CURO Group Holdings Corp.

Good morning and welcome to the Kuro Group Holdings third quarter 2023 conference call. All participants will be in a lesson only mode. Should you need assistance, please signal a conference specialist by pressing the star key followed by zero. After today's presentation, there will be an opportunity to ask questions. To ask a question, you may press star then one on your telephone keypad. To withdraw your question, please press star then two. Please note, this event is being recorded. I would now like to turn the conference over to Nick Panarossi, Head of Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Thank you, and good morning. Curo released its third quarter 2023 results before the market opened today, which, along with our earnings presentation, are available on our investor website at ir.curo.com. With me on today's call are Curo's Chief Executive Officer, Doug Clark, and Chief Financial Officer Izzy Dawood. Today's discussion will contain forward-looking statements based on the business environment as we currently see it. As such, it includes certain important risks and uncertainties. Please refer to our press release issued this morning in our Forms 10-Q and Form 10-K for more information on the specific risk factors that could cause our actual results to differ materially from the matters described in today's discussion. Any forward-looking statements made on this call are based on assumptions as of today, and we undertake no obligation to update or revise these statements as a result of new information or future events. In addition to US GAAP reporting, we present in the earnings presentation certain financial measures that do not conform to generally accepted accounting principles. We believe these non-GAAP measures enhance the understanding of our performance. reconciliation between these GAAP and non-GAAP measures are included in the appendix to our earnings presentation. Current and prior period financial information is presented on a continuing operations basis, which excludes the results and positions of the Canada POS lending segment due to the sale of the Flexity business on August 31st, 2023. With that, I would like to turn the call over to Doug.

Thanks, Nick. Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining us today. The third quarter was a successful quarter for Curo as we closed the sale of our Flexity point of sale business and completed our business transformation, enabling us to exclusively focus on our core business of direct lending in the US and Canada. We also made great financial and operational strides during the quarter, which collectively contribute to executing on our strategic vision. We continue to responsibly grow our loan portfolio across the US and Canada as we prudently extend credit to our resilient customer base. As you can see on slides three and four of our earnings presentation, we grew our overall loan portfolio by 2% sequentially and 8% on an annualized rate. The sequential balance increase was driven by a 5% increase in our U.S. loan book and a 2% increase in Canada on a constant currency basis. We continue to focus on our proven customer base and believe there is ample room to grow balances and improve overall credit profile in both geographies which is an important step in our path to profitability. Within our U.S. operations, we completed a major milestone by converting our entire U.S. branch network to a single loan management system. This conversion greatly simplifies management of our branches and allows us to increase efficiency and improve servicing. In addition, this will also enable us to offer both small and large loans in the same branch, providing opportunities for loan balance growth as well as network optimization. Our continued expense management led to lower operating expenses for a third consecutive quarter, excluding non-recurring charges. Expense management remains a top priority, and we feel we can continue to grow our loan book and improve our operating expense ratios. Turning to credit on slides five and six, we were very pleased with the stabilization of our delinquency rates and the improvement of our NCOs. Our NCOs decreased 110 basis points sequentially. We saw 170 basis points of sequential improvement in the U.S. and would like to highlight both the year-over-year and year-to-date improvement in our NCOs in Canada, driven by our Canadian open-ended product. As a reminder, we made a series of changes to our underwriting servicing programs at the beginning of this year, and we are starting to see the results materialize. We also continue to closely monitor credit and consumer health. Thus far, the consumer continues to perform consistent with previous quarters and our expectations, but we are ready to make further adjustments to the underwriting if conditions change. To summarize, we continue to deliver on our strategic priorities, simplifying the business, growing responsibly, and achieving key operational milestones all while closely managing our expenses. I will now turn it over to Izzy to give you more detail on our Q3 results, and then I'll close with some final thoughts.