BIO-key International, Inc.

Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. Thank you for standing by and welcome to BioKey International's third quarter 2021 conference call. During management's prepared remarks, all participants will be in listen-only mode. Afterwards, listeners will be invited to participate in a question and answer session. As a reminder, this conference is being recorded today, Tuesday, November 16th, 2021. I would now like to turn the call over to Kimberly Johnson, BioKey's vice president of product. Please proceed.

Thank you and thank you for joining our call this morning. With me on today's call are BioKeys Chairman and CEO, Mike DePasquale, Chief Revenue Officer, Fred Corsentino, Akintunde Carlton Jeje, Managing Director of Africa, and our CFO, Cece Welch. 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. Words such as estimate, project, expect, anticipate, believe, think, plan, may, or will, or similar words typically identify and express forward-looking statements. Such forward-looking statements are made based on management's beliefs and assumptions made using information currently available 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, please see Risk Factors in the company's annual report filed on Form 10-K and in other filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Listeners are cautioned not to place undue reliance on forward-looking statements which speak only as of today's date. The company undertakes no obligation to revise or disclose revisions to such forward-looking statements to reflect events or circumstances that occur after today. With that, I'll turn the call over to Mike DePasquale.

Thanks, Kim. Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining our Q3 call. After my prepared remarks, I will turn the call over to Fred to review some of our sales initiatives, followed by Kim again to discuss marketing. and Tunde, our Managing Director of Africa, is on the call. He will discuss the current status of our African business, and then CeCe will provide some financial highlights. We are very pleased with the growth of our core business in Q3, driven by increasing demand for our cloud-based portal guard IDaaS identity access control solution. We also continued building out our channel alliance program including a master agent referral partner program with Intellisys, which we believe can contribute substantial new market opportunities, as Fred will speak to momentarily. As I mentioned, I've invited our Managing Director of Africa, Tunde Carlton Jeje, to speak on today's call and to provide an update on our large-scale ID projects in Africa and why we remain very optimistic about the future contribution of these projects as well as other opportunities throughout Africa. As reviewed in our Q3 release, with the timetable of material revenues from Africa pushed forward to 2022, we've revised our full-year 2021 revenue guidance to a range of $5.5 million to $7 million from our prior estimated range of $8 to $12 million. The midpoint of this range would represent growth of 120% over 2020 revenue. Considering the success we are achieving in building our base of recurring, high-margin, software-as-a-service revenue, along with our expanding base of hardware solutions supported by a strong financial position, we are very optimistic about our prospects going forward. On our next call, we plan to provide our outlook for our revenue and profitability goals for 2022. Before turning the call to Fred, I did want to mention that last year's acquisition of PortalGuard's parent company, Pistol Star, has proven to be truly transformational for our company, providing a major boost to our management and engineering teams, our growth and base of recovering revenue, while also opening cross-selling opportunities for our biometric solutions. We have the pieces in place to rapidly accelerate our revenue in a very high margin business, and I am razor focused on ensuring the momentum we have garnered over the past quarters continues into 2022. The valuation multiples in the identity and access management business, especially multi-factor authentication, are far greater than in any other segment of the technology markets in general. Our strong balance sheet, patented technology, and experienced management team provide significant upside for the company this quarter and beyond. We continue to look for favorable tuck-in opportunities to further enhance our growth potential and financial performance. With that, I'll turn the call over to Fred.