Beneficient

Welcome to the Beneficent Second Quarter Fiscal 2025 Earnings Call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. After the speaker's presentation, there will be a question and answer session. Instructions will be given at that time. As a reminder, this call may be recorded. I would now like to turn the call over to Dan Callahan, Director of Communications. Please go ahead.

Good morning, everyone. Thank you for joining us today for Beneficent's Fiscal Second Quarter 2025 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. Today's webcast is being recorded and a replay will be available on the company's website. Today's call, management's prepared remarks may contain forward-looking statements that are subject to risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ from those discussed today. 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 made 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. On the call this morning are Brad Heppner, our CEO and Chairman, and Greg Ezell, Chief Financial Officer. I'll hand the meeting over to Mr. Heppner. Brad, take it away.

Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining us this morning. In our second fiscal quarter ending September 30th, we continued to build on the progress of the first quarter with a number of positive developments. The management team has also been busy meeting with the investment community, including our participation earlier this week at the CorpGov Forum and other investor conferences earlier in the quarter. Interest is high in how Ben is democratizing private equity and delivering custody and transaction services for all types of alternative assets. Venn was created to provide fiduciary products and services that deliver liquidity and primary capital for holders and managers of all types of alternative assets. We are developing our business to particularly focus on the target markets of mid to high net worth individuals and small to mid-sized institutions who have been underserved when it comes to exiting alternative assets prior to their maturity, in addition to general partners. We estimate that mid to high net worth investors in small to mid-sized institutions in the U.S. alone account for more than $2.7 trillion of net asset value, with an annual unmet demand for liquidity of over $61 billion annually, growing now to more than $100 billion within the next five years. Further, the markets for general partners seeking liquidity for their limited partners through restructurings in the secondary market is in excess of $100 billion annually. That means that when combined, our platform addresses a demand for secondary market liquidity from mid to high net worth investors and small to mid-sized institutions and general partners and LPs of over $150 billion per year and growing. The traditional process for these smaller investors seeking liquidity is incredibly complex. It's expensive. and it's time-consuming, often taking as long as 15 months or more if liquidity can be found at all. To address this problem, we built our own fintech platform called BenAltAccess with a goal of completing these important transactions online in a fraction of that time, now potentially in as few as 15 days with the introduction of our new machine-automated pricing system, or MAPS for short. It's an application which I will discuss shortly. In addition to demand for liquidity from alternative assets, our market faces a substantial demand for more primary capital into new alternative assets. For general partners seeking this capital, sourcing it has become increasingly difficult and there are few innovative new solutions to solve this problem. PEI data shows that it has been taking an average of 18 months for general partners to raise their private equity funds, which is approximately double what it took them just three years ago. The good news is that we understand both of these markets and have solutions tailored to their needs, which are the foundations of our business, and have now produced two quarters in a row of profitable progress for our stockholders. As a recap, during our first quarter into June 30, 2024, we provided a number of positive announcements. We announced a unique primary capital fiduciary financing product in the general partner starting new funds, which as I just detailed, we see as a robust, large, adjacent, related market to our liquidity fiduciary financings. Second, we initiated MAPS, which streamlines the pricing for our exalt loans that are backed by alternative assets. MAPS integrates enhanced algorithmic capabilities designed to handle a higher volume of transactions with greater efficiency and reduced transaction time to potentially as little as 15 days. Third, our board of directors approved the Exchange Trust product plan to complete up to $5 billion of fiduciary financings to customer Exalt Trust through Exalt Trust transactions. And fourth, we reported a profitable quarter our first as a public company. These developments last quarter provided meaningful enhancements to the operating model of beneficence and improved on the competitive dynamics we believe we already possess. But our work is not done, and in the second fiscal quarter ended September 30, 2024, we continued to build on those successes, delivering a second consecutive quarter of positive, fully diluted earnings per share for our common shareholders which Greg will discuss in just a moment. However, before we get into the numbers, I want to touch on a few key business highlights. First, in September, we announced a transaction that involved reclassification of certain preferred equity such that it improved our permanent equity by $126 million. This improvement to our permanent equity from a deficit of $148.3 million to just a deficit of $13.2 million. We will continue through this quarter on our plan toward completing transactions that will turn the deficit to a surplus of permanent equity. Additionally, we undertook a further SEC registration filing to put into effect our standby equity purchase agreement for issuance of up to 203 million shares of Class A common stock, which could provide beneficent with significant capital. I'm pleased to report that this registration statement was declared effective just three days ago. These transactions are part of our plan to meet important listing requirements, as well as to provide a source of capital for completing fiduciary financings backed by alternative assets, as well as operating funds for growth and represent a significant expansion of our balance sheet. Next, in October, the company announced the appointment of Patrick Donegan as an independent member of the company's board. Mr. Donegan brings almost 30 years of compliance legal, banking, and capital markets experience to Ben, having held various senior compliance positions, including as Chief Compliance Officer for bank holding companies and broker dealers, and as an Assistant General Counsel for a securities company. Through his legal experience and compliance officer roles, Mr. Donegan has developed expertise in identifying risks and establishing policies and procedures to effectively manage those risks. Mr. Donegan's understanding of banking and capital market rules and related regulatory processes enhance our efforts to maintain industry best practices across our organization. Over the course of his career, Mr. Donegan has obtained 11 FINRA licenses and two certifications from the American Bankers Association, including the Certified Regulatory Compliance Manager's designation He currently holds a certified anti-money laundering specialist certification. He serves on multiple committees of the Beneficent Board, including our audit committee. Finally, since our public listing in early June 2023, as much as 90% of our company's publicly listed Class A common stock was in the hands of a single holder. It's a liquidation trust of a prior parent company charged with liquidating their shares in Beneficent. Over the course of the last roughly 12 months, that trust has been consistently in the market selling a significant amount of the beneficent holdings. As of their last filing date on October 4th, the trust now holds about 8% of our outstanding shares having sold over 90% of their position into the market. This is a significant reduction to an overhang that has weighed on our stock price performance over the past year or more and resulted in the distribution of our shares across a much broader shareholder base. I'm very proud of our efforts to the first two quarters of fiscal 2025. We've improved the product offerings of the business, been introduced to new adjacent markets in need of our solutions and streamlined our cost structure to become a leaner more efficient company, ready for scale. We've taken steps to expand our balance sheet and improve liquidity with our standby equity purchase agreement. We are methodically managing the outstanding regulatory and legal issues, and the headwinds from our largest shareholders selling their stock should be now abating. With these improvements in motion, we will continue to work to educate the market on who we are, what we do, and the value and growth opportunity we represent for shareholders. We're moving forward, and I look forward to continuing to report progress on our key initiatives through the second half of this fiscal year. Now, with that, I'll turn the call over to our CFO, Greg Azell, to go over our operating and financial results. Greg?