Priority Technology Holdings, Inc.

Good day. Thank you for standing by. Welcome to the Priority Technology Holdings first quarter 2021 earnings call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. After the speaker presentation, there will be a question and answer session. To ask a question during a session, you will need to press star 1 on your telephone. Please be advised that today's conference is being recorded. If you require any further assistance, please press star 0. I would like to hand the conference over to your speaker today, Dave Fapelle. Please go ahead.

Thank you, Victor. Good morning, and thanks, everyone, for joining us today. With me on the call are Tom Priore, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Priority Technology Holdings, and Mike Volkmer, our Chief Financial Officer. 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 in our press release, and SEC filings available in the investor section of our website. With that, I would now like to turn the call over to our Chairman and CEO, Tom Priori. Tom, go ahead.

Thank you, Dave. And thanks to everyone for joining us for our first quarter earnings call. I would like to begin this morning's call by providing a brief overview of our strong growth in Q1 and how we're positioning priority for success for the remainder of 2021 and over the long term. I'll also provide an update on the Fincera acquisition and related debt financing and perpetual preferred investment from Aries Capital Management. Following Mike's financial review of our first quarter results and the improvement on our balance sheet, we would like to offer some perspective on our brief history as a public company, post-Fincera financial metrics, and our positioning for the future. There are a few quick highlights I'd like to share up front. As we outlined in our earnings release, the growth trajectory we've established through the pandemic last year continued in the first quarter of 2021. We met or exceeded forecasts across key metrics, including revenue, gross profit, and adjusted EBITDA. On a purely organic basis, comparing our first quarter 2021 results with our first quarter 2020 results, which excludes the rent payments business that was sold in September 2020, Revenue of $113.3 million increased 21.7%. Gross profit increased 16% to $31.4 million. And adjusted EBITDA increased 37% to $18 million. These excellent financial results were underpinned by nearly a 13% increase in total bank card processing volume to $11.9 billion for the quarter. and approximately 8% year-over-year merchant growth in the acquiring segment, a 2% outperformance to budget and commercial payments revenue, and a 17% outperformance in integrated partners EBITDA contributions. In conjunction with our strong financial results, we recently closed the refinancing of our existing debt, which reduces our interest expense by approximately $3 million per year. We also added a delayed draw facility and perpetual preferred investment of up to $250 million from Aries Capital Management to help finance the pending Fincera acquisition and provide us dry powder for further acquisitions. With regards to the status of the Fincera closing, the key execution items are in place and the combination remains on track for Q3 to close. As noted previously, the financing for closing is locked down, and the regulatory process for the transfer of the money transmission licenses is progressing smoothly. In terms of the business performance, the CFTPay integrated payments platform year-to-date financial results are in line with our expectations. Importantly, our leadership teams have been coordinating on how best to organize our collective resources and so that upon close, we are immediately solving our customers' greatest pain points and deploying resources towards our largest revenue opportunities. At this point, I would like to pause and hand the call over to Mike, who will provide further insights into our performance during the quarter, current trends in each business segment, and the improvement on our balance sheet and liquidity. Mike?