Priority Technology Holdings, Inc.

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by, and welcome to the Priority Technology Holdings fourth quarter 2020 earnings conference call. At this time, our participant line is on a listen-only mode. After the speaker presentation, there will be a question and answer session. To ask a question during the session, you will need to press star 1 on your telephone. Please be advised that today's conference is being recorded, and if you require any further assistance, please press star 0. I would like to hand the conference to your speaker today, Dave Falpel. Please go ahead, sir.

Thank you, Victor. Good morning, and thank you, everyone, for joining us. I'm Dave Falpel. I'm the Chief Marketing Officer here at Priority Technology Holdings. And with me on the call today are Tom Priori, our Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, and Mike Volkamer, our Chief Financial Officer. Now, before we provide our prepared remarks, I would like to remind all participants that our comments today will include forward-looking statements, which involves a number of risks and uncertainties that may cause actual results to differ materially from our forward-looking statements. The company undertakes no obligation to update or revise the forward-looking statements, whether as a result of new information, future events, or otherwise. We provide a detailed discussion of the various risk factors in our SEC filings, and we encourage you to review these filings. Additionally, we may refer to non-GAAP measures, including but not limited to EBITDA and adjusted EBITDA during the call. Reconciliations of our non-GAAP performance and liquidity measures to the appropriate GAAP measures can be found on our press release and SEC filings available in the investor section of our website. With that, I'd like to turn the call over to our Chairman and CEO, Tom Priori.

Thank you, Dave. And thanks to everyone for joining us for our fourth quarter earnings call. I'd like to begin this morning's call by providing a brief overview of our impressive Q4 and year-end results, along with a discussion of the acquisition of Fincera during the current quarter. Then I'll turn it over to Mike, who will go into more detail on our segment-level performance, financial highlights, and the improvement on our balance sheet. As you saw in our earnings release, the momentum that we built in Q3 continued through Q4. Our performance is the result of executing our plan through a challenging year due to the COVID-19 pandemic. We continue to invest in our people and culture, our products, and our technology infrastructure. The strength of our payment operations, product offerings, and having diversified countercyclical payment assets allowed us to quickly adapt to the changing COVID environment to deliver strong top-line revenue growth and bottom-line results. This was a statement year in the history of our organization. As consumers and businesses continued to struggle with restrictions related to the pandemic, our teams were focused on solving our customers' problems and helping them perform in this environment. Our results today show the success of that mission. Revenue of $106 million increased 8.1% from $98.2 million for the quarter and increased 8.7% for the full year despite the impact of the COVID lockdown period. Income from operations of $6.2 million increased 489.3% from $1.1 million for the quarter and rose to $20.9 million for the year, an increase of 190.4%. Meanwhile, adjusted EBITDA of $18.2 million for the quarter represented an increase of 12.7% from $16.2 million from the prior year period. For the full year, adjusted EBITDA increased 19.4% to $70.3 million, despite the loss of rent payments contribution during the fourth quarter of 2021. Recently, we announced an agreement to acquire Fincera Holdings, a pioneer in the fintech industry and a company that launched and operated one of the first banking as a service platforms. Combination positions us as a leading innovator in payment and financial technology solutions with the ability to deliver payment facilitation and banking-like services at scale to our software partners, SMB and enterprise merchants, and our integrated partner businesses' vertical software applications. CFTPay, Fincera's flagship application that provides account administration solutions to the burgeoning and counter-cyclical debt settlement industry will operate as a wholly-owned subsidiary of priority within the consumer finance division of our integrated partners business segment. We feel that this acquisition completes our payment infrastructure platform to fully monetize payment networks, given our combined ability to handle all forms of money or value in motion and at rest in virtual bank accounts and digital wallets. In short, we're a one-stop shop for modern software companies looking to monetize payments in acquiring and issuing without the headaches of managing payment operation functions like client service, risk management, underwriting, and compliance. We expect this transaction to close once the transfer of Fincera's nationwide money transmission licenses are complete in the next six to nine months. I'd now like to hand it over to Mike Volkamer to provide further insights into the quarter, current trends in each of our business segments, and the improvement in our balance sheet and liquidity. Mike?