VIQ Solutions Inc.

Good day, ladies and gentlemen. Today we are hosting a conference call to discuss the 2023 second quarter financial results for VIQ Solutions, Inc. Currently, all 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 1 and identify themselves before asking a question. Your host for today is Audrey Lu, Corporate Finance Controller for VIQ. Please go ahead.

Thank you. Good morning, everyone, and welcome to VIQ Solutions' 2023 Second Quarter Results Conference 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 a complete discussion of the risks and uncertainties facing VIQ, we refer you to the company's MD&A 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, CEO, Susan Sumner, President and COO, and Sandy Keung, VP Finance of VIQ. They will be available for questions following the prepared remarks. I will now turn the call over to Sebastian Paré to begin. Sebastian.

Thank you, Audrey. Welcome everyone to our second quarter of 2023 earnings call. I'll provide some high-level remarks on our results. Then I'll hand it over to Susan, who will discuss our operating results. Unfortunately, Alexi Edwards, our CFO, is not able to attend the call today as he's attending a personal matter. Sandy Kong, the AP of Finance, will discuss the financial results. We'll then open up for questions. As announced in July, we secure $1 million draw from the BD Investment Loan Facility initiated in January. As a result of the productivity gains realized by the rollout of our AI power workflow technology in the United States and in the UK, the draw is an important part of our restructuring, which is expected to yield between $2 and $2.5 million in reduced expenses over the next 12 months. The planned restructuring is scheduled to be substantially completed by December 31, 2023. Following the $1 million draw, we successfully close on an oversubscribed non-broker private placement of 1.8 million. While we plan to bring back positive EBITDA in the second half of 2023, the placement was an important part of our AI acceleration to further expand our competitiveness and competitive lead in our domain-specific AI models for the verticals and the region in which we operate. As of June 30th, we set a record for the net new organic bookings of 8.9 million in the last 12 months. Many of these new larger contracts are taking longer to ramp up than before COVID due to project and IT capacity within Fortune 500 companies and many governmental agencies. These delays negatively impacted Q3 revenue, Q2 revenue, but we're seeing increased volumes in June and in July. The organic wins validate that we've got the right offering at the right time for our industry segments. The agencies we serve are evolving rapidly towards cloud workflow, AI, and SaaS solutions. The private placement will accelerate the commercialization of the AI models to further strengthen accuracy and usability first draft and continue to increase margins. Our winning track record for SaaS offering with new and existing clients is directly tied to the usability and accuracy of the AI generated draft documents. Our first draft and AI workflow derived their value from the domain-specific AI models that we've developed, which further improves gross margin. AI is no longer in the hands of a few mega caps with billions in revenue and unlimited cash balances. Access to AI has been democratized in 2023. AI is going broader and deeper. into specific industry applications ripe for automation. More flexible, smaller, and mid-cap companies with deep reach into specific global industries are driving commercial AI adoption. BIQ is one of them. The change to the Queensland contract, as previously disclosed, continued to negatively impact some of our key metrics when compared to prior quarters. Decreases in revenue and gross margins are largely due to contract change. In fact, normalized Q2 results when factoring the new Queensland contract and foreign exchange rates were up by 3% compared to Q2 2022. We see tailwinds from improved business optimism and increased interest in applying VIQ solution to address business needs or either a lengthening the main cycle. As of our top 20 clients are trending higher in volume compared to same period of last year. We're seeing expansion in our insurance client base in July and the backlog in line enforcement from Q2 has been clear. During Q2, we continue to make great strides in our transition to SaaS. We grew our partner ecosystem in the United States and in Europe. We expanded our pipeline and we want several new contracts, which will make their way into our disclosures in the coming months. I'll now pass it over to Susan to discuss some of our operating results in greater details. Susan?