Evercore Inc.

Good morning and welcome to the Evercore third quarter 2025 earnings conference call. Today's call is scheduled to last about one hour, including remarks by Evercore management and the question and answer session. In order to ask a question, please press the star key followed by the number one on your touchtone phone at any time. I will now turn the call over to Katie Haber, head of investor relations at Evercore. Please go ahead.

Thank you, operator. Good morning, and thank you for joining us today for Evercore's third quarter 2025 financial results conference call. I'm Katie Haber, Evercore's head of Investor Relations. Joining me on the call today is John Weinberg, our chairman and CEO, and Tim Lalonde, our CFO. After our prepared remarks, we'll open up the call for questions. Earlier today, we issued a press release announcing Evercore's third quarter 2025 financial results. Our discussion of our results today is complementary to the press release, which is available at 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 Evercourse filings with the SEC, 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 GAAP 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 closing. I will now turn the call over to John.

Thank you, Katie. Evercore delivered record third quarter results following a record first half with momentum across all business areas. We generated over $1 billion in adjusted net revenues, up 42% year over year, marking our best third quarter ever and the second best quarter in our history, behind the fourth quarter of 2021. Our quarterly and year-to-date results reflect the strength of our diversified revenue streams, the impact of our senior managing director hiring and promotions over the past several years, and the benefits of a steadily improving market environment. We remain committed to delivering for our clients and shareholders by executing our long-term strategy, which includes focusing on areas of sector and geographic white space, broadening our client coverage, and expanding and deepening our product capabilities. We are working at closing out 2025 on a strong note and positioning ourselves for a successful 2026. Throughout the third quarter and in October, market conditions and investment banking activity have continued to strengthen, supporting a more conducive environment to dealmaking. Announced M&A activity has advanced at a healthy pace, led by larger strategic transactions, while capital markets activity has accelerated. Transactions that were impacted by market volatility earlier this year are now returning to the market. in line with the momentum that we've experienced over the last several months our backlogs continued to increase in the quarter and client activity across the firm remains robust we expect these trends to carry through year end and into 2026. it's worth noting that in many years we've experienced significant positive seasonality in our business in the fourth quarter this seasonality is likely to be less pronounced this year versus prior years given the strength of our year-to-date results the timing of some transactions closing that may have been impacted by the market volatility earlier in the year and a possible timing impact from the government shutdown which we are continuing to monitor closely that said we expect continued strengthening in the market and our business overall we continue to believe we are in the early stages of an investment banking recovery driven by a combination of cyclical and structural factors global announced m a as a percentage of global market cap remains well below historical averages and pent up demand from both corporates and sponsors together with broader secular shifts such as accelerating impact of ai and other long-term trends is driving new opportunities across sectors turning to talent we continue to make strong progress on our recruiting efforts We successfully closed the Robi-Warshaw transaction on October 1st, which has been an important addition to our build-out in Europe and significantly enhances our ability to serve clients across the regions and around the world. Along with the five new investment banking SMDs from Robi-Warshaw, four additional SMDs have committed to join our global investment banking practice. two in the U.S. with one focused on financial sponsors and the other on healthcare, and two in Europe with one covering financial sponsors and another advising Nordic clients. So far, 2025 has been our strongest recruiting year to date. With our most recent joiners and commits, we now have 168 investment banking SMDs, up nearly 50% from the year end 2021, positioning us well as the market strengthens. We continue to see a healthy pipeline of external candidates, and attracting and developing exceptional talent remains core to our strategy and future success. Now let me turn to the businesses. We experience broad-based strength across our diversified platform, both sequentially and year over year. In the third quarter and over the last 12 months, approximately 45% and 50% of total revenues respectively were from non-M&A sources. Our U.S. M&A advisory practice continued to gain momentum across sectors, including tech, infrastructure, and healthcare. Financial sponsor activity is steadily picking up, and we expect this positive trend to continue into next year. Evercore is well positioned to benefit as we have meaningfully built out our sponsor coverage effort in recent years. Our European advisory business delivered its best quarter on record with strong performance across sectors, products, and geographies. We are very pleased with our progress across the region and are seeing high quality engagements with both corporates and sponsors. We expect this to continue as we welcome the Robey Warshaw team and expand our presence in Europe. As of the end of the quarter, we advised on four of the 11 largest global M&A transactions. We've continued to experience strong activity in October, including advising Carlyle on its $7.7 billion euro acquisition of BASF Coatings and Huntington Bank Shares on its acquisition of Cadence Bank for $7.4 billion, representing our second transaction advising Huntington this year. Next, our strategic defense and shareholder advisory group remains busy, as the number of activist campaigns in the U.S. is at record levels. The liability management and restructuring business continue to see robust activity in the quarter, generally tracking in line with trends experienced earlier this year. We are seeing an increase in larger traditional restructuring assignments, and our backlog in this area remains strong as highly levered companies face ongoing challenges. our private capital markets and debt advisory team continues to be active as the credit markets remain open and transaction activity picks up consistent with the strength we saw in the first two quarters of the year our private capital advisory business delivered a record third quarter driven in large part by gp led continuation fund transactions In fact, through the first nine months of 2025, PCA revenues have already exceeded full year 2024, which was our best year on record. We continue to see strong momentum in all areas of the business, including GP-led continuation funds, LP secondaries, and securitizations. Similarly, our private funds group generated a record third quarter. While the overall fundraising market remains challenging, our team continues to be active, operating at a very high level. Equity capital markets saw a resurgence in activity in the third quarter, particularly with IPOs supported by lower levels of market volatility. Our underwriting business remained active throughout the quarter as we continue to focus on our sector and product diversification efforts. We saw particular strength in tech and industrials, with Evercore serving as an active book runner on Carmen's $1 billion follow-on offering. We also experienced a significant increase in convertible issuance, an area where we have been investing and expanding our capabilities. Our equities business, Evercore ISI, has achieved the number one ranking in XTEL's All-American Research Survey for the fourth straight year. Additionally, the business had its best quarter since the fourth quarter of 2016, reflecting healthy levels of volatility and broad-based activity across products and services. Strong client engagement combined with a constructive market backdrop and healthy client performance all contributed to the quarter's results. Lastly, wealth management achieved record quarter-end AUM of approximately $15.4 billion, driven by both market appreciation and strong new net client inflows. Before I turn it over to Tim, I'd like to make a final comment. The strength of our third quarter and year-to-date results reflects the power of our diversified platform, the continued execution of our strategy, and our commitment to our clients. As we look ahead, we're confident in our ability to continue delivering value for our clients, shareholders, and people. With that, let me turn it over to Tim.