StoneCo Ltd.

Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. Thank you for standing by. Welcome to Stone Co. fourth quarter and fiscal year 2021 earnings conference call. By now, everyone should have access to our earnings release. The company also posted a presentation to go along with this call. All material can be found at www.stone.co on the investor relations section. As a reminder, this conference is being recorded. Throughout this conference call, the company will be presenting non-IFRS financial information, including adjusted net income and adjusted free cash flow. These are important financial measures for the company but are not financial measures as defined by IFRS. Reconciliations of the company's non-IFRS financial information to the IFRS financial information appear in today's press release. Finally, before we begin our formal remarks, I would like to remind everyone that today's discussion might include forward-looking statements. These forward-looking statements are not guarantees of future performance, and therefore you should not put undue reliance on them. These statements are subject to numerous risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from the company's expectations. Please refer to the forward-looking statements disclosure in the company's earnings press release. In addition, many of the risks regarding the business are disclosed in the company's Form 20F filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission, which is available at www.sec.gov. I would now like to turn the conference over to your host, Rafael Martins, VP of Finance and Investor Relations Officer at StoneCo. Please proceed.

Thank you, operator, and good evening, everyone. Joining us here today, we have Tiago Piau, our CEO, Lia Matos, Chief Strategy Officer, and Marcelo Baldi, our CFO. Today, we'll present our fourth quarter 2021 results, discuss some recent trends, and provide an updated outlook for the business. I will now pass it over to Tiago so he can share some key messages and highlights of our performance. Tiago?

Thank you, Rafa, and good evening, everyone. I want to start today's call by taking a moment to reflect on our performance in 2021, the challenge we encountered, and what we learned from them. Then, I want to discuss the core strengths in our business that have enabled us to continue to grow fast and take market share, despite all the problems we faced last year. And finally, I will review some recent trends we are seeing in the business, why I have such confidence in our outlook, and why I think Stone is poised to benefit in 2022 and beyond. So let's start by reflection on 2021. This past year was unsatisfying for Stone. We executed well in some areas, but we certainly made some mistakes. We took an aggressive approach. This is how we built the company and how we helped lead the fintech revolution in Brazil. But I think at the end of the day, we tried to do a lot last year and we simply did not execute it as well as we would have liked. We ramped our credit offering quickly. but we did not manage this expansion well. Our execution challenges were magnified by the problems of the national registry system, which we were also not well prepared to deal with. So in mid-2021, we decided to pause our credit operation, regroup, learn from our mistakes, and go back to the drawing board. In prepayment, we delayed repricing our solutions when interest rates in Brazil began to rise. We didn't want to hurt our customers with higher costs. which we felt we could absorb for a while. But in the end, the impact was too much on our bottom line, and so we began repricing in November. Despite these issues, we did not want to slow down our expansion plan, so we continued making significant investments in the business, which increased our operating costs. In the fourth quarter, we almost doubled our selling expenses, excluding links, and continued to invest in building our own product, banking ecosystem, software solutions, and enhancing our technology and customer service, which remain a key competitive advantage for Stone. In hindsight, we should have spread out some of these investments to ease the near-term pressure on our bottom line. But I think overall, it was the right strategy for Stone to lay the groundwork for strong growth and market share gains over the next few years. And I'm already encouraged by the early results. Ultimately, I think we lost some of our focus and execution precision as we managed all of these issues, while at the same time also integrating links, an entirely new part of our business. As a result, our performance suffered and our profitability declined. So 2021 was not our best year. However, to be fair, we also did some pretty good things last year. We learned a lot from our mistakes, corrected our course, And despite all of our problems, we still produced very strong top-line growth. In the fourth quarter, we generated 87% revenue growth year-over-year, 60% excluding links, which was our best performance since the third quarter of 2019. During the quarter, we also produced a record number of new client wins, accelerated our TPV growth, Executed well in the MSMD segment with a big win in a micro merchant space, which is new for us. We continue to expand our banking ecosystem and generated double digits organic growth in our software solution. So the core growth engine of our business remains quite strong. We are winning clients, taking market share and expanding our footprint to lay the foundation for future top line and bottom line growth. We learned a lot from last year's challenges. and we have also made some important changes in our structure and management team to strengthen our application capabilities. We are reorganizing the company into two operating segments, financial services and software, which we will begin to report in 2022. The financial services segment is the stone payments, digital banking, and credit business. The software segment will bring together Lynx and all our other portfolio companies. We think this will provide greater transparency. As Leo will explain later, software is a strategic priority for us and will continue to drive growth and expansion in this area as well. Now, let me shift to our outlook for this year, which is quite positive with strong growth and improving margins. I think we are well positioned for 2022. The investments we made in our projects and operations will continue to help us drive growth on top of our strong core business, which keeps taking market share. In addition, the lessons we learned and the changes we made last year have positioned us to improve profitability this year. Looking at both top-line and bottom-line performance, I feel that 2022 will be a good year for Stone. I will discuss more of our outlook toward the end of our call. I will now pass it over to Lia, who will provide more detail about our fourth quarter performance and strategic direction. Lia?