MGIC Investment Corporation (NYSE:MTG) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

Nathaniel Colson: Yes, Bose, this is Nathan. I think what we were trying to call out there is throughout 2022, when we were getting the large dividends up, we were using that money very quickly, whether — and a lot of debt reduction activities in particular. And that without that, as a need for cash right now at the holding company because our liquidity and leverage ratios are near our targets right now that we’re — we continue to repurchase shares in the fourth quarter and through January. As we said, we expect that we’ll exhaust our repurchase authorization. But beyond that, repurchase activity and the dividend are things that we continually discuss with the Board. And I think in April or in Q1 and our earnings, we’ll have a better update for you on what that looks like, both from a dividends from the OpCo up to the HoldCo with 3 more months of kind of performance and macroeconomic updates as well as what the go-forward plan is on repurchases.

Operator: And our next question comes from Mihir Bhatia from Bank of America.

Mihir Bhatia: I did want to ask about just delinquencies. Are we back to like just the normal cadence of delinquencies now just from regular way business, like nothing unusual going on there in terms of both or just new notices coming in? And does that mean the delinquency rate drifts a little higher from here as we enter those peak years of losses that you mentioned? Just trying to understand expectations around delinquency rate.

Nathaniel Colson: Yes. Mihir, it’s Nathan. I appreciate the question. I think as I mentioned in the opening remarks, the level of new notices is still down quite a bit from pre-COVID levels. So I think we’re still really pleased with the level of credit performance, but I don’t think we’re seeing a lot of kind of direct COVID or unusual circumstance notices. I do think that this is becoming more just kind of regular way delinquencies that we’ve seen throughout time. In terms of where it trends, I think there’s a couple of things. We do think that we’re likely to see increased delinquencies out of the 2020 and 2021 books over time. They’re entering their third and fourth years now of seasoning, and that’s typically when we’ve seen the increase in delinquencies.

I think in terms of the impact on the delinquent inventory, some of the reason that it’s remained as elevated as it is, is that the pace of paid claims is still very, very slow. And if the pace of paid claims starts to pick up, if foreclosure activity starts to pick up, we might see resolution from some of these long delinquent notices that we do expect will ultimately go to claim at a pretty high rate. And that could impact the size of the inventory, too. So I think the other thing that we would have seen pre-COVID is more seasonality. I think a lot of that got really muted. But historically, the months of February, March, April are pretty strong seasonal months for credit. So I don’t know if it’s kind of monotonically increasing from this point.

But we might see — I think we do think it’s relatively flat with maybe a slight increase as we’ve insured a lot more loans than we had pre-COVID and these books — these large books get into their peak notice years in 2023 and 2024 here.