. The credit performance of our portfolio continues to track within expectations. Our 30 to 89 delinquency was 2.25%, down from 2.43% in the fourth quarter and up from the historical low 1.57% in the first quarter of 2021, which, as you know, was positively impacted by federal stimulus programs. 90-plus delinquency was 2.21%, up seasonally as anticipated from 2.0% in the fourth quarter. Recoveries remained strong at $67 million in the quarter or 1.4% of average receivables, well above our historical levels of about 90 basis points. We continue to see strong underlying performance in our recoveries. However, this first quarter was further enhanced by a sale of charge-off receivables. Net charge-offs were $262 million or 5.6% compared to a historically low 4.7% in the first quarter of 2021. We remain confident in our full year 2022 guidance for net charge-offs of 5.6% to 6.0%. Our loan loss reserve trends are shown on slide nine. We ended the first quarter with $2.1 billion of reserves and a reserve ratio of 10.9%, flat to last quarter and modestly above our CECL day one levels of 10.7%. The $25 million reduction in reserves in the quarter was driven by the small reduction in balance sheet receivables during the period. Turning to slide 10. First quarter operating expense was $348 million, up 8% year-over-year and flat sequentially. The year-over-year growth is a bit higher than our expected full year growth rate, primarily due to the path of quarterly expenses in 2021. First quarter '21 was still unusually low after the aggressive cost cutting we did in 2020, as a result of the pandemic. Our operating expense ratio in the quarter was stable at 7.2%, even as we continue to invest in new products and channels, technology, expanded digital capabilities and data science, all of which we expect will drive future growth. I'd like to spend a few extra minutes today on our balance sheet and funding programs in light of the current environment. Over the years, we've talked a lot about the strength of our balance sheet built on a foundation of significant liquidity and maintaining a balance of maturities and funding mix. I've also discussed the importance of diversifying our funding sources. The construction of our balance sheet today reflects a very deliberate effort to shift our liabilities to a greater mix of unsecured debt and to extend and strategically place each of our unsecured maturities. Since December of 2020, while rates lingered at all-time lows, we issued $2.2 billion of unsecured debt with maturities spanning from 2027 to 2030 at an average cost of 3.8%. As you can see on page 11, this strategy has reduced our current mix of secured funding to 44% at the end of Q1, below our strategic target of 50%. On the right side of the page, you'll see that this strategy began years ago with our near term maturities having been staggered to create funding flexibility. I say all of this to illustrate the proactive manner in which we've managed our liabilities. We actively took advantage of a cost-efficient unsecured debt market over the past 15 months, while preserving the optionality of being able to lean back into lower cost secured funding when that time came. In this current period of volatility and rising rates, our positioning is a competitive advantage as it affords us the luxury to be selective and look for windows of opportunity to access the markets. To that end, this week, we completed a three year revolving $600 million social ABS. This was the first ever social ABS by a US issuer and highlights our commitment to providing access to responsible credit for consumers in rural communities across America. This is our second social capital markets issuance with last June's unsecured social bond of $750 million, supporting credit underserved areas with 75% of proceeds being directed to racial minorities and women. Our efforts were widely recognized as that bond was recently awarded Social Bond of the Year by Environmental Finance. We are incredibly proud of our social bond programs, as they highlight our corporate mission to serve hard-working Americans. Earlier this week, we also completed $350 million of private secured funding with one of our long-term banking partners at very attractive rates. This funding is similar to one of our market ABS structures with a three year revolving period followed by an amortization period. Finally, and to put a finer point on the comment I made earlier about balance sheet flexibility and preparedness. As you may remember, in May of 2020, during the height of COVID market dislocation, we issued a $600 million five year bond at a coupon of 8 7/8% [ph] While this bond demonstrated our ability to issue in very difficult markets, it also presented an opportunity to add a callable feature to our bond program, which we expected would give us even greater flexibility to manage our funding in the future. To that end, this week, we issued a call notice for that bond, and combined with our social ABS, we have effectively replaced $600 million of 9% funding with funding closer to 4% for the next three years. Of course, we cannot control the rate environment, but we've prepared ourselves for this type of situation. And as a team, we are very confident that our balance sheet positioning and our funding programs will continue to be a competitive advantage. Let me now spend a few minutes discussing our liquidity. As you know, this is another hallmark of our balance sheet and critical for any company accessing the capital markets for funding. We have, over the years, invested in our liquidity position, having increased our runway from 12 to 24 plus months. This runway is the period in which we can operate the company under stressed macroeconomic conditions with no access to the capital markets whatsoever. We remain above that 24 month runway as we sit here today. The foundation of our runway is our committed bank capacity, which at the end of March was $7 billion. This includes $6 billion of committed conduits across 14 bank partners, as well as a $1 billion five year unsecured revolving credit facility that we completed in late 2021. We renewed two of our conduits in the recent quarter, and we're always actively engaged with potential new partners. With $10.2 billion of unencumbered loans at the end of the quarter, you can see that our liquidity resources to support these facilities remain robust. Moving on to page 12. Our strong capital generation of $280 million allowed us to repurchase 2.3 million shares, nearly 2% of shares outstanding for $110 million and returned another $123 million to shareholders through our regular dividend, all while maintaining our capital levels. Our net leverage at the end of the quarter was 5.5 times or flat to the prior quarter. As has been the case for years, we will continue to run our business within our long-standing leverage range of 4 to 6 times. I'll wrap up by reminding you of our full year 2022 guidance, all unchanged since we spoke earlier in the year. We continue to expect managed receivables to grow 5% to 10%, in line with our long-term operating framework. While the first quarter was above that range, the comparison period of 1Q '21 was heavily influenced by federal stimulus, as receivables fell by more than $500 million in that quarter. As discussed earlier, we continue to expect full year net charge-offs to be in the 5.6% to 6.0% range. We expect capital generation return on receivables to be approximately 6%. And as you know, we run our business to optimize capital generation, and we expect to generate $1.15 billion to $1.2 billion in 2022, and we expect capital generation per share to be between $9.10 and $9.50. With that, I'd like to turn the call back to Doug.