Welcome to the Q2 2023 Avantax Earnings Conference Call. At this time, all participants are in listen-only mode. After the speaker's presentation, there will be a question and answer session. To ask a question during this session, you need to press star one one on your telephone. You will then hear an automated message advising your hand is raised. To withdraw your question, please press star one one again. Please be advised that today's conference is being recorded. I would now like to hand the conference over to Dee Littrell, Director of Investor Relations. Please go ahead. Thank you, welcome everyone to Avantax second quarter 2023 earnings conference call. Yesterday afternoon, following market close, we issued our earnings release and posted the release and supplemental information on the investor relations section of our website at avantax.com. I'm joined today by Chris Walters, Chief Executive Officer, and Marc Mehlman, Chief Financial Officer. Before we begin, let me remind everybody that today's discussion contains forward-looking statements that speak only as of the current date. As such, they include risks and uncertainties, actual results and events could differ materially from our current expectations. Please refer to our press release and our SEC filings, including our most recent Form 10-K and Form 10-Q, for more information on some of these specific risks and uncertainties. We assume no obligation to update our forward-looking statements except as required by law. We will discuss both GAAP and non-GAAP financial measures today. Our earnings release and supplemental financial information are available on the investor relations section of our website at avantax.com, and include full reconciliations of each non-GAAP financial measure discussed to the nearest applicable GAAP measure. With that, let me hand the call over to Chris. Thank you, Dee. Good morning. I'm pleased to report that 2 quarters in, operating as a pure play wealth management business, we have maintained strong operational performance across key metrics. We delivered our 6th straight quarter of positive net asset flows and are on pace towards another record year. We've also continued to see stabilization in our financial professional count and growth in count of our most productive financial professionals. We continue to experience strong inflows of assets and minimal attrition, resulting in our production retention rate remaining above 99.5% in the 2nd quarter. We have also continued to make significant progress towards streamlining our operations to provide a more scalable and efficient organization. With regard to asset flows, our 6th straight quarter with positive net asset flows was driven by the growth and retention of our existing financial professionals through same-store sales. While Q2 same-store sales were not quite as high as we saw in Q1 as expected, it's worth noting that we received over $200 million of new flows in just the first few days of Q3, putting us off to a great start for this quarter. In addition to the positive organic flows, we also brought in additional net new assets by closing our first external acquisition into APP and expanding our national presence of our employee-based RIA, which now has more than $7.6 billion of associated assets under management. From a newly recruited asset perspective, we recruited approximately $141 million in new assets and have an extremely robust pipeline, which Marc will get into in a moment. We added 50 new financial professionals, primarily from our recruiting efforts, and also added 19 financial professionals to our Strategic Partners Program that helps unite tax and wealth professionals to drive incremental growth to our existing and newly recruited financial professionals. Overall, this quarter was a strong indicator of the strength of our tax-focused wealth management model. Existing and prospective clients are increasingly turning to Avantax financial professionals for a more comprehensive and tax-inclusive approach to their financial plans. Financial professional retention. In Q2, we continued our trend of exceeding 99% production retention, which we believe continues to be best in class. This strong performance on production retention is driven by multiple parts of the business. Our client services and operations team, which continue to achieve superior service and processing metrics. Our elite business strategy team, that partners closely with our largest financial professionals and their firms to help them maximize their performance. Our growth consulting team, which provides data-driven critical insights and solutions to our financial professionals to support their growth. Our product and technology teams, that continue to prioritize the financial professional experience and build out digital experiences that are easier to use, more intuitive, and can provide unique value to our financial professionals and their end clients. We are excited about some of the future developments that will be coming toward the end of the year, which will enable our financial professionals and CPA affiliates to even more easily serve their tax clients with wealth management. Our marketing team, which helps financial professionals market their firms through innovative support like our collaborative Marketing Mastermind program, small group marketing coaching, and our in-house agency model, Signify, that allows financial professionals to take marketing execution off their plates entirely. In addition, our initiatives focus on growth strategies and practice management for our financial professionals and accounting firms, such as our Rise to Elite coaching program, which have proven successful as our financial professionals participating in these programs are outperforming expectations. This peer-to-peer coaching program for our financial professionals has accelerated the growth of our graduates by more than their peers, which is a promising sign for the future. Finally, our upcoming conference, Connect for Growth, will take place later this summer in Dallas and has shown strong financial professional interest. We've already surpassed last year's registration numbers, and last year's attendees ramped up their growth rate by more than others. Now on to our mix shift. We completed the acquisition of Minnesota-based Summit Wealth Advocates, an independent RIA and advisory firm that manages over $300 million in client assets. This represents our first acquisition of a wealth management firm not affiliated with Avantax, and we look forward to others in the future. Our advisory assets under management continued, setting a new high watermark at just shy of 51% of total client assets. This growth was partially enabled by strong same-store sales of new advisory assets with net inflows from brokerage accounts. We have a strong recruiting pipeline heading into the remainder of the year, and we'll continue to look for acquisition opportunities for firms that are a good fit for App. Now on to the TaxAct separation. Finally, I'm happy to report that the Transition Services Agreement, or TSA, in relation to the TaxAct separation, is on track to complete this quarter, that we have already continued to progress on our post-sale efficiency initiatives, with savings expected to begin being reflected in our fourth quarter numbers. Now I'll turn it over to Mark. We'll be happy to answer questions after the prepared remarks. Thank you, Chris. Good morning, everyone. During the second quarter, we continued to build on the foundation the team has created for a strong 2023 and beyond. We continued the trend of breaking records for revenues and assets in advisory accounts as a percentage of total client assets. As Chris mentioned, we saw net positive asset flows for the sixth consecutive quarter and a continued strong production retention rate of 99.6%. Before reviewing the second quarter results, I would like to point out that we have brought back non-GAAP net income and non-GAAP net income per diluted share into our company reporting and guidance. We believe that this will provide meaningful information to management, investors, and analysts regarding the company's performance while assisting investors with the public valuation of the business. As noted earlier, our earnings release and supplemental financial information include full reconciliations of those to the nearest applicable GAAP measurement. 2023 has been a year of profound change for the business as we separated the TaxAct business from our operations and reset many of the financial and operational elements of our business. This has been done amidst a continued noisy macro backdrop of rising equity markets, client cash sorting, and continued volatility in interest rate expectations. That said, with the ending of the TSA this quarter, our Term Loan A fully drawn, the Fed apparently nearing the end of its hiking campaign, and many of the planned actions to reset the business now complete, we should have less noise and more predictability in our financial performance. As it relates to those planned efficiency actions, in the third quarter, we have acted on nearly $7 million of annual run rate savings, which, when added to the actions taken earlier this year, surpasses $10 million in annual run rate cost efficiencies. We are committed to continuous focus on managing our cost base in light of our pure-play wealth focus, and with the TSA almost behind us, we have the focus and ability to do so. We will have more to share at an investor day we plan to schedule later this year, where we will share our medium to long-term focus areas and expected financial outcomes. To discuss our second quarter financial results. Total revenue of $186.9 million was up approximately 15% from the second quarter of the previous year and up approximately 5% sequentially from the first quarter of 2023. The year-over-year increase of $24.3 million is due primarily to additional cash sweep revenue, bolstered by strong production retention rate and net new asset flows. Adjusted EBITDA from continuing operations was $31.1 million versus $5.2 million for the same period last year. GAAP net income from continuing operations was $3.6 million, or $0.09 per diluted share. This compares to $800,000, or $0.02 per diluted share, for the same period last year. Non-GAAP net income from continuing operations was $13.9 million, or $0.36 per diluted share. This compares to non-GAAP net income of $1.7 million, or $0.03 per diluted share, for the same period last year. A few other details regarding our performance this quarter. We ended the second quarter with total client assets of $83.8 billion. That is up approximately 4% sequentially from the first quarter of 2023 due to market improvements and net positive asset inflows. Fee-based advisory assets were also up sequentially by approximately 5% from the first quarter to $42.6 billion, with advisory assets as a percentage of total client assets ending the quarter at a new record high of 50.9%. Net asset flows into advisory for the quarter were $762 million, with total client assets having net inflows of $390 million for the quarter. Newly recruited assets were approximately $141 million for the second quarter of 2023, versus $228 million in the first quarter of 2023. The decline is a timing issue as our recruitment pipeline remains strong. Through August 8th, we have over $500 million in committed new store sales assets. We will continue to experience variability with our newly recruited assets on a quarter-to-quarter basis. This is partially due to the size of the recruits and onboarding of new client accounts. Our pipeline remains stronger than we've seen historically, and based on historical norms, the number of offers we currently have out to recruits would result in achieving our full year expectations of between 2% and 2.5% annual growth in recruited assets. At the end of the second quarter, our cash sweep balances were approximately $2.8 billion. This is down from $3.1 billion at the end of the first quarter and down slightly from the $2.9 billion we reported having as of April, largely in line with the rest of the industry. As discussed last quarter, balances have started to stabilize as clients reposition their mix of cash assets to higher yield products such as treasuries and money market funds during the first half of the year. During the second quarter, month-over-month declines in these assets for May and June were down approximately 2% and 1%, respectively. As of August 8th, we had roughly $2.7 billion in cash sweep balances, with the bulk of the difference from the end of the quarter due to the quarterly advisory fee charged in July. During our first quarter earnings call, we discussed the possibility of putting into place hedges for our cash sweep income. We, in fact, entered into derivative contracts this past quarter that, in essence, allow us to float between 2.5%-5.5%. These hedges went into effect for June and will expire on May 31st, 2026. The cost of implementing this program was just over $14 million, which we have elected to defer over the 36-month period, resulting in a monthly charge of approximately $0.4 million, which first started hitting the PNL in June. To frame the financial impact of executing on these hedges, it is equivalent to earning about a 0.25 point less on our sweep balances for the downside protection below 2.5%. We ended the quarter with a strong balance sheet, with cash and cash equivalents of $109.8 million and total debt of $268.3 million outstanding on our term loan. At the end of Q2, our net leverage ratio was 1.6 times. For the medium term, we expect our net leverage ratio to be between 1.5 times and 2.5 times. During the second quarter, under our established $200 million repurchase authorization, we continued to repurchase our common stock with a repurchase of approximately 2.2 million shares for an aggregate purchase price of approximately $51.2 million. As of June 30, 2023, we had approximately $124 million remaining under our repurchase authorization. Additionally, between July 1, 2023, and August 4, 2023, we repurchased approximately 0.4 million shares of our common stock for an aggregate purchase price of approximately $9.1 million. As of August 4, 2023, we had approximately $115 million remaining on our authorization. Earlier this year, I shared guidance for interest expense, which assumed a more modest amount of stock repurchases. So far in 2023, through August fourth, we repurchased a total of approximately 11.9 million shares, which is significantly greater than what we anticipated earlier this year. As a result, we borrowed on the Term Loan A faster than expected, resulting in a new interest expense forecast I'll share in a moment as part of our updated guidance. With the delayed draw Term Loan A now fully drawn, interest expense will be simpler to forecast. Our capital allocation priorities continue to be a mix of returning capital to shareholders, investing in our business to fuel long-term growth, and executing on our acquisition program of independent financial professionals. Our share repurchases moving forward will likely be less than the amount purchased in the second quarter as we adjust our purchasing as appropriate relative to other communicated capital allocation priorities. With that, let's turn to our full year 2023 outlook. We are adjusting our previously issued guidance to account for our cash sweep balance hedging activities and a lower cash sweep balance, with expected market improvement offsetting some of the downside from those two factors, as well as some softness in transaction sales, for instance, 1031 exchanges. We expect full year revenue of between $753 million and $756 million, and Adjusted EBITDA of between $124.5 million and $126.5 million. These figures assume 1% market growth per quarter from the end of Q2, 2023. As it relates to Fed funds rates, we are including the recent 25 basis points increase, which occurred in late July 2023. We are assuming no additional rate hikes or cuts for the remainder of 2023. Factors that can drive revenue and profit outcomes include the performance of transaction-based commission revenues, timing of asset flows throughout the year, and changes in cash balances. With respect to GAAP net income, we expect between $16 million and $18 million, and GAAP earnings per diluted share between $0.40-$0.45 per share. We anticipate non-GAAP net income to be between $49 million and $52.3 million, and non-GAAP net income per diluted share to be between $1.22 and $1.30 per share. As mentioned earlier, we expect one-time items relating to the cost of delivering cost savings, transition items related to the sale of TaxAct, and other one-time matters incurred this year to be higher than previously anticipated, expecting the number to be closer to $20 million. As mentioned earlier, much of the originally anticipated change is behind us, with just several million dollars of below-the-line expenses expected to be incurred the balance of this year, much of it in the third quarter. This concludes our prepared remarks. We will now turn the call over to the operator for Q&A. Operator? Thank you. We will now conduct a question-and-answer session. To ask a question during this session, you need to press star 11 on your telephone and wait for your name to be announced. To withdraw your question, please press star 11 again. Please stand by while we compile the Q&A roster. Our first question comes from Josh Siegler from Cantor Fitzgerald. Please go ahead. Yeah. Hi, guys. Good morning. Thanks for taking my question. Nice to see the strong KPIs. As you continue to shift the mix of FPs towards more profitable FPs, I was wondering if you could give us some more insight on how you're actively targeting these more productive FPs and successfully acquiring them. Yeah, we've talked about our shift in recruiting strategy over the last couple of years, which has been pretty notable. Historically, the business, virtually all of the financial professionals that were recruited were unlicensed tax professionals that we brought into the business. We continue to have a great tax focus, but there are now 3 segments that we target. 1 continues to be the unlicensed tax professionals that have never offered wealth management that we're bringing into the wealth management business. The second segment is licensed tax professionals, where there are thousands of them that sit at other broker-dealers. We believe that our value proposition is uniquely compelling for them, and fortunately, they bring assets and we're well positioned to win them from other broker-dealers. Finally, there's a third segment of existing wealth professionals that sit at other broker-dealers who have great interest in growing their businesses more rapidly through collaborating with tax and accounting firms. As we've shifted and expanded, right, the segments that we're targeting, we've seen great success because our value proposition resonates so well with all three groups. Great. That's a very helpful color. Thank you. Then, in your prepared remarks, you mentioned considering more M&A in the future. Can you talk through what you're seeing in the market right now and how you're thinking about valuations? Sure, Josh, it's good to hear from you again. Our M&A is going to continue focusing on the independent financial professionals that are currently affiliated with Avantax Wealth Management. As Chris mentioned during the prepared remarks, we did close our first external acquisition. The thing to note there is that the profile of this particular firm looks very much like the folks that are currently aligned to Avantax. Our M&A strategy is going to continue focusing on those who culturally, just align with what we're trying to achieve here as a mission. As it relates to valuations, we don't share those publicly. What I can say is they've remained fairly consistent for the size and type of firm that would choose to align with us. Understood. Thank you, guys. Thank you. One moment for our next question. Our next question comes from Alex Paris from Barrington Research. Please go ahead. Hi, guys. Thanks for taking my questions, and appreciate the additional guidance on non-GAAP, because that's been quite noisy, as you had said. In that regard, first off, within your guidance, you're, you're guiding for $18.4 million of executive transition, TaxAct-related reorganization, et cetera. By my math, you've already done $15 million or so on that. As you said, it's going to be less going forward than it has been year to date. Did you say, Mark, that that would be heavily concentrated into Q3? That's correct. you know, the new number just reflects a lot of the actions that we've taken earlier this year. you know, some of the executive transition is a bit of a back and forth, at the time of originally sharing guidance, those were best estimates. At this point, much of the actions that we're taking are behind us. To your exact question, yes, most of what's left is going to hit the third quarter. Okay. Then, while we're on the topic of math, how is the hedge going to work exactly, in terms of how it runs through your PNL? I understand by looking through the 10-Q, that the hedges are gonna cost you net of about $14 million. You're gonna recognize that on a straight line basis. Does that come into interest expense, or is that a contra revenue to cash sweep revenue? How should we model for that? Yeah, the simple answer is most of that's going to run as a contra revenue item. To keep it all in the same accounting bucket, that's why I sort of described it as basically taking a 0.25 point hit on the typical math. Our cash sweep revenue and profit will basically be $400,000 less each month for the next 3 years. Got you. it would have been- And then- Had we not put a collar in place. I see. The TSA on TaxAct. You say that's gonna be largely done by the end of the quarter. Did you forecast, I'm just relying on my memory here, earlier this year, that cost-cutting, which you've been doing all year long, streamlining the operation, would accelerate post the conclusion of the TSA? As mentioned, we were able to take some actions already in the third quarter. I wouldn't necessarily say it's going to accelerate. What I would say now is we don't have anything holding us back from continually building efficiencies into our model. What we've shared during our prepared remarks, in terms of the annualized cost savings, will absolutely start hitting, you know, later this quarter and into the fourth quarter. Now we can start taking actions on a regular basis. Great. Just 1 follow-up on M&A. Congrats on your first unaffiliated wealth management acquisition this quarter. I think on the last call, when you kind of announced the strategy that you were looking beyond your affiliated independent FPs, you said that you might do 1 or 2 more before year-end. What's any update there? Secondly, the affiliated independents. I think you made 20 of those acquisitions over the last couple of years. Have you been active there year-to-date? And what's the pipeline look like there? Yeah. Fortunately, the pipeline is quite robust, right? We've now been at this for over a couple of years, and as you noted, we've done 20 plus transactions of existing independent Avantax advisors. We expect that to continue as we move forward, and we've done a number of transactions throughout the early part of this year. We continue to expect that to be the bulk of M&A activity as we move forward, because I think we've talked about the value prop of that M&A for our existing financial professionals. One of the big needs that we're filling is for succession planning, right? Some of them do not have succession plans in place, and there's some that are looking to align with us to, you know, you know, realize some value from the businesses they've built, but be part of, you know, a more tightly aligned business and grow and move off some of the administrative responsibilities. That will continue to be the bulk of the activities. We, we see a healthy pipeline that has grown quite materially, both for on-platform and then as well as some of the off-platform deals that we're going to see. Specific to your question on any other external deals this year, Alex, we would expect to close at least one more before the end of the year. Great. That's helpful. Thanks for the additional color, guys. Thank you. One moment for our next question. Our next question comes from Dan Kurnos from The Benchmark Company. Please go ahead. Great, thanks. Good morning. Mark, obviously, the hedging program's been pretty well communicated by you guys. Just trying to find sort of the right mix. Can you just talk through sort of a little bit, the end process, why you ended up with this particular hedging program, this particular collar? I mean, we're starting to see some normalization of cash sweep balances. You know, obviously, none of us are Fed prognosticators, but, you know, seems like we have sort of a stable-ish environment for now. Just maybe just some incremental color on sort of timing and thoughts, why this is the right sort of ultimate solution. Sure. Good morning, Dan. The forward curve at the time of putting the hedges in place had assumed a number of cuts to the Fed funds rate before end of the year, as well as a number of cuts in early 2024. If we had put in a fixed hedge, like a swap or a fixed contract at that time, it would have resulted in meaningful, short-term financial impact. That forward curve was not really in alignment with what the Fed was consistently saying. Therefore, we chose to float, which in essence meant that we weren't taking a bet on where rates were going to go, but rather we were comfortable operating within a range. Ultimately, what we were looking for was downside protection, right? We wanted to prevent sweep revenues from going to zero during some unlikely macro event, like what happened during COVID. What we got was that protection, and it cost us a modest amount over a three-year period. In terms of going forward, you know, the way we think about it is maintaining that downside protection without necessarily taking a bet on where rates are going to go. We're going to consistently monitor where we are and the time left to the hedges that we have in place. And, you know, any particular hedge or derivative instrument is really fair game, as long as, you know, we maintain that focus on that downside protection. Got it. That's really helpful. Appreciate the additional color. Chris, maybe just one for you. I should have said this last time, by the way, congrats on sort of the FC stabilization. I know that's been sort of an important focal point. I just want to ask you, you kind of teased some new products, you know, kind of coming out later in the year. I know you guys are always trying to improve the platform, you know, and efficiency. It's probably at the margin, but, you know, just love to kind of get a sense on what you're thinking about. Like, you can see a pretty good plan forming here on how you guys are trying to get deeper, even fully or further deeper integrated with kind of the tax side of the equation and some of the strategic optionality over there. I'd love to hear that. And as a tangent, since everybody's asking about it on every other call, I'll, I'll give you the chance to talk about any thoughts on implementing AI into kind of your product suite or strategy. We may have been one of the few firms out there that didn't have AI mentioned at least 12 times or more in our in our remarks. We think AI is a really important development on the technology front that will enable efficiency in our business. We're monitoring multiple potential applications of AI. I would not say at our size and scale, we are going to be at the forefront of developing any applications, but we will be monitoring the use across the wealth management sector, and we'll be a very fast follower. We'll also use more functional elements of AI. Okay. right, and leverage our partners, right, and what they're doing with that. When I say more functional elements, so there's already efficiencies that are being realized in software development, right, through effective use of tools that are used across many industries. Our teams are already experimenting with that, and so we see real benefit. Are monitoring it closely and selectively using it, and we'll be fast in implementing things that we see that can work for our business. The other part of your question, which is more generally about technology, look, we look holistically across our financial professionals' experience center end clients, and we get a ton of feedback from our financial professionals about the things that will help them be more efficient. We have a rigorously prioritized product roadmap and are trying to improve each experience a fair bit more. One of the things that we're really excited about is at that intersection of taxes and wealth management, we believe there's more that we can do to make it easier for our financial professionals to identify more rapidly opportunities within their tax book. Both the magnitude of opportunity, but the specific clients, as well as the specific wealth opportunities with those clients. Over the next six to 12 months, it's one of the really exciting areas that we think we can make great progress on that will help our financial professionals grow more rapidly. Got it. Thank you. Marc, if I could just one last housekeeping. Just on the cost side of the equation, 2Q costs are actually even better than we would have thought. I know you talked about being able to take some initial actions in Q3 and some of the streamlining. I don't know, you know, it doesn't sound like you sort of revised your forward projections on where that ultimately may land, but, you know, you guys have been pretty good at finding a few nickels in the couch cushions here and there. I'm just curious if you have any kind of update on, you know, once we get into 2024 and beyond, if, you know, there are incremental efficiencies that you might be able to or have identified now. Sure. As we get closer to 2024, I think we'll be able to provide more details in terms of actions that we may take and what our expense base would look like. I also said during prepared remarks that we're looking to have an investor day later this year, where I think it would be a perfect time for us to sort of share our most, you know, updated views on where the market is headed and how our firm is going to compete. As part of that, you would expect us to share, you know, updated reflection on the financial health of the business and where we would expect it to go. As you point out, we are focused continuously on driving profitable growth. With us now operating as a pure play wealth business, with the TSA largely behind us, with a lot of the other corporate actions having taken place, whether it be tender offers or what have you, we are now in a position to focus our attention on just that. We're excited to really dig in. Got it. Super helpful. Thanks, Mark. Thanks, Chris. Great. Thank you. I am showing no further questions at this time. I will turn the conference back over to Chris, Chris Walters for final remarks. Great. Thank you all for joining us today and your interest in Avantax. We'll speak to you next quarter. This concludes today's conference. Thank you for participating. You may now disconnect.