Great Elm Capital Corp.

greetings and welcome to the great elm capital corp fourth quarter 2022 financial results at this time all participants are in a listen-only mode a brief question and answer session will follow the formal presentation if anyone should require operator assistance during the conference please press star 0 on your telephone keypad as a reminder this conference is being recorded It is now my pleasure to introduce your host, Garrett Edison, a representative of the company. Thank you. You may begin.

Good morning, and thank you, everyone, for joining us for Great Elm Capital Corp.' 's fourth quarter 2022 earnings conference call. If you'd 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, www.greatelmcc.com. I'd like to note the slide presentation posted on our website accompanying today's call. The slide presentation can be found on our website under financial information quarterly results. On our website, you can also find our earnings release and SEC filings. I would like to call your attention to the customary safe harbor statement regarding forward-looking information. Also, please note that nothing in today's call constitutes an offer to sell or a solicitation of offers to purchase our securities. Today's conference call includes forward-looking statements, 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 these statements. Great Elm Capital Corp does not undertake to update its forward-looking statements unless required by law. To obtain copies of SEC filings, please visit Great Elm Capital Corp's website under Financial Information, SEC Filings, or visit the SEC's website. Hosting the call this morning is Matt Kaplan, Great Elm Capital Corp's Chief Executive Officer, who will be joined by Kerry Davis, GECC's CFO, Adam Kleinman, Chief Compliance Officer of GECC, and Mike Keller, President of Great Elm Specialty Finance. I will now turn the call over to GECC's CEO, Matt Kaplan.

Thank you, Garrett. Good morning, and thank you for joining us today. Nearly one year ago, I hosted this call for the first time as the newly appointed CEO of GECC and outlined our strategy to reboot the company. Today, I am pleased to discuss our fourth quarter results, which I believe mark a clear turning point in Great Elm Capital Corp's history and begin to validate the revamped portfolio strategy on which the team has been executing. One of the key pillars of our strategy was to construct a high-quality, diversified portfolio focused on performing and cash-yielding investments. To that end, the cash income generated from our investment portfolio in the fourth quarter was the highest amount in GECC's history, and our portfolio is almost entirely comprised of cash-generating investments today. Talking about cash generation is one thing, but the impact is reflected in our financials. For 2022, PIC and accretion income was approximately 11% of total investment income, significantly lower than the nearly 40% in 2021. Our focus on cash generation and portfolio construction set us up to report fourth quarter NII of $2.3 million, or 30 cents per share, more than double the 14 cents reported for the third quarter of 2022. Quite simply, our shift to focus on deploying capital into senior secured floating rate investments is working and materially boosted NII from the prior quarter. Further, operating expenses declined from the third quarter, as I indicated on the November call. Additionally, our board decided to realign our quarterly distribution to what we believe to be a sustainable level of 35 cents per share for the first quarter of 2023. Given our momentum and our growing portfolio, I think we are well positioned to cover the new distribution over the course of the year. Another key strategic objective I outlined last year was to increase our scale by raising capital. While 2022 was a challenging year to raise capital in the markets, we successfully closed on a $37.5 million rights offering in June, which positioned us to take advantage of the volatility in the second half of 2022. In the fourth quarter, we opportunistically deployed approximately $38 million into new investments at average yields of approximately 12%. Meanwhile, about $20 million of assets were monetized in the quarter at average yields below 10%. Half of our debt investment portfolio at year-end consisted of floating rate debt, up from 48% at the prior quarter end and a marked difference from 33% on June 30th. Average yield on our credit portfolio also increased to 12.4% at year end from 11.6% at September 30th. You should expect that we will continue to focus on investments that benefit from rising rates. The third strategic initiative I outlined a year ago was focusing on scaling our specialty finance platform. In that regard, I am pleased to report that we continue to make significant progress. Last quarter, we formed and funded our healthcare finance platform with Arcadia as a strategic minority partner. Since that time, they closed on three loans, have cultivated a robust pipeline of potential investments, and are in active discussions to secure a senior financing partner. Our factoring business also continues to perform well, and we believe the specialty finance platform is well-positioned to provide material contributions to GECC in 2023. While we were pleased with the quarter from an income generation perspective, we saw a reduction in our net asset value to $11.16 per share as the result of unrealized mark-to-market losses on certain investments in the quarter. We are focused on recovering NAV in the months ahead. Moving forward, we remain measured with respect to deploying capital in the current market environment and are focused on finding investments with limited risk of permanent capital impairment and durable returns. We are excited for our future prospects and the opportunities we are seeing in the market for floating rate security that can provide attractive risk-adjusted returns. I'm proud of our team's ongoing efforts as we continue to transform and grow Great Elm Capital Corp. With that, I'd like to hand the call over to Carrie Davis to discuss our fourth quarter 2022 performance.