BIO-key International, Inc.

Good morning, everyone. Thank you for standing by and welcome to the BioKey International's first quarter 2023 conference call. During management's prepared remarks, all participants will be in a listen-only mode. Afterwards, listeners will be invited to participate in a question and answer session. As a reminder, this conference call is being recorded today, Tuesday, May 16th of 2023. I would now like to turn the call over to Mr. Bill Jones of Investor Relations. You may proceed.

Thank you. Thank you for joining today's call. Participating today are BioKeys Chairman and CEO Mike DiPasquale and CFO CeCe Welch. I remind everyone that today's conference call and webcast, as well as answers to questions, will include forward-looking statements, which are subject to certain risks and uncertainties that can cause actual results to differ from those expected. Words such as anticipate, believe, estimate, expect, plan, project, or similar words generally identify and express such forward-looking statements. These statements are made based on management's beliefs and assumptions today 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 the company, please see risk factors in the company's annual report as filed in Form 10-K with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Listeners are cautioned not to place undue reliance on forward-looking statements, which speak as of today's date only. BioKey undertakes no obligation to revise or to disclose revisions to any forward-looking statements to reflect circumstances or events that occur after today. And with that, I'll turn the call over to Mike.

Thanks, Bill. And good morning. And thank you for to everyone for joining us today. We held our q4 call just six weeks ago. And so we can keep our comments brief on this call. After CC does a brief update on our the status of our filings are 10k and 10q. She'll review our financials and then we will open the call to investor questions. We are very proud to report quarterly revenue growth of 59% from $1.9 million to $3.1 million for Q1 23, along with a substantial improvement in our bottom line performance, reducing our operating loss by 70% from $1 million to $308,000. As we have discussed, our quarterly performance reflects our growing base of annual recurring software and maintenance revenue, as well as strong new customer activity, reflecting our growing global base of partners in our channel alliance program, as well as enhancements to our direct sales efforts, including a disciplined focus on larger enterprise opportunities. These go-to-market paths are resonating in the market we serve and are generating a growing pipeline of opportunities, including several large customer prospects in the mid to high six digits and above range. Specifically, our identity-bound biometric solutions, which address customer mandates for phoneless, tokenless, or passwordless authentication, are really resonating in the marketplace. For example, at a recent Gartner hosted event, including the Gartner IAM conference in April, we have developed several significant IAM deployment prospects that we are now working to progress to formal engagements. The Gartner events have proven to attract a very strong base of larger prospects with particular requirements that match well to our solutions. We're optimistic that a number of these larger opportunities will progress to formal deployments later this year, including a few that are already in proof of concept stages. Building on this traction, we attended the RSA conference earlier this month And we'll be attending the Identiverse conference early June. We've also refined our focus in Africa, signing a number of new partners who will sell our portal guard solutions to the emerging markets in a number of countries on the continent. Concurrently, we continue to serve the larger contracts that we've executed two years ago. Our work with Nelex in supporting the onboarding of young college-level graduates to support the emerging identity and payment ecosystem is starting to gain traction. And you will be hearing more from us on this initiative in the coming months. First quarter developments included the expanded use of our biometric client identification system to 21 million users by Capitec Bank in South Africa. from just 9 million users in March of 2020. Our solution delivers enhanced security with streamlined client identification in a highly scalable manner. Capitech has been a flagship banking client since 2015 when they took the pioneering step to leverage fingerprint biometrics to secure their clients against fraud and theft. Our work with Capitech has developed into a long-term relationship a very valuable customer case study, and, of course, a growing base of recurring revenue for BioKey. Also in Q1, our Swivel Secure business launched a project to enable 1.5 million citizens in a Central American nation to securely access their country's online tax applications. Our solution will reduce long queues for tax delivery, providing substantial benefits to both taxpayers and and the tax authority. We have also recently supported Dayton Children's Hospital with their migration to Epic Hyperdrive, the next generation web-based medical records application. Our portal guard solutions provide support for their existing deployment of our biometric authentication solution in this new web-based Epic environment. Our work with Dayton's provides an excellent proof of concept for other Epic clients utilizing our biometric solutions who are now contemplating the migration to Epic Hyperdrive. Our identity bound biometrics or IBV capabilities create a personalized authentication solution that is both highly secure and frictionless for end users. Shared workstations are common in a variety of settings in healthcare, customer service centers, and even in manufacturing and industrial settings. Such shared workstation access creates the potential for security vulnerabilities due to password, token, or card sharing. Our IVB solutions allow customers to cost-effectively deploy flexible authentication capabilities in a phoneless, tokenless, and cardless environment balancing strong security, expediency, and convenience. Another Q1 highlight was with Alabama Power, headquartered in Birmingham, which selected BioKey's portal guard and WebKey to secure their 15 enterprise air gap networks, representing a new customer relationship for us. BioKey serves over 600 customers around the globe, with strong engagement in higher education, county governments, healthcare, and financial services. Customers are attracted to our highly efficient, cost-effective solutions that deliver secure, scalable, easy to use, quick to deploy user access across hybrid user environments. As mentioned, we are seeing particularly strong engagement prospects that are seeking a more robust authentication solution to meet their specific needs and eliminate commonly used authentication factors that are failing. To address this global opportunity, we continue to build on our technology and distribution partner efforts to position BioKey solution before a broader base of prospects. We're also working to more deeply engage with some of our larger and more influential partners. For example, our EMEA group recently met with a leading global web service provider about quickly onboarding BioKey into their accelerator program. We hope to have more to say on this next quarter. Additionally, we have an effort focused on building technical alliances with other leaders in the IAM industry, such as Beyond Trust and ForgeRock, where we can collaborate to bring the best-in-breed solutions to their customers. Though we had viewed these companies sometimes as competitors, We recognize today that there are mutually beneficial ways that we can work together. We continue talking with other industry leaders where we feel there are good synergies. We expect these tech partnerships to open new sales opportunities, both small and large, that we would not otherwise be able to pursue. As partner source sales opportunities are increasing, We're building awareness, engagement, and understanding of our capabilities within our CAP program members. In that vein, we have launched the program we call BioKey University for channel partners to train online on BioKey integrated solutions with the first version ready to roll out this quarter. In terms of product development, We recently completed a WebKey passwordless login browser for Epic. I mentioned that before. We're releasing two new PortalGuard family products, a PortalGuard Desktop MFA for Windows and Mac this month, and PortalGuard for MSPs this quarter as part of our effort to expand the capability and relevance of our suite of software solutions, especially for managed service providers, managed security, service providers, and all of our other partners in our partner network. On the marketing front, we have implemented an account-based marketing model where our marketing and sales resources are better focused and aligned to target new commercial account opportunities with larger deal sizes. Our goal is to increase our average project size by 50% this year. For perspective, We've contacted 35 new marketing qualified accounts in April alone, leveraging this new approach. CC will review our Q1 financials next, but from a high level, the strategic actions we have been taking enabled us to achieve record quarterly revenue in Q1 23, while also trimming our operating loss. Considering this solid start to 2023, and our growing pipeline of new and existing customer opportunities, including larger engagements, we are confident BioKey is positioned to deliver top-line growth and bottom-line improvements for the full fiscal 2023 year, with some variability in our quarterly results driven by timing of new business activity. With that, I'll turn the call over to CeCe.