Credit Acceptance Corporation (NASDAQ:CACC) Q2 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

Vincent Caintic: Hi. Good afternoon. Thanks for taking my questions. First one on the prepayment rates and the change – the adjustment there. I guess you highlighted that the – it had to do primarily with the timing of the cash flows and not the change in the absolute amount. I would think that lower prepayment speeds may be a positive in the sense that if the loan lasts for longer, you’re able to charge more – you’re able to get more interest income and so there might be a higher lifetime value to that loan. I’m just curious how that works. Your thoughts on that and how that maybe works mechanically, where maybe you’re collecting more interest income, but your forecasted collections comes down. Thank you.

DougBusk: Yes. I mean, that may in fact occur where the loan doesn’t prepay, you end up collecting more than you otherwise would because generally, the people that prepay the ones that were fairly likely to repay their loan in full anyway, i.e., they are the more creditworthy customers. But the amount of the provision is the amount required to reduce the net asset value, so gross loan less the allowance for credit losses to the discounted value of future net cash flows, so collections or dealer holdback. And that discount rate is in the neighborhood of 20%. So if you have a longer stream of cash flows and you’re discounting it back at 20%, it’s easy to see how that could result in an increase in provision, even if on certain loans you might be forecasting more total collections.

Vincent Caintic: Okay. That’s helpful. And that illustrates the timing differences, so I appreciate that. Second question on the spreads or the yields. In terms of you talked a little bit earlier about competitive – easing a bit. Are you able to talk about the pricing that you’re able to charge the consumer, any change on that in terms of improvement spreads?

DougBusk: I mean we don’t really price our products by bearing the interest rate on the retail installment contract with the consumer. We price our product to maximize the amount of economic profit that our loans originate. So economic profit per loan times the number of loans we originate. Obviously, one of the things that determines the amount of economic profit to loan is just the relationship between what we expect to collect and what we pay for the loan and origination. So as you can see, we had a little higher initial spread this year than we had last year, but that’s – we’re pricing to maximize economic profit and there’s a lot of things that go into that, including our cost of capital and timing of the cash flows and expenses and things like that.

Vincent Caintic: Okay. And then last one for me. Nice to see the active dealer counts and the activity growing year-over-year. Anything you can share in terms of the discussions you’re having with your dealer customers in terms of maybe what might be driving the increased engagement and increased volume you’re getting from the dealers?

DougBusk: Yes. I mean I think it’s the competitive environment that I mentioned earlier likely has something to do with it. Now, I think the fact that we’re originating more higher-quality loans has something to do with it as well. So I think it’s fair to say that increase from dealers has increased over the course of the last 12 months. And I think it’s primarily due to those two factors.

Vincent Caintic: Okay. Great. That’s helpful. Thanks very much.

Vincent Caintic: You’re welcome.

Operator: Thank you. [Operator Instructions] Our next question comes from the line of Ray Cheesman from Anfield Capital Management. Your line is open.

Ray Cheesman: Doug, when you just mentioned a minute ago, higher-quality loans, does the better competitive environment referenced earlier mean that you get more volume at, let’s call it, a static FICO score? Or has it allowed you to actually move up market slightly while maintaining your economics?