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Good day and thank you for standing by. Welcome to the VEF 4Q 2024 Earnings Conference Call and Webcast. All participants will be in listen-only mode. After the speaker's presentation, there will be a question and answer session. To ask a question during the session, you will need to press star 1 and 1 on your telephone. You will then hear an automated message advising your hand is raised. To withdraw your question, please press star 1 and 1 again. Please note that today's conference is being recorded. I would now like to hand the conference over to your speaker, Mr. David Nangle, CEO. Please go ahead.

Many thanks, Razia, and welcome all once again to our quarterly results conference call, this time for the fourth quarter of 24. Going straight into the deck, it was a more eventful quarter than usual, and the highlights of key events in the quarter, first and foremost, it was around our NAB and our Q4 NAB. Weakness was driven by mainly Brazil macro and market aspects feeding into our evaluation process. And we'll get into that in a bit deeper detail after the presentation. But we ended the quarter and the year at an average of $353 million, down 26% quarter on quarter, and a dollar turn from down nearly 20% quarter on quarter in SEC. From a portfolio point of view, looking at the underlying companies, Once again, still delivering. The quarterly message is the same as last quarter. Majority break even, which is where we want them to be. And growth is back in focus. And we saw those trends coming through in our key names in the portfolio through 2024. And that continues into Q4. And we expect 35% to 40% top-line growth, profit growth as we look at the next year. So it's a nice risk-reward balanced portfolio at this stage. On a micro level, credit has to always get focused, given the size and shape in our portfolio. The Q3 results would have been reported to you investors back in November, the latest set of public figures we have. The trends are continuing in the Q4 from what we saw throughout the year. But in Q4, they delivered 70% quarter-and-quarter origination growth, nearly 50% year-on-year. And that origination growth is obviously driving everything else from a balance sheet into an income statement as we are profitable growth and we're accelerating that growth into 2025. I guess what's new is basically delivering on promises around exits. We've been talking a lot about this for a long time. It was a key focus, goal for us, promise to the market. And now we've done two exits back to back with Black Book, the IPO in India. And more recently this week, we announced the exit of Gringo in a 100% cash deal. So again, to both of them. And that leads on to the last point, which is what these exits allow us to do. These exits are obviously delivered at NAV plus minus and with capital in. we just start to have a lot more flexibility and ability to put that capital to work. And what comes front and centre to mind is obviously our balance sheet, strengthening that by delivering, and our own equity is traded at a deep discount, and the opportunities to nibble at that. And from a numbers point of view, slide three, you know, as I said, headline, $353 million a year end of a NAV, from a SEC per share basis amount. NASDAQ for share, 3.73, down from 4.26 at the end of last year, mainly because of the Q4 moves. First three quarters of the year, quite directionally positive. We had that macro Brazil overlay in Q4, which we'll get into. And then from a graphical point of view on slide four, you see the step down in Q4 from what we had in September through to the $353 million in December. And finally, just to lay it black, which we're going to get into a lot more in detail on our NAV in Q4 and the key components of that. What basically happened in Q4 as a basis for that is the stark divergence in how markets performed in the U.S. versus the rest of the world and our core markets within that of Latin America, obviously quite robust from key markets, NASDAQ, S&P, and even fintech markets globally, which are heavily weighted towards developed markets, all having a very healthy Q4. you know, ARK and FinEx indexes of 12% and 24% respectively. You pull that into a last-time context in the FinTech companies of which we benchmark valuations against mathematically, and there was pullback in a lot of key last-time FinTech names. You add that to currency, and you get the math speeding into the valuation process that we try and be true and fair to. But that's a basis for what Alexis is going to talk to. So, Alexis, do you want to jump in at this point and get into more of the detail on that front, please?

Yeah, thanks, Dave. Hi, everyone. I'm going to start talking you through some of the individual portfolio position moves and the forces driving them. This quarter, as Dave mentioned, LATAM Comp and weak Brazilian RAI paired with a strong dollar had a large impact on our NAV evolution. And you'll see that as well later in the NAV bridge. But diving into the individual names, so Creditas saw a 44% decline quarter on quarter. As Dave mentioned, that was dominated by macro factors. The peer multiples that saw 30% contraction, specifically LATAM FinTech peers, in terms of their multiples, and the RAI depreciated 12% in the quarter. These two factors account for almost all of this move, this 44% move. Another name worth mentioning is TransferGo, where the valuation saw a 32% decline, reflecting the move to master model from the latest transaction. Peer multiples for TransferGo contracted since the latest transaction in TransferGo that was priced at the end of 2023, and weaker FX over the period also contributed to this move. Another name worth diving into is Gringo, where we saw an 11% decline quarter on quarter in the mark as we apply the calibration methodology to reflect the FX impact on the ongoing transaction, which was fixed at a Brazilian RAI price. Since the end of the fourth quarter, Gringo has entered into a definitive agreement to be acquired by Semperat, as Dave mentioned, and it's subject to customary closing, including antitrust approval, but VET will receive net proceeds of $15.2 million reflected there in that fourth quarter number. More details on this transaction will follow later in the presentation. On the positive front, the JustPay mark increased 6.5%. This is despite a 6% decline in comps and 2% depreciation in rupee versus the dollar, all more than offset by the company performance and growth of around 20% quarter-on-quarter. And Nebo saw a small increase of 2.6% quarter-on-quarter, reflecting stable comps in the SaaS space, including Latam SaaS comps, and a 12% decline in the currency offset by company growth of around 16% quarter-on-quarter. Those are the key names that I wanted to highlight in that slide. Dave, moving on to slide seven. So just to highlight what the key moving parts are in terms of valuation methodology changes are in the quarter. As we mentioned, TransferGo moves to Master Model as we move towards the end of the 12-month window since the last transaction, and we reflect our new fair value there in this quarter. Gringo moves to Calibration Methodology. to reflect the FX move on the transaction which occurred post the closing of the quarter. Black Buck is now a public company and valued as such. And so the net impact of these changes is that the public or latest transaction marks account for 26% of the portfolio, down slightly from 27% in the previous quarter, and 74% of the portfolio, the remaining 74%, are valued on a mark-to-model basis, with over 90% of those incorporating multiples further down the income statement as we've implemented earlier in 2024. We continue to expect a shift from the mark-to-model to public and latest transactions I guess the obvious catalyst being that Gringo is going to move to cash on the closing of the transaction, and further fundraisers would drive that shift as well. Moving on to slide eight, given the sharp move in credit assets marked to model this quarter, we wanted to illustrate some of the components of the pronounced move. which were largely macro in nature. So in the fourth quarter, the market focused a lot on Brazil's fiscal situation and the weak balance sheet and lack of fiscal discipline, but also the dollar strengthened in the quarter. As a result, there are two big factors that impacted the move in creditors. Here we show a basket of Latam FinTech share price moves in the quarter. As you can see, they moved 20 to 30%. These are not the actual multiples. These are not the actual comps of Creditas, but indicative of a basket of names similar to the comps that we use for Creditas. And as I mentioned earlier in the call, the multiples of comps were actually down 30% quarter on quarter. In addition, on the chart at the bottom of this page, you can see that the Brazilian REI depreciated 12% in the quarter, which was more than it depreciated in the preceding three quarters. And so, as Dave mentioned, you know, these two factors feed into our valuation methodology. So, despite Creditas' ongoing underlying solid performance and delivering on their promise of accelerating growth from a profitable base, these two factors feed through to the 44% quarter-on-quarter contraction in our mark. On slide nine, I'm going to run through the bridge for the NAB evolution over the quarter as we do. As you can see, it was the change in multiples for comps and FX, which dominated the move, accounting for over $100 million of the quarter-and-quarter NAV move. Portfolio performance within the model holdings remains resilient, but we did also make some adjustments to business plans for the next 12 months, given the shift in rate environment and wanting to remain conservative on our outlooks. And then the only other thing I would highlight on this fourth quarter bridge is this reflects $2 million that came in from Blackbuck in the latest transaction and that offset our OPEX and coupon payments in the corporate cash bucket. So that's why those buckets look very flat quarter on quarter. Going on to slide 10 and just running through The 2024 NAV evolution and bridge, we decided in this quarter it would be nice to have a look back and sum up all of the quarterly NAV bridges over the course of 2024 to really reflect on what drove the change in our NAV year on year. As you can see, portfolio performance represented $77 million of positive NAV growth. which equates to about 17% in the year. But this was offset by about $150 million of pullback from comp multiples in the year, and also FX, predominantly Brazilian REI and the Mexican peso. So, you know, we continue to believe in a strong portfolio performance, being able to drive shareholder value looking forward. But the 2024 headwinds from comps and FX of $150 million were particularly strong. Going on to slide 11, we just wanted to reiterate with this slide that, We continue to feel confident in the portfolio's ability to drive shareholder value. Now, over 90% of the portfolio is break-even and growing self-sustainably, not dependent on fresh capital to grow and in control of its destiny. The portfolio's next 12-month revenue and gross profit growth will be 35% and 40% respectively on our forecasts today. And that's reflected in credit us as public disclosures of accelerating growth and profitable growth in 2025. The portfolio companies are well-capitalized and high-quality targets attracting fresh capital. Examples of this being TransferGo, Confeo that raised, Solfacil, and now Gringo being acquired. And we expect to see more of the portfolio attract fresh capital in size fundraisers. Handing back to Dave, quick, just to run through an update on credit analysis number 12.