Information Services Corporation

Good day and thank you for standing by. Welcome to the ISC Quarter 1, 2021 Earnings Conference Call and Webcast. At this time, all participants are in listen-only mode. After the speaker presentation, there will be a question and answer session. To ask a question during the session, you will need to press star 1 on your telephone keypad. If you require any further assistance, please press star 0. I would now like to turn the conference over to your speaker today, Mr. Jonathan Haksham. Please go ahead, sir.

Thank you, Ruby, and good morning, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to ISC's conference call for the quarter ended March 31st, 2021. On the call today with me are Jeff Stusik, President and CEO, and Sean Peters, Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer. Jeff will provide some opening comments followed by a review of the operational and financial results for the quarter by Sean. Jeff will then make some closing remarks before we open the call up to the question and answer session. Before we begin, we would like to remind everyone that we will only be summarizing results today. ISCs and audited, condensed, consolidated interim financial statements and notes and management's discussion and analysis for the period ended March 31st, 2021 have been filed on CDAR and are also available in the investor section on our website under financial reports. We encourage you to review those reports in their entirety. I would also like to remind you that any statements made today that are not historical facts are considered to be forward-looking statements within the meaning of applicable securities laws. The statements may involve a number of risks and uncertainties that are described in detail in the company's CDAR filings, in particular in ISC's annual information form for the year ended December 31, 2020, and in ISC's unaudited, condensed, consolidated interim financial statements and notes and management's discussion and analysis for the three months ended March 31st, 2021. Those risks and uncertainties may cause actual results to differ materially from those stated. Today's comments are made as of today's date and will not be updated except as required under applicable securities legislation. Today's conference call is being broadcast live over the internet and will be archived for replay shortly after the call on the investor section of our website. I will now turn the call over to Jeff.

Thank you, Jonathan, and good morning to everyone joining us for today's call. Our financial performance for the first quarter of 2021 was very strong, building on the strength we experienced in the third and fourth quarters of 2020. While the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic was evident in our second quarter last year, our business has performed remarkably well since that time. An unexpected dynamic from 2020 is that the seasonality that was generally consistent pre-pandemic is now much less so as seen in this first quarter of 2021. The robust year-over-year performance of our three segments is due to a combination of strength in economic drivers, in registry operations, focus on new customer acquisition and growth in services, and successful delivery and implementation of technology in our technology solutions team. This has been paired with continued cost management across all areas of our business. In particular, registry operations volumes were stronger than expected during the first quarter of 2021, primarily driven by robust activity in the Saskatchewan real estate sector and increases in personal property security registrations, along with increases in new business entity registrations. Our focus on customer service and satisfaction, combined with our new cloud-based registry complete software, helped drive continued organic growth in services and the successful ongoing transition of customers to our new technology. In doing so, we have successfully empowered our remote workforce, advanced our product roadmap, and reduced our cost of delivery. The successful implementations in our technology solution segment also showed our ability to deliver world-class software to our customers, even during a pandemic. I'll now ask Sean to summarize our financial and operating performance for the quarter.