Medallion Financial Corp.

Greetings. Welcome to Medallion Financial First Quarter 2022 Earnings Conference Call. 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 Ken Cooper of Investor Relations. Thank you. You may begin.

Thank you. Good morning, everyone. Welcome to Medallion Financial Corp's first quarter earnings call. During our call, we will refer to our earnings supplement slides. This presentation is available on our website at medallion.com by clicking investor relations. The presentation is near the top of the page. Joining me today are Andrew Merstein, President and Chief Operating Officer, and Anthony Catrone, Chief Financial Officer. Certain statements made during the call today constitute forward-looking statements made pursuant to and within the meaning of the safe harbor provisions of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995 as amended. Such forward-looking statements are subject to both known and unknown risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from such statements. Those risks and uncertainties are described in our earnings press release issued yesterday and in our filings with the SEC. The forward-looking statements made today are as the date of this call, and we do not undertake any obligation to update these forward-looking statements. With that, let me turn the call over to Andrew. Andrew?

Thank you, Ken. Good morning, everyone. Before Anthony takes you through our presentation, I would like to just touch upon a few general comments about our business and our quarter. As you saw, we started the year off well. Our net income for the quarter was $9.8 million, up 17% from a year ago, our net interest income was up 25% to $35.9 million, and our net interest margin was a strong 9.2%. Our success over the past six quarters has positioned us well from a capital perspective. This allowed us to declare and pay a dividend of $0.08 per share and resume purchases under our stock repurchase program. Our growth lending segments are both consumer and commercial. Our consumer lending segments account for 94% of our loans. We continue to grow both our recreational and home improvement lending businesses. We originated 204.2 million of new loans in the quarter, which was up 44% from the prior year quarter. Our home improvement continues to be our fastest growing segment, and we continue to work hard to build our consumer business by increasing the contractors and dealers we partner with. Our commercial lending business is our other growth segment. We originated $4.4 million of loans in the quarter, which helped our overall loan balance grow from $76.7 million at the end of the fourth quarter to $77.9 million at the end of the first quarter. Like our consumer loans, we have a strong interest rate for our commercial portfolio, which was at 12.41% for the first quarter. Moving to a few business highlights. During the quarter, we had approximately $10 million less non-interest income than we did in the fourth quarter of 2021. This is due to no sales or exits of investments in the quarter. As a reminder, we make small investments in fintech companies through our early looks of diligence for our strategic partnership program and through our commercial business. The timing and return on these exits are not predictable. However, when we do execute exits, we have been successful and hope to continue such success in the future. And finally, I hope you saw our announcement yesterday regarding our most recent board and corporate governance enhancements. The board will add two independent directors and has created a lead independent director position on the board. Brent Hatch has been appointed to the board and has assumed the lead independent director role effective immediately. Our board will engage a third party executive search firm to assist in the search process for the additional independent director. These are further examples of our long standing commitment to strong corporate governance. With that, I will now turn the call over to Anthony, who will provide additional financial highlights on the quarter and the year.