Good morning, and welcome to World Acceptance Corporation's second quarter fiscal 2027 earnings conference call. This call is being recorded. At this time, all participants have been placed in a listen-only mode. Before we begin, the corporation has requested that I make the following announcement. The comments made during this conference call may contain certain forward-looking statements within the meaning of Section 21E of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 that represent the corporation's expectations and beliefs concerning future events. Such forward-looking statements are about matters that are inherently subject to risks and uncertainties. Statements other than those of historical fact, as well as those identified by words "anticipate," "estimate," "intend," "planned," "expect," "believe," "may," "will," and "should," or any variation of the foregoing and similar expressions are forward-looking statements.
Additional information regarding forward-looking statements and any factors that could cause actual results or performance to differ from the expectations expressed or implied in such forward-looking statements are included in the paragraph discussing forward-looking statements in today's earnings press release and in the Risk Factors section of the corporation's most recent Form 10-K for the fiscal year ended March 31, 2026, and subsequent reports filed with or furnished to the SEC from time to time. The corporation does not undertake any obligation to update any forward-looking statements it makes. At this time, it is my pleasure to turn the floor over to your host, John Calmes, President and Chief Executive Officer. Please go ahead.
Thank you. Good morning, and thank you for joining our fiscal 2027 second quarter earnings call. We are pleased with our second quarter results, and more importantly, we believe we are well-positioned for the remainder of fiscal 2027. This quarter reflects steady progress against our core priorities: growing loan portfolio responsibly, improving credit quality, and maintaining a disciplined approach to expenses. We achieved adjusted earnings per share of $1.92 for the second quarter. Earnings benefited from a 3.2% increase in revenue, as well as a 7.7% decrease in provisioning expense. Importantly, our credit quality continued to improve. We saw improvement in delinquency on both the front end and back end. Most notably, front-end delinquency decreased from 20% to 18.9%. These trends reinforce our confidence in the health of the portfolio and the strength of our underwriting.
On expenses, we saw improvement in our G&A expense, and we expect to maintain this disciplined approach to expenses going forward. At this time, Tobin Turner, our Chief Operating Officer, and I would like to open up to any questions you may have.
Thank you. We will now begin the question-and-answer session. To ask a question, you may press star then one on your touch-tone phone. If you are using a speakerphone, please pick up your handset before pressing the keys. If at any time your question has been addressed and you would like to withdraw your question, please press star and then two. At this time, we'll pause momentarily to assemble our roster. The first question will come from Kyle Joseph with Stephens. Please go ahead.
Hey, good morning, guys. Thanks for taking my questions. Just kind of want to pick your brain on what's going on macro specifically. Just kind of want to get a sense for how sensitive is the consumer or your consumer to gas prices? Is it to the point where you kind of see delinquencies kind of move in line with gas prices? Or are we at the point where gas is less of an important portion of their budget?
Yeah. So historically, we've always seen that gas prices will have an impact on our customer, right? But right now, we've been pretty conservative in our underwriting, so overall, the credit metrics continue to improve. I guess you could ask would they have improved by more than they have if we didn't have sort of higher gas prices? It's hard to know that for sure. But in general, with our portfolio, because we've been pretty cautious on our lending, the overall portfolio has seen improvement.
Got it. Yeah. A lot of variables there, so hard to pinpoint for sure. But yeah. Then in terms of kind of the strategy going forward, are you guys obviously, it's paying off. You guys are putting up strong credit results here. But are you kind of happy growing kind of the existing customer base, being a little bit more cautious, call it, on new consumers? Is that kind of the plan, at least for the medium near term, given what's going on macroeconomically?
Yeah, that is right. We are focused right now on the blocking and tackling and getting the fundamentals right of the operations, and then taking a cautious approach to lending. Right now, we are a little looser than we were, say, in the March quarter. But we are still a lot tighter than we were at this point last year. Yeah, we may continue to kind of pull on some of those growth levers to increase growth a little bit, but I would not expect any dramatic change in our growth trajectory in the near term.
Got it. Thanks very much for taking my questions.
Thanks, Kyle.
Again, if you would like to ask a question, please press star and then one. The next question will come from Guy Riegel with Ingalls & Snyder. Please go ahead.
Hey, Johnny. It's Guy here.
Hey, Guy.
Most of the--
How are you?
--my questions were answered, previous person, analyst. But I was curious, can you speak to the competitive environment? And last one would be, are you still testing a credit card offering?
Guy, great questions. Hey, this is Tobin Turner speaking. On the competitive standpoint, we at a macro level still feel very confident. We are pleased with our overall app flow. We kind of like where we are positioned. We see some opportunities to grow when and as we see fit. From the competitive standpoint, we feel pretty good. On the credit card front, we are still kind of pilot testing where we are. We have got enough cards out there that we are kind of getting to see how people behave over time. We really are kind of just letting that initial portfolio bake, and we are probably at least a quarter or two away from trying to make a decision on how to scale that.
Got it. Okay. Thanks so much.
This concludes our question-and-answer session. I would like to turn the conference back over to Mr. Calmes for any closing remarks.
Thank you for joining our second quarter earnings call, and thanks for your interest.
The conference is now concluded. Thank you for attending today's presentation. You may now disconnect.