BIO-key International, Inc.

Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. Thank you for standing by and welcome to Bio-key International's third quarter 2020 conference call. During the presentation, all participants will be in listen-only mode. After the speaker's remarks, you will be invited to participate in a question and answer session. As a reminder, this conference is being recorded today, Thursday, November 12, 2020. I'd now like to turn the conference over to Scott Manken, Bio-key's Vice President of Channel Sales. Please begin.

Thank you for joining us this morning. With me today are BuyerKeys Chairman and CEO Mike DePasquale, Fred Corcentino, our Chief Revenue Officer, and CeCe Welch, Chief Financial Officer. I'd like to remind everyone that today's conference call and webcast may contain forward-looking statements that are subject to certain risks and uncertainties that may cause actual results to differ materially from those projected on the basis of these statements. The words project, estimate, intend, expect, anticipate, believe, plan, may, or will, and similar expressions generally identify forward-looking statements. Such forward-looking statements are made based on management's beliefs as well as assumptions made and information currently available to management pursuant to the safe harbor provisions of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. for a complete description of these and other risk factors that may affect the future performance of Bio-key International, see risk factors in the company's annual report on Form 10-K and its other filings with the SEC. Listeners are cautioned not to place undue reliance on these forward-looking statements, which speak only as of the date made. The company also undertakes no obligation to disclose any revision to these forward-looking statements to reflect Statements to reflect events or circumstances after the date made. And at this time, I'd like to turn the call over to Mike DePasquale.

Mike? Thank you, Scott, and good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining our call today. As we've all been dealing with the effects of the coronavirus pandemic this past several months, I wanted to start off by thanking the entire BioKey team, including our new colleagues at Pistol Star, for their hard work and commitment during these challenging times. I also want to congratulate Scott Mencken, who just read our Safe Harbor Statement, for assuming the very important new role of Vice President of Channel Sales for Bio-key. Though the COVID-19 pandemic continues to impact our business in a variety of ways, the third quarter was a pivotal period for Bio-key, as we not only completed the recapitalization of the company, but we were able to build revenue momentum particularly with our integrated portal guard solution. During the quarter, we began to see a gradual return to more normal sales and marketing dialogues. Though many of those are still remote meetings and many customer prospects have yet to fully reopen to IT vendor dialogues, additionally, Q3 marked the first quarter incorporating the results of Pistol Star and its PortalGuard Multi-Factor Identity and Access Management, or IAN, business. PortalGuard has proven to be an ideal solution for challenges created by the pandemic as businesses and institutions grapple to provide user-friendly remote access. In particular, PortalGuard has demonstrated growing traction with higher education institutions seeking to strengthen and streamline online access to educational resources for students, faculty, and administration as these institutions manage the spike in remote access requirements. The portal guard purchase formally closed on June 30th, the last day of Q2, and we made significant steps in advancing our strategic vision for the company during the third quarter. In July, we successfully recapitalized our company with the proceeds from a public offering of common stock and warrants. This funding has put BioKey now on the strongest financial footing we've had in over a decade. Importantly, it removes risk to our company from possible business disruptions related to COVID-19 or any other economic or political factors that could affect our company or our customers and allow us to focus our full attention on growth initiatives. After repaying short-term note financings, funding the bulk of the Pistol Star acquisition, and addressing other working capital needs, Bio-key ended the third quarter with $18.4 million in cash and just $235,000 remaining on a note payable related to the Pistol Star transaction. Our financial strength also serves us well when dealing with large enterprise and government customer prospects. as well as partners who seek assurances of long-term strength when choosing partners for mission-critical solutions. It also allows us to make prudent investments in our business, such as building out our Bio-key Africa subsidiary and enhancing our sales and marketing team initiatives. We're now extremely well-positioned to execute on our backlog of over $75 million in contracts and to fully tap the sales potential of our expanded team. Enhanced product portfolio, growing customer relationships, and expanded visibility in the lucrative growth market for identity solutions, including authentication, network security, and access management. CC will review our Q3 financial results, which improved, showed solid top-line improvements over Q2 2020 and the year-ago third quarter. We expect this trend to continue into Q4 and 2021. supported by our contract backlog and a strong outlook for our solutions on a global basis, with particular emphasis on North America, Africa, and Asia. As we mentioned in today's press release, we are achieving initial traction in our African contracts, as we have commenced work on the first of the two large projects in Nigeria. These projects were delayed due to the COVID-19 pandemic, and then more recently following civil unrest, related to the police as well as reform concerns. The Nigerian economy is now open, business activity is beginning to return, and our projects are beginning to move forward. The first project to get underway involves our providing software and hardware solutions in support of the Nigerian Ministry of Labor program intended to create employment opportunities for recent college graduates in Nigeria. This program has gained even greater importance in the wake of the pandemic and its impact on employment. We're planning initial hardware and software deployments with anticipated orders for approximately $650,000 in this current fourth quarter. We expect the project to ramp substantially over the next few quarters with total expected revenue of approximately $45 million by 2022. We have another large-scale project to provide biometric security solutions for secure authentication of customers for a major African telecom provider that is slated to start early next year. This project is expected to generate approximately 30 million of revenue over roughly two years. On top of this, we are continuing to build out our Bio-key Africa subsidiary to support government civil ID and business enterprise authentication and security opportunities across the African continent. We believe our breadth of multi-factor authentication offerings, coupled with our biometric expertise, positions us well in this burgeoning growth opportunity across the continent. For example, we are looking to team with channel partners to deliver biometric security solutions for identification needs in areas such as mobile communications and payments, immigration and border security, and social welfare programs. Some of these initiatives are attracting international funding as well. Additionally, PortalGuard is becoming an integrated part of our core business, providing a more robust product offering across a broader range of business verticals. These verticals include financial, government, and highly regulated enterprises, as well as higher education and state and local government. It's not just market presence and customer reach, but we are now a larger company in terms of engineering, product development, and sales and marketing. There's substantial cross-selling or up-selling opportunity with Bio-key's biometric technology solutions that can provide a more robust, Multi-factor Identification and Access Management single sign-on to our existing portal guard customers. And we could also provide improved multi-factor IAM and SSO solutions to our existing Bio-key customers. To enhance our marketing efforts for our expanded product suite, in August, we named Kimberly Johnson as our VP of Product Marketing. Kimberly's charge is to provide cohesive marketing leadership across the company, and she brings to BioKey a strong track record of success. Under her leadership, last week we unveiled a brand new integrated corporate website to clarify our company and product messaging. Please be sure to visit our site at bio-key.com. Finally, with respect to our outlook for Q4, beyond the comments we have made, We expect revenue to be substantially higher than in Q3, and we expect continued momentum carrying into 2021, driven by the growth of our core business and the ramp-up of our African projects. Let me now turn the call over to Fred Corsentino to highlight a few specific developments in our business. Fred?