Hello, everyone, and welcome to Bladex's First Quarter 2018 Conference Call on this 20th day of April, 2018. This call is being recorded and is for investors and analysts only. If you are a member of the media, you are invited to listen only. Bladex has prepared a PowerPoint presentation to accompany their discussion. It is available through the webcast and on the bank's corporate website at www.bladex.com. Joining us today are Mr. Gabriel Tolchinsky, Chief Executive Officer; and Mrs. Ana Graciela de Mendez, Chief Financial Officer. Their comments will be based on the earnings release, which was issued earlier today. A copy of the long version is available on the corporate website. Any comments made by the executive officers today may include forward-looking statements. These are defined by the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. They are based on information and data that is currently available. However, the actual performance may differ due to various factors, which are cited in the safe harbor statement in the press release. And with that, I am pleased to turn the call over to Mr. Tolchinsky for his presentation.

Thanks, Chantelle. Good morning, everyone. Let me start by recognizing your vote of confidence at our Annual Shareholders' Meeting last week when you elected me as a board member and ratified my appointment as the new CEO of Bladex. On behalf of our Board of Directors and myself, thank you for your continued support of Bladex since it was first listed in 1992, and thanks for joining us today. In this call, I will discuss key aspects of our earnings results of the first quarter; our perspectives for 2018, considering the quarterly performance; and our views of the Latin American economic and business environment. But before I dive into it, as you are aware, the Board of Directors approved a $0.385 a share quarterly dividend. This decision reinforces once again the board's positive view about the prospect of our financial performance. Now moving on to earnings. The first quarter has always been a slow quarter for Bladex, and this year was no different. But in addition to the seasonal effect, tighter lending spreads, resulting primarily from the combination of lending to financial institutions with short tenors, rising base rates and abundant liquidity in key markets impacted our results further. Despite our lower-than-expected performance, I would like to share some key points that should take us onward. Please refer to Slide 3 for a summary. End-of-period loan balances were 5% lower in the first quarter than in the fourth quarter 2017. Nevertheless, average loan balances for the first quarter were 2% higher than in the previous quarter as we were able to maintain the positive growth -- positive origination growth trend that started in 2017. Looking at Slide 4, we can observe that new disbursements continued their growth trajectory with another strong quarterly performance. These significant origination amounts confirm that trade…

Thank you, Gabriel. Good morning, and thank you all for your interest and participation in today's call. Let me dive right into the line item variations in the quarterly results of operations and the effect of financial position changes. Looking at Page 5. Net interest income of $26.6 million for the quarter was down 6% quarter-on-quarter and 23% year-on-year. The main driver of this decline for both periods comparison was narrower lending spreads, mainly as a result of short-term origination experienced throughout 2017 and particularly during the first quarter of 2018, as Gabriel mentioned. The bank prices its loan book as well as its funding on LIBOR-based rates plus a spread reflecting tenor and credit risk in general. Due to the short-term nature of its loan portfolio, the bank continued to have a narrow interest rate gap structure, enabling it to pass along LIBOR-based rate increases in its funding to its assets very rapidly. To give you some color on this, while average funding base rates increased by 29 basis points on a quarter-on-quarter basis, average base rate on loans increased by a similar figure of 28 basis points. Moreover, the average spread component on Bladex's cost of funds continued to decline. For instance, in the first quarter 2018, it was 7 basis points lower than in the previous quarter as the bank was able to maintain its average deposit level, mostly coming from its central bank shareholders at $3.2 billion, representing 61% of average interest-bearing liabilities while maintaining a solid overall funding structure. In addition, the net effect of average asset and liability volume variation had an immaterial impact on net interest income for both periods comparison. Offsetting all factors described before was the average lending spread reduction, which we calculate to be 21 basis points lower quarter-on-quarter and…

Thank you, Ani. Let's open the Q&A. Chantelle, please?

[Operator Instructions]. Our first question will come from Yuri Fernandes, JPMorgan.

I have a question on your variable compensation. I note here a big increase. And I think this may be related to the management change that you had recently. So my first question is regarding how much of this $4.7 million they are related to the management change? And how much of this is recurring? Because if we look to the last year, about $2 million are kind of the recurring level for the first Q. So just would like to have a sense on how much of this is nonrecurring and how much is normal part of business?

Thank you, Yuri. The $4.7 million variable compensation is overall related to the restructuring that has taken place. And it's an annual number. So it's not a number that you should even remotely expect to see in subsequent quarters. So it basically relates to incentive, very much related to the restructuring that took place and very much related to -- just within the context of a bonus compensation for -- within the scope of an annual time frame. And the full -- because it was paid in 2000 -- in the first quarter of 2018, we took the entire amount for the quarter.

[Operator Instructions]. Our next question will come from Arthur Byrnes, Deltec.

Could you give a little bit more detail on how you intend to spread the tenor of the loans into a longer period? It's my understanding that by charter you're a trade bank. I've seen you in the past -- not you, but the bank, change its modus operandi when trade financing was not as lucrative as it's been in different periods. And the results haven't been good. So would you kind of clarify what sort of loans you're looking for and how it's different from what you're doing now, please?

Sure. Thank you very much for the question. We intend to stay within the context of our mission, which is trade finance and Latin American regional integration. It is within that context that we intend to pursue little bit longer tenors for the financing of trade transactions. Very often, cycles can be extended if the financing is there. Those are conversations that we have going on actively with our clients. It is in the interest of the clients to finance -- and I'm talking within the short-term origination part of the book that -- what is essentially trade or trade-related. We are having conversations with them with respect to what should be the financing of those credit transactions given the context, for example, that the Fed is on a schedule for rising rates and whether some of those rates should be locked in, even within the context of short-term loans. So what we're saying is that, so far, a priority has -- our priority has focused on continuing to build our short-term portfolio and not as much on the portfolio mix of different average tenors. We do have the capacity to have tenors that go beyond the 89-day average origination that we had in the first quarter. I also would like to point out that what we've seen in previous years is that, in general, the first quarter tends to have shorter tenors than subsequent quarters. And part of the reason is, a lot of our focus is in South America. The first quarter is when South America is on vacation. So the decision-makers are not there to negotiate better terms of payments on their purchases and extend their cycles within trade transactions. And all we're saying is, a difference between an 89- or a 90-day average origination tenor and 120-day, which is very much within the context of trade and trade-related transactions, makes a big difference in terms of how often our portfolio turns over and overall end-of-period balances. So that is what we're going to be focusing on in subsequent quarters. And we already are seeing a little bit of an effect of that with the beginning of the second quarter.

Thank you very much. Speakers, at this time, we have no further questions in the queue. I'd like to turn this conference back over to Mr. Tolchinsky for closing remarks.

Thank you, Chantelle, and thank you all. I hope we've addressed some of the issues that we've experienced during the first quarter. We remain, as I said and Ana Graciela reiterated, cautiously optimistic for the second quarter and the remaining of 2018. We are working hard to increase overall loan origination amounts and push maturities up within the context of our mission of promoting trade throughout Latin America and regional integration. And with those comments, I would like now to end the call and pass it back to you, Chantelle. Thank you very much for joining us, and we look forward to talking in the next quarter. And we always remain very open to any conversations or any meetings you'd like to have to clarify any particular aspect of our performance and how we see things going forward. Thank you.

Thank you very much. Ladies and gentlemen, at this time, this conference has now concluded. You may disconnect your phone line and have a great weekend. Thank you.