Information Services Corporation

Thank you for standing by and welcome to ISC fourth quarter and year-ended December 31st 2021 earnings conference call and webcast. At this time all participants are in a listen-only mode. After the speaker's presentation there will be a question and answer session. To participate simply press star 1 on your telephone. If you require any further assistance please press star 0. Now it's my pleasure to turn the call to Jonathan Harkshaw, Senior Director, Investor Relations and Capital Markets. Please go ahead.

Thank you, Carmen, and good morning, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to ISC's conference call for the fourth quarter and year-end in December 31st, 2021. On the call with me today are Sean Peters, President and CEO, and Bob Antichow, Chief Financial Officer. This morning, Sean will take you through some of the highlights of the year. Bob will then provide some financial and operating highlights for the year as well as speak to our outlook and guidance for 2022 before passing the call back over to Sean for some closing remarks. Before we begin, we would like to remind everyone that we will only be summarizing results today. The company's financial statements and MD&A have been filed on CDAR and are available on our website. 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. 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 laws. 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. With that, I would now like to turn the call over to Sean.

Thank you, Jonathan, and good morning to everyone joining us for today's call. I'm pleased to be here today in my new role as president and CEO of ISC, and I'm excited to bring my energy and enthusiasm for our business to the role. I'd also like to take the opportunity to welcome and introduce our new Chief Financial Officer, Bob Antichow. Bob is extremely familiar with the company, and I'm looking forward to us continuing our work together in our new roles as we take ISC forward. 2021 was a remarkable year for ISC. Not only did we continue to grow our services business in the face of a global pandemic, but we also delivered outstanding results in our Saskatchewan-based registries. Much of this success was fueled by robust economic activity in the markets in which we operate and contributions from our organic growth strategies, especially in services. In registry operations, the year was driven by a strong Saskatchewan real estate sector, resulting in increased transaction levels over the prior year, accompanied by higher average land values transacted through the registry and record high value transactions. During the year, we also saw increases in the Saskatchewan corporate and personal property registries, again underscored by higher transaction volumes. Services revenue was also up due to a combination of favorable economic conditions and continued organic growth across our product lines. In addition, we successfully transitioned many of our existing customers from our legacy platform to our new registry complete platform, giving them access to a more comprehensive suite of services. Technology Solutions continues to be impacted by COVID-19, which slowed our progress on active projects and the commencement of potential new opportunities. As a result, we saw weaker results in Technology Solutions in 2021 as compared to prior years, but we expect that to change as we move past COVID-19 and invest in leadership for this business. In addition to our financial success overall in 2021, We also executed on a number of key initiatives to support the business and our continued growth. We completed our integration of Paragon acquired in August of 2020 and are actively optimizing the technology for an even more efficient operation and enhanced client experience. For a second year, we very successfully continued our work from home program combined with providing in-person customer support where required to ensure the health and safety of our staff and customers without sacrificing our service levels. As part of our ongoing support of our Saskatchewan employees, in September we ratified a new six-year collective agreement with a membership of SGEU with respect to in-scope employees of ISC. We reinforced our balance sheet with the filing of a preliminary short-form base shelf prospectus, which allows ISC to make offerings of debt and equity instruments of up to $200 million. We entered into an amended and extended credit facility agreement for $150 million and paid down $35 million on the outstanding portion of our facility. And finally, in September, our board of directors announced an increase to our annual dividend from $0.80 to $0.92 per annum. The decision to increase the dividend reflects the strength of our current business and affirms our commitment to reward shareholders as we grow. Subsequent to the end of the year, we announced that we acquired all of the shares of a group of companies operating as Uplevel. I'm very pleased to welcome the Uplevel staff to our team as they bring extensive experience in customer touch and collateral management and will help ensure we maintain market leadership in the industry and provide our current and new customers with an expanded range of services. Overall, it's been an extremely successful year for ISC with increases in revenue, net income, EBITDA, and free cash flow. The performance of our overall business in uncertain economic environments, our ability to adapt to and take advantage of changing consumer behaviors, and our relentless pursuit of organic growth were on full display in 2021 and are evident across all of our financial reporting. With that, I'll now ask Bob to provide some further details on our financial and operating performance for the year, as well as an outline of our guidance and outlook for 2022.