Great Elm Capital Corp.

Good day, and thank you for standing by. Welcome to the Great Elm Capital Corp. Third Quarter 2021 Financial Results Conference Call. At this time, our participants are in a listen-only mode. After the speaker's presentation, there will be a question and answer session. To ask a question during the session, you will need to press star 1 on your telephone. If you require any further assistance, please press star 0. I would now like to hand the conference over to a representative from the company, Mr. Adam Pryor. You may begin.

Thank you, and good morning, everyone. Thank you for joining us for Great Elm Capital Corp's third quarter earnings conference call. If you would like to be added to our distribution list, you can email investorrelations at greatelmcap.com, or you can sign up for alerts directly on our website at greatelmcc.com. In addition to our comments for today's call, we will be utilizing an investor presentation as an accompaniment. While we will not be directly referring to the slides, our comments today will generally follow the form and structure of the presentation. The slide presentation accompanying this morning's call and webcast can be found on our website under Financial Information, Quarterly Results. On the website, you can also find a copy of this presentation, our earnings release, Form 10-Q, and a link to the webcast as well. I'd like to call your attention to the customary safe harbor language regarding forward-looking information. Also, please note that nothing in today's call constitutes an offer sell or solicitation of offers to purchase our securities. Today's conference call includes forward-looking statements and projections, and we ask that you refer to Great Elm Capital Corp.' 's filings with the SEC for important factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from those projections. Great Elm Capital Corp. does not undertake to update its forward-looking statements unless required by law. To obtain copies of SEC's filings, please visit Great Elm Capital Corp's website under Financial Information, SEC Filings, or visit the SEC's website. As a reminder, this webcast is being recorded on Friday, November 5th, 2021. Hosting the call this morning is Peter Reed, Great Elm Capital Corp's President and Chief Executive Officer. Please go ahead, Pete.

Thank you, Adam. Good morning, and thank you for joining us today. On today's call, we have our COO, Adam Kleinman, our CFO, Kerry Davis, and our portfolio manager, Matt Kaplan. I would like to start out by highlighting our acquisition of a majority interest in lenders funding near the end of the quarter. We are excited to partner with its founder, Bob Zadek, as well as Harvey Friedman and Gene Madden, who have built a business with a long-term track record, profitable growth, and a strong underwriting culture. We look forward to supporting lenders funding's future growth which I will touch on in more detail later. Also, as is our usual practice, I will now provide an overview of GECC's investment performance during the quarter, then Matt will discuss our portfolio, Kerry will discuss our financial highlights in greater detail, and I'll return for closing remarks. Our third quarter showed progress in many regards as we deployed $71.1 million into over 26 investments with a weighted average yield of and grew our investment portfolio to $246.7 million, an increase of nearly 18% from the second quarter. Our investments in the quarter spanned a variety of industries with a focus on specialty finance. We improved the weighted average yield on our debt investments to 11.3% from 11.1% in the prior quarter and continued to deploy capital into a higher number of income-generating equity investments. Throughout the year, We have successfully increased liquidity while lowering our overall cost of capital and strengthened our financial position through the extension of maturities. Finally, our asset coverage ratio was 163.8% at the end of the quarter. Let me take a quick moment to provide an overview of our financial position. At quarter end, GECC had total assets of $415.2 million. with $99.4 million of net asset value, or $3.70 per share. We pay a regular quarterly cash dividend of $0.10 per share, which represents a yield of 10.8% on September 30th NAV. NII for the quarter was approximately $1.6 million, or $0.07 per share, as compared to NII of $2.1 million, or $0.09 per share, for the quarter ended June 30th, 2021. Our NII this period was impacted due to certain one-time items primarily related to legal fees incurred in connection with the legacy full circle investment, which resulted in a reduction to NII of approximately two cents per share. As we have discussed in prior quarters, we are growing the portfolio and getting to an inflection point where legacy investments are no longer as impactful as they may have been in the past. To put this in context, Our largest industry in terms of percentage of the overall book at fair value is specialty finance. This is the first time in our tenure where the largest percentage of the portfolio is weighted to investments which were not part of the portfolio at the time of the full-service merger. We have now deployed over $179 million in new investments in the first nine months of 2021 with an increasingly diversified investment mix. as we seek to rotate the portfolio into what we believe to be higher quality credits, primarily comprised of secured loans, bonds, preferred equity, and investments in specialty finance businesses uncorrelated to the corporate credit portfolio. This is partially driven by our ownership position in relationship with Prestige Capital, a spot factoring business that provides liquidity to its clients by purchasing their receivables from creditworthy counterparties at a discount to face value. Prestige has over 30 years of experience in the factoring business, with approximately $6 billion in aggregate transactions factored during that time. Since our acquisition of a majority interest in Prestige, its performance has been excellent as Prestige is in many cases taking comparatively little credit risk for returns that are frequently more attractive than those that can be found in the syndicated credit market. As we have discussed previously, Our goal as managers has been to support the team at Prestige and to continue to allow them to pursue larger transactions due to the strength of our balance sheet. We are constantly analyzing the most effective methods to grow our specialty finance platform further, given the results produced to date. Our overall goal is to create an ecosystem where we can provide solutions to small businesses at varying stages in their development. Our team continues to explore a number of acquisition opportunities in the specialty finance space, many of which we were introduced to by the management teams at Prestige and Lenders Funding. To that end, we were very pleased to acquire majority interest in Lenders Funding during the quarter. Under the direction of the company's principles, Lenders Funding provides participant financing and risk sharing specifically for factors and asset-based lenders. The acquisition of Lenders Funding increases our visibility into the broader specialty finance market due to it having over 20 years of experience providing capital to lenders in the specially financed space, as well as it provides proprietary overflow opportunities for GECC. It is a perfect complement to Prestige and another important step in our specially financed strategy at GECC. In connection with this acquisition, GECC also issued approximately 3.4 million shares to lenders funding at net asset value. At this point, I'd like to turn the call to Matt to discuss our portfolio performance for the quarter.