Priority Technology Holdings, Inc.

Ladies and gentlemen, please stand by. Your Priority Technology Holdings Third Quarter 2021 Earnings Conference call will begin momentarily. Thank you for your patience, and please stand by. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Hello, thank you for standing by, and welcome to the Priority Technology Holdings Third Quarter Earnings Conference 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 the session, you will need to press star 1 on your telephone. Please be advised that today's conference may be recorded. If you require any further assistance, please press star 0. I would now like to hand the conference over to your speaker today, Chris Kettman. Please go ahead.

Good morning, and thank you for joining us. With me today are Tom Priori, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Priority Technology Holdings, and Mike Volkamer, 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 involve 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 gap measures can be found in our press release and SEC filings available in the Investors section of our website. With that, I would like to now turn the call over to our Chairman and CEO, Tom Priori.

Tom Priori Thank you, Chris. And thanks to everyone for joining us for our third quarter earnings call. I would like to begin this morning's call by providing a brief recap of our quarter three results, as well as highlighting the continued momentum we've seen so far in the fourth quarter. Following Mike's segment-level review of our third quarter results and balance sheet, I'll provide some final thoughts on our position in the marketplace, the closing of the Fincera transaction on September 17th, and our prospects for the future. As we noted in our earnings release, we continued our first half momentum with a strong quarter three, generating market-leading top and bottom line growth. On a consolidated basis, total revenue for the quarter increased 21.6% to $132.5 million. Our top line strength drove a 16.8% increase in gross profit to $39.7 million and 20% growth in adjusted EBITDA to $23.6 million. Similarly, income from operations increased 17.2% to $8.3 million. Importantly, These results reflect several encouraging trends when looking ahead to the fourth quarter. Our total bank card volume grew 22.1% for the quarter, despite self-imposed risk pairing in our specialized e-commerce business that shaved $5.3 million of revenue from our quarterly results. Furthermore, we absorbed an anticipated 16.3% decline in our commercial B2B segments due to the wind-down of an American Express program that began in Q4 2020, and the loss of $3.9 million of revenue from the sale of rent payments in September 2020. As with prior periods, our innovative products consistently fueled new contract wins. New merchant adoption remained consistent with an average of 4,473 per month in quarter three. A peek into the start of Q4 reveals continued strength in our processing platform. October's bank card volume grew 17.1% year over year, which bodes well for our top and bottom line results during the period. At this point, I'd like to pause and hand it over to Mike, who will provide further insight into our performance during the quarter current trends in each business segment and the improvements on our balance sheet.