We are very pleased with the composition and return profile of our current portfolio. Looking ahead, in the fourth quarter, we will continue to focus on investments that benefit from the elevated rate environment while continuing to monitor closely to uncertain macro landscape. We will remain disciplined with respect to deploying capital towards opportunities that have limited risk of permanent capital impairment and durable returns. By saying measured, we remain well positioned to further grow Great Elm Capital Corp. and generate attractive risk-adjusted returns for shareholders. We are very pleased with our performance thus far in 2023, enhancing both our overall yield and the quality of our portfolio composition and ultimately leading to improving NAV and NII that has consistently exceeded our quarterly distribution.
As we close out the year and think about what we have accomplished over the last 18 months, we have stabilized our business, built a stronger, high-quality portfolio and set our platform up with the appropriate infrastructure to accelerate our growth further in 2024. As Keri noted, our NII this quarter essentially tripled from the same period last year. We believe that all of the changes implemented at GECC since I took over as CEO in March 2022, leave us well positioned for further growth. We are excited for the future of GECC. And with that, I would like to turn the call over to Mike Keller to provide an update on Specialty Finance.
Mike Keller: Thanks, Matt. I would like to start off with the transformative transaction that provides a launch pad for our vision of Great Elm Specialty Finance. In the quarter, GECC contributed all its core specialty finance assets to Great Elm Specialty Finance, and we welcome a strategic investor that provided new capital to grow and scale our specialty finance platform, offering a one-stop shop for borrowers across the continuum of lending. Today, as an independent operating company, GESF can market its platform companies, Prestige, Sterling, Healthcare Finance and our new initiative, Great Elm Lender Finance under one umbrella to small- and medium-sized businesses for a bespoke capital solution. By bringing all the core specialty finance assets under Great Elm Specialty Finance, our platform’s operations are being streamlined under one cohesive operating company.
Now that we have the core pieces and capital in place, we can focus on growing our verticals and generating synergies across the platform. The pullback of traditional bank lending to small and medium-sized businesses could not be occurring at a better time for the GESF platform companies to reenergize their growth initiatives. We continue to see positive momentum within each of our verticals. First, I’ll touch on Prestige, which generated net income growth year-over-year and is tracking ahead of budget. Although the third quarter saw some seasonal weakness in invoice financing volume, going into the fourth quarter, we are seeing volumes pick up again and expect them to end the year strongly. At Great Elm Healthcare Finance, we continue to see robust deal flow and our team continues to execute on its plan.
This platform has benefited from the industry-wide pullback in health care lending, particularly in the skilled nursing and long-term care sectors. We expect Great Elm Healthcare Finance to continue to take advantage of market dislocation into the fourth quarter as well as into 2024. As mentioned last quarter, we continue to build out Sterling Commercial Credit and its asset-based servicing capabilities. In addition to providing asset-based revolving loans to lower middle market companies, Sterling provides loan monitoring and back-office servicing capabilities to Great Elm Healthcare finance. We believe that Sterling’s loan monitoring capabilities can be used across multiple specialty finance verticals. Turning to our latest business initiative.
I wanted to update you on Great Elm Lender Finance. This has been seeded with 3 participations contributed in the aforementioned specialty finance transaction this quarter, and we are working with various bank and non-bank capital providers to further grow and scale this business line. We believe that Great Elm Lender finance provides us with the ability to take advantage of opportunistic asset-backed transactions. In summary, now under GESF, I am confident that our specialty finance companies are properly positioned to execute on our growth initiatives as we seek to generate increasing and sustainable income over the coming years.
