First American Financial Corporation (NYSE:FAF) Q3 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

Soham Bhonsle: Okay. And then, on Endpoint Ken, I think you’ve previously talked about the opportunity there sort of being twofold right? Like, where you could potentially get some efficiency gains but then there’s also sort of this enabling of better customer service. I was hoping you could maybe dig a little bit deeper on the efficiency piece of the value proposition there. What sort of efficiencies do you sort of envision? And how does that maybe translate to margins versus call it the legacy title business?

Ken DeGiorgio: Yeah. Thanks for the question. I mean, I think its early days to exactly measure the efficiencies. But we anticipate sort of increasing the efficiency of an escrow officer fairly substantially. Again, it’s hard to put a number on that at this point. But we know there will be efficiency gains as we automate some of the more mundane and tasks that an escrow officer does and freeze them up to do the more people intensive — and people-intensive task. And there’s also other sort of efficiencies that we’ll gain. And we have already started gaining from Endpoint just by deploying some of their technology in other parts of our company. We’ve mentioned in the past about JOT which is our Mobile Notary Management Systems.

We relied on third parties for that in the past. We’re now able to do it more efficiently in-house and have made a lot of progress rolling that out in the direct division. It will probably be fully rolled out in the direct division sometime next year.

Soham Bhonsle: Okay. And just one more Mark, I think on the loss provision rate I guess you lowered it 25 basis points. But as we sort of go into next year and we potentially are in a more sort of uneven macro environment right? I mean, how are you thinking about that on that line I guess?

Ken DeGiorgio: This is Ken. I’ll start on that. And yes we did lower the loss rate. And one thing I’ll point out as you recall during the pandemic we actually took the rate up, which I think reflects our pretty conservative approach when it comes to building our reserves. The concerns we had when we did that in the pandemic didn’t come to fruition. Some of the concerns we had during the current market also haven’t come to bear. So we’ve built an extremely healthy level of reserves. In fact, we’re probably pushing the upper bounds. I mean, and I want to emphasize the upper bounds of reasonableness. And we think it was the right time to decline it. So we obviously continuously monitor our reserving level. The situation could change. But I think more directly to your question I think you could probably expect this rate to prevail at least through 2024.

Soham Bhonsle: Okay. Great. Thanks a lot.

Operator: [Operator Instructions] Our next question comes from the line of Bose George with KBW. Please proceed with your question.

Bose George: Hey, good morning. So first question just on the deboarding fees from ServiceMac how much was that this quarter? And is there more of that to come before that fully rolls off?

Mark Seaton: Yes. Hi. Good morning, Bose. So this quarter we had a $3 million benefit because of deboarding fees. And roughly about 40% of the loans were deboarded. So we have another call it 60% to come at some point next year. We’re not exactly sure about the timing.

Bose George: Okay. Great. Thanks. And then can you just talk about capital return priorities? Could we see the cadence of the buybacks pick up? And just also from a leverage standpoint what — is that a constraint you keep in mind just curious how you’re thinking about it more broadly.