Sanford A. Ibrahim
Analyst · Barclays
Thank you, Emily. Thank you, all, for joining us and for your interest in Radian. It is a pleasure to share with you today the details of our strong capital and liquidity positions, as well as the opportunity before us as we write a leading share of new mortgage insurance business in an extremely attractive market. I will also provide highlights from our first quarter and a few insights into what we believe the year holds for our company and our industry. Bob will then cover the details of our financial position. In March, we successfully improved Radian's capital and liquidity position through a capital raise, which provided net proceeds of $689 million. The capital raise translated into many immediate benefits, including our strong holding company liquidity position with more than $800 million currently available after making a $115 million capital contribution to Radian Guaranty in the first quarter. Combined with the contingency reserve release in the quarter from Radian Asset of $68 million, Radian Guaranty's risk-to-capital ratio improved significantly to 18.6:1 at March 31, 2013. We expect to maintain a risk-to-capital ratio for Radian Guaranty of 20:1 or below for the foreseeable future, while also preserving a strong level of holding company liquidity. Our goal for raising capital was to provide Radian with the competitive edge in the near-term while positioning our company as the leader in the future housing finance system in the long-term. Today, our immediate priority is to write as much new, high-quality business as possible as the FHA pulls back and as the housing market recovers, fueling our growth over the next couple of years and enabling us to return to normalized earnings. New insurance written, or NIW, is particularly attractive in today's environment, with high credit quality and home prices rebounding from their downturn lows and our new business is expected to produce attractive returns. From 2009 through the end of April, we wrote a total of $96 billion of new business, creating an impressive earnings ramp that we expect to fuel our return to profitability. Slide 18 in our webcast presentation depicts the impact and profitability of these newer vintages on our total mortgage insurance portfolio at the end of last year. And Slide 19 breaks out the performance by vintage in 2013. These slides clearly show that the profit from our new business is beginning to overbound the legacy book losses. Earlier today, we reported a net loss for the first quarter 2013 of $188 million, or $1.30 per diluted share. This includes the impact of fair value and other financial instrument losses of $173 million, primarily resulting from the significant narrowing of our credit spread during the quarter. It also includes compensation expenses of $38 million related to the estimated future value of performance awards which were impacted by the significant increase in our stock price in the first quarter. It is important to note that we do not factor stock price changes in our annual financial projections. Therefore, our guidance for a return to marginal level of MI operating profitability this year does not incorporate the impact of stock price changes. While the impact of fair value and other financial instrument losses was primarily concentrated in our Financial Guaranty business, compensation expenses mostly impacted our mortgage insurance business results. Absent this related compensation expense, all other components of our MI operating results were equal to or better than our expectations. Now I'd like to highlight the progress made against 3 important priorities for Radian. Writing new mortgage insurance business, mitigating losses in our financial insurance portfolio and reducing our Financial Guaranty exposure. First, focusing on new mortgage insurance business, we started the year strong, with NIW of $10.9 billion in the first quarter, an increase of 69% over the first quarter of last year. And we continued our momentum in April with a record NIW of $4.1 billion, which compares to only $2.5 billion written in April last year, and represents a new 5-year monthly record. Based on our steady pipeline of business and prospective new customers, we look forward to strong volume this year and we expect our total NIW this year to meaningfully surpass our 2012 volume. As I mentioned last quarter, mortgage originations over the past 2 years have been driven by high volumes of refinance activity. At some point soon, and we are beginning to see early signs, the market is expected to transition from refi to purchase. While this is expected to reduce overall originations, the MI penetration for purchased loans is significantly higher than it is for refi loans. In addition, purchases tend to be more skewed towards monthly versus single premium MI. As we look back at our single premium business activity, it is important to note that we believe our single premium business written since 2009 has produced attractive returns and represents a meaningful incremental contribution. This means we expect our overall financial results to benefit from using single premiums as a competing product against our industry's largest competitor, the FHA. Bob will discuss the profitability of this business in more detail. Turning to the progress we've made in improving the composition of our mortgage insurance portfolio, as you can see on Slide 20, on our webcast presentation, as of the first quarter, the 2009 through 2013 books grew to more than 48% of our primary risk in force, and the most problematic 2006 and 2007 books are now down to 24%. During the second quarter, we expect our book of business written after 2008 will be larger than the book written in 2008 and prior. Also on this slide, you can see the success of the HARP program, which improves the credit profile of our legacy book. More than 10% of our risk in force has completed a HARP refinance. And this, combined with our newer high-quality book of business, represents a strong portfolio that is now larger than our legacy book, representing nearly 60% of our total primary mortgage insurance risk in force. We are pleased with the recent extension of HARP through 2015, which should allow more borrowers to take advantage of the program. Finally, we continue to grow and diversify our customer base. NIW has benefited both from the solid incremental volume generated by new customers, as well as impressive increases in volume from existing customers. 26% or $2.8 billion of our NIW in the first quarter came from mortgage lenders new to Radian within the last 2 years. At the same time, NIW coming from lenders we've worked with for more than 2 years grew 50% to $8.1 billion in the first quarter this year compared to $5.4 billion in the first quarter of last year. Next, focusing on our continued efforts to mitigate losses in our mortgage insurance portfolio, the total number of primary delinquent loans declined by 9% from the fourth quarter of last year, and 17% year-over-year, as shown on Slide 23. And the default rate on our primary book fell further in the first quarter to 10.9% from 12.1% in the fourth quarter of last year. We maintain $2.9 billion in loss reserves, and our primary reserve for default was $30,426 in the first quarter, up from $29,510 at the end of last year, and $27,833 at March 31, 2012. We continue to see steady modification activity from HAMP and other modification efforts. We are encouraged by these reports, as well as by the payments made by borrowers even in late stages of default. We believe this indicates an ultimate commitment to the home and to the mortgage, despite the inability to make all of the payments needed to cure the loan. As shown on Slide 13, 33% of borrowers whose loans were in default made at least 1 monthly payment in the first quarter, compared to 31% in the fourth quarter of 2012, and 28% in the second quarter of last year, when we first reported this statistic. We believe that many of these payments reflect borrowers and modification programs. Yet, there are clearly others that may be trying to qualify for a mod or otherwise working with their servicer to award foreclosure. While we cannot predict borrowers' behavior or the success of any 1 program, we are encouraged by the steady pace of existing modification programs, as well as by the FHFA's recently announced streamline modification program. We estimate that approximately 1/3 of our delinquent loans are eligible for this new program. We are also encouraged by data and news headlines touting rising home prices. In April, CoreLogic cited a 10% increase in home prices across the country over the past year, with an additional 10% rise expected in the year ahead. Finally, our Financial Guaranty business continues to serve as an important and unique source of capital for Radian Guaranty. We have successfully reduced exposure in that business from a peak of $115 billion in June 2008, when Radian Asset stopped writing new business, to $28 billion in the first quarter of this year. This represents a decline of our total Financial Guaranty risk exposure by 76%. In January, we completed the commutation of our remaining reinsurance risk from FGIC, which resulted in a contingency release -- the reserve release of $7 million. And in February, we released $61 million of contingency reserves that combine to support our strong risk-to-capital for Radian Guaranty this quarter. The next dividend payment to Radian Guaranty of approximately $37 million is expected this year. As of March 31, 2013, Radian Asset maintains a statutory surplus of $1.2 billion. Our industry continues to slowly but steadily regain share from the FHA. The FHA's latest price increase in April, its third in a year, coupled with the elimination in June of FHA mortgage insurance premium cancellation, should help further that trajectory. Turning to the legislation affecting our industry, we continue to actively engage with legislators and other decision-makers in Washington. In February, we sponsored our fourth Housing Finance Discussion Panel on Capitol Hill, where a group of mortgage industry experts unanimously supported a healthier balance between the public and private sectors in today's mortgage market. We continue to hear this sentiment as a consistent theme. What continues to excite us at Radian and represents our most important going-forward priority is moving closer to achieving normalized earnings. This will be driven by 3 important factors. First, the size and potential earnings power of the high-quality MI business we have already written since 2008. Second, the continued management of our legacy mortgage insurance book which is slowly but steadily becoming a smaller piece of our total MI portfolio. Third, our success in writing even more new high-quality future business, driven by our strong customer relationships and a highly skilled and dedicated Radian team. Now I would like to turn the call over to Bob for details of our financial position.