OTC Markets Group Inc.

Good day, and thank you for standing by. Welcome to the OTC Markets Group first quarter 2021 earnings conference call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. After the speaker presentation, there will be a question and answer session. Please be advised that today's conference is being recorded. To ask a question during the session, you will need to press star 1 on your telephone. If you require any further assistance, please press star and zero. I would now like to hand the conference over to your speaker today, Dan Zinn, General Counsel, and please go ahead.

Thank you, Operator. Good morning, and welcome to the OTC Markets Group First Quarter 2021 Earnings Conference Call. With me today are Cromwell Coulson, our President and Chief Executive Officer, and Antonia Georgieva, our Chief Financial Officer. Today's call will be accompanied by a slide presentation. Our earnings press release and the presentation are each available on our website. Certain statements during this call and in our presentation may relate to future events or expectations and as such may constitute forward-looking statements. Actual results may differ materially from these forward-looking statements. Information concerning risks and uncertainties that may impact our actual results is contained in the risk factors section of our 2020 annual report which is also available on our website. For more information, please refer to the safe harbor statement on slide three of the earnings presentation. With that, I'd like to turn the call over to Cromwell Coulson.

Cromwell Coulson Thank you, Dan. Good morning, everyone. Thank you for joining us today. As we look back on more than a year of living with the global pandemic, I remain impressed by our incredible team's hard work and achievements at OTC Markets Group. I am proud of our colleagues' continued ability to serve our clients, stay connected, and deliver excellent results. Everyone in our organization has been impacted differently. They each have risen to the challenges presented and demonstrated the best of our company values. Thank you. We continue to support our colleagues' safe return to work. As New York and Washington reopen this summer, we are focused on bringing our teams together in a thoughtful manner so each person can best perform their role. Our goal is to inspire individual contributions, foster productive collaboration, and Most importantly, maximize our collective success. We saw a surge in trading volumes that stressed systems across the industry during the first quarter and increased transaction counts on OTC Link ATS and OTC Link ECN. With those substantial trading volumes, capital markets activity, and continued client engagement, we delivered record results during the first quarter. with gross revenues growing 57% and net income growing 77% compared to the first quarter last year. As a result, our earnings per share grew and our operating profit margin experienced significant expansion. Antonio will cover our financial results in more detail in a few moments. We are also pleased to report another quarter of providing reliable, consistent service to our subscribers. The secure, compliant, and effective operation of our regulated ATS trading systems is a collaborative team effort every trading day. Activity on our markets is moderated since the peak days earlier in the year. However, our trading volumes remain robust. Keeping stock markets running and serving our broker-dealer subscribers during volatile times is core to our mission of creating better informed and more efficient financial markets. We deliver mission-critical infrastructure for broker-dealers. We bring the benefits of public trading to a wide spectrum of securities. We efficiently fulfill the capital formation needs of a broad range of U.S. and global companies. The more useful we make our technology platform and data, the greater value we will offer clients. We will continue to invest in our people and platform to increase earnings power for shareholders in the years to come. We spoke last quarter about our ability to focus on longer-term goals while adjusting to the unique conditions of 2020. One of those goals was the creation of a third ATS named OTC Link NQB. This new ATS will be a fully attributable inter-dealer quotation system with matching engine functionality. The addition of OTC Link NQB to complement our existing regulated ATS will provide our subscribers with a choice of market structures to best serve their clients and their best execution needs. We expect OTC Link NQB to be operational before our next earnings call, and we look forward to discussing that along with other market enhancements in the future. Our corporate services business has continued to build off of the momentum from the end of 2020, and our OTCQX market is at its highest number of companies. Our OTCQX and OTCQB markets offer an alternative path for companies to be public. Using our data-driven market standards and technology platform, companies can ensure their investors have access to high-quality disclosure materials. Increased interest in these markets reinforces the vital role we play as a global gateway for companies to access the U.S. market in an efficient and cost-effective manner. Our market data licensing business also experienced strong results during the first quarter, driven largely by broader interest and participation in our markets. Our enhanced compliance data has tracked increased interest, and we continue to expand our reach by adding distributors internationally. it is exciting to watch our business lines come together to strengthen our overall platform to be public and better inform investors. Our data-driven, open, transparent and connected approach makes trading more efficient, allows public companies to demonstrate compliance with securities laws and improves compliance processes for broker-dealers and execution quality for investors. On the regulatory front, we remain focused on implementing changes related to the SEC's amended rule 15C2-11. With a compliance date upcoming in September 2021, we have been hard at work with the Commission and SEC staff to ensure an efficient industry-wide rollout of the new standards this September. We continue discussions with the SEC regarding creating an expert market, a regulated electronic market for brokers and other sophisticated investors to continue interacting in securities that are no longer eligible for public broker-dealer quotations under the rule. With the recent confirmation of Gary Gensler as chair of the SEC, we look forward to working with the Commission on the expert market and other regulatory priorities in the coming months. Building on a strong first quarter momentum, we are well positioned to execute in the three primary strategic initiatives that will guide us throughout 2021. First, we must successfully implement changes related to amended Rule 15C211. The rule offers us an exciting opportunity to enhance the level of disclosure available for investors, create efficiencies for broker-dealers, and bring more companies public onto our markets. Secondly, we will remain laser-focused on improving the functionality and ensuring the reliability of our trading systems. The increased trading volumes and innovation in our markets provide opportunities for continued growth, and we must continue to deliver reliable, compliant, and efficient trading systems to earn our broker-dealer-subscriber's business every day. Finally, we must support the issuers that rely on our OTCQX and OTCQB markets to inform their investors, be efficiently traded by broker-dealers, and demonstrate compliance with securities regulations and good corporate governance. In closing, we are pleased to announce that on May 3rd, our Board of Directors declared a quarterly dividend of $0.15 per share payable in June. This dividend reflects our ongoing commitment to providing superior shareholder returns. With that, I will turn the call over to Antonia.