Randy Underwood: Our average loan in Canada is about $500 Canadian dollars. Manitoba does not vary a great deal from that.
Daniel O'Sullivan (Utendahl Capital Partners, Lp): Can you give us a bit of a sense on your outlook for store growth in 2009?
Jeffrey Weiss: We have not really formulate that, but it would be somewhat comparable to what we kind of averaged over the last couple years. We are going to build them in all three countries.
Donald Gayhardt: That could be tied to where, in the pace of the regulatory change in Canada.
Daniel O'Sullivan (Utendahl Capital Partners, Lp): Can you break out what you guys are seeing over the last couple quarters as far as the collections environment in the three countries?
Randy Underwood: In the UK, we continue to see a little better collection kind of quarter by quarter here over the last year, as we focused a great deal on some softness we had there last year. In the Canadian business it has continued to go up a little bit.
In returns in the US we see that kind of creeping down modestly here over the last couple quarters, because we have adjusted some of our credit metrics and terms of the loans that we are putting up to prospective customers.
John Hecht (JMP Securities): On underwriting, what are you specifically seeing given that success from a credit perspective that’s causing you to pull back?
Randy Underwood: While we have not seen any kind of dramatic change in the complexion of our customer base, or even in their earnings, our customers do exist in the real economy and although the overall majority are not homeowners.
Donald Gayhardt: We always watch our auto loans and credit cards and we watch them country by country. We certainly started seeing some increase in the local fees and charge offs and prime, sub-prime credit cards and it’s everywhere.
Robert Napoli (Piper Jaffray): Is there an opportunity to add a narrow focused pawnshop business in other countries?
Randy Underwood: There are pawn like products that may well fit some of our other markets. |