Good afternoon, everyone. Thank you for joining us this afternoon. I'm Mihir. For those who I haven't met, I'm Mihir Bhatia. I cover consumer, finance, and specialty payments companies here at Bank of America. We welcome you to our conference, and we recognize this is keeping you from the drinks reception, so we'll try to keep it fast, but still cover all the key topics. I'm glad to have OneMain on stage with me here today. Doug is the CEO of OneMain. For those who don't know, I imagine most people do, but in case you don't, OneMain's a leading consumer finance company that provides personal loans, auto loans, and it recently expanded into credit cards. The company focuses primarily on non-prime customers. So Doug, thank you for doing this event, and welcome to the conference.
We'll get into some detail over the next half an hour, 40 minutes, on various aspects of the business. But I thought a good place to start would be for you to just provide a little bit of an overview of OneMain, and really, what makes it unique or different compared to a lot of the other companies at this conference?
Yeah, no, it's great to be here. Thanks for having us, and having me up here at the panel, and thanks, everyone, for showing up at 4:40 P.M. on a sunny afternoon in Miami Beach. We appreciate the focus and time. Look, OneMain, as Mihir said, is a consumer finance company. We are focused on the non-prime consumer. I think we're the biggest pure play public company lender on the non-prime segment. We, you know, our goal and our mission is to be the lender of choice to the non-prime consumer, and so to give people access to credit with credit products, but also to help them move to a better financial future with things like financial wellness, insurance products that give them peace of mind if something happens in their life.
We basically have three products. We have a personal loan, and it comes in two flavors, an unsecured loan, the average size is about $8,000-$9,000, and then we have a loan secured by an auto, but someone comes to us 'cause they want access to some money. And those auto loans, usually $12,000-$13,000 is the average price. Then we have an auto finance business, which is purchase money auto. We'll talk a little bit more about that later, where someone goes to an auto dealer, and they get a loan to buy a car. And then a couple of years ago, we launched a credit card business, so we run the gamut. We'll talk about some of those new products 'cause we're quite excited about those. I think our...
What differentiates us is a few things. One is we are nationwide. There's a bunch of non-prime consumer lenders who are, you know, geographically centered, but we have nationwide distribution. We operate in our installment loan, our traditional; we're state-based, and so we operate in 44 states. Auto lending and credit cards, we can do nationwide. We also have a unique branch network, combined with digital capabilities, combined with central call centers, and so we actually can service the customer in person, on the phone, or digitally. We think we underwrite better than anybody else in this business. We've got 100 years of history. We've got proprietary models. We've got proprietary data, and we'll get into some of the underwriting.
But if you match FICO to FICO, product to product, our credit results are both better on an absolute sense, and the volatility of credit losses traditionally has been a lot lower than competition. And then finally, we've got very deep access to funding and diversified funding. And so we issue a lot of long-term, unsecured, debt in the bond markets. We have an active ABS program. We have 15 diversified banks, where we have over $7 billion of credit lines that we don't even tap, that we just have as insurance in case something ever happens to the funding market. And so we've got a very strong, diversified balance sheet.
The stat I'd take you to is we have 24 months of liquidity at any time, which means if the capital markets froze, and we didn't get a dime of funding, we can run our business, pay our people, make loans, and be in the market. And just to give you a data point, in 2008, 2009, the capital markets were closed for, like, 3 months, and so we, you know, take liquidity very seriously.
That's a very comprehensive overview, but I wanted to go back to the branch network.
Yeah.
It remains a question we consistently get from investors: Why do they need so many branches? Could they be more efficient? So spend a couple of minutes just talking about why the hybrid model is right for OneMain. What does it mean? I think we've talked before, it helps on the credit side.
Yeah.
Just talk about the branch network and why it's the right thing to have.
So we have about 1,400 branches. In 2017, we had 2,000, so we're always paring back, consolidating, doing things with branches. In the non-prime world, being community-based is really important, and so the way our branches work is there are usually 3-7 people. There's a branch manager, and our branch managers have an average tenure of 15 years with the company. They are player coaches, so they actually do a lot of the work themselves. They're not just a manager. And in each of our branches, they do both underwriting and collections and servicing. And they get paid based on loan volume, which is sales, but also on delinquency and credit results. So you can think of our branches as little small businesses that have the right balance of incentives to manage the customer.
From a credit result, we hear all the time from our customers, you know, "Why do I pay you back? It's 'cause, I, you know, got a loan from Bob in the branch. When I got behind, I called Bob, and they either helped me, defer a payment and get through it, or when I was behind, I didn't get called from an 800 number. I got called from my local area code, and it was Bob, who said, 'Hey, we just did a budget. We thought you could afford it. What happened? How do we make adjustments?'" et cetera. And so, I mean, I'll just give you some credit results. This was in our Investor Day, which we had in December. Since 2016, our average losses were 6%, and our average FICO was around 635.
And our volatility of losses, measured by standard deviation, was 1.2. Our competitors, their average losses with the same bands of FICO were 11%, and their volatility was 3.4. Interestingly, prime, their average losses were 5% compared to our 6%, even though their FICO was about 100 points better than ours, and their volatility was slightly higher than ours. And so we actually think the branches, you walk in, you know. You meet somebody. We can do a budget with you. We can also put you in the right product and offer you insurance if we think it makes sense for you. You drive by that branch on a regular basis, so there's some psychic benefit. Our branches help drive those credit results, but they're also great for distribution.
What we've done over the last 5 years is we built up our central operations. So now we can do a lot of collections in central. We can do overload. When branches have too many applications, central can close a loan, and then it'll get signed back to the branch. And more and more, we've been building out a digital presence where a customer can do a lot there. You know, the last thing I'd say about branches is, people often ask them because they have a bank hat on. You know, bank branches are in the corner of the most expensive real estate in town.
These branches are in suburbs, in strip malls, in Class B office buildings, and so they're actually not that expensive to run. And so you can think about it as a distributed call center, as much as, you know, kind of what people think about with a branch.
Perfect. Changing gears a little bit. Last week, you announced some management changes.
Yep.
Talk about that a little bit. Not to put Jenny on the spot a little bit, but, like, you know, you went with an internal candidate. Was that relatively straightforward? Did you think about, do we need to look at some external candidates? Just talk about what that process was like. Why is now the right time to make this transition? What's happening there?
Yeah. So two people in the front row, Micah Conrad, who's our current CFO, is gonna become COO. Jenny Osterhout, who was never supposed to be on the panel, this was Bank of America's little snafu with the green scarf-
The green top
... is becoming the CFO. This was part of long-term planning that we've been doing, and we do talent development across the business. Two world-class executives. You know, when we recruited Jenny to come and be Chief Strategy Officer, and she's been running strategy, corporate development, all our new products, tech and digital, and then working closely with Micah and me on all the planning and financials. We actually recruited Jenny out of being a CFO for BNY Mellon's $1.2 trillion asset management division. So she's got CFO background.
... and was at McKinsey, before that. And so, you know, the plan always was that at you know, we'd find places for world-class executives. People would swap roles. It deepens our bench. And so this is really part of long-term, planning. Similar with Micah. You know, Micah has been in this job five years. Five years before that, he was in finance, and he was CFO of OneMain when it was at Citi.
He knows this business, you know, probably better than anybody else at the company. He's gonna bring you know, an incredible amount of analytical and financial rigor to the operations. In addition to that, you know, he's just a great people leader. So, the timing was all about, you know, long-term planning. The timing actually is pretty good 'cause we just laid out our 3-5-year plan at Investor Day, and so we wanted to make sure we had the right team in the right spot for those 3-5 years.
All right. Talking about the 3-5-year target-
... of achieving, I think it's $30 billion in receivables from $22 billion today, and generating $12.50 in per share and capital generation.
Yep.
Talk about the path to get you there. Do you have the right products in place already? Do you need to add more products? Do you need to do anything particularly different? If you can also just focus on some of the critical waypoints that you are most focused on or that investors can look at, you know, in the near term, to make sure you're on the path to achieving these targets.
Yeah, look, first of all, they are very doable; those are very doable targets with our current product set. Put it in perspective, you know, we're gonna close Foursight, which is just under $1 billion of receivables, so that gets us from $22 billion to $23 billion of receivables. From there, three years is about a 10% CAGR, and five years is about a 5% CAGR of growth. Either of those is very doable and achievable.
I will note, we don't have growth targets in any given year. Our view is anyone can grow as much as they want. You know, we could lend all the money we wanted. You know, the key is to lend money that gets paid back. And so what we do is we're very conservative, and we run a credit box, and we'll only, you know, things that meet our 20% return on equity hurdle, well, those are the only loans we'll book, whether it's card, auto, or personal loans. And then we run a great customer experience.
So the path to get there, I would think about modest growth. We're already the biggest player in installment lending, so, you know, probably 3%-5% growth in installment lending, and then you'll have some natural growth 'cause it's starting from small base in card and auto. I think there's a variety of levers we could get to go there. I mean, we could grow a little faster in auto, a little slower in card. We could grow a little faster in card, a little slower in auto. We could grow slower in both and more in installment loans. A couple milestones we set out, a $2 billion card portfolio, which will generate over $100 million in capital. You know, I think that's a few years away once we open up our credit box more.
Right now, we're running a very tight credit box, you know, across the spectrum. I think with auto, we've had nice, steady growth with a tight box. Foursight, when we add that, there'll be some growth along the way. So I would think about the $2 billion mark for both of those being you know, important milestones for those products to be more substantial. And then I think our lending portfolio, you know, we'll just keep doing what we're doing, which is great customer experience, innovate around price and size, make sure it's meeting our return hurdles. And so I think there's a number of ways to get there. The key is great product for our customers, really good customer experience, focus on our team members who serve our customers, and it is...
You know, we haven't put out any numbers since I've been here that we haven't hit, and so I think we wouldn't have put those out if we didn't think it was imminently achievable.
Got it. Let's jump to 2024 and the current environment a little bit. You serve a more non-prime customer base than probably the typical company at this conference. Just wondering, what are you seeing in terms of consumer health currently? Talk about demand, payment trends, demand trends you're seeing from this non-prime customer base.
Yeah, look, demand, the... I would separate the non-prime consumer, the whole industry, and us.
And so there's, you know, we see three different things. At the industry, the peak of demand and the peak of supply was the first half of 2022. Second quarter of 2022, there was 1.5 times the original origination volume as there was in 2019. Last quarter, fourth quarter of 2024, in the non-prime segment of installment loans, there was just about on top of where it was in 2019. So, like, things really ramped up, and then they went back. I think, payment trends, kind of a similar story. 2020 to 2022 consumers had a lot of extra stimulus cash in their pockets, and so there was higher payment, especially early payments, than had been there traditionally.
That's normalized back to kind of what we saw for the 10 years before that. And so I think both of those trends are going down. For us, we have access to funding. We have a really good brand that people know. We've been in the market the whole time 'cause we didn't run out of funding when the capital markets got tight in 2022 and early 2023. So we're still seeing really healthy demand, and we still are able to kind of pick our customers, and so we're able to, like, underwrite customers that we really like, that, you know, meet our return profile.
I see, you know, we look at the competitors, and we can see their volume in the market and their marketing. You know, some of the competitors that had a lot of trouble, that saw delinquencies and losses really spike, are still not fully back in the market.
Got it. So you're still continuing to benefit from some of the competitive pullback you've talked about previously?
Yeah.
Got it. Okay, maybe, like, let's turn to credit guidance, the 2024 guidance of around 8% net charge-offs. A little bit about the long-term 6%-7%. Talk about the path to get back to that 6%-7%. What does that look like? Does that just happen, like, as you exit the year, and, you know, the front book becomes a bigger part of the portfolio, it just, it takes a little bit longer?
Yeah. I mean, unless something unexpected happens with the economy, so, you know, if the economy stays relatively stable, our front book, which, you know, are the loans we booked starting in September of 2022 and all of 2023, that's performing within the 6%-7% long-term guidance that we've given. Just some data points, but we need to see the front book become the majority of the loss content to get there. At the end of last year, so December 31st, the back book, which has elevated losses in receivables, that really was hit in 2022 because of inflation spiking, so people had less money to pay back loans. It was only 45% of our $22 billion portfolio, but it accounted for 57% of our delinquencies.
and the reason for that is, the first six months after you book a loan, there's very few delinquencies, whether it's performing well or not, because we just underwrote you, and we paid you, and there's no losses, 'cause it takes - you have to, you know, be six months into delinquency to roll through, to loss. By the second quarter, the front book is gonna account for the majority of our delinquencies. So from there, there should be a downward path to where we're headed.
The other thing I think investors should get their mind around is, over the long run, you know, we basically run a diversified... You know, we run a... we're risk managers, and we run a nationwide portfolio of risk. In the past, it was based on, you know, our losses and our pricing in 44 states, and we'd adjust that so that we could hit that number, 6%-7%. As we add credit card, credit card, you basically will be higher priced with higher losses. Auto is actually lower priced with lower losses.
So we think that blended rate is gonna be 6%-7%, but we really, we don't underwrite to losses, we underwrite to return. So if we can price for higher losses, we'll be okay with that, but we do construct. I think the important thing about that loss guidance is, for our debt investors and our funding program, people like to see it within a certain band.
And so that's, that's why we have that, that guidance. But I think the path to is, it's pretty straightforward, you know. I mean, as the front book takes over the back book with delinquencies and losses, it'll naturally be driving down our loss rate.
Got it. In terms of that back book loss performance, is that really just an inflation story, or is there something else going on there? I'm just trying to understand, right? We haven't seen a big increase in unemployment.
Yeah.
So, you know, traditionally, that's what investors looked at, was like: Well, if people have jobs, they'll pay their bills. If they don't, that can be... So is it all just about inflation, or did something else also happen there?
I think it's the majority... First of all, it's, you know, it's very hard to say.
I mean, we've seen the whole industry has seen this phenomenon. I mean, with employment, the one thing I would say is in 2020 and 2021, or especially, you know, once kind of it became clear that, you know, there was a spike in unemployment, but it came right down, and as the government flooded the markets with $6 trillion, it was very hard to hire workers. So not only were people employed, they could get two jobs if they wanted, they could get a lot of overtime. Two spouses could get two jobs with overtime. And so even though the overall unemployment numbers are really low now, I think the ability to earn as much money higher, it did come down in 2022. And at the same time, we had double-digit inflation.
And so if you look at one of our customers or a typical non-prime customer, they make, you know, $60,000-$80,000 a year. The price of food has gone up, the price of gas has gone up, the price of school supplies for their kids have gone up, the price of clothing's gone up. And so even though inflation is moderating, it's still a lot of those prices are 20% higher than they were three years ago. So I think that's part of the story. On the positive side, I've seen some statistics recently that for the lowest two deciles of income, sometime around the middle of this year, wages should finally catch up with inflation. So, like, wage growth has remained, like, 3%-5% during all that time.
Inflation spiked, now it's a little bit below that. And so I think you, you know, should see things normalize.
Yeah. Maybe let's, let's switch to a bit about the strategic initiatives. So let's start with credit card. You've been pretty deliberate in your growth there, which I think investors generally like that-
... they're seeing the discipline there in growing. But give us the long-term vision there. Is it cross-sell? Is it help my customers build credit? Is this an opportunity to, you know, sell them some-- if they can't qualify a personal loan, maybe they can get a lower balance credit card loan? Like, what's the long-term vision? How does it really fit with your customer base?
Yeah. I mean, look, the long-term vision first is about complementary products, where a loan, you get $10,000, you pay it off over two, three, four years, and you say goodbye to OneMain until you need $10,000 again. A credit card, you know, you get a $1,000 or $2,000 line. You're with us while you have your loan, you say goodbye, and you still have your credit card, and we still have a relationship with you. And they're used for different things. You know, the personal loan is usually a big, episodic payment or an expense that you're looking for. A credit card is, you know, a daily transactional product. So we think it for customer stickiness and to diversify our product base for the same customer, that's, you know, that's the fundamental vision.
As far as cross-sell, all of our products, you know, I'm a believer that, if you're gonna spend shareholders' money, on something, whether you give someone a credit card or launch a new product, that the unit economics should make sense in and of themselves.
And so the product will be profitable in and of itself. You have to go through a J-curve 'cause you, you know, spend the money to get a customer, they get a credit card, it takes them 10 months to build up a balance, and then you start. And so it's more expensive upfront. So you need to get some critical mass for the overall portfolio to be profitable, and we think, you know, that should. We ramped it down. We thought it would be sometime in the beginning of this year, probably be about a year from now, before, like, the overall portfolio is now, you know, on that trajectory, and we have that scale. But we do think the card is a really great product for, you know, I like to call it cross-buy, not cross-sell.
It's how I was brought up, that, you know, it should be attractive for a customer to want, not us pushing it at a customer. But, the way we look at it is, a lot of our cards now are $750 lines with an annual fee. And so it can be a higher risk customer because you can have higher losses. The annual fee pays for a bunch of the losses, and you're not putting that much capital at risk when you do it. And so we can bring people into the franchise. Our card value proposition, which is unique in the industry, is Payments Equal Progress. So if you have 6 on-time payments, you can either lower your rate or increase your line.
If you have 24 of those, so 4 times 6 on-time payments, you can move from a fee card to a no-fee card. And the credit behavior will be great when we do that. So we actually think you pay to get, you know, it's a lower cost of acquisition to get someone into a card. We get proprietary data on them, and then we're gonna have a whole bunch of customers that when they wanna get a loan, you know, we'll be able to offer them that loan. They'll know us, they trust us, it's the brand, it'll be simple to get on the app. We'll have the data already, we'll have the credit pulls already and go from there. And so we think it's a great product. Our vision is it becomes...
You know, for the foreseeable future, personal loans are still gonna be the biggest part of our portfolio, but I could easily see card in a few years being a $2 billion portfolio, a few more years being a $5 billion portfolio, kicking off quite a bit of profit for the company.
Great. Given that you do serve a little bit more of a subprime population, I understand it's small right now, but I was curious about your thoughts around the late fee rule. We're hearing it could come as soon as this week. Now, we've heard that before.
Yeah.
But we are hearing it could come this week, Thursday. But just your thoughts around, you know, the late fee rule. Will you need to change your product for that? Will you need to change underwriting to account for that? How would
Yeah, um-
Any thoughts?
Look, we're watching it like everybody else. You know, I personally like, I think late fees, like charging people who cost you more money and aren't meeting their contracts, is better than charging everyone. We've got a lot of optionality around the pricing of our products, so the APRs and also the annual fees that we charge. And so, it's, it's not changing our underwriting, 'cause we think we can get the economics a variety of ways. And, you know, frankly, we're not super worried about it, because we don't have a big back book that depends on it.
It's a lot easier for us to say, you know, "Your interest rate is, you know, when you get the card, 32%," versus it would've been 29% six months ago before this happened, than it is for someone who's got, you know, several million card holders already and send out a notice that we're raising your interest rate.
And so because we're a challenger in this market and because we're building a book, I think it affects us less. And when it comes, who knows?
Let's switch gears to auto. Now, you've been doing auto lending or some form of auto lending for some time, but you recently acquired Foursight.
Yeah.
Maybe talk a little bit about what Foursight adds to the auto business.
Yeah. Just for folks out there who haven't tracked, in 2015, we created this product called a direct auto product. So somebody wanted to borrow $10,000, we saw that they had an auto loan. We said, "We can offer you $15,000. We'll pay off your $4,000 auto loan. You'll get $11,000, and you'll get a lower interest rate because we'll take your auto as collateral." To do that, we actually built up... We have an auto underwriting department, we have a collateral management department who can repo, you know, work with repo vendors, sell cars at auctions. We know how to perfect a lien in 44 states, which isn't a small task, like you have to build up. So we actually have a big auto infrastructure.
And then about 2.5 years ago, some team members who were there, and some of the leadership came and said, "Hey, we think we could start booking some loans through independent dealers, through Dealertrack network. Should we give it a try?" And we said: Sure, we'll give you a little bit of capital. Give it a try. Let's see what the performance is. It was really good, and so we have really low loss rates. We're booking good loans. We got some good relations with about 1,000 dealers, nationwide, and we built up a portfolio of $750 million. And so we like the business because it's, we know how to do it, it can leverage our infrastructure, and it's lower loss business, which dampens the volatility of losses.
So we think it's a nice part of our portfolio of risk. But the vast majority of auto lending happens with franchise dealers, so not with the independent dealers that we're doing business with. So we went out and said, you know, if we wanted to get in the franchise dealer network, we could either build it ourselves, we could buy something small, or we could buy something big. And we looked at and we ran a process around all of these. And, you know, Jenny, who runs strategy and corporate development, kind of ran that strategy for us with Micah and I. We ended up with Foursight because it's a really well-run company. It's a tuck-in acquisition, so it doesn't bet the farm.
They've got a really good management team, so that team will likely be the team that runs our auto business, both the one we have, Foursight and the expansion. So we bought a management team. They have really good tech. Like, our tech team has diligenced about 100 companies that we've looked at buying, and they always come back and they say, "Oh, the technology sucks. You know, it's not scalable, it's not componentized." This one, they actually came back and said, "Oh, it's architected really well. It can scale, et cetera." So we like the technology. We get credit models, so we get 12 years of auto credit models, and we get a small base of franchise dealers.
So what it does is, you know, the auto market we're playing in now, the independent dealer market for non-prime 550-700 FICO is about $100-$150 billion market. This will add about $450 billion more of addressable market. And so it just gives it... It rounds out, so we'll be able to work with franchise dealers as well as independent dealers, and it gets us a nice little platform for growth. What I would say is we are, we're super conservative on credit right now. Our posture is we're gonna play a very conservative game in, you know, first quarter 2024. And until that changes, it's not like it's gonna close and we're gonna accelerate growth.
I mean, I view this as a platform that gives us optionality for growth when we want to grow.
Okay. There's about seven minutes left, so let me just open it up in case anyone has questions, or I can ask a few more. If anyone has any, feel free.
Hi, thanks for all the comments. Maybe you could just share the current state of the credit box. You know, I know you tightened.
Yeah
... a year or so ago, and, you know, now the status for 2024, are you going into it with still a, a pretty high bar in terms of the credit box? Or, how should we think about it?
Yeah. So one really important thing is we call it the credit box, and we got to talk about general posture. The reality is it's like 1,000 little boxes. So, you know, we have 10 risk tiers, and within each risk tier, we run it by decile. Then we have different credit performance depending on the channel where a loan comes in from. So if someone walks into a branch, it's, you know, we see different credit performance than if we send someone a direct mail and they call us, than if they come in via Credit Karma, than if they come in via we sent them an email. And so we have, we have, different by channel. Different products and different loan size have different, you know, so secured, unsecured, smaller dollar loans, et cetera.
Then by state, we have different credit performance, and we have different pricing. Right now, we have a very tight posture, though if you go overall, we have a very tight posture. The way we underwrite is we have a minimum threshold at the margin of 20% return on equity. So every loan we make, about 15% of that loan is our—we put equity into that loan, and then the rest, the 85%, is debt. And so we need to make a 20% return on the equity.
The way we calculate that is, you know, the variables are: we have a price that we can charge, we have expected losses, we have our operating expense, our marginal expense of making that loan, and then we've got our cost of debt, so, you know, what we're paying for our debt at any given time. The biggest variable that we're managing to, when we talk about a tight credit box, is really the credit performance. Back in August 2022, we actually put a 30% stress assumption on our decision engine. So what that means is, we already had elevated losses and delinquencies that we had seen in the first half of 2022, and so that was accounted for in our credit box.
But then we said, "Even if losses increase 30% from an already elevated level, would we still make our 20% return on equity threshold? And we'll only book loans that will still make it." An easy way to think about it, that's unemployment in the 5%-6% range, as opposed to, you know, in the 3% range, where it's been hovering. So you could actually go into a mild recession, not have a soft landing, and those loans, we would originate. We're keeping that posture for now, so we have a very tight box. About half, though, of the tightening that we did in 2023 was increased pricing.
Micah has talked about it a bunch on our conference calls, that we took about 120 basis points across our personal loan portfolio of increased pricing. Some of the channels where we originate, there's not a lot of you know, you can increase pricing and people will still book. But in places like Credit Karma or LendingTree, where people do price shopping, some folks will drop off, but we like the trade 'cause it's more profitable. So that's another way to tighten the credit box, is you just give yourself more margin with more price. But it's a long answer to... We still have a very conservative posture on our credit box. You know, we'd rather leave a little money on the table and be careful with shareholders' capital than open up too soon.
I guess just to kind of dig into there, you know, Doug, it's I guess you kind of mentioned tightening the credit box back in August of 2022. It sounds like you tightened incrementally during 2023 through some pricing actions. I'm curious what you're seeing there that's kind of causing you to pull back on originations in this environment, given kind of—I guess the overall theme, it seemed like credit was getting better through the year. You expect kind of the consumer to be in a good spot. I'm just curious what you're seeing there to keep the box really tight.
Yeah, I mean, again, look, the way we run the business is very conservative balance sheet. We're never gonna run out of money, and very conservative on credit, and then very aggressive, innovative, and creative when it comes to product, customer experience, making sure we have the best team members, being a company that people want to work for. And so that's our mindset. During 2023, the biggest credit tightening, biggest category was just price increases, and so we could take price. It's less volume, but it actually is as much to the bottom line, so it's actually a very good trade. The others were just some judgmental tightening. So, you know, if you think about those 1,000 different small credit boxes, some we didn't like the performance, we tightened a little, but sometimes it was things... I'll give you an example.
We capped loan size for renewals for some of our existing customers. That if they were in a certain credit band, all our models would show, if we gave them a $12,000 loan, they paid down to $6,000, that we could top off their loan at a $10,000 if they came to us for money. And the models would show it would happen, but it would increase their payment now might be $300, and it would take it to $350. And we just said, "In this environment, we don't wanna overstretch current customers," and so we put some caps on it. And so the net effect has been, you know, a continued tight credit box. And again, you know, I... Look, I always say, "Your credit box is always wrong.
It's either too tight or too loose, and you're just trying to toggle and get the right, you know, get it right at any given time." And I think right now, we'd rather err on the side of too tight until, you know, a bunch of these crosscurrents clear up. You know, inflation, while the annual increase is down, you know, prices are still up quite a bit for our consumer. Wages haven't quite caught up. We still have high interest rates. You know, hopefully, they come down. Unemployment seems stable for now, but, you know, we wanna just have some wiggle room if it does tick up.
I think that brings us to time. I'm gonna ask one last question.
Sure.
Is there something. You do a lot of these meetings, you meet with investors. You've been at OneMain for five years now, I think. During this time, you probably learned a lot about the company, something maybe surprises you when you came into the company. But is there something that you wish analysts, investors understood better about the company, appreciated more, that you feel is maybe a little underappreciated about OneMain's business or... Yeah.
No, it's a good question. Look, I think there's a couple things. One is, people think about the non-prime consumer as some struggling, poor person who's always gonna default on their credit, you know? Ours is, you know, 93 or 94 out of 100 people pay their bills and pay our, you know, credit every year. That's the 6%-7% loss rate. And we've been doing this for a long time, and so I think a lot of people think about, like, a company like ours as like a financial algorithm figuring out the right losses, when the reality is, the customers pay our bill. Our customers are working Americans. Our employees are the ones who treat our customers well and service our customers every day.
So as long as we're an ethical company that works with our customers, we get a lot of customer loyalty, and a lot of, like, hardworking, middle-class people will come back to us time and again, and that's the key to our franchise. Of course, we gotta be really good with the numbers, and we gotta be really good risk managers, and we gotta tap the capital markets, and those are a bunch of variables. But the reality is, we have this incredible franchise, and we built it so that there's you know, in my mind, very low risk of the existential threats. Low loss volatility, almost no risk of, you know, there being a liquidity issue, 'cause we spend a lot of extra money on our balance sheet.
At the same time, we have, you know, 5% on average return on receivables, which is better than anybody else in the industry. I think investors understand it. I think probably don't understand how much we've dampened the risk, 'cause people still think of, you know, if you're doing non-prime lending, it's super risky. If you do it right, it's not that risky, and you build great customer loyalty, you have a really good product for your customers, and, you know, you can actually run a company that's profitable through the cycle.
Mm-hmm. Great. We probably should leave it there. Thank you so much for coming. Thanks, everyone.
Thanks for having me.