FinWise Bancorp

Greetings and welcome to the Finlay's Bank Court Fourth Quarter 2024 Earnings Conference Call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. A question and answer session will follow the formal presentation. If anyone should require operator assistance, please press star zero on your telephone keypad. As a reminder, this conference is being recorded. I will now hand the conference over to management to begin the preparatory months. Please go ahead.

Good afternoon, and thank you for joining us today for FinWise Bancorp's fourth quarter 2024 earnings conference call. Earlier today, we filed our earnings release and investor deck and posted them to our investor website at investors.finwisebancorp.com. Today's conference call is being recorded and webcast on the company's website, investors.finwisebancorp.com. On today's call, management's prepared remarks and answers to your questions may contain forward-looking statements that are subject to risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ from those discussed today. Forward-looking statements represent management's current estimates, expectations, and beliefs, and FinWISE Bancorp assumes no obligation to update any forward-looking statements in the future. We encourage listeners to review the more detailed discussions related to these forward-looking statements contained in the company's earnings press release and filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Hosting the call today are Kent Landvatter, CEO, Jim Noon, President, and Bob Wallman, CFO. Kent, please go ahead.

Good afternoon, everyone. Our solid results for the fourth quarter capped off another successful year for FinWISE, highlighted by significant progress in our goal to expand and diversify our sources of revenue to enhance the company's long-term growth. We leveraged the strength of our legacy business with our strategic initiatives and delivered solid financial performance, including a rebound in originations from existing programs, stable revenue, and continued growth of our tangible book value per share. Additionally, at the bank level, we remain well capitalized significantly above federal regulatory standards. We are also pleased with the number of new strategic programs we announced in 2024. Specifically, we added four new lending programs, two of which include our credit enhancement product, one payments program, and one credit card program. We continue to see momentum in the pipeline of new programs, particularly as strategic partners are enthusiastic about the benefits that our broader banking and payments platform provides them. On the regulatory front, we remain well-positioned to guide fintechs through a rigorous process to facilitate regulatory compliance, which continues to bribe us with a strong opportunity to gain market share. As part of our company culture, we have proactively invested in our compliance and risk management infrastructure for years and have successfully managed many regulatory exam cycles. As of the end of 2024, approximately 38% of our total staff is employed within compliance, risk management, BSE, and IT functions. Looking ahead, we are very excited about the outlook for our business, and as of now, we expect a gradual progression in growth as we move through 2025. Specifically, we look for our credit enhancement solution to be a meaningful incremental contributor in 2025 and also expect gradual traction in our BIN sponsorship and payments initiatives, both of which are now live. We also look for continued stability in originations from existing programs coupled with incremental growth from programs we signed late last year that are expected to scale through the next few quarters. Importantly, BIN sponsorship and payments provide a mid- to longer-term opportunity for growth, while our credit enhancement product offering represents a more immediate growth opportunity. By having these offerings under one roof, we now have the capability to enable the majority of use cases. It also provides us with a more sticky and recurring revenue stream, which would initially start slowly, but then accelerates as our programs start to scale. Lastly, we remain laser focused on generating positive operating leverage. We have completed most of the incremental investments in our new initiatives and expense growth going forward will be mostly production driven. With that, let me turn the time over to Jim Noon, our president. Thank you, Kent.