Enact Holdings, Inc. (NASDAQ:ACT) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

Rohit Gupta: Eric, the only thing I’d add to Dean’s question — or Dean’s answer is, when you just think about the environment we are operating in from a macro perspective housing and consumer, I think we are in a very different place than where we used to be pre-global financial crisis. So the impact of home price appreciation, home price decline on consumers is much lower. We are in an environment where the credit quality as Dean said is much higher. The cumulative equity accumulation for these consumers is pretty significant. And then you think about our portfolio being primarily — primary occupant and also a lower housing supply in the market. And while home prices will fluctuate in this market as we saw recently, we don’t think that that’s the primary driver for new delinquencies.

Eric Hagen: Yeah. Yeah. That’s helpful. Thanks for that detail. And I want to follow-up on the dividend too. I mean, how is your appetite to paying a dividend change, or maybe how would you run the business any differently, if your PMIERs ratio were either higher or lower than it is today?

Dean Mitchell: Yeah. Eric, I think we’re comfortable with our PMIERs sufficiency levels where they are today. We’ve talked about certainly under more economic uncertainty maintaining PMIERs levels above 150%. I think really our return of capital for 2023 is going to be driven by the macroeconomic uncertainty itself and how that ultimately — those economic headwinds tailwinds ultimately resolve are going to influence kind of our perspective on the most appropriate amount of capital to return shareholders — to shareholders in 2023. I think we’re going to follow the same capital prioritization framework that we’ve talked about in the past. And one of the key aspects of that is returning capital to shareholders. So we’re going to be thoughtful about that.

And I think we’ve provided a little bit of a road map, at least to part of our capital return story in 2023 with our quarterly dividends that we expect to continue prospectively in our share repurchase program. I think if you put those together, you can see your way to $160 million $170 million of planned capital return in 2023, and then we’ll continue to evaluate that the economic landscape as well as business performance through the remainder of the year to figure out if there’s incremental to that.

Rohit Gupta: Yeah. And I think Eric just from a cycle perspective, in normal times and good times in the economy, PMIERs target might be something that is kind of — we’ve talked about a range of PMIERs target for our business. But as we head into an uncertain environment, I think PMIERs might be more of an outcome. So if we want to buy more loss coverage on any part of our portfolio, it might drive a higher PMIERs ratio. That doesn’t imply that we are trying to drive an explicit capital return out of that ratio. It’s more of an outcome in that scenario. So I think that links very nicely with what Dean said.

Eric Hagen: That’s very helpful. Thank you guys very much.

Dean Mitchell: Thank you.

Rohit Gupta: Thanks, Eric.