Usio, Inc.

Hello and welcome to the UCO's fourth quarter and fiscal year-end 2024 earnings conference call. All participants will be in a listen-only mode. After today's presentation, there will be an opportunity to ask questions. Please also note today's event is being recorded. Now I'd like to turn the conference call over to your host, Paul Manley. Please go ahead, sir.

Thank you, Operators. And thank you, everyone, for joining our call today. Welcome to UCO's fourth quarter and fiscal year-end 2024 conference call. The earnings release, which we issued today after the market closed, is available on our website at uco.com under the Investor Relations tab. On this call with me today are Louis Hoke, our Chairman and CEO, and Greg Carter, Executive Vice President of Payment Acceptance and our newly appointed Chief Revenue Officer. Michael White, Senior Vice President and Chief Accounting Officer, Jerry Uffner, Head of Card Issuing, and our Chief Product Officer, Houston Frost, will be available during the question and answer session. Let me remind our listeners that certain statements made during the call today constitute forward-looking statements made pursuant to the safe harbor provisions of the Private Securities and Litigation Act of 1995 as amended and, as more fully discussed, in our press release and in our filings with the SEC. Let me start off the call today with some highlights from this afternoon's release. As expected, our fourth quarter performance was consistent with our third quarter. Excluding interest income inputted to each of our business units, total revenue was up 3% for the quarter, with growth in each card, ACH, and output solutions. Margins were up sequentially from the third quarter, primarily attributed to productivity and efficiency enhancements in both card and output solutions. Expenses were relatively flat, and we reported gap net income of $600,000, or two cents per share, which included a $1.5 million ERC benefit. This was our third consecutive quarter of positive gap net income. All of our electronic transaction processing businesses grew, leading to another quarter of record total dollars processed. which exceeded $1.9 billion in the fourth quarter, a 36% increase from a year ago. And for the full year, 2024, total dollars processed were up a very strong 33% to a record $7.1 billion. We also continue to generate positive cash flow. And in 2024, we generated $2.9 million of operating in the fourth quarter. We used some cash to repurchase stock during the year, including nearly $500,000 in the fourth quarter alone. End of the year, we repurchased nearly $1.5 million of stock. Even with these purchases and a modest year-over-year increase in capital expenditures, our cash position rose to over $8 million at year-end. And we expect cash to increase again this year. Lewis will talk more about this and what it means about our confidence in our strategy as well as the new share repurchase authorization the board approved as we announced today. This was a solid conclusion to a year we aggressively pursued new stable and recurring revenue to replace nearly $12.1 million in annualized revenue, which we lost from our large COVID incentive program, which expired earlier this year. We are also committed to improving profitability through better margins and operating leverage, as well as continuing to fund operations through positive cash flow. All of this progress puts us in a very solid position for 2025. At this time, I'd like to turn the call over to Lewis Hoke.

Thank you, Paul, and welcome, everyone. As I reflect on last quarter, I've come to realize that our real story is not only in the current financial results. The real story is in the increasing strength of our organization, the steady improvement in our financial condition, and most importantly, the unique capabilities we have both in terms of innovative technology behind our products and solutions, as well as an organization that is uniquely positioned to with a portfolio of diversified electronic payment solutions. Consequently, it should come as no surprise today that I'm happy to announce a new initiative that leverages our competitive strengths to further unlock UCO's full potential and value. And we call it UCO One. UCO One will unite and integrate all of our products. services, and resources under one brand. This will enable us to better leverage our innovative technology and extensive capabilities to gain an increasing share of our customers' electronic payment spend. Instead of individually selling ACH card or prepaid, we will now be selling UCO as a comprehensive solutions provider that offers a multitude of products and services to meet a wide range of customers' needs. Our unified brand will make it easier for customers to understand our value proposition and will be supported by a seamless sales support and onboarding process. One UCO brand with one unified IT team, one risk and compliance team, one sales team, one support team, and one marketing team. Already, UCO One Initiative has developed a new client onboarding system that has a single universal application that can be used across all of our product platforms. This should improve cross-selling success by making it easier for an existing client to add additional UCO products. For instance, although we have many card issuing clients, that do funds dispersing, only four of them use UCO for ACH. Another UCO-1 initiative will shortly launch as a proprietary checkout page tool, which will enable merchants to upload and send invoices. There are other new initiatives underway to complement and capitalize on UCO-1. we have consolidated our risk and compliance teams and are adopting AI for processes like fraud protection, improving marketing and sales efficiency, as well as increasing our own efficiency and productivity. As an example, we are using AI-driven analysis as a means to improve merchant conversion rates. In addition, One of my personal goals is to test a biometrics AI-driven application by the end of this year. As one of my first actions implementing this new initiative, I've named Greg Carter to newly created position of Chief Revenue Officer. All of our sales and marketing resources are now under Greg's direction, and his job will begin as pointed in the same direction. I'm very excited to get this new initiative underway, and I'm even more pleased to have Greg leading it. So, now, I will turn the call over to Greg.