Street Calls of the Week
Pathward Financial Inc. (NASDAQ:CASH), a financial services company with a market capitalization of $1.64 billion, reported its fourth-quarter earnings for 2025, showcasing a robust performance with earnings per share (EPS) exceeding expectations. The company posted an EPS of $1.69, surpassing the forecasted $1.38 by 22.46%. Revenue fell slightly short of projections, coming in at $186.7 million against an anticipated $189.9 million. Following the announcement, Pathward’s stock dipped 0.32% during regular trading hours and further declined by 1.99% in after-hours trading. According to InvestingPro analysis, the company’s current stock price closely aligns with its calculated Fair Value, suggesting balanced market pricing.
Key Takeaways
- Pathward Financial’s Q4 EPS of $1.69 outperformed expectations by 22.46%.
- Revenue missed forecasts by 1.69%, totaling $186.7 million.
- Stock price decreased by 0.32% during regular trading and 1.99% in after-hours.
- Strategic partnerships and innovation continue to drive growth.
- 2026 EPS guidance set between $8.25 and $8.75.
Company Performance
Pathward Financial demonstrated strong performance in the fourth quarter, with a notable 26% increase in EPS compared to the same period last year. The company’s strategic focus on niche market segments and partnerships has bolstered its position in the financial services industry. Pathward’s net income for the year reached $185.9 million, reflecting a 9% year-over-year growth. InvestingPro data reveals the company has maintained dividend payments for 32 consecutive years, demonstrating long-term financial stability. With a P/E ratio of 10.49 and a conservative beta of 0.62, the stock shows defensive characteristics.
Financial Highlights
- Revenue: $186.7 million, slightly below the forecast of $189.9 million.
- Earnings per share: $1.69, a 26% increase year-over-year.
- Net interest margin: 7.34%.
- Return on average assets: 2.46%.
- Return on average tangible equity: 38.75%.
Earnings vs. Forecast
Pathward Financial exceeded EPS expectations with a 22.46% surprise, while revenue fell short by 1.69%. This mixed performance highlights the company’s ability to control costs and improve profitability despite revenue challenges.
Market Reaction
Following the earnings report, Pathward’s stock experienced a slight decline, closing down 0.32% in regular trading and falling an additional 1.99% in after-hours. The stock’s current price of $70.55 remains within its 52-week range of $64.45 to $86. The market’s reaction suggests investor concerns over the revenue miss despite the strong EPS performance.
Outlook & Guidance
For 2026, Pathward Financial projects EPS between $8.25 and $8.75, reflecting confidence in its strategic initiatives and market positioning. The company plans to focus on balance sheet optimization, technology investment, and enhancing client experiences. InvestingPro analysis shows management’s commitment to shareholder value through aggressive share buybacks, while maintaining a healthy debt-to-equity ratio of 0.21. Subscribers can access 6 additional ProTips and comprehensive financial metrics in the Pro Research Report, providing deeper insights into Pathward’s financial health score of 2.66 (GOOD).
Executive Commentary
CEO Brett Pharr emphasized, "We believe that by virtue of our capabilities, we’ve developed strategic partnerships that enable and provide expanded financial access to customers and businesses alike." CFO Greg Sigrist added, "We find niche places in the market that are difficult to operate in and become good at it."
Risks and Challenges
- Revenue shortfall indicates potential market or operational challenges.
- Economic uncertainties may impact future growth.
- Competitive pressures in the financial services sector.
- Dependence on strategic partnerships for growth.
- Regulatory changes affecting financial operations.
Q&A
During the earnings call, analysts inquired about the Upstart partnership, non-performing loan strategies, and secondary market revenue expectations. The company addressed potential in the early wage access market, indicating future growth opportunities.
Full transcript - Pathward Financial Inc (CASH) Q4 2025:
Conference Operator: Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by and welcome to Pathward Financial’s fourth quarter and fiscal year 2025 investor conference call. During the presentation, all participants will be in a listen-only mode. Following the prepared remarks, we will conduct a question and answer session. As a reminder, this conference call is being recorded. Now to turn the conference call over to Darby Schoenfeld, Senior Vice President, Chief of Staff and Investor Relations. Please go ahead.
Darby Schoenfeld, Senior Vice President, Chief of Staff and Investor Relations, Pathward Financial: Thank you, Operator, and welcome. With me today are Pathward Financial’s CEO, Brett Pharr, and CFO, Greg Sigrist, who will discuss our operating and financial results for the fourth quarter and full fiscal year of 2025, after which we will take your questions. Additional information, including the earnings release, the investor presentation that accompanies our prepared remarks, and supplemental slides may be found on our website at pathwardfinancial.com. As a reminder, our comments may include forward-looking statements. Those statements are subject to risks and uncertainties that could cause actual and anticipated results to differ. The company undertakes no obligation to update any forward-looking statement.
Please refer to the cautionary language in the earnings release, investor presentation, and in the company’s filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, including our most recent filings, for additional information covering factors that could cause actual and anticipated results to differ materially from the forward-looking statements. Additionally, today we will be discussing certain non-GAAP financial measures on this call. References to non-GAAP measures are only provided to assist you in understanding the company’s results and performance trends, particularly in competitive analysis. Reconciliation for such non-GAAP measures are included in the earnings release and the appendix of the investor presentation. Finally, all time periods referenced are fiscal quarters and fiscal years, and all comparisons are to the prior year period unless noted otherwise. Now, let me turn the call over to Brett Pharr, our CEO.
Brett Pharr, CEO, Pathward Financial: Thanks, Darby, and welcome everyone to our earnings conference call. We had quite the fiscal year from completing the sale of our insurance premium finance business and the transportation portfolio, hiring a new Chief People and Culture Officer, contracting with several new partners, and winning multiple awards. The Pathward team has done a phenomenal job sticking to the 2025 strategy we laid out at the end of last year, overcoming challenges and executing day in and day out. I’m very proud of all that we were able to accomplish together this year, but it doesn’t stop there. While we celebrate past accomplishments here with you today, we are also planning for the future. I’ll dive deeper when it comes to our 2026 strategy in just a moment, but let me start by going over some of the full-year highlights.
We reported earnings per diluted share of $7.87 for the year, which was above the high end of the guidance range we provided last quarter and represents year-over-year growth of 9%. Net income for the year was $185.9 million. Our results were driven primarily by an increase in non-interest income of 10% when compared to last year. We also expanded our full-year net interest margin and adjusted net interest margin, which includes rate-related card expenses associated with deposits on the balance sheet, to 7.34% and 5.92% respectively. Performance metrics remain strong, with return on average assets for the year of 2.46% and a return on average tangible equity of 38.75%. There were some moving pieces to the fourth quarter, and Greg will be providing additional detail shortly.
We did a lot of work in 2025 to execute on our strategy, and we believe our efforts have laid the groundwork for a successful future that will allow us to grow. We had fantastic results in our consumer segment. During our last earnings call, we announced the signing of an agreement with Checkout.com. This quarter, we are proud to announce three new agreements. First, we entered into an agreement with Trustly to support the expansion of their pay-by-bank product offering. Through this partnership, Pathward is enabling settlement to their merchants, starting with a pilot launch of a major national retailer. Second, we are very pleased to announce that we have signed a multi-year agreement for merchant acquiring sponsorship with Stripe. After the quarter ended, we signed a new contract with Greenlight to support their family finance and teen card issuing business.
In credit solutions, we mentioned earlier in the year that we signed one new contract during 2025. We have now gone live and are pleased to announce that we are partnered with Upstart to offer personal loans through Upstart’s AI lending marketplace. Additionally, we would like to congratulate our partner, Claire’s, for the recent announcement regarding the availability of Claire on-demand pay as part of Intuit Enterprise Suite and QuickBooks Payroll on the Intuit platform. These two partnerships allow us to facilitate products, personal loans, and early wage access that align with our purpose of financial inclusion. Finally, in professional tax solutions, we had a great year, and we are not sitting still. After tax season ended, we continued to invest in technology improvements that we believe will set us up for greater efficiency in 2026.
There was also a tax code change for the 2025 tax year, and that could yield a positive consumer reaction in the tax preparation market we serve. Switching over to the commercial segment and commercial finance, we continue to optimize the balance sheet through divestitures and a focus on risk-adjusted returns, grew total loans and leases 14%, and improved many of the metrics we measured to gauge success. We increased origination dollars per FTE by 200%, and we decreased days to fund on average by 36%. It is imperative that we leverage the foundation we laid in 2025 to build, adapt, and move forward in order to grow our business, which includes growing with our partners. We believe that by virtue of our capabilities, we’ve developed strategic partnerships that enable and provide expanded financial access to customers and businesses alike. In so doing, Pathward Financial continues to power financial inclusion.
Building on our success in 2025 and delivering on our long-term strategy, being the trusted platform that enables our partners to thrive, we are introducing our fiscal year 2026 goals. There are similar themes echoed from last year, and most of these components are still top of mind for us when we think about the business with a few small tweaks compared to what you’re used to seeing. I’d like to go into a bit more detail and share what each of these elements will look like for us in 2026. Number one, maintain an optimized balance sheet. You have heard about our balance sheet optimization strategy over the recent past, and we are now at a juncture where the team has done a great job at closing the gap and getting us to where we believe our optimal asset mix might be. Maintaining this balance will also take work.
However, getting here was a challenge that we delivered on, and we are confident we can continue on that path. Number two, technology to facilitate evolution and scalability. We believe that in order to remain the partner bank of choice in the marketplace, we need to continue investing in technology. As in 2025, this investment will remain a part of our run rate in 2026. We believe that our ability to drive revenue growth is predicated on our ability to produce profitable outcomes with enhanced technological capability. We believe we can find synergies and opportunities to streamline platforms, create new products, and further innovation. Number three, people and culture are important assets. With Anjali Bharti at the helm as our Chief People and Culture Officer, she has provided a fresh look at how we can reimagine the human capital function within the business.
She and her team will be focused on continuing to build a talent pipeline, as well as reinforcing our commitment to collaboration with the talent anywhere remote working environment. Our commitment to remote working remains an opportunity to help us recruit the talent we need. It’s also allowed our employees to deliver better outcomes, resulting in multiple areas of recognition. There are two instances that come to mind. One, I mentioned last quarter, when Pathward Financial was named one of the 2025-2026 best companies to work for, according to the U.S. News and World Report on the Finance and Insurance List and the Midwest List. The second is that Pathward Financial achieved a Great Place to Work certification for the third year in a row. This recognition is something we are extremely proud of and is really a reflection of our amazing employees and the culture they exemplify.
Sustaining this momentum is certainly something we aim to do this coming year as well. Number four, mature risk and compliance framework. As you know, this part of our trusted platform helps our partners develop products and services for their customers while managing a regulatory framework that is often complex. In 2026, we’re building on two things. First, we will continue to lean on past experiences and stay true to what our program is built on: knowledge, monitoring, and relationships. Second, we will be investing further in our risk capabilities to help ensure we continue to have a scalable platform well into the future. We believe that these two components together will serve us well and are imperative to furthering partner success. Number five, the last part of our 2026 strategy is the client experience and continuing to pull through the pipeline of opportunities.
Through various successes and deepening of those relationships, we frequently evaluate potential new opportunities and add more partners to our universe. The work underway in this area has already begun. We cannot rest on our laurels as we recognize the rewards for delivering in an expanding market. Things like reducing time to onboard partners or launch new programs and heightening our ability to offer multi-threaded solutions across our suite of products are meaningful ways we aim to help our partners achieve their goals while driving Pathward Financial’s growth. Based on our 2025 successes and what we are looking to deliver in 2026, we are maintaining our 2026 guidance for earnings per diluted share of $8.25 to $8.75. Now I’d like to turn it over to Greg, who will take you through the financials in more detail.
Greg Sigrist, CFO, Pathward Financial: Thank you, Brett. Netting for the quarter ended September 30 grew 16%, with earnings per diluted share growing 26% to $1.69. These results were primarily driven by strong growth in non-interest income of 13% compared to the prior year period. For the full year, net interest income grew by 3% and non-interest income increased 10%. The growth in non-interest income through the year was driven in part by our success in optimizing the balance sheet by ensuring our loans either had high risk-adjusted returns or optionality. Our strategy of third-party delivery with stable partners is helping to drive secondary market revenues. As a result, we expect to continue to have secondary market revenues of about $5 million to $7 million per quarter on a run-rate basis.
Net interest margin in the quarter was 7.46%, and adjusted net interest margin, which includes rate-related card expenses associated with deposits on the balance sheet, was 6.04%. Despite the interest rate environment, we have improved these metrics year over year through our focus on risk-adjusted returns, which includes holding to our spread and discipline. During the quarter, we moved more than half of our held-for-investment consumer portfolio to held-for-sale due to an agreement to sell those loans in early October, which generated a $14.3 million release of our credit provision.
In conjunction with that, we took the opportunity to surrender some of our bank-owned life insurance policies, which comes through as an additional expense on the income tax line, and further optimized the securities portfolio, which together generated a loss of almost $6 million and will provide us with approximately $70 million of liquidity to redeploy within our balance sheet strategy. On the expense side, legal and consulting was elevated in part due to a restatement cost of approximately $2 million. This was partially offset by a decrease in compensation and benefit expense. For the year, the largest increase in expense was in the other expense line. The primary driver was better performance in our held-for-investment consumer portfolio, which generated higher payments to our partners based on the positive performance.
In the future, we believe the impact to the other expense line will be significantly less since we have already closed the sale I mentioned a moment ago, and we are now primarily originating held-for-sale in credit solutions. Deposits held on the company’s balance sheet at September 30th totaled $5.9 billion, which is a modest increase of $12 million versus a year ago. As is typical this time of year, our deposit base is generally at the lowest point seasonally. Custodial deposits held at partner banks on September 30th were $210 million, which is in line with last year. Average custodial deposits during the quarter were also in line with last year. Going forward, we would expect custodial deposit balances to run lower than in prior years due to the rundown in programs such as EIP.
This will translate to lower servicing fees on the card and deposit fee income line and non-interest income. Loans and leases at September 30th were $4.7 billion compared to $4.1 billion last year. The majority of the growth came from our commercial finance verticals. Within term lending, we saw significant growth in structured finance with the expansion of renewable energy. We also saw growth in asset-based lending and warehouse finance. Non-performing loans did increase in the quarter, primarily driven by one working capital loan, which we believe is well collateralized. As we have communicated before, our non-performing loans as a percentage of total loans can have movement from quarter to quarter, but that generally has not correlated to a change in our annual net charge-off rate given our collateral-managed approach.
When we have loans that move into non-performing status, we then work to bring the loan back to performing status or recover the collateral and resolve the outstanding balance. This quarter is no exception. We believe we have the path to working through many of the larger NPLs over the next few quarters since they are well collateralized for the amounts we have in NPL status. This is where we excel and is a secret to the success of our commercial finance team. Our allowance for credit loss ratio on commercial finance was 118 bps in the quarter as compared to 129 bps for the same quarter last year, primarily driven by a mix shift in the portfolio. Our annual net charge-off rate in commercial finance for 2025 was 64 bps compared to 52 bps in 2024, well within our historic range.
If you look at Pathward as a whole, whether it is in Partner Solutions or Commercial Finance, we find niche places in the market that are difficult to operate in and become good at it. We believe this is part of the reason we can deliver a return on average assets for the year of 2.46% and a return on average tangible equity of 38.8%. Our liquidity remains strong with $2.3 billion available. This is higher than where we were last year at this time, and we’re extremely pleased with our position. During the quarter, we repurchased approximately 181,000 shares at an average price of $82.95. This brings full-year repurchases to almost 2.1 million shares, with almost 5 million shares still available for repurchases under the current stock repurchase program.
The sale of the majority of our held-for-investment consumer portfolio will put downward pressure on both pre-tax income and our net interest margin in 2026. However, despite that, we are still reiterating our fiscal year 2026 guidance with an EPS range of $8.25 to $8.75, which includes the following assumptions: no rate cuts during the year, an effective tax rate of 18% to 22%, and expected share repurchases. This concludes our prepared remarks. Operator, please open the line for questions.
Conference Operator: If you would like to ask a question, please press star followed by one on your telephone keypad. If for any reason you would like to remove that question, please press star followed by two. Again, to ask a question, press star one. As a reminder, if you’re using a speakerphone, please remember to pick up your handset before asking your question. We’ll pause here briefly as questions are registered. First question is from the line of Tim Switzer with KBW. Your line is now open.
Hey, good afternoon. Thanks for taking my question.
Hi Tim.
First off, congratulations on the new partnerships. Great to hear that. Are you able to provide some details on the Upstart program in terms of, like, will that look similar to your other credit solutions products such as the one you mentioned with Claire’s in terms of, like, the financial statement impact on the balance sheet and, like, where revenue will be recognized on the income statement? Are you still fully indemnified for any credit losses in this program as well?
Brett Pharr, CEO, Pathward Financial: Yeah. Generally speaking, this is in the same category of all our marketplace lending, where we’re doing it through the third party, in this case, Upstart. Yes, it has all the credit indemnifications. It has the come on the balance sheet, go off the balance sheet, kind of approach to it. Yes, it’s very similar to that. Now, Claire’s is a little bit unique because it’s early wage access, which is a different thing, but very much in line with all of our other consumer lending kinds of programs that have the credit protections.
That’s great to hear. How long should these loans remain on the balance sheet? Is there something within the contract with Upstart, in terms of how quickly you guys will move them off the balance sheet, either back to Upstart, or do you plan to sell to a partner? Do they just mature very quickly?
Greg Sigrist, CFO, Pathward Financial: Yeah. I mean, to Brett’s point, these are very similar to the other marketplace programs we have. We shifted that entire program, the majority of the program, to held-for-sale several years ago, Tim. These are all held-for-sale out of the gate. Like the other marketplace lending we do, our hold period is 30 days or less.
Gotcha. My last question on that, is this an exclusive partnership with Upstart? Are they still going to be leveraging their own balance sheet and other partners they have out there?
Brett Pharr, CEO, Pathward Financial: I don’t believe this is exclusive. There are multiple things. This is a good-sized company, and a lot of our partners have multiple banks they work with.
Gotcha. Makes sense. Sort of related to all this, your secondary market revenue was a bit above the, I think you guys have said it should be like a $5 to $7 million quarterly range. I know that can fluctuate quite a bit since you guys are trying to optimize the balance sheet. Can you talk about what drove the upside this quarter? Was it SBA or USDA? Is that $5 to $7 million still a good target going forward?
Greg Sigrist, CFO, Pathward Financial: Yeah. I think this quarter, Tim, is really just being opportunistic. As you get near year end too, you’re out there getting some bids, and there are probably a few things we thought were going to slip to October, but the demand was out there, so we decided to hit the bids, to be candid. Going forward, we do believe we’re going to dial it back to that $5 million to $7 million range. We’re really excited about the opportunities with our partners there, particularly on the renewable with USDA side. I do think that’s what drove the majority of it. We do believe we’re going to dial that back a little bit next year because, again, we really like that optionality and the ability to keep those yields on the balance sheet.
Gotcha. Makes sense. Thank you.
Thanks, Tim.
Conference Operator: Thank you for your question. Next question is from the line of Joe Yantunis with Raymond James. Your line is now open.
Hey, good afternoon.
Brett Pharr, CEO, Pathward Financial: Hey, Joe.
How has demand for early wage access loans changed? Are you seeing any incremental demand from the current government shutdown?
I don’t think we would have seen the impact of that yet. If you think about the total employees that represents across the entire nation, that’s probably not that significant. Frankly, I’m not sure federal government employees would be the people that are getting those kinds of transactions. We’re talking about people that are at the very bottom of the economy and are looking at, you know, $200 for 10 days. This is a different kind of market. That being said, Claire’s contract with Intuit is going to bring significant volume in there because of the scale and breadth that they have. We’re very excited about that and expect that to have a much larger volume in the weeks and months to come.
Got it. I just wasn’t sure if any of your partners were leveraged to that kind of type of consumer. As you mentioned, Intuit, I know it’s early, but if we were just to think about the recent changes to tax law, which I believe normally is beneficial to your tax business, how much growth in the tax business is implied in your fiscal year 2026 EPS guidance?
Every tax year is different. We say that every year, and we actually experience that. Your data point about changes in the tax law speaks well for the business. It’s a very valid thing that happens. We don’t have huge growth expectations. One reason is we came off of a really good year, and so that’s kind of looking at that going forward. We expect to have a solid tax year, and I think some of the tax law changes are going to help with that.
Greg Sigrist, CFO, Pathward Financial: Yeah. Incrementally, I’d just say in terms of setting the guide, we obviously look at a range of outcomes across all of this. Our historic growth rate in that business is probably mid-single digits, and you ought to think about that when it comes to calibrating probably the range we’re looking at.
I appreciate that. Just kind of continuing to hop around here, I know you addressed a little bit in your prepared remarks, but you know, NPLs ticked higher in the quarter, and we saw past-due loans declined, suggesting that some of these credits are moving through the snake. I understand you pride yourselves on working out problem loans. I was wondering if you had an opinion on when you thought this portfolio concentration would peak.
Brett Pharr, CEO, Pathward Financial: A couple of things. One is there actually isn’t a tie between the past-due loans and the NPLs because a lot of times these are episodes. An event happens, and then you immediately go to NPL, and often it’s without warning. You have the collateral, and you manage the collateral. We move very quickly in those situations. I don’t think you can correlate those two things. When you look at our business going back to, you know, when we bought Grossmark in 2018, you’ll have a quarter where these things kind of spike, and then you go along, and then you work your way down. Some of them are resolved quickly. Some of them are not. These are stories, right? There’s three or four stories, and you work through the stories, and some of them resolve very quickly because you liquidate the collateral.
Some of them are tied up in some legal thing, but you still have the collateral, and it may take some time. The main line is looking at net charge-offs, and you’ll see that net charge-offs are not correlated with the whole discussion of NPLs.
Greg Sigrist, CFO, Pathward Financial: Yeah. The only thing I would add, Joe, is that balance out there of NPLs for the quarter end, there’s three loans that make up roughly half of it. We talked about two of those last quarter. We had, I think, a positive outlook at the end of last quarter. That hasn’t changed. The one we mentioned this quarter, again, well collateralized, we’re feeling pretty good about that. When you look at those three, I do believe those are going to resolve themselves over the next quarter or two. It could take three quarters because they have to rehabilitate or otherwise work down. Just to give you some context on what’s out there right now.
Brett Pharr, CEO, Pathward Financial: All right. That’s helpful. Lastly from me, as we just think about the pace of share repurchases in 2026, how should we think about maybe the buyback ratio as we look out in the coming quarters?
Greg Sigrist, CFO, Pathward Financial: Yeah. We had obviously slowed down that buyback ratio just to get some additional capital out there. I think we’ve kind of gotten pretty close to where we want to be, to what our target was. I think going forward, you’re going to see that buyback ratio kind of get back to its historic norms, which is probably in that 80% to 90% payout ratio range.
I appreciate it. Thank you for taking my questions.
We appreciate you asking. Thanks, Joe.
Conference Operator: Thank you for your question. There are no additional questions waiting at this time, so I’ll pass the call back to the management team for any closing remarks.
Brett Pharr, CEO, Pathward Financial: This is Brett Pharr. Thanks for joining the call today. Have a great evening.
Conference Operator: That concludes the conference call. Thank you for your participation. You may now disconnect your lines.
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