Micah Conrad
Analyst · Wells Fargo
Thanks, Doug, and good morning, everyone. Demand for our loans remains strong, and we continue to deliver on our customer value proposition with added digital enhancements and further adoption of our financial wellness tools. We continued BrightWay credit card development and the measured expansion of our distribution channel partnerships. And while we've seen some elevated levels of early-stage delinquency in certain segments of our book, we are very positive about the prospects for our business. Our Q2 financial results were strong. We earned $209 million on a GAAP basis or $1.68 per diluted share in the quarter. Our results included a $28 million charge associated with the early redemption of a $600 million bond issued in May of 2020 at a coupon of 8 and 7/8%. This redemption reflects the continued proactive management of our balance sheet that I discussed in detail on our last call. Capital generation in the quarter was $275 million, down $35 million from the second quarter of 2021. This primarily reflected an increase of $89 million in charge-offs from the historic lows we saw in 2021. That increase was partially offset by net interest income growth of $47 million year-over-year. On an adjusted C&I basis, we earned $233 million or $1.87 per diluted share, down from $2.66 per diluted share in the second quarter of 2021. The difference is driven largely by the normalization of charge-offs as well as in-period changes to our loan loss reserves, which you will see on Slide 9 of our presentation. The second quarter 2021 provision reflected a $64 million net reduction in loan loss reserves, which included a reversal of 2020 pandemic-related builds, offset by an increase of $58 million associated with on-book receivables growth in that quarter. Our current quarter reflects a similar level of receivables growth and a resulting increase in our loan loss reserves of $55 million. As you may recall, under CECL, we reserved for projected lifetime losses at the time of origination, which creates a growth impact in our financial results. Our managed receivables reached $20.1 billion this quarter, up $1.7 billion or 10% from a year ago, reflecting strong consumer demand and the continued positive impact from our investments in new products and distribution channels. Note this includes receivables sold through our whole loan sale partnership and serviced by OneMain as well as our credit card receivables. Our net interest margin remained strong at 18.6% in the quarter. Net interest income was $886 million, up 6% compared to the prior year quarter, driven by higher average receivables. Portfolio yield was 23.1% in the quarter, flat to last quarter. Interest expense was $218 million for the quarter, down 5% versus the prior year, despite an increase in debt supporting our balance sheet growth. Interest expense as a percentage of average receivables improved from 5.2% in the year ago period to 4.6% this quarter. We accomplished this through the proactive management of our funding structure despite this year's increase in benchmark rates. Other revenue was $153 million in the second quarter, up $5 million from the prior year quarter. Year-over-year increases from our whole loan sale program more than offset a $6 million current period market adjustment related to equity values within our $1.8 billion investment portfolio. As a reminder, this portfolio supports our insurance policy claims reserves. Our policyholder benefits and claims expense for the quarter was $40 million, down from $48 million in the second quarter of 2021, driven by positive year-over-year claims experience across several insurance products including life and disability credit insurance. Let's now turn to Slide 7 to review our originations and receivables trends. Originations were $3.9 billion in the second quarter, up modestly from $3.8 billion in the second quarter of 2021. We are seeing continued strong demand for our core loan product, which has been a partial offset to the impact of our underwriting adjustments. We're also seeing continued strength in our product and channel initiatives. We've talked in the past about testing with better credit quality customers within the more price-sensitive and competitive affiliate channels. Very recently, we've seen stronger application flow in these better credit quality segments, presumably a result of competition lacking the strength of our funding programs and our balance sheet. Additionally, our distribution channel initiatives continued to show strong performance with $90 million of originations in the quarter compared to $30 million in the second quarter of 2021. These loans are originated and serviced by a specialized central team, and importantly, outside of our branch network, demonstrating the value of our omnichannel model and giving us another scalable distribution channel for our loan products. Turning to Slide 8 and our credit performance. Personal loan net charge-offs were $283 million or 6.0%, above the historic low 4.4% in the second quarter of 2021, but still below normal historical levels. After tracking in line with expectations throughout the first quarter, segments of lower credit quality, lower FICO customers, concentrated mainly in our 2021 vintages, began to show increased levels of delinquency in May and June amidst an evolving macro environment, specifically persistent and elevated inflation levels. 30-89 delinquency increased to 2.73% in the second quarter, while 90-plus fell to 2.15%. 30-plus delinquency at the end of the quarter was 4.88%. As Doug mentioned, we've been making selective adjustments to our credit box since late 2021. And while we saw good performance in the first quarter, we've done some additional tightening in recent weeks due to the trends we saw in May and June. We, of course, will continue to monitor the environment closely and will adjust our underwriting accordingly. We continue to see strong back-end performance in the quarter with late-stage roll rates and post charge-off recoveries better than pre-pandemic levels. Recoveries were $68 million, including $7 million from a bulk charge-off sale. Recoveries were 1.4% of average receivables, significantly above our pre-pandemic levels of approximately 90 basis points. Let me touch quickly again on our loan loss reserves shown on Slide 9. We ended the first quarter with $2.1 billion of reserves and a reserve ratio of 11%. Our reserve ratio remains above CECL day 1 levels of 10.7%, reflecting a healthy level of caution given the continued uncertain environment. Turning to Slide 10. Second quarter operating expenses were $350 million, up 6% year-over-year. Note that operating expenses have been largely flat for the past 3 quarters. Our year-to-date operating leverage was 7.2%, 20 basis points better than a year ago. As you know, we have a culture of expense discipline within our company, and we've recently taken some proactive actions in accordance with the evolving environment. As an example, we are making some targeted adjustments to our marketing spend, especially in the direct mail segment, to better align with our tighter credit appetite and the competitive dynamics we are seeing in the market. While we are actively managing our expenses, we also continue to invest in new products and channels, technology, digital capabilities and data science, all of which we expect will drive future growth and performance within our business. We now expect our full year OpEx ratio to be approximately 7.1%, below our original estimate for this year and down from last year. Last quarter, I spent some time discussing the strength of our balance sheet and our funding programs, given the challenging rate environment with rising benchmark rates and widening spreads. The funding environment remained challenging in the second quarter. Despite that, we raised $1.2 billion in the ABS markets. We completed a $600 million social ABS, the first of its kind, at 4.3% in April, and followed that with a $600 million ABS deal at 4.6% in June. We've seen demand from a steady group of returning investors and have also seen solid interest from new investors this year. As we mentioned on our last call, we also structured a $350 million private secured funding transaction with one of our long-term banking partners at very attractive rates in April. We redeemed $600 million of unsecured debt with a coupon of 8 and 7/8% that was issued in June of 2020 during the heart of the pandemic. That bond included, for the first time, a callable feature, providing us additional flexibility to manage our funding costs. Every subsequent bond issuance has included this callable feature in addition to our long-standing investment-grade covenants, a true differentiator for our bond program in the market. We remain very well-positioned during this period of rate and market volatility to be selective and look for windows of opportunity to access the markets. As you know, another hallmark of our strong balance sheet is our liquidity runway of over 24 months. This is the length of time in which we can operate the company under stressed macroeconomic conditions and with no access to the capital markets. A foundation of our runway is our committed bank capacity, which at the end of June was just over $7 billion, comprising nearly $5.8 billion of conduits and a 5-year unsecured revolving facility of $1.25 billion, spread across a geographically diverse group of 15 bank partners. In the quarter, we added 3 new banks to our unsecured revolver and just recently closed a $400 million conduit with a new partner bank in early July. We now have over $7.4 billion of committed bank capacity as well as over $9 billion of unencumbered loans. So our liquidity resources that support these facilities also remains robust. Our balance sheet investment over the years provides sleep at night assurance that supports the resiliency of our business through uncertain economic conditions. We are confident that our balance sheet positioning and our industry-leading funding programs will continue to be a competitive advantage. Moving on to Page 12. Our strong capital generation of $275 million allowed us to repurchase 2.1 million shares for $94 million and return another $120 million to shareholders through our regular dividend, all while maintaining our capital levels. Our net leverage at the end of the quarter was 5.6x. On Page 14, we've updated our full year strategic priorities to reflect the current environment. Given our cautious stance on credit and the actions we've taken to tighten our underwriting, we expect managed receivables to grow at the low end of our previously stated range and also at the lower end of our long-term operating framework. As we discussed earlier, there remains an abundance of attractive loans at the higher end of credit scale given the competitive dynamics noted thus far in 2022. We also now expect full year net charge-offs to be approximately 50 basis points higher than our original expected range, still comfortably within our long-term framework of 6% to 7%. We are also taking appropriate actions to manage our expense base under the current conditions and are updating the full year estimate for our operating expense ratio to approximately 7.1%. And to wrap up, we anticipate capital generation to be approximately 12% below our original expected range, but still generate a very strong return of 30% on our adjusted capital. With that, I'd like to turn the call back to Doug.