FORT WORTH, Texas -

General Motors Financial generated the most North American originations in a single quarter ever while continuing to compile more prime paper than subprime contracts in the process.

President and chief executive officer Dan Berce highlighted that the captive’s North American originations jumped to $3.4 billion during the third quarter, eclipsing the previous high mark of $3.2 billion established a year earlier. During the second quarter, GM Financial’s North American originations totaled $2.5 billion, which include contracts from GM’s franchised dealerships in both the U.S. and Canada as well as dealerships of other OEMs and independent stores that still send the company applications.

Of that new company record, Berce explained during GM Financial’s conference call with investment analysts that $2.2 billion of the Q3 figure stemmed from new-model activity at GM dealers with $600 million being connected to used-vehicle financing at GM stores as well as another $600 million outside of the automaker’s dealer network, which oftentimes is where the captive’s subprime paper originates.

Berce then went on to describe the credit quality of those originations.

“As a percentage of all GM’s subprime lending activity as it relates to GM new vehicles, our share was 30 percent, down both sequentially and a year ago, but our share of prime lending increased to 12 percent, up from June of 2016, but down from 14 percent a year ago,” Berce said.

“I’ll point out as I did before that the mix of our originations continues to shift to higher credit quality tiers and it’s reflected here in the fact that our average FICO for the September 2016 quarter was 686, higher than what we've seen in the last four or five quarters.

Adding in its international activity, GM Financial reported that its retail loan originations rose $5.1 billion for the third quarter, up from $4.2 billion in Q2 and $4.7 billion in the year-ago period.

Through the first nine months of 2016, the captive’s retail loan originations totaled $13.4 billion, compared to $13.1 billion at the same juncture a year earlier.

GM Financial added that its outstanding balance of retail finance receivables stood at $32.2 billion as of Sept. 30.

All of that origination activity helped GM Financial to generate $147 million in net income during Q3. The metric softened a bit year-over-year as the company reported $179 million in net income for Q3 of last year.

Through nine months, GM Financial’s net income came in at $500 million, off from $515 million for the nine months of 2015.

Turning to other parts of its operation, GM Financial noted that its retail finance receivables sitting 31 to 60 days delinquent ticked lower year-over-year to settle at 3.5 percent of the portfolio as of Sept. 30, down from 4.0 percent that the company spotted on the same date last year.

Accounts more than 60 days delinquent also improved slightly as those customers represented 1.5 percent of the portfolio at the end of Q3, down from 1.6 percent a year ago.

GM Financial went on to mention its annualized net charge-offs were 2.0 percent of average retail finance receivables for the third quarter. For the nine months of this year, annualized retail net charge-offs were 1.9 percent. Both readings increased 1 basis point year-over-year.

“Compared to the year-ago quarter, we have continued to see normalization in credit results as well as low recovery rates,” Berce said. “Those factors have been offset by our positive mix shift to prime.

“Finance receivables with FICO scores less than 620 now comprise just over half of our retail loan portfolio in North America compared to 65 percent a year ago,” he continued.

“One more note on recovery rates: They are down both year-over-year and sequentially. This continues a trend that we've seen throughout 2016 and we do expect softer recovery rates as we move into 2017,” Berce went on to say.

Elsewhere within its operation, GM Financial highlighted that its outstanding balance of commercial finance receivables stood at $9.8 billion as of Sept. 30, compared to $9.4 billion on June 30 and $7.8 billion at the close of last year’s third quarter. Berce noted that 745 dealers are using GM Financial’s commercial finance offerings.

“Floor planning continues to represent the bulk of the portfolio at 88 percent, and we do expect to see continued steady increases in both the number of dealers and outstandings as we move forward throughout 2016 and into 2017,” he said.

GM Financial closed by mentioning the company had total available liquidity of $15.4 billion as of Sept. 30. That figure consisted of $2.6 billion of cash and cash equivalents, $11.6 billion of borrowing capacity on unpledged eligible assets, $0.6 billion of borrowing capacity on committed unsecured lines of credit and $0.6 billion of borrowing capacity on a junior subordinated revolving credit facility from GM.