Lazard LTD.

Good morning, everyone. Welcome to Lazard's fourth quarter and full year 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 today, please press the star key followed by zero on your telephone keypad. Now, at this time, I'll turn things over to Alexandra Degnan, Lazard's Head of Investor Relations and Treasury. Please go ahead, ma'am.

Thank you both. Good morning, everyone, and welcome to Lazard's earnings call for the fourth quarter and full year of 2024. I'm Alexandra Degnan, Head of Investor Relations and Treasury. In addition to today's audio comments, we have posted our earnings release on our website. 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. Lazard 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 Orzai, Lazard's Chief Executive Officer and Chairman, and Marianne Betch, Lazard's Chief Financial Officer. After our prepared remarks, Peter and Marianne will be joined by Evan Russo, Chief Executive Officer of Asset Management, as they open the call for questions. I'll now turn the call over to Peter.

Thank you, Allie, and thank you to everyone for joining us this morning. We are pleased to report strong fourth quarter and full year results, which reflect our teamwork across the firm and dedication to our clients, as well as improving business conditions we anticipated. Our continued momentum in executing our Lazard 2030 strategy is producing results ahead of schedule. In financial advisory, our strength in franchise captured increased market share. We achieved record revenue in Europe in 2024, where our integrated leadership team and cooperation across sectors and geographies are working well. While continuing to serve our longstanding corporate clients, we have also expanded the ways in which we serve private capital, and that effort produced robust revenue during the year. In addition, our leading restructuring and liability management practice was a meaningful contributor to our results, supported by our improved balance between creditor and debtor work. Overall, financial advisory delivered strong performance in 2024, and we expect continued strong growth in 2025. In asset management, we produced consistent results during the year, demonstrating the resiliency of revenue generated from this business. Growth in incentive fees during 2024 resulted from the outperformance of key strategies including our global convertible alternative strategy, Japanese equity, and quant. In addition, recent enhancements to the business and sales efforts and key products that took place throughout last year have enabled us to enter this year with $10 billion of one but not yet funded mandate, substantially higher than other recent years. These enhancements and sales efforts, along with our investments and talent, further position us to target a more balanced flow picture in 2025. I will say more on that topic later. In summary, execution against our long-term growth strategy has created momentum in 2024 that is reflected in today's results. We anticipate 2025 to be an even more productive and profitable year as we continue to pursue our 2030 objectives. Let me now turn the call over to Mary Ann to provide more detail on our earnings and financial performance and then I'll share more on the outlook.