VIQ Solutions Inc.

Good day, ladies and gentlemen. Today we are hosting a conference call to discuss the second quarter 2021 financial results for VIQ Solutions, Inc. At this time, our participants are in a listen-only mode. For those that dialed in, should you require any assistance during the call, please press star, then zero on your touchtone phone. We will have a question and answer session at the end of the call, at which time all participants wishing to ask a question will be instructed to press star one and identify themselves before asking the question. Please limit yourself to one to two questions so that others may have a chance to ask questions. You may re-enter the queue. Your host for today is Ms. Laura Kiernan, Head of Investor Relations for VIQ. Please go ahead.

Thank you, Stephanie. Good morning, everyone, and welcome to VI Solutions' second quarter results call. Before we begin, I would like to point out that certain statements made on today's call contain forward-looking information. subject to known and unknown risks, uncertainties, and other factors. For complete discussion of the risks and uncertainties facing BIQ, we refer you to the company's MDMA and other continuous disclosure filings, which are available on CDAR at cdar.com and on sec.gov. As a reminder, all dollar amounts are in U.S. dollars unless otherwise stated. With us today, we have Sebastian Paré, the CEO, Alexi Edwards, CFO, and Susan Sumner, President and Chief Operating Officer of BIQ, all of whom will be available for questions following the conversation. Following comments from each of them, we will do a Q&A session. I will now turn the call over to Sebastian Paré to begin.

Thank you, Laura. Welcome, everyone, to our second quarter 2021 earnings call. Last Thursday, we reached a significant milestone and began trading on NASDAQ stock exchange under the ticker Sambol EQS. This milestone cements our commitment to change the way evolutionary documentation is captured, transformed, analyzed, and distributed. While we were disappointed to cancel the capital raise in conjunction with the NASDAQ listing due to the shifting market conditions and pricing of the final offering, we met our commitments to list on NASDAQ. This was not a small feat. It required us to do an extensive reporting and due diligence with accounting, legal, banking, and other professionals to file our base shell prospectus, our F10, our F8 in the United States, and other compliance, all to meet the NASDAQ requirements. This involved an investment of considerable time and effort, all while we continued to proceed with growing our business and doing due diligence on potential acquisitions. We believe the recent pullback in our stock price was in part due to the market conditions, but also impacted by the provisions of our preliminary results and outlook, which was below expectations. We will speak more about that later, and I'm sure we'll get into it during the Q&A. Additional feedback from the market also suggests that the price action lately may also have been driven in part by the lack of announcements on M&A activity over the past year. We heard this feedback loud and clear, and now we have the listing and the prospectus in the United States and in Canada in the rear mirror view, and have completed due diligence on the robust outline of transactions. We expect to begin announcing acquisitions in the near term. Based on financial structures we have successfully deployed in the past, we do have sufficient cash at hand to close on the number of planned acquisitions in the second half of this year. In keeping perspective on this past year's results and first half of this year, we are executing on what we said we will do so far in the areas of technology innovation, expansion of sales and marketing, M&A, and due diligence on much larger strategic acquisitions and many additional corporate milestones that we committed to. None of these fundamental long-term value creation milestones are driven by the fluctuations of the markets and how our stock goes through this cycle. We've said it many times, we operate the business and execute on our growth plan by focusing on the long-term value creation for our shareholders and not short-term quarterly results. Our core strategy has not changed. In fact, it got stronger lately. It still rests on driving revenue growth both organically and to the right type of accretive acquisition, improving the quality of our revenue as we begin to evolve towards a SaaS and AI pricing model this year, all of which are expected to drive higher productivity gains, enabling gross margin expansion, and EBITDA cash flow generation. Susan will speak to some of these gains in her remarks. Our capital markets initiatives have placed us well in the United States and in Canada, and we're now on national exchanges. We expect this move will lead to progressively increased investment by a more diversified global high-quality investors, providing over time higher liquidity, which is positive for all shareholders. You will notice a lot of expense flowing to our income statement this year as we execute on several corporate milestones related to the acceleration of our technology innovation, global expansion in sales and marketing, and public market related initiatives in the first half of 2021. The significant, unusual, one-time expenses associated with these corporate milestones are and will be included in our results. And other than the equity compensation expenses and restructuring costs have not been backed out of the adjusted EBITDA. When considering this, we will have generated a positive adjusted EBITDA in the quarter of $300,000 and close to $800,000 in the first half of this year, despite the delays in the new contracts due to COVID lockdowns, particularly in Australia and in the UK. Investment include upfront expenses in cost of sale, employee retention related to staffing for backlog, an expanded contract in Australia, banking, legal, and advisory fees related to NASDAQ listing, and due diligence for the second half of the year plan acquisitions. These significant one-time fees are estimated to be approximately $200,000 in the first quarter, $600,000 in the second quarter, and will also be included in the second half of the year, depending on the timing of the closure on the acquisitions. These expenses, while considered one-time in nature, were not eliminated as part of the company-reported adjusted EBITDA calculations. We still have more of these expenses to realize in the back half of this year as M&A due diligence converts into closings, which will impact the third quarter and the end of the quarter, depending on timing. These significant investments in a variety of corporate actions during the year are aimed at executing key milestones and setting up the company for a jump out of the gate when our new contracts begin and we emerge from the COVID lockdown, particularly in Australia and the UK. Now I will hand it over to Alexi to provide a high level on our financial results for the quarter. We will also be followed by Susan who will provide some insight into our operations. And then Susan will hand it back to me to begin the P&A.