MGIC Investment Corporation (NYSE:MTG) Q2 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

Nathan Colson: Geoff, it’s Nathan. I mean — I do think that given the average loan amounts from the more recent vintages compared to the average loan amount that came in certainly in the kind of financial crisis years, much higher. So the average exposures on those are a lot higher. We have had a pretty consistent severity to exposure ratio that we’re putting on new notices. We’ve been running better than that. We’ve — actual realized severities have been in the 60s and 70s for the last several years. I think we think that’s really an artifact of things that are not long-term sustainable. But at some point, if that became what we thought the true new normal go-forward was, I mean, that could have an impact and a consideration that we would have. But I do think that we are likely to see a gradual uptick in that just as the average exposure on new notices goes up as more and more of those new notices come from more recent vintages at higher loan amounts.

Geoffrey Dunn: Okay. And then just a quick number. You said you’re at 7.5% claim rate assumption. Did you drop to 7.5% in the first quarter? Or was that incremental this quarter?

Nathan Colson: The 7.5% has been our new notice claim rate assumption for several quarters.

Geoffrey Dunn: Okay. I thought you were at 8% in the fourth quarter, that’s why I just wanted to clarify.

Nathan Colson: Okay. No, I think — yeah, 7.5% for the last several quarters.

Geoffrey Dunn: Okay. And then last question. I think, Tim, it was in your commentary about some of the competitive advantages beyond pricing for new business. How do you think the market is shaped up? It seems to me every day that goes by, mortgage insurance is almost kind of becoming more like auto insurance, where people are shopping the best rate on the engines out there. Where do you think we are in terms of mix of purely price shopping customers versus those that still value broader relationships and services? And how is that today compared to maybe three years ago?

Tim Mattke: I think there’s definitely more price shoppers, if you wanted to find that way now than there were three years ago. I think what we like to call out is there’s a fairly good percentage of our customers that aren’t price shoppers. Now, they’re not agnostic to price by any means, but they value, I think, some of the things that we can deliver and that we have delivered for over 65 years to them in those relationships that they aren’t as focused on price as some others are. And again, that’s up to the customer to decide what they want to do. We try to reflect on what we do to understand what our customers expect from us. So we have a core group of customers, we have a broad-based group of customers, all of them are phenomenal. But we definitely have a good cross-section that aren’t as focused on prices as others are.

Geoffrey Dunn: And does that fall into like typically like a regional or a local type of customer versus the nationals?

Tim Mattke: I think we’ve always felt like we do really, really strong in community banks, regional banks, credit unions, those types of institutions. So it’s — I think it’s fair to say that it’s probably a pretty strong correlation.

Geoffrey Dunn: Okay. Thank you.

Tim Mattke: Sure.

Operator: Thank you. Please stand by for our next question. Our next question comes from the line of Eric Hagen of BTIG. Your line is now open.