Welcome to Nuveen Churchill Direct Lending Corp.'s Fourth Quarter and Full Year 2025 Earnings Call. [Operator Instructions] As a reminder, this conference call is being recorded for replay purposes. I'd now like to turn the call over to Robert Paun, Head of Investor Relations for NCDL. Robert, please go ahead.

Good morning, and welcome to Nuveen Churchill Direct Lending Corp.'s Fourth Quarter and Full Year 2025 Earnings Call. Today, I'm joined by NCDL's Chairman, President and CEO, Ken Kencel; and Chief Financial Officer and Treasurer, Shai Vichness. Following our prepared remarks, we will be available to take your questions. Today's call may include forward-looking statements. Such statements involve known and unknown risks, uncertainties and other factors, and undue reliance should not be placed thereon. These forward-looking statements are not historical facts, but rather are based on current expectations, estimates and projections about the company, our current and prospective portfolio investments, our industries, our beliefs and opinions and our assumptions. These statements are not guarantees of future performance and are subject to risks, uncertainties and other factors, some of which are beyond our control and difficult to predict. Actual results may differ materially from those expressed or forecasted in the forward-looking statements. We ask that you refer to the company's most recent filings with the SEC for important risk factors. Any forward-looking statements made today do not guarantee future performance, and undue reliance should not be placed on them. The company assumes no obligation to update any forward-looking statements at any time. Our earnings release, 10-K and supplemental earnings presentation are available on the News and Investors sections of our website at ncdl.com. Now I would like to turn the call over to Ken.

Thank you, Robert. Hello, everyone, and thank you all for joining us today. I'd like to start by discussing our results for the fourth quarter and full year, and then I'll provide some thoughts on the current market conditions, economic environment, portfolio positioning and our forward outlook for 2026. I'll then hand the call over to Shai for a more detailed discussion of our financial performance. Before getting into the results for NCDL, I think it's important to reflect on the past year. 2025 was littered with headlines, including a change in administration, tariffs, interest rate reductions, geopolitical tensions and a few large bankruptcies. Private credit also garnered significant media attention, largely, we believe, due to the meaningful growth of the industry over the past decade. All of these headlines led to temporary market fears and a pullback in BDC stock valuations. In our view, the disruption in the sector has created a compelling investment opportunity. We remind investors that direct lending has been around for several decades. It did not appear overnight. And the investments in our portfolio are primarily directly originated and negotiated loans. At Churchill, we remain intensely focused on generating attractive risk-adjusted returns. We believe we are uniquely positioned with our focus on the traditional core middle market and our distinct sourcing advantage. Our conservative underwriting strategy and long-term track record of nearly 20 years have produced strong returns for our investors and stakeholders over time. Overall, NCDL had a successful year in 2025. NCDL generated an ROE of nearly 11% on net investment income. We paid total distributions of $1.90 per share, equating to a 10.7% yield based on our year-end 2025 net asset value. We took an important step to optimize our balance sheet and capital structure by issuing $300 million of unsecured notes…

Thank you, Ken, and good morning, everyone. I will now review our fourth quarter financial results in more detail. As Ken outlined, NCDL reported net investment income of $0.44 per share for the fourth quarter compared to $0.43 per share in the third quarter of 2025. Total investment income declined slightly to $50 million compared to $51.1 million in the third quarter of 2025. This was primarily driven by the decline in portfolio yields as a result of underlying loan contracts resetting to lower base rates. At year-end, our gross debt-to-equity ratio was 1.27x compared to 1.25x at September 30, while our net debt-to-equity ratio, net of cash was 1.2x, in line with the end of the third quarter. In January, we paid our Q4 dividend of $0.45 per share. And as Ken mentioned earlier, for the first quarter of 2026, we have declared a $0.40 per share dividend which consists of a regular dividend of $0.36 per share and a supplemental dividend of $0.04 per share. Both distributions will be paid on April 28 to shareholders of record as of March 31. Consistent with our communication to the market on our dividend policy since we IPO-ed in January of 2024, we intend to operate with a supplemental dividend program that sees us paying out a portion of the excess earnings over and above our regular dividend. This should allow us to deliver the benefits of higher returns to shareholders when market returns are higher as well as provide stability to NAV while allowing us to reinvest earnings for growth. We have assessed various scenarios related to interest rates, asset spreads, financing costs and credit performance, and we've concluded that a regular quarterly distribution of $0.36 per share is an appropriate level that we feel our earnings will comfortably cover…

Thank you, Shai. In summary, while the stock performance of NCDL and the entire BDC industry was underwhelming in 2025 to say the least, we believe NCDL had a successful year from an operational and financial standpoint. We also believe NCDL is well positioned for 2026 with an experienced investment team and our ability to originate high-quality investments in the context of a diversified portfolio and strong capital structure. I would like to thank our entire team for their hard work and dedication during this past year. Thank you all for joining us today and for your interest in NCDL. I will now turn the call over to the operator for Q&A.

[Operator Instructions] Our first question is from Douglas Harter with UBS.

Can you -- with your commentary that you look to stay at the upper end of the leverage target, can you talk about how you would weigh share repurchase versus making new loans and kind of just a little bit on the thought process there?

Yes. Doug, it's Shai. Yes, look, I mean, I think it's the classic sort of capital allocation thought process that we will go through, sort of evaluating the level of the discount and reinvesting in our portfolio that we've obviously conveyed confidence in the health of that portfolio and our ability to buy it at a meaningful discount, obviously, is an attractive opportunity. At the same time, we're also continuing to see attractive investment opportunities in the market. So I think it will be a question of sort of analyzing those two. As we have done in the past with our share repurchase programs, they are essentially programmatic, so designed to take advantage of discounts in the trading price and sort of operating independently. So we'll keep an eye on that activity and do all of that with a view towards maintaining leverage within our target range of 1x to 1.25x and as we've stated, sort of operating towards the upper end of the range given our confidence in the portfolio, the diversification and our ability to run that level of leverage against the type of portfolio that we have. So hopefully, that helps.

[Operator Instructions] Our next question is from Arren Cyganovich with Truist Securities.

The investment activity was really strong in 2025. Maybe you could share your thoughts on what the recent public market volatility has -- how that may have shaped your outlook for activity in 2026? Should we kind of expect it again to be a little bit more back-end weighted given the kind of near-term volatility we're seeing?

Yes. Thanks, Arren. It's Ken. I'd say a few things. One is, as I think we pointed out, across the platform, we had an extraordinarily busy year and actually quarter-over-quarter going into third quarter, fourth quarter and now even into the first quarter, deal activity has been extraordinarily busy and that really hasn't slowed. We entered the year with probably our largest pipeline overall as a firm in January. And we continue to see a very, very significant level of activity and obviously, in the core middle market. That said, I think that some of the dynamics in the public markets probably does shift some of the pricing power back to us. So on a marginal basis, I think it does put lenders like ourselves in a better position to get better structures and potentially even tighter covenants. And certainly, some of the spread tightening we saw developed earlier in 2025 has really subsided. Spreads have, in our view, stabilized around that kind of 450 to 475 level. So we think they've reached a floor. We certainly don't see any material tightening as we go through the first half of 2026. But I do think interest rates overall, as they come down, will continue to drive and unlock sponsor activity, sales of companies, M&A that obviously is a big driver of our efforts. So I would say the broader trend remains very, very good both with respect to deal activity and spreads. A little bit of volatility in the public markets has generally worked in favor of us as a mid-market lender. But overall, the trends have been very good, and we haven't seen any change in that in more recent activity.

And I appreciate the commentary on software. Clearly, you have a very small exposure to there, much smaller than a lot of the peers in the BDCs. Maybe you could share a little bit of why you've avoided that historically and why that's not an area because, obviously, it was a very kind of steady earnings business or industry for a long time.

Sure. So look, I think when you think of us in our underwriting approach from a credit perspective, we are very traditional, right? So we are looking at fundamental cash flow metrics, free cash flows of the business, both gross and net cash flow. We're looking at the fundamentals of the company with respect to the stability of those businesses and the ability to service the leverage profile that we're underwriting. So that traditional approach leads us to a number of conclusions. One is that we have never, in our history, in our 20-year history, ever done an ARR loan. And from our perspective, that's just not -- financing recurring revenue is not, in our view, an appropriate risk profile for our platform. We finance recurring cash flow, right? And so, if you look at the types of businesses that has led us to within the software area, it's been principally specialized managed service providers, systems integrators, cybersecurity consultants, businesses that are more traditional and away from Software-as-a-Service or SaaS businesses, which represent, as I mentioned, only about 2% of our portfolio. So when you think about the fundamentals, cash flow-generating businesses, mature businesses, where we are financing and obviously looking at things like customer retention, these are businesses are typically modestly levered, ingrained within the operations of the customers they serve and generally non-discretionary. So it really comes down to the fundamentals of our underwriting approach. But the reality is, not only are we not an ARR lender, we're also generally not looking at those very, very highly levered are deals that are being done in the upper middle market and the broadly syndicated market. So I think this is yet another situation where our focus on the fundamentals on the core middle market against the backdrop of some of the -- backdrop of some of the noise in the market actually shows very well for us.

[Operator Instructions] There are no further questions at this time. I'd like to hand the floor back over to Ken Kencel for any closing comments.

Great. Well, thank you very much, and thank you all for joining us today. We appreciate your support and look forward to moving forward with hopefully continued great performance and feedback to you all as we continue in the business. Thank you.

This concludes today's conference call. You may disconnect your lines at this time. Thank you again for your participation.