Information Services Corporation

Good day and thank you for standing by. Welcome to the ISC Q2 2023 Earnings Conference Call. 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 ask a question during the session, you will need to press star 1 1 on your telephone. You will then hear an automated message advising that your hand is raised. To withdraw your question, please press star 1 1 again. please be advised that today's conference is being recorded. I would now like to hand the conference over to your speaker today, Jonathan Hapshaw, Senior Director, Investor Relations and Capital Markets. Please go ahead.

Thank you, Shannon, and good morning to everyone joining us today. Welcome to ISC's conference call for the second quarter ended June 30th, 2023. On the call today with me 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 quarter. Bob will then provide some financial and operating highlights for the quarter 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 NDNA have been filed on CDAR Plus 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 rules. The statements may involve a number of risks and uncertainties that are described in detail in the company's CDAR Plus 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 will be archived for replay shortly after the call on the investor section of our website. I would now like to turn the call over to Sean.

Thank you, Jonathan. Good morning to everyone joining us for today's call. Results highlight the overall stability that we've built into our business with solid diversification and key acquisitions. While successive increases to interest rates by the Bank of Canada, including the most recent and somewhat unexpected one, have affected activity in the Saskatchewan Land Registry, the other parts of our business are making up for that. Activity in our services business and the addition of our property tax assessment business helped offset any impact to our revenue in the quarter from the lower land registry transactions. While adjusted EBITDA has naturally been affected from the change in revenue mix and related margins, the overall results are solid. More specifically on registry operations, we expected some contraction in our Saskatchewan registry markets with a higher interest rate environment, and that's what we've seen. As I noted in May when we reported our first quarter results, we expect that will continue for the balance of the year. but that does not diminish the contribution of our registry results, and the steady revenue from the addition of the Ontario Property Tax Assessment Services business is helping to offset any impact to registry operations overall. As you see in our results, registry operations remains a strong adjusted EBITDA and free cash flow contributor to the overall business. At the same time, services continues to be the main driver of organic revenue growth for ISD. The regulatory solutions divisions had a strong quarter, driven by many of our financial institution customers implementing increased due diligence as a result of the higher interest rate environment. We also continue to acquire and onboard new customers, even in a challenging macro environment. And finally, as expected, Technology Solutions has been advancing the delivery of various contracts announced earlier in the year, and we're starting to see this reflected on our revenue for the segment, as we hit various milestones for those and other ongoing contracts. The progress on these new contracts and focus on completing the ongoing contracts has bolstered third party revenue for the current year. As most of you know, subsequent to the end of the quarter, we announced the extension of our master service agreement with the province of Saskatchewan. This was a milestone and one which positions us incredibly well for the future, while securing the stability of the Saskatchewan registries by having a known and trusted provider in place until 2053. The extent to our investment in the Saskatchewan registries, addressing the evolving security infrastructure and other escalating people and technology costs that are required to deliver the reliable and assured title transaction services on the timely basis that we do. As an organization, we continue to execute on our strategic priorities, our focus on continued organic growth, our execution on strategic and accretive acquisitions, And now having completed a 30-year registry contract to underpin all of that, we are extremely well positioned to continue to deliver the strong, stable, and growing results that have been our hallmark. I'll now turn the call over to Bob to discuss some financial highlights before providing some closing thoughts.