Cohen & Company Inc.

Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to Cohen and Company's third quarter 2025 earnings call. My name is Alicia, and I'll be your operator for today. Before we begin, Cohen and Company would like to remind everyone that some of the statements the company makes during this call may contain forward-looking statements under applicable securities laws. These statements may involve risks and uncertainties that could cause the company's actual results to differ materially from the results discussed in such forward-looking statements. The forward-looking statements made during this call are made only as of the date of this call, and the company undertakes no obligations to update such statements to reflect subsequent events or circumstances. Cohen & Company advises you to read the cautionary note regarding forward-looking statements in its earnings release and in its most recent annual report on Form 10-K filed with the SEC. Earlier today, Cohen and Company issued a press release announcing third quarter 2025 financial results. Today's discussion is complementary to that press release, which is available on the company's website at cohenandcompany.com. This conference call is being recorded, and a replay of it will be available for three days, beginning shortly after the conclusion of this call. The company's remarks also include certain non-GAAP financial measures that management leaves are meaningful when evaluating the company's performance. A reconciliation of these non-GAAP financial measures to the comparable GAAP measures is provided in the company's earnings release. After the prepared remarks, the call will be opened up for questions. I would now like to turn the call over to Mr. Daniel Cohen, Executive Chairman of Cohen and Company.

Thank you, Alicia. And everybody, welcome to our third quarter's earnings call. The results, which Lester, our CEO, and Joe, our CFO, will go over, speak for themselves. We are super excited about our present, our future, and what we really have been able to build. We're in the middle still of that build-out of Cohen & Company Securities into the premier frontier technology investment bank. But the results over the past few quarters show the potential. Year to September 30th, we have IPO'd with sponsors 18 new SPAC vehicles in a market that only has started to recover, we believe. Companies like Vertiv, MP Materials, DraftKings, and SoFi are among the companies, I can remind you, that have gone public with SPACs. Alone, those comprise well above $100 billion market cap. We have maintained our position as the leading advisor for D-SPAC transactions, and we have built strong franchises in rare earth and quantum computing now, as well as continued our leadership in the digital asset transaction space. With tokenization of financial assets just beginning, we expect to extend our experience in taking blockchain assets to traditional stock market vehicles to what we see as the future of traditional assets moving to the blockchain. We are stoked to continue building the future and we will share our expectations going forward. Let me turn it over to Lester to make remarks on our year-to-date, our company, and our future.

Thank you, Daniel. We had a strong performance in the third quarter as we continued to execute our strategy and drive sustainable value for our stockholders. Our third quarter total revenue was $84.2 million, and our adjusted pre-tax income was $16.4 million, representing 19.4% of total revenue. Year-to-date through September 30th, our total revenue was $172.8 million, and our adjusted pre-tax income was $23.2 million, representing 13.4% of total revenue. We are focused on capitalizing on innovative areas in the capital markets where we can add value to our clients through various business cycles. Our boutique investment bank, Kohn & Company Capital Markets, or CCM, focused on SPACs during the height of the SPAC market and continued working with our SPAC clients through difficult times of 2022 and 2023. The result of this consistent client focus has resulted in CCM at the top of the league tables, coming in number one in SPAC IPO underwritings with the most left book run deals year to date, and number one in SPAC advisory by a wide margin with lead share in D-SPAC pipes. To further enhance our SPAC franchise, we've added an equity trading team to provide our investors with an additional source of liquidity. We have taken the same approach in the digital asset space where we invested in client outreach during a low in the capital markets activity. As a result of this outreach, we have become a leader in the crypto capital markets with over $12 billion raised with crypto clients and 26 transactions closed across digital asset treasury strategies, M&A, IPOs, and D-SPACs during the 2025 year to date, placing CCM in the top three firms on Wall Street in this space. Launched in 2021, CCM has become an increasingly important component of our company overall, generating $133 million in the first nine months of 2025, up from $22.7 million in full year 2021. CCM as a percentage of revenue, total revenue, total company revenue has grown to 77% for the first nine months of 2025, from 15% in the full year of 2021. Going forward, we will continue to focus on being the advisor of choice to the growth and frontier technology section of the economy, including blockchain, fintech, rare earth metals, as well as the related sub-verticals of stablecoin, tokenization, and AI. During the quarter, CCM generated $68.6 million in net revenue across 18 clients. Supported by a strong pipeline of transactions, CCM is well positioned to continue accelerating growth and deliver an exceptional performance through the end of the year. During the nine months ended September 30, 2025, CCM has underwritten 18 SPAC IPOs, four of which have announced transactions with 14 searching for D-SPAC target companies. Clearly, there are significant potential D-SPAC fees to earn in the next 12 to 18 months as part of CCM's 300 million gross pipeline of possible transactions. To put this in perspective, at this point in 2024, CCM only had 145 million gross pipelines of possible transactions. Although the CCM business can be uneven from quarter to quarter, we remain confident that we can continue growing our CCM revenue base and are excited for 2026 as we are with our success in 2025. Furthermore, we are confident in our ability to attract incremental talent to our innovative, cutting-edge investment banking operations. In addition, the declining interest rate environment has bolstered our trading revenue, which was up 26% in the third quarter from the previous quarter, with increased revenue coming across all our trading desks. Also, our gross gestation repo book has grown to over $3.3 billion, and we expect these trends will continue, providing additional opportunities to enhance net trading revenue. We're also hopeful that our sponsor, SPAC Columbus Circle Capital Corp. 1, will close its business combination with ProCap BTC in the fourth quarter of 2025, or the first quarter of 2026. We are at an important flexion point in our long-term strategy. Based on what we have seen in trading revenue and our CCM pipeline thus far, we are confident that we will generate more than $50 million in revenue in the fourth quarter and more than $220 million in revenue for the full year 2025. We also anticipate our compensation and benefits expense lineup for the full year 2025 to be in a range of 68% to 72% of revenue and our adjusted pre-tax income for the full year 2025 to be in the range of 10% to 15% of revenue. At this level of annualized revenue, our total annual revenue per employee will be around $1.8 million. In contrast, for 2024, our annual revenue per employee was $700,000. We are pleased with our results and are grateful for the efforts of all our employees. We remain confident in our future earnings potential and are committed to driving long-term, sustainable value for our stockholders, including through quarterly dividends. Now I will return the call over to Joe to walk through this quarter's financial highlights in more detail.