Good morning, everyone. Thank you for joining the call and for your interest in Navient. As you know, the board and management began an in-depth review of our business a few months ago. It's been a rigorous and comprehensive process. I've asked Ed Bramson, Vice Chair of the Navient Board, to join me this morning. Ed and I will describe the steps we're taking, their rationale and objectives, and what they mean for Navient. After that, Joe will share our Q4 results and 2024 outlook. We will then open it up for Q&A. There are three actions that we're taking coming out of our in-depth review: outsourcing loan servicing, exploring strategic options for BPS, and reshaping our shared service infrastructure and corporate footprint.
At a high level, and in the near term, these actions are intended to simplify our business, reduce our expense base, and increase our financial and operating flexibility. Over the long term, we believe these actions will increase the value shareholders derive from our loan portfolios and the returns we can achieve on our business-building investments. Let me turn to slide two of our strategy update. In May 2023, the executive team and the board launched an in-depth review of our business to ensure we were on the right path for success and value creation. This review has confirmed that changes are necessary for Navient to deliver its full value and potential. Our review included an extensive and intensive analysis of costs.
We focused on the size, purpose, and allocation of all costs by business unit and shared service activities like IT, as well as unallocated costs within our corporate other segment. At the same time, we sought to benchmark and compare our costs of important activities, including loan servicing, to the cost of third-party providers. We analyzed our projected in-house servicing costs over the remaining life of our loan portfolio and compared it to third-party costs through a competitive RFP process. Our current costs were found to be comparable to third-party providers, but it was also clear that our in-house cost to service would not continue to be competitive with third-party costs as our legacy portfolio amortizes and our economies of scale begin to disappear. As a result, we've decided to transition to an outsourced servicing model.
Once completed, this will create a variable cost structure for the servicing of our student loan portfolios and provide attractive unit economics across a wide range of servicing volume scenarios. Through our competitive process, we selected MOHELA as our servicing partner. MOHELA is a leading provider of student loan servicing for government and commercial enterprises. We are committed to a seamless transition for our customers in a few months' time. Many of our servicing employees are expected to transfer along with this transaction. Now to our second strategic action. Our in-depth review highlighted that a significant part of our cost base and infrastructure is shared between loan servicing and BPS, and especially within BPS's government services business. Both businesses involve many similar activities, such as call center operations, payment processing, and omni-channel customer interactions, such as telephony or text, among others.
Given the earnings multiple the market assigns to our shares, our BPS businesses do not receive the value assigned to comparable standalone businesses. This limits our ability to realize these businesses' full potential and value, such as through larger investments in organic or inorganic growth, for example. Therefore, we are exploring strategic options for BPS, including but not limited to divestment, with the goal of realizing the full value and potential of these businesses. We've engaged financial and legal advisors to help us with these efforts, and we'll provide updates along the way. Pursuing divestment simultaneously with the decision to outsource servicing maximizes the potential for shared cost reduction. We expect to be able to identify and more quickly eliminate stranded costs. Third, we intend to reshape our shared services functions and corporate footprint to align with the needs of a more focused, flexible, and streamlined company.
We've identified opportunities, and some of the steps that need to be taken are included in our 2024 outlook. The full scope and timing of these opportunities will depend on the progress of the outsourcing and potential divestiture transactions. These will define any transition services requirements as well as separation and stranded costs. If you look at our 2023 operating expenses, approximately $400 million, which is net of expected outsourced servicing expenses, could be eliminated under a scenario in which we had already completed the three steps we're announcing today. That scenario would also not include BPS revenue under a full business divestiture scenario. We expect to finalize all three actions during 2024. Their implementation is expected to be largely complete over the next 18-24 months. With that, let me turn it over to Ed.
Thank you, David. I think all of the things that David's spoken about that we're actually doing are relatively clear. But what we thought might be helpful today is that for the last eight, nine, 10 years Navient's been in a steady state. You can predict more or less what it's gonna do, and starting in 2025, it's gonna be steady state again. So the coming year is sort of transitional, and you could think about it as a turnaround year. And the firm that I'm with invests principally in turnarounds, so we thought it might be helpful to provide some perspective on not just what we're doing, but why we're doing it. And David asked me, I think the word he actually used was delegated me, to take you through it from that perspective.
So starting on page three, you could obviously say, "Well, why would the board look at doing this now as opposed to in the future or having done it in the past?" And if you look at the first bullet, it basically says that the share price since the spin-off in 2014 has gone down a little bit. It's not the worst you've ever seen, but I think the board concluded that it's not a tremendous return for 10 years' work. So, the question is, what do you do about it? And as David said, the first step was to do a really solid review of costs. And that project, and I've been involved in quite a few of these turnaround situations, was one of the best interactions between board and management that I've ever seen.
So this is a unified approach, and I think it's very well done. The basic issue it had to address is, if you think about Navient compared to other companies, a very high proportion of our costs are allocated rather than directly attributable. And what that tends to mean in practice is you always spend a lot of time deciding which bucket the costs should go into, which doesn't leave much time to figure out whether you should have them or not. And this study has sort of broken through that, and it's provided a lot of useful data. Obviously, it helps with what David's talking about in cost reduction, but it also points you to what to do next with capital allocation or growth or whatever. And what it all sort of ends up saying is that for turnarounds, it's a somewhat unusual situation.
The likely cash that's gonna be available in the next few years actually is higher in amount than our entire market cap. So, a lot of what the strategic plan will ultimately have to be about is how do you use that wisely. So, we'd like to take you through our thinking on that. If you go to page four, the major driver of our financial performance since the spin-off had to be the loans we inherited. At the time of the spin-off, about $135 billion of loans, and the intention was not to replace them. They were intended to run off. The intention was to do other things with it. And so we have made some efforts in that regard. We've actually generated about $9 billion of new loans.
But I think over time, and I've gone back and looked at some of the sell-side research, people were probably a little too optimistic about how soon you could start to get to the inflection point where new revenues grew faster than the old ones declined. And in reality, as you can see, we've had a runoff of about $90 billion of loans. We've added about $9 billion of new ones, so might be on track to some inflection points in revenue, but it's not near term. So, the inflections to focus on are the ones that David's talking about, which are inflections in earnings, or in shareholder value. And if you go to page five, I think this helps to put in perspective what we're focused on in the short run. The revenues coming down is not really the principal issue on this.
The issue is, the operating leverage that creates. And so, during the period, as you can see, if you take net interest income, we've had a drop of about $1.1 billion on an annual basis. Our operating expenses have come down by $80 million, and there are lots of reasons and background for that, which I won't get into. But whereas the ratio that we're getting here is 15 to one, unfortunately, it's a negative ratio, and that's what David's dealing with right now.
There's a second contributory issue that comes out of this, which we'll come back to a little bit later on, which is, as we thought that the revenue inflection is coming fairly soon, has receded, you tend to get a reduction in the PE multiple, and we'll get into what the consequences of that are in just a second. If you go to page six, during the period, we did make a lot of investments. We bought BPS, we bought Earnest, did some other things. The biggest single investment we made was in share repurchases, and as you perhaps know, we have bought back since the spin-off, about 75% of our original shares outstanding. And that program did what it was intended to do, which essentially was to maintain earnings per share. And the data in the table is a little bit messy.
There's a difference between GAAP and core, but I think it's fair to say that if you looked at it, it's maintained earnings flat to slightly up, so it achieved what it was intended to do. On the other hand, the problem we've had is because of the change in perceptions of strategy, the multiple's been coming down. So even though the earnings per share are flat to up, because of our declining multiple, the share price has come down. That's an issue that we need to deal with as well, and we'll talk about that shortly. With the joint project between board and management done, what are the immediate priorities? The first one is obviously to get your operating expenses down. And there are two elements to that.
There's an obvious one, which is that the loan portfolios, by and large, with one exception, are not designed to be replaced. So every dollar that you spend of overhead on them or other expenses connected with them, just comes out of the value of the portfolio. So our biggest single asset today is the loan portfolios. The less money you spend collecting them, everything else equal, the better. I think the more subtle issue is that our major future asset is the businesses we're trying to grow. And in an allocated environment, as the legacy businesses shrink, their allocated costs get reallocated to new businesses, which are the ones you're trying to grow, which can't afford them. So that needs to be dealt with.
I think the other thing, coming back to the rising cost of equity is this: if you accept that we're going to have a tremendous amount of cash relative to our market cap, to either return to investors or invest over the next 2-3 years, there needs to be a discipline on how you think about it. So, think about it this way, if we take $100 of cash and we put it into an investment, and it makes a 10% return, that's $10. At our current multiple, that means market value of $70 for the $100 you put in. That's not a buyer point. You can't do that. So you either have to return that money or come up with something better.
So where it leaves you today, and hopefully this will change, is you need to make about a 15% return on equity to justify doing anything, and if you do, it's sort of a wash. So with that as a background, what we'd like to do on page eight as I, as David said, and like I said at the beginning, this is a strategy update. It's how to think about the strategy, it's not the strategy. But the strategy is gonna be driven by what you have to work with. And on this page, we have the major components of the business. So the loan portfolios we'll cover in a second. Other items we have, we have quite a large amount of unrestricted cash, and we have two operating segments.
We have Earnest and we have BPS, and both of those have some interesting aspects to them. We'll cover a little bit in brief. If you go to page nine, this is the loan portfolios. Okay, so the first piece of the portfolio is our loan assets. And, I think it's important to explain that on our balance sheet, these are consolidated, which makes it a bit difficult to track what they're really worth. In reality, all the loans, almost all the loans that we have are securitized. They reside in trust accounts which, those trusts have incurred some borrowing.
So the real economic interest we have in the loan portfolios is what we get from those securitization trusts, and that's a combination of future net interest income, servicing fees, and the initial equity that we put in that comes back at the end when the trust is liquidated. So if you take those inflows, the table sort of puts together things that you've seen before, but maybe not in one place. And what it essentially says is that the expected distributions to us from the trusts are about $13 billion. Against that, we finance it in part with unsecured debt, which is a little less than $6 billion. So there's somewhere in the region of $7 billion, to come in from those trusts over time as we speak, and about half of that looks like it comes in in the next five years.
However, it does cost some money to get from there to what shareholders receive. And so if you want to maximize that value, you need to deal with loan servicing expense, corporate overhead, and the interest on our liabilities. We think there are opportunities in all of those areas, and I think David's already laying out for you what they are in servicing and corporate overhead. The objective here is to give you a realistic view of what these things are worth. We need to be able to give you all the data, which we don't have yet. So hopefully by the end of the year, we'll be able to lay all of that out. David covered the outsourcing. I just want to say briefly on page eleven, what this, the environment and what the decision that created it is.
When Navient was spun off, it had 12 million borrowers. Half of them were serviced through the Education Department, the other half were our loans. So, as you move along, probably one and two-thirds of the loans were financed for the Education Department. Much larger infrastructure than we require for what we do today. So surprisingly, and this is a real compliment to the management team, when you benchmark it, our servicing costs are very competitive today. The problem is, David said, as the base shrinks, they're gonna get less competitive. So there is an option to go ahead and invest in a smaller, more flexible system to deal with that. We think a more desirable option is to outsource to somebody who has scale.
The expectation, therefore, is not that we're going to save a lot of money on servicing in the short run because we are competitive, but as the portfolio shrinks, the benefits become very large by making it variable. So that's the loan portfolio. On page 12, there's another item, unrestricted cash, and I think a way to look at this is it's not part of the loan portfolios, but it goes with it. And the reason we have all the cash you see on the charts here is that it's a liquidity buffer for the large, loan maturities that we have coming up periodically, and so it's always been there. However, it's not always easy to get this out of the financials. It's unrestricted cash. It's available for general corporate purposes, and it belongs to the shareholders.
As at the end of 2023, that's about $7.50 a share of cash that belongs to the shareholders. In fact, if you look at some other liquid assets that we have in addition to cash, it's more like $10 a share. So if you think about that, and if you think about the potential inflows from the loan portfolios, that's why I was saying earlier that even if you don't sell BPS, you're going to be having cash available for distributions or investments that's actually, in the next few years, equal to more than our entire market cap. So obviously, the key to this situation is to do that wisely. So, if you go to page 13, I think from what I said earlier, it's sort of obvious in which circumstances you would just return cash to shareholders.
But here's an example of some things that are going on at Navient under the hood that perhaps aren't well highlighted. So, the one I'm going to pick is Earnest. And Earnest is something we bought five years ago or so, but the point is that it's a new brand to Navient, and it's customer-focused, and it's designed to focus on relationships. And what we mean by that is a relationship is something that causes a customer to come back for another product after they've got the first one. The reason you want that is it enables you to build attractive lifetime economics with customers. In that sense, it's distinct from the Navient brand. There's nothing wrong with the Navient brand, but it's a servicing brand.
So the interaction you have with it is collecting a loan that might have been written by the Education Department, or maybe it's one of our old ones. We do the best we can to treat you properly. We try and be efficient and, you know, sympathetic to the extent necessary. But at the end of that relationship, you don't expect to see us again. So it's not the right sort of brand to build a business in the future. So Earnest has been going for a while. It is now running at a bit less than $200 million a year of revenue. It's principally focused on education industry types of products at the moment. Our objective is to move that out into a broader set of product lines at some point in the future.
But what we have today is a lending business, which has generated essentially all of our new loans in recent years, which is highly efficient, and we'll tell you about it in a second. There's another part of Earnest, which we're calling a financial counseling platform, really for lack of anything more imaginative to call it. And in my own work in engineering, this would be the difference between saying what something is and what it does. So financial counseling is what it is. What it does is that it enables us to address a much broader base of customers than we have today, to build our relationships potentially for the future, and also to develop data for the sorts of things you might do next.
But the management team at Earnest is quite a bit younger than some of the other management at Navient, and one of the things that they've done, I think, quite well, is to resist some pressure to monetize this business too soon. So it does generate a little bit of revenue, but the way to think about it is it's all paid for within Earnest's operations budget. Quickly covering the brand point. As we said, we're trying to target a certain kind of customer. We're trying to target them efficiently. What's on the page here is that Navient periodically does a brand health survey. There are 11 brands in here. One of them is Navient, one of them is Earnest, the other nine are competitive companies. And there are lots of attributes. We just picked some of them.
But, as you know, generally speaking, financial services companies are not super well-liked by their customers. But if you look at these attributes, what you find is that, Earnest, in its dealings with people, is perceived as being fair, as being ethical, being reliable. What it's not perceived as is being aggressive or arrogant. So if you come back to the efficiency of acquiring customers, if you treat them properly, they come back, and that's much cheaper than getting a new one. So that's the point I think we want to make. So just to give you a bit of an insight into how Earnest is doing. On the lending side, the principal thing it does is graduate loan refinancing at the moment. There's 5%-10% of it that's in-school lending, but I don't think it's relevant to this discussion.
It's not the only thing we want to do, but it's a good place to start, and it pays the rent. The reason it's good is it aligns with the sorts of customers you want to get and the characteristics you want, and it's something we know how to do. It's been successful. Our market share in this field is either one or two for most of the last few years, and we've generated about $9 billion of loans here. It's also now quite profitable. It went from a loss in 2020 of about $8 million to making about $80 million pre-tax today. The counseling program platform, I think the point to make here is that over that time, it's grown fourfold, a bit more so. And so, you've got almost two million users.
Earnest has probably 150,000 customers, so it's multiples of people that you have relationships with above those that you actually currently lend to today. The reason that's important is that they may be future customers, but coming back to a point we made earlier, we're looking at product line extensions. And the most economic way, and least risky way of doing that, is to test into those things, to do research, to try them out, rather than commit hundreds of millions and find out it was a bad idea. And there's an industry celebrity, who I have not met personally, who has, I think, an interesting way of describing consumer lending.
He says, "People go into it with wide eyes, and they come out with black eyes." So one of the principal values of this platform is to enable us to be judicious as we start to add new products. On Earnest itself, its business model, why is it distinct? We talked about the brand, but if you think about financial services, generally, it's very difficult to have a lower cost of funds than other people. Product differentiation is stuff, something people talk about, but at best, it's squeezing. So neither of those are going to be advantages for us. So, what Earnest is focused on is targeting customers who are efficient and then managing that process efficiently.
So if you think about what people in the industry generally talk about, they say, "Well, our NIM will be better because we'll charge people more for the same product than other people can get," or, "We'll fund it cheaper than other people can do," or, "Our cost of customer acquisition will be less." All of those things are important, but what really counts is the end-to-end efficiencies. So, taking a few data points there. Earnest is acquiring customers at an annualized cost of about 30 bps. And what that is, it's a little bit more than a percent to get one, you keep them about four years. Another element of efficiency is that we're targeting more affluent customers. So, the average balance at Earnest at the moment is about $50,000, which is almost three times what our legacy portfolio is.
In fact, that 50,000 is trending a little bit higher as we speak. Then the other point on here is the realized loss rate, and the 40 bps might sound attractive. It probably is helpful in generating NIM, but the more important point in an end-to-end analysis is all the people you don't chase, you don't have to worry about, you don't have to think about every day, don't cost you money to manage. So in terms of efficiency, that's probably the major advantage of targeting those kinds of customers. To wrap up on this, because this sounds like a plug, and I have to say that it really isn't because we haven't decided firmly what to do with it or about it.
But having said that, we talked earlier about operating leverage, and one of the great things about the project that the guys did is you were able to identify these points of leverage. You do this, you get that, and various elements. So, Earnest is an example, I think, of positive operating leverage because you have well-controlled costs and you have a growing revenue base. So, to put that in context, if you look at Earnest from 2023 to the end of last year, its revenue increased by, I'm going to call it $125 million. Its marketing expenses went up, but if you get more customers, you have to spend more money to get them. What's interesting, though, is that the other operating expenses went up by about $15 million.
So that's a ratio of a little bit better than 8-1, and as you grow, that ratio actually gets better. So, what this looks like to us is a classic example of online growth business economics. So, it's probably something that you will want to find a way to expand. So, with that, not to say that there are not very interesting businesses within BPS, but that one, as you know, is subject to an analysis of strategic alternatives. I'm going to turn it back to David. I'm going to get off now, and I'll turn it, delegate it back to him.
Great. Thanks, Ed. So, turning to page 18, let me provide a brief review of our BPS businesses. These businesses operate in two distinct markets with separate operations. Several of the businesses within this group were acquisitions. Our healthcare business goes to market under the Xtend brand. Xtend offers revenue cycle management services to healthcare providers and is relatively independent from the rest of Navient from an operational perspective. The government services and transportation businesses operate under several brands and provide a variety of services to federal, state, and local governments. Its operations share costs, infrastructure, and corporate support with the rest of Navient, particularly loan servicing. While we're at an early stage in exploring strategic options for this business, we will keep you updated as that process unfolds. Let me try to summarize on slide 19.
We have identified and we're taking steps to significantly reduce the expense base and simplify the company. These actions are designed to increase the value of the cash flows from our loan portfolios and increase the returns and transparency around growth initiatives. The cash we have on hand, the enhanced cash flows from our loan portfolios, and the proceeds of any divestiture of BPS combined, could generate significant cash flows in excess of our current market cap over the next few years. We will invest that cash in activities that are expected to generate market value in excess of the invested cash. Excess cash will be distributed to shareholders. Shortly following my transition from the board to the role of CEO, I shared with you my initial impressions from inside the company, namely, that Navient has a strong foundation of assets, capabilities, and talent.
I also said that we would undertake a rigorous review to identify ways in which that foundation can deliver more to shareholders. These actions are the first steps in delivering our full value and potential, and we look forward to providing updates on our progress.