Rob Beck: Yeah, sure. Absolutely, Bill. So yeah, what you’re seeing here is as we were tightening credit really since the fourth quarter of ’21, but more aggressively after July of 2022, we tightened credit on our higher rate, higher risk loans, which tended to be disproportionately small loans. And so that’s why you see the growth rate slow there. Now that is obviously done because of the current environment and the uncertainty, but where we’ve cut is also where there’s opportunities to lean back into growth when we see the economic environment have a little bit more certainty and that naturally within help our yields and the like. So it’s really just the result of our tightening credit and taking risk off in this environment.
Operator: This concludes the question-and-answer session. I would like to turn the conference back over to Mr. Beck for any closing remarks.
Rob Beck: Thanks, operator, and thanks everyone for joining this evening. I’d also like to thank our team again for their exceptional execution in a challenging environment. We’ve taken numerous actions in the fourth quarter of 2022 that I think put us in an even stronger position as we enter this year. So, just a quick summary; as I said, we began tightening in fourth quarter ’21. Obviously we increased that tightening in July or mid-2022, and we tightened again here in the fourth quarter. But it’s important to note that as of year-end of 2022, 47% of our portfolio had been originated since July 01 and by year end 2023, more than 80% of our portfolio will have been originated since that time as well and obviously those are the portfolio that has the tightest underwriting.
We still have incredibly strong balance sheet. 88% of our debt is fixed as the year end. We have plenty of liquidity fund growth for the next 12 months based on our growth projections for 2023. It’s great that we’re entering 2023 with 30-day delinquency, nearly flat to pre-pandemic levels, having — after having sold the $27 million of distress loans in the quarter and we are seeing early indications of proving credit, as I said in the prepared remarks. So besides the first payment default that was 7.1%, and as I said 170 basis points lower than 2019 when it was at 8.8%, we saw improvement in the early bucket roll rates versus the third quarter. Our early bucket delinquencies are down versus pre-pandemic levels, as I said in my prepared remarks and our 30-day to 89-day delinquencies are flat compared to fourth quarter of 2019.
And we attribute these green shoots, if you will, to our tighter underwriting next shift and the early impacts of our next generation scorecard that we fully rolled out in the fourth quarter. We also, as I said, began to reprice the portfolio more aggressively and we increased our collection staff by 50% in preparation for the tax season this quarter. And while inflation is coming down, as I mentioned in the Q&A, we’re encouraged by that continuing to drop. We’re encouraged by what’s happening with the number of open jobs for our customers, we’re encouraged by what looks to be fairly strong real wage growth in recent months. And with all that, we’re remain cautiously optimistic that we’ll see improvement in delinquencies in the first half of the year and net credit loss rate in the second half of the year and of course, if the macroeconomic conditions improve later this year we know that our sophisticated underwriting models will enable us to respond quickly and take advantage of the better operating environment.
So thanks again for joining. Have a good evening.
Operator: This concludes today’s conference call. You may disconnect your lines. Thank you for participating and have a pleasant day.
