Onity Group Inc. (ONIT) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Good afternoon, everyone. My name is Miguel Walker. I'm the Managing Director of the Financial Institutions Group at Barclays. And It's my privilege and pleasure to welcome you to today's session with Onity Group. Onity is a leading nonbank financial services company, providing mortgage origination and servicing solutions through its primary brands. That includes PHH Mortgage, which is one of the nation's leading market servicer as well as Liberty Reverse Mortgage, which is one of the nation's largest for reverse mortgage lenders. Founded in 1988, Onity has been serving its customers for more than 3 decades. And today, operates in the U.S., the U.S. Virgin Islands, India and the Philippines. We're honored to be joined by Mr. Glen Messina, Chair, President and Chief Executive Officer of Onity. Mr. Messina brings decades of leadership experience, including a PHH Corporation and General Electric and has guided Onity's growth and strategy since joining the company in 2018. Please join me in welcoming Mr. Glen Messina.

Thank you, everyone. Yes, let me tell you a little bit about Onity. So we are, as Miguel said, a mortgage originator and servicer. From an originations perspective, we focus on correspondent and co-issue markets and consumer direct for portfolio recapture inside of our own portfolio. And on the servicing side, we service a variety of different mortgage types to include forward and reverse mortgages. We do own servicing, we do subservicing, and we also do business purpose residential and performing in specialty servicing. So very diverse skill set as part of our business. Our servicing portfolio is balanced 50-50 between owned servicing and subservicing. We believe that's the right target mix to optimize the returns associated with our business as well as minimize the capital deployment in the company as well, too. From an industry ranking perspective, we are one of the top 10 nonbank mortgage originators and servicers. And you can see in various segments of our business, we have moved up quite remarkably over the last 5 or 6 years since I've been here. Go back, the foundation of Onity is really Ocwen Loan Servicing, which was a specialty servicer. And today, we are a much better diversified business with better profitability and results. You could see year-to-date, 18% adjusted ROE, which we'll see in a couple of charts, is highly competitive with our peer group. And at the top end of our guidance range, continuing to grow servicing and book value and have been steadily walking down the debt-to-equity ratio of the business. Over a year ago, we were slightly over 4:1 debt-to-equity ratio. The business has transformed pretty materially over the last 6 or 7 years, again, from a small, quite frankly, shrinking specialty servicer with a very bloated cost base, unprofitable to what is now today a balanced and diversified business our transformation and the results you saw us deliver on the previous page was really as a result of executing a 5-pillar strategy around balance and diversification, prudent capital-light growth, industry-leading cost structure, top-tier operating performance and dynamic asset management. And a constant and relentless focus on those 5 pillars has built the business into a very formidable competitor that punches well above our weight class today. Our priorities for 2025 and going forward are really focused in 3 areas. First off is accelerating growth, and our focus there is expanding our addressable market with new products, retaining more MSRs, certainly increasing win rate and recapture rate and then continuing to expand our asset management capabilities. From an operating performance perspective, from our -- we are focused on delivering differentiated operating performances, and this is about delivering superior financial and operating outcomes for our clients and our consumers and as it relates to the assets that we own. And it's all about delivering value to our clients and customers based on the metrics that matter most to them. And then lastly, elevating the customer experience and creating customer experience that promotes portfolio recapture and essentially captivates our customers. And that's about making it personalized, high level of engagement, high touch but high tech and low effort from a customer perspective. Yes. From a mortgage market industry overview, I think most of you are familiar with the mortgage industry. Look, it is a fairly sizable, probably the largest financial services segment for the consumer. $14.4 trillion of mortgage servicing outstanding. Of that $4 trillion is the amount of subservicing that's outstanding. And over the last 12 months, the industry has seen about $1.8 trillion worth of originations. I'd say, look, where we are in the third quarter, it's never been busier. We've seen interest rate slide almost 80 basis points, the 30-year fixed rate mortgages has reduced about 80 basis points over the course of the third quarter. And look, lower interest rates means more refinancing opportunity. That's consistent with the MBA and Fannie Mae forecast for the industry for the third quarter. It's also seasonally a high from a purchase market volume perspective in the industry. So while you could see there's expected double -- strong double-digit growth in refinancing volume by the Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac averages for the full year and single-digit growth in the servicing portfolio. I think servicing portfolio growth remain relatively consistent with industry estimates. The origination market in a lower interest rate environment is actually looking quite robust, quite frankly. So really like the environment that's in front of the company. So the question is, look, why Onity and why now? And the bottom line is, look, we are delivering profitability comparable to our peers at a much more attractive valuation. Second, as we have built the business to be an all-weather business. So our balance and diversified model is set to perform whether interest rates are high or low. And we do have the originations capability, the recapture capability to take advantage of interest rates that are trending in the direction that they are today. We've been constantly increased market position for the business and have won new clients and have grown the business largely through organic efforts. And this is winning one client at a time and winning them from our competition by delivering superior results for our customers. And then lastly, we'll see it in a moment that look, we are not disadvantaged, I believe, from a cost structure perspective or a capability perspective based upon our size relative to some of the mega players in our industry. We focus on technology, continuous process improvement and global operating capability to create a highly competitive, highly scalable platform. And again, we believe punch is well above its weight. So in terms of some of the numbers, profitability as compared to peers, you could see, we're -- for year-to-date so far in 2025 as of the end of the second quarter, we were delivering 18% adjusted ROE. That's highly relevant and commensurate with our large public peers. Similarly, our guidance range is right smack in the middle of where our large public peers are as well. But from a price-to-book perspective, our stock is still trading at a relatively low price to book. And some of this just really has to do with what management focus has been. And that is over the last 6 to 7 years, mostly 6 years, we've been focused internally on delivering and building the capabilities and performance that we have today and really have not focused on marketing the company. And at the end of 2024, we hired a full-time Investor Relations person, Valerie Haertel, who is sitting here in the first row. And we have really begun to put a full court press to really get out and tell Onity's story and show the growth and the performance that we've developed in the business. We talked earlier about balanced business model being part of the core strategy of the company and how we would expect to reform through interest rate cycles. You could see here on the left that, look, when interest rates were very low during the pandemic, the originations platform was the primary earnings contributor to the business with servicing profitable but a much lower portion of the total earnings of the company. As we look forward to where we were in the second quarter of this year with interest rates almost double what they were during the depth of the pandemic, servicing is really the profit driver. And while originations is profitable, is real focus is on replenishing and growing the servicing portfolio. And overall, our adjusted operating earnings for origination servicing have gone up because we've grown the business and we've improved profitability. And as you could see in the column here with rates down, which is the environment that we've been experiencing most recently, we do expect that originations volumes and margins would increase, forward own servicing values and runoff would -- values would go down because runoff goes up. The reverse servicing is a nice hedge against forward, those values appreciate. And then subservicing really doesn't have a material financial impact whether rates are high or low directionally, there's no real change in the profitability profile of that. So let's talk a little bit about our growth. From a growth perspective, we've been focused on just a few simple things, but doing them extraordinarily well, and that is delivering better operating outcomes for our clients, delivering better financial outcomes for our clients and ease of doing business and delivering a better customer experience and customer satisfaction. And look, we started the originations platform from scratch in 2019. And you can see here by mid-2020, we had about 600 correspondent clients. And even though the market has shrunk dramatically since 2020, we've been able to more than double that client base. So we're now over 1,300 clients on the origination side. And a lot of that has to do with, again, the value delivery model that we employ and the enterprise sales strategy of offering multiple products within our portfolio the single correspondent client. On the subservicing side, we've grown that business as well, too. Although in the subservicing side, we've done more of a transformation. So we rotated out about 44 of the legacy clients, subservicing clients that Onity and PHH had because of the relatively average low balance per client servicing -- loan balance per client that we were servicing and it was really not profitable servicing for us. But we've added 56 new clients over that 4-year time frame by, again, winning them from the competition with better performance and a better customer experience. And what that's allowed us to do, as you could see, over the last several years, even though the industry volume has been cut in half from the 2022 COVID pandemic days, we've been able to double our originations capability both in terms of owned servicing and total subservicing additions. And similarly, that's resulted in growing the portfolio, and growing our portfolio quite nicely despite our focus on dynamic asset management of rotating and selling MSRs when we think the relative value of selling the MSRs is higher than retaining them in our portfolio. So we've sold over $20 billion of MSRs during this time frame and have dealt with 1 subservicing client book that's running off quite materially, and we've still net-net grown the business. From a recapture perspective, this is really critical to maintaining the value of our MSR portfolio and quite frankly, growing the business. It's much easier to retain customers and grow than it is losing customers and trying to grow off of that base. And you could see our recapture platform has done really, really well over the last 12 to 24 months. So we have more than doubled volume year-over-year as of the second quarter. And we're now delivering recapture rates, as you can see on the right-hand side of the page that are at the top tier as compared to our public peers. So based on the last 12 months, Onity being the blue column, we were roughly second in terms of our large third-party origination-focused independent mortgage banks. And for the second quarter alone, our recapture rate was the highest out of that peer group. So continuous investment in people, process and technology and more sophisticated use of data and analytics to identify customers with a high propensity of the refi and having a compelling value proposition for the consumer has helped us maximize this portion of our business. On the servicing side, again, it's all about delivering superior outcomes for clients, homeowners and investors. And you could see from a servicing capability for 4 years running, we were a top-tier servicer rated by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. And for HUD, Department of Housing and Urban Development for FHA and VA insured loans, again, we are a top-tier servicer as ranked by Ginnie Mae. We'll talk in a minute about our investments in technology, which has helped build the platform capability that we have today, but our investment in technology was recognized by the shared servicing outsourcing network with their Technology Center Automation Center of Excellence Award and as well from a cost structure perspective, again, here you could see we punch well above our weight based on the 2025 Mortgage Bankers Association average, I should say, annual cost study for servicers, we fall into the large servicer peer group, which includes some of the largest in the industry, the Mr. Coopers, the PennyMac and the like as well as several large banks. And our performing cost of loan servicing is 23% better than the peer average and our nonperforming servicing cost is more than 50% lower than the peer average. And again, this is not by virtue of scale, it's by investments in technology, continuous process reengineering and maintaining a global operating presence. Now all of that investment in technology also helps the customer experience. You can see on the right-hand side of the page that whether it's the borrower experience into our call center, the loan boarding experience and/or our subservicing clients and how they rate us. So again, we've been very highly rated across all 3 dimensions. And to put it in perspective, that 55 Net Promoter Score from clients, Net Promoter Score is a measure of customer satisfaction, and that's consistent with companies like Apple and Google and Amazon. So very top-tier performance. From a technology side, technology is the lifeblood of, I believe, of our business and the future of the industry. And we've been taking -- or taking what's called -- what we call a 4x4 approach around our investments in artificial intelligence. And there's really 4 baskets of technology under artificial intelligence, and that's robotic or robotic process automation, natural language processing, think voice bots, chatbots, there's vision or optical character recognition and neural network data extraction. And then there is machine learning and it's how you use that data for predictive analytics. And we use that to drive a number of different elements of our business and that's driven our growth. We drive the customer experience. We drive the operating cost structure of the business, and we drive the operating performance and financial outcomes for clients. So in terms of what we've invested in, what it's accomplished and where we're going, look, across each basket, you could see, there's tangible use cases in terms of how this technology has impacted our business. So in the second quarter, 88% of customer inquiries were handled through digital interface channels. We have over 190 processes that have been automated using robotic process automation, and that results in saving over 50,000 hours of manual work effort per month, which is the equivalent of about 400 employees per month in our servicing factory. So again, we're continuing to drive this automation across our platform to create a more consistent experience for clients, consumers and investors to create better outcomes and to drive a better customer experience. One of the things that we're really excited about is in the subservicing space in late first quarter, early second quarter, we announced our new artificial intelligence-based search engine for subservicing clients called LASI, LoanSpan Information Retriever, where our clients can ask freeform questions into LoanSpan, and it goes and extracts data automatically for the clients. So instead of have to rely upon them going in and searching for the data through our portal or asking one of our client service representatives to get data for them, they can merely ask our LASI artificial intelligence agent to go get the data for them. It's been a huge lift for our company. In terms of capital allocation, we are focused really on driving organic growth. So our capital allocation to date, following a pretty significant balance sheet structuring last year, where we eliminated 2 tiers of corporate debt, paid down our corporate debt by -- corporate and MSR debt by over $140 million, refinanced and extended the maturity on our corporate debt into a single tranche. We are and delever the company. We're now focused on driving organic growth and organic earnings to grow our equity base and deleverage the company by growing our equity. And again, from -- to support originations and optimize liquidity, we are, again, making sure that we have a lack of a better term, prudent liquidity to manage a volatile interest rate environment. So what we saw through the first half of 2025 was lots of volatility in interest rates, which we do hedge our MSR at close to 100%. And as a result, there's cash moving one direction or another, and we need to be prepared for that. And finally, as we continue to invest in MSRs, invest in returns, invest in technology for our business to drive performance, it does drive long-term value for our shareholders. So again, our disciplined approach to capital management has paid off very well for the company to drive the high teen adjusted ROEs for the company. In terms of guidance at the end of the second quarter, we did confirm our guidance of a 16% to 18% adjusted ROE range. You saw for the first half of the year we're at the top end of that range. We're targeting to grow our servicing UPB by about 10%. And that's again with a 50-50 mix of owned servicing and subservicing. Again, that's year-over-year. And again, maintain our operating efficiency ratios, which have performed quite nicely over time. And then lastly, we did mention that it is reasonably possible that there will be some release of the valuation allowance that we have against our deferred tax asset. That represents future tax benefits or reduction in our future cash taxes paid. We have been taking advantage of that. But during the transition and turnaround of Onity, we were not allowed to realize the deferred tax asset on our balance sheet, and we have a valuation allowance against it, and we would expect some portion of that to be released during the course of this year, which again will further help deleverage and improve the balance sheet of the company. So look, we're excited about the opportunity we have here in front of us. It's been an extremely busy year. Originations at the end of the second quarter was up 35% year-over-year in an industry that grew by probably in the 20 percentage range, 25%, 28% year-over-year. So we're growing at a rate faster than the marketplace. The balanced and diversified platform is performing well. We think we're positioned for the lower rate environment. We've got a track record of increasing growth and scale by winning new clients and not being dependent upon bulk acquisitions or whole company acquisitions to grow and scale the business. We grow the old-fashioned way by winning one customer at a time. And from a scalability perspective, our investments in technology and process reengineering and global capability has given us a highly scalable platform that delivers superior performance for our customer and investors alike. So that's a little bit about Onity.

Excellent. Thank you for that, Glen. Very insightful look at how the business has evolved and how well you're positioned for the opportunity in front of you. Maybe at this time, I'll open things up for Q&A. [Operator Instructions] So Glen, I appreciate the comments. Also, look, I think for anyone following the story and following the company closely, it's clear that you've -- since you've joined, there's been a real significant transformation and evolution of the business. It appears that evolution may not be fully appreciated by the market in terms of what's been accomplished. And you alluded to some of it in terms of you've been head down, focused on doing the work, maybe have had the opportunity to chose it from the mountain. But as you think of the things that may be misunderstood about the business by analysts or investors, what are some of those elements be?

Yes. So one of the questions we get asked frequently is, geez, is your size or scale a disadvantage, right? So you're not big like some of the mega players and how do you compete against some of the big mega players. And as we started the transformation with the company, one of the things that we firmly believed in, size doesn't cure all evil. Size alone doesn't make you a competitor in the marketplace and size alone doesn't guarantee continuous steady growth in the business. So what drives growth is just a few simple things. One, delivering better operating outcomes for your customers and investors. Second, delivering better financial outcomes for your customers and investors. And third, delivering a better experience for your customers and investors. And we have been laser-focused on those dimensions of our business to drive the growth and the growth has come. And I know when we've talked to shareholders one-on-one about how we've grown the business and just how we've won clients from competitors, again, with 56 new subservicing clients boarded over the last 4 years, we've competed -- you name the competitor from a subservicing perspective, we've competed against them with going from 0 to 1,300, over 1,300 correspondent clients, they're not all new customers, right? We won that share of wallet. We won that market share from our competitors. And sustainable competitive advantage comes from investments in technology to create those differentiated outcomes. So rather than focus on going out and doing bulk acquisitions and going out and buying whole companies, our focus was really to drive performance through capability and creating an intrinsically low-cost structure by virtue of leveraging technology and continuous process reengineering. So there's always a question about, geez, do you feel you're disadvantaged from a scale perspective? And the answer is not at all. We go up competitors of any size, of all sizes all the time. Amazon was a small company at one point in time. Apple was a small company at one point in time, right? They didn't necessarily acquire the way to where they are today. They just operated really, really well, right? So that's kind of, I would say, point one. Point two, again, building that capability created -- we were focused internally. We were not going out and selling the company. So we did not have a full-fledged shareholder relations effort, right? So now that we're actually going out and selling the stock essentially and telling people about what we've done with the company and how formidable competitor we are, stock price is moving and it's catching up to our peers, and we've had over a 40% growth in share price over the last year. And that's not just by virtue of going out and selling and tying our story, but it's about the performance of the company, right? So we've delivered consistent, sustainable performance here that's at or above our peer level.

Helpful. Anything from the crowd? I'll keep going. Maybe Glen, just to switch gears a bit, and you referenced some many of your competitors from a strategic perspective, in terms of acquiring the size. It's been clearly an active market from an M&A perspective. I think the 800-pound gorilla when you look at space is Rockets acquisition of Mr. Cooper. Personally, I think that deal kind of validates the importance of servicing capabilities when you think about the kind of mortgage business model. But I'm curious to get your thoughts on that transaction activity as a whole in the space, what it means for opportunities for Onity.

Yes. So look, we are not frightened by that transaction. As a matter of fact, we're excited by that transaction. We're excited by that transaction because we think net-net, it creates opportunity in the space that we play, particularly in the subservicing space and in the correspondence space, frankly. On the subservicing side, the Rocket acquisition of Cooper was the fifth subservicer that changed hands in the last 2 years. And that has caused a significant amount of subservicing customers or clients really thinking about, okay, who do I want to have as a partner that I'm subservicing with? And if you have a retail origination platform and you now are subservicing loans with somebody like Mr. Cooper and you now know your loans are going to go to Rocket mortgage and your subservicing is going to be co-branded with Rocket because that's required in several states, you can't private label subservice, you have to co-brand. You really scratch your head and going, do I really want my customer knowing that Rocket Mortgage is servicing their mortgage. And the answer is probably not. So we don't have a retail origination channel. We have direct-to-consumer which focuses only on recapture for us and recapture for our subservicing clients who want it. And we've seen more activity on the subservicing side today than we've seen in any year in the past 4 or 5 years. There's lots of clients who are really looking for, trying to explore their alternatives. So the reverse inquiries are high. Whenever we go to one of our marketing events, we are -- our dance card is booked. So it's been quite robust and quite active. So yes, I think in some spaces, you may be frightened by it as we think about it, it creates opportunity. Any time there's a big transaction like that, it's a disruptive event for the industry, disruption creates opportunity.

And maybe a final question from my end. There's been a ton in the news just around the GSEs and activity there. We've seen this rodeo before. Obviously, it does have a certain degree of certainty around at this time around. So just curious if you think about your business for people out there, if the GSE was to get out of conservatorship, is there anything or exposure to your business? Or how would you think about the impact to Onity from that?

Yes. So again, I think it's an area where there are opportunities and risks. So I'll start with the opportunity side, right? So having Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, both out in the public domain and competing with each other for market share and competing with each other for business and competing for clients is good for the industry. I think it creates innovation. The GSEs have been one of the big innovators historically in the industry. So innovation from a product perspective, innovation from a technology and a delivery perspective. So I think from that angle, it's good, right? More competition, more innovation, I do think is helpful. As well, I do think as you look at what happened with the GSEs historically where they drifted from their mission and their buy box got really big, I would expect that the government guarantee will be focused and narrowed and constrained and there's not going to be just an open checkbook again. I don't think the government will go through that movie twice. And that's going to create new product opportunity. I think that creates more opportunity for development of private label products, non-agency products. There is a robust private label mortgage-backed security securitization market again for second liens for self-employed loans for vacation properties, so on and so forth, right? So I do think it creates an opportunity to be more innovative on the product side outside of their scope. So those -- and net, it brings more investors. And with the GSEs now in the marketplace, I think it brings more investors and more investment capital into the space. On the concern side, would be again, what happens to GPs, right? Do they raise or lower GPs and does it make the GSE product more or less price competitive. So what's going to happen with GPs. And one of the concerns the industry has with the GSEs before they went into conservatorship was are they trying to cut mortgage bankers out of the pie, and are they trying to interact directly with consumers. So if they still work through distributors essentially like us, which are nonbanks and banks to be the mortgage aggregators and they really just become the issuer of the mortgage-backed security, that's good. But if they try to disintermediate the business, that could be bad. But that didn't go up with them the last time.

We'll see how things evolve this time around. Any final questions from the crowd? Well then, I really appreciate your time, and thank you for taking time to speak with us. It's been impressive to see the story and see the work you and your team have put in, building and evolving the business over these last few years. And glad to see that starting to finally come through in the stock price and long made that continue.

Thank you. Appreciate you. Appreciate my team, too. Thanks, everyone. Appreciate your interest in the company.