Owner Scorecard


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AX, Axos Financial Inc.

Banks financial

Axos Financial Inc. is a technology-driven, diversified financial services company with approximately $24.8 billion in assets and approximately $39.4 billion of assets under custody and/or administration at Axos Clearing LLC.

Our client-centric, technology-enabled services model provides secure and scalable banking, clearing and custody, and investment advisory solutions to retail and business customers.

Axos Bank (the "Bank") provides consumer and commercial banking products and services through its digital online and mobile banking platforms, low-cost distribution channels and affinity partners.

Latest annual: FY2026 10-K
AX · Axos Financial Inc.
I

The business

What it sells, where the money comes from, the kind of company it is.

Revenue · FY2026
$1.5B
+17.6% YoY · 18% 5-yr CAGR
Vital signs · FY2026, with 5-yr average
Revenue $1.5B 5-yr avg $1.1B
Return on equity 15% 5-yr avg 16%
Return on tangible equity 17% 5-yr avg 18%
Efficiency ratio 49% 5-yr avg 48%
Equity / assets 10.6% 5-yr avg 10.1%

The business in brief

read the 10-K →

What this business is and what moves its needle, from its own SEC filings.

What moves the needle
Net interest margin, loan losses, and book value. A lender is read on the quality of its balance sheet, not an earnings multiple, and the worst year of credit losses matters more than the best. On its own account, the filing leans hardest on pricing power & competition, set against the numbers in what the filing emphasizes, below.
Is it a good business?
Return on equity has run high across the record (median 16%, above 12% in 10 of 10 years). It runs at a 49% efficiency ratio, lean. A bank that earns above its cost of equity through the cycle compounds book value; whether this one did it by underwriting discipline or by reaching for risk is what the 10-K, and the worst years in the record, will tell you.

Every line is arithmetic on the company's filings, shown in full in the sections below.

II

The record

Ten years of arithmetic, read across the cycle.

The record, 2017–2026

realized figures from each filing · older years to the left
2017’172018’182019’192020’202021’212022’222023’232024’242025’252026’26
Income statement
$381M$439M$491M$581M$644M$721M$904M$1.2B$1.3B$1.5BRevenueRevenue
$387M$475M$565M$623M$618M$660M$1.2B$1.7B$1.8B$2.0BInterest incomeInt. inc.
$74M$107M$156M$145M$79M$53M$374M$694M$688M$710MInterest expenseInt. exp.
$313M$368M$409M$478M$539M$607M$783M$961M$1.1B$1.2BNet interest incomeNet int.
$68M$71M$83M$103M$105M$113M$120M$223M$131M$234MNoninterest incomeFee inc.
$11M$26M$27M$42M$24M$19M$25M$33M$56M$101MCredit-loss provisionProvision
$233M$240M$213M$263M$306M$340M$432M$635M$613M$647MPretax incomePretax
$135M$152M$155M$183M$216M$241M$307M$450M$433M$490MNet incomeNet inc.
42%36%27%30%29%29%29%29%29%24%Effective tax rateTax rate
Cash flow & returns
1.6%1.6%1.4%1.3%1.5%1.4%1.5%2.0%1.7%1.6%Return on assetsROA
16%16%14%15%15%15%16%20%16%15%Return on equityROE
16%16%14%15%15%15%16%20%16%15%Retained to equityRetained/eq
16%17%17%17%17%16%17%21%17%17%Return on tangible equityROTCE
36%40%51%47%49%50%50%44%47%49%Efficiency ratioEffic.
$0$35M$56M$39M$17M$0$49M$96M$58M$22MBuybacksBuybacks
($789M)($1.0B)($932M)($1.3B)($867M)($2.8B)($2.4B)($2.6B)($1.8B)($5.0B)Investing cash flowInv. cash
$747M$837M$962M$2.2B($459M)$3.1B$3.0B$2.1B$1.3B$3.6BFinancing cash flowFin. cash
$157M($21M)$235M$1.1B($913M)$537M$807M($196M)($9M)($869M)Change in cashΔ cash
Balance sheet
$7.4B$8.5B$9.4B$10.7BLoans held for investmentLoans
$41M$49M$57M$76M$133M$149M$167M$261M$290M$347MCredit-loss allowanceAllowance
$8.5B$9.5B$11.2B$13.9B$14.3B$17.4B$20.3B$22.9B$24.8B$30.0BTotal assetsAssets
$6.9B$8.0B$9.0B$11.3B$10.8B$13.9B$17.1B$19.4B$20.8B$24.6BDepositsDeposits
$36M$71M$71M$71M$96M$98M$98M$98M$144MGoodwillGoodwill
$7.7B$8.6B$10.1B$12.6B$12.9B$15.8B$18.4B$20.6B$22.1B$26.8BTotal liabilitiesTotal liab.
$834M$961M$1.1B$1.2B$1.4B$1.6B$1.9B$2.3B$2.7B$3.2BShareholders’ equityEquity
Per share
63.7M63.1M61.9M60.8M59.2M59.5M59.7M57.5M56.9M56.7MShares out (diluted)Shares
$2.12$2.41$2.51$3.02$3.64$4.04$5.15$7.82$7.61$8.66EPS (diluted)EPS
$13.11$15.21$17.34$20.25$23.65$27.60$32.12$39.83$47.14$55.89Book value / shareBVPS
$13.11$14.14$15.16$18.18$21.69$24.97$29.57$37.37$44.78$51.49Tangible book / shareTBVPS
Per-share growththe realized rate an owner's share compounded
9-yr5-yr
Revenue / share+17.8%/yr+19.2%/yr
Owner earnings / share+13.3%/yr+6.5%/yr
EPS+16.9%/yr+18.9%/yr
Capital spending / share+48.1%/yr+92.9%/yr
Book value / share+17.5%/yr+18.8%/yr
III

Quality & stewardship

Returns, the balance sheet, capital allocation, and pay.

Owner’s Scorecard

FY2026 10-K · source on SEC EDGAR →

Is it a good business?

  • Strong
    Net income $490M ÷ equity $3.2B
    Industry peers: median 8%
    What this means

    The bank's north star, what it earns on shareholders' capital. Cost of equity is roughly 10%, so a return durably above that builds value and below it destroys it. One year is noisy; the durability across a full credit cycle is what counts.

  • Strong
    Net income ÷ (equity − goodwill $144M − intangibles $105M)
    Industry peers: median 11%
    What this means

    The cleaner return, stripping out the goodwill paid for past acquisitions. This is the number a buyer of the whole bank actually earns on the hard capital.

  • Low cost ratio (<58%)
    Noninterest expense $733M ÷ (net interest income + fees)
    Industry peers: median 60%
    What this means

    The share of revenue eaten by running costs; lower is better, and below about 60% marks a genuinely efficient operation. A low ratio held for years is the operational side of a moat.

Is it sound?

  • Capital (equity / assets) 10.6%
    Well capitalized
    Equity $3.2B ÷ assets $30.0B
    What this means

    A plain-English leverage read: how much of the balance sheet is the owners' own money. This is a rough proxy; the regulatory figure is the CET1 ratio, which is risk-weighted and reported in the filing. The point is the same, how much loss the bank can absorb before depositors are at risk.

  • Deposit-funded
    Deposits $24.6B ÷ assets $30.0B
    What this means

    Low-cost, sticky deposits are a bank's real moat, the cheap raw material it lends out at a spread. A bank funded mostly by deposits earns more durably than one that rents its money in the wholesale market.

  • Credit cost (provision / NII) 8%
    Low
    Provision for credit losses $101M ÷ net interest income $1.2B
    What this means

    What the bank set aside this year against loans going bad, as a share of its lending income. This swings hard with the cycle, low in good years and spiking in recessions, so read it across the record, not in one year. Disciplined underwriting shows up as low, stable provisions through a downturn.

The franchise and the credit cycle

  • Rate-sensitive funding
    Noninterest-bearing deposits $3.8B ÷ deposits $24.6B · pays 3.36% on the interest-bearing rest (avg of year-ends)
    What this means

    The share of deposits the bank pays nothing for — checking accounts that stay through rate cycles. This is the deposit moat in one number: a high share means cheap, sticky raw material for lending; a low share means the funding reprices with every rate move. Buffett's Wells letter is built on exactly this economics.

  • Dollars only — loan base withheld
    Charge-offs net of recoveries $43M · the loan-base rate is withheld (the loan book is not cleanly tagged in structured data)
    What this means

    Loans actually written off, net of recoveries. The rate against the loan book is the comparable figure, and it is withheld here because the loan base itself is not cleanly tagged — a rate on a guessed denominator would be a wrong number. Read the dollar trend against the bank's own history.

All figures as filed; the source filing is linked above.

Management, ownership & pay

read the proxy →

From the proxy: how much of the business the people running it own, and how they are paid, beside what the business earned for its owners in the same years.

Fiscal yearChief executivePay, as filed“Actually paid”Owner earnings
2021Gregory Garrabrants$5.2M$12.0M$402M
2022Gregory Garrabrants$13.7M$8.3M$204M
2023Gregory Garrabrants$10.6M$5.9M$185M
2024Gregory Garrabrants$13.9M$19.4M$289M
2025Gregory Garrabrants$11.7M$22.7M$469M

Both pay figures are the company’s own, from the pay-versus-performance table its proxy statement files. “As filed” is the Summary Compensation Table total: salary, bonus, and equity awards at their value on the day of grant. “Actually paid” is the SEC’s prescribed recalculation, which re-marks those equity awards to what they became as they vested; it can swing far above or below the filed figure in either direction, and negative years occur. Owner earnings are the whole business's, from the record above, for the same fiscal years.

  • Insider ownership4.9%

    The stake all directors and executive officers hold together, per the 2025 proxy: skin in the game, the first thing Munger reads.

  • Stock-based compensation$44M

    The slice of the business handed to employees in shares in fiscal 2026, 3.0% of revenue, equal to 3.3% of operating profit. Buffett's oldest accounting fight: this is compensation, compensation is an expense, real whether or not the headline earnings admit it. One trap: the cash-flow statement adds SBC back, so the operating cash, and the owner earnings drawn from it, are flattered by exactly this amount; counted as the cost it is, what an owner keeps is lower.

Peers, Banks

The same industry, side by side on the bank lens. Each column names the period it is read over; the group median at the foot is the line to read each figure against.

CompanyRevenuelatest FY, USDROEmedian over the recordROTCEmedian over the recordEfficiencymedian over the recordNII / assetsmedian over the recordNoninterest-bearing sharelatest FY
FLGFlagstar Bank N.A.$2.1B7%10%48%2.1%18%
FNBF.N.B.$1.8B8%14%59%2.7%26%
HWCHancock Whitney$1.5B10%14%62%3.0%35%
ASBAssociated Banc-Corp$1.5B8%11%66%2.4%17%
AXAxos Financial Inc.$1.5B16%17%48%3.8%16%
BKUBankUnited$1.1B10%10%60%2.5%31%
PFSProvident Financial Services Inc$870M8%11%56%2.8%19%
EBCEastern Bankshares Inc.$723M6%8%70%2.6%
Group median8%11%59%2.6%19%
IV

The price

What a price has to assume.

What the price implies

price / tangible book

A bank is worth a multiple of its tangible book value, and the multiple it deserves is set by the return it earns on that book. Type today’s price; we show what you would be paying against what Axos Financial Inc.’s record justifies.

$
The assumptions

Tangible book / share, delivered20%/yr’21→’26

The justified multiple is (return on tangible equity − growth) ÷ (cost of equity − growth). A bank earning exactly its cost of equity is worth about one times tangible book; the premium above that prices each point of durable excess return. A higher cost of equity lowers the justified multiple for a bank.

Enter a price above to run it.

Price / tangible book
Justified by the return
Normalized return on tangible equity17%
Price / book
Earnings yield
P/E (3-yr avg ’24–’26)
Graham’s price gate

Graham applied the same standards to financial enterprises (Intelligent Investor ch.14): the 15× multiple cap on averaged earnings, and P/E times price-to-book at most 22.5. The gate marks the bargain-hunter’s floor, not a verdict.

Tangible book $2.9B on 57M shares, a 17% normalized return on it. The dials set the multiple such a return would justify; your price sets the multiple you are paying. It assumes the bank keeps earning that return; a credit cycle, a rate shock or a bad acquisition changes it, which is what the record and the 10-K are for.

Cite: Owner Scorecard, "Axos Financial Inc. (AX), the owner's record," https://ownerscorecard.com/c/AX, data as of 2026-08-17.

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