Unidentified Analyst: Okay. Great. And then I guess the other — maybe those other lines like expenses you’ve been pretty able to hold those expenses controls pretty well about the expense ratio. Just wondering, if there’s more kind of room to hold it if the expenses can you hold it kind of relatively fixed for a while?
Rob Beck: What I would tell you is, that we are laser-like focused that every dollar we spend, helps drive the business forward. And we’ve been strongly profitable in this environment and yet still investing in the business. And we will adjust the spending pattern as we need to continue to grow the business where growth is needed or to continue to drive operating leverage that we need to do overtime as well. So I can’t really give you any more guidance than that right now.
Unidentified Analyst: Okay. Perfect. And last one for me. So the product mix has shifted. You’ve talked about high-quality loans doing more, auto-secured. And just wondering if that’s a trend that we should expect to continue? And if there’s any way — are there may be certain products you want to lean into more? Thank you.
Rob Beck: Well, look, I think auto-secured is definitely one that we’ll continue to lean into and grow. And I kind of view that and we’ve said this before, kind of the one end of the barbell. We have our large loan products that are the bulk of our business now and that are performing well. And then we have the small loan business. And the small loan business is very attractive on a return basis. And you would have seen that we actually grew that this quarter sequentially, same as we did last year sequentially at this time. And part of that is, we — it was part of our tightening where we said, you know what, we have the opportunity instead of making a larger loan to some group of customers. We can give them a smaller loan, but charge them a little bit more because we perceive the risk to be higher.
So we risk based priced it and put on some more small loans. And effectively we think created a pretty good return on that growth that we did in the small loan book. So, there’s always that opportunity for us to lean in, where it’s attractive on small loans. We haven’t limited ourselves to a rate cap at 36%. So having the ability particularly in a rising rate environment or hopefully a flat rate environment, we’ll see how that turns out. Having that ability to lean back into those segments when it’s appropriate, is something that I think helps us stand out versus competitors.
Unidentified Analyst: Great. Very helpful. Thank you.
Rob Beck: Great. Appreciate it.
Operator: [Operator Instructions] The next question is from Bill Dezellem with Tieton Capital. Please go ahead.
Bill Dezellem: Thank you. I like to kind of circle back to the comments that you just made here. You had some pretty significant small loan origination growth this quarter. What is that actually signaling to us, or what were you doing there? I think you started to allude to that in your last answer.
Rob Beck: Yeah. I think Bill as we look to put on high confidence growth, high confidence growth doesn’t just mean you put on larger loans with the highest risk ranks. You’ve got to look at it from a bottom-line return on a risk-based basis as well. And so when we were looking — and I give you an example, when you’re looking at whether it’s digital or a check or even a branch loan renewal on a branch, as we look at that and we’ve been staying focused on where we might reprice and we have this 1,500 line on small loans instead of giving somebody $2,000 or $2,500 below a 36% rate, we’re looking at the credit quality and say on the margin you know what, let’s give the person a $1,500 loan and maybe charge them a 43% rate because we believe that they’re a good credit on a relative basis and now we’ve got the pricing to make sure that we’ve got plenty of room and buffer built into the stresses on the model to be able to achieve our return hurdles.
So we — when we say a highest confidence asset, we’re looking at the highest confident asset on a marginal basis bottom line return. It’s not just necessarily putting on the highest FICO customer.
Blli Dezellem: And Rob taking that one step further said another way that’s the highest ROE customer? Or are you seeing — saying something slightly different than that?
