First American Financial Corporation (NYSE:FAF) Q4 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

Soham Bhonsle: Got it. Okay. And then can I just get sort of an update on the roll off of your subservicing assets here? How should we think about that impacting the investment income line potentially through the year?

Mark Seaton: So we’ve talked about in the past, these home point loans, it’s unclear exactly when the home point loans would leave. Right now, our expectation is that they will be somewhere in mid-year. But one thing I would say is that, again, is not going to have a material impact, certainly to our investment income because we generate investment income from those loans. But we also pay out interest expense in those loans. So even if we lost them, it’s not going to have — you’ll see fluctuations for interest income and interest expense. But from a pretax perspective, it’s not going to be significant at all. But to answer your question, right now, the expectation is we hold on to those midyear, but that could change depending on circumstances.

Soham Bhonsle: Got it. And then just last one. I think Mark, you guys have talked about, look, the $15 million is better than the $20 million historically because you’re trying to sort of bring folks to the bank and maybe bank with you guys. I guess I was wondering, have you seen any sort of discernible movement in agent behavior in a market like New York, where you’re sort of hearing just likes of NYCB and these folks having some issues. Are you seeing some of that business come to you or any sort of other banks in that market specifically?

Mark Seaton: You’re talking about like deposits for our agent banking industry.

Soham Bhonsle: Yes.

Mark Seaton: We haven’t seen a big influx in deposits because of the issues you’re referring to here. But I would just say that long term, we are real positive on agent banking. When we started in January of ’23, we had basically $110 million of deposits for agent banking. At the end of the year, we had $271 million of deposits. So we’re growing it really nicely. It’s just from a very small base, right? On a bank deposit base of $6 billion, I mean, $270 million is material, but we’re very optimistic about the growth. We feel like we’ve got a good product market fit, we just need a little bit more time to execute. So we’re very optimistic, but the growth that we’re seeing isn’t because of any troubles of any other bank, it’s mostly because we can provide a really efficient product and service to our agent banking clients.

Operator: [Operator Instructions]. Our next question comes from Mark Hughes with Truist Securities.

Mark Hughes: Any thoughts on the capital management outlook for 2024?

Mark Seaton: Capital management, there’s a couple of different components we think about it. One is M&A. And I would just say that we would have thought the acquisition pipeline would have been a little bit more robust when the market fell. And it really hasn’t, as we’ve talked about on these calls. But we feel like the longer this kind of market malaise lasts, the more M&A opportunities will be. So that will always be something we look at in terms of the buyback, I mean, we’ve been very active in the buyback the last 2 or 3 years, and that’s always something that we’ll look at. At the end of the day, if we’ve got excess capital, we feel like stock is undervalued and we don’t have better uses for the capital, we’ll buy it back.

And so that’s always something we’ll continue to evaluate. And then of course, the dividend. We’re not committed to raising dividend every year come hell or high water, but we pretty much have raised the dividend, and that’s something we want to continue to do. So the fortunate part is that we’ve got a really good balance sheet at the trough of the cycle here, and we’re looking to actively put it to work where we can.

Mark Hughes: And then not to try to cut it too finely, but you’ve mentioned that the January purchase up 6%, commercial up 7%. I think you suggested there could be some spillover from December. If you look at the kind of recent trends, maybe late January or early February, do you see any difference relative to those numbers you gave us?

Kenneth DeGiorgio: Yes, I think we saw probably a larger uptick in the early weeks, the first week of January and some it tailed off as you went through the month, which suggest, yes, there was some spillover. But I think on the whole, we feel pretty good about where the numbers came out in January.

Mark Hughes: Yes. Well, I guess they didn’t immediately shift the order somewhere else. So spillover has some meaning as well.

Kenneth DeGiorgio: Yes.

Operator: Our next question comes from John Campbell with Stephens.

John Campbell: So Mark, in your prepared remarks, you highlighted that it’s impossible to fully size the exact impact of the cyber incident. I think that’s definitely understandable. Obviously, a lot of moving parts there, but I’m going to see if we can get a little bit more color at least on what was visible for you guys. So you called out the $11 million expense, but as far as maybe what else is visible, you guys, maybe it’s orders that got pushed into 1Q like you just mentioned or maybe it’s orders you had the mix that pulled out and went to competitors. Do you have any rough sense for what just — broadly what the degree of the impact was from that standpoint?