Beneficient

Good day and thank you for standing by. Welcome to the Beneficent Company's third quarter fiscal 2024 earnings call. At this time, all participants will be in a listen-only mode. After the presentation, there will be a question and answer session. To ask a question during the session, you will need to press star 1 1 on your telephone. You will then hear an automated message advising your hand is raised. To withdraw your question, please press star 1 1 again. Please be advised that today's conference is being recorded. I would now like to hand the conference over to your host today, Dan Callahan from Beneficent. Please go ahead.

Thank you, and good afternoon, everybody. Thank you for joining us for Beneficent's fiscal third quarter 2024 conference call. In addition to this call, we issued an earnings press release that was posted to the shareholders section of our website at shareholders.trustben.com. As the operator indicated, today's webcast is being recorded and a replay will be available on the company's website, shareholders.trustmen.com. On today's call, management's prepared remarks and answers to questions may contain forward-looking statements that are subject to risks and uncertainties. Actual results and future events could materially differ from those discussed in these forward-looking statements because of factors described in our earnings press release and the risk factors section of our Form 10-K, and in subsequent filings we make with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Forward-looking statements represent management's current estimates, and beneficent assumes no obligation to update any forward-looking statements in the future. Today's call also contains certain non-GAAP financial measures. Please refer to our earnings press release, which is available on our website, for important disclosures regarding such measures including reconciliations to the most comparable GAAP financial measures. Hosting the call today are Brad Heppner, the CEO and Chairman of Beneficent, Greg Ezell, the Chief Financial Officer, and Jeff Welday, Global Head of Originations and Distribution. Following the prepared remarks, we'll hold a question and answer session with institutional and research analyst participants. I'll now turn it over to our CEO and Chairman, Brad Heppner. Brad?

Thank you, Dan. Good afternoon and thank you for joining us. Today we will cover our fiscal third quarter and year-to-date results. More importantly, we will also share with you our vision to accelerate Ben's growth. I'll start our remarks with an update on Ben's unique position in the alternative investment market as a new source of liquidity and capital, coupled with trustee custody and administration services. And then Jeff will provide a deeper dive into our current sales strategies and addressable markets, including plans to build our scale. And then Greg Azale will provide comments on key metrics from our quarterly results. Afterwards, we will take a few questions from institutional call participants. Since we are new to the market, and many of you are likely new to BEN, let's start with a quick overview of exactly what we are. BEN was created to simplify an otherwise complex task of providing fiduciary services and financings that deliver increased liquidity and capital for holders and managers of alternative assets while simultaneously increasing our public shareholders' exposure to various alternative investment asset classes comprising the collateral Ben's loan portfolio. While we can compress the crux of our business into that one pretty simple sounding line, the mechanics of achieving this vision rely on our state-of-the-art, internally developed FinTech platform, AltAccess. which is subject to bank regulator examination and works hand in hand with our first of its kind proprietary financing and trust structure that we call the Exalt Plan to deliver our products and our services to our customers. We believe these unique aspects, which have taken years to develop, differentiate our business from our competition. There have been organizations that have tried to offer early exit or liquidity solutions to our target market but haven't been able to deliver with certainty across three very important dimensions, price, cost, and time. Ben's Alt Access platform and the Exalt Plan financial products are designed to address each of these issues, which we believe will enable us to meet the incredible private market need for liquidity and capital among mid- to high-net-worth individuals, small- to mid-sized institutions, family offices, general partners, and the funds that they manage. There are many ways to measure the addressable market opportunity in front of Ben. but every measurement shares two characteristics. First, that the need for private market liquidity and capital is massive. Second, that our customers are underserved, including by fiduciaries, leaving them with few or limited pathways to achieve their objectives. We've now rolled out our innovative liquidity products and our trustee custody and administration services to the market through our powerful and proprietary FinTech platform, AltAccess. and we have begun the process of scaling our business to achieve operating leverage. We believe these factors will enable us to fulfill our vision of being the premier fiduciary provider of liquidity, capital, and related fiduciary services to a U.S. market that's valued in excess of approximately $2 trillion in net asset value. So let me dig in a little bit more. The market for alternative assets differs greatly from traditional investment assets where there is a robust marketplace with ample liquidity, capital, and ease of transactions through a number of regulated exchanges. With alternative assets, there is no common marketplace where a regulated fiduciary can act on behalf of investors, provide for dedicated permanent capital, and execute timely trades. These structural issues often make alternative assets very illiquid, difficult, and expensive to transact in for most investors, with the exception of well-capitalized, sophisticated financial firms. But in spite of these limitations, we are seeing more participation than ever in these alternative investments by smaller funds, by medium to high net worth individuals, and by other similar parties. The largest private equity funds have certain liquidity solutions available to them simply by virtue of their scale. But what do the growing cadre of smaller owners of these assets do when they need to monetize their holdings? That's where BEN comes in. Through BEN liquidity, which generates interest income, we finance the early liquidity from our customers' alternative assets when they otherwise have limited options. And then we custody the customers' alternative assets in trusts, which serve as a collateral of these financings through BEN custody. FinCustody generates trustee custody and administration fees for us. We may also combine a number of our financings together, including those originating and closed through our AltAccess FinTech platform, into one loan participation program, enabling us to raise cash from large institutional alternative asset investors that find these financings attractive. Ben has developed an end-to-end platform to access, to value, and to provide early liquidity for the illiquid alternative asset market and is now positioned to capitalize on its growth. Ben's fintech capabilities provide the starting point through our all-to-access platform, which is designed to attract alternative asset holders and enable efficient transactions. More importantly, we believe these tools drive our Ben liquidity and Ben custody segments, which can grow and scale to profitability hand-in-hand together far more quickly than either segment could do by themselves. By combining this platform with our extensive pool of relationship with holders of these private market assets and our marketing team's reach, the platform is now ready to grow the asset base and scale toward our operating goals. That's a great transition point now to hand the call over to Jeff Welbe. our global head of originations and distribution, to discuss the addressable market and our current performance. Jeff?