Evercore Inc.

Good morning and thank you for standing by. Welcome to Evercore's fourth quarter and full year 2021 financial results conference call. During today's call, all parties will be in listen-only mode. Following the presentation, the conference call will be open for questions. If you have a question, please press the star followed by the one on your touchstone telephone. Please press star zero for operator assistance at any time. For participants using speaker equipment, it may be necessary to pick up your handset before making your selection. As a reminder, this conference call is being recorded today, Wednesday, February 2, 2022. I would now like to turn the conference call over to your host, Evercore's Interim Head of Investor Relations, Jamie Easton. Please go ahead.

Thank you, Michelle. Good morning, and thank you for joining us today for Evercore's fourth quarter and full year 2021 financial results conference call. I'm Jamie Easton, Evercore's Interim Head of Investor Relations. Joining me on the call today are John Weinberg and Ralph Schlossstein, our co-chairmen and CEOs, and Celeste Millay, our CFO. After our prepared remarks, we will open the call for questions. Earlier today, we issued a press release announcing Evercore's fourth quarter and full year 2021 financial results. Our discussion of our results today is complementary to the press release, which is available on our website at evercore.com. This conference call is being webcast live in the For Investors section of our website and an archive of it will be available for 30 days beginning approximately one hour after the conclusion of this call. During the course of this conference call, we may make a number of forward-looking statements. Any forward-looking statements that we make are subject to various risks and uncertainties, and there are important factors that could cause actual outcomes to differ materially from those indicated in these statements. These factors include, but are not limited to, those discussed in EverCorp's filings with the SAC, including our annual report on Form 10-K, quarterly reports on Form 10-Q, and current reports on Form 8-K. I want to remind you that the company assumes no duty to update any forward-looking statements. In our presentation today, unless otherwise indicated, we will be discussing adjusted financial measures, which are non-GAAP measures that we believe are meaningful when evaluating the company's performance. For detailed disclosures on these measures and the gap of reconciliations, you should refer to the financial data contained within our press release, which is posted on our website. We continue to believe that it is important to evaluate Evercore's performance on an annual basis. As we have noted previously, our results for any particular quarter are influenced by the timing of transaction closings. I will now turn the call over to John.

Thank you, Jamie, and good morning, everyone. When we spoke this time last year, we never imagined that a year later we would still be wrestling with COVID, and yet here we are. And although these times continue to be trying and volatile, Evercore has continued to effectively serve its clients while sustaining our unique culture and fostering deep collaboration across our firm. While we look forward to our return to office after Omnicom 2021, our teams have successfully adjusted to the ebbs and flows of pandemic life and importantly remain intensely focused on advising our clients on their most pressing strategic priorities. Before we go into results, I want to note that today is Ralph's final earnings call. It is hard to believe that this is his 51st quarterly call. There's no better way to salute his impressive leadership than with the successful quarter we've had and the year that we've all just announced. It is a year of records, and 2021 was by far the best year in our firm's history. We exceeded $3 billion in adjusted revenue for the first time ever and achieved record-adjusted operating income, record-adjusted net income, and record-adjusted EPS. We continued to invest in our future, adding more senior talent to our team in 2021. In advisory, we recruited eight senior managing directors, had two additional SMD recruits join last month, and promoted our largest class ever. We also added two important coverage sectors in equity research and expanded our capabilities and reach in most of our businesses. As a result, our firm is well positioned to begin 2022. Celeste will discuss our financials in more detail later in the call, but as a preview, I would like to highlight a few important achievements. We reported our fifth straight quarter of advisory revenues greater than $500 million, and our 2021 advisory revenues of more than $2.7 billion are nearly $1 billion more than in 2020. Our underwriting business generated another solid quarter, booking more than $65 million in revenues. This is our second year with underwriting revenues well surpassing $200 million. Our equities business continued to perform well, while AUM in our wealth management business exceeded $12 billion for the first time. As for our margins, we delivered a fourth quarter adjusted operating margin of 41%, while our fourth quarter adjusted EPS of $7.15 increased 26% from the year prior. For the full year, our adjusted operating margin was 34 percent, exceeding our long-term stated target. Full-year adjusted earnings per share of 1750 increased 82 percent from 2020. Also, in 2021, we returned over $850 million to shareholders through dividends and share repurchases, executing on our goal of returning all of our earnings not invested in the business to our shareholders, in addition to well more than offsetting compensation-related shares issued to our employees. Later in the call, I will provide more detail across our businesses in my first annual year-end review. But first, we will hear from Ralph. And before we do, I want to commend him for leading Evercore on a path of sustained growth, a path that we will continue to follow. Thirteen years ago, Ralph started to assemble the building blocks that would ultimately lead Evercore to what it is today, a large, nimble firm that is diverse enough to be successful but still grow in a variety of environments. Ralph guided us with his vision, extraordinary leadership, and management skills, building a firm of broad and deep capabilities with the highest quality talent on the street. I've loved being Ralph's partner over these last five years and feel incredibly fortunate to also have him as my friend. Beyond being an extraordinary business leader, he is an extraordinary person. I will miss his active involvement in the running of the firm and know that his passion and support for Evercore will continue. Let me now turn it over to Ralph.