Forge Global Holdings, Inc.

For the speaker's remarks, there will be a question and answer session. If you'd like to ask a question during this time, simply press star followed by the number one on your telephone keypad. If you would like to withdraw your question, again, press the star and one. Thank you, and I will now turn the call over to Dominic Bichelle, SCP. Dom, you may begin your conference.

Awesome. Thank you, Kayla. And thank you all for joining us today for FORGE's third quarter 2023 earnings call. Joining me today are Kelly Rodriguez, Forge's CEO, and Mark Lee, Forge's CFO. They will share prepared remarks regarding the quarter's results and then take your questions at the end. Just after market closed today, we issued a press release announcing Forge's third quarter 2023 results. A discussion of our results today is complementary to the press release. which is available on the investor relations page of our website. This conference call is being webcast live and will be available for replay for 30 days. There is also an accompanying investor supplemental PDF on our IR page that I would recommend you download. During this conference call, we may make forward-looking statements based on current expectations, forecasts, and projections as of today's date. 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 included in the statements. We discuss these factors in our SEC filings, including our quarterly report on Form 10-Q, which can soon be found on the Investor Relations website. and the SEC filings website. As a reminder, we are not required to update our forward-looking statements. In our presentation today, unless otherwise noted, we will be discussing adjusted financial measures, which are non-GAAP measures that we believe are meaningful when evaluating FORGE's performance. For detailed disclosures on these measures and GAAP reconciliations, you should refer to the financial data contained within our press release, which is also posted to the IR site. Additionally, we have posted, as I mentioned, the supplemental information on the same page. Today's discussion will focus on the third quarter 2020, sorry, 2023 results. As always, we encourage you to evaluate both annual and quarterly results for the full picture of Forge's performance, which can be affected by unexpected events that are outside our control. With that, I'll turn it over to Kelly.

Thanks, Tom. Thanks, everyone, for joining. I'll open today by summarizing some of the highlights of the quarter before turning over to Mark for a deeper dive into our financials. And then we'll close with a quick overview of what we're seeing in the market. In Q3, we witnessed the continued cautious return of investors to the private market, which drove higher volumes and revenue in our markets business compared to both Q1 and Q2. This improvement was observed for the quarter even as continued concern over interest rates and existing geopolitical conflicts served as a backdrop for a softer September. Though the IPO window remains mostly closed, we're seeing continued traction in markets activity and a narrower bid-ask spread than we have seen since the start of the downturn. These are encouraging signs that investment in the private market is returning amid the great reset, the effects of which we believe are still ongoing. With that, we saw improved results in the third quarter over that of Q1 and Q2. In Q3, Forge's total revenue, less transaction-based expenses, was up 11% to $18.4 million from $16.6 million in Q2. Placement fee revenue, less transaction-based expenses for Forge in Q3, improved up 27% to $7.1 million compared to Q2. We believe this was due to modestly improving market conditions that, again, benefited our markets business. Another encouraging indicator was the rise in transaction volume, which increased 53% to $234 million compared to Q2. Forge's adjusted EBITDA loss narrowed in Q3 to $10.4 million, better than both last quarter's loss of $11.8 and a $13.3 million loss in Q3 of last year. This reflects revenue growth and a disciplined and deliberate cost management strategy. including intentional cost cutting enacted in prior quarters, and we're reiterating our commitment to lowering our burn for 2023 and 2024. Custody administration fees for the seventh straight quarter continue to rise to $11.3 million in Q3, benefiting again from the higher interest rate environment. In addition to our financial highlights, We're encouraged by the progress we're making in technology and platform development, and we're investing strategically to ensure that we can meet the needs of the expanding universe of private market participants as the market rebounds. While we continue to build to drive more efficiency and scale to the market, we're also continuing to develop our institutional product suite to bring more sophisticated capabilities to institutional investors. We have expanded our data strategy to include index and index-related product development and are currently testing new innovations that combine the power of our proprietary market data with enhanced trading capabilities. We intend to debut new products related to those efforts to the general market in 2024. With that, let me turn it over to Mark.