 Jason Paltrowitz is the executive vice president of OTC Markets. Jason, welcome to the Investor Intel Studio. Thank you, happy to be here. OTC, over-the-counter markets, used to differ from stock exchanges. Is there any difference in this electronic age? Yes, there's still a difference. The company's actually over 100 years old and started as something called the National Quotation Bureau, became Pink Sheets, which was a publisher of stock quotes on Pink Paper. We are now what's called an ATS, Alternative Trading System, SEC-regulated FINRA member firm. Unlike an exchange, you know, we still trade electronically in a way similar to what NASDAQ was before it became an exchange. So a network of broker-dealers that are linking electronically messaging to trade off-exchange listed securities in the U.S. You have, I think, something in the range of 10,000 companies listed on your three platforms. What are the three platforms? From lowest to highest, we have what's called the Pink Market. Pink is that legacy dealer market. It's an amalgamation of securities ranging from bankrupt all the way up to some of the largest international companies, really where it's broker-driven trading. So companies aren't involved, but if a broker dealer in the U.S. wants to trade those securities, they can get a ticker symbol. They can apply, get a ticker symbol, and trade those securities. It provides a valuable service. If you think when American Airlines went bankrupt, there was a place for their investors to still trade the security. Our next market up is something called OTCQB. That's what we call our venture market. That has company involvement. It's got some light-touch requirements for companies to be traded there. And it gives early-stage and developing companies a place to be proactive, to engage their investors while having some very light-touch requirements so that aren't onerous for an early-stage company. Our best market, OTCQX, has significant financial requirements. It requires companies to have a light-touch corporate governance regime put in place and really gives companies all the benefits of being listed on an exchange at a significantly reduced cost so that they can focus on their companies rather than on meeting the myriad of requirements that are put in place by the exchanges that might not be suitable for them given their size and scope as a public company. Investor Intel, our audience will understand that quite a few of the companies that we are dealing with here are talking about are listed on the OTCQX. These are primarily foreign companies that are primary listings are elsewhere. Is that a big part of your 10,000? Well, if you look at the QX and the QB specifically, that is a big percentage, albeit not the majority percentage. We have a significant number of U.S. companies that avail themselves of our platform. But yes, there are a significant number of international companies all the way from the pink to the QX. And what differs is their level of engagement or how they want to access the U.S. investment community. For international companies, the ability to have a really good public trading market in the U.S. without having to be duplicative in their reporting so they don't have to be SEC reporting. They can use what's called the 12G3 to be exemption to be allowed to trade in the U.S. They don't have to worry about things like Sarbanes-Oxley. They don't have to be U.S. gap compliant. They can use their home market disclosure and reporting, which they're good at, which they know how to do. And they can use that to then, in turn, access the U.S. market. And as part of our service, we kind of take those financials and dollarize them and put them into a way that a U.S. investor can understand. You also have listings for American depository receipts. What is an American depository receipt or ADR? So an ADR is really a settlement mechanism. So a security type that makes it even easier for U.S. investors. U.S. investors can actually buy the ordinary shares of a company. They can buy them in the U.S. and in the local market. Or they can buy what's called an ADR. And the ADR simply dollarizes or Americanizes the foreign security. So that security gets customized by a U.S. bank who, in turn, pays dividends in U.S. dollars, who make sure that the proxy materials are distributed in English to U.S. investors and who allow those securities to kind of trade and settle in the U.S. mechanism that investors are used to rather than trading and settling locally, sometimes T plus five or T plus one, getting their dividends in a foreign currency which they then have to go and convert, maybe not getting their proxy materials in English or at all given time zone changes and differences. So it just makes it even easier for U.S. investors to be able to access foreign markets. One of the investor intel clients is Alcain Resources. The primary listing is on the ASX in Australia and they have both ordinary shares and the American Depository Receipts on your platform. The ordinary shares were trading earlier today at about $0.37 and the ADRs were trading at about $3.50. Why is there a difference? What the ADR allows for is something called a ratio. So the ADR is actually 10 to 1, so 10 Australian shares equals 1 ADR and that's why you get those price differences. So it does allow companies to have a price that more reflects the norm in the U.S. rather than have a security here that would trade $0.37. It's really marketing and perception a little bit, just what U.S. investors are used to and what they might prefer. So just to go through the mechanics once again, because I'm a slow learner here, Jason, when Alcain decided on an ADR structure, they went to a bank to act as the custodian. So the bank then would buy the securities on the ASX, bring them to North America? Nope, I'll go a little. So really from an investor perspective in the U.S., it's relatively transparent. So what would happen is a U.S. investor would go to their broker and say, I'd like to buy Alcain. That broker-dealer actually now has the ability to access two pools of liquidity. They can either buy on our market ADRs that have already been created and are trading ADR to ADR, or they can go into Australia and buy the ordinary share and ask that those shares, when they settle, be deposited into the depository bank's custody account for the issuance of new ADRs into the United States. At the end of the day, the investor will wind up getting in their account ADRs of Alcain and T-plus-3 settlement as they would any other U.S. security. So the depository bank or the custodian bank isn't buying securities, they're just holding those securities for broker-dealers that are transacting on behalf of their clients. And then the depository bank keeps that register in the U.S., and when it's time for voting or dividends, in Australia they actually show up as a shareholder and are given all the proxy materials and the dividends for the shareholders that they're evidencing that have ADRs, and they're just moving all of that over to the United States. So they're never actually buying and selling shares, they're just custodizing and settling those shares on behalf of other investors. Crystal Clear, thank you. Now you're in Toronto marketing OTC markets products. Are you marketing primarily to public companies to get them to list Canadian public companies to have them list or are you also marketing to the brokerage community here? Like most exchanges, even though we're not an exchange, we actually have three businesses as most exchanges do. Primarily what I'm here for this trip is around, yes, companies and just really educating companies on options available to them to be dual-listed in the United States. Again, to have a dollar denominated security that trade and settles in the U.S. There are over 100 companies on our QX platform that are Canadian that take advantage of dual listing, if you will, in the United States. But we're also spent a lot of time, I also spent a lot of time talking to broker-dealers and market data providers as part of the other parts of our business, which are trading and market data. Over time, our markets, as I mentioned earlier, really evolved from what a lot of people will remember the earlier days of pink sheets into that fully electronic market with three tiers that have standards. With that comes going out to the brokerage community and providing them our data and our resources so that they can then, in turn, take advantage of that and make good investment decisions and have good compliance for their clients. So our OTC QX platform, for instance, companies on that platform can't be what are called SEC penny stocks per the SEC penny stock definition. A lot of clearing firms and trading firms have restrictions on trading penny stocks. The fact that no QX company can be a penny stock means that they can have, you know, feel more comfortable in trading those securities and it's incumbent upon us to make sure that we can feed them that data and those compliance files so that they can trade on behalf of their clients. So we do spend a lot of time with the clearing firms and the brokerage firms in Canada and in the U.S. as we've evolved our markets so that they can be up to date. They can protect their clients. They can make good investment decisions and we can all benefit from a growing market. Well, we've all benefited from you explaining OTC markets to us. Jason, thanks very much. Thank you. I appreciate it.