Medallion Financial Corp.

Ladies and gentlemen, greetings and welcome to the Medallion Financial Third 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. As a reminder, this conference is being recorded. I will now turn the conference over to Ken Cooper with Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Thank you, and good morning, everyone. Welcome to Medallion Financial Corp's third quarter earnings call. 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. Forward-looking statements made today are as of the date of this call, and we do not undertake any obligation to update these forward-looking statements. In addition to our earnings press release, you can find our third quarter presentation on our website by visiting medallion.com and clicking investor relations. The presentation is near the top of the page. With that, let me now turn the call over to Andrew. Andrew?

Thank you, Ken. Good morning, everyone. We are very pleased with our results this quarter. We had another quarter of strong loan originations, which drove growth in our net interest income. This comes in a quarter where we continue to see rising interest rates. The growth in our consumer and commercial lending businesses continues to yield positive results. We earned $7.6 million for the quarter and $30.8 million for the year-to-date period. For our total company, the $274 million of loan originations was up 40% over last year's quarter and resulted in solid loan growth for us. Each of our consumer lending segments had a good quarter. Home improvement continued to be our fastest growing segment with 44% loan growth, our marine and RV business with 25% growth, and our commercial segment with 30% loan growth. The loan origination activity was the key driver of a 23% increase in net interest income. It is also important to note that we did start to see some benefit from recent pricing actions we put in place on new loans originated. During times of increasing rates, one of the levers we can use to protect our bottom line is to raise our loan rates. We typically are a fast follower rather than a leader in this, and this period of rising rates is no different. Regarding capital allocation, we declared and paid a dividend of $0.08 per share during the quarter. In addition, we used 8.2 million of cash in the quarter to repurchase roughly 1.1 million shares of our common stock. We recently increased the total available under the plan from 35 million to 40 million, and we ended the quarter with 21.8 million available under the plan. With that, I will now turn the call over to Anthony, who will provide some additional insight about our quarter.