Medallion Financial at Sidoti Conference: Strategic Growth and Challenges

On Wednesday, 19 March 2025, Medallion Financial Corp (NASDAQ: MFIN) participated in the Sidoti Small-Cap Virtual Conference. The company highlighted its strategic focus on niche lending markets such as RV, boat, and home improvement loans. While showcasing impressive portfolio growth and profitability, Medallion also addressed challenges in investor perception and the legacy taxi medallion business.

Key Takeaways

• Medallion Financial’s portfolio has grown to $2.3 billion, with margins of 800 basis points.
• Strategic partnerships with fintechs have doubled in volume over the past year.
• The company trades below book value, with a dividend yield of approximately 5%.
• Medallion anticipates moderate growth, with a focus on capital allocation and economic cycle navigation.
• The Utah Industrial Loan Bank charter is a key advantage, allowing low-cost deposit acquisition.

Financial Results

• Portfolio Growth:

- The portfolio has expanded by approximately 19% annually over the past several years, reaching $2.3 billion.

- Strategic partnership business volume doubled from $100 million to $200 million in the last year.

• Profitability:

- Medallion earned about $300 million before taxes over the past four years, averaging $60 million annually.

- An incremental loan of $20,000 at 16% interest generates $3,200 per year.

• Margins and Returns:

- Net interest margin is around 8%, with lending margins significantly above the US bank average.

- The company trades at approximately 5.8 times earnings, under its book value of $16 per share.

• Capital Allocation:

- Medallion is committed to dividends, stock buybacks, and reinvesting in growth.

- The stock repurchase program has bought back over 10% of shares, with a dividend yield of 5%.

Operational Updates

• Loan Portfolio Composition:

- Rec loans make up 62% ($1.5 billion) of the portfolio, with home improvement loans at 33%.

- The total loan portfolio stands at $2.5 billion.

• Origination Platform:

- Loans are sourced through 900 contractors and 3,300 dealers.

- Operating expenses are low at 2.2%, with a loan loss rate of 4.35%.

• Credit Quality:

- Home improvement loans have an average FICO score of 760.

- Mezzanine loans average $5 million in size with 13% rates.

Future Outlook

• Growth Projections:

- Medallion expects to grow 6% to 7% annually, focusing on dividends and stock buybacks.

- Loan volume growth and debt reduction are key priorities.

• Interest Rate Impact:

- Charge-offs are expected to remain slightly elevated in 2025 but should improve as interest rates decrease.

• Strategic Focus:

- Continued expansion of strategic partnerships and lending businesses is anticipated.

Q&A Highlights

• Utah Industrial Loan Bank Charter:

- Allows FDIC-insured deposits without traditional banking operations.

- Offers a high-return model without needing physical branches.

• Strategic Partnership Business:

- Fintech partnerships have grown significantly, with a low credit risk fee-based model.

• Capital Allocation Priorities:

- Targeting 50% leverage at the parent company level, with a focus on maintaining a strong tier one leverage ratio.

• Loan Portfolio Performance:

- Net interest margin in the commercial segment is comparable to rec loans.

• Operating Cost Trends:

- Operating costs as a percentage of net interest income are expected to decline, albeit at a slower pace.

In conclusion, Medallion Financial Corp’s participation in the Sidoti Small-Cap Virtual Conference provided insights into its strategic growth and operational challenges. For a detailed discussion, readers are encouraged to refer to the full transcript.

Full transcript - Sidoti Small-Cap Virtual Conference:

Brendan McCarthy, Analyst, Sidoti: Hey. Hello, everybody, and welcome to Sidoti’s March Small Cap Conference. My name is Brendan McCarthy. I’m an analyst here at Sidoti, and I’m pleased to welcome Medallion Financial Corp Corporation. Joining us from the firm will be president and COO, Andrew Murstein and CFO, Anthony Catron.

And before I hand it over, a quick reminder that the Q and A tab is located at the bottom of your screen. Feel free to type in any questions throughout the presentation, and we can save time for q and a at the end. But with that said, Andrew, take it away.

Andrew Murstein, President and COO, Medallion Financial Corp: Great. Thanks all for joining us today. If we flip on to the next page, we’ll just get started. There’s the important information, and we’ll start with what makes Medallion Financial special. So, we’ve been around a very long time, started actually by my grandfather in the nineteen thirties.

And the basic premise is niches, there are riches. We try to find these niche businesses where we could be the market leader, kind of fly under the radar of larger competition. And we’re very good at it. And, as you could see, the results will show that. So, we my my family owns about 20 of the stock.

We’re very much aligned with our shareholders. We have what I think is the best banking charter in the country. It’s a Utah industrial loan bank charter. There’s only about 15 of them or so. They’re very hard to get.

There’s been a moratorium on them in the past for many years. And it lets us do everything a bank can do in that we are able to take in low cost deposits, and we lend them out at very high rates and have great margins as you’ll see. Our main lines of business is RV lending, boat lending, and home improvement lending. Over the last five years, we’ve grown the portfolio substantially up to about $2,300,000,000. The margins are very impressive.

They’re 800 basis points, more than double what the average bank in The US has, a very strong return on equity and return on assets. And on top of our core business, we also have a couple of other lines, which are icing on the cake, so to speak, and to be very accretive potentially to our bottom line, which is our mezzanine group that does commercial lending, our strategic partnership group, which is fintech partnerships, which we’ll touch base on, and the cash collections from our taxi medallion portfolio. We wrote off about a hundred million dollars or so. And, we’re able to go after those borrowers and hopefully collect a meaningful amount. If you flip to the next slide, you’ll see why now is a good time to look at Medallion Financial.

So we’ve just completed the best four years in our company history. Over the last four years, we’ve earned roughly $300,000,000 before taxes. The portfolio has been growing the last several years at about 19% per year. The ROE and ROA are, as you can see, again, very impressive. The stock purchase we started several years ago, we bought back over 10% of the company.

We started a dividend a couple of years ago. We’re paying a yield of about 5%. And current, PE is significantly below others. We’re trading only at about 5.8 times earnings. Other companies, for example, no one’s at an exact comp, but companies like, FinWise and other banks are trading at three times that, about 16 to 20 times earnings.

We’re trading under book value, which is $16 and, also under our tangible book value, which is $10.50 a share. You flip to the next page. The company overview, as I mentioned at the start, rec and home improvement loans. So the rec portfolio is 1,500,000,000.0. It’s about 62%.

We’re getting, 15% on average rates there. New business is being written at about 16% at higher than that. Very small loans, again, fly under the radar, kind of roll up our sleeves and do the hard work that’s needed to get these above average returns where we’re doing RV marine and collective core loans. We’ve got a a very good network of about 3,300 dealers around the country and financial service providers that are feeding all these loan applications into us. Home improvement lending comes through general contractors.

It’s about 33% of our portfolio there. Average rate on our books today is 10%, but new business is being written at 11%. Really strong credits here with average size loans of $20,000 typical loans are roofs, pools, windows, etcetera. Average FICO score in this portfolio is about 760 or so. So they’re a plus quality loans.

The other businesses which I mentioned, commercial lending, we’ve got a mezzanine group out of Minneapolis that does on average about $5,000,000 sized loans at 13% rates, and they get equity kickers, warrants, or small equity positions in many of the portfolio companies that boosts the returns even further. So while they’re getting 13% coupon, on top of that, it’s averaged out about a 15% average return that we’ve gotten from this group since we bought them in 1998. Just a wonderful long term track record. The strategic partnership business has been growing substantially. So that’s where a fintech will send the loan to our bank.

We’ll fund the loan, and the fintech will buy the loan back. They’ll take advantage of that wonderful charter that we have, again, the Utah Industrial Loan Bank charter. And this business has doubled in the last year, roughly from a hundred million dollars to $200,000,000 in volume, have grown substantially. Lastly, the taxi medallion lending, I mentioned before that we wrote off a lot of this. We’re collecting it at about $2,000,000 per quarter, have the potential to even do better.

All these loans had personal guarantees on them. So in addition to the actual medallion, we’re able to get other assets when we seek recoveries. If you flip to the next page, you’ll see the overview of the loan portfolio. And we’ve really created a wonderful cash flow machine here. We have billions of dollars of loans, 2,500,000,000.0 as you can see on the right, thrown off an average rate of 13% per year.

So we’ve got almost $300,000,000 per year coming in from this portfolio. And, the portfolio split, as I mentioned, before on the left, you could see the home improvement loans and the rec loans. But combined, that’s 2,500,000,000 of loans. And you could see in 2020, we were less than half of that. We’ve done a great job growing this.

Brendan McCarthy, Analyst, Sidoti: If you

Andrew Murstein, President and COO, Medallion Financial Corp: flip to the next page, you’ll see the economics of our business. So just trying to simplify it here, you could see on a new incremental $20,000 loan, whether it’s a boat loan or an RV loan, the average rate is 16%. So you’re getting about $3,200 coming in per year. Interest cost is 4%. We’ve got a brokered CD network.

No bricks and mortar for our banks. This is a highly effective business model where we’re able to just order CDs online. The average rate today is about 4%. Low losses are 4.35%. So it’s kind of a high yield, higher than typical loss scenario for other banks’ perspective.

Low operating expenses of 2.2%, so we’re making $1,210. The bank doesn’t have very much leverage either. It’s only leveraged six to one, which is one of the reasons, we have an an A plus rating from, Egan Jones. So it’s an investment grade rating with that low leverage. So with 3,000 of equity and 17,000 of deposits, you could see that we’re making a 40% pretax return on equity, substantially higher than most banks in The United States.

With that, I’ll now turn the presentation over to Anthony. Thanks,

Anthony Catron, CFO, Medallion Financial Corp: Andrew. So Andrew spoke a little bit, about our loan book. And what drives, you know, the growth that we’ve experienced really is our origination platform. It’s those 900 contractors, three thousand three hundred dealers and FSPs that, you know, we source the loans through on the consumer side. That’s really the economic engine, which allows us to grow originations and essentially grow our balance sheet.

And, you know, that translates into high originations translates into a higher book, but more importantly, higher net interest income. And you could see that on the right side of the screen. You know, we’re not quite, but but closer than not to double where we were, you know, just four or five years ago. So it’s pretty remarkable about, you know, what we’ve been able to do in a short amount of time. On the next slide, you know, our net interest margin sits around 8% at the end of twenty twenty four.

And and obviously, you know, we’re funded through broker deposits, which have a slightly higher cost of funds. We think that’s a good trade off given our unique industrial loan charter and that we don’t have a network of brick and mortar branches. So, you know, you could see, you know, over the past couple of years, interest expense has migrated higher, but so is the interest income. So as we’ve, you know, incurred higher costs on our borrowings, we’ve been able to pass that along, to our on our new originations to new borrowers. You know, Andrew mentioned that, you know, we’re lending right now around 16% on new originations on the rec portfolio, 11% on on home improvement loans.

You know, our average book is about 15% on rec and, and just under 10%. So as the portfolio grows, we’re able to increase the average coupon, increase the yield, and we’re able to absorb a lot of those interest, interest expense increases we’ve seen over the past two or three years. And what it does is it translates into an 8% margin, which as Andrew mentioned, our return on equities is above what you would typically find in a bank and the 8% interest margin certainly is as well. Yep. Just looking at the next, next slide, you know, we’re we’re somewhat unique.

We’re not a typical bank. So we we employ double leverage, and it goes back to our founding. You know, historically, we were an investment company that, you know, employed leverage at the parent company. That still exists today. And what we’ve done here is we’ve shown what our capital looks like, you know, if he was to deconsolidate us.

So we’ve got equity, shown in blue. And you could see that that’s the piece that keeps growing. The debt that we have at the parent company, that’s the gray piece at the bottom. You know, that’s that as a percentage of total capital, that’s continued to decrease. It’s increased slightly in total dollar numbers, but but, you know, not nearly to the to the level that our equities increased.

And the piece in in the middle of that yellow piece, that’s our non controlling interest. That’s essentially preferred equity that we issue with our bank subsidiary. We currently have two tranches of preferred equity at Medallion Bank. One is, is SBLF funds that were issued, about fifteen years ago through to The US Treasury. And the other piece is, what we refer to as our Series F preferred stock at Medallion Bank.

That trades on the Nasdaq under the ticker MBNKP. So that allows us to bring in equity at a finite cost of, you know, blended, it’s just above 8 percent, and leverage it and get the returns that we spoke about previously. Just moving on to the next slide. Again, you know, we believe there’s a compelling reason that investors should look at our company. You know, as Andrew mentioned earlier, you know, we are a small company, but we’ve always played in niche lending spaces, which have proven, you know, proven, you know, well for us.

In terms of capital allocation, we like to think that we’re, you know, we’ve got a finite amount of capital we generate each year. And what we want to do with that is pay the shareholders in terms of a dividend, opportunistic stock buybacks, and redeploying that capital in ourselves in growing our book. And that’s what we’ve done for the past couple of years. I think we continue on that trajectory. You know, looking looking ahead to growth, you know, we’ve grown substantially over the past couple of years.

As we get bigger, we don’t we don’t foresee being able to grow at the the 20% level that maybe we have in in the past. However, we do think that, you know, you know, growing in the in the mid to high single digits is a reasonable amount. And when we think about, you know, a 6% or 7% growth rate on a 2 and a half billion dollar book of loans, that’s still a large number that we’re putting on the on a balance sheet every year. And, again, you know, Andrew’s family and the insiders here own 20%. You know, we are completely aligned with the shareholder in that regard.

And I think, that’s our presentation. I think we’ll open it up to questions, and turn it back to Brendan.

Brendan McCarthy, Analyst, Sidoti: Fantastic. Well, thanks very much for the overview. And we can now open the floor for Q and A here. As a quick reminder, the Q and A tab is located at the bottom of your screen. Feel free to type in any questions.

And I guess, well, I guess a great place to start would be the Utah Industrial Bank Charter. Maybe you could talk a little bit about what that is, you know, what that entails and and kinda what are the advantages there.

Andrew Murstein, President and COO, Medallion Financial Corp: So back in 02/2001, we started trying to find a a low cost dependable funding source. We were always reliant upon banks, which was a good and bad thing. There’s always something that occurs in its economic cycle where banks get nervous. And we back then, it was, unfortunately, 09/11. So we wanted to never be reliant on a bank again.

We went out, we looked at what type of charters exist in the country. We saw Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley and Acadia had this bank charter in Utah. And, we’re curious, like, why they’re they’re very smart people. There must be something to it. And the more we found out about it, the more we liked it.

So, these charters, go back a hundred or so years. There’s only about 15 of them in the country. We’re able to take in FDIC insured deposits. We cannot offer checking accounts, but that’s not our business model anyway. We’re not geared up to offer demand deposits and have ATM machines and bricks and mortar all over the country.

So it’s a really high return business model without having that bricks and mortar. And we’re just taking deposits online, broken CDs. We can order anywhere from ninety days to ten year CD money, trying to match fund everything perfectly as or as perfectly as you can. It’s never really perfect. But, it’s it’s been great for us.

We get calls constantly from fintechs and others looking to buy, the bank charter, but, in the past, there’s been a moratorium on them. I think it’s gonna open up again now, though, with the new administration who’s much more pro ILC charter.

Brendan McCarthy, Analyst, Sidoti: Great. That’s helpful. And then looking at the strategic partnership business, can you talk a little bit about that business in detail and ultimately how these partnerships come about and and maybe the growth outlook for that area of the business.

Andrew Murstein, President and COO, Medallion Financial Corp: So so that’s, another benefit that we found from this chart. We went into it not thinking about that business, honestly. We just thought about how do we lower our cost of funds, which we’ve done very well. But fintechs around the country don’t have licenses to lend. What they do is they have to go into every state and get licensed, which is a campaign for them and very bureaucratic and every state has a different type of lending law and news recap.

So a fintech, works with primarily Utah banks. That’s kind of their go to bank. And, they’ll send the loans to a Utah bank. The Utah banks like us will fund the loan, and then the fintech will buy the loan back two days later or so. Sometimes more than that.

Sometimes you get ahold of the paper. But we don’t hold it very long. So when you earn a fee, it could be anywhere from 15 basis points to 65 basis points when a loan is originated, and then we get the flow for a couple of days. So it’s a no risk business in that you don’t have the credit risk and you’re generating a lot of fees. That’s grown roughly from a hundred million to $200,000,000.

And it’s really just a numbers game in that we have a foundation in place. We’ve got a great compliance team. And now every time we add a new fintech partner, a lot of the volume goes to the bottom line. So we just signed a very large partner about six months ago, and now, finally, we’re getting fruits of that as the production has really ramped up.

Brendan McCarthy, Analyst, Sidoti: Got it. Thanks. That’s helpful. And then looking at the balance sheet, I think you mentioned six to one leverage ratio there. I guess, what what level of leverage makes sense for the business in the long term?

And then maybe as a follow-up question, you know, how can we kinda think about the company’s capital allocation priorities in terms of, you know, loan volume growth, shareholder returns, and and ultimately debt pay down?

Andrew Murstein, President and COO, Medallion Financial Corp: Sure. Yeah. So I’d you

Anthony Catron, CFO, Medallion Financial Corp: know, I’d as as Andrew mentioned, you know, we rolling lever at the bank six to one, and that’s because of the capital maintenance agreement that, the bank has with its with the FDIC where it has to maintain a tier one leverage ratio of 15%. You know, at the parent company, what we’ve, what we’ve tried to steer to is a is a 50% leverage. So, so we’ve got capital and, and common equity of $370,000,000. You know, we’re we’re targeting 50%. You know, that number will ebb and flow based upon, you know, you know, what’s going on and and where we see opportunities.

You know, there might be opportunities to expand on lending businesses at any given point. So that number might increase, some as a ratio of of equity. But I think that’s a that’s the target where we see where we wanna be, and and the leverage we deploy.

Brendan McCarthy, Analyst, Sidoti: Great. That’s helpful. And then, you know, looking at across the loan portfolio, I guess, what areas of the business be it, you know, consumer, home improvement, commercial, what what areas do you kinda see the highest, net income margins? And and then what areas are you most positive or, you know, most I guess, have the brightest outlook as far as loan growth?

Anthony Catron, CFO, Medallion Financial Corp: Yeah. So I think the the highest net interest margin clearly is in our rec portfolio. And that comes with risk, and we’re aware of that. We think we’re compensated appropriately for that. You know, in the in the presentation, Andrew went through, you know, the the the economics of the consumer lending portfolio.

You know, right now, we’re getting, you know, 16%. Our cost of funds is 4%, more or less. And we’ve got charge offs hovering above 4%. So when you when you factor that in, it’s still a pretty compelling investment opportunity for us. You know, it’s, that that business and that consumer is gonna be tied to the economy.

So I think as interest rates come in, you know, we’ll start to see improvements in charge offs. We can’t guarantee it, but that’s what we’ve seen historically. You know, I think these high interest rates are, you know, hurting all consumers, not just ours. And, and and as, you know, as things improve and rates come down, you know, we’ll start to see that. You know, for 2025, we expect those charge offs to be slightly elevated, around where they are.

But again, we’re not seeing any indications that we’re going to get back to the levels that we experienced during the Great Recession. And just to talk about our other segments for a bit, commercial, the net interest margin is comparable to what we get in the rec. The yields are slightly lower, but we also deploy different leverage there, that being, you know, facilitated through an SBIC. And on the other consumer product, the home improvement, this is our super prime credit. You know, FICO is, you know, in the high 700s.

The net interest margin is gonna be lower, but the charge off experience is lower, and the and the performance of this credit is better than what we see in the rec. So I think, you know, when we when we blend that all in, we’re comfortable with, you know, what we’re getting as a whole. And we think that, you know, we’re we’re positioned well to write out the cycles.

Brendan McCarthy, Analyst, Sidoti: Got it. That’s helpful. And it looks like, for past few years, operating costs have declined as a percentage of net interest income. What’s been driving that trend? And do you do you see that trend continuing?

Anthony Catron, CFO, Medallion Financial Corp: Yeah. I think that’s, I don’t want to step on Andrew’s toes, but that’s a function of our being able to grow our book, being able to grow our net interest income. You know, we would expect that continue. We might that that decrease down might not be to the extent that we’ve seen over the past couple of years. You know, as we grow, there’s definitely additional costs we have to bring in.

You know, we are regulated institution, so there’ll be higher, you know, compliance costs associated with being, you know, a bank, you know, to the extent that we continue to scale our strategic partnership business. You know, that as Andrew mentioned, that takes a lot of compliance, personnel to make sure that we’re doing it right and we don’t have any footfalls. So, you know, costs will go up, but we don’t think they’ll go up to the level that we increase our net interest income.

Brendan McCarthy, Analyst, Sidoti: Got it. And it looks like there’s been headlines around consumers pulling back on discretionary purchases. I guess so far in in Q1, have you seen any declines in demand for for RV or boat purchases?

Anthony Catron, CFO, Medallion Financial Corp: Yeah. No. We we haven’t seen anything that’s telling us demand is drying up. You know, Q1, the, you know, the it’s a little too early to tell. Q1 is typically the end of Q1 is typically seasonally when when things start ramping up, you know, ahead of the second quarter, which, you know, when you think of the the nice weather seasons, that’s when everyone wants to be outside.

They want a new trailer. They want a boat. So that’s historically when we have the most originations on our rec portfolio. But we’re not seeing any indications that that that’s not gonna be other than what we expect.

Brendan McCarthy, Analyst, Sidoti: And, Nick, can you talk about, loan loss reserves or, you know, I guess, how how loan losses have trended in in recent years and your outlook there?

Anthony Catron, CFO, Medallion Financial Corp: Yeah. Again, you know, I think I covered this a bit, but, you know, you we’re slightly elevated from where we are norm you know, historically. But, again, you know, I think the interest rate environment in the economy has some, you know, negative factors that are, you know, specifically related to that. As those factors, you know, settle, I think we’ll start to see that charge off experience come in. And we’ve actually started to see the charge off experience in our home improvement business improve in 2024 compared to 2023.

So we would expect it, you know, to to continue to improve. You know, on the rec side, we’ll probably see, you know, elevated charge offs to continue for some time. But as interest rates settle in, over the next, you know, six to twelve months, we would expect to see improvements in that.

Andrew Murstein, President and COO, Medallion Financial Corp: Yeah. I’ll add, you know, we we do a lot of due diligence before we get into lines of business. So the RV and Marine portfolio, for example, we formed the bank again in 02/2003. We bought the portfolio about a year after that, 02/2004. And when we were buying it, we bought it from Acadia.

We went back and looked at a ten year track record on how it performed because everything looks good on the market. So in 02/2004 through 02/2007, everything looked great, but we were always holding our breath a little bit what happens when you hit a recession. And we modeled it out perfectly where the bank management did. 02/1989, losses went up. We still did very well, still made a lot of money, but then losses dropped dramatically.

So we’ve got a lot of confidence, and it’s good to know that that business alone, for example, we’ve looked at thirty years of data, feel pretty confident in our future.

Brendan McCarthy, Analyst, Sidoti: Yeah. Absolutely. Maybe we could dive into underwriting a little bit. I guess, what you kinda look for at the consumer level across the consumer lending business as well as, you know, home improvement and and, commercial as well.

Anthony Catron, CFO, Medallion Financial Corp: Sure. You know, we we talk a lot about FICO, but FICO is really how we measure up the credit. We don’t that’s actually not one of the inputs we look at when determining the creditworthiness of a borrower. So, so we’ve got an internally developed scorecard that we implemented for both the home improvement and the rec business, you know, a number of years back. And it looks at, you know, a, you know, a handful of different criteria.

You know, we’re talking about the age the average age of the borrower, the, you know, the the debt to income levels of the borrower, their average wage, things of that nature, in determining, you know, whether or not, you know, we wanna make this loan. And what we found is that since we’ve utilized that scorecard, you know, we’re getting a better FICO. So the end result is better. We’re still getting the rate we want. And it’s just, it’s it’s been a a wonderful tool for us, in terms of, you know, strengthening our credit as well as, you know, keeping the returns high.

Brendan McCarthy, Analyst, Sidoti: Got it. We time for a couple more questions here. Can Andrew expand on how buying the bank came about and what the story is behind the the, ultimate decision there?

Andrew Murstein, President and COO, Medallion Financial Corp: So, we had all of our debt come due 09/30/2001, which was very bad timing. 09/11 hit. Medallion prices dropped. Back then, we were heavy in medallion loans. And the banks, rather than comforting us and helping us, said to us, we want all of our money back.

We said, gee, let’s never be put in this position again. So as I mentioned before, we looked around the country, saw Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, and Acadia have this bank charter. Back then, Mario Cuomo, the former governor of New York, our board of directors. And he and I had all these calls with people in Utah, including Brent Hatch at the time. Brent Hatch is or in Hatch’s son and and former senator in in Utah.

And we really did a lot of tire kicking, got very comfortable with, the Utah charter and the regulators there, and it’s been just a remarkable long term relationship with them. Very pro business in Utah, wonderful people to work with. Employees are great there. And we it was hard to get. It took two years to get this license, the charter.

They didn’t really wanna give it to us because they didn’t want a lot of these charters out there. We convinced them, our ability to to run a bank and our ability to analyze credit. And, in retrospect, they made a great decision, and we made great decision. The bank has been profitable every single year, which is not easy to do when you’re starting something from scratch. So every year that we’ve been in business, every full year since 02/2003, we’ve been very profitable.

And, it’s, again, throwing off a lot of money for us, thankfully. The bank’s been making about $60,000,000 a year, and has ROE and ROA, performance data greatly in excess of what the typical bank in The United States makes.

Brendan McCarthy, Analyst, Sidoti: Fantastic. And maybe to conclude, I know you mentioned, you know, shares are trading under tangible book value and and book value per share. I guess, what are investors missing here, and and why is why is now the right time to take a look at the stock?

Andrew Murstein, President and COO, Medallion Financial Corp: You know, years ago, we we used to make a dollar a share, and the stock was at 28. And so so we we don’t have a great answer for that. I could tell you why I think, the stock’s trading at such a low multiple. So we we made a dollar a share. The stock was at 28.

Now we’re making a dollar 50 a share or so. The stock’s at 8 or 9. We we used to really have a a great group of, analysts, and institutional shareholders that were interested, and we’re seeing that again finally. This is, we should have done perhaps more of these Sidoti conferences, but we’re getting really I think we have 12 meetings between today and tomorrow. We need to get out there more.

We need to get our name out there more. We need to have the the misperception here is maybe it’s our fault that the name should be changed, but the medallion business is point 5% or less of our company. So sometimes you hear the name medallion, you think of a taxi medallion, that’s the way the business used to be, but we’re far from that today. We wrote off the portfolio pretty much in 2020. And, again, it’s 0.5% of assets, and and we’ve never done better.

So I think we just have to get our name out there. We have to do more investor conferences. We’ve gotta get more research coverage, and I’m sure the stock will trade up to a normal PE over time.

Brendan McCarthy, Analyst, Sidoti: Great. Well, Andrew and Anthony, we really appreciate the overview and appreciate your time as well. If there were any questions we did not get to, feel free to contact Medallin directly, or you can reach out to Sidoti. Guys, Guys, thanks again. We appreciate it.

Anthony Catron, CFO, Medallion Financial Corp: Thank you.

Andrew Murstein, President and COO, Medallion Financial Corp: Thank you all.

Brendan McCarthy, Analyst, Sidoti: Take care, everybody.

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