Midwest Holding Inc.

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the Midwest Holdings Incorporated Q1 2021. My name is Katie and I'll be coordinating your call today. If you'd like to ask a question during the presentation, you may do so by pressing star followed by one on your telephone keypad. I'll now hand you over to your host, Tom Bombalo, to begin. Tom, please go ahead.

Good afternoon and welcome to Midwest Holdings first quarter 2021 earnings call. This is Tom Bumbelow, head of business development here at Midwest. Joining me for today's presentation will be our co-CEOs and founders, Michael Salem and Mike Minnick, as well as our chief financial officer, Deborah Havronik. Yesterday evening, Midwest issued our Q1 2021 earnings release, announcing our financial results. During today's call, we will reference this letter, a copy of which can be found on the Investor Relations page of our website at ir.midwestholding.com. While this call will reflect items discussed within that document, for more comprehensive information about our financial performance, we also encourage you to read through our Form 10-Q, which has been filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Before we begin, I want to remind you that matters discussed on today's call will include forward-looking statements related to our operating performance, financial goals, business outlook, which are based on management's current beliefs and assumptions. These forward-looking statements reflect our opinions as of the date of this call, and we undertake no obligation to revise this information as a result of new developments that may occur. Forward-looking statements are subject to various risks, uncertainties, and other factors that could cause our actual results to differ materially from those expected and described today. In addition, we are subject to a number of risks that may significantly impact our business and financial results. For a more detailed description of our risk factors, once again, please review our Form 10-K, where you will see a discussion of factors that could cause the company's actual results to differ materially from these statements. A replay of this conference call will be available on our website under the Investor Relations section. I would also like to remind you that during the call, we will discuss some non-GAAP measures in discussing Midwest's performance. You can find the reconciliation of those historical measures to the nearest comparable GAAP measures in our earnings release in 10Q. Lastly, we are pleased to announce that Mike and Michael have been selected as speakers for Piper Sandler's virtual Midwest Life Insurance Tour on Thursday, May 20th. Their discussion will begin at 9.30 a.m. Central Time, led by Senior Research Analyst John Barnage. Please reach out to John Barnage or a member of the Piper Sandler team if you are interested in attending. With that, I'll turn the call over to Michael Salem. Michael?

Thanks, Tom, and good afternoon, everyone. I'm pleased to join you today to report on the solid progress we are making at Midwest. We continue to execute on our business plan and remain uniquely positioned to capitalize on the life and annuity supply chain. The opportunity in our space is significant. Our business model has been validated by the industry. But while incumbents and large financial institutions struggle to adapt due to their size and complexity, we are executing. Midwest was in fact built for this opportunity. built from scratch to manufacture and distribute individual life and annuity products on behalf of third-party asset managers and investors. The difficulty and complexity of our industry creates a natural moat around our success. We have an extremely unique and talented team that is dedicated to our vision. And it is our ability to execute that will ultimately separate us from the pack. Our goal is to build a platform capable of generating significant long-term earnings power. We are not here to build a very good small company. Our opportunity is to build a transformational company. And in order to do that, we must build an incredible infrastructure, including investment in technology, distribution, asset management, and operations. And we must manage our capital and our growth. We are pleased with our progress in the quarter in pursuit of this long-term mission. First of all, our premium volumes remain strong with $123.7 million in written annuity premium, representing 159% growth from $47.8 million in the first quarter of last year, with management revenues growing 126% during the quarter to $6.4 million from $2.8 million in the first quarter of 2020. We are also making strong progress in building a leading technology and operations platform, not only allowing us to efficiently scale, but also providing us incredible third-party revenue opportunity. In our reinsurance program, we have significantly expanded our distribution capabilities for our products, positioning us for scalable access to capital for years to come. but our transition to larger, more strategic sources of reinsurance capital takes time. We have an extremely valuable product, and we will be deliberate in our relationships. We are confident in our ability to execute on our long-term reinsurance strategy. We have also built the beginnings of a solid asset management platform, attracting top talent to lead our efforts, including 1505 CEO Eric Delmonico, head trader Elliot Sperber, and head of credit Brad Schneider. Admittedly, our investment income was below our target for the quarter as we have been slow to invest the proceeds from our December public offering. As we continue to develop reinsurance and asset management relationships, we expect this to correct. Finally, managing our investor relations and financial presentation as a new public company has been a work in progress. We still have more work to do, but we are moving in the right direction. The last thing I'll say before I hand this over to Mike is that we have an extremely talented and committed management team. We are well aligned, we are focused, and we are poised to deliver results for our stakeholders. And as we continue to execute as we have, we truly have an opportunity to become a leading life and annuity platform. Mike? Thanks, Michael.