Lazard LTD.

Good morning and welcome to Lazard's third quarter and first nine months 2024 earnings conference call. This call is being recorded. Currently all participants are in a listen only mode. Following the remarks, we will conduct a question and answer session. Instructions will be provided at that time. If anyone should require assistance during the call, please press the star key followed by zero on your telephone keypad. At this time, I will turn the call over to Alexandra Degnan, Lazard's Head of Investor Relations, Treasury, and Corporate Sustainability. Please go ahead.

Thank you, Todd. Good morning, everyone, and welcome to Lazard's earnings call for the third quarter and first nine months of 2024. I'm Alexandra Degnan, Head of Investor Relations, Treasury, and Corporate Sustainability. In addition to today's audio comments, we've posted our earnings release on our website. A replay of this call will also be available on our website later today. Before we begin, let me remind you that we may make forward-looking statements about our business and performance. There are important factors that could cause our actual results, level of activity, performance, achievements, or other events to differ materially from those expressed or implied by the forward-looking statements, including, but not limited to, those factors discussed in the company's SEC filings, which you can access on our website. Lazar assumes no responsibility for the accuracy or completeness of these forward-looking statements and assumes no duty to update them. Today's discussion also includes certain non-GAAP financial measures that we believe are meaningful when evaluating the company's performance. A reconciliation of these non-GAAP financial measures to the comparable GAAP measures is provided in our earnings release and investor presentation. Hosting our call today are Peter Orszag, Lazard's Chief Executive Officer, and Marianne Vetsch, Lazard's Chief Financial Officer. After our prepared remarks, Peter and Marianne will be joined by Evan Russo, Chief Executive Officer of Asset Management, They open the call for questions. I'll now turn the call over to Peter.

Thank you, Allie. We are pleased to report another quarter of strong results with total firm-wide adjusted net revenue of $2.1 billion for the first nine months of 2024, up 24% from 2023. These results demonstrate the ongoing execution of our Lazard 2030 strategy and our focus on delivering differentiated advice and investment solutions for clients. In financial advisory, we achieved strong year-over-year performance in Europe in the third quarter and record revenue in America's year-to-date. Restructuring and liability management was also a meaningful contributor to overall revenue growth, which reflects our longstanding excellence in this area, as well as investments made to diversify through expanding our coverage of the creditor's side. There are several factors that present opportunity for further momentum. M&A activity continues to rebound with M&A valuation multiples having returned to their 10-year average, narrowing the gap between buyer and seller expectations. For the market as a whole, M&A announced volume is up over 20% for the first three quarters of 2024 compared to the same period last year. Private equity is becoming increasingly active with a significant uptick in sponsor take private activity. Holding periods for PE-backed portfolio companies have been at an all-time high, and we believe many of these companies will be brought to market. We are also seeing significant activity in our private equity fundraising business, especially in the secondary market, as the longer holding period I just noted has increased demand for liquidity. With regard to growing momentum in private markets, we are well positioned due to our investments in hiring and developing teams, along with firm-wide collaborative efforts to deliver integrated client solutions. Year to date, revenue associated with our overall interactions with private capital, which span strategic advisory, restructuring, and liability management, along with capital raising, is up more than 50% compared to the same period last year. We believe that additional growth will occur as we continue to expand our efforts and as private markets participate more actively in M&A as the cycle develops. Turning to asset management, we delivered another solid quarter of results while pursuing our strategy of strengthening our platform. The third quarter ended on a strong note for equity and bond markets, with U.S. equity markets posting all-time closing highs. Despite secular headwinds affecting active asset management, we believe the reduction in rates and a more appealing outlook for global and emerging market equities support demand for Lazard's investment strategies going forward. During the third quarter, we announced a senior leadership hire for asset management to serve as our global head of ETFs. As the active ETF market further develops, we are expanding our efforts to offer investors access to our premier investment products through a more efficient vehicle that aligns with their preferences. For example, last quarter we launched the Lazard Global Listed Infrastructure Active ETF to investors in Australia, which builds on the success of one of our specialty strategies while capturing new business opportunities. Across both of our businesses, excellence in serving clients is predicated on our culture and our people. Periodically, we conduct employee engagement surveys to evaluate and enhance our workplace. We are pleased to see substantial improvements in our latest study, which took place this month, with the best results achieved since launching these engagement surveys. Our colleagues' commitment to Lazard's future is evident in our latest study and in our successful performance this year. Let me now turn the call over to Mary Ann to provide further details on our results, and then I'll share more on our performance and outlook.