Hello and welcome everyone to the annual stockholder meeting of Triumph Bancorp, Inc. My name is Carlos Sepulveda and I serve as Chairman of the Board. I'd like to welcome all those attending this meeting by webcast. Those of you here in person, I'd like to ask you to turn off your cell phones and also be aware that we have automatic cameras here, so if there's any talking, you may find yourself on the screen. Just be ready for that. I'd also like to introduce my fellow board members that are attending here. Chuck Anderson, Harrison Barnes, Deborah Priebatsch, Laura Easley, Aaron Graft, Maribess Miller, Michael P. Rafferty, and Todd Sparks. I'd also like to take this opportunity to thank Fred McCaul, who's not standing for re-election at this meeting.
Fred has been serving us in a dedicated manner, and has served on the board since 2016. I also introduce our executive officers of the company, other members of senior management of the company and its subsidiaries, as well as directors of our bank subsidiary. Some of those in attendance are Brad Voss, EVP and CFO of the company and TBK Bank. Ed Schreyer, EVP and COO of the company and the bank. Gail Lehmann, EVP, Secretary, and Chief Regulatory and Governance Officer of the company and the bank. Adam Nelson, EVP and General Counsel of the company and TBK Bank. Todd Ritterbusch, President of TBK Bank. Geoff Brenner, CEO, Triumph Financial. Melissa Forman, President, TriumphPay. Mark Daigle, CLO and TBK Bank director. Gail Lehmann, our EVP and Secretary, will act as Secretary of today's meeting.
Adam Nelson, our EVP and general counsel, will act as the inspector of elections. I'll now turn the meeting over to Aaron Graft, the company's Vice President, Vice Chairman, and CEO. Thank you, Carlos. We're gonna go through the formal part of the meeting and then do a presentation that many of you here have seen, but not everyone on the webcast can see. I'm Aaron Graft, I'm the President and Chief Executive Officer of the company, and I will serve as the Chairman of this meeting. I now officially call the meeting to order. The business items on the agenda today were outlined in the company's notice and proxy provided to all stockholders.
The matters to be voted on at this meeting consists of the election of each of the directors named in the proxy statement for the election to the board for a term to expire at the next annual meeting of stockholders. Approval of a non-binding advisory resolution regarding the compensation of the company's named executive officers as disclosed in the proxy statement. Approval of an amendment to our certificate of formation to change the name of the company to Triumph Financial, Inc. Ratification of the appointment of Crowe LLP as our independent registered public accounting firm for the current fiscal year. At this time, those stockholders who hold proxies, please deliver them to the Inspector of Elections. Those stockholders who desire to vote in person, please give their name to the Inspector of Elections.
The Inspector of Elections will give you a ballot for matters to be voted upon today. While we are waiting for the Inspector of Elections to determine if a quorum is present, let me ask the secretary whether proper notice was given for this meeting.
I have available a certified list of the holders of the common stock of the company as of close of business on February 28, 2022, the date fixed by the board of directors for determining the stockholders entitled to notice of and to vote at this meeting. I also have available the notice of meeting, proxy statement, and proxy, and an affidavit from the company's representatives as to the due mailing thereof.
Thank you. I would ask that those documents be filed with the records of the company. This now brings us to the determination of a quorum. Our by-laws provide that the presence in person or by proxy of a majority of the votes entitled to be cast on a matter constitutes a quorum. May I now have the report on whether a quorum is present? There are present in person or represented by proxy the holders of 20,756,550 shares of common stock, or 82.5% of all shares authorized to vote at this meeting. Consequently, a quorum does indeed present and authorized to transact business on the matters that were submitted to the stockholders for approval. Will the secretary please introduce each order of business with me.
The first order of business is the election of each of the directors named in the proxy statement to our board of directors for a term to last till the next annual meeting of stockholders. The summary of the proposal begins on page five of the proxy statement.
I move to approve the election of such directors. I second the motion. Our by-laws require stockholders to provide advance notice of their intent to nominate candidates for directors. No stockholder has provided notice. I therefore declare the nominations for director closed.
The next order of business is approval of the non-binding advisory resolution regarding the compensation of the company's named executive officers as disclosed in the proxy statement. The summary of the proposal begins on page 18 of the proxy statement.
I move to approve such a non-binding advisory resolution. I second the motion.
The next order of business is the approval of the amendment to our certificate of formation to change the name of the company to Triumph Financial, Inc. The summary of the proposal begins on page 49 of the proxy statement.
I move to approve such amendment. I second the motion. The next order of business is the ratification of the appointment of Crowe LLP as our independent registered public accounting firm for our current fiscal year. A summary of the proposal can be found on page 50 of the proxy statement. I now move to ratify such appointment. I second the motion. At this time, we ask each stockholder voting in person to mark your ballot and to deliver your completed ballot to the Inspector of Elections. Seeing none, all the stockholders present in person or by proxy have had an opportunity to vote. I now declare the polls closed. It is. What is the time of this? 10:07. April 26th 2022 . Will the Inspector of Elections examine the proxies and ballots submitted? Mr. Nelson, would you please provide the results of the vote?
With respect to the election of directors, 19,331,591 shares were voted in favor of Mr. Sepulveda, with 202,650 shares voted against, 3,958 shares withheld or abstaining, and 1,218,351 broker non-votes. 19,334,082 shares were voted in favor of Mr. Graft, with 201,300 shares voted against, 2,817 shares withheld or abstaining, and 1,218,351 broker non-votes. 19,137,317 shares were voted in favor of Mr.
Anderson, with 397,063 shares voted against, 2,818 shares withheld or abstaining, and 1,218,351 broker non-votes. 19,526,835 shares were voted in favor of Mr. Barnes, with 8,608 shares voted against, 2,756 shares withheld or abstaining, and 1,218,351 broker non-votes. 19,460,789 shares were voted in favor of Mr. Bradford, with 73,574 shares voted against, 3,635 shares withheld or abstaining, and 1,218,352 broker non-votes.
18,123,129 shares were voted in favor of Mr. Davis, with 1,411,211 shares voted against, 3,858 shares withheld or abstaining, and 1,218,352 broker non-votes. 19,348,342 shares were voted in favor of Mr. Easley, with 186,021 shares voted against, 3,835 shares withheld or abstaining, and 1,218,351 broker non-votes. 19,310,378 shares were voted in favor of Ms.
Miller, with 223,955 shares voted against, 3,866 shares withheld or abstaining, and 1,218,351 broker non-votes.19,451,098 shares were voted in favor of Mr. Rafferty, with 73,243 shares voted against, 3,858 shares withheld or abstaining, and 1,218,351 broker non-votes.19,294,239 shares were voted in favor of Mr. Sparks, with 239,502 shares voted against, 3,858 shares withheld or abstaining, and 1,218,352 broker non-votes.
Consequently, each of the directors nominated to stand for election as set forth in the proxy statement have hereby been elected for a term to last until our next annual meeting of stockholders. With respect to the proposal to approve the non-binding advisory resolution regarding the compensation of the company's named executive officers as disclosed in the proxy statement, 19,081,922 shares were voted in favor of such proposal, with 384,998 opposed, 71,278 abstentions, and 1,218,352 broker non-votes. Consequently, such proposal is hereby adopted.
With respect to the proposal to approve the amendments to our certificate of incorporation to change the name of the company to Triumph Financial, Inc., 20,761,774 shares were voted in favor of such proposal, with 1,174 opposed, and 3,592 abstentions. Consequently, such proposal is hereby adopted. With respect to the proposal to ratify the appointment of Crowe LLP as our independent registered public accounting firm for our current fiscal year, 20,646,273 shares were voted in favor of such proposal, 105,133 opposed, and 4,742 abstentions. Consequently, such proposal is hereby adopted.
With no further business, I hereby second the motion that this meeting be adjourned. I second that motion. As previously noted in Carlos' remarks to start the meeting, we would now like to take a few minutes to update our stockholders on Triumph's previous fiscal year and its activity to date this year. Before I begin, let me remind you that we may make comments that might be characterized as forward-looking statements under the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Generally speaking, comments regarding the company or management's beliefs, expectations, intentions, goals, plans, outlooks, or predictions of the future are forward-looking statements. These statements involve a number of risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to vary materially from the anticipated results implied by these forward-looking statements.
These risks and uncertainties are detailed in the company's filings with the SEC, which are publicly available on the SEC's website. Now we actually get to talk business. Thank you for bearing with us for the formalities. Our theme this year, and if the people only on the webcast, they can only see my head and I'm standing in the right spot.
Can you return to,
Oh, I'm sorry. Okay. Am I in a good spot now, though? Okay. For the clear path forward. Now, many of you have seen this, some of you have not, and certainly some of you, some of the participants on the webcast have not. We just want to take a few minutes of your time to talk about what's happened, what was a remarkable year of 2021, what is happening in 2022, and what our plans are going forward. First, oh, again, it takes lawyers to draft that. I encourage you to read it if you want to. 2021. This on the left-hand side is our net income. Since November 5th, 2010, when we bought a failing $200 million bank that not a lot of people thought could get done.
Many of you in this room were part of that journey. You see in 2010 and 2011, we didn't earn a lot of money. We were planting the seeds that you can see have led to some pretty remarkable growth, especially in 2021, when we earned just under $120 million in net income. Over the same period of time, if you look at the right-hand side, you can see our assets have grown from $200 million to just under $6 billion in assets, both organic growth and through acquisition. I think this is a cool chart to look at. Inception to date, cumulative net income is just between $400 million and $460 million.
That is net income after tax we have generated over the last 10 years, and we've re-deployed into building this franchise into what it is today. An interesting fact is 25% of that was last year. This has been a perpetual building project, and we never quite think we're there. We never quite think we're mature as a company. There's always the next thing to work on. Many of my team members in this room who've been here since 2010 are like, Are we done yet? The answer is no, we're never done. We're always gonna invest for the future, and this is why. It was a remarkable year in the economy for what we did and what we do. If you don't invest to build it, you don't catch that remarkable economic tailwind like we did last year.
Here is Triumph's performance against the S&P Base Index to go back to November tenth, 2014. November seventh, 2014 was the day we went public. My daughter and my wife were there that day. That felt like a low point for me professionally because, man, I wanted to price at $14 a share or 7.8, right? It had to be more than 14. We priced at $12. Big bummer for me. My daughter was sick. I was tired. Like, it was like, this is not what I thought going public was gonna be like. Like, where's the champagne? Where's the, you know, all the stuff that goes with it? But we made the decision to do it.
Had you invested with us at that time, you could see in the red line, the growth in the value of that investment over time. Of course, we've seen a dramatic reversal in the tech, you know, the headwinds in the tech space since late last year, really first part of this year, which has certainly pulled down our performance relative to the index. I would still. If you look over that long period of time, we're above the ninetieth percentile of all banks for compounding value for our shareholders, which is what you pay management fees. Just compound your value over time. This is an interesting chart just to show the change in the perception of what it is we do and who it is we are. Veritex, great Texas bank.
C.Malcolm Holland, Chairman and CEO, dear friend of mine, they went public just about the same time we did. It was always a proxy for us of how does the market look at a Texas bank versus whatever you call Triumph. Like, what is Triumph? Like the market spent a lot of years trying to figure that out. We look at it on a price-to-tangible book value basis. You can see in the early days, Veritex, seen in the gray, the market put a discount on what it is we did. They didn't understand a bank that was focused on trucking. They didn't really have comfort with a bank that had a branch network spread across five non-contiguous states. Had we told them about a payments network, they would have totally freaked out.
We held that back until several years down the road. You can see starting in third quarter of 2020, there started to be a dislocation between how the market looks at us versus how the market looks at a very well-run Texas bank. That dislocation is associated with our pivot away from just trying to grow a community bank into truly creating a financial technology with a use case in a very large industry. The catalyst to that was our acquisition of HubTran to convert into the open-loop payments network, which there was a lot of thought that went into that. There were even some concerns about how that would be executed, but you can see how the market received that. Here's where we sit today. There's three things to what we do.
I borrowed this from one of my teammates who said it, and I think it sums us up really well. We view the bank as the gold standard, right? Think about the bank that when people think of a bank, it should be safe, it should be sound, it should be well capitalized, it should have a strong deposit base. The kind of entity that a large company would want to do business with. The bank is the gold standard. It's the gold standard for how we achieve regulatory excellence, cyber risk excellence, all the things we need to do so that our team members and our customers can trust that they're dealing with an enterprise that can survive whatever's gonna happen coming down the road. Whether it's economic turmoil, anything, the bank has to be built to withstand that.
Factoring business is the golden goose because our factoring business will generate this year probably close to $240 million of revenue and deliver net income and operating margins that are unseen in any other scaled business in banking. There is not a more profitable, long-term, sustainable business in banking that I have ever seen than what we have built at Triumph Business Capital team. I was in the room when we ground our teeth over spending $9 million. That was the premium we had to pay to buy in January of 2013 to buy, what was then called Advance Business Capital. Actually, it's January of 2012. We have compounded that investment. It's really changed everything around here. It is the golden goose. Then lastly, payments.
That would be TriumphPay, and we would say that is the golden ticket. If you're a Willy Wonka fan, you know that the golden ticket changes your life if you get it. We believe the creation of a ubiquitous, invisible, scaled payments network for trucking changes everything for our institution. We see it will also disrupt the industry as it currently exists. The three of those work really well together to provide the confidence for us to do business with Fortune 500 companies in our payments business, to provide the capital we need to re-invest into what we're doing, and to just make us subject matter experts. If you're a shareholder here or you're a team member here, you're part of an entity that I think I can say with all appropriate humility, that is the best in the world at paying truckers.
Not what I thought Triumph was gonna turn out to be, but that's where time and opportunity has taken us. We pay more truckers than anyone in the world, and we're gonna parlay that excellence, that subject matter expertise into something that I think creates a lot of value for shareholders. This is what I'm gonna show you, and we've not done this before. I'm gonna show you actually the five drivers that I wrote for our team. This is inside baseball. This is what we are endeavoring to do on a go-forward basis. Number one, primary driver, TriumphPay establishes the payment network for trucking, demonstrating scalable and defensible revenue growth. Nothing will drive value for us over the long term till we're close to achieving number one. This is our primary objective. How we do it, we hire the best talent.
You all probably saw the announcement of Triumph X, which has given us a recruiting platform to bring technical talent into this organization in a way that we haven't done before. We wanna land and expand. What we mean by that is as we solve one problem for a customer, that gives you the opportunity to solve more. If you create an integration, if you create a relationship, and you demonstrate excellence in how you solve your customer's problems, we think we can expand the reach of what TriumphPay does to be a more multifaceted solution. Third, we want to acquire shipper market share. TriumphPay run rate exiting the first quarter is $24 billion in payments. Of that $24 billion, approximately $3 billion of that is shipper. Of the rest of it would be tied to brokers freight market.
The shipper market is $250 billion plus. There is a tremendous opportunity for us to grow in that space. Then lastly, defend the fortress. Here's real-time, real stuff that we're dealing with. Several people in this room, we caught a hack. 22 of our clients, we have thousands and thousands of clients who use TriumphPay. Their credentials were stolen and available on the dark web. Sophisticated, possibly state-sponsored actors from Eastern Europe, including one address from Russia, was using those credentials to try to test our system. That's a big deal because, number one, we caught it and stopped it before there was any financial loss. Number two, we were able to go to our customers and say, Hey, you need to know that your credentials have been hacked. It was turned into a non-event.
You should know every financial institution is potentially in danger of being hacked. We have to do what around that. For us, defending the fortress is ideal. We have to make sure that we continue to protect the network, and as much as we can, we wanna be valuable to our clients. We think a lot about that and we work really hard at that. We turned what could have been an event into a non-event. That's what a network should do. That's what a trusted partner should do. Number two, Triumph Business Capital enhances its operational platform and technology stack to maintain its market position. Triumph Business Capital is the second-largest factor in the United States in the transportation space. We are 15% of the market. I do not materially see that growing.
I don't think our goal to be 40% or 50% of the market. We want to maintain our market leading position, but we want to do more things for our customers. We're spending time thinking about how do we deliver value, who is our target market segment? There's 250,000 trucking companies in the United States. 96% of them have four trucks or less. How do we serve those customers and what are their needs versus some of our largest factoring customers have 500 trucks. How each channel that we serve has different needs. We really want to be tight on what that market segment is and what the value proposition is. Number two, technology-driven efficiency.
That's $16 billion plus $16 million of invoices per day, $2,300 at a time of 375 teams. This business is a flow business. To the extent you can use technology to leverage what your people are doing, you create a tremendous advantage. To improve the process of doing the same thing will allow us to do that better. Then lastly, own the user experience. Customers who I mean, if you think about it, every one of you who interact with financial services expect it to feel like Apple. Expect it to feel like Google. Right? A very tight user interface, simple log on, all your data in one place. That hasn't historically existed in trucking for sure, and even in community banking as well as it should.
We have invested and are investing to build something. Ultimately, the question we ask ourselves is what if, what if a bank were built by truckers for truckers? What would the app look like? If you were driving a truck for a living, what would you want in your app on your phone to see? You wanna know about when you're gonna get paid on invoices you sold. You wanna know possibly about your checking account balance, your fuel card, your insurance. We're re-imagining what it is a trucker would want, and can we deliver that to them through our platform? I believe we can and we will. I thought this was a great chart just to show you Triumph Business Capital performance on a gross revenue basis over the last four years.
You can see this also demonstrates some of the seasonality that we see in trucking. The first quarter is generally slower. It grows towards the back half of the year, really starting about now as when produce season happens. A lot of trucks get allocated to hauling fruits and vegetables out of the Inland Empire. Then of course, you've just got macro-economic things that move, trucking, because trucking is very tied to what the economy is doing in real time. I thought this was an interesting start to the year 2022, averaging roughly $20 million in gross revenue per month compared to any other year, including last year, which was a record year. We're starting on a much higher basis. Now, you can see how last year really peaked at the end of that red line because of the tightness in the trucking market.
I make no predictions of what the trucking market is between here and the end of the year. I don't think you're gonna see a peak, certainly like you did last year. It continues to go up. Even if it stays level, that we're generating a significant amount of revenue above and beyond what we've ever done in the past in that business. The third thing, the gold standard for TBK Bank. What do we need to do to make TBK Bank excellent? We wanna improve efficiency, maintain credit quality, and grow fee income and deposits. You can see the four things we work on. We wanna maintain operational leverage. We need to grow revenue faster than expense. We wanna have moderate loan growth. We do wanna grow loans, but we're not looking at this time in this market to grow loans at a fast clip.
We think the risks are such that that is not wise. We always wanna grow transactional accounts because transactional accounts are the lifeblood of any healthy community bank, and it's something we had none of. When we showed up here in November 5th, 2010, there were no transactional accounts. It was all CD, it was all hot money. It has been a long-term effort to rebuild that. Then lastly, credit vigilance. You have to defend the fortress. Just like you have to defend it from cyber risks, you have to defend it from credit losses. Going back to that deposit comment, I want to show you this. The gray line, reading left to right, is the number of transactional deposits. Okay? The total amount, and you can see that on the left side of the screen.
If you look back at 2013, we had just over $500 million in transactional deposits. Just so we're clear, transactional deposits are either non-interest bearing demand accounts or interest bearing demand accounts. The reason you want them, especially the reason they're valuable right now, is they have low beta. As rates start to rise, transactional accounts, the interest the bank pays does not go up at the same rate that rates are rising because the Fed's moving. They are more and more valuable. The higher the Fed raises rates to tamp down inflation, the more valuable transactional accounts become. You can see the growth in transactional accounts from just over $500 billion to where it stands today, which is about $3.7 billion.
Most of that growth, not all, but most of that growth was organic. A lot of it happened. You see this red dotted line? That was when we made the strategic shift. We talked about it a few years ago. We talked about it on earnings calls, but we just said, we're done trying to just grow, grow. Instead, we're gonna grow where we're great. We're gonna focus on what we're great at. We're gonna double down on trucking, and we're gonna, instead of a community bank just growing assets, grow transactional deposits. You can see that as a result of that work, the blue line, our cost of total deposits has fallen just over 1% to about, I think it's 25 basis points. Is that right, Brad? 25 basis points. Remarkable.
We have gone from being considered by the industry a poor performer on deposit quality to a very good performer on deposit quality. Just because we made up our mind to go do it, and we invested, what gets measured is what gets done. We made it an internal goal to do this. Our deposit, where we stand as an institution, our deposit footprint is better than it's ever been, and it's a great time for it to be so, because we're going to continue to see interest rates rise. Two more. We have to incent all our business units, whether you work for the bank, whether you work for TriumphPay, whether you work for Triumph Business Capital, it doesn't matter. You work for Triumph. We win and lose as a team.
Just like there's an offense and a defense and a special team, you're all still on the same team. We have to make sure that 1,277 team members spread across 12 states, that everybody knows where we're going, is excited about where we're going, and understands what it means for them if we achieve where we're going. You can see, I mean, we incent the desired behavior. As a team, whether you work for TriumphPay or not, it matters economically to you whether TriumphPay achieves its volume targets. As a team, whether or not you're engaged in lending, it matters to you whether we maintain pristine credit quality. We want everyone focused on all the KPIs, the key performance indicators for us going forward. We want that understood throughout the enterprise.
Number two, we want to be ready for an agile response to a pull-back. We have built up a significant amount of capital. We're earning about $25 million after tax per quarter. We have the ability to buy back a significant amount of our stock. In light of the recent pull-back, you should know that's something that's on the table for us to look at. We always want to weigh that with the opportunity to do an acquisition that enhances specifically what TriumphPay is doing. We are more than prepared to buy back a significant amount of our stock. We have a $50 million buyback authorization outstanding right now, and we certainly would have more dry powder to go above that should the board decide that's the right thing to do. We want to maintain regulatory excellence, mitigate cyber risk.
I already told you about one event as one of many events that all financial institutions are facing right now, whether it's from state-sponsored actors or just local hackers. It's something you have to be mindful of. Lastly, maintain our winning culture, prioritize team member wellbeing. Take care of the team, the team takes care of the customer, the customer takes care of the shareholder. I always believe that. You know, you should always be wary of people telling you how great their culture is, right? That's, it's better for you to hear it from others. I would say to any stakeholder who wants to investigate that or any board member, just find someone in the halls here and talk to them. We're not perfect. We do not get culture perfectly.
We have lived out to the best of our ability the concept of servant leadership and transparency over these last 10 years, and there's a very few people who leave this place, very few. That's the people who are what makes it happen, right? It's not the CEO, it's not the chairman, it's not the board. It's the people that we hopefully train, coach, give a plan to, and then allow them to go execute. You can see the results of what's happened as a result of that. Then we're broadening our investor relations. We are no longer a community bank that owns a financial technology company. We are a financial technology company that's part of a bank, and that changes the investor base. That's who we talk to.
That's something I spend a lot of time doing, is trying to explain to the market who Triumph is, who Triumph was, who it is, and what we're going to be in the future. Those five things, how we touch the three legs of the stool, it's how we maintain culture, and how we prepare ourselves if there are economic head-winds. The great news is we're very profitable. We have excess capital. We're more than prepared for anything that might come down the road. That's it. No more than five. You got to know those five things. You got to live them, you got to do them. With that, we'll turn this over for questions. Yes, sir. I assume I can't ask questions on the webcast. Got it. Awkward silence with technology, I can assure you.
You have time to pump, Aaron?
What's that?
you have time to prep for the question?
Be my guest, yeah.
If I was listening in to all the media stuff around where things are in the industry, right, transportation being challenged right now, supply- chain challenges, clearly the market and every correction of that in our own stock. Give me just your view on where we're heading around supply chain.
Anyone who tells you and pounds the table with conviction that they know what's happening in the supply chain on a predictive basis is either lying to themselves or they're lying to you. It is so. The market is. There are so many factors at play in what's happening in China. Like, everybody's talking about Elon Musk buying Twitter. Y'all be talking about what's happening in China. The lockdowns in Shanghai and Beijing, that is gonna dramatically affect supply chains, including trying to get microchips. There is so much at play. Or what's happening in Ukraine. You need neon gas to make the chips that you use to build trucks. Well, it's kinda hard to get those out of Ukraine right now. The view from Triumph's view, and you have to understand, trucking is a lead indicator of the economy.
I do believe that we are coming off of what we were seeing in fourth quarter was an unsustainable high. $4 per mile on dry van is just that can't last. We're returning to a more normalized place. Now the question is that $3 a mile? Is it $2.50 a mile? Is it $2 a mile? If it drops to $2 a mile, that's a problem. Most lanes, we don't at least for the rest of this year, it seems unlikely that happens. You've got a shortage of equipment. OEM producers are. If you order a truck today, you'll get it sometime in 2023. There's a shortage of drivers. Now we have some new trucking companies come into the market, but those aren't new drivers.
Those are drivers who left big trucking companies to start small trucking companies. Difficult to find someone who wants to be gone three nights a week, can pass the driving test and pass a drug test. It's just hard. We're 80,000 drivers short. Unemployment at around 3%, the consumer still has money to spend. All these people who are predicting this bloodbath in trucking has driven a lot of, you know, driven down a lot of transport stocks and us along with them. We don't share that conviction. I don't think it materially goes up from here. We think it muddles along. If it muddles along at where we're at right now, then Triumph is exceptionally profitable. I'll give you example.
In the first quarter, it generated a 1.7% return on average assets, which is a 17% return on tangible common equity. That would put us in the top 10% of all banks. All banks. We did that while investing just under $7 billion. The drag on earnings from TriumphPay was $7 million. Okay? If you normalize that, if you just say TriumphPay breaks even, our ROA for the quarter would have been over 2%, and our return on tangible common equity would have been over 20%, and that would put us in the top 1% of all banks. This institution is exceptionally profitable, even while choosing to invest in TriumphPay.
To date, between the M&A we've done and just the organic seeding of TriumphPay, we've invested, I would say, close to $200 million in this technology. The EPS side is many multiples of that, or we wouldn't continue doing it. If trucking moderates, it certainly will add revenue volatility for us. Because of the diversity of our asset base, because of how we're positioned, we will be profitable enough to continue, in my view, doing what we're doing. Yes, sir.
Two questions. One, Triumph Business Capital, you mentioned number two in the U.S., 15% of the market today. Why is the goal to grow that substantially? Or did I mishear that or just the rationale behind that? Two, long-term, what are the impacts, if any, if more manufacturing is brought onshore as far as trucking or the clients we serve? Does that mean positive, negative, or doesn't matter?
Yeah, taking the second question first, our belief, and if you talk to the trucking companies we do business with, is COVID plus Trump's tariff against China is gonna make Mexico great again. Our expectation is you're gonna see a lot of onshoring in Mexico. Manufacturing won't happen overnight. Supply chains are super, you know, it's difficult to move. We already believe we're gonna see more freight coming through Laredo and through those southern ports would be an expectation. If it onshores even domestically, it doesn't really affect the trucking industry. Whether our customers are moving things from the Port of Long Beach or from a manufacturing facility in Mississippi, it still has to leave that facility and go to a distribution facility and ultimately to the end user.
I don't see that changing things. There is a value proposition for TriumphPay. We think of tracking things from. Ultimately, our long-term plan would be of tracking from the point of manufacture to the last mile. That would be an amazing value delivery back to the market. But that's a long journey to build that, all those integrations. On the first question with Triumph Business Capital, we want Triumph Business Capital to grow in profitability and grow with the market. We should just pause on this. For years, people have been predicting that factoring was going to get disintermediated in trucking. They've also predicted that small truckers would no longer be able to exist.
Despite that's what the industry experts are telling you, what we see is small truckers are growing faster than anything else, and factoring is taking more market share. In broker stats, they used to say one out of every two invoices were purchased by a factoring company. It's kind of remarkable if you think about a freight broker, they're not actually paying a trucker, they're paying a factoring company who already bought the invoice from the trucker. Real-time data, depending upon which freight broker you look at, it's closer to 65% of all invoices are going into the factoring industry. I think the factoring industry as a whole in transportation is approaching something like $100 billion in purchases. There are 385 factoring companies that are active in transportation, and the top 20 control 75% of the market.
We have never historically seen that level of consolidation at the top end of the market. Remember what TriumphPay does. TriumphPay has a value proposition, not just for the carrier, not just for the freight broker, not just for the shipper, but also for the factoring industry, because they are a significant payee. They are our customers. 72 factoring companies use TriumphPay in order to process their invoices inside of our technology platform, rather than doing it the way they used to do it. If that's true, then it's difficult for us to also have a plan to go try to disintermediate all of those factoring companies on their same playing field. When I talked about defining the market segment, Triumph Business Capital still serves small truckers. We still serve owner-operators.
Where I think we're really good compared to the rest of the market is serving larger fleets because we have the bank balance sheet, the lower cost of funds, and it also takes us out of competition with a lot of the people we want to be clients for TriumphPay. The second value proposition is instead of just growing market share and winning deals from other factoring companies, what are the other services that being a bank allows us to provide? If you remember what I said about that user experience, insurance, bank accounts, fuel cards. How can we build a product that would be compatible with what other factoring companies do, not just compete? We're happy to compete. If we need to compete, we will.
If we're playing the long game, the value of $1 of revenue coming from TriumphPay is going to be 10 times revenue, right? A fast growth payment network, there's a normal market value to that. The growth of $1 of revenue in Triumph Business Capital is going to be 12x-14x earnings, not revenue, right? Because it's a commercial finance company. If we're thinking about long-term value creation for the entire enterprise, we have to think about that. Triumph Business Capital is a core part of what we're doing. It's a core value provider. It's here. I think the market deserves to know it's not our goal for it to be the largest factoring company in the industry. It's our goal for it to be the best at what it does. Does that answer your question?
Great. Thank you.
Okay. Thank you all for coming. Feel free to mill around. This is our new floor, by the way. Where's Teal? In addition to being the secretary, inspector of elections, chief regulatory officer, she's also chief architect and builder of all the space you see around here. We call this the arena. There's a quote behind on this wall that comes from Teddy Roosevelt about the critics who count the person in the arena. That's what we like to think about. There have been lots of people who said, Triumph, you can't do this. You won't do this. You're too young, you're too small. Our view is just get in the arena. Don't talk about it. Get in it. This is where we do a lot of our meetings. Thank you all for coming. We appreciate your support.
Have a great day.