Forge Global Holdings, Inc.

Financial, sorry, yes, Chief Financial Officer, and Lindsay Riddle, Executive Vice President of Corporate Marketing and Communication, and Dominic Peschel, Senior Vice President of Finance and Investor Relations. All lines have been placed on mute to prevent any background noise. After the speaker's remarks, there will be a question and answer session. If you'd like to ask a question during that time, simply press star followed by the number one on your telephone keypad. And if you'd like to withdraw that question, again, press star one. Thank you. And I will now turn the conference over to Lindsay Riddle. Ms. Riddle, you may begin your conference.

Thank you, Krista. And thank you all for joining us today for FORJA's fourth quarter and full year 2023 earnings call. This call will be a bit longer as we recap the full year. Joining me today are Kelly Rodriguez, FORJA's CEO, and Mark Lee, FORJA's CFO. They will share prepared remarks regarding the financial results and then take your questions at the end. Just after market closed today, we issued a press release announcing Ford's fourth quarter and full year 2023 financial results. A discussion of our results is complimentary to the press release, which is available on the IR page of our website. This conference call is being webcast and will be available for replay. There's also a company investor supplemental page on our IR site. 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 these actual outcomes to materially differ from those included in these statements. We discuss these factors in our SEC filings, including our annual report on Form 10-K, which can be found on the IR page of our 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 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 also posted to the IR page. Today's discussion will focus on the fourth quarter and full year 2023 results. As always, we encourage you to evaluate both annual and quarterly results for a full picture of FORJA's performance, which can be affected by unexpected events that are outside of our control. With that, I'll turn it over to Kelly, our CEO.

Thank you, Lindsay and Dom, and thanks all for joining us. I'll first share some of our 2023 successes. followed by brief highlights of our Q4 results before turning it over to Mark for a deeper dive on our Q4 and annual financials. And I'll finish with some insight on the business and what we're seeing in the market. I'm proud to say that in 2023, we made important moves to invest in Forge's future vision and our path to profitability. Forge focused on three things, accelerating technology development, winning with data, and expanding our category leadership. We invested in 2023 in the Forge Next Generation platform, a flexible and scalable technology platform on which we are building next generation institutional trading and data tools. We developed and tested with key clients Forge Pro, our first product combining our automated trading capabilities and our proprietary data and marking the first availability of our global order book for institutional trading customers, all in one powerful platform. We announced our first two indexes, the Forge Private Market Index, a benchmark for private market performance, and a first-of-its-kind investable index, the Forge Equity Private Market Index. And we delivered proprietary and meaningful market data through our products, reports, and experts, to the tens of thousands who turned to Forge for perspective as the market bounced around the bottom throughout the year. Amid the volatility that persisted last year, we ran our business with a focus on lean growth and operational efficiency, meeting our targets for lowering cash burn and keeping headcount flat, even as we strategically invested for the future, hiring key positions to advance our business. So I'll now turn to financial highlights for Q4 and for the year. In the fourth quarter, the slow market recovery continued, and we grew revenue for the third consecutive period. Forge's total revenue, less transaction-based expenses, rose to $18.9 million, up 3%, from 18.4 million last quarter, and up 22% from Q1 2023's trough of 15.5 million. For 2023, Forge's total revenue less transaction-based expenses was 69.4 million, marginally up from 68.9 million a year ago. And although the macroeconomic environment dragged trading volumes in the first half of the year, we are optimistic that the worst is behind us. Ahead of a meaningful recovery on the market side, total custodial administration fees in 2023 made up the difference and grew 53% to $44 million. Meanwhile, assets under custody were up 5% in the year to $15.6 billion. Our modest improvements in the year reflect the strength of our diversified business model, which includes cyclical and counter-cyclical revenue streams from our trading business and our custody business, respectively. We anticipate that as the market continues to improve, we'll see the trend reverse again and marketplace revenue will eventually outpace custody revenue. Now, I'll turn it over to Mark to talk about the fourth quarter and annual financials in more detail. and then I'll return with some notable business highlights and Forge's market outlook.