Midwest Holding Inc.

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the Midwest Holding Incorporated Q2 2021 earnings call. My name is Lydia 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 our host today, Tom Bumbalo. Please go ahead, Tom.

Good afternoon and welcome to Midwest Holding's second quarter 2021 earnings call. This is Tom Bumbelow, Head of Business Development at Midwest. Joining me for today's presentation will be our co-CEO and founder, Michael Salem, as well as our Chief Financial Officer, Deborah Havronik, and Director of Corporate Finance, Nojun Chu. Yesterday evening, Midwest issued our Q2 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 10Q, which has been filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Before we begin, I want to remind you that matters from today's call will include forward-looking statements related to our operating performance, financial goals, and 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 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 the 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'll discuss some non-GAAP measures in discussing Midwest performance. you could find the reconciliation of those historical measures to the nearest comparable gap measures in our earnings release. We have several exciting developments to report for the second quarter, and I'll turn the call over to Michael Phelan to tell you more. Michael?

Thank you, Tom, and good afternoon, everyone. It's a pleasure to be with you today to report on Midwest Holdings' second quarter results. It was a solid quarter, and we continue to execute on our plan. On a macro level, our opportunity remains as strong as ever, the wealth management and insurance value chain continues to be under tremendous flux. Asset managers are becoming insurance companies. Traditional insurers are divesting of assets. Private equity is aggregating. Technology is circling. We expect this industry realignment to continue for some time, with the true winners to be determined in decades, not years. Midwest was, in fact, built for this environment from the ground up as a technology-enabled life and annuity company. At the forefront of our vision is our commitment to driving value to our customers and partners. We do this as an open architecture product manufacturer. Our platform allows us to aggregate and curate alternative asset management that we repackage and distribute to individuals seeking to fund their retirement and institutions seeking unique uncorrelated returns. Our business is positioned to be aligned with these key stakeholders by connecting them to attractive products with top customer service, all powered by information and technology. We believe we have the people, the platform, and the vision to be a long-term winner in this market. In the past quarter, we solidly executed in pursuit of our opportunity. Importantly, We advanced our reinsurance pipeline, including closing a key transaction that helped drive our strong financial results. As we said before, these pipes take time to build, but we are building them to support long-term sustainable growth. Additionally, we have advanced our technology and operating infrastructure, crucially positioning us for long-term scalability. And we also expanded our distribution efforts. notably adding Nate Thompson with over two decades of experience to spearhead this important area of our growth. We are moving quickly. We are driven by an incredible energy, and we are attracting incredible people. We believe that our team and our speed will be key drivers in our success, and our admittedly higher-than-forecasted expenses reflect our opportunity to move more quickly than we expected. From the top line perspective, we are satisfied with where we are. Our FIA production is in line with our expectations, and our MIGA products, like we've said before, are more price sensitive. But we currently see an opportunity in the market, so our production should be more balanced in the second half. While we know investors and analysts are going to be focused on our short-term growth, our focus is equally on investing in our platform and our capabilities to support long-term sustainable growth. These investments will take time to materialize into tangible results. But if you simply look at the scale of the market and our relative size, it's just 2% market share in fixed annuities alone, we would be at over $2 billion of production. And the opportunity is much bigger than that. So hopefully that provides some context on our approach. In summary, we feel exceptionally well-positioned for our long-term success. At this moment in our company's trajectory, there is incredible excitement, so much promising activity, and a continued and unwavering commitment to the hard work on the road ahead. And with that, I'll now turn it over to our CFO, Debra.