Welcome to the OneMain Financial first quarter 2022 earnings conference call and webcast. Hosting the call today from OneMain is Peter Poillon, Head of Investor Relations. Today's call is being recorded. At this time, all participants have been placed in a listen-only mode, and the floor will be open for your questions following the presentation. If you would like to ask a question at that time, please press star-o ne on your telephone keypad. If at any point your question has been answered, you may remove yourself from the queue by pressing the pound key. We do ask that you limit yourself to one question and one follow-up, and please pick up your handset to allow optimal sound quality. Lastly, if you should require operator assistance, please press star- zero. It is now my pleasure to turn the floor over to Peter Poillon. You may begin.
Thank you, operator. Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining us. Let me begin by directing you to page two of the first quarter 2022 investor presentation, which contains important disclosures concerning forward-looking statements and the use of non-GAAP measures. The presentation can be found in the investor relations section of our website. Our discussion today will contain certain forward-looking statements reflecting management's current beliefs about the company's future financial performance and business prospects, and these forward-looking statements are subject to inherent risks and uncertainties and speak only as of today. Factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from these forward-looking statements are set forth in our earnings press release and include the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on our business, our customers, and the economy in general. We caution you not to place undue reliance on forward-looking statements.
If you may be listening to this via replay at some point after today, we remind you that the remarks made herein are as of today, April 29, and have not been updated subsequent to this call. Our call this morning will include formal remarks from Doug Shulman, our Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, and Micah Conrad, our Chief Financial Officer. After the conclusion of our formal remarks, we will conduct a question-and-answer session. Now let me turn the call over to Doug.
Thanks, Peter. Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining us today. This morning, I'd like to take some time to review our strong financial performance for the quarter. Then I'll spend some time updating you on our key strategic initiatives. Before I provide the financial overview, let me say that we continue to view the current economic environment as constructive for our business. The predominance of data suggests that the financial health of our customer base remains quite good, with savings in excess of pre-pandemic levels and debt service levels comfortably below pre-pandemic levels. Importantly, employment remains strong, with more job openings than job applicants, especially in the segment of the population that we serve. As you know, the primary factor that impacts our customers' ability to repay their loan is employment status. We feel that our customer base is positioned quite well.
However, given all the uncertainty in the world, including rising interest rates, inflation, and the war in Ukraine, as a management team, we are closely monitoring the economic environment and our customers' financial health and will be ready to pivot quickly if we see any changes that warrant it. I also want to mention our issuance this week of a $600 million social ABS bond. This was the first-ever social ABS issued by a U.S.-based company, which continues to highlight our position as a leader in this space. The social ABS underscores our mission to serve hardworking Americans and demonstrates our commitment to providing access to responsible credit for lower- and middle-income consumers, with the proceeds of this bond focused on lending in rural communities across the United States.
As you know, OneMain plays an important role in the lives of many customers who often have a hard time gaining access to credit. Our history and expertise in lending to non-prime customers and our responsible approach to lending is highlighted in this ABS offering focused on lending to rural communities that are often not served by other lenders. Micah is going to speak more about our incredibly strong balance sheet with a long liquidity runway that is a real competitive advantage for us in this economic environment. This bond issuance again demonstrates our ability to continue to access markets even during a volatile time in the bond market. Demand for our loan products remains strong.
Originations in the quarter were above seasonal pre-pandemic levels as healthy demand for our core personal loan product was bolstered by our expanded products and channels, including smaller dollar loans and partnerships at the point of purchase. The strong originations in the quarter led to excellent managed receivables growth of 11% year-over-year. This is another sign that our customers feel good about their financial prospects. Our experience is that when demand is robust, it means that customers are feeling good about their finances. I'm very pleased with our first quarter performance. We run this business with the goal of maximizing the underlying economics, what we define as capital generation. In the quarter, we generated $280 million of capital. First quarter charge-offs were 5.6%.
Our portfolio of loans is performing quite well, comfortably in the range we anticipate to meet our risk-adjusted returns and return on equity hurdles, even as we get further away in time from our own credit tightening actions that we took back in 2020 and the significant pandemic-driven government support programs. The strategic pivots that we have made over the last few years are paying off. We continue to leverage our strong branch network and decades of experience underwriting and serving non-prime customers. We have added leading digital capabilities with almost half of all lending now occurring outside of the branch. We are also now well on our way to being a multi-product company, most evident by our rollout of the credit card. As I discussed last quarter, the BrightWay and BrightWay+ credit cards were successfully launched late last year.
As a reminder, we set out to create and distribute a limited number of cards to customers so that we could test and learn around three primary criteria. The first is take-up rates. Does the value proposition resonate, and do customers want the card? Second is utilization. Once they take the card, do they use it? Third is credit performance. Do they pay what they owe on time? We've been very pleased with the key metrics that will drive the ultimate success of the card product as take-up rates and utilization rates along with digital engagement have all been strong. Importantly, we've been really pleased with the early indicators of card usage levels, as well as where and how the card is being used. We believe the BrightWay card is top of wallet for many of our customers.
Customers are using the card at gas stations, grocery stores, restaurants, and retailers. The fact that these types of transactions are being made on the card are a validation of our strategy of adding a daily transactional product to our larger, more episodic installment lending product, thereby expanding both the total addressable market and the utility of our products for non-prime customers. While our user experience and engineering teams are making weekly improvements, we're pleased with our initial feedback from customers about the digital experience and have seen the BrightWay app getting great traffic and reviews. This is important to our longer-term strategy as having digital real estate that customers go to on a regular basis will give us opportunities to deepen our relationships with our customers and offer more products and services in a seamless, low-cost way.
Cardholders increased modestly during the quarter to 74,000 from 66,000 at the end of last year, while card receivables doubled to $50 million during this time frame. This is in line with our expectations as we are using the first half of 2022 to concentrate on improving customer experience and to deeply analyze the performance of the pilot portfolio to validate our risk models. As I've mentioned before, we've run tests to determine the segments that we will lend to and are monitoring across a number of different variables, including risk grade, acquisition channel, history with OneMain, spend patterns, geography, and more. We will continue to closely monitor and evaluate the data to determine the right segments that combined will allow us to meet our return hurdles for each of our two products, BrightWay and BrightWay+.
We are encouraged by what we see and remain on target to meaningfully scale the business in select segments in the second half of this year. As a reminder, given our confidence in the value that these differentiated cards bring to customers, we expect our cards portfolio to generate at least $100 million-$150 million of capital by 2025, with more growth in the years beyond. We are also making good progress with Trim, our financial wellness fintech platform. It is now available as a set of features to all of our customers. We're really pleased to be able to reward our customers with Trim's unique expense-saving tools like bill negotiation and subscription monitoring and cancellation. The feedback from customers has been great.
Trim is another tool in our toolbox to deepen our engagement with customers while helping them advance to a better financial future. I've also mentioned to you in the past that we continue to innovate in our traditional installment lending product. A great example of this is our smaller dollar loan product that we launched less than two years ago. Smaller dollar loans, as you may recall, are $2,500 loans that we offer to customers that do not quite meet our criteria for a larger loan. With a smaller loan and a smaller monthly payment, the program opens eligibility to a wider group of customers with payments that fit their budgets while developing improved credit habits and discipline. Since its inception in 2020, we've generated about $350 million of originations while adding more than 140,000 new customers.
These are customers that we've now brought into our ecosystem to whom we can provide even more value over time. Finally, let me update you on our capital return in the quarter. We've followed the capital allocation priorities that we laid out on our fourth quarter earnings call. Our first and highest priority remains investing in our business that generates 6% return on receivables, translating to very attractive return on adjusted capital in excess of 30%. We will continue to prioritize in balance sheet growth that meets these hurdles, while also continuing to invest in key growth initiatives like digital technology, data science, and new products and channels, while also managing our leverage within our long-standing range of 4x-6x . Excess capital will continue to be returned to shareholders in the form of dividends and share repurchases.
During the first quarter, we paid a regular dividend of $0.95 per share and expect to do so over the remaining quarters of 2022. This $3.80 annual regular dividend yields a very healthy return of approximately 8% at the current share price. We are also executing our share repurchase program, which has a $1 billion authorization through 2024. During the quarter, we utilized $110 million of capital to repurchase 2.3 million shares or nearly 2% of shares outstanding. With that, let me turn the call over to Micah to take you through the financial details of the first quarter.
Thanks, Doug, and good morning, everyone. We had another good quarter as demand for our loans was strong and we continued to expand our customer value proposition with new products and distribution channels. The financial health of our customer has been solid and net charge-offs for the quarter were well within our expected range, coming off the heels of historically strong credit performance in 2021. We earned $301 million on a GAAP basis or $2.36 per diluted share in the quarter. On an adjusted C&I basis, we earned $299 million or $2.35 per diluted share, down 30% on a per-share basis from the first quarter of 2021.
However, recall that the prior year results had the benefit of a significant loan loss reserve reduction of $208 million and historically low stimulus-driven net charge-offs of $205 million. Capital generation was $280 million in the quarter, down 6% compared to the prior year, primarily driven by the year-over-year increase in net charge-offs and modestly higher operating expenses associated with an increase in originations and continued investment in our business. Managed receivables were $19.5 billion, up $1.9 billion or 11% from a year ago, reflecting strong consumer demand and the continued positive impact from our growth initiatives. Our net interest margin was strong at 18.5% in the quarter.
Interest income was $1.1 billion, up 3% compared to the prior year, primarily driven by higher receivables and partially offset by lower yield. Portfolio yield was 23.1% in the quarter as compared to 23.3% in the fourth quarter. As discussed on our last call, we expect our full year portfolio yield to be around fourth quarter 2021 levels. Interest expense was $217 million for the quarter, down 7% versus the prior year. Interest expense as a percentage of average receivables improved from 5.3% a year ago to 4.6% this quarter and also improved 23 basis points sequentially. Other revenue was $158 million in the first quarter, up 17% compared to the prior year quarter.
The increase was primarily driven by economics from our whole loan sale program. As a reminder, our whole loan sale program comprises two-year flow agreements with three select partners. As I've said in the past, these sale programs provide us with additional flexibility in our funding, but we intend to maintain the vast majority of our receivables on balance sheet for the foreseeable future. Finally, policyholder benefits and claims expense was $45 million in the quarter, up from $33 million in the prior year. The prior year result reflected a positive reserve adjustment related to favorable involuntary unemployment insurance experience as expected losses at the onset of the pandemic in 2020 did not materialize as many customers got back to work sooner than we had originally anticipated. Let's now turn to slide seven to review our originations and receivables trends.
Originations were $3 billion in the first quarter, up 30% year-over-year, leading to managed receivables growth of 11%. Receivables were relatively flat sequentially as our new products and distribution channels helped offset what is typically a quarterly seasonal decline. Note that our managed receivables this quarter also include $50 million of credit card receivables and $528 million of receivables sold but serviced by OneMain for our whole loan sale partners. Turning to slide eight, the credit performance of our portfolio continues to track within expectations. Our 30-89 delinquency was 2.25%, down from 2.43% in the fourth quarter and up from the historical low 1.57% in the first quarter of 2021, which as you know, was positively impacted by federal stimulus programs.
90+ delinquency was 2.21%, up seasonally as anticipated from 2.0% in the fourth quarter. Recoveries remained strong at $67 million in the quarter or 1.4% of average receivables, well above our historical levels of about 90 basis points. We continue to see strong underlying performance in our recoveries. However, this first quarter was further enhanced by a sale of charged-off receivables. Net charge-offs were $262 million or 5.6% compared to an historically low 4.7% in the first quarter of 2021. We remain confident in our full-year 2022 guidance for net charge-offs of 5.6%-6.0%. Our loan loss reserve trends are shown on slide nine.
We ended the first quarter with $2.1 billion of reserves and a reserve ratio of 10.9%, flat to last quarter and modestly above our CECL day one levels of 10.7%. The $25 million reduction in reserves in the quarter was driven by the small reduction in balance sheet receivables during the period. Turning to slide 10, first quarter operating expense was $348 million, up 8% year-over-year and flat sequentially. The year-over-year growth is a bit higher than our expected full-year growth rate, primarily due to the path of quarterly expenses in 2021. First quarter 2021 was still unusually low after the aggressive cost-cutting we did in 2020 as a result of the pandemic.
Our operating expense ratio in the quarter was stable at 7.2% even as we continue to invest in new products and channels, technology, expanded digital capabilities, and data science, all of which we expect will drive future growth. I'd like to spend a few extra minutes today on our balance sheet and funding programs in light of the current environment. Over the years, we've talked a lot about the strength of our balance sheet, built on a foundation of significant liquidity and maintaining a balance of maturities and funding mix. I've also discussed the importance of diversifying our funding sources. The construction of our balance sheet today reflects a very deliberate effort to shift our liabilities to a greater mix of unsecured debt and to extend and strategically place each of our unsecured maturities.
Since December 2020, while rates lingered at all-time lows, we issued $2.2 billion of unsecured debt with maturities spanning from 2027 to 2030 at an average cost of 3.8%. As you can see on page 11, this strategy has reduced our current mix of secured funding to 44% at the end of Q1, below our strategic target of 50%. On the right side of the page, you'll see that this strategy began years ago with our near-term maturities having been staggered to create funding flexibility. I say all of this to illustrate the proactive manner in which we've managed our liabilities. We actively took advantage of a cost-efficient unsecured debt market over the past 15 months while preserving the optionality of being able to lean back into lower-cost secured funding when that time came.
In this current period of volatility and rising rates, our positioning is a competitive advantage as it affords us the luxury to be selective and look for windows of opportunity to access the markets. To that end, this week we completed a three-year revolving $600 million social ABS. This was the first-ever social ABS by a U.S. issuer and highlights our commitment to providing access to responsible credit for consumers in rural communities across America. This is our second social capital markets issuance with last June's unsecured social bond of $750 million supporting credit underserved areas with 75% of proceeds being directed to racial minorities and women. Our efforts were widely recognized, as that bond was recently awarded Social Bond of the Year by Environmental Finance.
We are incredibly proud of our Social Bond programs as they highlight our corporate mission to serve hardworking Americans. Earlier this week, we also completed $350 million of private secured funding with one of our long-term banking partners at very attractive rates. This funding is similar to one of our market ABS structures with a three-year revolving period, followed by an amortization period. Finally, to put a finer point on the comment I made earlier about balance sheet flexibility and preparedness, as you may remember, in May 2020, during the height of COVID's market dislocation, we issued a $600 million five-year bond at a coupon of 8 7/8.
While this bond demonstrated our ability to issue in very difficult markets, it also presented an opportunity to add a callable feature to our bond program, which we expected would give us even greater flexibility to manage our funding in the future. To that end, this week we issued a call notice for that bond, and combined with our Social ABS, we have effectively replaced $600 million of 9% funding with funding closer to 4% for the next three years. Of course, we cannot control the rate environment, but we've prepared ourselves for this type of situation. As a team, we are very confident that our balance sheet positioning and our funding programs will continue to be a competitive advantage. Let me now spend a few minutes discussing our liquidity.
As you know, this is another hallmark of our balance sheet and critical for any company accessing the capital markets for funding. We have, over the years, invested in our liquidity position, having increased our runway from 12 to 24+ months. This runway is the period in which we can operate the company under stressed macroeconomic conditions with no access to the capital markets whatsoever. We remain above that 24-month runway as we sit here today. The foundation of our runway is our committed bank capacity, which at the end of March was $7 billion. This includes $6 billion of committed conduits across 14 bank partners, as well as a $1 billion five-year unsecured revolving credit facility that we completed in late 2021. We renewed two of our conduits in the recent quarter, and we're always actively engaged with potential new partners.
With $10.2 billion of unencumbered loans at the end of the quarter, you can see that our liquidity resources to support these facilities remain robust. Moving on to page 12. Our strong capital generation of $280 million allowed us to repurchase 2.3 million shares, nearly 2% of shares outstanding for $110 million, and return another $123 million to shareholders through our regular dividend, all while maintaining our capital levels. Our net leverage at the end of the quarter was 5.5 x or flat to the prior quarter. As has been the case for years, we will continue to run our business within our long-standing leverage range of 4x-6 x.
I'll wrap up by reminding you of our full year 2022 guidance, all unchanged since we spoke earlier in the year. We continue to expect managed receivables to grow 5%-10% in line with our long-term operating framework. While the first quarter was above that range, the comparison period of 1Q 2021 was heavily influenced by federal stimulus as receivables fell by more than $500 million in that quarter. As discussed earlier, we continue to expect full-year net charge-offs to be in the 5.6%-6.0% range. We expect capital generation return on receivables to be approximately 6%. As you know, we run our business to optimize capital generation, and we expect to generate $1.15 billion-$1.2 billion in 2022, and we expect capital generation per share to be between $9.10 and $9.50. With that, I'd like to turn the call back to Doug.
Thanks, Micah. As you heard, we had another great quarter. As I said to investors two years ago when the pandemic was in its early stages, we believe that our business is resilient and well-positioned regardless of the macroeconomic environment. We remained very focused on the core fundamentals of our business, granular, detailed underwriting that benefits from advanced analytics and machine learning. Our nationwide branch network, as well as a long history and expertise in serving the non-prime customer and a conservative balance sheet with a long liquidity runway. We also used the past couple of years to double down on investing in our future. We built digital distribution capabilities, and now almost half of all of the lending is happening outside of the branch. We evolved our installment loan offerings to provide value to more customers through products such as our smaller dollar loans.
We added new partnerships to drive more lending volume at the point of purchase. We launched a totally new lending product, the BrightWay credit cards, which opens up a market 5x as big as our traditional core loan products. We feel very good about the fundamentals of our core business as well as our new products and channels, which will drive growth in the future. All of our focus and efforts are coming through in our results this quarter and position us extremely well to serve more customers in the years to come. With that, I'll conclude today's call by thanking our team members across the country for making all of this happen and continuing to come to work every day to make a difference for our customers and our shareholders. Thank you for joining us today, and we are happy to take your questions.
At this time, the floor is now open for your questions. If you have a question or comment, please press star- one on your touch-tone phone. If at any point your question has been answered, you may remove yourself from the queue by pressing the pound key. Again, we do ask that while you pose your question that you pick up your handset to allow optimal sound quality. Thank you. Our first question is coming from Michael K. with Wells Fargo. Your line is now open.
Hi. Good morning. Any more color you can give us on delinquency trends, which were up on a sizable basis year-over-year? I understand it's comping against all that stimulus last year. How is delinquencies tracking versus your expectations? How do you expect delinquencies to trend throughout 2022?
Hey, good morning, Michael. Thanks for the question. Let me say a couple of things here. You know, one on delinquency, I think you clearly mentioned, like, the prior period, 1Q 2021 was heavily influenced by government stimulus, and in fact, it was the lowest 30-89 delinquency we'd ever seen in the history of the company as a result of that. It's not really a great compare. You know, but unlike charge-offs and other things in our income statement, delinquency is reported on one day at the end of a quarter. You know, comparing that particular day to any day in years past is not an ideal or perfect benchmark.
That said, if you want to compare, let's say, to a pre-COVID period, March of 2020 is probably the most recent and best estimate. We were tracking that month to about a 215 finish on our 30-89 before those COVID disruptions began in the later part of the month in that year. That's within 10 basis points of where we are today, or at least at the end of March at our 225 number. You know, while early delinquency levels certainly are important, the velocity of which delinquency moves to loss is also important. Our back-end collections and recoveries continue to remain strong, as you heard on my remarks earlier and also in our printed results. Our March 30-89 is performing within our comfort levels and certainly within our risk-adjusted return expectations. Our guidance for the full year remains at 5.6%-6% on losses, and as you know, that's still below our long-term operating framework of 6%-7%. You know, net-net, we feel great about the portfolio and where things stand right now and appreciate the question.
Great. Thank you. You know, forgetting about the effect of product mix, you know, how are the interest rates you're charging at key loan products trending considering rising rates and debt costs? How much pricing power do you have to offset these rising funding costs? Also secondarily, are you bumping into any state rate caps?
You know, Michael, a couple things. As you know, we have a number of different products that are priced differently. We actually gave you some exposure to it in the last conference call, the fourth quarter conference call, where we showed pricing for higher credit customers and partnerships is well below our average stated yield. It all is still returning 6% return on receivables. You know, we try to use pricing and dynamically price for two reasons. One is it has to meet our returns, which, you know, we're targeting 6% return on receivables. Second is to be competitive. Micah also mentioned, you know, earlier in his remarks that our cost of funds are not going to be going up.
You know, if anything this year and probably next year, our cost of funds are going down the way we constructed our balance sheet. We're not going to actually be forced to move pricing to keep margin at this point. With that said, I think given the market environment, there may be some opportunities. Competition may move their pricing up, which means there's some room to move pricing and gain, you know, still be gaining market share. You know, it's all going to depend on market dynamics. You also might see competition forced to move their pricing up because they don't have as strong a balance sheet to plan for this as we did. We can keep our pricing where it is, and we can pick up market share. This is all going to be very dynamic. What we like about it is we built a balance sheet, so we're not going to be forced to drive up pricing. We may do some up if there's opportunities, though.
Thank you. Thank you.
We will take our next question from Vincent Caintic with Stephens. Your line is open.
Hey, good morning. Thanks for taking my questions. I appreciate all the color on the capital markets, and so maybe a follow-up on that one. First, you know, appreciate that you have a very defensive or very you know stable balance sheet. If you could maybe talk about the demand that you're seeing from the capital markets. Your execution seems to be better than what others are getting. Kind of relatedly, to the point about competition, it seems like some of these other competitors are getting worse execution, particularly on the fintech side. Maybe if you can talk about how competition is. Are you seeing some of these you know competitors maybe back off or other maybe weaker competition? Thank you.
Hey Vince, good morning. Thanks for the question. You know, in terms of capital markets execution, you know, obviously we've got a very, very strong program. We actually, years and years ago, probably eight or nine at this point in time, we actually created the consumer ABS asset class. We've got a lot of experience. We've spent a great deal of time building our programs and building relationships with investors and importantly, delivering on our commitment to those investors. You know, all of that takes a long time to build and is really, really important when you get into times like this, in addition to all of the things that I said about how we've constructed the balance sheet and put ourselves in this position. You know, we feel good about demand.
You know, we just did this, the Social ABS as we talked a lot about earlier. You know, we marketed a $500 million transaction there. We were able to upsize it into good demand up to $600 million. You know, we felt strongly and good about that. Obviously, benchmark rates have increased. That influenced price. Our spreads increased just a tiny bit on top of that, but we feel great with the execution and where we are. I think we'll continue to watch the markets closely. I won't comment on other peers or other fintechs, but we feel really good about our programs. We feel strongly in terms of their performance and our ability to access these markets going forward.
Yeah. Vincent, let me just add to this. It's Doug. You know, first of all, we've got a lot of respect for our competitors. You know, we think having good, strong competition keeps us on our toes and makes sure, you know, customers are served well. We did talk about, you know, we've positioned our balance sheet and our business through a cycle. We underwrite to healthy returns, and we make sure we're profitable. We've got a lot of liquidity runway on our balance sheet. We're programmatic issuers, you know, regardless of capital markets. We do think the whole package of managing through the cycle of both your credit box and your balance sheet and making sure that it's very resilient gives us competitive advantage. You know, like Mike has said, we can't comment on kind of other competitors' balance sheet, whether they'll be able to access funds and therefore whether they'll have to trim back or not, you know. Time will tell.
Okay. Thank you. Appreciate that. Follow-up question, just kind of on the macro. You know, I appreciate all the good learnings you've had with the credit card business and ramping up with that. You know, one of the questions I've been getting is sort of there's a lot of macro balls in the air, whether you've got, you know, credit normalization and rising interest rates and rising inflation. If you could maybe talk about what gives you the confidence to be leaning in on growing the credit card business and what you're seeing there. Thank you.
Yeah. Look, we are building out and launching our credit card in a very de-risked way. You know, I talked through in detail because I think it's important, you know, our approach, which is we put a number of cards out testing a wide range of, you know, credit, geography, customer types, channel. We're now looking at spend patterns, and, you know, we're getting the early read on payment data. We won't scale the credit card until we have a lot of confidence in the early reads we've gotten. Like, we put out, you know, call it 70,000 credit cards so far.
There's going to be variables in those credit cards, risk grade, spend pattern, channel that we don't like. If the performance doesn't meet all of our hurdles, we're not going to scale those. You can expect later in the year when we start scaling, it'll be in the lower risk subsegment of the card. We'll keep testing into it, and then we'll be continually looking at performance. If the macro environment changes, similar to with our loan product, we'll change our credit box. We've got a number of variables we can change to make sure we still hit our return on receivables. I actually think we're well-positioned because we're entering the market. If any sort of economic uncertainty that, you know, comes to pass in the future, we won't have a ton of cards out there, and we'll be able to throttle back or throttle forward depending on the environment.
Great. Very helpful. Thank you.
Thanks, Vince.
We will take our next question from Moshe Orenbuch with Credit Suisse. Your line is open.
Great. One of the things that, you know, given that you talked to us about the small dollar product, the $350 million that you've originated cumulatively over the period. One of the issues that product has always had is customer acquisition costs, although I would assume it's much lower because these are probably customers that are applying to you anyway that you wouldn't have had a product for. I guess, could you talk about that? And maybe, you know, given that you've originated a fair bit of these loans, I mean, how do you think about it kind of relative to the, you know, the credit card where you've put out a target for, you know, for capital generation, you know, over a period of time? I mean, obviously, you know, the ability to expand your market, you know, is important given, you know, your size in the core market. Maybe if you could just talk about that a little bit. Thank you.
Yeah, look, with the way we think about the smaller dollar loan is there's a set of customers who maybe can't afford, you know, after we do their budgeting and look at, you know, what is their cushion or what's their net disposable income, wouldn't be able to afford a $10,000 loan with a $250 monthly payment, but could afford a lower loan with a $100 payment. They need access to credit. This allows us to give more people access to credit. Once you book the card or the loan with us, we've got then the ability to see your on-us behavior. If the behavior is good and you still want more credit, we've helped you build up your credit.
We've got proprietary data, and we can give you a larger loan if that's something that you were looking for and you can afford. It actually, similar to the credit card, feeds into our core traditional product and allows us to broaden and serve more customers. It's as simple as that. As we kind of innovate, look to serve more customers, it also means there's, you know, 140,000 customers in our ecosystem that we can help them save money on bills with Trim that we could potentially offer a credit card to if that's something they're looking for. We can substitute a credit card. It's just another way for us to serve more customers and provide more value.
We have not put out a, you know, any sort of kind of capital generation prediction. We did last quarter talk about, you know, in aggregate, we think we're going to generate about $4 billion of capital over the next three years. You know, this is one of the many ways that, you know, we'll be able to put more assets on our book, generate more capital, and provide more value to customers.
Moshe, I'll add to that, you know, while Doug's comments, you know, about capital generation, we haven't put anything out there. These are still very strong loans. You know, there's a few things we are looking at with the smaller dollar loan, you know, and you mentioned the acquisition costs. These people have already said through their application they want to do business with us. So, the acquisition costs are relatively low on this base, given that we're already speaking to these folks. You know, secondly, the other couple things I think are what the renewal pattern looks like as they grow and move into this loan. Renewals have been strong and credit performance as well. Credit performance because of the smaller payment is performing a little bit better than what a regular size loan might look like on an unsecured basis. You know, we've been doing this now for two and half, three years, and I think the performance is really good. You know, we'll continue to expect this in the future.
Got it. You know, one of the discussions that you've had several times on the call already and consistently over the last couple of quarters has been about this normalization of credit. Could you talk a little bit about the signs that you would be looking for to see whether that consumer performance, you know, is better or worse than what you were expecting, you know, as of the beginning of the year? Obviously, you know, we all kind of track your monthly data, but I would assume you've got, you know, things that you would look at that are, you know, kind of more granular or more timely than that.
Yeah, certainly. I mean, within our underwriting box, we have a number of attributes. You know, we're looking at cohorts of loans that are originated based on industry, based on state, risk grade and credit profile is also important, NDI trends, et c. Anything we can look at within the more granular level of our portfolio, we are evaluating on a monthly basis. That comes down to even how we acquire a loan, whether it's through direct mail or one of our affiliate channels. You know, they all have varying performance. We obviously have three products as well. What we're really looking at is vintage performance.
We've talked about it a little before, you know, without getting too granular into it, the 30-day delinquencies at three months on book and 60-day delinquency at six months on book and those sorts of vintage trends. Because when you look at delinquency and in the overall portfolio, sometimes there's different, you know, aging of vintages and noise that's created in the numbers. You know, as Michael asked earlier, where are your first quarter 30-89 relative to prior periods? It's, you know, we feel we're very confident in those delinquency levels being within the range of comfort where we underwrote them and within our risk-adjusted return framework. You know, we feel good about where things are, and we continue to look at things and adjust as needed, as we do always.
Great. Thanks very much.
Thanks, Moshe.
We will take our next question from John Hecht with Jefferies.
Morning, guys. Thanks very much for taking my questions. I guess it's a little bit of an extension of the last discussion point. Yeah, because if you do the math, you know, your charge-offs for the you know your kind of loss rate for the year math and you account for the first quarter, you know, I think if you know pre-pandemic, you might have peaked in charge-offs in the first quarter, but it doesn't seem like that's happening this year. I guess the question is kind of where are we at a seasonality perspective and you know does that ever get back to levels we saw pre-pandemic?
Yeah. It's a good question, John. I think there's still, you know, we're still certainly not completely back to normal seasonal patterns. I think we're getting there, but y ou know, there's a lot of factors that influence that. You know, from a charge-off perspective, you can see it where we are in the first quarter at 5.6%-5.7%. For the first quarter, we are tracking. We're below where we were sort of before the pandemic if you go back and look at first quarter 2019 or first quarter 2020 levels, for example. You know, I would look for seasonal patterns in our delinquency to emerge first. I think that's certainly begun, but we're not quite there yet. You know, we'll see as time goes on. I think as you look at charge-offs throughout the remainder of this year, they're probably gonna look a little bit more like pre-COVID levels than they looked the last couple of years where it was really heavily influenced by stimulus.
Second question, I understand that you guys have a very good position on liquidity. You know, as rates rise, Micah, what's your thoughts using kind of the balance of secured versus unsecured debt? Should that shift at all over the course of this year?
Yeah, I mean, it certainly could. John, we've created our situation where we are, you know, below our strategic sort of target level for unsecured and secured, as I talked about. We can certainly lean back towards that lower cost secured funding to manage things this year. You know, we started that with our Social ABS bond. We feel again really good with our current position. We've got a lot of liquidity, so we can lean on those conduit lines as well for funding while we, you know, wait for selective points in the year to be able to issue in the capital markets. You know, we always think about it relative to our 24-month runway.
You know, even with some modest assumptions around conduit renewals, which we're constantly working on, we renewed a couple this quarter in fact, we don't really need to issue until at least Q4 while still maintaining 24 months of runway under stress. That puts us in a really good spot. I think you probably, if I were a betting man, I would say we probably would move more towards a little bit more on the secured side, this year just because where the dynamics are. You know, we'll remain open and the rate market continues to be volatile. We'll just keep our eye on the ball here and issue selectively as we can.
Great. Thanks very much.
We will take our next question from David Scharf with JMP Securities.
Hi, good morning. Thanks for taking my questions as well.
Good morning, David.
I wanted to maybe shift gears, you know, away from the obviously topical questions on capital and the macro environment, and maybe revisit something that was more top of mind in the early days of the pandemic, which was sort of digitization, online lending trends and how it might impact you. You know, other than the quarterly kind of metric we get of roughly 50% of loans now closing digitally, is there any sort of qualitative or strategic updates you can provide, you know, vis-a-vis kind of the longer term strategy in terms of the branch network, potential rationalization or consolidation and so forth?
Sure. You know, in late 2018 when I first came here, we started talking about we were going to invest heavily in technology, digital, and we were going to be an omni-channel lender. What does that mean? That means, you can do business with us in your mode of choice. You can walk into a branch if you value in-person interaction. You can call us on the phone, if you know, you want to actually talk to a human being, or you can engage with us on, you know, your mobile device or your computer however you choose. We actually spent 2019 doing a lot of the back end work that needed to be done.
You know, I haven't talked about it a while, but a trip down memory lane, you know, it used to be because we'd built technology for branches that, you could access it and make it work, during the day, and it wasn't, you know, 24/7 technology necessarily, all of our customer-facing things. That had changed. We did a lot of kind of back end, call it plumbing, work. In 2020 when the pandemic came, we were ready to allow people to book loans online, and we were going to open the pipe very slowly, but all of a sudden nobody wanted to come into a branch, you know, back in, the time where pre-vaccine people were scared. We said, you can close remotely or digitally. We actually quickly built a variety of digital tools.
We built the ability to co-browse, which means we could be on the phone with somebody who wanted to book a loan. They could go on their computer, and we could see the same thing they're seeing on the computer and really walk them through. Because a lot of people value this interaction where with us, where they understand us, they understand we help them think about their finances and what they can afford. We built co-browsing. We built two-way video. We've now got, you know, as good as anyone in the market document upload where you take a picture of your document and then you upload them. Then on the back end, we have all sorts of ability to kind of analyze for fraud and use state-of-the-art tools.
As we got through the pandemic, you know, where we are today, we now have a suite of tools to operate in an omni-channel capability. You can book your loan online, you can co-browse with us, you can interact with us via text. Even in the servicing, like collection and overdue payments, people are now getting emails from us and texts from us and just having the digital experience all the way across the spectrum that they didn't have before. That is, you know, where we are headed. I think, you know, vis-a-vis the branch, you know, we actually think our branch is a differentiator being in community. It actually supports digital. People in branches now can have digital interactions with customers.
Someone calls a branch and they say, "Hey, I don't want to come in for an appointment," and they can close a loan online. We also have gotten a lot of feedback from our customers that they feel comfortable doing business with us without ever walking into a branch because when they're driving to work or the grocery store, they've driven past a branch and they know we're a real company, not, you know, a Russian bot. It gives them a lot of comfort about if something happens, I can walk in and deal with them. You know, I think that is our future and we're well on our way there. We've built up our central servicing capabilities for both originations and servicing to support our digital efforts, and we're going to have world-class digital efforts.
Then we've got a branch network. We're always looking at branches. You know, we open some every year. We close some every year based on demographics flow. We combine them and look at different branch footprints. But I think, you know, step way back. Three years ago, we were a branch-based installment lender. Now we are, you know, a company that has both physical and digital presence, that's multi-product with the credit card rolling out. I think that's the direction for our future.
Got it. No, that's very helpful. I mean, it's been a while since we've sort of covered it this comprehensively. Hey, quick follow-up, more on [data]. I'm sure I can do the back of the envelope math, but I'm wondering if you can provide a little shortcut. You know, regarding the credit card comment about capital generation, by 2025, I believe. Can you back that into what type of loan balances that would represent?
Yeah. I think we said it was in excess of a couple billion dollars.
Okay. Got it. Thank you, Micah.
We will take our next question from Mark DeVries with Barclays. Your line is open.
Thank you. Micah, I was hoping you could talk us through kind of the longer- term funding cost tailwinds you have. You know, you obviously significantly reduced your funding costs with the activity this quarter, you know, retiring debt around 9% and replacing it at 4%. I get that it's not exactly apples to apples, one being unsecured and one secured. How should we think about the opportunity as, you know, to lower your funding costs and benefit NIM as we look out at some of these maturities you have upcoming?
Yeah. It's good question. I think, you know, you got to look at the last couple years because that's really what has given us that the trajectory that we're on. I n 2019 and 2020, we were closer to 5.5%-6% as a percentage of receivables on our interest expense metric. In 2021, that was 5.1%. What we've said is we expect that to certainly be lower. We've gotten a little bit to a flat NIM. You can do some math based on where we put our yield at, you know, based for the year. We think our NIM will be very consistent with the last couple of years. That should give you a sense.
We expect interest expense to be, you know, sort of in that mid-4% context for 2022. You know, we feel really confident in that, one, because we have no unsecured bullet maturities until March of 2023. You know, a very large portion of our debt stack that is fixed rate, so call it roughly 95%-97% and 90% of our average debt for 2022 is already on the books at the beginning of the year at fixed rate. There's not a lot that you can do to really move the interest expense in the year. As we look forward to 2023 and beyond, that percentage is about 75% of our debt for next year, for 2023, is already on the books.
This is what gives us a lot of confidence. We've looked at a number of different ways at this, whether it's 100 basis point parallel shift from where we are today. You know, obviously the forward curves give us some idea for where we think things could be issued over the coming years. We think at current, even at current rates, which is in that 4%-4.5% context for ABS and roughly 6.5%, 7% on unsecured. Even at those rates, we still think for the next couple years we'll be in that mid-4% context. Obviously a lot goes into that, but and some assumptions. Coming off of a 5.1% last year, we think we're pretty stable in the mid-4s-percent, which is why when Doug talks about the stability of our yield, we feel good about our NIM for the next few years to come.
Okay. Yeah, that's really helpful. Am I right in assuming that you pick up some funding cost benefit from structuring into these social financings? If so, how much and how much of the lending that you do is actually eligible for those types of financings?
I'll give you a benchmark from last year in terms of our social bond that we issued in June of last year was $750 million. We had somewhere in the range of about $4 billion of collateral that could fit in that. These social bonds are as much a commitment to continue to fund those sorts of loans, whether they be in underserved communities or with this ABS, the rural communities with a focus on lower income borrowers. We think that they are also a testament and an indication and an advertisement, if you will, as to all the good that we do within our business in these types of areas.
In terms of the coupon benefits, that's not really what we're out for with these social bonds. We think last year we got about a 25 basis points benefit from the social aspects of that bond. I think more importantly, it opens us up to a whole new pocket of investors that really have a lot of focus on ESG. Of course, that is continuing to grow as we sit here today. You know, we think very positively of these. I'm sure you'll see us do more of these in the future, and we're proud to have some of the accolades that we've gotten over the last year for our programs.
Great. Thank you.
We'll take our next question from Rick Shane with JPMorgan. Your line is open.
Morning, everybody, and thanks for taking my question.
Hey, Rick.
W e see credit starting to normalize, and you know, it's been observed your credit's normalizing fairly quickly. I am curious, when you look across your different products, for example, some of your auto secured, are you seeing a divergence in terms of normalization trends?
Yeah, Rick, I mean, we certainly don't publish these results regularly, but we are seeing this a very, very similar path for all products because it is really driven by normalization and not anything unusual. I would say broadly speaking, a lot of this obviously is growth math that goes into those different equations. We feel good about all of our products and, you know, we feel good about our return on receivables going forward. You know, where delinquency and other credit metrics are tracking relative to our expectations.
Great. Thank you very much, guys.
Thanks, Rick.
[We have from Charlotte].
I'm sorry. Go ahead, operator.
I apologize. You may go ahead, Mr. Shulman.
Yeah, look, I just want to thank everyone for joining us today. As always, our team is here if you have any questions and we look forward to hearing from you and talking to you, at a future date. Everyone have a great day.