Hello everyone, and welcome to the NB Private Equity Partners Capital Markets Day. I am Peter von Lehe, Head of Investment Solutions and Strategy for Neuberger Berman Private Markets. We are all experiencing challenging markets in unprecedented macroeconomic conditions. We are pleased to report, however, that the operating performance of NBPE's portfolio has shown real resilience. We have an interesting agenda planned for today, with the goal of giving you, the shareholders, and prospective shareholders of NBPE, insights into our strategy, what has driven our performance, our current portfolio, and prospects for the future. We will start with a few words from our Chairman, William Maltby. After that, my partner, Joana Rocha Scaff, will provide an update on the private equity market. My partner, David Stonberg, will give you an overview of Neuberger Berman's Private Equity platform and our Co-investment business in particular. Paul Daggett and I will then give you an update on NBPE's portfolio. After that, Jennifer Signori will give an overview of NBPE's ESG principles and how they apply to our portfolio. We'll then have presentations from two private equity managers who are the lead investors in some of NBPE's important investments. Those firms are Thoma Bravo and Platinum Equity. We will conclude with closing remarks from our chairman before opening up to questions from all of you. I'd now like to introduce the chairman of NBPE, Mr. William Maltby. Good afternoon, everyone, and thank you for attending. We live in mighty challenging times, rampant inflation, war in Europe, oil and gas crises, supply chain disruption, and climate change to name but a few. Despite this, our private portfolio is performing well. Our total NAV return was 1% up on an LTM basis since 31st of August last year, but 10% down year to date. Our share price total return is 3% up on an LTM basis since August last year, but 9% down year- to- date. We've increased our dividends to $0.94 per share paid during this year, which represents an increase of 30% compared to 2021. On a weighted average basis, our private companies are growing LTM revenues by 27% and LTM EBITDA by a mighty impressive 20%. We've announced $114 million worth of realization so far this year, which represents about 7% of fair value at the beginning of the year. That was a 26% uplift or a 2.7x exit multiple. I'll now hand over to Joana Rocha Scaff from our manager, NB, who will provide an update on the private equity market backdrop. Hello, I'm Joana Rocha Scaff, Head of Europe Private Equity at Neuberger Berman. I will be presenting to you today on the state of the private markets. We summarize here some of the most prominent investor concerns at present based on our assessment. Persistent inflation and rising interest rates, weakening economic indicators, increased market volatility, labor tightness, supply chain disruptions, regulatory uncertainties, geopolitical tensions, including a war in Europe, and a lingering pandemic, to enumerate a few. More importantly, and interesting for you to know is: what are we doing given this market backdrop? While we think the current environment warrants caution, we remain constructive and positive on the long-term outlook for private markets. This slide summarizes our approach, which we call our all-weather strategy. Its key elements include, to continue to broaden the sourcing funnel of new opportunities to choose from. To maintain discipline and high levels of selectivity. To partner with the best, most experienced private equity firms out there. Targeting quality assets in good industries with industry leadership, limited cyclicality, more protected business models with high barriers to entry, pricing power, and revenue resiliency. Investing thematically behind key long-term secular growth trends. To verify that the lead sponsors have active hands-on execution-driven value creation plans for their investee companies. To seek to be distinctive in our sourcing approach by offering creative capital solutions to our GP partners through mid-life co-investments, structured capital, and other solutions, partnering with the broader private markets team at Neuberger Berman. To continue to refine and make enhancements in systems, processes, and people. Finally, in any environment, it is crucial to maintain prudent and balanced portfolio construction and diversification. Though the future is never certain, we believe that this all-weather strategy has served and will continue to serve our investors well throughout cycles and over time. On this page, we are showing you a snapshot of what we have been seeing in our underlying investments since the onset of the pandemic in 2020. We looked at over 350 active private equity funds in which we have invested, managed by over 150 different managers across buyouts and venture capital. The conclusions that follow are based on our private equity dataset, that is to say, funds in which we have invested and tracked closely. One can see that both public indices and private equity funds have performed strongly in 2020 and 2021. With private markets outpacing public markets significantly in 2021 as buyout and venture managers took advantage of the buoyant market environment, not only to make improvements in their companies, but also to seek liquidity and exit selected investments at attractive prices. Thus far in the 2022 year to date, we have seen a shift with increased volatility and declining public equity indices. Overall, private equity funds have held up relatively well compared to public indices in the first quarter of 2022, but with more volatility in the second quarter. Year to date, buyout funds were down only about 2%, with venture down 10%. Venture has been a bit more impacted given the longer duration of the underlying assets and therefore higher sensitivity to interest rate moves. We are keeping a close eye on performance as we enter a more uncertain part of the economic cycle. If history is a guide, we would expect the private equity industry to continue to outperform public equities. The story of strong relative and absolute private equity performance rings true across longer and varying time periods as well. The private equity industry has on average produced mid-teens annual rates of return over the long term, with materially stronger performance in excess of 25% per annum for first quartile funds. That is a material excess outperformance versus global public equity indices across varying medium to longer term time frames. On the fundraising side, sustained private equity outperformance in the last decade has led investors to shift and increase portfolio allocations to the asset class. As a result, the industry has raised increasing amounts of capital from investors over the period. It is worth noting that in recent years, most of the growth in fundraising activity has come from venture and growth equity managers who have been raising larger and more funds. After a record fundraising year in 2021 across all private equity strategies, investor appetite has slowed in 2022 due to concerns over the current market and economic environment. On the GP side, the trend of successor funds coming back to market increasingly faster is slowing down, and we now see private equity funds taking more time to reach their fundraising targets. Investors have experienced a denominator effect resulting from recently public market declines, negatively compressing the value of their portfolios. At the same time, investors have experienced a numerator effect for private equity exposure as the asset class valuations to date have stayed very resilient. This phenomenon has resulted in certain private equity investors being above their private equity targets and needing to reduce exposure and decelerate new commitment activity. Going forward, we believe that high quality general partners with excellent track records and strong reputations will be able to continue to raise material capital in the current environment, albeit slower than anticipated. Less established, less well-known and/or undifferentiated managers, however, will likely face a more challenging fundraising experience. We have seen robust and generally growing levels of investment activity since the global financial crisis. Last year the private equity industry hit an absolute record level of activity with almost $1.6 trillion of capital invested. This buoyant level of investment activity was supported by a number of factors, including ample liquidity and dry powder in the market, meaning cash-rich buyers, high valuations with many prospective sellers willing to transact in such an environment, low interest rates making debt financing more affordable, early innings of a strong post-pandemic recovery with good earnings momentum and deal appetite, significant and profound shifts visible in both businesses and consumer behaviors post-pandemic, creating disruption, but also opportunities for investments in new or solidifying trends. Investment activity in 2022 is so far slowing down from prior year record levels. The market is becoming more discerning of quality, and certain assets or segments of the market are not trading given the increased uncertainty. Despite the sharp correction in public equity multiples, we have not seen pronounced changes in private markets valuations for new transactions. Valuations for new deal activity in private equity remain fairly resilient and at sustained high levels, especially for high-quality assets. You can notice that the valuation discount of private versus public indices has shrunk in the U.S., and in Europe private markets trade at a premium. Albeit the composition of the private and public indices is quite different and it is hard to make direct comparisons, the key takeaway here is that the argument of better relative value in private markets relative to public markets is becoming less powerful at present. Take-private activity was very strong in the U.S. and in Europe last year and has continued into 2022. Recent stock market declines have allowed well-resourced private equity buyers to make offers to acquire high-quality public companies at reasonable all-in purchase prices, even when paying material premiums. As seen on the charts, there have been meaningful take-private deals throughout 2022, and we believe this activity will continue subject to availability of financing. Let's look at the credit markets now with monthly data portrayed here. One can see that the credit markets are also seeing profound changes in 2022. In the U.S., high yield volumes have shrunk, and so have broadly syndicated loans. Europe is seeing a similar pattern which significantly limited new issuance volumes of high yield and bank loans. At the same time, we have seen a rise in private lending activity. Private credit providers have been highly active during this time, taking share from banks and the high-yield market, and have become a more important source of funding for the buyout industry. With strong and growing levels of private credit dry powder available, we expect there to be good funding support of buyout activity up to a certain deal size threshold. Unlike in prior cycles, the significant growth of private credit should be able to support still material transaction volumes, even during economic disruptions. While we are not expecting buyout activity to dry up as much as it did, for example, during the GFC, we believe that such capital will only be available up to a certain quantum, potentially to the detriment of large and mega-cap buyouts, which we believe will be harder to fund in this environment. Last year was a record one for private equity-backed exits, with many firms taking advantage of high valuations and well-capitalized buyers to realize investments. Things are changing in 2022. After a couple of years of particularly strong public listing activity, the IPO market has very much shut down in the first half of 2022 amidst challenging current economic and market conditions. Full-blown M&A processes are also becoming rarer, as sellers are reluctant to launch such processes in this market and risk not completing the deal and tainting the assets for a period of time. While we are still seeing a good volume of bilateral discussions between potential buyers and prospective sellers, overall exit activity has slowed down meaningfully this year. Minority sales, dividend recaps, and GP-led transactions may become more prevalent in the current environment as GPs balance liquidity with the desire to hold on to assets and preserve exit upside for a more favorable valuation environment. In conclusion, interest rates are expected to continue to rise, and credit markets are becoming tighter. Private debt lenders are gaining share and supporting buyout activity, but the quantum of available debt has become more limited, and this is expected to hurt, in particular, the ability to complete larger buyout deals. Private equity activity is slowing down as a result of deteriorating macro and market conditions. Public-to-private transactions have remained of noteworthy prominence in 2022 as private equity buyers seek to take advantage of the sharp correction in public market valuations for some high-conviction stocks. Private equity valuations have remained resilient, both for current unrealized assets and new deals. Ample dry powder in the industry continues to create hot competition for high-quality, desirable assets. Slowing exits and tectonic shifts in public markets have caused many LPs to be above target allocation for private markets. We expect to see a strong level of activity in the secondary market once pricing trends become clearer. On the fundraising side, the robust calendar of fundraisers at the start of 2022, coupled with the LP constraints I just noted, is slowing down fundraisers. Capital formation and velocity of deployment are both likely to slow down from here, frankly, to more normal and healthy levels. Finally, despite the slowdown in activity, NB continues to source record levels of co-investments. We believe we are gaining market share as some LPs pull back from the co-investment market given their over-allocation issues to the asset class. We continue to seek to gain share via our differentiated mid-life sourcing approach and co-underwriting opportunities. This concludes our market update session. Thank you very much for listening and joining us. Hello, everybody. I'm David Stoneberg, Deputy Head of NB Alternatives and Co-Head of our co-investment platform here at Neuberger Berman. Today, I'm going to spend about 8-10 minutes going through our platform and specifically with a lens on our co-investment business. With that, let's go ahead and dig in. On the first page here, if I could draw your attention to the left side of the page, to that ring. What we're talking about as our private markets business, we're at over $100 billion of assets under management. Now, we've highlighted on this ring, as you can see there, about $93 billion of that assets under management across what we refer to as our GP-centric strategies. What we mean by our GP-centric strategies, those are the strategies where we are partnering with a leading private equity firm on a daily basis across those areas. An example would be on the left side of the page, what you could see there, our primaries business. Think of that as where we are an LP in another private equity fund, that's the largest part of our business at $33 billion of assets under management. That's where we're partnering with these leading private equity firms as an LP in their fund or our co-investment business, where we're co-investing alongside these leading private equity firm in transactions that they are doing. Our secondaries business, where we could be doing a GP-led transaction or a traditional LP secondary across these firms. Our private credit business, where we're lending to the transactions that they're doing with these leading private equity firms. Across those four areas, last year, we invested and committed over $15 billion in about 260 separate transactions. Almost on a daily basis, we're interacting with these leading private equity firms around the world. That makes a very strong and deep relationship and contact point for us, which you'll understand. I'm gonna put that into perspective in a couple of slides here on why that's important to the co-investment business. A few statistics on our private equity co-investment platform that you can see here on this page. We've participated in close to 350 co-investments, investing over $15 billion in those transactions over the last 10 years. A big body of work. On this next page here, I wanna reference back to what we were just talking about a couple of minutes ago in terms of our entire platform and how this generates deal flow for us on the co-investment side. Co-investments for us, no different than really any other private equity strategy. Deal flow is really the lifeblood of our co-investment strategy. How is it that we generate our co-investment deal flow? It really starts first and foremost with those GP relationships where we're an investor with them in their fund. As you can see here on this page, on the left side of the page, we're now an LP in close to 600 private equity funds. Last year, in 2021, we committed to over 85 funds. I think the exact number is 86 funds. That was a record year for us, which is important. You want a business that's growing on the primary side, growing in terms of number of relationships, growing in terms of amount of capital that's available to deploy with those relationships in order to strengthen the relationships with those private equity firms and generate more deal flow. We now sit on over 260 LP advisory boards, yet another indication of the strength and the durability of our relationships with these leading private equity firms. You can see what that's translated to on the right side of the page in terms of deal flow. Right? So if you go back a handful of years, 3.5, 4.5 deals, that's per week. You can see that's doubled over the last handful of years to seven, eight, and even nine deals per week in this current year. Very strong deal flow generated by our relationships, really starting with the primary side of the business. I'm gonna spend a couple of minutes on the team here as well on this next slide. What you'll see from the team, and again, I'm gonna throw a couple of numbers out here. On the box on the right, upper left there, you'll see close to 100 investment professionals across our primaries business, secondaries business, and co-investment business. Then I'm gonna jump back to the upper left, and you can see about 2/3s of those people work on an active basis on co-investments with us. It's a big, broad global team. We've invested very significantly in the scale and depth of our platform overall, and specifically in our co-investment team, in order to be able to effectively prosecute and execute against seven, eight, nine deals per week that we're seeing there. What you'll see from the photos and images on this page, this is our senior team that is capable of leading co-investment opportunities directly for us. Behind this team, a very sizable mid and junior team as well, supporting us. As you see some statistics on the bottom right side of the page, long-tenured investment professionals, 25 years, about 24 years there on the MDs, and being here at Neuberger Berman for about 15 years of that. Then you'll see the bottom left statistic there, about 99% retention of our senior employees, and we're very proud of that as well. On this slide, we're gonna spend a couple of minutes on our co-investment strategy. If I could draw your attention to the ring on the right side of the page, and let me start with a couple of definitions here. A traditional co-investment, that's a co-investment that most people would think of. The lead private equity firm has signed up a deal. They may have closed that particular investment opportunity, and they're reaching out to the 10, 12, 15, 20 LPs in their fund who've expressed an interest in co-investments. They're usually, there's a data room up. There's gonna be a call with the management team next week, a call with the deal team the following week. Is this something that you, Neuberger Berman, are interested in participating in? The truth is, if there's enough access to information, enough time for us to do our work, enough ability for us to diligence the information and get comfortable around it, and we like the risk-reward, those are investments that we are likely to consider as options for our co-investment platform. As you can see here, about 1/3 of our capital over time has gone into those traditional transactions. What we prefer is if you swing to the right on this dial, the co-underwrite and the non-syndicated transaction. It's the same investment that we were just talking about on the traditional side, same private equity firm, same target. The distinction being they're coming to us earlier. They're coming to us typically in the second round of a process. They're competing still to win the asset against two, three, four other private equity firms, maybe a strategic buyer as well. They're not exactly sure how much they wanna pay for the asset, what the capital structure is gonna be, what the value creation plan is gonna be. Is this the right management team? They're asking us if we wanna work side by side with them to co-underwrite this particular transaction. We prefer these investment opportunities, simply put, because they're richer diligence experiences. If you spin one more just to the left there, you'll see the mid-life opportunity. That's different altogether from the traditional and the co-underwrite. The mid-life opportunity. That's a label that we generated. All it means is that the lead private equity firm has been an investor in that business for some period of time. It could be six months, it could be six years. You would naturally ask the question, why would a lead private equity firm need a co-investor four years into an investment? It's typically gonna be for one of two reasons. Either they need additional capital for growth, M&A, some purpose like that, or they wanna sell down 5%-10% of the position. Those, again, are transactions that we are very much drawn to. We like the risk-reward dynamics on those transactions. Those are assets that have been owned by the lead private equity firm for a period of time. They know those businesses, they know the management teams that they own. Very often in the context where they're doing an M&A acquisitions, those can prove to be accretive. Those are transactions that we seek out. Generally speaking, those mid-life transactions are not ones that walk in the door the same way a traditional and a co-underwrite would be. All in all, when you look at it, you can see that those mid-lifes plus those co-underwrites have tended over time to represent about 2/3s of the capital that we put out from a co-investment perspective. On the following slide here, I'm gonna spend just two minutes talking about some of the diligence resources and what I believe are advantages that we have here at Neuberger Berman, and specifically, why do we have these advantages? It's really from being a business that sits inside a $450 billion investment management firm that has the ability to invest in these resources. These are not typically resources that you're gonna find, generally speaking, at a traditional private equity firm, right? Let's start with, in the box in the upper left, our 50+ buy-side research analysts. These are research analysts that are dedicated, again, buy-side only. We don't sell our equity research to helping portfolio managers at Neuberger Berman make better investment decisions for their investors. When applicable, when appropriate, we will work with these buy-side research analysts to better understand industries, industry valuations, industry trends, the stuff underneath of particular industries, technological threats coming to those top management teams, et cetera. It's a real advantage to us as we're working on these co-investment opportunities. The next one I would probably talk about is our big data team, where we have a team of PhDs crunching data that Neuberger Berman is purchasing very often. We can really use this on the consumer retail side. Think about a brand, and you're trying to understand how its sell-through is going on Google, on Amazon, credit card data that we're crunching. A real leg up to us, in helping us understand, and again, make better investment decisions for our investors. A quick second on ESG, 'cause I know there's going to be a separate presentation on ESG here on this next slide here. Just want our investors in NBPE to understand that ESG is a part of our process on the co-investment side. I'd say it's a part of process in two ways. First is we're certainly understanding the ESG characteristics of the investment that we are underwriting and trying to develop a point of view as to the risk-reward characteristics from an ESG perspective, and whether this makes this investment more favorable or less favorable through that lens. Then secondarily, is making sure that we understand the ESG qualifications of the lead private equity firm with whom we are participating on this investment. Again, I don't wanna spend too much time here 'cause I know there's gonna be a separate presentation and discussion on ESG. I mentioned the ESG qualifications of those lead private equity firms. If we wanna go to the next slide. Really, this is the heart of it, right? Our partners that we get to participate on these co-investments with, we are thrilled to be able to call these firms our partners. Terrific organizations across the spectrum, global, large mega-cap firms, Thoma Bravo, KKR, Cinven. You can see the quality of the firms here, but also when you think about upper mid-market, small, Europe, Asia, North America. Just really excited about the firms that we get to participate with. We focus on participating with the right firm for the opportunity, where it meets their core expertise. Firms that have been around for a while doing this, understand cycles, understand how to put together capital structures and balance sheets for their private equity firms, understand how to put together value creation plans that will create value in their investments. That's a lot of what we analyze and understand, try to understand, on our co-investment side. With that, Again, I wanna thank you for your time, and thank you for your attention during this presentation. Thanks, David. The mission of NBPE is to invest in private companies to generate long-term growth. We seek to execute this mission by making direct investments into companies alongside top-tier private equity firms in their core areas of expertise. We invest globally, but are focused on the United States, the largest and deepest private equity market in the world. We have fully integrated ESG analysis into our investment process. We believe this approach allows us to build a high-quality, diversified portfolio of direct investments in private companies and have generated strong long-term performance with a gross IRR of 18.5% on our direct equity investments over the last five years, at 2.6x multiple of cost on realizations over the same period. Listed private equity vehicles can play an important role in giving investors access to an illiquid asset class in the form of a listed share. We believe NBPE's strategy provides potential advantages compared with other listed private equity vehicles. Most listed private equity vehicles are either single manager direct investment portfolios or hyper-diversified fund of funds. The single manager direct vehicles are often managed by high-quality groups with significant expertise, but typically have fairly concentrated portfolios and have the risk of being exposed to only a single lead manager and the strategy where that manager is focused. These vehicles often invest by committing to the traditional private funds of those managers, exposing them to both over-commitment risk and the fees of those structures. Fund of funds vehicles, on the other hand, are often hyper-diversified by underlying portfolio company, lead manager, and strategy. This makes it more challenging for investors to understand the underlying portfolios or for individual portfolio companies to meaningfully affect performance. As fund of funds, they have a double layer of fees and may take on meaningful over-commitment risk. We believe that NBPE combines the best of these approaches. NBPE typically invests directly into individual private equity-backed companies on a transaction-by-transaction basis. This allows NBPE to have a portfolio which we believe is appropriately diversified but not over-diversified. NBPE is currently invested in 94 companies alongside 56 lead private equity managers. The typical size of a new investment is 1%-2% of NBPE's NAV. This limits the risk that an individual company can create for the portfolio if the investment does not perform, but can result in material gains for NBPE if it does do well. By investing on a transaction-by-transaction basis, we can dynamically respond to market conditions and control individual investment decisions while investing alongside a wide range of top-tier private equity managers. We believe this approach allows us to be more capital efficient and remain fully invested without taking on significant over-commitment risk created by committing to private funds. This approach is also fee efficient. Not only does NBPE typically avoid the double layer of fees of fund of funds, but the management and performance fee rates we charge are meaningfully lower than those of a typical listed direct private equity fund. Markets have been challenging this year. We believe NBPE's portfolio has shown resilience given this environment. NBPE's NAV total return year-to-date was minus 10%. This was driven by declines in our public positions and negative FX from our non-US dollar investments. On a constant currency basis, our private investments increased in value by almost 3% in the first half of the year. Operating performance of our portfolio companies was strong, with LTM revenue growth of 27% and LTM EBITDA growth of 20% inclusive of M&A. Our private portfolio was valued at a weighted average enterprise value-to-EBITDA multiple of 16.5x, and a debt-to-EBITDA multiple of 5.7x. We paid $0.94 per share in dividends in 2022 or $44 million. This was a 30% increase versus 2021. We have had $114 million in announced realizations with a weighted average exit multiple of 2.7x cost, and made two new investments in 2022 totaling $41 million. Turning to our key performance drivers, our portfolio has declined in value by $136 million year-to-date. Our private investments increased in value by $32 million driven by strong operating performance. This was offset by a $125 million decline in the value of our listed investments and a $43 million negative move in foreign exchange. NBPE's portfolio is focused on two core investment themes. Long-term secular growth trends, which are companies that are expected to benefit from higher growth rates due to long-term trends or behavioral changes. Businesses with low expected cyclicality, which are companies that tend to be in more defensive sectors or end markets. Our portfolio companies addressing these themes are in a range of industries, including technology, consumer and e-commerce, industrials, and healthcare. Paul will provide a deeper look into a number of these sectors later in the presentation. We believe NBPE's portfolio is well-diversified by geography and industry. 74% of our portfolio by fair value is in North America, recognized as the largest and deepest private equity market in the world, while 22% of our portfolio is in Europe. NBPE is well-diversified by industry as well. Our largest exposures are to consumer and e-commerce, technology, media, and telecom, industrials and industrial technology, and financial and business services. We are also diversified inside each of these industries to a range of sub-industries and end markets, as you can see on the charts on the right. Our portfolio is also well-diversified by underlying portfolio company and lead manager. We are invested in 94 direct equity investments alongside 56 different private equity managers. With our top 20 positions making up approximately 50% of our net asset value. We believe this results in an appropriately diversified portfolio while still allowing winners to drive meaningful upside to the overall performance of the portfolio. I'll now hand over to Paul to dive deeper into the operating performance of our portfolio companies. Thank you, Peter. Obviously, in this difficult economic environment, the companies in our portfolio have been dealing with inflation, supply chain pressures, and higher interest rates, among other issues. Generally, we've been pleased with how these businesses have navigated this and continue to perform. I'll now try to give some insights as to what has performed well, but also a few areas where we've seen more pressures within the portfolio. The data on the following slides is for NBPE's private companies only and is presented on a weighted average LTM basis as of the 30th of June. Starting with revenue. We've been pleased to see weighted average revenue continue to show strong growth over the last 12 months, with total growth of 27.2% year-on-year within the private portfolio. This aggregate number is the result of revenue growth across the underlying portfolio, with 97% of the underlying companies by fair value, producing revenue growth both organically and through M&A activity. To that point, in the gray bar, we also show growth excluding one large investment, which is a company that completed particularly significant acquisitions during the year. Importantly, even excluding this investment, the average revenue growth of the portfolio was still 18.4% year-on-year. Turning to EBITDA. We're also pleased to report good growth with weighted average LTM growth of 20.1% year-on-year or 16.2% without the one large portfolio company mentioned on the prior slide. These revenue and EBITDA growth numbers were driven by a number of factors, including organic growth, M&A, and in a few cases, companies that performed well over the last 12 months against a lower base comparable period. That said, within EBITDA, there was a greater range of results as companies grapple with the difficult operating environment. While the large majority of companies reported EBITDA growth, approximately 20% of the portfolio by fair value showed a reduction in EBITDA. Overall, it's notable that EBITDA growth was at a slower rate than revenue growth, which highlights the margin pressure that most companies are having to navigate as a result of materials and wage inflation and supply chain issues. We're seeing management teams and lead private equity managers implement responses to this operating environment, and we believe that this should position the portfolio well to weather the economic climate. Looking more closely at the revenue and EBITDA growth. Here we've broken out the dispersion of the results within the weighted averages we just showed you. On the left chart is the dispersion of revenue growth by fair value, and on the right is EBITDA growth. As you can see, revenue growth was overwhelmingly positive, with over 2/3 of the portfolio's fair value in companies growing at a rate of 10% or more. EBITDA growth was more varied, and although more than half of the portfolio's fair value was in companies which grew EBITDA by 10% or more, there were also 16 companies representing 19% of fair value that showed EBITDA declines. The principal reason for this was increased raw materials and freight costs. Moving on to valuation and leverage multiples. As Peter mentioned, the private portfolio produced a gross 2.7% gain during the first half of the year, excluding the impact of FX. This small increase is a result of the operating performance of the portfolio that I just highlighted. You can see that while fair value increased, the average valuation multiple fell by almost a turn of EBITDA. The private portfolio was valued at 16.5x enterprise value to EBITDA at the 30th of June, which is down from 17.4x as of year-end. Public market comparables are one of the factors usually incorporated into private equity valuations, and in the first half of the year, this has driven this overall decline in the multiple. However, as Joana discussed, so far this year, we've generally not seen a reduction in the valuations of new private equity transactions. We believe these two factors combined makes this valuation level reasonable. Looking at the leverage multiple, this increased from 5.2x- 5.7x over the past six months. We believe the principal reason for this was a number of companies completing acquisitions using debt rather than equity, which is quite typical in performing private equity companies. Another factor was that some companies reported an EBITDA decline during the first half of the year, and this is something that we will continue to monitor. Looking at the debt in the portfolio in more detail, you can see on the left of this slide that 73% of the portfolio has covenant-like debt or no debt. On the right-hand side, we show the debt maturity profile of the portfolio, and you can see there is very little debt maturing in the short term. Now, moving on to an analysis of the portfolio by sector, starting with technology, media, and telecom. TMT represents almost $320 million of fair value in NBPE's portfolio across 21 companies. Almost half of this is in software companies, with the other half diversified across services, media, hardware, and other. As you can see in the pie charts in the bottom left of this slide, this is mostly a cash flow positive group of companies rather than companies with a venture or growth profile. This is very important in the context of valuations, given what has happened in the public markets, where higher growth and particularly unprofitable technology companies have in many cases, seen a material decline in valuations. Looking at the five largest positions, which are Accelitas, BeyondTrust, Octane, Engineering Ingegneria Informatica, and Branded Cities. All of these companies grew LTM revenue and EBITDA, and margins generally held up well. Below these five largest positions, there were three companies that reported a year-on-year revenue decline, two of which were positions with less than $5 million of fair value. Six companies reported an EBITDA decline, and there was a broad range of explanations for this, but these were mostly not material and mostly in smaller positions. Overall, we think NBPE's portfolio in this sector is well-positioned and that the valuation and leverage metrics are reasonable. Moving on to the consumer sector. This sector represents approximately $200 million of fair value across 15 private companies. There's a variety of business types represented, including e-commerce, consumer staples, branded consumer discretionary, and in the case of the largest position, Action, a non-food discount retailer. NBPE's consumer portfolio produced strong average revenue and EBITDA growth year-on-year, driven by the top five companies, which represents 73% of the private company consumer sector fair value. Within these top five investments, all five reported strong year-on-year revenue growth, but two of the five did report EBITDA declines. Across the entire sector within NBPE's private portfolio, three of 15 companies reported revenue declines, but these were in positions with an aggregate of $16 million of fair value. However, seven companies reported EBITDA declines, mostly as a result of supply chain pressures, increased shipping costs and product inflation. We believe corrective actions have been taken to mitigate this over time. Business services is a diverse sector within NBPE's portfolio, and one that produced very strong LTM results across the seven private companies with fair value. All seven grew revenue, and only one had an EBITDA decline, which was more of the result of a particularly strong comparable period and weakness over the last 12 months. Two of the companies had significant M&A events, and while this was by far the biggest driver in the average numbers, the portfolio also produced organic growth. Within industrials and transportation, NBPE has 13 private portfolio companies representing $135 million of fair value. Again, there is real diversity in the businesses in this part of the portfolio. For example, the top five companies by fair value are Material Handling Systems, Solenis, Monroe Engineering, Q-Park, and Wind River Environmental. These businesses focus on parcel handling automation systems and software, specialty chemicals for water treatment, distribution of custom and standard hardware components, a European parking operator, and non-hazardous liquid waste removal. If we look across NBPE's companies in this sector, all 13 companies produced LTM revenue growth, and all but one grew EBITDA. That said, while growth was attractive, we also saw margin contraction in many of these companies as a result of supply chain pressures and inflation. We believe the portfolio is well-positioned, and that these companies have high-quality private equity owners that are able to help them weather this environment. Financial services is a relatively small portfolio within NBPE, with seven private portfolio companies representing $170 million of fair value. These seven companies are focused on wealth management, insurance brokerage, and consulting. Excluding the smallest position, which is $2 million of fair value, all six companies reported revenue and EBITDA growth. Strategic M&A and systematic roll-up acquisitions were a significant part of this growth, which is in line with the original investment thesis of these investments, and we're very pleased with the performance of this sector within the portfolio. The most recent addition to NBPE's financial services portfolio is True Potential, a U.K.-based wealth management platform. This was an investment that we made alongside Cinven in January this year. Cinven has a strong financial services track record and team, and had followed this business for some time. We believe the investment is attractive due to its integrated model, differentiated technology platform, and the structural growth of the U.K. wealth management sector. True Potential has demonstrated very strong historic growth in recent years, and the investment is off to a good start. The final sector is healthcare. We've had a number of exits from this sector in recent years, including Agiliti, which is now public, so not included in this private company analysis, and the M&A exits of Aldevron and Inovalon. Today, the portfolio is currently $53 million of fair value in five companies. These five all produce good LTM growth in revenue, and while average EBITDA growth was also strong, two companies did see EBITDA declines and margin contraction over the last 12 months. That concludes the portfolio analysis, and I'll hand it back to Peter to conclude the NBPE update. Thanks, Paul. Year to date, NBPE has had $114 million of announced realizations. We've had six full or partial exits, which have generated a 2.7x gross multiple and a 26% uplift from their valuation three quarters prior. NBPE's portfolio is also well diversified by vintage year and has a weighted average age of 3.9 years. 59% of our portfolio has been held for three years or more. Given current market conditions, we expect realization activity in the near term to be subdued. However, given the maturity of our portfolio and the operating performance to date, we believe that NBPE's portfolio is well-positioned to generate liquidity when markets stabilize or conditions for exits improve. NBPE continues to have a strong capital position. Pro forma for the repayment of our 2022 ZDPs, which occurred last week, NBPE has $285 million of capacity on our credit line, $3 million of cash, and additional $39 million of proceeds expected to be received from announced realizations, for a total of $327 million of available capital. We have minimal unfunded commitments. This gives NBPE significant flexibility to take advantage of new opportunities that may arise in the current market environment, given the strong deal flow from the Neuberger Berman platform, which David described earlier. Here you can see NBPE's NAV and share price total return over time. Our NAV total return, which we measure in dollars, has outperformed the MSCI World Index on a year-to-date, a one, three, five, and 10-year basis. Our share price, which we measure in sterling, has outperformed the FTSE All-Share for all these same time periods other than year to date. In conclusion, we believe NBPE continues to offer an attractive investment opportunity due to our differentiated strategy of co-investing directly in the companies alongside leading private equity managers and our long-term track record of outperformance. We believe our portfolio is well-positioned to weather current market conditions, and the strength of our balance sheet will allow us to take advantage of opportunities as they arise. Thank you, and I will now hand you over to Jennifer Signori to update you on our ESG initiatives. Hello, I'm Jennifer Signori, a managing director at Neuberger Berman, where I oversee ESG integration in private markets. Today, I will provide a recap and a portfolio update of NBPE's responsible investment approach, as well as share some market insights on ESG and climate-related data and some initial carbon footprint analysis of the NBPE portfolio. NBPE's investment objective is to seek attractive risk-adjusted returns, and our approach to ESG and responsible investing is centered on this objective across three pillars. Avoid. NBPE seeks to avoid significantly adverse social and environmental outcomes to people on the planet with specific avoidance areas outlined in our policy. Assess. NBPE considers the material effect on risk and return of ESG factors on investments alongside traditional factors in the investment process through its ESG integration. Amplify. NBPE can also identify portfolio companies deemed to have an overall positive potential benefit to people on the planet, including contributing to solutions to pressing global challenges. Here, we present the NBPE portfolio through a sustainability lens. The overall potential for positive sustainability outcomes of the portfolio stands at 22% as of June 30th, 2022. We define positive sustainability potential as companies whose product services have an overall positive benefit to people or the environment or that are identified as positively contributing solutions to pressing social or environmental challenges, such as the UN Sustainable Development Goals. Generally, we believe that understanding the sustainability potential of a company can be consistent with businesses that are less volatile and benefit from secular tailwinds, an important component of NBPE's investment philosophy. An example of a company in the portfolio that can contribute positively to sustainability outcomes is Renaissance Learning. Renaissance Learning is a software and learning analytics company that provides personalized assessment and instructional tools in math, reading, and early literacy for K-12 students. NB first invested in Renaissance Learning in 2018 alongside Francisco Partners and has made several follow-on investments in 2019, 2021, and 2022 as the company's offerings continue to expand. Disparities in school readiness start in early childhood and are exacerbated along socioeconomic and racial lines and can bear significant consequences on future graduation rates and earning potential. The company serves 40% of public schools in the U.S., reaching a wide range of students from diverse backgrounds and can play a role in improving positive education outcomes in alignment with UN SDG 4, quality education. Renaissance has an emphasis on digital assessments using computer adaptive technology to allow teachers and administrators to identify student readiness gaps and offer data-informed personalized learning progression. This compares to the historically standardized curriculum, which is more of a one-size-fits-all model. Ultimately, the company aims to increase the level of student readiness and proficiency in key skill areas of math, reading, and literacy, and promote higher levels of student retention and graduation rates. Climate change has been a major area of focus for many of our clients at Neuberger Berman. As an overview of our climate commitment in March 2019, Neuberger Berman released its first TCFD-aligned climate-related corporate strategy, which reflects the growing impact climate risk has on our operations and investments. In 2021, the firm became a signatory to the Net Zero Asset Managers Initiative. In addition to several other climate-focused collaborations, including the Institutional Investors Group on Climate Change and the Initiative Climat International. The firm has established a dedicated ESG advisory council in 2021 made up of leaders in academia and policy who help advise NB on forward-looking ESG topics. The first topic of focus for the committee has been the firm's net zero commitment. In terms of our investing activities, we have a targeted approach to assess the climate risk, both physical and transition-related, of direct investments, and are building out our carbon footprint and other climate-related assessment tools in private equity. Engagement is key to driving greater awareness and best practice. For example, NB Private Equity Partners hosted a webinar with the Institutional Investors Group on Climate Change in December 2021 to provide private equity managers with an overview of methodologies and metrics for measuring net zero alignment in private equity. The current state of the private equity industry is that there is generally more limited ESG and climate data-related disclosure. However, there are market forces that are encouraging greater consistency and prevalence of disclosure. One example is the ESG Data Convergence Initiative, which Neuberger Berman is a part of, a group of private equity investors that have agreed on requesting a core set of ESG metrics to help move the industry forward. There is a range of methods to produce a carbon footprint report. Generally, the bottom-up approach of collecting the data inputs necessary at the company level to calculate actual carbon emissions is the most accurate, but also resource-intensive. However, given the current state of data availability in private markets, when reported emissions data is not consistently disclosed, an approach using proxies such as economic activity-based factors or industry averages is a common practice. As such, over the past year, NB Private Markets has developed its capabilities to estimate portfolio carbon footprinting for private equity, primaries, secondaries, and co-investments based on average industry emissions data of publicly traded companies. We've also formalized our request of carbon emissions data from portfolio companies. The idea being over time, as more companies disclose actual emissions data, the estimates can be replaced to inform our reporting capabilities. Here's a snapshot of our initial estimation analysis. Based on this analysis, the portion of the NBPE portfolio for which we have information and the private equity industry in general have lower carbon-intensive portfolios, largely driven by the industry and sector makeup of a typical private equity portfolio relative to a public benchmark such as the Russell 2000 for illustrative purposes. We continue to build upon our climate-related analysis and reporting capabilities and look forward to sharing more on this topic in the future. Thank you for your time today. We hope these updates have tangibly illustrated how NBPE continues to work towards improvements in ESG and sustainability outcomes. Thank you, Jennifer. I'll now hand over to William to give his concluding thoughts, which will be followed by Q&A. Thank you, Paul. Turning to our dividend policy. Including the dividend paid in August, NBPE has increased the dividend by 30% compared with last year. We've had a long-term policy of paying out 3% of NAV, and despite the fall in NAV during the year, we maintained the level of dividend paid in August. This equates to a 5% annualized yield on the share price and 3.4% yield on NAV. The 2022 dividend is 2.6x covered by announced realizations. I would like to remind you of our value proposition finally. NBPE brings an access to a portfolio of direct private equity investments. We have generated a very attractive track record of returns over the short, medium, and long term. Our track record is derived from leveraging the strength of Neuberger Berman's $100 billion private equity business, which sources and executes investments. Most importantly, the co-investment model allows NBPE to be in control of its capital deployment with real-time new investments decision, and we're able to respond to market dynamics as they change, which is obviously of particular importance in the current environment. We invest globally with a particular focus on the U.S. market, the largest private equity market in the world. Also very importantly, we're fee efficient. We don't have any second layer of fees. I'd now like to open this session to questions, and I'll hand over to Paul Daggett to explain the rules of engagement. Thank you again to everyone for attending today. We're now going to move to Q&A. For those who have not yet submitted a question but would like to, you can do so using the Ask a Question button in the top left of your screen. Before we start that, I'd like to quickly hand it back to William for some comments on yesterday's buyback announcement. Thank you, Paul. Yesterday, as Paul said, we announced a buyback program with our brokers, Jefferies. Now, the board evaluates the merits of a buyback at all times, but obviously, we've been doing so particularly closely and recently in the light of market developments. We believe that the company's share price undervalues the portfolio and its prospects, and therefore, we feel this represents an attractive opportunity to buy back shares. This, of course, will be immediately accretive to NAV and of benefit to all shareholders. In setting up the program, we've set Jefferies some parameters which they have to follow before they execute a purchase, and these include the absolute level of discount and the discount relative to our peers. We're not actually going to disclose the details of these parameters to prevent them being used against ongoing shareholders. As it's been some time since NBPE has done a share buyback program, I thought it'd be helpful to give you some color on what the board considers when evaluating share buybacks. First, and as you would expect, we monitor the discount and consider it both absolutely and also relative to peers. Most importantly, we see this as an investment decision. Clearly, buybacks at a wide discount are accretive to NAV and good for IRR. Our returns have been primarily driven over the years by multiples of capital invested. We have to consider the opportunity of a buyback and compare it against other investment opportunities that our manager is reviewing. We also consider the effect on share price, and I think we'd all like to think that buybacks were a panacea. The advice we receive from our advisors remains consistent, that the effect of buybacks are likely to be limited and of relatively short duration. We do, however, recognize the soft factors, and it's certainly an expression of confidence in the portfolio. We also consider the effect on liquidity of our shares. We've benefited from our entry into the FTSE 250, which improved liquidity. We also can monitor the exit and entry levels of the 250, which isn't a big factor for us at the moment, but it's something that we monitor nonetheless. Finally, we're very conscious that dividends are our main method of returning capital to shareholders. With the dividend policy that I've already highlighted, that will remain our major method of returning capital. Paul, I'll hand it back to you now. Perfect. Thank you, William. So we've had quite a few questions coming in, and I will moderate this by handing questions to William, Peter, or myself as appropriate. To start off with, we have a question on the underlying portfolio performance, which is that we reported good portfolio operating performance in the first half of the year. But do you have visibility as to how that develops in the third quarter and the outlook beyond that? I'll ask Peter to give his thoughts on that. Sure. Thanks, Paul. Well, as we mentioned earlier, weighted average LTM portfolio company revenue growth was 27%, and EBITDA growth was 20% through June. Excluding the one large position we had, which had transformational M&A during the year, those numbers were 18.4% and 16.2%. All those numbers include M&A, consistent with our past practice. By the way, we're providing the figures excluding the one large position to illustrate what might be a more representative picture of the rest of NBPE's portfolio. In terms of outlook, it's a bit too early at this point to give the portfolio's Q3 operating performance. We believe our portfolio companies are generally very well-positioned for all the reasons we've talked about here today. However, we are experiencing unprecedented macroeconomic conditions, which makes specific forecasts more challenging. It is worth noting that if the pace of portfolio company M&A changes, that will also have a comparable effect on the M&A-driven aspect of the growth figures, as well. Great. Thank you, Peter. Another question on the underlying portfolio, which is to do with the EBITDA growth metrics that we gave. The question is that 20% of the portfolio experienced negative EBITDA growth. Essentially, should we be concerned about that? Let me start by kind of giving a little bit more color around what that actually means, which is that there are 16 companies that represented 19% of fair value as of June where we saw negative EBITDA growth. Obviously, negative EBITDA growth doesn't mean negative EBITDA necessarily. It just means that the EBITDA was smaller than the prior year. And that was across different sectors. It was in consumer, business services, industrials, and technology. There were different reasons in each case, many of which won't surprise you, things like freight and supply chain, raw materials, and some companies just really investing for growth. I think importantly, most of the companies in that data set actually still grew revenue, and so very much at this point an EBITDA question. I think it comes back to, you know, the outlook comes back to what we've been talking about, which is the value-added private equity. You know, we're invested alongside what we think are very high-quality private equity funds. You know, in many cases, we've already seen them taking appropriate action in these companies and others. That can be all kinds of things. Obviously, you know, even though private equity can be agile, and that's one of the advantages of private equity, it still takes time, quarters, to show through in financials. We'll be watching that closely. It's things like pricing strategies. You know, they're a common area where private equity managers can add value to portfolio companies, but obviously that will not be immediately apparent in the results we've seen so far. We will, of course, be watching that very closely, and we'll keep reporting that to all of you as we get new numbers as we go through this year and into next year. With that, I'll move to another question, which is, there was a question on fees in the underlying portfolio, you know, in particular including monitoring and transaction fees. Just to give a little bit more background on the fee level in the underlying portfolio, and I'll maybe ask Peter to answer that one. Sure. Well, first of all, in about 97% of the NAV of our direct equity investments, we are not paying any management fees or carry to the lead private equity managers. Therefore, the only cost is the cost of NBPE itself, in terms of fees being charged, you know, to NBPE, as an investor. 97% of the time, you know, with no management fees and the carry from the lead sponsor. That's an important point. The question I think also had to do with transaction or monitoring fees, and those are fees that a lead private equity manager might charge directly to the underlying portfolio company, not to an investor like us. Frankly, market practice is fairly broad. Some private equity managers, you know, charge those regularly, others don't. The levels of those also can vary. Importantly, that is a key factor that we analyze when underwriting a transaction and deciding whether or not to invest into the company. We look at that in a couple of different ways. One is we look at alignment of interest, right? We wanna make sure that we're well aligned with that lead private equity manager, and they're not going to be, you know, earning disproportionate returns based on, you know, the fees that they're charging the company, as opposed to the actual performance of the company itself. That's one aspect is alignment that we're very focused on. The other aspect of that is just what's the actual effect that that has on the returns. We will look to see if that will make a material difference in terms of what's, you know, actually what our returns will actually be under different scenarios as investors in the company. That's another important factor that we look at. It absolutely has been the case that we have said no to deals because we thought that there was not a proper alignment and/or that there would be a negative effect, a material negative effect on the return potential for us. That's a key underwriting factor that we look at. We obviously always try to negotiate those sorts of, you know, fees and make sure that those are anything that's there is proper and is in the best interest of the investor. Also importantly in a limited number of cases, we've even gotten it so that our investors, including NBPE, were actually able to share in that fee stream as well. Rather than being just a payor at the portfolio company level, that we actually and therefore NBPE actually received some of those. I wouldn't say that's the exception rather than the rule, but that has been the case in a certain number of cases. Great. Thank you, Peter. So several questions on the underlying debt in the portfolio companies, and I'll try to combine those into one answer. So the questions really, I think are, can you give more color on gearing at the underlying company level? Is it floating rates? What's the ability to refinance those companies over time? Related to that, debt has increased from 5.2x- 5.7x from December to June. Can you give more color on that? So, you know, I'd say that a meaningful minority of the portfolio has either got fixed rate debt or has swapped into fixed rate debt for some period of time. And a small number of companies also have no debt. Obviously that means the majority of NBPE's portfolio company debt is floating rate, which is typically structured as LIBOR or SOFR, plus a spread. Obviously, LIBOR has increased significantly in recent months. While so far this appears to be manageable for companies, obviously it'll have some impact on returns at the very least. It's something we're watching, but of course, when we go into investments, it's also something that certainly over the last few years, we've thought about and looked at in our modeling of companies, what the impact of rising interest rates could be. The average portfolio company leverage is 5.7x at June 22nd. We think it's a reasonable level for a private equity portfolio with the types of companies that NBPE owns. In addition, our average portfolio company debt, if you look at it, as a percentage of the capital structure, is 35%. Increases in interest rates obviously will have less impact on portfolio companies than they would if debt was higher. 35%, again, we think is a reasonable level, for a portfolio of companies like NBPE owns. In terms of that increase from 5.2x- 5.7x, again, there were several reasons at play, and obviously, with 94 companies, a lot of things for us to look at. One of the largest drivers was actually M&A, where portfolio companies either had completed large transactions or had continued roll-up transactions and had funded those through debt, which again is very often a part of a private equity investment thesis and in line with what we expected for those types of companies. That is the biggest reason for that increase. Obviously, with some companies reducing EBITDA, that is also a part of that number. But again, at 5.7x, on average, we think that is a reasonable level for a portfolio like this. With that, I will move to there's a question on valuations and how our valuations compare to the underlying sponsors. Maybe I'll ask Peter just to summarize our valuation policy and answer that question. Sure. We use the practical expedient method for valuing assets, which means that we typically use the GP's marks for our valuation. Before we do that, before we even make an investment in a particular company, we'll have conducted operational due diligence on that lead manager's policies and procedures for doing valuations, and so gotten comfortable with the approach that they take. What we do is use our best available information for rolling, you know, from the GPs and rolling that into our NAV. It is using the NAVs the GPs, but that NAV is the policies and procedures and the NAV of the GPs that the GPs are coming up with has been vetted by our team. Importantly as well, you know, because we obviously have our annual report and then the semiannual as well. What we also do is we have our monthly NAV statements that we come out with. When we get a piece of information from a GP, we'll then roll that into the next monthly NAV. That methodology that we described is rolled in as soon as we get it in the next monthly statement. That's how we do our GP marks, you know, based on the information we're getting from the lead private equity managers, but then also how that rolls into our monthly NAV. Great. Thank you. A related question, which I'll answer very quickly, which is: What is the valuation multiple if you exclude public holdings? Actually, the numbers we gave already exclude public holdings. It is exactly what you see on that slide. Another question that maybe I'll just take, which is that we said the private valuations are generally holding up well. Is there any dispersion between different stages of funding, series A, B, et cetera? I think very importantly, NBPE is focused on cash flow positive buyouts, not venture funding rounds like series A and B. As far as NBPE is concerned, the difference between what is going on in that sort of venture growth world and what's been going on in the buyout world is quite distinct and really based on cash flow multiples in most cases. You know, I think importantly, we feel very good about positioning in terms of all the things we talked about in the portfolio, the types of companies, and critically, that you know, we're focused on buyouts, not venture and growth. I think, unless I have missed any, I'm just quickly checking. We'll pause, give anyone else an opportunity for maybe 30 seconds, but otherwise, that is I think all of the questions that have been submitted. Seeing nothing else, I think we will conclude the Q&A session, and obviously with that, the Capital Markets Day. Again, thank you to everybody for your support and for joining us today. We very much appreciate it. Of course, if there are any questions, hopefully you know where to find us, and we'll be happy to arrange one-on-one calls to go through any additional items that people have. Thank you. Thank you, everyone.