Ron Faris
Analyst · Bose George with KBW. Please go ahead
Good evening. And thank you for joining us today. Last quarter I highlighted our superior servicing results for both homeowners and RMBS investors, our progress in resulting our legacy issues, our path to return to profitability and our strategy for future growth. I intend to highlight much of the same today. However, I would like to start with our path to return to profitability. Following last quarter’s earnings call, I began to believe that we had a chance at achieving a quarterly profit, not next year but in the third quarter. So I challenged the entire Ocwen team to respond. From our press release released earlier today, you already know the result. The team did respond and we achieved GAAP net income of $9.5 million, our first profit since the second quarter of 2015 and a $97 million improvement over the second quarter of this year. Frankly when I made the challenge to the team, I had hoped that we would get some help from a rise in interest rate that would have helped us recover some of the MSR impairment taken earlier this year. We didn’t get much help from rates, and we continued to incur some large legacy expenses yet we still met the challenge. Included in the third quarter results was an additional $10 million reserve for the potential regulatory settlement in California, which I will discuss further in a few minutes. If you adjust for the additional $10 million California reserve, third party monitor spend at $15 million, new remediation, and legal settlement reserved the $6 million and ample of other normalizing items all of which are summarized on pages 40 and 42 of our investor presentation. Our illustrative adjusted pre-tax profit would have been $28 million, up $25 million or over eight times higher than Q2. I am also extremely excited to say that the servicing segment reported a pre-tax profit of $33.2 million for the quarter, which is a $47.9 million improvement over the prior quarter’s loss of $14.7 million. Included in the Q3 profit, was $12 million related to the gains associated with the execution of various call rates. Our capital market and servicing teams did a great job executing these call rates and achieving this positive result. Servicing revenue was strong due to our superior borrower system results and operating costs continued to decline. Going forward, we must closely manage our servicing and corporate costs, maintain quality service, improve efficiencies and better integrate with our leading, our lending business to improve our recapture rate. Our inability to grow over the past 30 months due to our regulatory constraints has resulted in a significant reduction in the size of our servicing portfolio and revenue. However, we have used that time to continue to improve our customer service, community relations, compliance, risk management, technology and processes. It has made us an even better servicer. This quarter’s results for both our customer and shareholders helped to demonstrate that. Our lending segment on the other hand had a disappointing financial quarter, delivering only $3.6 million of pre-tax income despite origination of volumes rising 8%, but we are continuing to make progress at rolling our new and improved origination technology that should help in enhanced results in the future. Bottom line, I believe for our company to be successful long term, we will need a far better contribution from our lending business in the future. Let me spend a minute explaining why I believe we can achieve better lending results in the future. Our existing servicing portfolio provides us a tremendous opportunity that we must take advantage of. We want to grow our mortgage origination so we can better serve and retain our customers. At our current capacity, we are reaching only about 25% of our customers that can benefit from a lower interest rate or lower payments. We’ve intentionally ramped up slowly and carefully to maintain quality in an environment with intense regulatory scrutiny on the entire mortgage market. The mortgage originations industry is very competitive and to win we need a competitive advantage. We believe, we can gain that advantage through better technology. We are now about half way through a two and a half year project to implement a new proprietary loan origination system that will automate significant portion of the verification and underwriting process. It will implement systematic controls for items that we check manually today. Best of all, it should easily plug into third party capabilities including some of the more promising Fintech technology. We implemented a similar technology and approach in our reverse mortgage origination business a few years ago and dropped our operating cost by over 50%. We simultaneously improved our quality, cycle time and service. That is why we are one of the leading reverse mortgage originators in the country. We believe the key differentiator for all future mortgage origination is technology and we are making investments now to build this necessary foundation. Automotive capital services or ACS continued to make progress growing outstanding receivables by 66% over June 30, 2016. As we have briefly discussed in the past, we believe we have discovered a great opportunity in an underserved market. We are currently providing inventory financing to use car dealers at an interest rate of 9% to 9.5% and we are earning a similar amount in fees. Later on in this presentation, Tom Gilman President of ACS will discuss in more detail our Auto Floorplan lending business. Turning back to the total company results, compared to the second quarter, Ocwen revenue was down $13.6 million or 3.8% driven UPB runoff in our servicing segment and lower margins in our mortgage origination business. Reported operating expenses were down $113.3 million or 29% compared to the prior quarter and adjusted operating expenses as shown on slide 41 were down $57 million or 19% highlighting the progress we had made with our cost improvement initiative. As outlined on page eight, we continue to believe that we have substantial value estimated at $463 million that is not currently reflected in our balance sheet. Our call rates changed this quarter were a great example of one of these items. While we have made great progress and reported a profit this quarter, I do want to point out that we will continue to face certain significant financial challenges and risks in Q4 and next year including the exploration of HAMP at year end, the continued run off on the servicing portfolio, ongoing third party monitor cost, uncertainty around regulatory settlements in action and known and unknown legal exposure. Next, I would like to report on our ongoing progress in resolving some of the legacy issues which have hampered our ability to grow and return to sustainable profitability. If you recall, in Q2 we agreed to settle the Fisher DOJ [ph] cases for $30 million. I want to note that we didn’t incur an additional $2 million of legal expenses in Q3 related to these cases. The $30 million amount has not yet been paid and the parties are working to finalize the settlement document. We also received last quarter a positive report from Duff & Phelps and a separate more recent positive report from Murray Analytics, which found that certain 2015 RMBS investor allegations they reviewed were also baseless. In addition, this month we reached an agreement in principle to settle the previously disclosed consolidated shareholder derivate action from2014. We believe this resolution will be covered in full by our applicable insurance coverage. This quarter we received a long awaited upgrade to our servicer ranking from S&P to average. We believe this upgrade eliminates a significant risk and any reasonable chance that new residential could request the transfer away from us for any other related servicing rights it controls for effective servicing agreements come April 2017. We remain committed to providing new residential best in class servicing performance and we continue to work collaboratively with Michael Nierenberg and his team on various fronts to strengthen our partnership. While we have not yet reached a settlement with the California Department of Business Oversight, which would among other thing end the current consent order and associated third party auditor. We believe, we have made good progress since we last reported out here. At this point, we believe the $25 million settlement reserve will be adequate although there is no final agreement and things could change. It is not appropriate for us to discuss any additional details at this time, but we would very much like to resolve this matter this year. As for the New York Department of Financial Services, we are getting closer to requesting that their ban on us acquiring mortgage servicing right on loan portfolios be lifted. We will be making this request after achieving over 170 specific benchmark established by the New York monitor in accordance with the 2014 consent order. We hope to make the request in the coming weeks. I would note however that even if we have the ability to acquire MSR from a regulatory perspective, we would not necessarily expect to engage in significant transaction. Any future MSR acquisitions will have to take into consideration various factors, including but not limited to our cost of incremental capital the type of MSRs available, advance financing etcetera. I would also like to note that our CFPB consumer complaint volumes continue to decline year-over-year. For the three month period of May to July, they declined at 28% and at a higher level than other mortgage companies. We continue working to resolve all of our remaining legacy issues. I would also note that notwithstanding our progress we continue to invest in our compliance and risk management systems. Next, I would like to briefly report on our continued superior servicing performance for both homeowners and RMBS investors. We received some additional good news during the third quarter related to our performance under the U.S. Treasury HAMP program through the second quarter of 2016. Ocwen along with Chase SBS and Wells Fargo were assesses meeting only minor performance improvement the best category. Nationstar and Citi received moderate improvement needed and Bank of America received substantial improvement needed. Ocwen received three stars, the best rating on all primary complaints assessment metrics. Ocwen was the best or second best of all services in all secondary rating criteria established by the treasury department. Of the 7,811 streamlined modifications completed by all servicers in Q2, Ocwen completed 4,112 or 53% of the total industry wide. Ocwen is responsible for 20% of all HAMP modifications completed like to date. Ocwen has completed 52% more modification than the next best servicer Wells Fargo, and Ocwen has completed 48% of all HAMP principle reduction modification done industry wide. Without question, we have outperformed the rest of the industry under President’s Obama Making Home Affordable program. This is a great accomplishment and one that should be recognized. Overall, Ocwen helped more than 21,000 families through owned modifications in the third quarter, an increase in borrower systems over both the first and second quarters of this year, despite the run off of our portfolio. For the year, we have helped over 57,000 homeowners obtain a loan modification and retain their home. A large part of our success in helping families continues to be attributable to our partnership with numerous non-profit housing counselling agencies across the country. In partnership with groups such as NID Housing Counselling and the NAACP, we have recently held very successful outreach events in Sacramento and San Bernardino, California along with an event [ph] in Des Moines, Washington. We continue to work closely with our community advisory council which is made up of true leaders in housing counselling and housing advocacy. Having just met with the council in September we are working together to try to ensure homeowners continue to receive the assistance, education and services they so desperately need as part of the homeownership process. Ocwen strives to be a leader in better servicing and better serving consumers through partnerships with non-profits and government agency. As I've said before many times without question a homeowner whose loan is serviced by Ocwen has a much better chance of avoiding foreclosure then if they're loan is serviced by any other company. Independent third-parties continue to recognize Ocwen's outstanding servicing performance. Earlier this year, Fitch upgraded our service already. In our last call I reported that Moody's success that Ocwen continues to have the best total care and cash only metrics among all the servicer they assess. This quarter we saw S&P upgrade our servicer ranking. I hear from RMBS investors all the time how pleased they are with our performance. Indeed some have published analysis showing our superior performance that has and continue to benefit RMBS investors. Moving forward, in terms of specific action items within our strategic business plan we have the following key objective. Resolve our remaining legacy, regulatory and legal issues, improved regulatory relations and end the various monitorship [ph] on time, maintain adequate liquidity and a strong capital structure. Further reduced and control operating cost while continuing to focus on compliance and risk management, complete our build out of our mortgage lending technology and then grow our lending business into a top originator. Complete the nation-wide rollout of our auto floor plan lending business. We believe Ocwen can eventually renew its growth even if that in more moderate pace than in the past and we do not believe we are business in run off. I also believe non-bank servicers such as Ocwen fill much needed mortgage industry role that large banks generally cannot and do not want to provide. A profitable, healthy, effective Ocwen is critically important to the state's stability of the U.S. housing market and for the non-agency RBMS market. We have quality assets and non-agency servicing portfolio has very little interest rate sensitivity. We also have substantial value that's not reflected on our balance sheet. However to be profitable on a sustainable basis we must get the remaining legacy issue behind us, we must become more efficient and we must resume growth. We seek to control our own destiny on the growth side by originating more loans and retaining our existing customers and mortgage servicing rights. We also seek to diversify through our commercial automotive floor plan lending business. In a moment, I'm going to have Tom Gilman, spend a few minute describing in more detail the business plan for automotive capital services. I'll then have Michael Bourque discuss the progress we have made on controlling our operating costs and maintaining adequate liquidity going forward. Before I do that however, I would like the highlight the outstanding job, our highly qualified and diverse Boards of Directors is doing. Let by our independent Chair women Phyllis Caldwell, the board is actively involved in promoting a culture of compliance, diversity, risk management and service excellence. They are committed to carrying out a strategic business plan and continuingly challenging management to do better. They are aligned with shareholders and all stakeholders to evolved Ocwen into a leader in mortgage and commercial auto finance and more importantly a model company for others to inspire to. I'm honoured to help, carry out their vision. With that, I would like to turn the call over to Tom Gilman. Tom is President of Automotive Capital Services and has over 30 years of industrial experience. Before joining Ocwen in the fall of 2014 he served as President and CEO of TD Auto Finance, and before that as Chairman and CEO of Chrysler Finance. Tom?