Conference Transcript - OMF 2026-02-11

Mihir Bhatia, Analyst — Bank of America

Thank you for joining us this afternoon. For those who don't know, I'm Mihir Bhatia. I cover consumer finance and specialty payments companies here at Bank of America. Next on stage, we have OneMain. I'm delighted to welcome Doug Shulman, who is the CEO of OneMain. And for those who don't know, OneMain is a consumer finance lender, provides personal loans, auto loans, also credit cards, with a real focus on the subprime consumer. So firstly, Doug, thank you for being at the conference, for doing this event. It's the second or third year that we've had you, and we really appreciate the support. So why don't we just dig it right in? You know, compared to a lot of companies at this conference, I think, you know, OneMain's focus on the non-prime consumer historically is a little bit different. So maybe give us a view on the health of the customer. We've heard a lot about, you know, high inflation, but inflation's come back to a good place. wage growth has been happening. How is that non-prime customer, the core one main customer doing?

Doug Shulman, CEO

Yeah, no, thanks. Look, I would say our customers, which represent a section of the non-prime consumer, are quite resilient is the word we use. And I think you have to compare. I like to give the disclaimer that we underwrite and lend to people who can pay us back. And so that's not everyone. And, you know, our customers, we've got a bunch of tools that we can use to make sure we can extend credit to customers in a responsible way. So whether it's the product, because we have a secured product, the size of the loan, the risk grade that they are, the state that they're in and the rate, you know, so there's a number of things. And so my disclaimer is, you know, our underwriting is quite granular and there's no like one broad set of consumer. It's can this person pay us back? Can they afford the loan that they want? With that said, you know, there is we see a lot of applications from the consumer. So we've got a decent sense. I'd say, you know, I've talked about it before. Income is definitely caught up with, you know, cumulative incomes have caught up with inflation a couple of years ago. I think the non-prime consumer is doing fine. I think they've been steady and resilient. They haven't improved dramatically in the last year or so. And I think there's a whole bunch of cross-currents. Employment is an interesting one, which is unemployment still historically is quite low, which means most people who want a job can get a job. With that said, it ticked up a little bit last year. So there's some cross currents there. Inflation, I think, is at a controllable level. And as you said, is, you know, the rate of growth has come down. But cumulatively, you know, it's still more expensive at a grocery store than it was five years ago. And so, you know, I think that our consumers are doing great, you know, as evidenced by our credit trajectory. I think in general, the non-prime consumer is doing fine.

Mihir Bhatia, Analyst — Bank of America

So maybe just like digging in a little bit, would it be fair to say there hasn't been like any big change in approval rates in the loan applications that you're seeing in? Like if you would, you say the non-prime consumers doing generally fine. Is that a fair interpretation of that, that it doesn't mean any big changes for you all in terms of what you see coming in the door?

Doug Shulman, CEO

Yeah, I don't know. No, I mean, I guess I wouldn't interpret it that way, which is we spend a lot of time on the people we approve. And so our approval rates, you know, I don't even think of it as approval rates. I think of, do you meet our underwriting criteria? And if you do, then we'll have a conversation with you about what's the best way to serve So then maybe just talk, turning to the portfolio a little bit.

Mihir Bhatia, Analyst — Bank of America

One question that we get a lot from investors is, how resilient is this portfolio, right? like you mentioned, unemployment is still historically low. But compared to maybe some prior cycles, how resilient is the portfolio from your perspective, from an employment shock or income shock? What are some of the lessons that you have learned over the last few years that inform the risk posture today?

Doug Shulman, CEO

Yeah, look, I think our current portfolio is quite resilient. And I'll just give you the way we've underwritten, you know, the vast majority of that portfolio is in 2022, we and everyone else saw an uptick in delinquencies that then became an uptick in losses. And we cut our credit box, you know, quite aggressively. And the way we manage our credit box is we have a minimum threshold of 20% return on equity of any loan we make. And, you know, we usually put about $15 for every $100 of equity into a loan and the rest we borrow. And so for that $15, we need a 20% ROE. And the way we calculate the ROE is our model of, you know, what's going to be, what's that loan going to produce over the lifetime of the loan? It's customer lifetime value model. And the main factors that go into it is what's the interest rate we charge? You subtract operating expenses against that loan. You subtract our cost of funding that loan, especially the debt portion. And then losses is a big number. Since 2022, we've got our model that says, you know, whatever, losses for this customer will be 5%. You know, we've put a 30% stress on that. And so the model will say the loss is going to be 6.5%, right? because there's 30%, even though the loans have been performing at closer to 5% losses in that scenario. And so since then, that's a pretty hefty stress overlay. That's like an overlay saying you're going to have like a mild recession when it comes to employment. And so we've been underwriting saying, even if unemployment ticks up, then we still will make our 20% ROE. So we think our portfolio, you know, from a profitability standpoint, is quite, quite conservative. And we've had that since 2022. So it's almost, you know, this summer, it'll be six years of running that playbook, and we haven't lightened it up. And so, you know, we feel pretty good about it. I think, you know, the lessons you asked about, you know, for us, I think the biggest lesson for me is which we've known all along is you just need to be disciplined in this business like you can't go chase growth you can't say oh you know maybe things are better like you need to follow the data and like we said our customers been resilient our customers been performing as we expect but they haven't been necessarily outperforming and so you know have a very conservative balance sheet so you always have a lot of liquidity in case there's a shock err on the side of being conservative with your portfolio and then just run a great business and you know it's very easy to like say oh things are looking good the economy is good you know maybe you should tighten your box you just got to follow the data and stay disciplined and run your game in in the lending business like i guess that that does like you know one question that you know i have is what do you need to see in the data when you do maybe loosen a little bit, right?

Mihir Bhatia, Analyst — Bank of America

You mentioned putting the 30% stress overlay on. Today, we're at what, 90% of the front? 90% of the book is like with this new tighter underwriting that you put in place. So what do you need to actually see in the data to start loosening a bit?

Doug Shulman, CEO

Yeah, I think you need to see some, you know, period of time where there's consistent, better performance than our models had predicted. So we're seeing our models predict really good. You know, our underwriting is quite good when we pick the customer and manage the customer the way we know how to manage them. And it's performing in line with our expectations, but it's not like the customer's losses are lower than we thought, or their delinquencies are lower. They're exactly what we thought. And so one is, I think you need to see continued outperformance. Two is we have this thing, we call it weather vane testing, where we're always booking a sliver of loans. It doesn't really show up in our portfolio because it's not a material amount that are people who have like a 15% ROE or an 18% ROE just to see if those are performing like just below our cutoff to see if they're performing better. And we haven't, There's some variation. Sometimes it ticks up and down. But on a consistent basis, we haven't seen it perform better. And then I so I think we'd need to see the weather vane consistently perform better. We need to see our book consistently perform better. Not we like the way it's performing. It just would need to outperform and it would say we can loosen the box some. And then you'd need to see some of those macro. I mean, there's still some uncertainty in the economy with macro geopolitical. There's a there's a variety of things. And so I think, you know, you need to feel really good when we open up, though. It's it's not going to be a big bang. It's going to be secured products in these states for, you know. We have 20 risk rates for these specific risk rates coming through our, you know, branch based channel. Right. So it's going to be by channel. It's going to be by state. It's going to be by product. And so you're going to have it be a very granular adjustment of the credit box. It's not going to be, you know, coast is clear, let's open the box.

Mihir Bhatia, Analyst — Bank of America

Maybe then, like, let's switch a little bit to the ILC application. I guess first question on it is just what's the latest on the ILC application? And then we can have a couple more follow-ups on that one.

Doug Shulman, CEO

Yeah, look, latest, I don't have any updates. You know, like I tell my board, you know, when you've applied for a license with the government, You either have it or you don't have it. We don't have it yet. So we're, you know, we're in my lines. Yeah, I wouldn't predict it.

Mihir Bhatia, Analyst — Bank of America

But let's just walk through why you applied. Like, what's the strategic vision? Like, how does this ILC license help you, both from an operational standpoint, but also, like, obviously, there's the funding cost, maybe a little more straightforward.

Doug Shulman, CEO

Look, I think it's important before I answer that, that for us, it's a nice to have, not a must have. You know, we've got a very profitable business. We've got a huge amount of confidence in our ability to continue to drive earnings and capital generation up and out years. We've got a lot of levers. So we have a lot of momentum in our business. On the nice to have, you know, you get some diversification of funding. It wouldn't be a huge amount, you know, especially the first five or so years, because the size of it will be limited as a de novo application. You would the big advantage is it would unify the operation. Right now we operate in 47 states. Each one has different rates. It has different rules. It has different fees. It has different reportings. The states have different, you know, regulations around branches and all these things. And so it could simplify the operation, simplify the technology backbone around that. Every time legislation is passed in a state, you need to code your application. You need to train your people. You need to do this. And we're, you know, we're a button down shop, super compliant. We comply with all the states. So I think there'd be a simplification. We also have a, you know, a small credit card that's growing. And right now we have a partner bank because you need to have a bank to issue a credit card. We'd be able to issue it through our bank. So that would be an advantage. And so, you know, in the meantime, we're playing our game, driving profitability up. We feel good about it. If we get it, it would be great. If we don't get it, you know, well, that's fine, too.

Mihir Bhatia, Analyst — Bank of America

Right. I hear you. If you get it, great. It's a nice positive optionality, maybe, is the way to think about it for investors. But I think one question we get a lot from investors about this one is, yes, it simplifies operations, it helps them with that, but it also potentially lets you export the rate cap and you get to go past different state rate caps and potentially get a bigger TAM. Is that something you're thinking about with this, where you can maybe, you know, state has a cap of 25%, and now you can go up to 36% so you can approve more. Is there any way for us from the outside to be able to size that opportunity?

Doug Shulman, CEO

Yeah, look, we have not sized that. We think about it as providing access to credit potentially for more customers, right? Because riskier customers, you need to have price to absorb the loss, right? And so I think that would have an effect. That's part of simplifying the operation, but we haven't sized it. Publicly.

Mihir Bhatia, Analyst — Bank of America

Maybe when you get the license, then you help us size that. But returning to the funding strategy more broadly, you expanded your TPG partnership recently. You potentially have the bank charter coming. You're active at the ABS markets. Just talk to us more generally about, I think you mentioned, you know, having resilient funding. What is the funding strategy? How do you go about doing that? Like, what are you trying to achieve from funding when we think about it?

Doug Shulman, CEO

Yeah, look, you know, we have a very conservative balance sheet. And, you know, if you look at the history of consumer finance companies, liquidity and running out of liquidity is, you know, the existential risk. And we wanted to take that off the table. So when I came in, we started pivoting and creating a much more diversified balance sheet with a long liquidity runway, with long tenured securities. And so our goal is just to have that be a zero issue and to have a fortress balance sheet. We're willing to pay for that. We have extra interest expense. If we ran a just-in-time funding like a lot of people do with lots of whole loan sales and only the ABS market, which is cheaper, and not having lots of extra bank lines, we'd kick off more capital generation and more earnings every year. I'd trade it all day long just to have an enduring franchise. That's our fundamental precept. The funding strategy is we pretty much which split most of the funding between ABS, and we do a lot of long data. We'll do a five-year ABS, even longer. Unsecured funding, just issuing bonds, and we'll do 10-year bonds. We're no name with a diversified investor base that can get very good terms. So we don't have covenants on that. This is like, here's your money. You have it for for all these years. We then have bank lines and we have over seven billion dollars of bank lines from 14 different banks again. And back in the beginning of end of February of 2020, when was the pandemic?

Mihir Bhatia, Analyst — Bank of America

2020.

Doug Shulman, CEO

Yeah, yeah. February month. Long ago. Yeah, yeah. We actually tapped all our bank lines when everyone was panicking and the market was going down and everyone thought we were going to have full arm again. And we tapped them all just to test it and say, like, were these good if you needed it? And then we have our whole loan program, which, you know, we've been very public about. We did it to have the pipes and to create optionality. And sometimes it's a good economic trade for us, but it's not a huge part of our balance sheet. And so highly diversified. We keep about two years of liquidity runway. So capital markets froze up and we had no access to the capital markets. Pay our employees, make every loan we want to make, invest in technology, run our business. You know, in 08-09, the longest any of the markets froze up was a couple of months that you couldn't tap them at all. Again, you know, right after the pandemic started, we went out and actually did an unsecured deal. It was, you know, higher than normal, much lower than everyone else. And so, you know, our balance sheet we view as like a core competitive advantage, And we run it long liquidity runway, diversified, and I think it's been a strength. And I think investors trust us because of our attitude towards our balance sheet.

Mihir Bhatia, Analyst — Bank of America

Yeah, no, I think we've definitely heard that from investors. Let's turn to the auto business for a second. Our CFO, Jenny Oster, how to sit in the back. She runs it all. So let's turn to the auto business, right? Give us an update on the progress you've made there. You've been leaning in the last few years. Just what does the ROE profile of that business look like relative to your personal loans and what's been going on with the auto business?

Doug Shulman, CEO

Yeah, look, we like the business a lot. I mean, our history was for over a decade, we've had secured lending for personal loans, which wasn't I'm buying an auto, but it was, you know, somebody says I want $10,000. And we said we can give you an $8,000 unsecured loan. at this interest rate, or we can give you a $15,000 loan secured by your auto, we'll take over, you know, we'll take the collateral on your auto, we'll pay off the old lender at $5,000, you get $10,000, which you requested, and it's all at a lower interest rate. So it's a very, it's been a great product. About five years ago, we had some team members who kind of ran the collateral part and the other thing. And they said, hey, we'd like to see if we can get into some independent dealers. You know, we've got, we know how to do all of this. We know how to value collateral. We know how to secure a lien. We know how to collect on an auto. We have the underwriting machine. And so we actually gave people a little pot of money and they built a nice like $800 million business with independent dealerships. And then as we looked at it, we said, great, but we built it on our personal loan platform, which isn't exactly fit for purpose for interacting with auto dealers, et cetera. And so we went out and scoured the market and found a great company called Foresight that we bought um and uh the um and foresight had a great technology had relationships with some franchise dealers had a great management team and so we picked up foresight as a tuck-in acquisition put the two together and at that point i think we had like 1.8 billion of uh of receivables since then we put the businesses together we've moved over to a proper auto you know, platform. We've refined the models around that. And we've started to expand the dealer, the deal relations and sales. And so it's been a nice little growth engine for us. I view it as like a complimentary business. It's one that has lower risk because it's 100% collateralized. And so it's good for like our volatility of risk profile. It generally has a a little bit lower ROEs than the personal loan business or the credit card business, which we're also growing. And so I think it fits nicely in our product portfolio and has a huge total addressable It's like $500 billion. And so even if we just take a little of it, like we're playing our game. As you saw, we just signed a partnership with Ally where they'll send us turndowns. through their ClearPass program, which should get us some more application volume, which will be a nice little piece of growth. And we're also just expanding our sales team so that we're penetrating more auto dealers. Got it. Now, that's great.

Mihir Bhatia, Analyst — Bank of America

You mentioned credit cards. Receivables have actually been growing at a pretty nice clip. I know early on you announced market conditions. You all pulled back prudently, I think, in most investors would say. But they've again started growing at a pretty nice clip. Talk about just how the credit card business fits into the overall OneMain strategy.

Doug Shulman, CEO

Yeah, look, back in 2019, we did a real look and said, we've got a bunch of core assets in our platform of OneMain. And is there more we can do than just personal loans? And we looked across the whole spectrum of all lending that happens. And we made a decision. We were going to stay focused on the non-prime consumer and we're going to focus on lending. And we're not going to be a wealth manager. We're not going to be a bank and deposit gatherer as, you know, like in traditional sense. And auto and card, when we thought about a future portfolio, were the most attractive for us. And if we had our personal loans as the core center and the biggest part of our business, but we had two ballasts to, like, stabilize the ship and add some growth, card, which is same or higher ROE than personal loans, and I'll talk about it for a minute, auto, which is a little lower volatility, a little lower ROE, both places, you know, we thought intellectually they made the most sense to put together. But then we did a whole exercise, like what's our right to play? And I talked about auto. We knew how to do collateral. We had relationships. We'd already built a small business. I think card, super complimentary for us. One is we had a whole bunch of infrastructure we could use. Most of our underwriting team had card experience. We had plugged into the credit bureaus already. We had 3 million current customers and 50 million either former customers or applications we had seen. We could build it digital first so we wouldn't have to use the whole branch infrastructure. We had a whole tech and digital team who knew how to kind of put that together. And so we thought we had a bunch of head starts. I think they're incredibly complementary products. And so if you think about it, a card is a daily transactional product that serves a different purpose for the consumer. And the highest use for our cards is what you would think, retail, dining, gas, groceries. You're using it for that. A personal loan is a large, episodic transaction. Either I want to consolidate debt, I want to pay for my grandkids' horseback riding lessons and some other things, or I've got my hot water heaters broken and I need to get it fixed or my HVAC. And so large, episodic, daily transactional, you put them together. And so they complement each other. Then the card is actually real estate, because if you get a personal loan with us and you're a good customer, you put it on autopay and there's not a lot of reasons to interact with us. I mean, we have customers logged into our app and they change their address or they change their payment date, those kinds of things. But a card, you're checking in, you're checking, you know, do I have $100 left on my line this month for this groceries that I'm about to buy from my family? Most of our cards have rewards. So, like, you're taking your points and using your points. And then our card proposition is payments equal progress. And so if you make six on-time payments, you either get a line increase or you can get a decrease in your rate. And so we're getting a lot of action on the digital real estate. Our average card customer is in there like seven times a month checking on the app. For the customers who have been paying on time over time and we have unique insight into their credit, Now it pops up and says, would you like a $10,000? You're pre-qualified for a $10,000 loan. Apply here. When we get that customer, acquiring a card customer is about a quarter of the cost of acquiring a loan customer. So you acquire them, and a year later, you get a new customer at zero customer acquisition costs. And so it's a very complementary product that we think we've got a right to play, and we bring some special sauce to it.

Mihir Bhatia, Analyst — Bank of America

How different is the underwriting for a personal loan versus a revolving card product?

Doug Shulman, CEO

You know, it's different models because it's different behavior. I mean, a card, you're only extending a $500 line, so you can take a little more risk. Some of our cards have fees, so they absorb some losses. I think, but we still, for card, auto, and loan, we have our 20% return on equity threshold that I talked about before. And so we have each one has its own customer lifetime value model. Each one has to return 20% return on equity on any credit that we extend. I think the big difference is a loan, you get 100 percent of the amount day one and you start earning interest on it. A card, it takes about, you know, nine, 10 months to build up. So you issue the card. You don't get lending, you know, on it quite as quite right away. And then the peak losses occur at different times. And so it's a different loss profile. It's a different delinquency profile, and it's different underwriting. So you definitely need it. It's separate models, but the fundamentals of 20% ROE based on customer lifetime value and us running that discipline is the same.

Mihir Bhatia, Analyst — Bank of America

We just talked about credit card. I'd be remiss if I didn't ask you. I know it's out of the news now, the 10% interest rate cap. People are saying it maybe doesn't happen, but we're probably a tweet away from it being front page news again. So how would one man react if we got that?

Doug Shulman, CEO

Yeah, I mean, look, to state the obvious, it's uncertain where this will land. Our card, while you said it's growing, is still under a billion dollars of our $26 billion portfolio. So it's like less than 4% of our portfolio. And we don't have a big back book to manage. So even if it occurred in the back book, What I'd say is, you know, we would see what happened with our card. What I like about our position is we've got a lot of different ways to serve customers. I mean, if somehow this happened, I think your CEO has been public, Bank of America, saying it would cut off credit to a lot of people. Our job is providing responsible credit to people who have had some blemish, usually on their credit record at some point. And so I think we could serve them with personal loans. We could do other things. And so I think it's quite manageable for our business, regardless where it lands.

Mihir Bhatia, Analyst — Bank of America

So maybe, like, let's turn to the core personal loan business for a second. But, like, you know, in an increasingly digital first world, some of your peers or maybe even, like, you know, some of the fintech lenders, they've leaned in very heavily on this idea of we're going to get a loan approved in a few minutes, a few pieces of information, click, click, click. you get a loan, as little interaction as possible. OneMain's continued to be very omni-channel with both an in-person branch model. You also have digital tools and a model, but just talk about that. What does that give you? Why do you want to stay omni-channel? Some of the advantages.

Doug Shulman, CEO

Look, I mean, if you look at our credit, FICO for FICO, I think it's better than anybody in the industry by a pretty wide margin. And I do think our ability to serve customers in a variety of different ways and establish a relationship with customers is important for this business. Setting up a loan correctly, getting them into the right product, setting people up on auto pay, talking to them and getting alternative phone numbers you can call them at if there's an issue. that we need to reach them. There's a lot of, you know, a high touch model has a little more cost in it, but has advantages. Now, at this point, only about half of our customers actually walk into a branch to get a personal loan. And so what we've done is we've built relationship tools, and we We built the ability that depending on the customer, you can we can serve you in a variety of ways. You know, if you think about our branches, our average branch manager has 14 years tenure there in the community. I stop by branches all the time. And, you know, you see customers and I say, why do you come back here? And, you know, I say, oh, why come to one main? He said, oh, you know, this is my third loan in 20 years. People always treat me right. One time I lost my job and you helped me through it and you didn't just foreclose on it and didn't hurt my credit record. And I got a job within two months. A lot of people would have cut me off. And so there's real deep relationships in the community, long tenured branch team members. And you can think of them as little entrepreneurial pods, like three to seven people in a branch. They both make loans and collect. And so they're really set up not to push loans out the door, but to get people in loans they can afford and they can pay back. And they're paid on delinquency as well as loan production is part of their payments. payments. So we want them to only make loans where they can afford. With that said, we have a whole network of call centers that take overflow application, capacity, can help balance out capacity, specialized. We've now moved a lot of setting up the loan application process and scheduling the appointment out of the branch. And then they just show up in the branch to have the real value add. And then we build all sorts of digital tools that we've talked about. And so our view is branch is a huge competitive differentiator. Our 1,300 branches, if we were a bank, would be the seventh largest branch network in the country. So most people can drive to a branch in the country. But we also have a really world-class call center operation. And then we have really good digital tools. And so our philosophy is simple stuff, change of payment date, check your account balance, et cetera, try to push everyone as far digitally as you can. Things that are repetitive and aren't relationship based, get them into the call center and keep the branches for, you know, high touch in-person interactions. And, you know, we think it's the right model to serve our customer and to, you know, have a long term and enduring franchise. The last thing I would mention, just since we're here in case people, I mean, these are not bank branches like in the fanciest real estate on the corner of a town in America. Like our branches are in, you know, shopping centers, kind of strip mall kinds of things or in a class B office building on the second floor. And so the real estate cost isn't wildly different between a branch and a call center. And so you can think of them as like 1,300 distributed call centers as well, but they serve their local community.

Mihir Bhatia, Analyst — Bank of America

One thing that you mentioned in your answer, I think that sometimes gets lost is the branch does collections, early stage collections. The branch managers actually get paid on loan performance, it sounded like.

Doug Shulman, CEO

Yeah, well, we'll see. and they're like entrepreneurs production and delinquency right so it's a balanced scorecard which tries to incentivize people again you know our business is extending responsible credit so we want to give people access to credit but we want them to be able to pay us back that's good for them that's good for us yeah yeah no i think that that does get missed sometimes when people look at it and they're like all 1300 branches like inefficient like you know to your point but But anyway, let's turn to capital returns.

Mihir Bhatia, Analyst — Bank of America

You just upsized your buyback in the third quarter last year, I believe. Just talk about capital priorities over the next year. How do you think about M&A versus buyback at the current price? What's more attractive to you?

Doug Shulman, CEO

Look, our capital stack and priorities are pretty clear. First, we're going to invest in the business. So we're going to make every loan. We're going to put that 15% equity into every loan, credit card, auto loan that meets our return thresholds, because that's good use of capital. Then we're going to invest in our platform. So whether it's people, technology, digital, underwriting, data, so that we have long-term and enduring franchise. After that, we've got a healthy dividend that's about 7% at the current share price, which has been a differentiator, I think, us with the investor community. It puts kind of a floor on returns that people are going to get. And then access capital, we look at opportunistically. We've recently decided that, or we've recently leaned, we've had a buyback program for a while, but the board just upped it to a billion dollars, um, going through 2028. Um, we, uh, you know, fourth quarter, we bought more than double in the third quarter and more than double of the whole year of 2024. So you can see the trajectory. We don't have like a set plan, but we're pretty much, you know, we want to stay at our, you know, in the, in the leverage range we've committed to the rating agencies. We want to invest in the business, have buybacks. The leftover or the excess capital generation, our bias is to share repurchases now. We think it's a good use of capital. It's a good return of capital to our shareholders. We're always looking at M&A opportunities. I've been here seven years. We've done two tuck-ins. We bought a financial wellness platform and we bought foresight. They were both very small. We're quite discerning. You know, our M&A filter is strategically, does it make sense? And is it going to accelerate our, you know, growth and profitability plans? Financially, does it make sense? The price makes sense? Is it accretive? And is it, you know, for shareholders? And execution, like, can we execute? Because a lot of, you know, a lot of M&A, there's execution. Again, we don't think we need, we've got a very good organic growth plan. And so that's why you've seen us lean into buybacks, because we think it's the best allocation of capital right now. If the right M&A thing came up, we would definitely consider it, but there's nothing imminent.

Mihir Bhatia, Analyst — Bank of America

Got it. We have a couple of minutes left, if anyone has any questions. Anyone? Not seeing any hands, so maybe. I think he's got it, Mike. Sorry.

Doug Shulman, CEO

Yes, Jenny. That's Jenny. She can answer. She can't ask. It's our CFO, Jenny Osterhout.

Mihir Bhatia, Analyst — Bank of America

So maybe we'll just finish off then with, is there anything that you think isn't well understood by the investment community about OneMain? Anything you want to hit on before we finish here?

Doug Shulman, CEO

I think people understand it, especially people who follow our stock. but I would say, we talked about balance sheet and we talked about credit. I think people hear about a wholesale funded non-prime lender and they think it's a lot riskier than it is. And if you run it in a very disciplined manner, our balance sheet is this fortress balance sheet. We're not going to have issues with our balance sheet. And so that's how we've put it together to not have issues. And I think the investors have understood that through the 2022 cycle where a lot of people couldn't get funding, and we had plenty of funding and no issues. I think it kind of proved the point. And then the non-prime consumer, if you underwrite them well, and if you set it up well, and if you have a relationship with them, the actual volatility of losses is lower than a lot of prime lending. And so we had at our investor days a couple of years back, a chart that showed our volatility of losses over, you know, an eight year period was the standard deviation was 1.4 or 1.3. I think prime was 1.4 for like lending and our competitive set who had even a little bit higher FICO than us, their losses were double ours and their volatility of losses were like over three. And so if you run these businesses correctly, you actually have pretty low volatility of loss. And the balance sheet, you don't need to be a bank to have an incredibly secure balance sheet. If you're just conservative and you pay extra money to have lines and everything else is just backup liquidity. And so I think that's a really important point is we built our business through the cycle. I mean, you can make a little less money in a recession. You make a little more when you're not, but it's built as an enduring franchise through the cycle.

Mihir Bhatia, Analyst — Bank of America

Got it. No, that makes all of it makes sense.

Doug Shulman, CEO

With that, we have time.