Home Capital Group Inc.

on music hold thank you for your patience THE END THE END THE END Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by, and welcome to the Home Capital Group Fourth Quarter Financial Results Conference Call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. After the speaker's presentation, there will be a question and answer session. To ask a question during this session, you will need to press star 1 on your telephone. Please be advised that today's conference is being recorded. If you require any further assistance, please press star 0. I would now like to hand the conference over to your speaker today, Jill McRae, Investor Relations at Home Capital. Thank you.

Please go ahead, madam. Thank you, Cindy. Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining us today. Our agenda for today's investor presentation is as follows. We'll begin the call with remarks from Yusri Basada, home CEO. Our CFO, Brad Kodesh, will then review our financial performance, which will be followed by a question and answer period for participants. We have a number of members of our senior management team with us on the call to help answer your questions. On behalf of those speaking today, I note that this column may contain forward-looking statements and that actual results could differ materially from forecasts, projections, or conclusions in these statements. Please refer to our advisory on forward-looking statements on slide two of the presentation. I would also remind listeners that the column uses non-GAAP financial measures to arrive at adjusted results and that management will be referring to adjusted results as well as reported results in their remarks. Finally, a link to the slides accompanying this presentation is available in the investor section of Home Capital's website. And now I'd like to turn the call over to Yusri Basada.

YUSRI BASADA Thank you, Jill, and good morning, everyone. Thank you for joining us today for our fourth quarter and 2020 full-year results conference call. Earlier today, we announced another quarter of solid operating results with earnings per share of $1.06 for the quarter and $3.33 for the full year. This represents strong growth over the same period in 2019. Just as important as the results themselves are the conditions in which we achieved them. The onset of COVID-19 and ensuing lockdown created uncertainty throughout the industry. When the first stay-at-home order was issued, people were concerned about the consequences of declining GDP and rising unemployment on housing demand and therefore mortgage demand. However, The lockdown conditions had the opposite effect. Following a sharp decline in the spring, the demand for home ownership rebounded in the summer and grew stronger than ever through the rest of the year. Many people ended up with a renewed focus on their living and working spaces. The persistence of low interest rates and remote working capabilities led to higher home prices and sales volumes across the country. The global health crisis made 2020 an extraordinary year with wide-ranging impacts on people, organizations, and the Canadian economy. Home capital was no exception. In fact, 2020 presented us with three unique challenges, all at the same time. The first was the challenge to shift our operations to a work-from-home model to protect our employees and business partners. The second was to create, launch, and administer a loan deferral program that would offer meaningful support to our customers. And the third was to implement our Ignite program, which had some critical milestones in 2020. I'll discuss each of these in turn. To begin with, the decision to work from home came about swiftly and without much advance notice. It was more than just a change in physical location. We had to find new ways of communicating with our employees, supporting them through this transition, providing them with systems and tools they needed to look after our customers, and above all, safeguarding their health and safety. At the end of the year, I can look back and say we accomplished all this and more. Our move to remote working was done in a secure environment to protect our customers' information. We created new online tools to work with solicitors, appraisers, title companies, and other suppliers to fund mortgages. We hired new people who have never set foot in our office and had only met their colleagues virtually. And those new team members were interviewed, hired, onboarded, and trained in their new position in our sustainable risk culture all while working remotely. I continue to be inspired by the resilience of our team members. At the same time as our shift to remote working, we were given an opportunity by our industry partners and regulators to support the financial well-being of our customers by offering a deferral program. We moved quickly to develop, launch, communicate and administer this program. And our people rose to this challenge as well. Looking back, we can conclude that our deferral program was a success. Whether we measure our success by the number of people we helped, the number of calls we handled in our contact center, the number of loan payments we deferred, or the percentage of our borrowers that returned to making their regular loan payments. We were able to allocate talent and capital to help people cope with the economic impacts of COVID-19. I'm proud that Home was able to help people stay in their homes when they most needed our support. In 2020, we also had some key milestones in our Ignite program. Many of our people had to devote significant time to setting up and testing new system and processes while executing their day-to-day functions. They rose to this challenge as well. We went live with a complete replatforming of our core banking system. This will eliminate many of the customizations from the old system. Our operations will be more flexible and agile, allowing for faster product introductions and advanced analytics. There's a lot of excitement internally about the potential for this new platform. We continue to execute on our strategic objectives. We launched our accelerator program, the A Mortgage product, which was met with great acceptance despite our more conservative underwriting parameters associated with the pandemic. We substantially reduced our exposure to our consumer retail through the disposal of our point of sale business and select HVAC loans. We implemented 10 robotic process automation programs to manage high volume tasks. We grew Okin deposits by successfully migrating to an online environment when our stores were closed. Through it all, we stayed focused on our relationship with our customers and business partners, finding new ways to support them and maintain quality service levels. Again, I'm proud to report what home has done this again. We were also recognized again as the Bank Lender of the Year at the 2020 Mortgage Awards of Excellence. Finally, we turned to strong financial performance for the quarter and for the year. We grew our originations in the residential and commercial market, delivered a record high net interest margin, and completed a $150 million substantial issuer bid in the first quarter. We ended the year with an industry-leading CET1 ratio. You should expect that we'll continue to be prudent with our capital in the future. Looking ahead to 2021, The path towards reopening remains uncertain. We know that some restrictive measures are still necessary to contain the spread of COVID-19, but we can be encouraged by the growing availability of vaccines. We look forward to further economic improvement as the year progresses. We appreciate the continued confidence of our customers and broker partners and the perseverance of our employees through all the challenges of 2020. We may be physically apart, but in some ways, we're closer than ever. I'll now invite Brad to discuss our financial results.