This conference is being recorded. [Foreign language]. All participants, please stand by. Your conference is now ready to begin. Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the RF Capital Second Quarter 2023 earnings conference call. I will now turn the meeting over to Mr. Tim Wilson, Chief Financial Officer. Please go ahead, Mr. Wilson. Good morning, and welcome to RF Capital's 2nd quarter 2023 earnings call. As a reminder, this call is being webcast and available for replay. I'd also like to remind you that our remarks may contain forward-looking information and that actual results could differ materially. Forward-looking information is subject to many risks and uncertainties. Certain factors or assumptions applied in the forward-looking information can be found in our latest AIF and MD&A. These documents are available on our website and at sedar.com. This morning, I'm joined by our President and CEO, Kish Kapoor. Kish will share key takeaways from Q2, then I will cover our detailed financial results and our financial outlook. Kish will then end with closing remarks, following which we will open the call to questions from analysts. If you have questions once this call is complete, please reach out to investor relations. Our contact information can be found at the end of our earnings release. I will now turn the call over to Kish. Thank you, Tim. Good morning, everyone. We're so pleased to be hosting this call from Calgary, our second-largest market in Canada. In the past 2 years, we've recruited 4 great teams in this city, and our pipeline has many more high-potential recruits based here. This momentum is in large part due to our extraordinary branch manager, Neil Bosch, and his management team, along with the Calgary-based Paul Landry from our corporate acquisition team. These leaders, as well as our 36 local advisor teams, together are generating serious traction, telling our story and spreading our word about the name on our door. I've also had the pleasure of taking multiple business trips to Calgary over the past few months, including attending a special branch-hosted Stampede event, which, yes, was my first rodeo. With each visit, I see optimism building about our future from our entrepreneurs, our teams, and our employees. Needless to say, we're all very bullish on the growth opportunity Calgary presents and are thrilled to be hosting this important call with our team here today. This optimism is not limited to one city. I'm seeing it across our company with all my market visits. I especially witnessed it when we hosted our annual advisors conference, we refer to as our summit, in Austin, Texas, this past May. This is a pay-your-own-way format, where everyone from across the company can join with travel and accommodation at their own personal expense. We had over 150 attendees, and many of our advisors rewarded their own team members with an invitation to participate. We had some of the world's best money managers on stage, many of our brightest advisors also shared their business strategies. Like any extraordinary company, we're deeply inspired by each other and enjoyed the chance to celebrate the firm we've become and the future we have in store. We also hosted three meetings for our CEO Advisory Council, two virtually and one in person. This council was created just this year to solicit feedback from a group of advisors who represent their respective branches and peers. Topics have been meaty, and our discussions have been highly productive, with immense engagement from every member. The optimism I'm hearing from this esteemed group is also nothing short of magical. Our optimism is also attributable to what we've already achieved in the past 2 years, ending in 2022. Since our transformation journey started, our AUA has increased 28% to $36 billion. Revenue has increased 33% to $354 million, and Adjusted EBITDA has increased 77% to $62 million. This is a testament to the character, resilience, and commitment of our advisor teams, who believed in our vision and knew we would deliver on our promises. The advisors who stayed put through it all managed 95% of our AUA. They knew when the renovations were done, we would have a beautiful new home, and in the end, the chaos would be worth the headaches and the frustration. In fact, over the past two years, while managing through this disruptive technology integration at a pace of change never experienced here, their businesses grew by 20%. Imagine what they can accomplish now that most of the heavy lifting is behind us. The optimism is also ignited by industry recognition, too. In this year's Investment Executive Brokerage Report Card, we ranked second in a three-way tie amongst 14 firms surveyed. We also increased our Net Promoter Score to 74, a level considered to be exceptional. For the fifth consecutive year, we were named as a best place as Best Workplace in Financial Services and Insurance by Great Place to Work. Nine of our advisors were also recognized as Canada's Top 100 Women in Wealth Advisors for 2023 by The Globe and Mail and SHOOK Research. Our second quarter results highlight the shift in focus to growth. Our transformation costs were down from CAD 4.3 million last quarter to CAD 413,000 this quarter. This is a 90% decline. Our recurring fee-based revenues were up almost CAD 2 million or 3% of the same period last year, now stand at 90% of revenue. Interest revenue is up 61% over the second quarter of last year. Our recruiting pipeline is up CAD 6 billion versus last year and almost CAD 1 billion sequentially. Excluding one large commission, insurance revenues and Adjusted EBITDA were also up over last year. Tim will have more to say on all of this in his remarks. However, our stock price has not yet taken these significant improvements in our platform and financial performance into account. I'm confident that in time, they will align, especially as we deliver on the growth phase of our journey, including our organic recruiting and M&A strategic pillars. This is the one area that had been a disappointment for our shareholders, and needless to say, for me as President and CEO. All the work will translate hopefully soon. The enthusiasm we're experiencing is infectious, and excitement is growing, especially now that our digital transformation is complete. Now it's time to focus on growth, and that, of course, is highly motivating. Our potential is very apparent, and this gives us such energy and drive to become the destination of choice for Canada's top advisors. I'm grateful to all our Richardson Wealth people for their hard work in delivering these results and for trusting that the long-term gain was worth the short-term pain. I assure you, my team and I will continue to work as hard as we did during this successful transformation phase to drive growth, and even harder to inspire investors to see the immense value and potential in our business. In the meantime, thank you for your loyalty and your patience. Thank you to my Alberta colleagues who had such a positive outlook on our company, including Edmonton-based David Porter, advisor, member of our CEO Advisory Council, as well as board member of RF Capital Group. Our other CEO Advisory Council members in Alberta, Rob Campbell from Edmonton, and Calgary-based Susan O'Brien and Gary McCullough. With that, I will pass the call over to Tim. Thank you, Kish. For the second quarter of 2023, RF Capital reported CAD 89 million in revenue. The reported results show the 2% decrease over last year, but removing the impact of 1 large insurance sale made in the second quarter of 2022, revenue increased 7%. At a more granular level, fee income increased 3% relative to last year, which is directionally consistent with the 6% increase in ending AUA and the 1% increase in average AUA. Interest income increased 61% over the prior year, reaching over CAD 12 million. Interest income has been a meaningful source of revenue diversification as we continue to experience relatively low levels of corporate finance revenue with the drop-off in equity financing activity. Insurance income comprised 4% of total revenue in the second quarter, which is above our internal target for this year and moves us towards our goal of increasing this revenue source to 5%-6% of revenue in the coming years. We reported CAD 15 million of Adjusted EBITDA in Q2, relative to CAD 16.6 million in the prior year. Behind that, gross margin was flat for the quarter at approximately CAD 52 million, and adjusted operating expenses increased 4%. In light of inflation in wages, the return to office and travel activity, as well as the investments we've made in growing our business, we see containing OpEx growth to 4% as a pretty good outcome. Looking at the results another way, if we remove the impact of that large insurance commission last year, Adjusted EBITDA was up by over CAD 2 million relative to 2022. We ended the second quarter with CAD 89 million of working capital, which is consistent with Q1 2023. We have solid organic cash flow and have not yet drawn on our credit facility to fund strategic initiatives. We will likely draw on it in Q4, however, as our recruiting and our advisor succession planning activities ramp up. Turning to our outlook, we currently expect Adjusted EBITDA to be flat as compared to the prior year, versus our previous expectation for 10% growth. This change is because of the ongoing softness in capital markets activity. Our forecast is for markets to remain flat in 2023, which is unchanged. While the TSX is now up relative to this time last year, our advisors run very diversified portfolios for their clients that include cash, bonds, and private market investments. These asset classes do not tend to have as high of a correlation to equity markets. Additionally, we expect adjusted operating expenses to increase in the second half of the year as compared with Q2 levels, primarily because we do not expect continued recoveries in our share price, share price-related expenses. We will also continue to invest in building our platform and attracting Canada's top advisors. With that, I'll now pass the call back to Kish. Before we open the call to questions from our analysts, I would like to reiterate how excited we are about the future of Richardson Wealth. We have proved that our advisor teams can grow and serve their clients while we transform our business. We have demonstrated that we are prepared to work tirelessly in delivering on our promises. We've proved that we have the courage to take bold steps towards achieving our goal, our goal of tripling the size of our business through the thoughtful and well-sequenced execution of our three-pillar growth strategy. Now, as we turn our focus to growth, I'm confident that we can prove that we can drive organic growth, accelerate recruiting, and acquire like-minded firms, and in the process, significantly improve our share price performance. That concludes our prepared remarks. Operator, please open the line for questions. Thank you. We will now take questions from the telephone lines. If you have a question, please press star one on the device's keypad. There will be a brief pause while the participants register. We thank you for your patience. The first question is from Jim Byrne from Acumen Capital. Please go ahead. Your line is open. Yeah, good morning, guys. Couple questions, maybe first one for you, Tim. Just remind us what your, your capital program looks like this year and where you're spending some of those, some of those funds on, on some of the offices? Yeah. Our capital program is significantly lower than it was last year. Last year, we invested close to $30 million in renovating offices and other premises across the country. This year, we pulled that back quite significantly, expect CapEx for the year to come in and around $10 million-$11 million. Again, most of that, that renovating a few of the offices across the country, including primarily, actually, building out our Kitchener location, where we recently attracted a number of new advisors to the firm, and we're creating space for them to work. Okay, that's great. Then, Kish, good to see that the recruiting pipeline is still growing. Tim, you mentioned in your, in your remarks about Q4, are there teams, signed up that you expect to be adding, over that time period, or you got good line of sight for, for the back half of the year? We have a very good line of sight at the back end of the year in terms of the people that have expressed an interest in joining us, and offer letters are out to these teams, but it's hard always to get a definitive date on when they're going to onboard. You know, with the summer holidays, it's even more difficult for them to actually commit to the timelines, but we do have a very good line of sight on the people that have expressed an interest on joining our firm. Okay, great. Maybe just, can you give us an update on Fidelity and the conversion? I know the, the headaches, were long-lasting. Maybe just, kind of give us maybe a final update on, on where that sits. Well, I, I mean, it's a really good question. I would say to you that, you know, our advisors and their teams experienced, you know, challenges with the Fidelity migration, and that is probably not to be. It's, it's not unexpected, given it was such a large and significant undertaking, where we were porting, you know, 315,000 accounts, 100 million historical transactions, for 32,000 households, where, you know, there was an extensive amount of learning of our new systems relative to our old systems. There were learnings by Fidelity about the white glove experience that our advisors have come to get used to. Just all of that change did, for the first six months, you know, obviously create challenges for our teams. Our teams have progressively identified for us where the pain points were, where the gaps were, and then we've been working together with Fidelity in addressing many of these. I would say to you that incrementally, it's getting better week after week. I would say if, you know, this is not a exact statistic, but if, you know, if we had 15,000 open tickets in the month of January, we're now down to about 1,000. So we're now getting to a place where the experience is dramatically better, but that doesn't mean we've completed all of the changes that we need to make in terms of enhancing straight-through processing. Some of those will be completed in Q3 and Q4. I think by the end of the year, we should have a very good sort of steady state operation at Fidelity. Okay, that's great. Thanks, guys. Thank you. Once again, please press star one on the devices keypad if you have a question. The next question is from Jeff Fenwick, from Cormark Securities. Please go ahead. Your line is open. Hi, good morning, everyone. Hey, Jeff. the, the first question is a follow-up to the last one, just on the Fidelity conversion. I guess there was still a little bit of, of spend there in the quarter when I looked through the numbers on completing that. Are, are, are we through that now? Do you continue to think that you're gonna get the, the anticipated cost, cost savings? You did give us a little bit of guidance on the OpEx going forward here, but just want to clarify that. Yeah. Everything is in line with our, with our original expectations, or what we've talked about over the last few quarters. Our transformation costs were low in the quarter, and they actually tapered off in each month. Our run rate on transformation costs related to Fidelity is virtually zero. In terms of the cost savings, we said we expect to realize $5 million-$6 million of, 5 or so, of EBITDA benefit during the year. You know, we've recently refreshed those numbers, and they still stand. That said, we do expect OpEx to increase relative to Q2 levels as we look forward to Q3 and Q4. There are a couple of reasons for that. One, we had, we had recoveries related to our RSU and our DSU plans because of the decrease in our, in our stock price. We certainly hope that that won't persist in, into the next couple of quarters. We're continuing to invest and, and, and build out some of our teams, in order to better support our advisors and enable growth across the company. Those investments will, will also start to show up more in the coming quarters. Maybe back onto recruiting, Kish. I mean, we've seen a number of the players out there being pretty aggressive in the market, and certainly Wellington- Altus is pushing very hard, and there's some movement. We saw the Gluskin Sheff team sort of breaking apart, some going to RBC and some to an independent. I mean, what, what's your, your impression of the dynamic out there, and does that really impact the pipeline from your end and the nature of the offer that you're putting in front of those advisor teams you're targeting? Yeah. Jeff, I didn't hear your question completely, but I'm going to give you what I think I heard back. It's really what's happening in the, in the environment. I would say, independents continue to enjoy success, and that's a good thing. When we talk about that, there's more and more people talking about joining independents, and that's a good thing for all independents. The reason our pipeline's increasing, it's increasing because of that particular, you know, trend, where more and more people are seeing, advisors that have joined independents enjoy some success. Others are now starting to want to hear the story. They hear our story, they hear the story of some of our competitors, lots of activity. I don't see, you know, very significant change in actually the pricing relative to the recruiting offers. We've kept ours steady, it's more really about what we've built, what our story is for the long term, and the success that we're enjoying. That's what we're seeing in the marketplace. I think that's helpful. Then, I mean, you did reference the share price and, I, I guess, just given the cadence that some of the recruiting may be weighted toward the end of the year, what about share buybacks and using some of the capital or the, or cash you have available today to maybe ramp up the buyback activity? You know, we always continue to get advice around these issues, by pretty much everybody on Bay Street. We certainly entertain that at our board, and have those discussions. At this stage, really, I don't really have anything more to comment on other than the fact that we continuously look at all of our options on what we should do that. As you can imagine, you know, we've just gone through 24 months of incredible change, achieved most of the things that we said we were going to do. For me personally, it is really disappointing that some of this effort hasn't translated into a good share price, and obviously I own that. I'm going to do everything in my power now to get the story out, to drive growth, drive recruiting success, re- require... drive, sorry, drive acquisition success, and persuade people that we have, you know, built something that is far more valuable than it is reflected in our share price. Okay, thank you. That's helpful, helpful color. Maybe, maybe one last one here. I, I, noted your... the charge from discontinued operations tied to some litigation, from the prior transaction with respect to the, the, the capital markets group. Is that the end of that? Is there any other outstanding, matters there that, that are sort of contingent liabilities for you? I was a bit, a bit surprised just, you know, we're, we're 3 years, I guess, effectively past that transaction. So any color you can offer there? Well, the color that I'll offer is that, when we did that transaction, you know, we knew we had a couple of outstanding matters at that time, and we provided for them on our, on our financial statement at that time, in terms of what an estimated liability would have been. The charge this quarter is essentially a reflection of crystallization of that open item related to a matter that was really pertaining directly to that sale in December of 2019 of our capital markets business. To the extent that we expect, I don't think we expect anything significant left in that on a go-forward basis, but you know, there's one or two small things, but we think we're adequately provided for. Okay. Thank you for that color. That's all I had. Thank you. Yeah. There are no further questions registered at this time. I will turn the call back to Kish Kapoor. Thank you, everyone, for joining us today. As always, please feel free to reach out to Investor Relations if you have any further questions. Have a great weekend. Thank you. The conference has now ended. Please disconnect your lines at this time, and we thank you for your participation.