We also announced in the second quarter that we extended our agreement with Thomas Cook. During the quarter we have been preparing for the launch of their Going Places locations which are currently schedule to begin roll out in early November. We’re also expanding our distribution by adding new countries. We entered Serbia during the quarter through Agrobanka’s extensive network of 120 branch locations. We added the Czech Republic to our network in the quarter with the signing of Chequepoint. We’re currently in 28 Chequepoint locations and expect to grow the network to nearly 150 locations by the end of the year. We launched our services with BGD in Gabon, a Central African market with strong potential. We continue to grow our presence in high potential markets. In Poland we signed three key agents, the post office, Bank DPS and Poland’s largest electronic bill payment provider. This more than triples our network in this important country. In Germany we launched with GE Money Bank in six cities. We will go live with GE Money Bank’s 95 location network in December giving us nationwide coverage.

We expanded our presence in South Korea with the signing of Kyongnam Bank one of the largest regional banks in the country. The bank’s 150 locations represent a key add because they are primarily in more rural underserved areas. In Bangladesh we added our tenth bank agent, Islami Bank Bangladesh and in Latin America through our new agents Grupo Elektra and Banco Azteca we added more than 225 locations to Guatemala, Honduras, Panama and El Salvador. Grupo Elektra is already installed and processing transactions. As you can see we have delivered strong growth in emerging regions. Eastern Europe is up 54%, Asia Pacific and the Indian subcontinent have grown 25% and Africa is up 20% year-over-year. Our global network now stands at 163,000 up 17% from the prior year.

Moving on to slide 11, another part of expanding our distribution is to control our network in selected markets where it makes sense be it regulatory, competitive or other factors. During the quarter we finalized our acquisition of two super agents in Spain, MoneyCard World Express and Cambios Sol. We expect to complete our process to merge the two companies in the first quarter of 2009. These important acquisitions provide us with a money transfer license in Spain which we will use to open additional locations in high traffic areas. We continue to grow our own retail locations in France and Germany. In Germany we expanded our own retail locations to 29 and in France we now have 21 locations. We are seeing impressive year-over-year growth in both countries. The second strategy in pursuing profitable global growth is providing our consumers with a superior value. The primary vehicle for us providing value is the MoneyGram Rewards Loyalty card.

Our most loyal consumers receive faster transactions at the point of sale, tiered discounts based on usage, notification of receipt of the funds sent and account management via www.Mymoneygram.com. The MoneyGram Rewards program was launched in January of this year and we have already exceeded our annual goals for consumer acquisition and transaction usage. Another part of our value proposition that continued during the quarter is the roll out of our multi-currency platform which provides consumers more choices in how they receive funds. In China we began offering pounds sterling and expanded our euro payout services and in Poland we’re offering the zloty, euro and the US dollar. The multi-currency options allow consumers to receive the currency of their choosing.

We now offer local currency or a choice of currencies in 127 countries and territories. A third element of driving profitable global growth is our strategy to deliver a superior low cost service platform to our agents and consumers. During the quarter we acquired a retail point of sale platform that we believe will significantly improve our efficiency as well as the customer service experience in our retail locations in France and Germany and in our own super agent businesses in Germany and Spain.

We are also continuing to roll out the platform which allows our consumers to conduct transactions without needing to complete a sent form. This option is now live in 15 countries, provides added convenience to our customers, faster transaction speed for our agents and reduced forms expense. Additionally we continue to invest in our MoneyGram Rewards platform which provides faster transaction speed and other benefits for our agents and consumers. MoneyGram Rewards is currently only offered in the US. However we plan to roll it out to selected markets during 2009. Our final strategy to drive profitable global growth is to deliver enhanced payment product offerings for our customers. On the send side we continue to enhance our capabilities through products such as eMoney Transfer. Our consumers are responding positively as evidenced by online money transfer and bill payment transactions increasing 45% over the third quarter of last year.

We are also pleased to announce a multi-year agreement with Cardtronics. This opens up a new channel by combining our form free platform with ATMs. Through the agreement we’ll be offering money transfer and bill payment services for walk up customers without the aid of an in store clerk in more than 2,007 such locations nationwide. On the receive side we are providing our consumers with better control and choice over how their money is being delivered to recipients. As we mentioned last quarter we launched our cash-to-account services in Mexico and Poland allowing senders to deposit money directly into a bank. Based on these early successes we are planning to continue adding this convenient service to our customers in other receive markets. Now I’ll turn it over to Dave to discuss our financials, Dave.

David J. Parrin

Great, thanks. As Tony discussed our third quarter results demonstrate the strength of our business, our relationships with our customers and agents and the commitment and talent of a great employee base. I’ll take the next few minutes to give you a view of our results excluding the items that do not have a significant impact on our operations. As you can see in our slides and earnings tables we have adjusted certain measures by excluding net securities gains and losses as we believe these adjusted measures provide information useful to you in understanding the underlying operations of the company. If you look at slide 16 you’ll see that our adjusted EBITDA was $74.5 million this year compared to $75.3 million in the third quarter of last year.

As we said last quarter because of material changes in our capital structure we believe EBITDA is a more relevant measure of our performance. We’ve removed significant items that are not expected to recur or are portfolio related and reconciled those back to income taxes of income before income taxes. So our EBITDA performance reinforces our corporate priority to drive cash flow.

The $74.5 million adjusted EBITDA provides ample financial flexibility to pursue our growth strategy and gives us a solid debt service coverage. Third quarter 2008 EBITDA increased from the second quarter because we saw an immediate benefit from the Q3 Fed Funds rate reduction in our commission’s expense. At the same time we benefited from a lag in that Fed Funds rate reduction on our investment yield. We had the benefit of our official check re-pricing and lower marketing spend in the third quarter. Higher marketing in support of fourth quarter agent roll outs and the stronger dollar that catch up from the Q3 Fed Funds rate reduction on the investment portfolio and the timing of Ramadan which increased our international money transfer realization by about 3% in the quarter will likely bring EBITDA in the fourth quarter more in line with the second quarter of 2008.

Let’s look at the income statement on slide 17. We had positive adjusted operating income of $22 million for the third quarter reflecting the ongoing strength of our core business. We increased fee and other revenue 18% driven by continued growth in the money transfer product. Investment revenue was down 68% reflecting reduced yields on a much lower risk investment portfolio, declining market interest rates and lower investment balances. The second results start on slide 18 with global funds transfer. The total reported revenue increased 9% despite a $19.3 million decrease in investment revenues. Most importantly total fee and other revenue increased 18% and continues to be driven by the growth in the money transfer product. Retail money order and other fee revenues you see on the slide increased 13% primarily from the acquisition of PropertyBridge in October of 2007.

However the retail money order fee and other revenue related to retail money orders for the third quarter 2008 declined 3% compared with the third quarter of 2007 and volume declined on money orders 5% year-over-year. We anticipate higher volume declines in the fourth quarter. Investment revenue in global funds transfer decreased 78% in the third quarter because of lower balances from the money order product and lower yields on lower risk assets as well as decline in market interest rates. Approximately 75% of our commission’s expense growth was driven by higher money transfer transaction volume. The remainder was due to tiered commissions that went into affect the fourth quarter of last year. In the third quarter of 2008 commissions expense includes a higher commission rate on the extended Wal-Mart agreement as well as a higher signing bonus amortization.

Reported operating income in the third quarter was $39.5 million which was affected by lower investment revenue and net securities loss of $2 million resulting in an operating margin of 14.1% for the third quarter. On an adjusted basis you can see the operating income and margins are slightly better than reported but are down from 2007 due to significantly lower investment revenue. Moving on to payment systems segment on slide 19 last quarter we restructured the official check business by re-pricing the commission rates and exiting several large customer relationships. We anticipate the balances associated with these institutions will continue to run off over the next year or so. Additionally we are negotiating the exit of a handful of other official check relationships.

Most importantly on an adjusted basis operating income increased nearly 45% driven in large part by the re-pricing initiatives. We are pleased with the overall progress we’ve made in right sizing and re-pricing this business with the goal of improving profitability which we’ve achieved in a very short timeframe. If you look at slide 20 our realignment of the investment portfolio to highly liquid assets supports our corporate priority to minimize risk and minimize volatility in our investment portfolio. At September 30th about 90% of the portfolio was in cash and cash equivalents and the remainder in government agency securities. Slide 20 provides more detail on the portfolio and the shift to the lower risk investments. At the end of the third quarter we also owned auction rate securities with a market value of $30 million which does not reflect a potential recovery for the pending settlement with our broker.

We also own CDOs with a market value of $52 million which represents a clearing value on an average of 7% of face value. While our goal is to sell these securities over time we believe they pose limited risk at current clearing values. At the end of the quarter our assets available to cover payment service obligations totaled $6.5 billion. With payment service obligations at $6.1 billion our unrestricted asset position stood at a healthy $3.69 million which of course you can see on slide 21. The repositioning of the investment portfolio into lower risk assets has substantially changed our investment portfolio risk profile and the recapitalization was specifically designed to provide the liquidity and capital necessary to operate and grow our business. If you recall our discussion from last quarter auction rates for the CDOs that remain in the portfolio had an assumed zero value at the time of the recapitalization.

Assuming a zero value for these securities unrestricted assets are $286 million at September 30th an increase of nearly $30 million from the $257 million at June 30, 2008. So to wrap up the financials let me summarize a few items that will affect our results for the full year. Money transfer transaction volume and revenue are expected to grow albeit challenged by the global economic situation. We continue to expect global funds transfer adjusted margins for the full year to be between 12% and 13%. Investment revenue will continue to decline on a year-over-year basis in both segments with the change in our investment strategy, lower interest rates and declining balances. We told you last quarter that we expected a net spread for the payment system segment to be about 135 to 145 basis points for the remainder of the year.

The actual spread in Q3 was 1.66%. This is primarily due to higher investments driven by customer balances in equity and to a lesser extent the lower Fed Funds rate. Keep in mind that in a falling Fed Funds environment we typically have a benefit on increasing rates and have a negative impact on the spread. Many of these factors are likely to continue to have a favorable impact on the net investment spread in Q4. However given the variability of the market we’re not providing projection for the fourth quarter. We may see some additional mark-to-market losses on our auction rate securities and CDOs although the potential market value losses don’t affect our liquidity as we ascribe zero value as I discussed earlier.

With that, Tony, I’ll turn it back to you.

Anthony P. Ryan