CI Financial Corp.

Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. At this time, I would like to welcome everyone to the CI Financial 2020 Second Quarter Results Webcast. All lines are in a listen-only mode. After the speaker's remarks, there will be a question and answer session. If you would like to ask a question during this time, simply press star, then the number one on your telephone keypad. If you would like to withdraw your question, please press star than the number two. Please take note of the cautionary language regarding forward-looking statements and the non-IFRS measures on the second page of the presentation. Now, I would like to turn the conference over to Mr. Kurt McAlpine, CEO of CI Financial. Mr. McAlpine, you may begin.

Good morning, everyone, and welcome to CI Financial's second quarter earnings call. Joining me on today's call is our CFO, Doug Jameson. During the call, we will cover the following five topics, a discussion of the highlights and challenges of the second quarter, a review of our financial performance, an update on our sales to date for the month of July, an update on the execution of select elements of our corporate strategy, Then we will take your questions. We had a strong financial quarter with earnings per share of 56 cents. We continued to be very successful in controlling costs even as we made rapid progress on our strategic initiatives. We made significant reductions in SG&A expenses both quarter over quarter and year over year even as we took on several new businesses. Comparable SG&A expenses, which excludes expenses from the acquisitions we have made this year, were down 17.9 million, or 14% over the second quarter of 2019. As I stated last quarter, we are taking a dynamic approach to our capital allocation that includes a combination of debt reduction, share repurchases and dividends, while pursuing M&A opportunities that align with our strategic priorities. We renewed our normal course issuer bid in June. In our opinion, there continues to be a disconnect between our current stock price and the true value of our business, so we took advantage of this disconnect to buy back 2.7 million shares during the quarter. We also paid a regular dividend of 18 cents a share for a total of $39 million. At the same time, we've been reducing our debt which included completing the repayment of the $175 million balance on our credit facility. We also issued a new series of debentures, ensuring the repayment of the $450 million tranche that is maturing in December. Doug will go into more detail on our debt level in a few moments. On the sales front, although the company continues to be in redemptions, our Canadian retail flows have improved significantly over last year. despite this year's uncertain markets. For the second quarter, Canadian retail flows improved by 910 million, or 48%. Institutional flows for the quarter were flat compared with last quarter, but down from Q2 2019, driven by one redemption from a bank-owned asset manager internalizing a mandate to their in-house team. That accounted for 90% of our institutional redemptions in the quarter. As we've outlined in our press releases this week, we have made tremendous strides in executing our corporate strategy over the past few months. First, we have rapidly built up our U.S. wealth management business through the direct acquisition of five high-quality RIAs. We acquired SureVest in the first quarter, completed transactions for One Capital Management and the Cabana Group in the second quarter, and closed the Congress deal in July. When we complete the BDF acquisition later this quarter, we will have approximately $11 billion U.S. or almost $15 billion Canadian in our U.S. wealth business, generating strong momentum against our strategic priorities of expanding wealth management and globalizing the firm. We've also continued building our Canadian wealth management business through investments in Asante and our CI private wealth platforms, and now through an agreement to purchase aligned capital partners. With $10 billion in assets, Align will add considerable scale to our wealth business. We acquired the remaining minority stake in WealthBar to allow us to eventually merge that business with virtual brokers to create a unified online investing platform to be called CI Direct Investing. In fact, as of this morning, WealthBar is now operating as CI Direct Investing. On the asset management side, we continue to be very active in enhancing the product lineup to better meet the needs of investors. The highlight of Q2 was the launch of three CI double-line mandates managed by Jeffrey Gundlach. Despite launching in the summer, during a pandemic, these mandates have attracted incredible interest from advisors and are off to a strong start.

I will now turn the call over to Doug to review our financial results. Thank you, Kurt.