Great Elm Capital Corp.

Greetings. Welcome to the Great Elm Capital Corp Third Quarter 2023 Financial Results. 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 during the conference, please press star zero on your telephone keypad. Please note this conference is being recorded. I will now turn the conference over to your host, Garrett Edson, a representative of the company. You may begin.

Good morning and thank you everyone for joining us for Great Elm Capital Corp's third quarter 2023 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'd like to call your attention to a customary safe harbor statement regarding forward-looking information. Also, please note that nothing in today's call constitutes an offer to sell or 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 Chief Financial Officer Kerry Davis, Chief Compliance Officer Adam Kleinman, 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. Our momentum throughout the year continued, and I'm pleased to report yet another strong quarter for Great Elm, generating an ROE of nearly 8.5% in the quarter, bringing our year-to-date ROE to approximately 25%. We continued to successfully deliver across all facets of our business. We saw portfolio growth, continued cash income generation, capital structure improvements, and implemented operational enhancements. I remain proud of our team's consistent execution and incredible effort to position us to further grow our platform and portfolio in the quarters and years to come. Turning to slide six, you can see we would have reported NII of 45 cents per share if we excluded the net impact of certain refinancing items in the quarter, showing continued sequential growth from our second quarter 2023 NII. However, the impact of the refinancing transaction in the quarter led us to report third quarter NII of $3.1 million, or $0.40 per share, again exceeding our quarterly distribution of $0.35 per share. I especially want to highlight slide 7, which shows our cash NII. Even with the double interest expense associated with the refinancing, we continue to generate enough cash NII from our portfolio to cover our distributions. driven by another consecutive quarter of record cash income generated from our investment portfolio. The cash income we generated in the third quarter represented approximately 88% of total investment income. We continue to make great strides in enhancing our portfolio to generate increased cash income. We also successfully harvested lower yielding investments and used the proceeds to continue enhancing our mix of first lien secured debt. with 90% of our deployments in the quarter going into first lien investments, all while further improving overall corporate portfolio yield. These results are a further testament to our ability to build a new and high quality portfolio filled with attractive cash yielding investments. In addition to another quarter of excellent NII performance, our net asset value increased by 5.5% in the quarter to $12.88 per share, driven by gains on investments, as you can see on slide nine. Our investment portfolio gains were broad-based, with over 75% of the portfolio pricing stable or up quarter over quarter, with most of our investments that saw fair value declines being limited to NICs and NACs that we expect will largely recover over the coming quarters. We remain focused on further recovering and improving our NAB moving forward. Along with our strong results, we successfully completed the refinancing of our 2024 debt maturity with the issuance of new notes due in 2028. While accomplished at a higher cost of capital given the current rate environment, we were pleased to extend our maturity wall and do not expect a material drag on NII from the higher interest expense in the fourth quarter. We continue to evaluate the capital markets and potential financing transactions opportunistically extend our maturities at an attractive cost of capital and further position us for both near and long-term success. In addition, as Mike will discuss in his remarks, we also capitalized Great Elm Specialty Finance with our core specialty finance assets in the quarter and welcomed in a strategic investor to assist GESS in growing and scaling the platform. With outside capital and increased operational flexibility, I believe GESF can become a significant engine of growth for GECC over the next three to five years as it further scales. With that, I'd like to hand the call over to Carrie Davis to discuss our third quarter 2023 performance.