Macrina Kgil
Chief Financial Officer
Thank you, Jay. Turning to page 7, I wanted to provide you with a couple of highlights on our Acquisitions and Servicing segment, known as the SpringCastle portfolio. The SpringCastle portfolio continues to perform really well, with pretax income of $39 million in the third quarter versus $34 million in the prior quarter. Credit performance has remained strong, with charge-offs continuing to decline. Although, like the branch portfolio, we do anticipate some uptick in the fourth quarter due to seasonality. In early October, we refinanced our 2013 SpringCastle securitization. The completion of this deal generated approximately $540 million of proceeds to us. After paying down the original debt, we used the excess funds to repurchase and retain a portion of the debt as an investment. Approximately $340 million of the $540 million was invested in rated securities from this transaction, and will generate a blended yield of approximately 6%. Net of this investment, we are left with almost $200 million of net new cash. Turning to slide 8, I'll now talk about our third-quarter financial results. As Jay said at the beginning of the call, we had yet another very solid quarter. With our core business generating pretax earnings of $101 million, which represents a 42% increase from third-quarter 2013. Our Consumer and Insurance segment earned $63 million pretax in the quarter, significantly ahead of last year's quarter. The primary driver of our sequential quarter improvement was growth in the Consumer loan portfolio. And as I just mentioned, our Acquisitions and Servicing segment contributed nicely to our results again this quarter, driven primarily by continued improvements in credit performance. On a GAAP basis, we earned $427 million after-tax, driven largely by the $610 million pretax net gain on the sale of real estate receivables which we closed during the third quarter. Turning to slide 9, let's go through our guidance update. First, we are tightening our guidance for net finance receivables to a range of $3.75 billion to $3.85 billion. Reflecting the continued strong growth in our branch personal loan business, and the early volume trends from our new direct auto loan product. Second, we are fine tuning our yield expectation range to be between 26.75% and 27%. Our auto volume is coming in strong, and as we expected, is slightly impacting our yield range. Overall, we continue to expect this product to be a net positive to our bottom line. Lastly, we are projecting hour risk-adjusted yield to a range of 21.75% to 22.25% for the full year 2014, consistent with the slight decrease in yield. Now let me ask the operator to begin the Q&A period.