Well, good morning, everyone. Welcome. Great to see all of you here. This is our ninth annual Investor Day for National MI. We have a great morning scheduled for you, and it's always such a pleasure to see you all in person and online. Before we begin, wanted to give you some logistics. Today's presentation is being delivered in person here in New York and simulcast on the web. The link is in the presentation. For those joining remotely, presentation materials have been made available online alongside the webcast and on our website. We'll host a Q&A session following today's formal presentations, and our webcast audience will have an opportunity to submit questions through the Q&A window on the webcast page. Also note, a replay of today's meeting will be available on our website.
I want to make a few comments about forward-looking statements. During the course of this 2023 Investor Day discussion, we may make comments about our expectations for the future. Actual results could differ materially from those contained in these forward-looking statements. Additional information about the factors that could cause actual results or trends to differ materially from those discussed today can be found on page 80 of this presentation and on our website, or through our filings with the SEC, which are also on our website. If and to the extent we make forward-looking statements, we do not undertake any obligation to update those statements in the future in light of subsequent developments. Further, no interested party should rely on the fact that the guidance of such statements is current at any time other than the time of this presentation.
Also, note that we will refer to certain non-GAAP measures and provide a reconciliation to the most comparable measures under GAAP on pages 80 and 82 of this presentation and on the Investor Relations section of our website. Without further ado, let me ask Brad Shuster to come up.
Well, thank you very much, John, and good morning, everyone. We appreciate those of you in the room who've taken the time to join us, and I also want to welcome those who are viewing online or those of you watching the replay, for that matter. We have a great story to tell. We're very excited about it, and we think after you go through the details with us, you'll be excited, too. So our agenda for today is packed. I'm gonna spend just a few minutes outlining the broad themes you're gonna hear throughout the day. But as I said, we find it very exciting when we stop and reflect on all we've achieved as a company in our short life, and there's a lot of success that we've achieved.
But, and more importantly, we wanna share with you today how well-positioned we believe we are to continue to achieve success and take advantage of the significant opportunities that are available to us in the future. And we're gonna share a lot about our long-term outlook for the market ahead and how that's going to translate into future success. So, with that, we will get into it. You're gonna hear from a number of members of our executive team today. I'd just like to say I'm really proud of this team. This is the strongest executive team we've had in the history of our company, and it's also the strongest in our industry. It's a small industry.
We all know each other, and I'm totally proud to be working side by side with this team and encourage you to get to know them because I think you'll reach the same conclusion. So in addition to hearing from Adam today, and Norm, and Rob, and Ravi, also with us is Bill Leatherberry, our General Counsel. Bill, can you wave your hand there? And Bill heads up our government relations effort in Washington, in addition to his general counsel responsibilities, and so I'm sure you'll enjoy visiting with Bill. Also here is Mohamed Youssef. Mohamed, raise your hand.
He's our EVP and Head of Operations and Technology, and a lot of what you're gonna hear about that we view as a competitive advantage when we compete in the marketplace is due to the efforts of Mohamed and his team, and we continue to innovate and improve the way we interact with our customers. And so, we're gonna take a couple breaks over the course of the day, so I encourage you to introduce yourself to the team if you don't already know them, and feel free to ask your questions of them. We're also gonna do a Q&A at the end of the day, as we always do, which is probably our favorite part of the whole presentation. So get your questions ready. We're ready for them. Okay, broad themes for the day.
These are things you're gonna hear more than once because they're important. They're touchstones for us. We're gonna tell you about our track record of success, what we've achieved as a company. We're very proud of it, but it provides a very strong foundation for the company going forward. We're also gonna share our perspective on our differentiated strategy and how that positions us to continue to deliver success in what we believe is a very attractive market going forward. We're gonna go into more detail about why we have that belief. Then importantly, we're gonna articulate what we believe is a really exceptional opportunity lying ahead, how we can take our past success and our current positioning and capitalize on that success. So you will hear a lot about that as we move through the program today.
So in terms of founding principles, these have driven our company since its inception. They haven't changed. You've heard about them from us before, but they remain central to everything we do. First and foremost, we help qualified borrowers achieve the dream of homeownership. This is a critical. This is what we do. This is who we are. It's a very important social mission to help homeowners gain access, particularly their first home. In our history, we've helped over 1.7 million borrowers gain access to housing, and that's something everybody in the company is proud about and feels good about. This is in our DNA, and it makes it very easy to come to work in the morning when you know this is, at the end of the day, what you do when you're successful.
Secondly, in order to achieve that objective, we have to be a credible and durable counterparty. We have to manage our capital and our business in a way that positions us to be able to write new NIW and do so in a economical fashion. And we also have to position ourselves so that we can pay claims across all market cycles. So not just benign credit environment, but we're built for all the cycles, and we feel very well positioned to be able to do that. Since our founding, we've designed ourselves to deliver a great customer experience, and that comes from our people, our IT platform, which I've mentioned earlier. But that's enabled us to build a very strong customer franchise. We now have just under 1,500 active customer relationships, which obviously we find very gratifying.
And then, as you'll always hear from us, we manage risk to ensure strong long-term performance across all market cycles. You've heard us talk before about our comprehensive credit risk management program. You're gonna hear a lot more about that today, and we'll also drive down on our actual performance, and you'll see that that's paying benefits and dividends to us every day when we look at our outperformance relative to our competition. You've always heard us talk a lot about culture, and it's a real source of pride, what we've been able to do there. We're gonna talk—we're gonna drill down on that particular point in the next slide, but this remains as important now as ever. And we've always built the company to generate strong mid-teens returns.
The bottom line is, we have delivered this, and we've done it by creating the kind of strong revenue growth that we've sought. We've done it by managing the portfolio such that our credit performance is absolutely stellar and that has, in turn, and we've also managed our expenses in a very disciplined way, as you've seen in our recent expense ratio results, and that has allowed us to generate very strong net income. For the last five years, each year we've had record net income, and that's an achievement we all take great pride in. That leads to strong return on equity, strong returns for shareholders, strong growth in book value. Bottom line, we've built a durable business that's uniquely positioned to perform well and to continue to perform well.
So with that, let's drill down a little bit on our track record of success. I said we would talk about culture, and here we are. All the success we've achieved and all the success we're gonna be talking about today traces directly back to our people. We have the smallest employee count of any mortgage insurer, at around 240 employees. But we believe that we have absolutely the best talent in the industry. And that shows through everything that we do. We think our employee base and our talent is a competitive advantage, and I think happily, I think our people feel the same way about working at National MI. As you know, for the eighth year in a row, we've been certified as a Great Place to Work.
You might think that after eight years, we might be getting complacent about that, but quite frankly, the opposite is the case. We feel the pressure building as we continue to be recognized by this special award eight years in a row now. Adam and I spent a lot of time talking about this, and are we still getting across to our people in the way we want to? This last year, the actual response rate and the ratings of the company as a Great Place to Work actually were both at their highest ever. So we feel very gratified by that. I'd like to just kind of sum it up: We think we're the best here, and we're getting better. It's a good place to be in from a culture standpoint. Let's talk more about customers.
We have dramatically expanded our customer franchise and our market presence. And we see great opportunity ahead to continue even though we have much deeper penetration with customers, we see tremendous opportunity ahead to do better with the existing customers and to continue to add more. So Norm will talk much more about that later on this morning. We have connections with our customer franchise at the executive level, at the operational level, as well as digital connections, so that we can do business with our customers when and where they want to. And the customer base continues to expand to our core value proposition of certainty of service. We have a strong and engaged sales force who takes a consultative approach with our customer franchise, and lenders and borrowers are responding to that.
They're increasingly coming to National MI for critical down payment support at a time when they need it most. Oops! Let's spend a few minutes talking about our high-quality insured portfolio. We've achieved both success in both growth and quality of our insurance portfolio. You saw in our recent press release that we're now approaching $195 billion of insurance in force as of the end of the third quarter. That's a compound growth rate of over 25% annually since 2017. And I want to emphasize, it's not just growth in the size of the portfolio, but it's also growth in the quality of the portfolio.
We see the new business environment being constructive, even though it, it's somewhat challenged from an affordability standpoint due to higher interest rates, but we're still finding plenty of opportunities to write new, high-quality business and continue to expand. We are delivering, if you've seen our numbers, the industry's best credit performance, and, we're gonna share lots of data with you today to back that up. So we, we look forward to sharing that with you. And then finally, let's spend a few minutes just talking about the final element of our track record of success, and that's our strong financial results.
To put it succinctly, the success we've had with our people, our development of our customer franchise, the shaping of our insured portfolio, our comprehensive credit risk management framework, our disciplined management of expenses and capital, have translated into extremely strong financial performance. As I said, record net income in each of the last five years, consistent, strong mid-teens returns, a business model that delivers strong returns while limiting volatility. So we're very, very proud of that. Let's spend a few minutes talking a little bit more about our differentiated strategy and how that's gonna help us propel ahead. Looking forward, you can expect further execution along the lines of what we've already achieved. We have a large and growing market to serve.
The demographic demands that we've seen or that we expected to exist when we started the company have in fact come to fruition and continued to be strong drivers of the market for us going forward. Significant numbers of the population, including the millennial generation, are getting to the age where they want to buy their first home, and that's always been the sweet spot for us. But if you add in the challenges of affordability, as I mentioned earlier, the demand for our product is extremely bright. That's what we're built to do, and we're happy to do it. We have very broad access to the market now. I'd say our access to the origination market is as good or equal to any of our competitors, which is a nice position to be in after starting from nothing.
Seems like not that long ago, but it's over 10 years ago. Our differentiated and disciplined approach to risk management, driven by our comprehensive credit risk management framework, has allowed us to build a portfolio that's not only fast-growing, but also high quality and high performing... So this leads us to being able to put up results that are truly outstanding. As I mentioned earlier, we've also been continually focused on expense efficiency, having the smallest headcount, giving us the smallest expense footprint, and we're putting up expense ratio numbers that really were aspirational at our founding, and we've actually overachieved some of our aspirations there. We've built a robust balance sheet with a very strong funding position, and we'll talk a lot more about that.
So our differentiated strategy of growth and value has led to strong and consistent returns for our shareholders, and we intend to continue doing that. So let me just close out my section and just let you all know that we're finishing 2023 in a great position. Our past successes are providing the foundation for continued future performance. We think we're uniquely positioned to capitalize on the long-term opportunity in a large and attractive market, and we expect to be able to deliver returns, book value growth, and shareholder value going forward. And with that, it's my great pleasure to welcome our President and Chief Executive Officer, Adam Pollitzer.
Well, thank you, Brad, and good morning, everyone. I'm delighted to be here with you today and appreciate your continued interest in National MI. I'll begin on slide 14, and over the next several pages, we'll share a perspective about our strategic outlook, where we see a tremendous opportunity to leverage our core strength and the success we've achieved to date, to continue investing in our people, supporting our customers and their borrowers, and delivering differentiated long-term growth, returns, and value for our shareholders. I'll get into the detail on slide 15, where we lead the private MI market from a position of strength and success. We've always operated with a goal to provide a differentiated commitment and standard of service, and a clear vision as to how we should engage in the market to drive value for borrowers, our lender customers, our employees, our shareholders, and other important stakeholders.
We've had tremendous success in this regard. We've helped over 1.7 million borrowers gain access to mortgage credit and opened the door to affordable and sustainable homeownership in communities across the country. We've established a national customer franchise on a foundation of partnership, trust, and innovation. We've built a talented and dedicated team who drive our success every day. We've developed a comprehensive credit risk management framework, have built a large, high quality, and high-performing insured portfolio with significant embedded value, and we've generated consistently strong and differentiated financial results. Taken together, we are leading the private MI market and outperforming in a dramatic way, excelling with our culture, our customers, our portfolio, our platform innovation and efficiency, and in the growth, returns, and value we're delivering for shareholders. Turning forward, we'll have a look at each of these areas of outperformance, starting with our people.
We believe that the quality of our team and the culture that we've established are key competitive advantages. We've built a talented, dedicated group and have established a culture of collaboration, integrity, and performance, where our employees feel energized and valued, and our continued success traces directly to their hard work and dedication. We have 239 employees, by far the smallest headcount in the mortgage insurance industry. While we're small in footprint, our team is big in impact. We lead with a clear organizational mission, values, and purpose. Our mission is to help people gain access to housing and support them as they build value and community for themselves and their families. Our values are anchored around partnership, service, integrity, and excellence.
Our purpose is to serve our customers with distinction, security, and success, and to optimize the long-term benefit we provide to our shareholders and other stakeholders. Shifting to slide 17, corporate sustainability is one of the ways we put purpose into action. We've always focused on building our business in a sustainable way, with discipline and risk responsibility at the core. In doing so, we've built National MI into a market leader and have positioned the company to serve stakeholders with consistency across all cycles. Our products provide borrowers with the support they need to access mortgage credit, and in doing so, we help to open the door to affordable and sustainable homeownership in communities across the country. We're passionate about our work and proud of the support we provide and impact we have in the market every day.
Turning to slide 18, winning in the market and building a large, diversified national customer franchise. We have active relationships with nearly 1,500 lenders. We've earned their trust and partnership because of our terrific team and our consistent focus on service, value-added engagement, and technology leadership.... The mortgage market is evolving, connected, and competitive, and we have the best sales team, top to bottom, to lead and outperform in a changing environment. Customer engagement has evolved. Digital is here to stay, and we have adapted faster than anyone. I'd also note this is a time when lenders need our support more than ever before. Their business has been strained by the rise in rates and decline in origination activity, and it is critically important that we show up for them with confidence and consistency as they navigate through a challenging period.
We're doing just that, staying close, staying connected, activating new accounts, and capturing increasing flow from our existing partners. Shifting to slide 19. When I talk about our book, I often use superlatives because it is appropriate and well-deserved. Our insured portfolio is the fastest-growing, highest quality, and best performing in the private MI industry by a wide margin, and these attributes are not typically paired. Usually, growth comes at the expense of discipline, or risk management comes at the expense of growth. We have achieved them all together. 25% compound annual growth in our insurance in force over the last 5 years, credit quality that stands ahead by every objective measure, and the lowest default experience in the sector by orders of magnitude. We have an insured portfolio advantage, and I'll build on this detail over the next several slides. Our insured portfolio advantage is not happenstance.
It is deliberate and traces directly to our risk management approach. We've built National MI to perform through all market cycles, and the discipline with which we have managed our business across the board stands ahead. Our philosophy all along has been that in order to get full benefit from risk management strategies when times are tough, you need to have implemented them when times were good. And this can be seen most specifically and most importantly, in our comprehensive credit risk management strategy. There is no bigger long-term driver of our success than credit performance and how well we manage risk in our insured portfolio, and how we manage credit risk stands out. Our approach spans three foundational pillars. One, individual risk underwriting. Losses happen at an individual policy level, and the more information we have about each of the loans we insure, the better off we are.
Two, the use of Rate GPS, which allows us to fully price for the risk we're taking on a granular basis, and also to price away the risk we don't want in our portfolio. And three, an expansive reinsurance program, which covers nearly all of the risks we've ever written as a company and helps to backstop our credit exposure in periods of broader uncertainty or market volatility. We have a goal to deliver differentiated performance in terms of our discipline, risk selection, and credit experience, and Rate GPS is a critical tool that has helped us achieve standout results. Rate GPS, where the GPS stands for Granular Pricing System, is our proprietary multivariate pricing engine.
It allows us to factor for a wide array of foundational borrower and loan-level risk attributes, and to further consider how regional trends and product design will drive loan performance and our credit experience at an individual policy level. Price is a part of our voice in the market, and we use Rate GPS to directly express our risk appetite, drive our mix, and shape our insured portfolio to great effect. And in a world like today's, where risk can evolve rapidly, Rate GPS is highly flexible and immediately responsive. Changes that we make to our risk decisioning and pricing framework one afternoon are effective in the market the very next morning. Rate GPS is a powerful tool, and it's a key source of differentiation for us. Turning to slide 22, our portfolio strength in stark relief. We have an exceptionally high quality insured portfolio by design.
As an insurance company, we take risk. That is our purpose. Taking this risk responsibly, reviewing it and understanding it in detail, being selective as to what we ultimately put on our books, and establishing appropriate concentration guidelines is critical. And here you can see we have done just that. There's a natural cause and effect. Our focus on and prioritization of credit discipline and the high quality of our insured portfolio drives our loss experience. And here we highlight the strength of our performance in a period of stress on the left, at the onset of the COVID pandemic, and in a constructive credit environment on the right, as of the most recent reporting on September thirtieth.
We are deliberate in our strategy, with a focus on building a high-quality insured portfolio, consistent in our execution, using Rate GPS to actively shape our mix of business, and proud of our outperformance, delivering consistent, industry-leading results. We have the fastest-growing, highest quality, and best-performing insured portfolio in the private MI industry by a wide margin. We've built it that way on the front end, through the success we've achieved with customers, the business they entrust us with, and the disciplined approach we take to managing the mix of risk that we allow onto our balance sheet. We do even more on the back end, where we've led with innovation in the risk transfer markets and have secured comprehensive reinsurance coverage on nearly all of the policies we've ever originated...
Our program provides protection against adverse credit losses in periods of stress, and in doing so, serves to insulate our business, our book, and our financials from potential points of volatility. Of equal importance, reinsurance provides us with an efficient and elastic source of regulatory capital funding. At September 30, risk transfer in all forms provided us with over $1.8 billion of aggregate premiums funding at an estimated 5% pretax cost of capital. Turning to slide 25, I'll shift from our credit profile and outperformance as a source of differentiation to our platform innovation and operating efficiency. We've always been focused on managing our business with discipline and efficiency, and we have a distinct advantage with the smallest expense base in the MI sector by a wide margin and the lowest expense ratio across the industry.
In terms of the benefits that this provides, the financial impact is obvious. Lower expenses translate directly to bottom line profitability and returns, and Ravi will share these details in his discussion. But I highlight efficiency in my discussion today because there's also real strategic value here that is often overlooked, and it feeds directly into our risk management approach and the flexibility we have to more actively shape the profile of our high-quality insured portfolio. As a financial matter, we write business and price our policies to generate an adequate return on capital. We need premium revenue coming in to absorb our operating expenses, loss costs, funding needs, and taxes. With our expense advantage, we simply don't need larger concentrations of higher risk, higher yielding business to cover our operating base.
We can and have been achieving best-in-class returns, while also taking the most proactive and disciplined approach to managing our mix of business and the high-quality profile of our insured portfolio. From our perspective, the fact that we have a sustained expense advantage is a key part of why we have a sustained portfolio and credit advantage. Turning to slide 26, our balance sheet and the strength of our funding position serves as the foundation for the broad success that we're achieving in the market. We have a robust liquidity profile, a sizable regulatory capital buffer, significant embedded earnings power in our platform, and a focus on funding efficiency and optimization. Our balance sheet strength provides us with the wherewithal to confidently continue to invest in our employees, support our customers and their borrowers, and deliver for our shareholders.
Shifting to slide 27, this is a new view that we've developed this year, and it's a powerful one. Everything I've highlighted thus far, our focus on team and culture, our commitment to our customers and their borrowers, our uniquely disciplined approach to credit risk management, the growth, scale, and performance of our high-quality insured portfolio, and our operating efficiency and funding strategy, are key to what I call the National MI Way. These principles are intentional. They trace back to our earliest days and the work we've done from day one to establish National MI as a sustainable market leader, positioned to deliver strong mid-teen returns with lower volatility through the cycle. Over the past five years, we have delivered the highest and most consistent returns in the sector by a wide margin.
Broadly speaking, we've built our business to deliver a very high floor in stress and operate with very high upside when market conditions are favorable, and our pronounced return advantage translates directly to value. We set a course, we deliver differentiated performance, and we do so with less volatility and greater certainty of outcome. Taken all together, we have built a premium franchise that has consistently outperformed across all key metrics for our shareholders. We're proud of what we've achieved and the success we've delivered to date, primarily because of the confidence it provides as we look forward. And looking forward, we see an exceptional long-term opportunity to deliver continued growth, returns, and value. Turning to slide 29, and to talk about the opportunity that lies ahead. At our Investor Day last year, I shared a slide with a similar format but a very different message.
It was titled Developing Macro Backdrop, and flashed warning signs about where the macro environment and housing market were heading, primarily on concerns that aggressive action by the Fed risked pushing the economy into a recession. A year later, while real risk remains and we continue to take an appropriately proactive stance with respect to our pricing, reinsurance, and risk decisioning, our initial concerns have been met by tremendous resiliency in the housing market. Even though interest rates are up dramatically, the labor market has held strong, house prices continue to trend higher, and existing borrowers are performing exceptionally well. We're encouraged as we look forward. Turning to Slide 30, one of the reasons we value Investor Day is because it provides us with the ability to share a longer-term view with more depth and detail than we can on our quarterly earnings calls.
One important point I want to highlight is the sustained new business opportunity that we see in the market, which admittedly sits somewhat in contrast to the dominant headlines about rates, affordability, and origination activity. Obviously, these things, rates, affordability, and activity, matter, and the new business environment today is different than it was at the peak of the pandemic. However, there are secular trends driving long-term strength in the private mortgage insurance market, and we still see a tremendous opportunity to engage with impact and drive value over the long term. Secular trends. One, demographics. Demographics drive demand, and current population vectors, particularly the aging of the millennial generation, provide a long-term tailwind in the housing market. Two, the long-standing practical and emotional pull towards homeownership in the U.S., which was dramatically reinforced by the experience of the pandemic.
And three, house prices, which are expected to appreciate long term, given the severe supply-demand imbalance in the housing market, matter, because as house prices move higher, loan sizes increase. Add to this dynamic the current reality that borrowers today need more support than ever before, and the long-term private mortgage insurance NIW opportunity will be large, very large, and the opportunity that we have at National MI to build long-term value is clear. Two complementary forces are propelling long-term embedded value across the MI sector, and for National MI, in particular. Secular themes driving a sustained new business opportunity, paired with increased persistency in a higher-for-longer rate environment, fuels long-term growth in MI industry insurance in force. And I want to pause for a moment here on this chart, because it's an overwhelmingly positive view and one that is often overlooked.
The private mortgage insurance market is a $1.6 trillion industry that has grown at an 8% compound annual rate over the last five years. It is a large, fast-growing, and dynamic market. While year-to-year growth may vary based on the economy, on interest rates, and on origination volumes, long-term, there is a tremendous opportunity for the sector overall, and National MI in particular, to continue delivering outsized growth, returns, and value. Turning to Slide 32 and the unique opportunity we have to deliver long-term growth in an attractive market. We often talk about our embedded portfolio advantage as a credit matter, and this makes sense because we have objectively the highest quality, best-performing, and short portfolio in the industry. But it's only part of the story. We also have an embedded growth advantage that we call the pull to par.
Before I explain, I do want to level set. I'm about to mention share, market share, and I want to remind everyone that we do not, have never before, and never will manage to a market share goal. So with our disclaimer said, for this discussion, share is relevant. The pull to par is simply the difference between our share of industry insurance in force, 12.5% at September 30, and our share of NIW, which has averaged 14.4% for the last 3 years. Over time, our share of industry in force will grow and align with our run rate share of new business production, and this provides us with a unique embedded growth engine. Over the last 5 years, we've grown our insured portfolio at a 25% compound annual rate, compared to 7% for the rest of the sector.
While our relative outperformance will naturally slow, given the size of our book today at nearly $200 billion, we have a track record of differentiated performance and the benefit of this pull-to-par tailwind driving us as we look forward. Ultimately, growth in our high-quality insured portfolio drives our revenue growth and embedded value gains for shareholders. Shifting forward to a chart that we like a lot and use frequently. You'll see it a few times today, and we've shared versions of it in many of our past Investor Day discussions. We call it the Blue Mountain of Value, and I see it as a visual representation of the exceptional opportunity we have to deliver long-term growth, returns, and value for shareholders.
Over the past five years, we've compounded book value per share at nearly 20% annually, a terrific achievement that highlights the consistency and significance of our success to date. Looking forward, we are levered to the upside in an attractive market with a uniquely valuable strategy and are well-positioned to continue delivering for our shareholders over the long term. To wrap up, I stand in front of you today with confidence in the NMI Way , in the differentiated performance we've so consistently delivered thus far, in the long-term opportunity that we see across the private MI market, and in our ability to continue to execute and drive growth, profitability, and returns for our shareholders. I'm delighted now to turn it over to our Chief Sales Officer, Norm Fitzgerald. Norm?
All right. Well, thank you, Adam, and hello, everybody. Thank you for taking time to hear our story today. As Chief Sales Officer, I'm proud of what we've accomplished as a sales team and as a company since our founding more than a decade ago. I'm especially gratified to see what my team has accomplished over the past year, as we've made ourselves even more valuable for our customers and for the company in the face of rising interest rates and declining origination activity. I'm excited to take you through the results we've achieved, how we add value, and how we're thinking about growth. I'll also share highlights of how our market-leading digital strategy and the unique opportunity that it creates for National MI going forward. As you heard earlier, we have a great team and a strong customer platform.
We can access every lender in the country, both in person and virtually, effectively engaging with our customers wherever they are. We have a lean and efficient team, and we're stronger than ever. Our account coverage and access to market has never been better than it is today. We can do this with fewer people and do it well because we have a strong team armed with powerful digital tools that have allowed us to amplify the voice of our sales team to reach more customers, more proficiently every day. Now, I'm proud to say that I really know every individual on this list of 40, and that's because I've had the honor to recruit, to train, and to lead this group for over 9 years. I've had the opportunity and the responsibility to build our sales team organically.
So I built it around seasoned people who have proven to be effective in an ever-changing environment, always keeping in mind that personal relationships and wide-ranging experience matter a lot. We have intentionally built our team with strong and resilient people who represent the core culture we were founded on. People who are willing to roll up their sleeves and get the job done, no matter what it takes. Yes, I believe we have the best sales force in the industry, and their success is evident in the record growth of our account base and our NIW production year after year after year. Now, we've been incredibly successful activating new accounts and building our base. Our expansion has been fundamental in helping us grow our high-quality insurance in force in a sustainable and balanced way.
You'll see here that over the past six years, we have continued to increase our active customers, reaching a new record of 1,488 active customers as of the end of third quarter. I can tell you all of these accounts were earned. They all started with the word no, or at best, maybe. However, our talented team has been able to persevere. With our boundless professionalism and enthusiasm, we've been able to change that narrative to yes, nearly 1,500 times, and we're not done yet. But our ultimate objective is to ensure that our large base of active customers remain active and growing customers. Now, we talk a lot about active customers or active accounts. What does that mean? It means we have a master policy in place, we're integrated with the customer as both an operating and a technology matter, and we've generated NIW.
That's it. It's simple, but it's far from easy. Of course, step one is getting our master policy approved, and this is a big undertaking, but we have a lot of experience, as you can see, and we're very proficient at it. Step two is getting complete connectivity with the customer. That involves people, process, and systems. That system connection is absolutely crucial because this is how they see us, and we really aren't ready to receive a customer's business until we're fully connected. In today's world, being fully integrated in the systems and knowing our customer's entire process, front end to back end, is essential to sustain success. Keeping all lines of communication open is paramount. In order to win business and activate accounts, we must meet customers where they work, and today, that most often means remotely, and we have been winning.
I'm proud to say that we've activated 456 new accounts over the past five years. Over just the past 12 months, we've activated 79 new accounts, including 10 of the top 600 lenders in the country, continuing to expand our access to market. Account growth is crucial in times like this, as customers are facing volume challenges, mergers and acquisitions, and trimming headcount. We're sad to see the human impact of these challenges, but also somewhat insulated by our large group of clients. Because of our success in account growth, we now have an incredibly broad and diverse customer base, and this breadth matters because our active accounts represent approximately 95% of the MI industry opportunity.
My team's highest priority is providing NMI equal access to the high-quality NIW opportunity that we target as a risk management matter and helping achieve our NIW and credit quality goals. Now, even though we've been incredibly successful at adding new accounts, we still have an opportunity to grow. Alongside our focus on account growth, we're always working to increase our capture of each customer's NIW opportunity. With all the accounts we've activated over the past 10 years, we've achieved what we believe is equal access to the entire MI market, in line with our legacy competitors. We have worked ceaselessly to get here, and we will work just as vigorously to make sure we hold that line. We've earned it. Now, I get this question a lot: Why do we win? Or how do we win year after year?
Well, I believe it's because we've built our team organically. Really, every individual on our team has built their own base of customers, one at a time, using the strength of both their personal and our company brand in every sale. We have a small team that we lead with transparency and a spirit of ownership, which has earned us the lauded recognition Brad talked about as Great Place to Work eight years in a row. Eight, that's special. We simply care more, and we care about our customers, and we care about each other. We are good students, and we do our homework. Our experienced team of professionals are well known and respected in their markets. They deeply know all our accounts and prospects. We know every customer situation is different, and we customize our approach.
One thing that's consistent, though, is that account success always starts with effectively building trust and always delivering value. Now, for one customer, it may be about post-close underwriting validation program and our accelerated rescission relief. Very important today. For another, it may be about our ability to seamlessly integrate into their loan origination system. And for many or most, it comes at the end of a long process of due diligence, counterparty review, and executive-level engagement. I could say, as a general matter, that more and more of our conversations with customers are about what the industry refers to as the digital mortgage roadmap, including digital marketing and client experience. We are a thought leader on these subjects and have technical credibility because of our modern IT platform, our transformational IT and operations leadership, and our Rate GPS system.
This leadership has become a big differentiator for us as we're leveraging it to broaden our footprint and penetrate the market. We have offered an outstanding customer training program for years, consisting of original, customized training offered both virtually and in person. Part of our continued success has been quickly shifting and refreshing what we offer to address the evolving set of customer needs. Our client base now counts on us to help them navigate the changing landscape. But again, I want to emphasize that the digital experience begins and continues with people who care. Digitization helps us efficiently get our best people in front of more customers wherever they are. It's our ability to capture these moments and drive our value adds, our service, our experience, our culture, our training, and of course, our people.
Our team's excitement and level of commitment to our customers absolutely remains the most critical component of why we win. The best part is, even with all this success, after 10 years, we care even more, and we're far from done. The mortgage industry is becoming more and more digital. It's the edge that lenders need to win. The race continues for customers, and our lenders are continuously compressing the mortgage cycle. Prospective borrowers are applying online, credit checks and FICO scores are being processed instantaneously, MI quotes are pulled and priced electronically, loan documentation is uploaded to secure lender portals, all with essentially no human touch. This technology shift is driving efficiency and flexibility for our customers and for NMI, and the trend plays to our strengths. Technology disrupts lender habits and legacy relationships.
We win if we can help the lender do it faster, more efficiently, and with greater precision. We are a technology-forward company and have pivoted to a digital engagement model quickly and seamlessly, which is driving both new account growth and stronger penetration of accounts. NMI's sales team continues to be at the forefront, educating our own team and using that knowledge to help evolve our clients when they need it. This is good because the digital trend allows us to expand our reach and engage across far more customer points of contact than was ever possible before, what I call amplifying our voice or a force multiplier. Through this digital transformation, we've taken our experienced, respected, accomplished team...
Continue evolving and using every available tool to ensure our best-in-class team is everywhere they need to be, and doing everything that they need to do to take care of our clients in a time when they need us most. This is why we are the smallest and most efficient sales team in the industry. Things continue to change fast, and I'm very fortunate to have a talented team that's as excited to grow and evolve with the needs of the market as I am. So in summary, we have been incredibly successful, driven by a great team with a differentiated message and value proposition. I joined this company 10 years ago because I love a challenge, and I love building things. Nothing fuels my fire more than an initial no.
This has been an incredibly rewarding time, and I'm as excited today about our opportunity as I was on day one. I'm grateful for all the relationships and partnerships we've built internally and externally. For me, it's always been about the people. It's all about our customers, our employees, and our culture. These aren't just words on a slide. This is what drives me every day. Our team will continue to focus on high-value new account activations. We'll use our entire organization and strategic engagement to continue success in penetrating these accounts. We have an advantage through our digital literacy when it comes to effectively connecting with customers and winning their business, and we are dedicated to driving all of this with sales efficiency and excellence.
With this combination, the best people and the best platform, we're excited about what we've been able to accomplish in this market and about the opportunity that lies ahead. So with that, I thank you for your attention. We're going to take a 10-minute break now, and when we return, you're going to hear from our Chief Risk Officer, Rob Smith. Thank you.
We're, we're ready to get started. I'll welcome Rob Smith to the stage.
Hi, everyone. Thank you for taking the time to attend our presentation, either here or online, for those listening. As in previous years, I'm gonna discuss our risk management framework, and we'll describe in some detail how we approach risk selection and risk distribution. Following that, I will review our performance to date, and then provide our perspective on the current economic and housing market environment. Due to the nature of stress events in the housing market, which can develop and persist over multiple years, strong risk management is particularly important in the mortgage insurance industry. Since our inception, we've established a comprehensive risk management framework designed to reduce the volatility of our results by mitigating the losses we've experienced during adverse economic events.
This approach to risk management exists within a tight regulatory framework that was instituted in the aftermath of the Great Recession and remains in place today. Now I'm gonna take some time to discuss specifics of our approach towards managing the risk in our insurance portfolio. Although there are many details in how we manage risk, we generally think of our approach as having three main risk pillars. First, we emphasize individual risk underwriting, which helps us understand the loan manufacturing quality of our customers and helps us correct defects in underwriting as they occur. Next, our risk-based pricing engine, Rate GPS, allows us to price appropriately for the risk of each individual loan scenario. Finally, as we aggregate risk, we actively purchase reinsurance in a variety of forms in order to cap our losses.
The introduction and widespread adoption of risk-based pricing in the MI industry is a significant advancement in our ability to actively manage risk. By giving industry participants the ability to independently determine the appropriate premium rate to charge, given the borrower product and geographic risk of each loan scenario, risk-based pricing allows each participant to shape their portfolio the way they consider appropriate. While the use of risk-based pricing is firmly embedded in the industry today, comprising of the overwhelming majority of industry volume... We put particular emphasis on acquiring business through our engine and actively adjust our pricing as the environment develops. We are of the view that accepting more volatile risk requires higher premium rates to compensate for that volatility. As a result, we tend to under-index the industry on key risk markers, as the graphs on this page demonstrate.
Delving into some of the details in this slide, our immediate reaction to declining house prices late last year was to increase rates on higher loan-to-value ratios, where the impact of declining equity would be felt most acutely. As house price paths have now normalized and others have raised rates in reaction, our mix of high LTVs has increased. Similarly, increased economic stress will be felt most intensely by those borrowers who have weaker financial credit history. As a result, we feel it's prudent to reduce our exposure to those weaker credit scores, a position in which we continue to hold today. On both an absolute and relative basis, our portfolio has practically no product risk. Nearly all our insured loans are fixed-rate, fixed-payment mortgages. The borrowers taking out these mortgages are fully documented for income, assets, and employment.
We operate across the country, resulting in a well-diversified geographic mix. As we have seen on the previous slide in reviewing new insurance trends, and is reflected again here on a portfolio view, we are selective in insuring loans with lower risk attributes and therefore tend to under-index the market. The outcome of constructing a relatively high credit quality portfolio is relative outperformance. Industry results have been and continue to be strong, but our high-quality portfolio generates fewer losses as expected. Despite our efforts to control for known risks, macroeconomic risk in the form of declining house prices or rising unemployment is outside our control. For those macroeconomic events that may generate more severe losses, we purchase comprehensive reinsurance. This coverage attaches anywhere from first loss, in the case of quota share, to a low working layer for our insurance-linked notes and traditional excess of loss agreements.
This is another significant advancement for the mortgage insurance industry, with reinsurance now available in many forms from many different market participants in both traditional reinsurance and capital markets, and covering risk already in our portfolio and risk we have yet to write. We have been active in the traditional reinsurance market since 2016 and the securitized market since 2017 and intend to stay active in all markets. This slide shows a simplified example of the impact of reinsurance. Again, this year, I will spare you from going through each line of this example in detail. But you can see the volatility-mitigating effects of reinsurance in a stressful economic scenario. In practice, we regularly project our portfolio performance through a variety of stress scenarios and calculate detailed risk-mitigating impacts of reinsurance that are in line with the simple calculations on this slide.
I will now spend a few slides discussing the environment in front of us and how we intend to manage through it. The U.S. economy continues to face some uncertainty, though it's proven incredibly resilient thus far. GDP continues to grow at an impressive pace, and the housing market has held up well in the face of decreased affordability. While overall housing activity, although there are pockets of increased inventory, for much of the country, active inventory remains well below pre-pandemic levels. Nonetheless, the Fed's continued fight against inflation, exacerbated by large debt issuance, has increased interest rates, which generally foreshadows economic slowdowns. We continue to respond to this uncertainty by remaining active in risk selection and reinsurance purchasing. Excuse me.
Underpinning the strength of the U.S. housing markets is a persistent supply-demand imbalance built up in the aftermath of the Great Recession, intensified by continued demographic trends that generate a large house-buying cohort, and exacerbated by the lock-in effect, keeping many existing homeowners from adding their homes to the market. This supply-demand imbalance serves to provide a tailwind to house prices, notwithstanding any short-term economic disruptions. As we look forward, we expect this favorable dynamic will help generate upward house price momentum that will continue despite any temporary disturbances that might arise... While we are optimistic about the continued strength of the U.S. housing market, the evolving risk environment creates some uncertainty around the near-term outlook. It is in this environment where the benefit of risk-based pricing stands out. We and the broader industry have responded to this uncertainty with higher premiums, as this slide demonstrates.
This is wholly appropriate and demonstrates that risk-based pricing works as intended, quickly responding to the changing economic environment and outlook. In many cases, purchasing reinsurance structures we had not previously employed. Through these 8 transactions, we have reduced the time we warehouse risk. For our existing book of business, we have insured loans with extremely high credit quality, as we have reviewed on previous slides. We are confident in the ability of these borrowers to perform well through economic stress, given their risk profile, the underwriting through which they were vetted, the stable payment profile of the mortgage products which they have selected, and the equity they have generated. While the average LTV at origination in the MI industry tends to trend around 92%, we estimate the average LTV in our portfolio today is roughly 75% on a mark-to-market basis.
Even moderate declines in house prices will leave most borrowers with sufficient equity to provide an incentive and ability to avoid default. When we tally up the totality of the steps we have taken to manage and mitigate our risks and the strength of the environment under which our industry operates, we feel confident in our ability to continue to deliver exceptional results. In conclusion, risk management is at the core of the National MI Way, is validated by the credit performance of our insured portfolio to date, and informs our actions in this economic environment. I will now turn you over to Ravi Mallela, our CFO.
Today, I will cover the details of our best-in-class financial profile, discuss how our balance sheet provides foundational strength for our standout performance, and share with you what we see as the exceptional long-term opportunity to continue to drive differentiated growth, high returns, and value for our shareholders. I refer to differentiated growth, returns, and value because that is what we've achieved to date, and we believe we are well-positioned to continue to deliver as we look ahead. For more than five years running, we've delivered growth in top line, profitability, and book value, and return on equity. Growth and high returns are two things that usually don't come together, but we're doing it consistently and by design. I'll talk about the drivers behind this in later pages. It starts at the top of this page that I'm showing you right now.
Significant growth in insurance in force, driving revenue growth. We've been disciplined in managing risk and expenses, driving our underwriting margin, and this, in turn, is driving our bottom line. 21% compounded annual growth in net income over the past three years. We've been efficient managers of capital, averaging over 17% return on equity over that time, and we've achieved strong compounded growth in book value per share, up 18% over the past three years. We've been performing at a standout high level for an extended period of time, building with discipline, consistency, and visibility. We're proud of what we've achieved, delivering industry-best performance and achieving it at scale. And this gives us a strong foundation and confidence going forward as we look to continue to deliver consistent outperformance and value. Moving to slide 63, the theme here is consistency.
Steady growth in net income and strong returns, even through the COVID stress period. We've achieved this level of consistent performance because that's our goal, day to day, quarter to quarter, year after year.... doing all the things I've mentioned on the prior slide and doing them with relentless focus. For us, the primary source of potential volatility comes from claims expense. That's why we manage the flow of risk into the portfolio, individually underwrite the vast majority of loans that we insure, and spend real dollars to reinsure our portfolio, all to manage the volatility and ultimately to allow us to achieve consistent outperformance. Adam shared a version of this slide earlier, and I wanna highlight this point again. The chart on the left plots our return on equity over each of the past 20 quarters, and plots the same using the average of our monoline peers.
When we look at the value we've created over the last few years, we are consistently better than the industry, quarter-over-quarter, year-over-year. On the right side of the slide, our consistently higher ROEs are driving outsized growth in book value per share. Turning to slide 65, our operating excellence stems from the strength of our balance sheet, and I will highlight a few points on the topic today. On page 66, I'll start with an overview of our balance sheet and funding profile. Capital is critical for us. We're a balance sheet-intensive insurer, making long-term commitments to our customers and our counterparties under a broad umbrella of regulatory and rating agency oversight, and so we focus on our balance sheet at all times.
We have a solid foundation today, with a strong liquidity and capital position and broad protection from our comprehensive reinsurance program, a conservative investment portfolio, and access to funding across the capital markets and reinsurance spectrum. We've done an enormous amount of work to innovate in the ILN and reinsurance markets and to optimize our funding profile. Here on slide 67, we provide a snapshot on how we're currently funding our gross PMIERs capital requirement with a balanced mix of quota share and excess of loss reinsurance, ILNs, debt, and equity. Our funding profile today is sizable. It provides significant downside protection, with reinsurance offering both funding support and risk absorption in downside scenarios. It's efficient. We estimate that our weighted average pre-tax cost of PMIERs funding is about 5%, and reinsurance enhances our return profile, embedding responsible, cost-effective leverage and providing us with significant flexibility.
As we look at the success we've had, the foundational strength of our balance sheet, and the discipline that underscores how we manage the business, we see an exceptional opportunity to continue to drive outperformance. On slide 69, we outline the components of our outperformance, and I'll share a perspective on how we are positioned to deliver strong mid-teens returns over the long term. We like this view, what we call a decomposition of our ROE profile, because it helps us take stock of the different factors that drive our bottom line and returns, and trace how our operating decisions work their way through to per financial performance. Most importantly, we can see how readily achievable our goals are and how we are poised to continue delivering our strong mid-teens returns target over the long term.
We continue to deliver industry-best growth in our high-quality insured portfolio, a 5-year compounded average growth rate of 27%. Persistency has been a tailwind, 86.2% as of the third quarter. Our portfolio has significant embedded value, and as high persistency extends the duration, the embedded lifetime value is increasing. The portfolio's yield profile is supportive of mid-teens returns. Its strong credit profile leads to low PMIERs requirements and favorable loss experience. And the historically low weighted average note rate means that this business that we've worked so hard to source, underwrite, and reinsure will be with us for an extended period of time. Turning to slide 71, our high-quality book of business continues to deliver credit performance that stands out in a positive way relative to the industry....
The confidence we have in performing well through both normal periods and stress environments is grounded and informed by our results. Our peak COVID default rates were nearly 40% lower than the average of our peers, and in a more normal credit environment, our current default rate is roughly a third of the current profile. Credit experience ties directly to loss ratio and underwriting margin. Expense is always in focus for us, because every dollar of expense savings drops straight to our bottom line, and we've scaled our platform. Discipline and efficiency have always been a primary focus and a significant drivers of our differentiated rate profile. We do everything a high-performing MI needs to do, and we do it with 239 people, by far the lowest headcount in the MI sector.
Over the last 12 months, we've incurred only $108 million in operating expenses, less than half the average of our peers. As of third quarter, we've achieved the lowest expense ratio as well. Turning to page 73, our high-quality investment portfolio stands to gain from increasing invested balances and the deployment of cash flow generated from operations at significantly higher new money rates. Investment returns at higher yields will generate additional earning support and enhance our overall return profile. We're delighted to include investment income as a significant driver of our performance going forward. That's because every 1% increase in book yield drives roughly 100 basis points of ROE expansion.
With our investment portfolio yield sitting at 2.8% and with new money rates coming in currently at 5%-5.5%, we have a sizable opportunity to support our return profile through increasing investment income. Adam and I have versions of this chart in our materials today, and we've shared versions of it in past Investor Day discussions. It's a visual representation of book value per share, what we've achieved to date, and our significant opportunity to grow our book value going forward. We've noted in the upper right a view of the progression of book value per share and how it would be moderated under a repeat of the Great Financial Crisis. In our stress test, a repeat of the Great Financial Crisis across the projection period.
Even under a stress environment, we accrete book value per share, and that's a very, very high floor. Our growth in book value per share provides a pathway to capital distribution. We delivered record financial performance, and as a result, expanded our ordinary dividend capacity at the Holdco, at the operating company. We built our high-quality insurance in force to $195 billion and executed in the reinsurance markets to add additional premiums funding. In July... $ million dollars, and extend the authorization of the program to the end of 2025. We're committed to providing our shareholders with direct opportunity to participate in the value we're creating. As we look forward, we've delivered significant financial success, continued to build an efficient, durable, and risk-responsible balance sheet, and are well-positioned to capture the opportunity ahead. Now I'll turn it back to Adam for concluding remarks.
Opportunity we see over the long term to drive continued growth, returns, and value for our shareholders. We thank you for your time today and your continued interest in National MI. We'll now take a five-minute break to set up for-
... You guys keep that. Do you have a microphone?
We'll share this one. Yeah, we have one.
Ready, John?
All set.
Okay. All right, great. This is our Q&A portion of our program, and raise your hand, please, if you have a question, and wait for the mic and state your name, and we'd be happy to answer your question. Up here.
Thanks. Arren Cyganovich from Citigroup. I think something is, you know, definitely stands out is the low default rate that you have relative to your peers. You know, how do you balance, you know, I guess, maybe potentially under-earning some of the lost business you-?
... have there? And, you know, where is that kind of, you know, efficient frontier, do you think, where you can maximize your profitability and your growth?
Yeah, Arren, appreciate the question. It's one candidly, that we get with some degree of frequency. And so, value per share accretion. And so even though we have the highest quality portfolio, where we're clearly under indexed to some of those higher, sorry, lower quality risk cohorts, we're still delivering a massive ROE advantage, right? We saw it in the slides that it's 250-300 basis points with consistency over time. And so we don't actually think we're missing anything. Instead, we're outperforming because of all the broad attributes, right? We have the ability to focus on higher quality risk cohorts to deliberately under index some of those, lower quality buckets. And because of the efficiency we bring from an expense standpoint, from a funding standpoint, we could still achieve ROE outperformance. So we don't think we're missing anything.
What we're really doing, candidly, though, is we're spending, if you will, some amount of the advantage that we have in terms of our expense profile, the efficiency of our funding base, so that we can choose to be less risky from a credit standpoint and still achieve ROE outperformance. And we think that that's the right trade-off. It means we have, as we talked about, both a high ceiling, clearly a higher ceiling in... Sorry, a higher-
Why an originator would choose you versus another MI?
Sure. Thanks for the question. You know, I started earlier talking about, you know, our people. You know, most of our people, or I think the average amount of time our people have had in the market is over 20 years. They know people. To you this way, everybody Best Ex 's all the time, right? I mean, we all do. If you think about how you choose where you get gas, it's different, right? You can go a lot of different places, but most people choose a place they know, a place that's convenient, closest to them, right? There's all different types you can do. With the way that we do it, that's the- I would say, our customers know us.
We have to make it convenient, and we educate them, and there's usually a one other piece to it, that it's not usually pure Best Ex . There is a certain amount of tolerance that somebody can have. So between the six MI companies, you hear that everybody's been disciplined. That's true. We're all just about the same. So people still have a choice to choose where they want to go. I don't know if that answers your question.
We, we've got a question online, Brad.
Okay.
This comes from Bose George of KBW. I think it's customer related. He asked, "Once you get into a lender rotation, do you eventually get your pro-rata share of business, or does share within a customer move around based on pricing or risk decisions made by you or your competitors?
John, can you repeat that again?
Sure. Once you get into a lender rotation, do you eventually get your pro-rata share of business, or does share within a customer move around based on pricing or risk decisions made by you or your competitors?
That's a great question. Again, it's different, it's different by account. But generally speaking, when you're taken on into a rotation like that, you start off with a low allocation for a lot of different reasons. One of it is just to make sure that your systems work, that everything you promised them that you'd do, you'd be able to do, and then you eventually try to work your way up to pro rata. That's about where you'd like to be, and then and generally where you get, but it doesn't happen overnight. It happens over time, which is one of the reasons why we still have growth potential in accounts that we've recently brought on that use that model.
Mark Hughes with Truist. I think you've talked about the... You've got a pretty favorable outsourced technology arrangement, and I think it goes through 2027, so that's you got some good runway on that. But how much of that is priced below market? You know, if you had to go back and either do it yourself or renew the relationship, what kind of advantage is that at this point?
So Mark, I'll bring you back. When we announced that partnership in early 2020, we entered into it in, on March 31 of 2020. We signaled an expectation that over the 7-year life of that agreement, we would save $100 million, and it wasn't taking dollars out of the system, it was avoiding what we expected to be growth in our, in our cost base that we otherwise would have needed to deploy had we continued to manage it as we had previously been. Certainly, the experience of the pandemic, what's happened from a goods and service standpoint, cost standpoint, the likely savings are higher than that $100 million. It's one of the elements of our expense advantage, is that we have a modern-day IT platform, and we have an efficient way in which we manage.... today?
Yeah, thank you. Then I'll ask, Norm, when you have sales calls and customers say, "I'd like to give you more business, but I can't," you're obviously choosing not to give, but what do you hear?
Yeah, maybe you could explain that question a little bit more.
The question is, often in sales-
Yeah
You'll go in, and they'll say: "Well, I'd like to give you more business, but..." What is—what usually follows that?
Ugh! You know, today, the but would be, "But we don't have much." Honestly, I think people are struggling right now. And they've been used to a significant amount of volume over the years. So it's interesting that I find that customers are most apologetic about the amount of business that they have to be able to give. As far as what we'll do, you know, really, the biggest questions that we're asked right now. I think everybody's trying to figure out a different way to be able to-
Thanks. Eric Hagen from BTIG. This is really good, guys. Thank you very much. A couple questions. I mean, do you feel like a lot of borrowers are getting priced out of the market right now, just from an affordability standpoint? And how much, you know, how much growth do you think might exist for the MI market as a whole if rates- of an input or an output? Like, do you-- would, like, would you tolerate, like, a lower PMI ratio if it meant that your ROE was even higher than it is or could be today?
Yeah, Eric, maybe I'll get started and Rob perhaps can weigh in as well. From an affordability standpoint, undoubtedly, there are certain borrowers and prospective buyers that are getting priced out of the market. But what's also happening is that buyers who, in a lower interest rate environment, perhaps would have bought a home at a value that was above a jumbo product, that would've sat above where we provide coverage, are looking at homes that are simply less expensive, right? And we talk about long-term drivers. We talk about demographics being key. Life really matters, right? And there's a point in time where, you know, borrowers, they reach a certain age. Typically, they get married, have kids, want to put down roots in a certain community.
And so we've seen during the sort of period of, we'll call it, rate shock, a significant increase. That causes a little bit of a pause, but ultimately, buyers recalibrate, and they're still active. And so, yes, there are undoubtedly some buyers who are priced out of the market now from an affordability standpoint, but there are others who are coming down into our market that we otherwise wouldn't have served. And so from a, a volume standpoint, pace of activity broadly on the origination side is down, but over the long term, we serve the purchase market, right? Primarily. And within that, it's first-time home buyers, and there are demographic strong demographic tailwinds. So there's a significant, significant opportunity. Even as some buyers are moved out of the market, others come down into our market. If we saw interest rate decline, what would that do?
Sure, we'd probably see an increase in origination activity, and that may mean, you know, there's a slightly larger new business opportunity that would emerge in the immediate term. But over the long term, the view is the same. There's an exceptional opportunity for us to continue to support borrowers and write high-quality new business. And if you wouldn't, please remind me of the second question.
Just with, you know, credit being so stable, would you say PMI is an input or an output, and how sensitive you are to taking the ratio even lower, and if it meant your return was higher?
Yeah. You know, again, we're delivering. We just delivered a 19% return on equity in the third quarter, and so we're quite proud of what we've achieved. As to how much higher could our returns be if we took our PMI ratio down, a lot of it depends on how you choose to bring your PMI ratio down, right? We could choose to bring the PMI ratio down by reducing our equity position with more aggressive distributions. We could choose to purchase less reinsurance coverage and transfer less risk. I think the way we have our balance sheet tuned today provides us with a great degree of comfort, and we're still in an evolving risk environment, right? We're not in a blue sky environment just yet.
So we think it's prudent to carry, you know, an amount of excess to continue to source reinsurance coverage. And if we could do that while we're delivering 19% ROEs, then, you know, we're all the better for it.
Hi there, Kamal Gajri from Return on Partners. There's a guy out in Omaha who owns a bunch of insurance companies, and I don't think he owns a mortgage business, but he said that when there is no matching of rate to risk, he sort of incentivizes his employees to go play golf and not do anything. So my question is, on compensation and incentive systems within the organization, if there's nothing to do, how do you ensure that people do nothing?
I think, rest assured, the fact that we are delivering outstanding performance with consistency doesn't mean there's nothing to do. There's an enormous amount that we do to deliver the results that we are. Right? This is. It's a very active outcome. It is not a passive result of us just sitting idly by. We obviously focus on our people. We talk about our culture. We talk about collaboration. We talk about the investment that we make in them. It's critically important, right, that we put the right people in the right seats, give them the right resources, and invest in them. What we find then is that they give back to us, right? They are investing and driving our success. Compensation is a critical, important component of that. And the reality is, and again, rest assured, our employees are not doing nothing.
This is, it's a very active, actively managed outcome for us.
We have another online question. This comes from Bill Dezellem of Tieton Capital: Do you foresee reducing reinsurance or other risk-sharing over time to capture more of the earnings over the cycle?
Yeah, it's a good question, and look, for a while, when we were a younger company, and we were scaling our insured portfolio, reinsurance—the capital benefit of reinsurance, while it's critically valuable and important today, was even more so. Because as we were growing so quickly and we're writing so much business relative to the size of organic capital generation, we had to find efficient sources of funding that weren't dilutive in nature, and we found that through reinsurance. The risk benefit of reinsurance is always a constant, it's always clear. Going forward, we have an opportunity, given that we're now fully self-sufficient from a capital standpoint. We are generating more capital organically than we are deploying, or that's necessary for us to recycle back into the portfolio to think about decisions like that, to think about capital optimization.
One of the questions that we'll address is, you know, what do we do from a reinsurance purchasing standpoint? We still see Rob explain, we will be active across all risk transfer markets. We will continue to execute in the capital markets in ILN. We'll continue to purchase reinsurance coverage, both quota share and XOL. The size of those purchases, the cadence, what we choose to do with our in-force deals, in particular, once risk has seasoned meaningfully, might we have an opportunity to recapture some of that? These are all opportunities that we have, but right now we're focused on continuing to secure foundational amounts of reinsurance coverage and think that's the best strategy for us.
Mark Hughes with Truist. Just curious on an update, kind of a regulatory Washington update, either Bill or Brad. Any movement of the government kind of pushing into the private MI space? Just anything that might be bubbling. Just curious to get your latest thoughts.
Yeah, look, I mean, I think we, we focus on different borrowers, and so, you know, while there's a lot of affordability initiatives that the FHFA, you know, pushes towards the-
Another question from our online audience. Jeff Dunn of Dowling is asking: How do you think about the optimal funding, funding of your PMIERs requirement, specifically balancing the return benefits of the lower-cost reinsurance options with the risk of disruptions in those markets?
Well, I think most importantly, right, that new treaties become more difficult to source or coverage becomes more challenging to secure in future periods. It doesn't do anything to our existing profile. And so when we pair the fact that these are permanent solutions in place and tied to the portfolio that we have, with the fact that we are fully self-sufficient from a funding standpoint, we're gonna continue to use reinsurance consistently while it's available to us on appropriate terms, and if the market is dislocated for a period of time, that's okay. We'll fund ourselves with organic capital generation, as we've been doing now for some time. But one of the things we do to try to protect against that outcome is we also really focus on securing forward flow coverage.
The last time we had a quota share renewal was in September of 2021. We secured two years of forward flow coverage. At a time when the market was favorable and offered us terms that we were comfortable with, we took two years of coverage. We're again, at this point, focusing on putting in place foundational amounts of coverage through 2024, and by both securing fixed coverage that's contractually locked and also, as best we can, securing it on a forward basis, we really mitigate that risk.
Final question from the online audience. This is from Bose George of KBW. He says: "You, like your peers, have a relatively young portfolio. How do you think about the seasoning trajectory for your larger vintage years?
Well, boy, the seasoning trajectory is already beginning to happen. Right, we looked at it in Rob's presentation. We have massive equitization of the risk because of the embedded house price appreciation that existing borrowers have benefited from. Because we're... You know, we've seen such resiliency in the house price environment and house price paths. It gives us confidence that we'll continue to see further improvements in the mark-to-market equity position as we roll forward.
Terrific. Any final questions from the live audience?
Thanks. Melissa Wedel, JP Morgan. On slide 47, within the risk management section, there is a chart in the bottom right that shows 97% LTV concentration. It's a lot lower than the rest of industry, starting at the beginning of the year, but that's expanded a lot within your portfolio and is now approaching sort of rest of industry levels. Just wondering if you could extrapolate on that, what's driving it, and what is the optimal level?
Yeah, so it's active decisioning, right? And Rob referred to it. We made a conscious decision towards you know the latter part of last year. We saw affordability creating temporary strain for borrowers and putting temporary pressure on house prices. And, you know, equity matters a great deal for expected credit performance. So borrowers with thinner down payments were expected to see the equity erode in a declining house price environment. And so we made a conscious decision that for what we perceived as increased risk, we needed increased rate, and so we increased premium rates on 97 LTV risk accordingly. What we found then is two things: the rest of the market, we sense, has generally taken a similar view and increased pricing as well, perhaps slower than we did, which is why you see a dip.
And at the same time that the rest of the market has increased pricing, we've obviously seen resiliency now establish itself in house price paths. And so we're comfortable taking an increased amount of 97 LTV risk than we had been a year ago. It's not necessarily higher than where we are in our portfolio, but higher than where we were a year ago for those two reasons, right? We've seen resiliency in house prices, and we're getting paid more for the risks that we still perceive on the horizon there.
Other questions? Seeing none and,
Okay, no more questions.
We're clear online.
Thank you.
Yeah.
So thanks to all of you who joined us here live today, as well as those of you who joined online. We really appreciate the opportunity to share our story with you. As you can tell, there's a high degree of enthusiasm and excitement among the team, and we enjoy these opportunities, and we look forward to many more opportunities to share our progress with you. Thanks for coming.