Thank you, everyone, for tuning in this afternoon. I have an immense pleasure of introducing you here to the Enact CEO, Rohit Gupta. This is meant to be a fireside chat. So the agenda here is pretty free-flowing. I'll, you know, we'll have a very free-flowing discussion here with Rohit about the MI space and Enact in particular. And, to set the stage for this conversation, Rohit, can you please provide us an update on your business, including products offered, customers served, and any relevant market trends?
Sure, Arvind. First, thank you for having me. We have a great story to tell. We help families responsibly achieve the dream of sustainable homeownership, and then we help those families stay in those homes. We have a dynamic platform with an innovative approach to onboarding risk and then managing risk and capital to both build a strong balance sheet and a strong insurance in force. We have been in business 40+ years. Although we have been in business since the early 1980s, we actually went public about three years ago in 2021 through a partial spinoff from Genworth. Since our IPO, we have delivered consistent results against expectations, market expectations. And just to give you a few highlights, within those strong financial and operating results, we have delivered mid- to high-teens returns to our investors during that time.
We have maintained and increased a common dividend since early 2022. We just recently announced our third share repurchase program of $250 million. In addition to that, we have done that while actually increasing the strength of our balance sheet, which has also been recognized by external constituents. As a proof point, we have received three to four upgrades from each rating agency that rated us three years ago. That has resulted in our holding company having an investment grade rating. Our operating company actually has A minus ratings from four different credit rating agencies. Lastly, I would just say that two weeks ago, we did our first investment grade debt issuance. It was the largest debt issuance in the sector in the last decade, and we had a very successful execution. I'll pause there.
Thank you, Rohit. That's, that's a wonderful story. Thank you for informing our investors about your evolution since the IPO. You know, one of the things that's really frustrated me as an observer of the MI space is, one is how overlooked it is. I really believe it's a missed opportunity for investors. A lot of investors are still stuck in the era of 2008 and 2009. I believe the industry has changed so much since then in the last 15 years. I would really like to use at least a couple of minutes of your time to educate investors as to what has changed, why they should focus on this industry versus other financial subsectors, and why this could be a missed opportunity for investors.
Absolutely, Arvind. And I couldn't agree with you more. I'm a big believer that our asset class, which I would define as prime mortgage space, has completely transformed from what it used to be in Global Financial Crisis or prior to Global Financial Crisis. And I'll share some proof points. I would start off by just looking at the Dodd-Frank bill, which was implemented in 2013, that essentially created the definition of Qualified Mortgage, which I would equate to a prudent mortgage underwriting standard. And that did two things. First thing, the definition of Qualified Mortgage just told the market what is an okay mortgage to originate as a sustainable way of putting consumers into homes. Second thing, even for the non-Qualified Mortgage standard, it aligned the interest of the consumer with the originating lender. So that was a great thing.
We have seen an impact of that, that even in a market where purchase originations are down by 50%, refinance originations are down by 90%, we have not seen an expansion of credit box or change in underwriting criteria in the market. That shows you the sustainability created by that legislation. Then within the MI space, I'll give you four proof points. There are many more, but I would say these are the four meaningful ones. First one is Master Policy. Post-Global Financial Crisis, we worked very constructively with GSEs and the FHFA to come up with a Master Policy that is consistent across all lenders and all MI companies. That basically gives us an ability to implement our contracts in a very uniform way in good times or difficult times.
Second one, I would say, is PMIERs, which is Private Mortgage Insurer Eligibility Requirements that are required for each MI company to meet to be a qualified MI company for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac saleable loans. The most important aspect of PMIERs is the capital standard because the capital standards are extremely granular, which means every MI company has to comply with the same granular risk-based capital standards as the insured loans in the market. Third, credit risk transfer. This is our ability to transfer risk from our balance sheet to either reinsurance companies that are highly rated or funded insurance-linked notes. It creates an ability for us to source capital from third-party balance sheets and also create loss mitigation tools at very attractive cost of capital.
Last but not the least, in 2018, the entire industry, each MI company moved to granular risk-based pricing, which means on any single day, we have millions of individual cells, different cells, which capture loan attributes, consumer attributes, and even capture our view of geographic market differences to implement our risk appetite and our pricing mindset in the market. That gives us an ability to be very agile. Even if we face into disruptions like COVID, we can actually shift our credit policy and our pricing in a very short time frame. When you combine all of that, I'm a big believer that all those changes combined together makes our industry more resilient. You saw the impact of that in COVID, that while we went through a pretty significant delinquency event, we were able to navigate through that, in a very smooth way.
That tells me that the industry is going to be more resilient in future credit events. That creates a case for the industry to be reevaluated from a valuation perspective and a resiliency perspective.
I couldn't agree more. Just to expand on that a little bit more, in your comments to the prior question, you talked about mid to high teen returns, right? If I put that in a price to book ROE regression, the value of the valuation should, to your point, would be significantly higher versus what it's being valued at today. So particularly these four points that you just talked about, when you actually risk adjust that, there is a very solid argument to make that just on a traditional price- to- book ROE regression, the industry needs to move up.
Completely agree.
Yep. And, and would you say, from a PE basis, how would you think about it? Do you think there is a case to be made with, you know, particularly with risk transfer, with the credit risk transfer market, you know, you're, you're going increasingly towards the moving business rather than the storage business? You could make the case. There's a case to be made on that front as well.
Absolutely. I think we have talked to investors about the performance of our book under different stress scenarios. If it's a mild stress, obviously these risk transfer transactions are not going to attach. But if we get into a mild to moderate stress, then these risk transfer transactions start attaching on a book year basis, book year by book year basis. What that essentially means is that in those scenarios, we are ceding all those losses to third parties, either highly rated reinsurers or to insurance-linked note transactions, thus creating stability in our earnings and resiliency in our regulatory capital. That actually does not end up impacting our income statement or balance sheet until we get into really stressful events.
Even in those stressful events, given the changes I talked about in the underwriting criteria and the manufacturing quality, we are just ensuring a much more resilient consumer than we used to.
Makes a lot of sense. And I would say actually your consistent capital return only speaks more towards that story as well. I mean, you wouldn't be doing that if, you know, if the things that you mentioned weren't true.
Exactly.
What do you think about the market, broadly? You know, you talked about COVID and the industry being resilient through that.
Yep.
We came out of that, then we were dealing with higher interest rates and the housing market volumes are down, but persistency in the MI space has been very high, and that's been a big factor as well. There's been reserve releases coming out of COVID. How do you see the next, you know, 24 months playing out, both in the housing market, and how do you, I mean, that people are going to value you in the future? So.
Yeah, yeah.
I want to make sure you have an opportunity to answer that question.
Yeah. Arvind, as you would expect, that I'm not going to try to predict the future here because, there are so many times we have tried to do that, and most of us have been wrong in the last 10 years or so. But what I would say is, I think you are seeing our business model play out very well, irrespective of the changes in the market. So when we were in 2020 and 2021, interest rates came down, and while we took a hit on persistency, the books we were originating were some of the largest books we ever originated, and that allowed us to grow our insurance in force. So in 2020, we originated a $100 billion book. In 2021, $97 billion book, and that just allowed us to grow our insurance in force.
If you compare that to 2023, while origination market was down, as I said, overall origination market down 70%-80%, purchase market, which is what we are correlated to, was down about 50%. But even in that market, we were able to grow our insurance in force because our business model creates more stickiness, more persistency, higher persistency on existing book while we are still onboarding reasonable size and reasonable scale new insurance written books. Even for the most recent quarter, we grew our insurance in force by 4.5% in probably the lowest quarter we've seen on an origination side in a while. Our expectation for 2024 is that MI market size will be generally similar to 2023. So we have described that around generally around $300 billion of market size. That is a scaled market size for MI space for six MI companies.
So that still gives us a right scale. And even in a mortgage origination market that is suppressed, that gives us an ability to grow our book although the growth rates might be slower. The more important aspect is if you complete the picture on the credit side. So on the credit side, consumer is still resilient. So consumers are performing really well. New delinquency rate and total delinquency rate is very much in line with where it was pre-pandemic. So that is actually leading to lower losses, reserve releases, which has driven our mid- to high-teen ROE over the last three years. In addition to that, we are seeing a very good trend even from a reduced origination activity. So as you said, the demand in the market is lower because interest rates are high and embedded, embedded home prices are creating an affordability challenge.
But at the same time, the supply in the market has also been slower because a lot of consumers are locked into really good mortgage rates. So that balance in demand and supply is leading to home prices still continuing to increase. I would say at the rate of 5%-6% per year. That creates more embedded equity in our insurance in force. So that embedded equity creates a tailwind for us. If you think about our book, I want to say 88% of our portfolio, our entire portfolio has at least 10% equity in front of it. 70% of our portfolio has 20% equity in front of it. So that becomes a tailwind that even in a lower origination market, a higher persistency and this embedded equity gives us good economic value that's built into our balance sheet.
Either it's coming from the insurance in force side or it's coming from consumer performance side.
What it means is you're generating a lot of cash.
That's right.
That's obviously helping capital return, which again, going back to the investor missed opportunity, it's such an important point for institutional investors today as they look for consistent capital return. It's a really missed opportunity, from that perspective, given all the things you're talking about only means more cash coming into the holding company for you to be able to do a buyback or do a dividend. So.
Yeah. Arvind, one thing I don't want to miss is obviously we are talking about here and now when we talk about those dynamics, there's an upside for our industry, which is kind of looking at the future. So if you look at U.S. demographics, U.S. demographics are very favorable for our sector, right now and in the coming years. Between 2022 to 2026, we have the biggest population of Americans reaching first-time home buying age of 33-35 years of age that we have seen in probably the last 15 years. And a lot of those consumers are currently not being able to buy homes because of affordability challenges, but at some point of time, they're going to buy homes because the tendency to buy homes has not gone down. First-time home buyers use private mortgage insurance 60% of the time to get into homes.
At whichever point those consumers, whether it's tomorrow, whether it's next month or next year, whenever those consumers decide to buy homes based on their each individual financial situation, that is going to create a lot of upside for us in terms of new insurance written and growth of our insurance in force.
That's, that's super interesting. I'm sure you guys have done some market sizing, any sort of early read into what do you think that growth might look like?
Yeah, I probably don't have a number at the top of my mind in terms of dollars, but I would say it's pretty significant numbers. The good thing about this trend is if you look at the demand that's in the market, that is going to get converted into actual purchased homes versus a supply that's coming in the market from both what builders have in their pipeline right now to get delivered as well as housing starts and the permit approvals that they have. We are not going to see this demand getting fulfilled for the next three, four, five years. So this is going to be a tailwind for our sector because we see more demand coming than there is supply in the market, and that should be a good balance for us.
And do you think residential construction in this country, you know, comes back in a meaningful way? I mean, there's still very low levels of building versus what we saw, you know, I mean, some of it is healthy, obviously, but given the supply-demand dynamic you talk about, you would think the builders would be, you know, increasing construction levels, but we're not really seeing an uptick there. Like, what is going on on that front?
Yeah, Arvind, I would say builders are definitely very profitable right now. There's a lot of discussion around like where the margin is and how they're using it to make sure that they're putting people in homes. But I think those are at healthy levels. Builders also probably have learned similar lessons for themselves as all of us learn for our own sectors from Global Financial Crisis that if you suddenly pick up too much growth and there is a credit event in the market or consumers are weak because of higher rates, then suddenly you could end up with a lot of inventory in your hands. So I think they're probably balancing that in their entire picture on how much supply do they bring to market.
But we think that given the reduced demand right now, the supply is actually pretty balanced in terms of new homes coming into market. I think if you were to double that supply, given mortgage rates right now, I'm not sure if all of that gets consumed immediately over a period of time, absolutely, given the demand, dynamic I described, but might not be in the short term.
Yep. Makes a lot of sense. One of the things I did want to cover as investors think about this theme of a missed opportunity is, you know, one thing investors might bring up is it's a regulated industry. And, you know, how do they think about regulatory risk, and political risk? You know, and, I think the upside is clear. I think the U.S. demographic argument is crystal clear. I think the fact that home prices have held in, I think that the, all the arguments that you made are very sound. How do investors say, okay, I'm convinced, but I'm still concerned about getting into a regulated industry. How would you answer that question?
Yeah. So I would say regulated industry creates both sides of the equation. I described to you that the regulated industry part actually has created more resilience in our industry than many other sectors, even in financial services. So I would describe that as an upside. And in an industry where you're expecting participants to participate today, but the results of their participation get decided three, four years from now when the loss curve develops, I think it's actually good to have a regulated industry so you don't have participants who can actually not behave right and then somehow damage the entire industry long term. So we see that as an upside. I think from a political perspective, we are very well positioned from both sides.
From a democratic perspective, our purpose for existence is to put people in homes who can't get into homes because they don't have a 20% down payment. There is a big myth in the market that there are not that many people who actually need that 20% down payment assistance. Reality is for all consumers who come to market to purchase a home with a mortgage, 40%-50% of those consumers do not have 20% down payment. That's not during difficult times or times of low affordability. That's over the last 30 years. Within that 40%-50%, half of that population is served by private mortgage insurance.
So when you think about the democratic side, the fact that we are helping out of all the consumers coming to market, 20%-25% of purchase originations getting into homes, their first home, and getting on a path of wealth accumulation, that's a great purpose we serve and we get a lot of support on that side. On the Republican side, we also get a lot of support from the fact that we are putting private capital ahead of taxpayers in two different ways. First, in front of Fannie and Freddie, because they're our biggest policyholders. Since the beginning of global financial crisis, I believe our industry has paid $60 billion of claims to Fannie and Freddie, most of that during global financial crisis.
Second thing, we support consumers before they end up in the FHA program, which obviously is a subsidized program by the government, and that can draw down taxpayer funds at times of distress. So I think that is a very good support point in terms of how the Republican legislators see the value of our product in the market. So I would say we have a balanced role. Obviously, in a regulated market, you're exposed to regulatory actions and changes. But over the last 10 years, I think a lot of those changes have made our industry more resilient and more robust.
Again, very, very sound arguments there. No, no, no dispute from my side. The two parties have definitely coalesced in many ways and, and particularly in this topic of home ownership. I think they're pretty consistent in what they would like to see. Certainly the, the topic of putting more people into homes is a topic dear to both parties. And, and there's a tailwind, for your sector from that, from that perspective. I actually want to repeat the stat that you had said earlier, which is you see actually 60% of first-time home buyers in the next, you know, call it three, four years needing private mortgage insurance. That's a pretty staggering statistic.
That's right. And if you look at home price increases, that need only gets bigger.
Yeah, absolutely. How are you specifically coming to Enact? How, how do you think about capital management? You know, that's, that's an important topic, obviously for financial investors. What's your philosophy? How do you see that philosophy changing? What would change that philosophy?
Yeah. So we have a very consistent philosophy, Arvind, that we've talked about for the last three years as a public company. We allocate our capital in a very disciplined way. Our first allocation of capital is to existing policyholders that we are supporting and are already in our books. Our second allocation is to either existing mortgage insurance business that we grow, try to grow every single quarter, every single month, or to look for opportunities that might be adjacent to us, compelling adjacencies that can create more shareholder value. And then once we actually get past those two, then we return that capital, excess capital to shareholders, through three different mechanisms. We have a common dividend, as I said, that we instituted that dividend in 2022 and we have increased it twice already. Second is share buybacks. We have launched our third program.
Our second program is close to completion and the third program is the largest one yet. Then in our situation, at times, we've also done a special dividend in fourth quarter of every calendar year to just return that excess capital stub that we weren't able to return through the first two mediums. I would say if you think about that capital allocation strategy, in action, we have used it in a very disciplined way. We first go towards supporting our policyholders, as I described, our book is doing very well. So that's actually generating more cash. Second, we have been growing our insurance in force in a very prudent and balanced way, but we have created good growth numbers. In addition to that, we saw opportunities within the GSE credit risk transfer space.
So last year we launched Enact Re, which is a Bermuda-based, reinsurance entity rated A minus by AM Best. It's approved by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac as a non-exclusive affiliated reinsurer. And then at the same time, is actually approved by BMA. So we started using that entity and using the strength, the expense, and the ratings of our flagship to start growing in the GSE CRT space that we had not grown into historically. So that's an example of the second capital pillar in terms of driving growth, to generate more shareholder value using existing infrastructure. And then once we got past that, for 2023, we returned $300 million, over $300 million of capital to shareholders. And for 2024, we have guided the market that we will return similar level of capital in 2024 to our shareholders.
Do you see that trend? Do you have like any targets, metrics internally that you think about? Anything that you could guide investors, do you feel comfortable sharing?
Yeah. So we have not looked at a payout ratio kind of in a prescriptive way. I think in our market, the payout ratio is determined by a lot of input factors, some in control, some out of control. Obviously, business results also feeds into our view, not only current performance, but what we see coming in future. If we do think that there is uncertainty in the future, we don't want to return too much capital and then be in a position that we have to raise capital in a rough market. So when you saw our debt refinance recently, that was one of the things that we took into account that we saw the market being accommodative. Our debt maturity was not until August of 2025, but we wanted to get ahead of it just to create certainty that we can take that risk off the table.
That gives us more certainty in being able to return capital to our shareholders. I would say those are the considerations that I would put in front of shareholders versus just any single metric that defines it.
Got it. No, very, very helpful. How do you, how do you think about third-party reinsurance?
Yeah. So we have been very programmatic users of third-party reinsurance since we started down this journey. I want to say the first year we started doing transactions was 2014 or 2015. And since that year, we have been very active users of reinsurance transactions and insurance-linked note transactions. So at this point of time, we have pretty much every single option in our tool belt. So we have excess of loss transactions with reinsurers that we have used. We have done quota share transactions with reinsurers, and we have done insurance-linked note transactions with capital markets. And I think the most recent transactions, I believe, were in fourth quarter of 2023, where I believe we had one of each kind, executed in the same quarter, and some might have closed in January of 2024.
So we are very active users, and we also think it's great for our shareholders because it allows us to source capital at an attractive cost of capital we've described as mid- to low- to mid-single-digit cost of capital. And then at the same time, we are seeding that mezzanine layer of losses to reinsurance or capital market.
It's a really important point, which is why I wanted to stress on it, because I think you, you heard me say that earlier about being in the moving business rather than the storage business. And, and I think this makes that point even clearer, bringing the cost of capital down, bringing the beta and stock down, and giving more consistency to investors. It's all part of the broader story about why the valuation needs to be higher, on a, on a risk-adjusted basis. I know we're nearing time. I, I want to ask one final question. How do you think about your long-term strategic opportunities? I know you're a public company. You have to think about quarter to quarter, but how do you, when you, when you sit in your boardroom, how do you think about the next five years?
Yeah. So, Arvind, the next five years are definitely growing our mortgage insurance business with the right market opportunities, running the business prudently, but also taking opportunity within our market and in any compelling adjacencies to create shareholder value using the skill sets we already have, using the relationships we already have. And I didn't stress this on the front end, but if you think about our company, the depth we have and the breadth we have from a management team perspective, from a tenure perspective, we have one of the largest customer bases in the market. We actively do business with 1,700 active lenders, that even in a slow market gives us a lot of scale to deploy our commercial strategy, our pricing and risk strategy in the market. And that creates an ability to harvest a good amount of insurance in force, new insurance written from the market.
Then we combine that to essentially invest in data, invest in analytics, and drive more value, smarter decisions in our business that can drive one of the highest gross premium written in the market, the highest net premium in the market, while our delinquency rate in the portfolio on an apples-to-apples basis is actually in the middle of the market. So how do we drive the highest economic value for our shareholders? And now we have a scale business from an expense perspective. That would be the last element of our story that as we think about leveraging our business when these first-time home buyers come to market, we already have a scale business in 2023. 2023, we were able to reduce our expenses by 6% compared to prior year. And this year we have given guidance to keep expenses flat.
When you pull it all together, you get a growing platform, which also has a capability of increasing that scale to just drive leverage growth over the next few years.
Thank you. I know we are nearing the end of time. First of all, I wanted to thank you, Rohit, for your time this afternoon. It was very educational for our financial investors. Hopefully they were paying attention to my comments repeatedly through the call about this being a missed opportunity for them. Hopefully we were, we were able to give them very sound arguments around, around those lines. Thank you really, thank you very much for answering my questions and look forward to our next conference together.