Flow Traders N.V. Stock

Hello, and welcome to the Flow Traders Second Quarter 2026 Results Conference Call. I would now like to hand over the call to Dick Peters. Please go ahead.

Thank you. Good morning, and thank you for joining Flow Traders Second Quarter 2026 results presentation. As you may have seen, we published our results earlier this morning. I'm joined by our CEO, Thomas Spitz, and our Co-Chief Trading Officer, Marc Jansen, who will take you through the results.

As for our prepared remarks, we will be happy to take any questions you may have. Before we begin, let me draw your attention to the disclaimer on Page 2. As always, this presentation is for information purposes only and the results we will be discussing are unaudited. I will now hand over to Thomas for the update.

Thank you, Dick. And let me start with a high-level overview of our Q2 performance. We delivered a solid second quarter, resulting in a net profit of EUR 40.8 million and an earnings per share of EUR 0.93. Our ETF value traded increased 34% year-on-year and was flat quarter-on-quarter while market volumes were down 14% quarter-on-quarter. In Q2, we generated a net trading income of EUR 147.8 million, which equates to 53% return on trading capital. Our NTI consisted of EUR 131.7 million NTI in our traditional business and EUR 16.1 million in our digital assets business.

Fixed operating expenses were EUR 59.3 million in line with our revised guidance of EUR 235 million to EUR 245 million for the year. EBITDA reached EUR 63.6 million for Q2, which equates to an EBITDA margin of 43%. We ended the quarter with 641 FTEs down from 656 at the end of Q1 2026. Overall, we delivered steady diversified results across regions and products. I will now hand it over to Marc to walk you through the market environment and regional performance.

Thank you, Thomas, and good morning, everyone. ETF AUM continued its strong trajectory and increased 41% year-on-year and 16% quarter-on-quarter. Continued growth is driven by increased fund inflows, combined with strong year-on-year market performance. The global ETF market showed reduced activity in Q2 with ETF value traded 14% down quarter-on-quarter, marking the first down quarter since Q2 '24. Year-on-year ETF value traded is up 33%.

Implied volatility reduced in Q2 as the situation in the Middle East moved to a ceasefire. ETP velocity, the ratio between ETP value traded and AUM decreased both quarter-on-quarter and year-on-year. This decrease typically correlates with the decrease in volatility as you can see by comparing the 2 charts at the bottom of the page.

Overall, fundamentals remain supportive of continued long-term growth in the global ETF markets.

Moving on. Since the start of the year, the Bitcoin price is down 33% and it's down 53% since its peak in October 2025. The overall market cap of the crypto markets moved in tandem with the price changes observed in Bitcoin. Global crypto ETF value traded was down 28% quarter-on-quarter as activity remains subdued. Year-on-year, global crypto ETF value traded was up 11%. Strong momentum in tokenized markets continued with tokenized assets increasing by 15% quarter-on-quarter. Despite the recent trends in crypto, structural growth trends for digital assets remain in place.

I'll now move on to our regional performance overview of our traditional business. In Europe, we maintained our leadership position in European ETFs, supporting liquidity both on and off exchange. Our results were in line with the prior quarter despite reduced market activity in the European markets. The Americas saw continued NTI increases compared to the prior quarter. Supported by stable ETF volumes for our U.S. business compared to a market with reduced activity quarter-on-quarter.

In Asia, overall ETF market value traded was up significantly year-on-year in H1. However, it has not translated into a material year-on-year uplift in our own ETF value traded in H1. We continue to develop and expand our Asia market presence, and as such, we were not yet able to fully capture this increase in value traded. We continue to view APAC as a growth region and continue to focus on strengthening the business.

Moving to digital assets. As indicated during our Capital Markets Day, we said we would provide more information regarding our digital asset business. We also explained that EMEA crypto ETF value traded can serve as a proxy for our digital assets NTI while recognizing that our digital asset business extends beyond ETF market making. We will continue to review this as the business develops, and we'll update the market if we believe other metrics become more suitable.

EMEA crypto ETF value traded for the market was down 38% in Q2 compared to Q1 and down 24% year-on-year for H1, which highlights the reduction in market activity in H1 2026. In line with movements in market activity, our EMEA crypto ETF value traded decreased by 40% quarter-on-quarter and 20% for H1 year-on-year. In line with lower market activity across crypto markets, our digital assets NTI was down 36% year-on-year for H1 and 26% quarter-on-quarter for Q2.

We'll now hand over to Thomas to talk about our financials.

Thank you, Marc. As shown on this slide, fixed operating expenses were EUR 59.3 million in Q2, an increase of 6% quarter-on-quarter and 15% increase for H1 year-on-year. These increases were primarily driven by ongoing technology investment and adding subject matter experts and other one-off expenses. We delivered a 43% EBITDA margin in Q2, underscoring the resilience of our operating model. We ended the half year with 641 FTEs, a 2% reduction in the workforce.

Fixed operating expenses guidance for the year 2026 is EUR 235 million to EUR 245 million, driven by continued technology investment and selective headcount additions to support growth initiatives in line with Horizon 2030.

Turning to capital. As you know, trading capital is core to our business. In Q2, our trading capital grew by 5% Q-on-Q to achieve EUR 1.2 billion. On the trading capital base, we delivered a return on trading capital of 55% during H1 2026. Shareholders equity also reached a record of EUR 970 million, up 6% quarter-on-quarter. And return on equity is 20% for the first half of 2026.

On the 23rd of June, we hosted our 2026 Capital Markets Day, during which we presented our Horizon 2030 strategy. And as we continue to progress in the execution of that strategic plan, we are committed to keep you updated on our progress. During the 2026 full year results, we'll further provide you with our first progress update on that strategy and implementation.

Thank you, Thomas. That concludes our prepared remarks. We would now like to open the floor for questions. So operator, please go ahead.

[Operator Instructions]

I will now hand over the Q&A to Dick Peters. Please go ahead.

Any questions from our analysts? Okay. No further questions from them. We also see that there are actually no further questions also in the room. So then I think with that, we can conclude the call for today. Thank you all.

Good morning, everybody, and welcome to the 2026 Capital Markets Day of Flow Traders. My name is Dick Peters. I'm the Global Head of Corporate Strategy here at Flow Traders. And on behalf of the entire team, I would like to welcome you today in the room as well as online.

Our schedule for today is the following: First, we start with our CEO, Thomas Spitz, who will present the overall group strategy. Then, our Co-Chief Trading Officer, Alex Kieft, will talk about our traditional business and our strategic focus. Followed by Marc Jansen, our Co-Chief Trading Officer, who will shed more light on our digital asset business, the convergence to 24/7 markets and our strategic relevance in that space. We will then have a short 15-minute break, after which our CTO, Owain Lloyd, will tell you more about technology, AI and deep learning and how this continues to be at the core of everything we do and how it will enable our strategy going forward. I will then share guidance regarding our financial plan and the ambitions that we have going forward. Finally, we will have Thomas to wrap it up with the key highlights of today, after which we will open the floor for Q&A.

Before we start, I would appreciate if you could review the disclaimer regarding forward-looking statements at the back of the presentation.

With that, over to you, Thomas.

Thank you, Dick, and good morning, everybody. Good to see so many of you in the room, and good for all of you joining online. Thank you for the time you are giving us today. Today, we're announcing a set of decisions that will shape the future of the company. I would like to walk you through them upfront before we go into the details. We are committed to becoming the liquidity provider of choice in a 24/7 global financial ecosystem. The ambition sits behind everything you will hear about today. To deliver on that, we have set 5 priorities: we will expand and scale our retail business, we will continue to grow our digital asset franchise, we will expand into tokenized asset trading, we will build out our quantitative trading capabilities and we are launching a frontier AI and deep learning division that will go live in 2027, and finally, we are building a unified 24/7 distribution model to meet the growing expectations of our counterparties. Alex, Marc, Owain and I will go into more detail this morning.

Behind those priorities, we see 3 financial levers that will drive value for our shareholders. The first is revenue growth by executing on the priorities I just described. The second is operational efficiency by building a leaner and more focused organization. The third is the acceleration of our trading capital expansion by continuing to grow the capital base. The initiatives you will hear about today are what will let us put that retained capital to work faster and at a greater scale. On the back of those 3 levers, we are announcing clear financial ambitions for 2030, a net trading income of more than EUR 1 billion, a return on trading capital of more than 50% and an EBITDA margin of more than 45%. Dick will explain the framework behind these numbers later this morning.

9 months into this role, I would like to mention 3 personal observations on why we believe this is the right plan at the right time for Flow Traders. Flow Traders is a remarkable business. It is profitable, it is global and it is technologically advanced. Over more than 2 decades, it has built a counterparty franchise and a trading platform that very few companies in the world can match. That was my first impression, and it has been reinforced ever since. Then, on the moment we currently live.

Over more than 2 decades, we've seen the markets growing at an accelerated pace. But at this moment, we are seeing one of the most consequential period of our industry and one that will reshape the entire foundation. Traditional and digital markets are converging. Trading is moving toward continuous 24/7 innovation operation. And the third is the pace of innovation. AI and deep learning are reshaping how we work, how we operate, but also how liquidity is provided. Each of these force matters. And together, we believe they will provide a significant redraw of the financial markets landscape. Flow Traders is well positioned for this transition, but positioning is not winning. To win, we need a clear strategy, a coordinated plan and the discipline to execute.

Before I look forward, I want to spend a few minutes looking back. At our last Capital Markets, we set an ambition of EUR 1 billion of net trading income. We did not get there. We also committed to expanding into fixed income and commodities at scale. We fell short there, too. But we did deliver and deliver well on digital assets, where we built a market-leading position on an institutional franchise that very few in this space can match. We continue to expand in APAC, growing revenue from EUR 55 million in 2022 to EUR 122 million in 2025. We did diversify the revenue base. But the overall scorecard is mixed. So the obvious question is, why should this time be different?

The third difference is focus. Last time, we tried to do too many things at once. We spread ourselves too thin, and we delivered on too few. This time, we've made a number of deliberate choices, 5 priorities and a sharper focus on delivery and execution. The first -- the second is building from our strengths. The quantitative trading focus builds on 20 years of accumulated market experience and data. The distribution platform built on a leading institutional network delivered by a strong and regulated firm. The tokenized asset capability build on what we already do every day in ETFs and digital assets. The third is the external environment I briefly mentioned.

The forces driving market towards 24/7 operations are real. There is also, as I mentioned, a significant reshuffling of the competitive landscape. It is fair to say that the big have become bigger, but the markets themselves are growing and changing fast enough that our scale, our strength and our plan will give us this capacity to execute successfully. Today, we have a strong foundation. We have a unique position between digital assets and the traditional ecosystem. We have a growing presence in high-growth markets. We have an institutional distribution franchise second to none. We have a global infrastructure spanning a broad set of venues across multiple continents. And we have a growing capital base and a robust risk framework underpinning all of it.

By 2030, we intend to have extended each of those foundations significantly. And it's true, the distance between 2030 and now is real, but the path is deliberate. The sequencing has been designed, and we plan to execute with a focus and a discipline that, to be frank, was not always present before. That is what gives us confidence in our ability to deliver.

Let me come back on a few figures about Flow Traders today. We trade over EUR 7 trillion of value annually. We cover more than 25,000 products. We connect to over 150 venues, and we execute over 440 million transaction every year. That is the activity profile of a globally diversified firm. On the financial side, in 2025, we generated EUR 480 million of NTI. Our trading capital base stood at EUR 1 billion, and we delivered over 50% of return on trading capital and a 41% EBITDA margin. They are healthy metrics. They reflect a structurally profitable business, and they are foundations on which we are building our strategy. On our footprint, we operate offices across the globe. We have more than 600 people coming from 60 nationalities. We are not anymore a European business with institutional satellites. We are a genuinely global firm.

Now, I want to spend a bit of time on explaining the trends which is driving the market today. We are seeing a number of structural change going through the markets. ETFs democratized diversified and passive investing over the past 20 years. Tokenization is now doing something similar. It is moving traditional assets into digital infrastructure. It enables 24/7 trading. It enables instant settlement. And it will, we believe, broaden access to markets in a form that is cheaper, faster and more transparent for a much wider set of investors. Perpetuals are a clear example of an innovation born in crypto that is now seeping into traditional finance.

And over the past decade, the crypto market has trained a generation of investors and institutions to expect that anything should be tradable anytime, anywhere. That expectation is now migrating to traditional assets. We are seeing growing demand for UCITS ETF trading outside of European hours. New platforms now let investors trade U.S. stocks in Asia, bridging the gap between market close and open.

The investor base itself is shifting. A new generation of investors is comfortable with continuous market access. They even expect it. And as global events increasingly occur outside of traditional hours, real-time hedging and investing become less of a luxury and more of a requirement. And we have seen this pattern in other industries. In the 1980s, the conventional view was that nobody needed 24-hour -- 24/7 news. Then CNN launched and news became always on. In the 1990s, the conventional view was that nobody would want to shop in the middle of the night, then Amazon launched and shopping became always on. In the 2000, the conventional view was that people would not want to be connected to friends every hour of the day, then Facebook launched and social interaction became always on.

The 2020s, we believe, are the decade in which investing became always -- become always on. We are seeing the early signs already, and we expect them to accelerate from here. Regulation is moving in the same direction. In the U.S., you have the GENIUS Act, providing a stablecoin framework, the CLARITY Act. In Europe, MiCA now provides a clear regime for digital asset market participants, and jurisdiction from Singapore to the UAE are competing to host tokenized securities.

The technical constraints that historically made overnight market closures a necessity are also being removed. Cloud native matching engines now run alongside traditional venues. Nasdaq, CME, ICE are all migrating their core system into cloud. The DTCC is moving its settlement into a T+0 framework and is currently piloting tokenized collateral for production this year. Stablecoin's rails are already settling tens of billions of dollars a day around the clock with finality measured in seconds rather than days.

And finally, AI and deep learning are reshaping the economics of liquidity itself. The same class of models that power ChatGPT can now price thousands of correlated instruments in microseconds. They capture signals from feelings, news, execute on transaction on chain data in real time, feeding them directly into pricing engines. Research cycles, which took weeks, now take hours. The result is more efficient price discovery, tighter spread and continuous coverage at a quality that was not available even 4 years ago. Owain will go much deeper into this later.

So these are the 4 reshaping our industry. The question for us then becomes simple. What does it take to win in this environment? And we are building our answer around 6 pillars: research and technology, product, connectivity, distribution, trading and execution and risk and capital. This is a framework we use internally to assess every market opportunity and every investment decision. None of them is sufficient on its own, and they are deeply interdependent.

Let me share with you my assessment of where we stand today against those pillars, what we have built and where we are focusing our investment. Starting on the established side, where we already operate at scale. We hold leadership position in both ETFs and digital assets, position recognized by issuers, by investors, by venue and by our peers. We have a global connected infrastructure across every region in which we trade. We have a leading distribution franchise, and we have a mature risk management framework that has been tested across multiple cycles.

Our focus now is to accelerate the scaling of our research and technology platform, and that will unlock several levers of growth. It will help us diversify our ETF business in regions where stronger quantitative capabilities are needed, such as the U.S. It will support our growth in innovative ETF segments such as active strategy. It will also let build genuinely new capabilities in quantitative trading. That will allow us to deploy additional capital at scale into the opportunities that matter most. What I also would like to highlight is that we are not starting from 0 on these dimensions. The deep learning divisions build on 20 years of market and research we have done.

The distribution platform builds on an existing counterparty franchise. The tokenized trading capability build on the ETF and digital assets tradings where we already have a leadership position. For over 20 years, we have been the capability to provide liquidity even when underlying markets are closed and is a strong added value for 24/7 trading. That reduces our execution risk significantly.

In this slide, I want to show you how we bring our priorities together and give you a highlight of -- for each capabilities, what the focus and what are the choices. Our research and technology remains our highest priority. It is what unlocks growth across the entire rest of the business. It supports the latest innovation in ETF markets, including deep learning models that improve how we read market movements. It lets us handle the exponential growth in data as the same underlying risk increasing trades through multiple formats and multiple venues. And it is the foundation for our new deep learning division and our quantitative trading build-out.

On product, we are expanding on several fronts. The ETF market has grown for 30 years on the back of passive index trackers, then sector and then thematic products. The fastest-growing segments today are different, actively managed ETF, buffered ETF, ETF with optionalities. On tokenized and digital assets, we are currently one of the very few market makers active at scale, both in traditional and digital markets simultaneously. That puts us at the center of one of the fastest-growing ecosystem in capital markets, particularly in tokenized real-world assets.

On connectivity, our network has always been a strength, strong venue connectivity combined with cross-region, low latency infrastructure that we own and operate ourselves. Because to price consistently across markets and across time zone, you need to move signals between them fast and with high resilience. That infrastructure is in place and is well aligned with where markets are heading.

On distribution, we are creating a unified platform across all relevant asset class, and I will come back to this more in detail. And on risk and capital, we are retaining and deploying capital with discipline through 2030. That synced alongside structural cost optimization, which frees up resources for growth. A quick word on capital because it's a very important matter. We took the decision to suspend the dividend for a simple reason because the economics of this business are clear. Every euro of retained capital redeployed into trading compounds at a return on trading capital that has averaged above 50% over the past 2 years.

Our trading capital base had become too narrow relative to the scale of the markets we now serve. Retaining earnings is what has allowed us to remain competitive, and it is what will fund and support Horizon 2030. And these priorities will reinforce each other. Better research tightens pricing. Tighter pricing attracts more flow. More flow strengthen distribution. Better distribution opens up more product. And all of it run on the same connectivity layer and the same capital base. They will also diversify our revenue base.

Historically, our business has been too dependent on burst of very high volatility. The priorities we have set will generate more recurring and less correlated revenues. Quantitative trading, in particular, will contribute when markets are quieter. I want to spend a few minutes on distribution specifically because I believe it is one of the most significant value drivers over the next 4 years. And yet from the outside, it is probably the least visible part of what we are building.

Let me start off how the landscape is shifting itself. For most of our industry history, the distribution model was simple. The trading price of product execution happened through traditional electronic channel or a long time ago by voice, and there was multiple layers of intermediation. That model is changing very fast. And there are several forces that are reshaping the distribution at the same time. The first is that the institutional channels are deepening and diversifying. The buy side now expects multi-asset, multi-protocol access through simple interface, RFQ, IOIs, streaming prices, SI style execution, connectivity through API or FIX, increasingly on a 24/7 basis.

The ETF market is a good illustration of how far this has already gone. In Europe, around 70% of ETF volumes now trade off exchange through RFQ, OTC and DeFi venues and with a growing number of retail and super apps now providing ETF to the retail base. The U.S. markets remain exchange and ATS driven, but with relentless product innovation. APAC has been growing at roughly 37% per year since 2019 and is now a $13 trillion market. But the micro structure are very different from China to Korea to Japan. And as a liquidity provider, we need to cater for every one of those connectivity style. The second is a direct activation of retail. For decades, retail flow reached the market through layers of brokers and banks, and that intermediation is collapsing. Platforms like eToro, Bitpanda, Revolut, Trade Republic, Robinhood in Europe or the U.S.; Moomoo, Tiger, Webull across Asia, all this platform route flows that 5 years ago that mostly with traditional brokers, high transaction counts and very small ticket sizes. They request a fast and efficient pricing, streaming and a constant innovation on product.

And the third force is the convergence of the infrastructure itself, traditional rates and digital rates coming together. From the digital side, crypto-native funds, tokenization venue, origin platforms have now reached institutional scale. But at the same time, the largest traditional asset manager, banks and custodians are now building on the same digital race. BlackRock with BUIDL, Franklin with BENJI, tokenized treasury and tokenized money market fund, BNY, State Street, Fidelity entering digital custody and the same trends are happening in Europe. Some investors will want to settle their ETF in dollar or in euro, other in digital assets or in stablecoin. A platform can launch a tokenized offering that needs a liquidity partner who can settle on chain at 2:00 a.m. on a Sunday. It is one convergent viewed from both ends. And the firms that can serve both sides, TradFi and DeFi through one coherent model will define the next decade.

This is precisely where Flow Traders is well positioned as we stand at this intersection between these 2 ecosystems. And we also believe that in spite of a very strong existing network, we are not yet making the most of our distribution and as we already have. So how are we going to capture it? We are building our sales and distribution function. The sales and execution opportunity for us is a one Flow voice. You can have segmented strategy for asset managers, pension funds to retail and neo-brokers, but it's one voice across every asset class they trade, whatever the settlement mechanism, whatever the uptime.

Partnership and large-scale relationships. We have partnered for decades with asset manager launching ETFs and with investors wanting to access the liquidity. We are now extending that partnership approach to a much broader range of counterparts, exchanges, issuers and tokenization platforms. But the landscape also keeps shifting and focusing on the convergence and the new channels is something we've done and we continue to accelerate. It will be one of the crucial element that will define the financial landscape of the next 10 years. All these pillars will plug into one thing, a unified asset-agnostic distribution platform, 24/7 uptime designed to absorb new asset classes as the market evolves. The commercial logic is straightforward. Every existing counterpart relationship becomes an opportunity to deepen and broaden. And the same platform is what will help us bring new counterparts and new segments of growth.

Distribution is, in our view, the next competitive advantage in market making. It is also one of our historical strengths. The firms that combines superior pricing with superior access will succeed in the next decade, and we fully intend to be one of them.

Before I leave the floor to Alex, let me talk a little bit about the team because the strategy is only as credible as the people accountable for delivering it. The team sitting with me this morning has collectively over 2 centuries of capital market experience, built across trading, technology, risk and operation and across every region we serve. And what I'm the most proud of is a blend, long-tenured Flow Traders colleagues who carry the culture and the craft of the firm and experienced external talent who have joined us recently, bringing new perspective. The result is a strong and experienced team, an innovative leadership group, one that will support the ambition and the hard work of our over 600 colleagues we are, in the end, the real strength of the firm.

And with that, I will hand it over to Alex.

Thank you, Thomas, and good morning, everyone. So in the next 15 minutes or so, I will walk you through our traditional business, what we built up over the past 2 decades, where we're focused on, where we lead and what we're focused on to grow from here. So let me start by setting the scene. Flow Traders is a world-leading ETF liquidity provider, and the numbers on this slide make it concrete.

Last year, in our traditional business, we traded over EUR 6.7 trillion in total, of which EUR 2.1 trillion was in ETFs. In terms of our size, we cover over 8,500 unique ETFs. We operate in over 90 venues, and we service over 1,300 active counterparties. In terms of our position, we hold a 3% global ETF market share. Towards our counterparties, we have a 20% RFQ hit ratio. And in Europe, we're a market leader with 27% market share.

On the right, in our revenues, in 2019, we made EUR 216 million as a firm. That is now EUR 501 million on a 12-month trailing basis. And the mix within that has diversified. In 2019, 93% was coming from our traditional business. That is now 76% with the remainder coming from digital assets. And within our traditional NTI, in 2019, almost 2/3 was coming from Europe. That is now 50%. And the biggest grower is APAC, coming from 13% in 2019 to over 27%, and that diversification has been delivered. So in short, our ETF business is large, it's profitable and it's still growing. And it's what everything else that we're going to discuss here today, but it also has still significant runway on its own.

So the ETF market is both high growth and mature, and that's a quite rare combination. In this slide, I will discuss 3 structural forces that are driving this. Number one is simply the continued global ETF adoption by both institutions and retail. But capital continues to flow into ETFs because they're cost-efficient, transparent, and they increasingly make innovative strategies accessible. And that has led to total ETF assets under management to grow from EUR 6 trillion in 2019 to EUR 19 trillion last year, and it's forecast to keep growing at well over 12% per year to over EUR 35 trillion by the end of this decade.

Number two is geographic expansion. So non-U.S. ETF assets under management has seen a similar growth trajectory. And in fact, last year, both APAC and Europe each grew at over 40% in their assets under management. So the ETF market is still globalizing very rapidly, and that's very good news for a global liquidity provider like ourselves with strong presences, both in Europe and in Asia.

Number three is product innovation. So more and more sophisticated strategies are being wrapped into ETFs and are made accessible to a broader investor base. Think about active ETFs, buffered ETFs, private equity or credit ETFs, fixed income ETFs. And all this innovation means more complexity, and more complexity means an increasing need for specialist liquidity providers like us. So we operate in one of the most structurally attractive segments of global financial markets, and these tailwinds, they are structural, not cyclical, so they grow our addressable market regardless of any short-term volatility.

So let me now explain how that growth plays out in each of the 3 regions because each region is different and understanding those differences is what helps you to understand our business model better, and it's what allows us to be a smarter and more profitable participant in each. So starting with Europe. Last year, Europe traded EUR 3.3 trillion in ETFs. And the key distinguishing feature of the European ETF market is that 70% trades off exchanges, of which the majority on RFQ protocols like Bloomberg and Tradeweb. That means that the investor base is largely institutional with a lower retail adoption than the other regions, although that number has been increasing recently. And this is exactly where our RFQ franchise that we've built up is at its strongest, although as I will show in the next slide and is common -- as everybody knows, we have a very strong exchange presence as well in Europe.

Then in the U.S., the U.S. is by far the largest ETF market with over $52 trillion in ETF volumes. And here, I've shown the segmental split of the ETFs. And here, the majority of ETFs are domestic equity ETFs. That means that they're listed in the U.S. and they have U.S. equities as their underlying as opposed to Europe, where the majority are international ETFs, so global baskets or Asian baskets or from a European perspective, U.S. baskets.

And if you want to trade domestic ETFs successfully, you also need to trade the underlying cash equities at the same time, whereas for international equity ETFs, you need to have global pricing models and global connectivity, and that's where we are at the strongest. Also in the U.S., we've seen an explosion in those innovative ETFs. So the U.S., yes, it's a very competitive, but also a very large market and with growing pockets of opportunity where pricing excellence or product complexity can create an edge for us.

Then, in APAC, APAC is by far the fastest-growing ETF market from EUR 2 trillion in 2019 to EUR 13 trillion last year. That's a 37% CAGR. And within APAC, it's not one integrated market. Each country is its own ecosystem with their own participants and their own rules. The largest is China with over 79% trading in Mainland China. And within China, it's mostly money market funds, domestic equity ETFs and with a small but growing international equity ETF segment.

Second largest market is Hong Kong, where we have a very strong presence and where we have been recognized by the Hong Kong Stock Exchange as ETF Market Maker of the Year for 2 years in a row now. Third largest market is Korea, although this year, on the back of market strength in Korea, Korea has now taken the second spot in Asia.

A notable absentee in APAC in the ETF market is India. India has one of the world's largest derivatives market, but they hardly trade any ETFs yet. So we believe this represents long-term opportunity as we do think that in the next decade, ETF adoption will rise in India as well.

So in short, each ETF market is different, but what they have in common is that they are all still growing and they all represent opportunities for us. And in this slide, I will show our position in each market, where we lead and what we're focused on to grow from here. So in Europe, we traded EUR 890 billion of ETF volume last year. And we are the largest ETF liquidity provider on European exchanges with over 30% market share. We have a 25% RFQ hit ratio towards our counterparties, and we get asked on over 90% of all RFQ inquiries. We have very strong issuer relationships. We often partner with issuers, and we make sure that we provide prices at the launch when new ETFs are listed. And we have a very high ETF coverage. So this is a position of clear market leadership, and our job is to defend it and to deepen it.

In the U.S., our posture is close the gap. Last year, we traded EUR 898 billion, making this the largest margin by volumes, not by margins. And here, we are also a top 5 RFQ market maker with over 15% RFQ hit rate. And in the international ETFs, where global pricing models create an edge for us, we hold a 15% primary market share, that means a 15% creation redemption market share, showcasing our strength also in the competitive U.S. landscape. Where we're closing the gap in the U.S. is in on-exchange trading, it's in domestic ETFs and in keeping up with the product innovation and making sure that we cover all those innovative ETFs.

APAC has been our fastest-growing region, both by volumes and by revenues. And last year, we traded EUR 152 billion in ETFs. Here, we have one of the regional's largest RFQ franchises, and we also have a 25% RFQ hit rate in Asia. When it comes to China, we are now trading well over EUR 100 million in average daily trading volume, and that represents roughly 15% of our total ETF trading in APAC. In terms of our revenues, it is a similar order of magnitude. We have recently in China expanded our exchange connectivity, and we also secured additional funding to make sure that we can keep growing in China.

Then, we come to U.S. overnight trading. This is the first proof point of traditional markets going to 24/5 trading models. And we are seeing ATSs, and by the end of this year, also U.S. exchanges offering U.S. equities and ETFs on a 23-hour basis. And the biggest driver of that are the Asia -- APAC overnight trading hours. And that's a very natural extension to our business, and we trade well over $200 million every day in that time zone in U.S. equities and ETFs.

So across all 3 regions, the direction of travel is clear. We defend and deepen where we lead. We close the gap where we're not yet at full potential, and we build and scale where the growth opportunity is biggest. So let me close this section by outlining the firm-wide strategic focus and how they apply to our traditional business, the 6 concrete pillars, each with a clear focus and a clear outcome. So as Thomas said, the key initiative in our firm is in the research and technology bucket, and it's what we call internally the quant enablement program. It means that we will deploy the technology such that we can create systematic pricing at scale for both ETFs and our underlying, such as fixed income or cash equities. And this will increase ETF profitability. It will grow -- help us grow our domestic ETF trading, and it allows us to develop new systematic trading strategies, both very short term, but also medium frequency trading, whereby we take a bit -- positions on our book a bit longer.

Second is product. So number one, in product is that we will broaden our coverage to all innovative ETFs such that we can be the first to price them when they launch and create a first-mover advantage. And number two is that we will develop capabilities to trade cash equities better, as this will create synergies with our ETF trading as well as laying the foundation to tokenize equity trading.

Number three is connectivity. So we are seeing a growing trend of off-exchange trading and also of bilateral trading. So the buy side increasingly demands technology directly into a market maker and streaming prices that they can execute. So we are developing that connectivity towards our counterparties.

And second, we will take that a step further. We will utilize the technology and create a single unified multi-asset distribution platform like a single dealer platform to become the 24/7 liquidity provider of choice for our counterparties.

The fifth is trading and execution. That's our APAC strategy. So we will continue to scale China. We will grow our U.S. overnight trading activities, and we will expand in other high-growth markets in APAC, whether that's Korea or, in the long run, India. And this will directly result into increased revenues from the fast-growing APAC region.

And finally, we will keep scaling our trading capital base and deploy towards a proven ETF business and the adjacent strategies while keeping the same risk mentality that we have built out over the past 2 decades. So these 6, they're part of a coordinated plan. They're interlinked to reinforce each other, and they are already underway. So it's not just a vision.

So with that foundation set, I will hand it over to Marc, who will talk about the next wave of growth in digital assets and tokenization.

Thank you, Alex. So Alex just went through our ETF business, 20 years of building and still a lot of runway ahead. I'm now going to dive into the digital asset business and how these 2 businesses are converging. We've been building for that convergence since 2017. In the next 25 minutes, I want to show you 3 things: first, what we have built in digital assets; second, why the timing is right; and third, what we are going to do with it through to 2030.

We have been active in digital assets since 2017, nearly a decade. And I want to start by grounding everything that follows in what that has actually produced. One in 2 crypto ETP trades in EMEA goes through Flow Traders. That's 50% market share. Across tokenized real-world assets, a market that barely existed 3 years ago, we already hold a 10% average market share across the markets we trade on. We're covering over 1,000 products. Over 300 of them, we are commercially market making right now. We are connected to more than 60 venues across centralized and decentralized exchanges, 12 blockchains, and we are doing over 300 million trades annually. Top, we have more than 350 active counterparties. As Alex showed you, their total revenue has more than doubled since 2019. What I want to add is what happened inside that number.

Digital assets moved from 7% of total revenue to 24%. That's a structural shift in what this company is. But the more important story is the revenue split. We report 2 categories: first, trading revenue, what we earn from proprietary market making, managing risks and quoting spreads; and second, our commercial revenue. That is the income we generate from being embedded in the digital asset markets itself for our VC investments, our partnerships, our on-chain infrastructure and our market making and token market making agreements. It's contractual, and it behaves differently from trading income.

In 2019, our digital asset revenue was approximately EUR 15 million. Today, it is EUR 122 million. But the more interesting story there is not the growth, but it's what the revenue is made of. In 2019, our commercial revenue was approximately 0. Today, it represents 62% of our total digital asset income. It's contractual, and it's less sensitive to day-to-day market conditions.

One thing worth being transparent about on the token market making side is that some agreements are compensated in the token itself rather than in fiat. That creates a natural correlation with the outgoing market. When tokens appreciate, we benefit. When they depreciate, our compensation moves with them. We manage that exposure actively, but it's also a real feature of the revenue stream, and I want to be straightforward about that.

So concluding, our digital asset franchise is large, profitable, diversifying and structurally improving in revenue quality.

So that was the franchise. Now let me show you the environment it's operating in because whatever the short-term market conditions, the structural tailwinds behind this business are large and compounding. There's 3 forces on this slide: first, the continued crypto growth. Since 2015, the global market cap has grown from EUR 5 billion to over EUR 3 trillion. That's a 90% compound annual growth rate over a decade. Even through the crypto winter in 2022, which tested conviction of the entire industry, the asset demonstrated resilience and recovered strongly. What has changed is the nature of the demand. Institutions are no longer dipping their toes in. They are allocating.

Per the Coinbase and EY institutional survey, 73% of institutional investors say they plan to increase their digital asset allocation in 2026, not exploring it, but actively increasing. And when institutional capital moves with that kind of conviction, it does just not grow the market, it transforms it.

Secondly, digital asset growth and innovation. The honest picture is one of significant progress and significant distance still to travel. Regulated custody is live. Crypto ETF AUM has grown from EUR 60 billion to over EUR 180 billion in 2025. But prime brokerage, capital-efficient clearing, institutional grade netting, these are all still maturing. Prefunding is still the norm in digital assets. That gap will close. And when it does, the question is not who benefits from better infrastructure because everyone does. The question is who entered that more mature market with 9 years of proprietary data, hundreds of institutional relationships and a platform that spans the full digital asset life cycle. You can't build 9 years of experience overnight. We didn't wait for the infrastructure. We built alongside it.

And then third, and this is actually the number I want you to sit in with us, the tokenization of real-world assets. In 2022, the tokenized RWA market was approximately $3 billion. By the end of 2025, it has reached $36 billion. The forecast for 2030 is $5.5 trillion. That's 150x where it stands today in less than 5 years. This is the point where traditional finance and digital asset markets stop being separate conversations and definitively will converge.

Tokenization enables 24/7 trading of traditional assets and fractional ownership at a scale the existing infrastructure simply cannot provide. Every major trend here on these slides is accelerating simultaneously. Our investment in this franchise is not ahead of the market, but it's validated by it. So everything I just described it sounds like a forward-looking thesis. So let me show you what has actually happened, most of it in the last 18 months. I have 6 facts here: exchanges, CME crypto futures are already trading 24/7. The SEC approved Nasdaq for 23-hour trading in April this year. NYSE Arca is approved for 22 hours.

On the asset manager side, BlackRock, Franklin Templeton, Fidelity and State Street, they're all deepening their tokenization programs. The world's largest asset managers are moving on-chain. And when they move, the market moves.

On the indices side, in March this year, the S&P Dow Jones officially licensed the S&P 500 for perpetual contracts on Hyperliquid. The world's most iconic index is now trading 24/7 on chain for the first time in history.

On the equity side, we see the same story, all of it happening at the same time. That doesn't happen by accident.

Regulation, the GENIUS Act, the first U.S. Federal stablecoin framework is signed into law. MiCA is live in Europe. The CLARITY Act is advancing through the Senate as we speak. Regulatory clarity is not coming. It's arriving.

Then, on the rails side, the DTCC, the backbone of U.S. market settlements, is now tokenizing stocks, ETFs and treasuries across multiple blockchains. When the DTCC moves on chain, the rest of the U.S. financial system will follow.

So this is not happening in one corner of the market. It's happening across products, venues and regulators simultaneously. The shift to 24/7 on-chain markets is no longer theoretical. The question is not whether it continues, the question is who is ready when it scales. So why Flow Traders specifically? Because what 24/7 tokenized world -- what the 24/7 tokenized world requires is not new to us. It is what we already do. It's applied to new and expanding set of markets. So let me go through that in 6 -- with 6 different examples.

First, tokenization is a market structure revolution. Like ETFs before it, tokenization makes existing assets more efficient to issue, trade and settle. Tokenized equities are already live. Tesla, NVIDIA, Apple, they're all trading on crypto venues today. Pricing those tokens continuously, tracking the underlying share, hedging the existing exposure, managing them across closed market hours, that's something we do every day inside our ETF business. The skills we have built over 20 years of ETF market making map directly on tokenized assets. We are positioned to be the liquidity backbone of this new infrastructure from day 1.

Second, we're an early mover of the -- tokenization is an early mover on the ETF adoption curve. We've seen this before, early skepticism, then institutional embrace. We were building ETF liquidity infrastructure before most institutions treated ETFs as serious instruments. When we started, the European ETF RFQ market did not really exist. We helped build it. We are in the same position in tokenization today, already active in tokenized real-world assets, while most firms are still writing internal memos about it. Our combined ETF and digital asset experience positions us to lead as the market matures rather than catch on to it.

Third, our ETF experience directly translates into tokenization. Minting and burning of tokens is economically identical to ETF creation and redemption. Both are primary processes designed to keep the instruments aligned with its underlying. Think about, for example, BlackRock's BUIDL Fund, a tokenized money market fund on chain. The mechanism keeping its price pegged to $1 is the same arbitrage loop that keeps the ETF tracking its underlying index. Our core pricing mechanisms and liquidity skills apply from day 1 in any tokenized market. Tokenization is not a new market structure. It's the next evolution of one we already mastered.

Fourth, 24/7 pricing is natural territory to us. This is already our core skill. As Alex mentioned, international ETFs are a significant part of our ETF trading revenues, and they never fully sleep. In Asian hours, that might mean pricing in ETF with U.S. names in the basket while the U.S. market is shut. We have spent 20 years answering the question, what is this asset worth right now even though its primary market is closed. Tokenized assets simply extend that same challenge across more hours and more venues.

Fifth, we're built for trading across fragmented venues. Look at the S&P 500, the world's most traded index, wrapped into dozens of ETFs across the U.S., APAC and Europe in multiple currencies on multiple venues. We trade them all, keeping the prices aligned across every wrapper in every region. That's our core business. The same index now trades 24/7 across crypto venues as well as perpetuals on multiple exchanges, and this tokenized products from issuers like Ondo and Dinari. We built this capability over 20 years in ETFs and nearly a decade in digital assets. It transfers directly.

And then sixth, distribution is the next competitive moat. Tokenized markets will only scale with the connectivity to match. Issuers, institutional investors, exchanges, prime brokers, platforms, every participant in the tokenized market need a liquidity partner already plugged in to the rest of the ecosystem. We are that partner. Alex showed you our 1,300 ETF counterparties. Add to that, more than 350 on the digital asset side. And as the world moves to 24/7, we can scale continuous pricing and liquidity across that entire network. Same relationships, same infrastructure, just extended around the clock. That network took us years to build. It's not something new. It's not something a new entrant replicates quickly. So we are not pivoting towards this opportunity. We are already operating inside it.

Now let me show you where we are taking this. So this is where we are going, traditional capabilities on the left, digital asset capabilities on the right, converging into a single, unified platform that's powered by research, technology and AI at its core. 5 dimensions unified: product, connectivity, distribution, trading and execution and risk and capital. One platform, one relationship across any asset, any venue, any hour. Think about what this means in practice, continuous liquidity across the markets that matter on exchange, OTC and on chain around the clock through one relationship. That is our target state, and the next slide will show you how much of it we have already built.

So over the past years, we have been busy building, and every layer on this slide is live and generating revenue today. This was not designed top down. It was built bottom up through 9 years of commercial activity, deal by deal, relationship by relationship and validated by the institutions that have adopted it. First, VC investments and partnerships. We invest selectively in the protocols and infrastructure projects that will define tomorrow's market structure. We get equity, we get tokens and we get early access before these markets are established. That positions us as the preferred liquidity provider as those ecosystems grow, and it funds itself through capital appreciation and token returns.

Second, unchanged support. We run validators. We deploy capital as value locked into DeFi protocols. This generates revenue and keeps us embedded in the networks we also trade on. We are not just the user of these ecosystems. We are part of their functioning infrastructure.

Then third, go-to-market support our market-making mandates and token market making agreements, contractual revenue from issuers and projects who have chosen Flow Traders as their long-term liquidity partner. If you take these 3 together, we see investments and partnerships, on-chain support and go-to-market. Those form our commercial revenue base. It's contractual, and it's structurally different from trading income. This is what has changed the shape of this business.

Then trading and liquidity, our core across every relevant venue simultaneously, ETFs, on-exchange, OTC, DeFi, on-chain, operating across both CeFi and DeFi with the same risk framework and capital base. Most competitors are one or the other, but we are both.

Each of these 4 layers is live. The next step, which you will see in the strategic priorities, is bringing them together into the unified platform I just showed you. That is the build. And what you see here is the foundation it sits on. Everything I've shown you, the franchise we have built, the market tailwinds, the convergence already underway, the platform we operate today leads to 6 specific priorities that take this from current position to a fully unified 24/7 platform by 2030.

On the research and technology side, we are applying AI and deep learning to data sets no other firm has. Our own tick data, order book data, on-chain data across CeFi and DeFi accumulated over 9 years of active trading across 60 venues and 12 chains. Better models from better data means better pricing, which means better spread capture and stronger trading revenue. That compounding advantage grows with every trade.

The product side, the RWA market is forecast to reach $5.5 trillion by 2030. That is the opportunity. We are already trading crypto, tokenized assets and perpetuals today. The work now is expanding coverage as the market grows. On the connectivity side, as traditional and digital asset markets converge, the infrastructure connecting them has to keep up. We are building unified low latency connectivity across traditional and digital asset venues, one network, one infrastructure layer, serving both markets simultaneously.

On the distribution side, the network is built. The platform is live. The priority now is integrating it into a seamless franchise from token launch and primary issuance through to secondary liquidity so that every counterparty accesses everything through one relationship.

On the trading and execution side, we are already netting digital assets and traditional exposures through a central risk book on a 24/7 basis. That gives us a structural advantage in a converging market, better capital efficiency, better hedging, and ultimately, better pricing for counterparties.

We remain a regulated firm with capital transparency no crypto-native competitor can match. As institutional flows into digital assets grow in size and seriousness being the counterparty that Boards and Risk Committees can approve without reservation is a hard commercial differentiator. So we started building in 2017. Most of our peers did not. That head start shows up in every metric on these slides I showed you. And it compounds with every trade, every relationship and every year of data. Now we scale it.

And with that, we will pause for a 15-minute break.

[Break]

Good morning, everybody. So for the next 20 minutes, I would like to take you to the frontier of trading research and show you how the same technology that's behind the AI revolution is being used by the world's leading market makers to transform traditional ways of extracting alpha from markets. Our conviction is simple. Over the next few years, deep learning will become the method that drives liquidity provision. And Flow Traders is building these capabilities now.

Let me start with a statement of principle. Technology is not a support function of Flow Traders. It is a large part of our competitive advantage. And now AI and deep learning are central to our 2030 strategy. The way I look at it, there are 5 forces that are reshaping the research that drives our industry. First, research velocity. Machine learning creates a continuous feedback loop, dramatically accelerating the pace at which we identify, test and improve trading strategies. The firm iterates the fastest, compounds its edge fastest. And to be clear, alongside these frontier deep learning capabilities, we're also building the tools and the infrastructure to bring data-driven research to our existing core trading.

Second is obviously the application of AI and deep learning itself. And here, the trajectory is clear from the original linear heuristic models of 20 years ago through machine learning and feature engineering and now on to large neural networks. It's a natural increase in complexity, and it's changing how the best liquidity providers operate today, and it will define who leads tomorrow.

Third is an increased and more diversified opportunity set. So AI enables execution strategies to be more tailored towards the counterparty segment or the instrument type or by local liquidity pool. So a broader, more diversified set of opportunities across many dimensions than traditional market making alone.

Fourth is increased market efficiency through this. More accurate price discovery and tighter spreads do 2 things at the same time. They improve the quality of service for our counterparties, and they sharpen our competitive position against our peers.

And fifth, this is like all the types of data that need to be sucked in to build the models. Advanced systems now integrate diverse, unstructured data sources to identify hidden market signals more accurately than traditional price feed methods that have occurred before. And they allow us to combine both high frequency and mid-frequency predictions together in our core strategies. So the message that I want you to take away from these 5 principles is that AI and deep learning are really fundamental to how liquidity provision will be done by 2030. And Flow Traders is well progressed on that journey.

So let's look at like how we're investing against this shift, and I'll show you the structure of our technology strategy. It's really in 2 parts. And the first, we call the quant enablement of our trading. And this itself has the 3 pillars, 3 parallel approaches: firstly, improving the existing business, then opening up new markets, and finally, preparing for the future. So I'll explain each of those in a little bit more detail. So the first part is about extracting the most value from our existing moated business. So we apply a rigorous data science approach to fully optimize what we already do. So every pricing model, every execution algo and -- I mean, maybe it's easier if I give a bit of an analog from outside of our industry. So if you think of these sort of like direct-to-consumer brands, you see like advertising on social media feeds. So I'm thinking of like sunglasses or the thin wallet or whatever. So that is like the most traditional business model you can think of.

You make a product in Asia and you sell it worldwide. But the winners that we see that you're aware of and that's why you're aware of them because they're winning, they use data science to optimize every step of that process, so the placement, the promotion, the pricing, the timing, the logistics. They basically wring every possible last dime out of that traditional model. So this is what we're doing with our core ETF market making. The business model is already proven and moated and the data science ensures that we extract every basis point from it, beginning with the lowest hanging fruit.

The second pillar there is think of it as the offense. So we take the same internally developed quantitative tools, and we just point them towards new market opportunities. So these are the opportunities that are only addressable with a quantitative approach. So essentially, the tooling that we built to optimize the core becomes the research engine powering the expansion beyond ETFs.

And lastly, the preparation for the future, AI and deep learning, the frontier, a dedicated division built from a clean sheet without legacy constraints. Its purpose is to conduct frontier deep learning research and monetize it through proprietary trading with a go-live of 2027. So this is our most significant and most differentiated technology investment to date. And as such, I'll spend a lot of the next 15 minutes introducing you to it.

A parallel purpose of this on the other side of the slide here is the business process automation for efficiency. So we're deploying Agentic AI solutions to streamline the processes across the whole organization in every department. And this matters financially because it's how we recycle savings into strategic investments rather than simply extracting them as margin. And Dick will pick up on the financial mechanics of that later.

So in summary, this is a coordinated 4-pillar technology strategy that simultaneously improves our core, unlocks our future and funds the efficiency gains needed to do both. So let me focus on how quant research translates directly into our trading capabilities. And we'll get a bit more specific about the techniques that impact our business. There are 5 strategic objectives that form a self-reinforcing feedback loop and show how the quantitative research and technology translate directly into trading advantage across all products and all markets.

Starting by systematically optimizing the trading logic. We continuously refine execution algorithms, pricing models and market-making parameters. The goal is to remove the human bias and embed best practice decision-making directly into our systems. Again, a useful analogy, I think, is if you think about an airline cockpit, the best response to any given situation has already been studied in advance and agreed and coded into the system and into procedure. And it happens the same way on every flight, whether the pilot is fresh or exhausted. That's what we're doing to our trading logic. So we take the best decision that our sharpest trader can make. And after testing it for months on months or years of data, we embed it. So there's no fatigue, no mood, no bias.

The next is to be able to accelerate the research velocity and make it self-reinforcing. So the faster we move from a research idea to a live strategy, the more iterations we can run, the better the edge. Shortening this cycle is itself a structural competitive advantage, and it compounds. The feedback loop is the point. Every live strategy generates more data that is used to further improve it. And I think we've discussed data on pretty much every slide in the deck. So using all the available data, we integrate every source to form a combination of genuinely private data sets combined with high-quality market data from every market across assets to form the most complete picture of the fair value. And we use it to optimize risk management, dynamic quantitative hedging of our trading strategies, responding to market conditions in real time. And the most profitable firms out there understand that better risk management is not a constraint on returns. It's a source of them because you can take more opportunity for the same risk budget.

And then leveraging AI and deep learning at scale, so applying these frontier machine learning techniques across our full product universe systematically and at production scale. So the message I want you to take away from this is that quant research and technology are not separate from our trading business. They are integral to the engine. Every improvement that we make to the research platform translates directly into better execution, better pricing, better returns.

So now, I'm going to dive even deeper and give you a window into why this R&D is really so exciting and so critical. The competitive landscape is changing rapidly. So we observe now that the AI native firms are the ones emerging to disrupt traditional market makings. And we're meeting this head on. First, the market reality. AI native liquidity providers are growing at a rapid pace. And they're investing heavily in the key enablers of their business model, namely talent, compute, data and hardware. So the conclusion, I think, is unavoidable that liquidity providers that do not evolve over time will become obsolete. So we see this emerging in our competitive environment even today. So investing in AI and deep learning is crucial to future-proofing our business model.

So our response to this, after 2 years of hard work, I'm excited to publicly announce today the Flow Traders Deep Learning division going live trading in 2027. It's built on the same 4 enablers, and I want to take you through each of those in a bit more detail now relative to us. So I think most importantly is talent. Effectively monetizing these advanced techniques does remain a hard problem. There's no panacea of just deploying these prebuilt tools. So a cross-disciplinary team bridging quantitative finance, deep learning and systems engineering, drawing people from world-class institutions such as NVIDIA, DeepMind. So this combination is rare and it's deliberate.

Frontier AI research is only monetized when it's connected to deep market expertise and domain-specific production-grade research engineering. We all know how important compute capacity is, training these complex models at scale and at speed requires serious processing power. So again, I'm excited to announce here again for the first time that we've secured this through a dedicated partnership with the largest pure-play AI neo-cloud, CoreWeave. They provide the infrastructure backbone behind most of the frontier AI labs. And this gives us this GPU infrastructure of an AI native firm without the capital intensity of building the compute ourselves. So CoreWeave, if you like, they're the closest thing to the market has to a pure bet on AI compute scarcity.

Thirdly, data, again, we ingest and clean massive amounts of market data, including from alternative sources. And crucially, again, we layer this on top of our proprietary private data estate that casts no shadow on public data. And it's this estate that's an accumulating advantage. It grows every day that we trade.

And lastly, the hardware, so market making is one use case where it happens in microseconds or less. So we're deploying specialized infrastructure from GPUs on one end to FPGAs and even low latency ASICs to run real-time inference at the latency that this business demands. So the message here is that we're -- and I think this is important that we're not retrofitting AI into a legacy system. So we're building this purpose-built frontier set of capabilities from the ground up, and that 2027 go-live is a commitment, not an aspiration.

So what are we going to do with these capabilities? I think it's worth exploring a little bit the opportunity space. And this slide sort of illustrates the multidimensionality of that space that can be explored by the deep learning quant research capabilities to navigate and find opportunities within it. So it spans asset classes, ETFs, equities, fixed income, digital assets, product types, strategy types, market making, start arb, information sources, the data, also time horizons, so we can be from seconds to days and also crucially the distribution, so on exchange, OTC, on chain. But the -- before I get too scary, the really important point is that -- and I want to be really clear on this, is that we're not trying to be everywhere at once now. So our approach is systematic and selective.

We're now able to identify these intersections where our data advantage and our domain expertise and the technology capabilities combine and create the highest probability of sustainable edge. But what makes this compelling over time is that as our research platform matures, the feedback loops accelerate and the number of viable opportunities within this space expands organically through all of these dimensions. So the opportunity set essentially compounds with our capabilities. The key point here, I think, is that we have this clear disciplined approach to alpha generation across the expanding opportunity space and the technology infrastructure that we have to execute it at scale, which brings us probably to the most important question for you listening is what is it about Flow Traders specifically that we think we can win in this space. And I think there are 4 very concrete answers to that.

Firstly, it is this clean sheet architecture. So the value of this definitely should not be underestimated. So unlike the incumbents who are retrofitting more modern research techniques onto their legacy quantitative research systems, which may have been around for 10, 15 years and gone through 3 or 4 iterations of architecture, our research platform is architected from the ground up for the latest generation of tools. And if anybody has any experience in technology, you'll know the sort of structural advantage that comes from not having legacy debt. So this is something that capital alone cannot replicate. You can't buy your way out of a legacy stack. This puts us in a unique place relative to each and every one of our significant competitors today.

Next is the data that compounds. So years of executing thousands of instruments and counterparties has generated this genuinely private data set. So you saw the over 90% RFQ observability within EMEA. This is our own trades, our own orders, our own timing data. And combined with the ongoing high-quality market data from every venue that we trade all around the world, this training foundation becomes more powerful with every trade that we do. This, again, can't be purchased. It can only be accumulated through active participation in markets.

Next is the domain expertise to be used as a research accelerant. So this deep ETF market expertise that's native to the Flow DNA gives us strong prior. So we can cut down the research search space and shorten the time to market in ways that pure technology firms can't replicate. This also reduces the compute cost of doing so because we know where to start looking and what to ignore. So I like to think of this in terms of like the oil exploration industry. So if you imagine you've got like 2 teams with the same rig and the same budget and one of them goes out and drills 100 wells with the state-of-the-art drilling equipment and hoping to strike. The other one reads the seismic data and drills 3 holes. So same capital, but completely different returns because one team knows where not to dig. So our ETF experience is the seismic survey. And it tells us where to point the compute where we're not just burning up dry holes.

And finally, I think it's the approach that focused beats broad. So rather than competing across all markets, we concentrate these frontier capabilities on specific instruments and venues where we know we can generate superior signal from the same tools. So focus creates the depth and depth creates the edge instead of spreading the resources too thin, which produces mediocrity everywhere.

So to wrap up, the edge that we have is not just one thing. It's 4 that reinforce each other. And the timing also matters. As the advantage shifts to what money can't buy, proprietary data, domain expertise and a clean platform, that's exactly where we are strong.

So yes, it's been my pleasure to share my excitement with you. And with that, I'll hand back to Dick, who will talk about how this adds up. Thanks, Dick.

Thanks, Owain. Now, let's bring it all together from a financial perspective. Throughout today, you have heard how we're building the 24/7 liquidity provider of choice. What I want to do in this final section is translate that strategic ambition into a clear financial framework and show you exactly how that converts into value creation. I will walk you through our financial strategy, discuss the key value levers and what that implies in terms of financial ambitions. Furthermore, I will update you on our disclosure on how we want to provide a more comprehensive view on Flow Traders. I hope these insights will give you a clear picture of how our strategy translates into financial performance.

With a new and seasoned management team in place, ready to execute on the strategy presented today, we want to emphasize our commitment to delivering increased value creation. To that extent, we put forward a financial framework that, on the one hand, illustrates our level of ambition, and on the other hand, is grounded in solid financial planning in combination with realism. We've defined 3 clear levers that constitute our financial framework to deliver sustainable growth.

The first one is revenue growth. Executing on the strategy presented today is imperative to deliver revenue growth that underpins our value creation narrative. The second is operating leverage. Continued focus on operational excellence is crucial to be able to deliver and create the operating leverage that we need, and we also believe we possess as an organization. The third one is capital expansion. With our trading capital expansion plan in place in July 2024, we've been able to materially increase our trading capital base, which is fundamental to driving growth across all parts of our business. For that reason, we continue to focus on driving and accelerating capital expansion to support the strategic ambitions as presented today.

We truly believe that the combination of these 3 value levers will drive sustainable growth for Flow Traders and deliver value for our shareholders and other stakeholders. Let me now provide you more color on the 3 value levers. While we recognize that our NTI potential has not been fully realized in recent years, we continue to believe that the implementation of our trading capital expansion plan in combination with the strategy presented today enables us to achieve our 2030 financial ambition of at least EUR 1 billion NTI. It's the expansion of our ETF franchise across products and markets, the build-out of our digital asset business and tokenized asset trading, the build-out of our quant trading capabilities in combination with a unified 24/7 distribution model, which are the key vectors of our growth. That, in combination with the leadership team, delivering on our strategy, is the foundation of achieving our 2030 NTI ambition.

If we then go into our EBITDA margin development, besides 2023, our EBITDA margin has been relatively stable, highlighting our ability to actively manage our cost base despite elevated inflation that we've seen in '22 and '23. Since 2025, we have actively increased our technology expense and added relevant subject matter experts to build and grow our business. Even despite this increase in fixed OpEx in 2025, we have again been able to maintain a solid EBITDA margin of around 40%. It's clear that our fixed OpEx will continue to grow over the coming years, in line with the strategy presented today. But we want to reiterate that we remain laser-focused on unlocking greater operational efficiency from our whole organization to drive the operating leverage in combination with targeted investments.

With that, we intend to demonstrate that active cost management and facilitating growth can go hand-in-hand, achieving our second 2030 financial ambition of an EBITDA margin of 45%. Then the question is, how do we intend to actively manage our cost base. On the one hand, we've identified 3 cost levers where we intend to take decisive action. On the other hand, we're focused on business process automation.

Now looking at the cost levers. The first cost lever is our workforce. We're focused on upskilling our people to deliver on the strategic priorities as presented today, while also optimizing the overall workforce composition. We're focused on both elements and initial actions have been taken while this is an ongoing process. The second lever is our technology cost. We're conducting a rigorous review of our technology cost base, identifying where we can control and we can optimize, particularly in the areas of AI and cloud. The third lever is our other expense category. This category captures a variety of costs, and we will apply stricter cost control to actively manage and optimize these costs.

Besides the identified cost levers, we're also focused on business process automation. To advance our efforts in that area, we have recently hired a new Global Head of Data, AI and Automation to drive change at Flow Traders and support the management team in creating a more efficient and lean organization ready to deliver on the strategic agenda.

With business process automation, we focus on 3 core elements. The first one is process understanding. We will map and analyze all workflows across the organization to identify any inefficiencies and opportunities to automate. Secondly, the latest AI tooling. We will deploy AI agents to eliminate any repetitive work and free up capacity for higher-value work. Intelligent automation, using AI tools to accelerate every team at Flow Traders from document processing to regulatory monitoring. The key concept here is cost optimization. The savings we generate from these different initiatives are reinvested in our strategic priorities, as they have been presented today. This is how we intend to fund our growth ambitions without material cost going forward.

The third lever is our trading capital framework. Our trading capital framework is the foundation to accelerate growth and increase value creation. Since introducing our trading capital expansion plan in July 2024, our trading capital base has increased by 75% to $1.1 billion, partially driven by the $200 million private credit facility. It's this increased trading capital base and the disciplined deployment that provides us with the financial firepower required to grow our business.

The deployment of our trading capital base across these various strategic initiatives is done in a disciplined and economic manner to be able to achieve the maximum return. The buckets to which we can deploy our trading capital base are the following: we can add trading capital to trading desk to structurally grow these desks or enable them to capture opportunities in the market as they arise. We can expand our business into new strategies such as quantitative trading as discussed today. We can invest in technology, capabilities, talent required to structurally build out our business. And lastly, we can allocate capital to value-accretive inorganic growth to the extent they complement and accelerate our strategy as presented today.

Given that we see sufficient growth opportunities at appropriate return levels, our current dividend and capital distribution policy remains to reinvest all profits back into the growth of the business. The continued buildup of our capital base is expected to further accelerate our growth trajectory, as we continue to deploy our capital to NTI-generating opportunities. These elements constitute our trading capital framework and illustrate that it's not just a financial mechanism, but it's the foundation of our strategic execution, which results in compounding value creation.

Now, let's bring it all together with our financial ambitions for 2030. We will focus on 3 key metrics to drive our financial performance. The first one is net trading income, or NTI. The second is return on trading capital, or RoTC, and the last one is EBITDA margin. These financial ambitions are grounded in solid financial planning and aligned with the strategy and trading capital framework we presented today. They demonstrate our ambitious yet realistic view of our business and the opportunities ahead.

Let me take you through them one by one. The first one, NTI. Our Q1 2026 LTM NTI stood at around EUR 500 million, and we expect it to grow to at least EUR 1 billion by 2030. As also highlighted by Alex earlier, this reflects the combined effect of the strategic priorities we discussed today. It's an interplay between all those initiatives.

Secondly, return on trading capital, or RoTC. Our most recently reported RoTC is 53%. As we continue to scale our business and grow our NTI, it's our ambition to achieve an RoTC of at least 50%.

Lastly, our EBITDA margin. Given our NTI ambition, the continued focus on operational excellence, we target an EBITDA margin of at least 45% by 2030. Then, in terms of the trajectory and how we will get to these 2030 ambition levels, we foresee that 2026 and the first half of 2027 will be a transitory period where we will not yet see a material uplift in NTI, as we expect the NTI benefits of our strategy and our investments to come through from the second half of 2027 onwards.

We expect our 2026 fixed OpEx to end up above the communicated range of EUR 220 million to EUR 230 million due to nonrecurring items and further investments in our technology. These nonrecurring items are driven by the decisive action that we've taken to date and we continue to take. For that reason, we update our 2026 fixed OpEx guidance to EUR 235 million to EUR 245 million. These financial ambitions in combination with the guidance provided regarding our financial trajectory should provide you with a near to midterm visibility of our financial planning.

Lastly, let's talk about disclosure. Let me address how we intend to communicate against the strategy and ambitions presented today. We will have clear and comprehensive disclosure in line with what was put forward today. To provide a more comprehensive view of our business, we will split NTI across traditional and digital assets. The data we provide on our traditional business, as you know it, will remain in place, and the data will be complemented with very specific digital asset data that could be used as a proxy for our digital asset revenues. Given that we're well aware that our business continues to evolve, we will keep you updated if we deem other metrics more suitable for estimating our NTI. We will provide half year reporting, including progress updates on our strategy as presented today. And in addition to that, we will provide quarterly trading updates.

With that, I would like to hand it over to Thomas to discuss the key highlights of today. Thank you.

Thank you, Dick, and thank you, everybody. It has been a long morning. It has been a morning, I hope, full of information. And it has been a morning where we've tried to show you a few things. First of all, our conviction about how the markets are changing and how we want to benefit from that, the evolution of the ETF market, the evolution of the digital assets, the adoption of tokenized and of real-world assets, the buildup of quantitative trading, the development of a new generation of investors, the convergence between a digital infrastructure and a traditional infrastructure.

It was important for us to spend a bit of time to explain to you that landscape because in fairness, it's a complex landscape. And we see that from our standpoint and one of our biggest strengths. The knowledge we have accumulated during 20 years of ETF market making and 10 years as a digital asset expert has really helped us understand and embrace those changes very early in the cycle.

I also hope that we have made clear where our ambitions fit into that picture, how we want to build it from 20 years of market making in traditional markets and close to a decade in crypto, how the long-term commitment we have provided to our counterparts is now positioning us to build that into the One Flow Traders commercial initiatives, how our research and technology focus will not only accelerate our existing business, but it is also the area where we're going to build quantitative deep learning and appropriate trading capabilities, but also how growing the capital base will let us take more risk and participate into -- more actively into more -- sorry, more actively in larger transaction and in ever bigger markets.

As I mentioned at the beginning, we are also aiming to build a revenue base that is less dependent on large spikes of volatility. That's one area where a lot of these initiatives will come into place as this strategic plan is evolving. We want to make Flow Traders not only highly successful in highly volatile market, but we want to make Flow Traders as a reliable source of NTI generation even where markets are quieter. Quantitative trading, commercial activity, partnerships are going to be key into that focus.

I also hope that we made clear that we have a plan, we have a correct plan, have a plan in place, but more importantly, our focus on execution. Having a clear vision is necessary, but it's by far not sufficient. My focus, the focus of the leadership team and the focus of everyone in this company is going to be around execution. Dick said it earlier, and I want to repeat it, we are fully focused on delivering well, delivering fast and delivering at scale.

And now, before I close, I would like to acknowledge the work of our team. None of this happens without the people of this firm. The 600-plus colleagues across our offices around the world, engineers, traders, researchers, operations, risk, finance and beyond. They are the reason why Flow Traders is what it is today and the reason why it will be successful in the future. So to the team, I say thank you. To our shareholders, our counterparties and our partners, thank you for the trust you have placed in us. We do not take it lightly. I'm genuinely excited about what the next 4 years hold for Flow Traders. Horizon 2030 is about turning a position we have built into a delivery and into sustained value creation for everyone who has invested into this company.

With that, Dick will open the floor to questions, and thank you very much.

Okay. Thank you very much, Thomas. I'm now going to invite everyone back on stage. So I will moderate this session. You can ask questions by raising your hand, and there are 2 microphones on each table. So I know it's not a big room, but for the people on the webcast, it's helpful if you use the microphone when asking your questions.

Yes, Julian, please go ahead.

Really insightful. I have a couple of questions, but just to kind of not take up the whole time, I'll probably do it in different rounds. But to start with 3 questions. On the financial targets, they look ambitious clearly. And I think it's -- I mean, it's pretty -- you've kind of got to play really cautious, I guess, but also aggressive at the same time and rollout of the strategy just to hit the milestones given the fact that I think some of the previous financial targets were kind of missed. But just wanted to first start with the OpEx.

If you're looking at the NTI kind of implied growth at your EUR 1 billion, it's about 16% according to my maths from the 2025 level. EBITDA, that's about 17% CAGR, which would have sort of implied an OpEx growth of just below 16%, so let's call it 15% CAGR. Just wondering if you can kind of unpack that. To me, it seems high. But if you could kind of speak about what are the building blocks of that, where can you see a bit of upside to perhaps maybe limit to only 10% CAGR. So that's on the OpEx growth over the medium term.

Then, on the NTI split, highly appreciating the, let's say, willingness to share the incremental disclosure on especially the crypto part of the business. But looking back on 2025 figures or actually, what is it, Q1 '26 last 12 months numbers, just wondering if you could split also the profitability of the traditional and digital assets. And then also, if you look at the EUR 1 billion NTI target for 2030, just wondering if you could share something about the NTI mix across the market making and the recurring part of the revenue base, which you'd like to scale up. But also if you can have sort of a bit of a view on how much the mix would look between the traditional part of the business and also on the digital assets part of the business.

Clear. In terms of the OpEx growth, indeed, I think your estimates are fine. It depends where you start, right, if you started Q1 because then the numbers look a bit different versus when you started full year. I think what we've tried to lay out is exactly the point that we're trying to achieve is the operational efficiency, right? Given where we are in terms of our latest -- if you look at the full year '25, our EBITDA margin was 41%. As we drive the growth of our business, what we try to do is strike a balance with our targets, and we try to strike a balance between a number of things.

One is how do we optimally use our trading capital, right? So that's the RoTC, so what's the optimal application of that of deployment. Secondly, when we do so, do we do it in a way that we can actually scale it? So what's the scalability of the trading and the NTI?

And thirdly, what is the scalability of the organization? So that's the EBITDA margin. And as I mentioned before, we're well aware that our OpEx base has increased. And as we announced today also, the guidance for this year is increasing. And if you take that into account, I think it's important to be mindful that we are very focused on that and managing that OpEx base, and that's something that's also top of mind for us. So I think that may be on question one.

In terms of the NTI split on the profitability, that's something I can be pretty sure that's something we don't disclose at this point in time at least, only the NTI split, not the profitability. And maybe to give you a bit of guidance on the NTI mix to 2030, I think what's important to add to your question is that when we look at that NTI mix and at NTI ambition that we have for 2030, it's -- we're not going to depict exactly what sits in there if it's traditional VA. But I think what is important to understand, and also going back to the point that we made on realism in combination with ambition, is that what Owain discussed in terms of the AI and deep learning division that will go live in 2027, that's not part of that number, right?

And I think it's important to understand because it goes back to your question on OpEx, right? We are currently already making the investments in that business. We're seeing that back in the current OpEx. But when we look at the ambition for 2030, that EUR 1 billion does not yet reflect that or doesn't reflect that at the moment.

Yes. [indiscernible] yes, if you could use the microphone.

[indiscernible] First, thanks for the presentation. It was quite helpful, a lot of data and information. We have a few questions. First of all, about your AI division, deep learning division. You put a lot of effort in it. You started with a clean sheet. It will be live in 2027. But can you tell us how many people are now involved? What do you need? How many talented people? You mentioned already, it was the most important thing is talent. How can you attract talent for that division? How many people do you still need? And how many -- you already mentioned that the OpEx will go up, how many money do you need to finally get the division live? And what can we expect for -- after 2027? And the competition is fierce, AI is the future also for liquidity providers, prop firms, et cetera. So beyond 2027, what can we expect about that?

Yes. So 2 questions there. Firstly, on the costs and the scale, we're not disclosing the exact quantum, but other than to say that it's appropriately scaled and comfortably affordable. Same goes for the size of the population. It's a relatively small team. They are like extremely high-performing individuals from a broad variety of backgrounds. And I think to address the question about how we plan to attract people, it's -- I mean, it's the same answer as how we have attracted people with diverse backgrounds to the core business and also to the deep learning division already. And I think it's -- I mean, the value proposition is to not be a small cog in a big wheel basically. So talent follows a focused mission rather than like the biggest balance sheet. So that's worked for us so far, and we would expect that to continue to work for us.

And then, in terms of, I think, the -- what shape it takes after 2027, it's -- when ChatGPT was released, like everyone, OpenAI didn't go home, right? So it starts off with a proven, workable, profitable use case. That's when it goes live, and they continue to work on it, and it continues to grow and improve and explore that multidimensional opportunity space. But I think the key thing is that we think of it at the moment as orthogonal to the core business.

And what can you tell us about the new partnership you today announced with CoreWeave?

Yes. So -- I mean, the compute is an input. It's not where our edge lives. Our differentiation is the proprietary data, the domain expertise, et cetera. So we -- this compute is what we think is the best solution to providing that input right now, but it's not a dependency. So we're not architecting ourselves into anyone's proprietary stack. So if we needed to, we could move. And it just -- it's the best choice for us right now as we are building to sort of guarantee that availability of compute.

And about your stack, your data stack here? You have your own proprietary own data in-house, but do you use also large language models from Anthropic's Claude, et cetera? Are you agnostic or...

So we use those models for the core business efficiency pillar. For the deep learning side of finance, you can think of it as Anthropic, OpenAI's models. They're foundational models and refined post-trained models for language, so they predict the next language token. We're building foundational models based on financial data, so it's -- we're building those models from scratch. And the scale of them is -- varies depending on the use case between language and financial data, but we're basically repeating that process from scratch.

And how confident are you, if you look at your fierce competitors, just like Jane Street, to keep that advantage in AI?

Yes. So -- I mean, that's an interesting point. And I think it's been acknowledged by the -- I think there's probably like 2 or 3 firms that are well monetizing these techniques already, and they've acknowledged the same point that it's not a winner-takes-all situation, like a super, super, deterministic, low-latency strategy would have been 15 years ago. So it's a more diverse opportunity space. So I think there's basically room for all players that have talent, skills and put the work in.

Okay. And we have also questions about your geographical split. If you look at -- in the U.S., it's by far the biggest ETF market in the world, your market share is very small, below 2%. What are you going to do about that?

As Alex mentioned earlier, the U.S. market is by far the biggest. And indeed, we are mostly a niche player today in that market. We have a significant market share in what we would call international ETFs. To build a more systematic approach to the U.S., the first thing we need to build is a number of the developments from the quantitative side. It's a very exchange-driven market. It's a very fast market, and it's a market where efficiency is much more important than a number of things in Europe. We are not going to plan to target 5%, 10%, 30% in the U.S. I don't think that's a game we should play. I think we could spend a lot of money trying to do that. So what we have been -- what we are building is, one, comforting our space where we're very good at international ETFs.

And then, we are going to be using a number of the quantitative trading strategy to build into a number of additional capabilities within the U.S., including being more active in exchange, but also including being more active in RFQ or bilateral on domestic market. But the reality of it is that, first, we have a number of quantitative build to achieve. Then, we will focus more on the build of new things in the U.S. We already have a strong franchise we want to protect. We're not to just go and build and try to gain 5% or 10% market share with the tech stack we have today. We're very hopeful that from next year, a number of the additional technology capabilities we've built over the past 2 years are going to be able to help us expand in the U.S.

The other area for which the U.S. becomes interesting to us is the digital asset part because that's where today most of the tokenization discussion, convergence is happening most. And that's an area where we already have the relationship and we have that credibility. So to give you an example, we have moved at the beginning of the year a number of our digital asset team from Europe into the U.S., especially on the distribution side to cater for that market. And here, we believe there is an opportunity, but we are not going to go after being a top 3, 4 or 5 market share in -- on exchange in the U.S.

Is M&A an option to buy teams, for instance, in single stocks?

So M&A is always an option. That's not an obsession either. So first, we wanted to have a clear plan. We know where we want to go. With the management team, we look at opportunities on a regular basis. But today, we want the team focused on the execution of the plan. If at one point, we see that there is some complementary M&A we could achieve, we will consider them, yes.

Yes, we have still a lot of questions, but Reg, you are also...

We can share the question. Sorry, Reg Watson at ING. Could you clarify for us, please? I was surprised when you said that the EUR 1 billion NTI number doesn't include AI, given that the AI goes live mid-2027. So why is your guidance that the NTI program really only accelerates in mid-'27? What happens between now and mid-'27 such that we don't see core NTI improving, particularly around the investments?

So there's a second question that follows on from that, which is what is going on in the investments? You've got a big increase in your fixed operating cost base coming this year. Would -- and Julian asked the question about how this then progresses going forward because of the numbers you've provided? If we go to the endpoint in 2030, it suggests that this pace of investment continues year after year after year. So it would be really helpful for us to understand what you're investing in, how and why you think it's going to deliver? And then, why there's a pause between we actually get the investments and the delivery as well?

So I'll take the first part and maybe you'll take more of the financial part. Just to come back on when we say about AI and deep learning, I want maybe to make sure it's well understood. We're applying this technology across the board of different areas. Our current business, expansion of our current business and a brand-new activity, which is our deep learning trading division. This is a part which is the most innovative. This is a part which is really coming online next year. And this is a part where for the time being, we have decided not to include it into our projection. It doesn't mean that some of the other initiatives we're putting towards deep learning or the quantitative enablement for existing business is not included. It's a brand-new business that we have decided on purpose not to put. And for a simple reason that we are very confident given the work we've seen over the past year or 2 years that as it goes online, it will be profitable.

But when you're very new into a market, we also want to be mindful and not promising that we don't have already price point or observable data to compute. As we go online next year and we start seeing how we can scale, we may update at one point in the next few years our guidance and how, overall, it impacts the business, but we thought it was more realistic to focus on, I would say, our existing business and in the expansion than on the brand-new division of trading.

And if you want to take on the financial question?

In terms of OpEx, going back to what we discussed before, I think there are 3 different points to it. First one is if we look at technology expense, as we've indicated, I think, quite often is that we are very focused in building out our technology base in terms of actual technology and subject matter experts. So that's one part of the investment we've been very focused on. In addition to that, on the technology side, also, as Owain explained, AI and deep learning division, so that's one part of the growth in the expense.

Second part, as I discussed, there is a nonrecurring element to it, right, as we try to make the organization more efficient. There are some nonrecurring items we're incurring now that we assume will not happen next year. And then, as I also highlighted, we have the other expense category, right? That's a variety of -- it captures a variety of costs. And we have seen that, that line has increased as well a bit, and we're very focused on also managing that actively. So on all 3 lines, we're doing the things that are very important. And also on the tech side, and I mentioned it before, we're focused on the AI and cloud cost.

And just to highlight that point because it might sound counterintuitive to what we've presented today, I think across the Board, just not our company, but the industry, there's a clear focus on actively managing these costs, right? Because the unlimited deployment of AI tools across any organization for a lot of large companies has come at a huge expense. And this is also a part of our focus, being able to have a better control of these AI and cloud costs for the euro cost you make, what is the, let's say, the operational efficiency gain that you're -- that we're having. So those are the elements that constitute our, let's say, cost management going forward and how we believe we will get to that cost target that we've sort of indicated implicitly in that forecast.

Okay. So I'm a simple man. You're talking about cost optimization, but costs are going up. So could you break it down for me, please? You've given us 3 buckets of optimization, but where is the -- and I appreciate you're doing your best to keep a lid on costs, but they're going up. So where and by how much are these costs going up?

So if we're only looking at the change in our guidance, let's focus on that one first, right, the change in our guidance has gone up by EUR 15 million, right? So that EUR 15 million is roughly 2/3 is technology, 1/3 is nonrecurring items. So I think that's helpful guidance probably for you to understand how that buildup works. As we've discussed today, if we think about how we want to be competitive long term, as we highlighted, anything around technology, AI and deep learning is at the core of everything we do.

So that sits across almost every function, right, from business support to trading to risk management. So that's also why we are investing now today effectively in that area of the business to be able to deliver going forward, right? So we need to make the investment to also be able to deliver. So that's why that at a certain point, we will be able to reap the benefits, as we discussed in terms of the NTI trajectory. And that's also why we believe that over time, we will be able to manage that cost. But as we indicated today, the guidance for this year is up versus what it initially was at the end of -- what we've communicated end of '25.

And then you broke down the increase for us? Can you also break down the year-on-year from '26 to '25 because it's quite a big jump from EUR 205 million to what it was previously, the EUR 225 million?

Yes. So during our Q1 release -- sorry, Q2 release on the 31st of July, we can provide more guidance on actually what the breakdown of the cost is, right? Because normally, we break it down in technology expense, employee and other expense. And then, you will have the insight that you probably need on that cost guidance.

Okay. I've hogged this for long enough.

I think maybe we can also share like a little bit more detail there without -- there was a question about are we using AI labs, LLMs, yes, of course, we are. We use those for the business process optimization. It's actually quite easy to use those tools and get more efficient. The hard part is understanding if you're using them optimally and efficiently. So clearly, just making them available to the entire firm costs money. You have to pay for those tokens. So -- and likewise, on the quantitative growth project, we have to pay for compute that we wouldn't have done in previous years to do research.

Julian?

Yes. Again, back to the NTI revenue guidance for 2030. I think in the past, Flow is obviously quite cautious giving out a single kind of data point in the future. Given the nature of the business, you guys are operating in a highly cyclical environment with like market dislocations, volatilities, digital assets, whatever. So I guess that was also the case why, again, in the past, I mean, you kind of refrained from being so bullish on setting out a data point. But this kind of changed today. And I was just wondering what did change in your thinking that kind of led to this, again, single data point on the horizon, not an average, but just clearly a data point and perhaps kind of derivation of that. So how should we read that through a kind of volatility lens and maybe market volume cyclical lens to understand this figure? I'm just wondering, let's say, if eventually hit like EUR 1 billion in 2030, but because of the volatility, you hit like EUR 900 million in 2031, like would that be mission complete? Or would it be a bit of a setback on the strategy as a whole?

So there is a few things here. The first one is that indeed, and we discussed that a few times during the presentation, Flow Traders business has been highly cyclical. And while it has provided a base revenue, which over cycles have been growing, it's also a business that has been probably more cyclical than some of our peers. And when you look at that and you look at across these clients, you need to wonder why and can we mitigate that or change that. So that's one of the reasons, for example, why we are building quantitative trading and quantitative capabilities because this is a business for which the revenue are pretty decorrelated from high level of spikes of market collapse of 2020, et cetera. So for us, building a quantitative trading capability and the deep learning division and focusing on revenue based on this kind of techniques and technologies is a business that will provide revenue on a much more recurring basis. You can be very profitable in these businesses even if you don't have a VIX of 45% or 50% -- 45%.

That being said, in addition to that, we also live in a market where our business traditionally of ETFs and digital assets has been prone to more cyclicality. And it has been prone to more cyclicality for, I think, a couple of reasons: one, when you are more niche, which we have been, which -- and you mentioned it, we are very big in Europe, growing in Asia and somewhat for the time being more muted in the U.S., we're also much more subject to 1 market or 2 markets. That compounded with our focus on building our sales and distribution is also going to allow us to build some more recurring revenue. And just to give you an idea, we see today the trend of market connectivity for retail being one of the most significant change in the market we're seeing at the moment.

As we focus on being able to deliver to this platform, we are not targeting retail directly. We're targeting to support and focus on supporting the platform that need to be able to access ETF for their clients or crypto or tokenization. It's also going to build some revenue flows that are probably -- that are not probably, that are much less correlated to our core institutional ETF business. So why are we trying to put a target like 2030, EUR 1 billion?

I think, first of all, the best way to focus the mind is to give targets on a specific date. So it's not meaning -- it doesn't mean that the targets are not credible, but it also means that we want on purpose to build a business and invest in technologies or in people or in business that is providing through the cycle or whether it's volatile or not, consistent revenue base. And then a year where you have lots of volatility, I would expect to make much more. But I think we could not continue to just say, and it's going to be still the case for a few years that our business is completely driven by the VIX going at 45% or 30%. It will continue to be correlated, but we are targeting and a number of those initiatives are targeted at decorrelating it to the high volatility spikes.

Maybe worth adding as well that a lot of those additional opportunities carry the same cost base that we're already incurring.

Yes, we still have a few questions left about your trading capital, your lifeline of the company. You raised last year EUR 200 million. The CFO is in the room, but not on the stage. What is your priority to increase your trading capital?

It's EUR 1.1 billion last quarter. But what is the goal if you want to reach the EUR 1 billion net trading income in 2030? And you already mentioned your 50% return on trading capital is EUR 550 million. Is it? So what do you need to reach that EUR 1 billion NTI? Is that organically with the EUR 1.1 billion in the net profit around EUR 200 million a year, less or more.

And if you look at the past, the last decade, the average of your return on trading capital was 63%. So why at least 50%, why not more if you look at the AI deep learning division and a lot more to come in the tokenization from EUR 36 billion to EUR 5.5 trillion in 2030. So maybe you can explain more.

Shall I take the question, Lisa, on the trading capital. So as you can derive from the targets we put forward, the EUR 1 billion NTI at a 50% return on trading capital assumes a trading capital of at least EUR 2 billion. So that's the focus as to where we want to grow. And then I can also take the question if you want to on the return trading capital, Tim, if you want to add.

On return on trading capital. You mentioned 63% over the past 10 years. Yes. And 2020 plays a big role in above -- in this 63%. So again, we're not defining a return on trading capital assuming COVID 2.0 or something similar. Obviously, as I mentioned earlier, there are years of much higher volatility, we will make more money. But we are trying to think on a base case scenario. And I think our assumptions for our current projection is in VIX on average around 20%, if I'm correct.

Then you mentioned quantitative learning, AI tokenization, et cetera. Diversifying revenue does not necessarily means for everything a higher return on trading capital. What I'm saying, so I'll give you an example today, the digital asset business or the tokenized market are profitable business, but they don't have a crazy 100%, 200% return on trading capital.

The return on trading capital is somewhat around our target. In deep learning, there might be -- there will be businesses with a much higher return on trading capital. But as we mentioned, we also, for the time being, on purpose decided to discount this part of the business.

So I'm much less focused on saying across a 5-year where 1 year, we will have 100% over return on trading capital because of COVID, we can get to 60%. I'm more focused on saying we can generate consistently as a baseline, a certain return on trading capital by 2030 and then build upon that. If in the meantime, the market are much more favorable to us, we'll do better. Maybe the market will be much worse. I cannot plan for that.

What I can plan is to have a business model, which is more stable on a year-to-year basis and not across the cycle. That's the way we're thinking about our business.

That's very good. My other question is about Flow Traders strategic capital. When you started that division or how do you call it, a few years ago, you mentioned an invested capital of around EUR 50 million. If you look in the past, you did [ EUR 15 ] or more something investments. What can you say about the total investment you made? And what are you going to do up to 2030 and beyond of that division?

So I don't think we're disclosing the exact number at the moment on our investment. I would say that today, we have a portfolio which is very focused on supporting the digital asset initiatives, and it will remain like that. So we want to see a number of our current initiatives mature and scale.

And recently, we've participated to a couple of scale of existing of our business. We want to be also a bit mindful about growing that portfolio significantly from now on. I mean it's always a question of focus. We have capital to allocate, do we allocate it to a VC business or trading business, our technology business.

For the next couple of years, the focus is really on the quantitative and the trading business. Supporting our existing VC portfolio. Again, if a partnership comes and we see some value, we'll add to it, but we are not going to proactively target to expand the VC portfolio for the time being.

So you do not expect a unicorn between now and 5 years or...

In our portfolio? We may, but I'm not going to do a projection in 2030 hoping for Unicorn in our portfolio. It will be a good add to the bottom line.

Okay. So our last question is the most important for us as a long-term shareholder since 2016, now more than 10 years. You went public in 2015. The IPO price was EUR 32 a share. We are nowadays, thanks to one analyst here at EUR 25. So if you look back and your ambition for 2013, if you look at your valuation of the company, it is just above shareholders' equity book value.

If you look at your only peer in the U.S. listed, [indiscernible], today, a new record high or less or more year-to-date, 85% share price increase and a valuation above 4 book value. If you look back at your IPO, it was around 3x book value you went public. So what are you going to do about that?

You did in the past a small share buyback and to attract people, the best talent in the world working for Flow Traders, one of the best incentives is the share price, of course. You are already -- I think almost of you are shareholders, too, just like we. So what are you going to do with that ridiculous absurd low valuation?

Yes, sure. So I think step one, as we try to do today is want to provide more clarity on what it is we do, what our business looks like in terms of traditional and digital assets, which are 2, there's clear crossover between the business, but also 2 very distinct businesses, potential also from a valuation perspective.

Secondly, what we've tried to do today, again, is laying out a strategy how we believe that we could drive value for shareholders, right? And I understand for some shareholders, the value really sits in the dividend or capital distribution. But we believe that our value creation, the value creation story that we have as Flow Traders is that compounding ability of our capital base and deploying that in the right way and also scaling our organization as a whole, right?

And I think if you look at what our current plan implies, I think that's probably our answer to your question. And it's really down, I think, to all of us to deliver on that plan and show everyone what that could imply in terms of share price.

And I'd like a couple of things maybe from a more strategic or high-level perspective. I think when the Board decided 2 years ago to stop the capital expansion plan, what it realized and something I mentioned today is that in reality, while huge size does not necessarily matter, there is a certain minimum amount of size that you need to be relevant in that business.

And we were at the point where our scale was just too small. And we can see it, and I'll give you a very simple example. Over the past 4 to 5 years, yes, the scale of our competitors has grown and for some of them, 40x. But what has also massively grown is the size of the market and the opportunities.

So today, for example, to capture the most profitable flow, you need to be able to transact some of the very significant flow. We see more and more of the investor or the market when those big flows comes, it's not EUR 10 million or EUR 100 million. It's billions of transactions. And at one point, your capital prevents you to grab these opportunities.

So it's not to say that at one point, we're not going to redistribute dividend or look at different capital strategy, obviously. But it's also to say that at one -- if you can't even deliver or sustain your existing market, forget about building something else.

So what the capital expansion plan in 2024 has allowed, and I mean, Alex and Marc every day is that it allowed us to also continue to be relevant in a market where our skill sets are recognized, our connectivity and our relationship are recognized. But at one point, we are becoming somewhat less relevant for the bigger ticket or the bigger opportunities when they occur. And that is, to some extent, threatening to the whole business model. So that's for me the first thing.

The second element is that as we deploy our capital in areas outside of Europe, we talk about Asia. We also believe that it will allow to show that this company is not as purely a European company as it is. And I'm not comparing ourselves to [ virtue ] or anything, but in reality as well, the multiple -- I mean, you can look at any segment of the market and look at the multiple.

I mean, I worked and some of you worked in European banks and look at the multiple of pure European banks versus global banks. So we are not going to become a completely global player, but by internationalizing also our business and become more visible and more relevant, it will also, in our view, attract potential investors that are going to see us as a more global company that's a pure European one and should attract a stronger valuation.

Yes, clear. About the EUR 2 billion of trading capital 2030, can you deploy it with the same number of people as of today? Or do you need a lot more people?

I'll tell you in 2030. I think we may need more people, but we're not going to need to double the number of people. And I think there is a few things we need to have in mind on this one. First, automation is really something happening. I mean -- and a lot of the business we do was very manual, and it is also very -- it's going be more automated.

Everybody talked about developers and coders, but it's across the globe. But the other element, and sometimes I kind of compare our company to a railway company. So it does not excite a lot my team when I say that. But we've built a lot of rails. And now we need to run trains, but we still need to get our rails fixed and manage and everything.

So we have some -- to some extent, a fixed cost or an infrastructure, then we need to maintain and grow. What we are doing today is building on that and some of them with additional investment, especially in compute, we are building on that additional revenues for which once the compute is there, the incremental cost will be lower. So no, I don't expect to double the number of people when you double the capital.

I would expect, and it's hard to say, to have a relatively managed number of headcount. The more -- the bigger question or the question you could ask me is -- I'm sorry I'm asking myself, is more the profile of people. And if you look at what we have been hiring over the past 18 months compared to the past, we are moving more and more in the quant and reserve side than the trading and operation, and that will continue to happen.

So the NTI per FTE will significantly go up by 2030.

By headcount, you mean? Yes.

Maybe in terms of time, so we do one final question from the room.

Now that I've been outed. Okay. I'm going to ask a challenging and personal question to you, Thomas. Your predecessor, [ Mike Kuehnel ] one of the smartest men I've ever met, stood in a room not dissimilar to this 4 years ago and said that Flow Traders needed to focus more on where it deployed its capital. I've heard you talk about focus.

There needed to be better cost control, which he managed and that he didn't want the business to be known as a volatility hedge, and you're saying the same thing with diversification of earnings. And that in order to achieve this, more capital was required. I've heard all 4 things from you. He -- his legacy is not a good one. He's failed to deliver on that, and he's not here to receive the award. How are you going to deliver where he couldn't?

So a couple of things. First of all, I was not there 4 years ago, as you know. So...

Yes. You have to take my word for it.

If you have questions to Mike, I'm sure you can reach out to him.

I'd like to know what your assessment is, why he failed.

I think there's a few things. The first one, and if I were to be very -- my team knows I'm pretty straightforward. I think in 2022, having these ambitions without having a real capital plan set up at the same time was highly optimistic.

It was probably already clear at that point than being able to deliver on EUR 1 billion NTI without having a plan to grow the capital because remember, at that point, a lot of that capital, a lot of that trading income was directly paid into shareholders, and that's fine. I mean -- but it was preventing flow to follow the trend of their competitors. It's as simple as that. So you can have all the ambitions in the world. You need to have the capital plan.

So the first thing that has changed, and it was [ mid-20 ] almost 2 years ago, you're going to tell me, but is when the Board took that serious decision to stop paying those dividend and grow the capital. Now about the past 2 years.

A few things. One, in Europe, in ETF, and Alex mentioned it, we probably have, what, 25% to 30% market share. So if retaining the capital is only to try to grow from 25% or 30% to 35%, honestly, it's going to be rare to get EUR 1 billion. So what has started to be built last year on the technology side, what has started to be accelerated in the past year on the DS side is really to also build additional capabilities to diversify our revenue source. That's the second point.

And the third point I would make is that when all this happens, at the end of the day, and yes, all CEOs, I'm sure, say that at the beginning of their tenure, it's about focus and execution. So I'm going to tell you the same thing. It's about focus and execution. I think we have a stronger overall and broader management team that we had 4 years ago.

I think we have a more diversified set of experience. We have a strong [ CFO ]. We have brought efficiency team. We have brought people with knowledge of the region we want to focus in. And as much as technology is important, as much as capital is important, if you have the right people to work with the right team, that's also how you deliver.

So I would put the initial problem around the capital that was -- capital strategy in 2022. And then we've been able to start developing through '24 on what we need. Today, the capital, and we can all say, okay, Flow is not performing very well over the past 2 years, but coming back to Europe again, the only competitor we have in Europe in our business today at scale is 40x our size, roughly. I don't have the exact numbers on public, but it's 40x our size.

I mean it's a pretty good success for Flow to still be there. If we can take that success and build upon it, I have no reason to doubt we can't succeed. But yes, execution will be very difficult. Yes, it will be focused. And yes, it requires some effort from everybody, and that's what we've laid out today.

That concludes the Q&A session for today. First of all, I would like to thank everyone here in the room as well as online for joining us today and spending time with us. We hope that we've been able to clearly lay out the strategy of the company, how we expect to execute on it and what it means in terms of value creation and the potential by building stronger Flow Traders. That concludes our 2026 Capital Markets Day. I would like to invite the people here for a brief lunch with us. Thank you all.

Hello. Welcome to the Flow Traders First Quarter 2026 Trading Update Conference Call. [Operator Instructions] I would now like to hand over the call over to Dick Peters. Please go ahead.

Thank you. Good morning, and thank you for joining Flow Traders First Quarter 2026 Trading Update Presentation. As you may have seen, we published our trading update earlier this morning. I'm joined today by our CEO, Thomas Spitz; and our co-Chief Trading Officer, Alex Kieft, who will take you through the results.

After our prepared remarks, we will be happy to take any questions you may have. Before we begin, let me draw your attention to the disclaimer on Page 2. As always, this presentation is for information purposes only. Any results will be discussed are unaudited.

I will now hand over to Thomas for the trading update snapshot.

Thank you, Dick, and good morning, everyone. Let me start with a high level review of our quarter 1 performance. We delivered a strong first quarter, resulting in a net profit of EUR 50.4 million and EPS of EUR 1.15. Our ETP value traded increased 27% year-on-year and 25% quarter-on-quarter, underscoring the healthy trading environment.

Our total value traded grew 27% year-on-year. In the first quarter, we generated an NTI of EUR 155.9 million, increased slightly by EUR 1.8 million in other income, leading to a total income of EUR 158 million. Our fixed operating expenses were EUR 56.1 million in Q1, in line with our guidance of EUR 220 million to EUR 230 million for the year.

The EBITDA reached EUR 72.2 million for Q1 with an EBITDA margin of 46%. We ended the quarter with 656 full-time employees, up from 635 at the end of 2025. Overall, we delivered steady, diversified results across regions and asset classes.

I will now hand it over to Alex to walk you through the market environment and the regional performance.

Thank you, Thomas, and good morning, everyone. So the global ETP market showed a strong momentum with ETP value traded up 77% year-on-year and 23% quarter-on-quarter, setting a new record high. Implied volatility measured by the VIX was elevated compared to the previous quarters, driven by the geopolitical events in the Middle East.

In terms of assets under management, there's a solid year-on-year growth of 19%. On a quarterly basis, AUM growth is more muted, though this is mainly caused by market weakness.

ETP velocity increased both quarter-on-quarter and year-on-year, which correlates with the increase in volatility, as you can see by comparing the 2 charts on the right. The overall fundamentals remain very supportive for continued long-term growth in the global ETP market.

Here, we discuss the fixed income and crypto market dynamics. In fixed income, U.S. investment grade and high-yield volumes showed strong pickup. Fixed income volatility stabilized in Q1 on the back of a trend of declining volatility, which peaked back in 2022 on the back of significant rate increases.

Moving to crypto. Crypto markets saw a continued decline in trading activity after the peak in October last year. Bitcoin volumes are still slightly up, but overall -- in the overall crypto market, volumes are down. Global crypto ETP value traded decreased quarter-on-quarter, but showed material growth year-on-year, underscored continued institutional adoption of crypto ETPs.

Moving to our regional performance overview. In Europe, we maintained our position as a leading liquidity provider in European ETFs, supporting liquidity both on and off exchanges. Our results came in higher than the previous periods, benefiting from increased activity in both equity and commodity ETPs.

The Americas saw continued NTI increases compared to prior quarters, supported by increased ETF volumes and our ability to participate in larger transaction flows, following the increase in trading capital on our balance sheet.

In Asia, overall, ETF market volumes are up significantly year-on-year. We are still developing and expanding our Asia market presence, and as such, we're not yet able to fully capture this increase in volumes, though results are still up meaningfully quarter-on-quarter. We continue to view APAC as a core growth region and continue to focus on strengthening the business.

Moving to crypto. As mentioned earlier, the crypto market is still in a downturn, leading to lower trading volumes and fewer trading opportunities.

On the positive side, we continue to see growth in tokenized real-world asset trading, reflecting a shift to 24/7 trading models. We are actively providing liquidity in tokenized equities and other real world assets on a 24/7 basis, as mentioned in our press release in March.

I'll now hand it back to Thomas to walk you through our NTI, cost base and capital base.

Thank you, Alex. This slide illustrates our structural growth in NTI relative to implied market volatility. Our investments in trading capabilities across regions and asset classes continue to enable us to capture opportunities under varying market conditions.

1Q 2026 performance is strong due to a conducive market environment combined with a number of actions taken to expand our trading operations. As shown on Slide 8, fixed operating expenses were EUR 56.1 million in Q1, an increase of 10% year-on-year and 7% quarter-on-quarter. This increase was driven primarily by higher employee expenses and ongoing technology investments and are consistent with our growth plans.

We delivered 46% EBITDA margin in Q1, underscoring the strength of our variable compensation model and our high operating leverage. We ended the year -- we ended the quarter with 656 FTEs, reflecting targeted hiring to support our strategic initiatives.

Fixed operating expenses guidance for the year 2026 is EUR 220 million to EUR 230 million, driven by continued technology investment, selective headcount additions to support growth initiatives and inflationary pressures.

Turning to capital. As you know, trading capital is one of the core of our businesses, and since 2024, we have continued to strengthen our balance sheet. In October 2025, we secured a $200 million private credit facility and a $75 million revolving credit facility, significantly enhancing our financial flexibility.

Both of them have not been fully deployed and will continue to optimize the allocation of this capital across our trading operations. As a result, trading capital increased by 36% year-on-year, reaching EUR 1.092 billion, the highest level in the company's history.

Shareholders equity also reached a record of EUR 918 million, up 17% year-on-year. Return on average shareholders' equity is 23% for the quarter. Our continued capital expansion ensures that we can continue to optimally position and capture opportunities across asset classes and geographies and will continue to support our diversification strategy.

As a reminder, on the 23rd of June, we will be hosting our Capital Markets Day. During our Capital Markets Day, me and the rest of the leadership team will provide the market with an update on the business as well as the strategy and our expansion plan going forward. Further details regarding the CMD will follow in due course, and we are looking forward to have the opportunity to introduce our updated strategy and meet with our investors.

Thank you. That concludes our prepared remarks. We would now like to open the floor for questions. So operator, please go ahead.

[Operator Instructions] Our first question comes from Julian Dobrovolschi from ABN AMRO-ODDO BHF.

Congrats on the quarter. I think it looks pretty good, but still I have a couple of questions just to understand some dynamics. So first one is on the U.S. market shares. This one, again, seems to be on the lower side, 1.5% in Q4, marginally up to 1.6% in Q1. But if you look in the previous quarters, you were at about 2% in the U.S. in the ETP business.

So I would appreciate if you could share additional color on why underperforming in the recent quarters. And also, how does that actually correlate with your ability to participate in larger transaction flows following the expansion of capital? I believe that's exactly what Alex just said during the presentation. So that's the first one.

The second one is on the returns on capital. This one seems to be flat quarter-over-quarter, but technically, you had on hand the entire pool of trading capital available for the full quarter. That was clearly not the case for Q4, for example. So just wondering if anything has changed operationally that could answer the flat progression in the returns of capital Q1 versus Q4.

And then on the P&L line items, A and B parts. On the A part, so we see another small impairment becoming a bit of a recurring item. Just wondering what's the origin of it? And how can we make sure this does not happen in the next quarters?

And the part B is the equity-accounted investments looks quite volatile. This went from EUR 4.5 million positive to minus EUR 1.3 million in Q1. Just wondering what's driving this vola in kind of the general case and also would appreciate, related to that, if you could speak about the underlying VC portfolio position that you have.

Thanks, Julian. Thanks for the questions. I'll take at least the first 2. So on U.S. market share, indeed, we saw a slight pickup quarter-on-quarter amid the general rise in volumes. Our ability to participate in larger trades is not always -- doesn't mean higher on exchange turnover. It can also be large RFQ or OTC trades with counterparties that we previously could not do.

The volumes in the U.S. are highly concentrated to the mega cap ETFs like SPY and QQQ, where our market share is low compared to other ETFs that require more diverse pricing capabilities. We are monitoring and making sure that our market share remains where it is. But we don't necessarily target to increase it massively. We prioritize profitability in the U.S. over purely going for market share.

Then on the return on capital question, the published numbers are LTM, so trailing ROCE. So on a quarterly basis, it's slightly higher than the previous one.

We see that we can deploy on peak days, can deploy the majority of the PCF, and even on someday drew the RCF, but yes, given that we've increased our capital base now by almost 80% in 2 years, we know that we need a bit of time to optimize it further. And as we do that, we expect that we can continue to deploy it accretively, but also that we have more buffer to participate and to use it when volatility peaks.

And on the third question you had on the impairments. There, that's comparable to the previous quarters, whereby we have certain token investments and that we hedge, whereby depending on the market, either we have a positive in NTI and a negative impairment or the other way around.

And typically, for accounting purposes, those hit in different lines, but this is the same as what we saw in previous quarters. And given the decline in crypto prices, this is -- there was a small positive in NTI and a small impairment comparable to the previous ones. If there's an increase in crypto prices, you expect it the other way around.

Understood. And then I also had a second part on the equity accounted investments, also quite some swings. Anything to flag the way you see the evolution of the VC portfolio there?

Yes. So Julian, in terms of the numbers specifically on this quarter, so that's mainly due to the venture capital portfolio where we're seeing that some of the investments where we're having a revaluation. Well, not exactly revaluing. Equity accounting, where we see that there's costs that impacts the value -- the carrying value of those assets.

The next question is about capital allocation. The trading capital has risen. Is there room for dividend or buybacks in the future?

Let me take that one. There's currently no plan for a new share buyback or reinstatement of the dividend as that would not be in line with the trading capital expansion plan that was implemented and communicated before. We will provide an update on that as well if there's any change to that.

The next question comes from Mike Werner from UBS.

I have 2, please. One, we saw a bit of an uptick in the headcount in the quarter. Can you just tell me where -- which areas you are hiring for, either regions or departments within Flow Traders?

And then second, you're talking about improving the capabilities to deploy all the capital. What do you need to get to being fully operational from a capital allocation perspective with the new capital basis that you've built up in recent quarters? And how long do you think it will take to get there, I guess?

Thank you. I'll take the first part of the question regarding headcount. It is true that we have been increasing our headcount, as mentioned, as noted. Our focus at the moment is very much on the quantitative technology and related businesses.

So the headcount is more focused on a number of technology initiatives, AI initiatives and quantitative initiatives that are complementary to our existing business, and will accelerate our existing business and that we can now use much more or much more efficiently as we are deploying more capital as well, and I will let Alex explain the second part.

Yes. Regarding the capital deployment. So what we saw in March when it was very volatile, then we could deploy everything. So there we have in our core ETF business, having a diversified trading strategy. So from ETFs to fixed income and FX to crypto allows us to optimally -- and also across the regions allows us to optimally deploy it where we can.

We are, of course, a market maker, so we cannot -- we typically respond to opportunities that happen in the market rather than take on positions actively. So this flexibility allows us to provide liquidity even in this when volumes and activity and volatility increases to our counterparties and to the exchanges. And we're confident that as time passes, we're able to fully absorb the PCF that we've added alongside with the increase in retained earnings.

And I think when we had it -- the PCF is a secure facility. We have now had it on the balance sheet for 5 months. I think we're quite pleased with how quickly we've been able to increase trading activity in certain parts, and we continue to optimize that further in the coming quarters.

Our next question. Are you expecting operating expenses to continue growing over the next quarters?

As Thomas explained, we continue to invest in our growth through investments in technology as well as targeted add-ons of subject matter experts, which results in higher costs as we experienced this quarter. But as also guided, there's -- we expect for the year operating expense to end up in the range of EUR 220 million to EUR 230 million. And I believe that's what the expectation is for the rest of the year. So we can't provide any further guidance beyond that.

[Operator Instructions] And with that, I will now turn the call back to Dick for any closing remarks.

Thank you, operator, and thank you all for joining today's call. We appreciate your continued interest in Flow Traders and look forward to speaking with you again during our 2026 Capital Markets Day. This concludes today's presentation. Have a great day. Thank you.

Welcome to the Flow Traders' Full Year 2025 Results Conference Call. [Operator Instructions]

I would now like to hand the call over to [indiscernible]. Please go ahead.

Good morning, and thank you for joining Flow Traders' Fourth Quarter and Full Year 2025 Results Presentation. As you may have seen, we published our results earlier this morning. I'm joined today by our CEO, Thomas Spitz; and our Co-Chief Trading Officer, Alex Kieft, who will take you through the results. After our prepared remarks, we'll be happy to take any questions you may have. Before we begin, let me draw your attention to the disclaimer on Page 2. As always, this presentation is for information purposes only and the results we will be discussing are unaudited.

I will now hand over to Thomas.

Thank you, Caroline. And let me start with a high-level overview of our Q4 and full year performance. We delivered a solid fourth quarter, resulting in a full year net profit of EUR 133.6 million and an EPS of EUR 3.07. ETP value traded increased 22% year-on-year in the quarter and 26% for the full year, underscoring the healthy trading environment. Total value traded grew 5% year-on-year in both Q4 and full year 2025. In Q4, we generated an NTI of EUR 123.8 million, offset slightly by EUR 2.8 million loss in other income, leading to a total income of EUR 121 million.

Fixed operating expenses were EUR 52.4 million in Q4 and EUR 204.1 million for the year, in line with guidance. EBITDA reached EUR 49.2 million for Q4 and EUR 198.9 million for full year '25 with margins of 41% for both periods. We ended the year with 635 full-time employees, up from 609 at the start of 2025. Overall, we delivered steady, diversified results across regions and asset classes.

I will now hand it over to Alex to walk you through the market environment and the regional performance.

Thank you, Thomas, and good morning, everyone. So on this slide, I'll discuss the global ETP market environment. As you can see on the top left, ETP value traded increased substantially year-over-year, 44% compared to 2024, underscoring ever-increasing adoption of ETFs as investment, allocation and hedging vehicles. Market volatility, as shown on the right by the VIX was similar compared to Q4 last year and a slight pickup quarter-on-quarter.

ETP assets under management reached EUR 16.9 trillion, an increase of 21% year-on-year, driven by fund inflows and some market strengths. ETP velocity, which is the ratio of ETP value traded divided by assets under management, increased modestly back to its multiyear average. So overall fundamentals remain very supportive for continued long-term growth of the global ETP market.

In fixed income and crypto markets, starting with fixed income, trading volumes in U.S. IG and high yield declined due to seasonality in Q4 and are up modestly year-over-year. However, fixed income volatility as measured by the MOVE Index that decreased substantially in the quarter, underscoring a muted trading environment for our fixed income business.

Moving to crypto. After a spike in activity in October, which also saw the largest crypto liquidation event in history, volumes subsided in November and December. Bitcoin volumes are still up for the quarter, but the overall crypto market across all tokens and derivatives is down. Crypto ETP volume, however, increased again, highlighting continued institutional adoptions of ETPs as a tool to gain or manage crypto exposures.

I'll now move to our regional performance overview. On the left, the stack bars are the market ETP value traded. In the middle, we see Flow Traders' ETP value traded per region. And on the right, we see the total income per region. Starting with Europe, we maintained our position as a leading liquidity provider in European ETPs with a pickup in market share amidst the pickup in trading activity compared to the previous quarter, especially in equity and precious metal markets following the rise in gold and silver prices last year.

In the Americas, we saw an increase in NTI compared to the previous quarters due to increased trading volumes and our ability to participate in larger transactions following the increase in trading capital. In Asia, the ETF market volumes rose significantly year-on-year with most growth coming from China. Excluding China, the growth was 36% year-over-year, so more in line with the global average. But in onshore China, that saw a much more significant increase. Onshore China is still a development area for the firm. And as such, we were not yet able to fully capture this increase in volumes, but it remains a key development area for us.

Also interesting to note in Asia is the increase in overnight trading activity in U.S. equities, which is reflecting increasing investor adoption and appetite for overnight and round-the-clock trading. We see a similar trend in digital assets, where we have seen the start to tokenized equities trading, a market that Flow Traders is active in, and we are actively providing liquidity in tokenized real-world assets and forming partnerships around the topic. As mentioned, we also witnessed the largest crypto liquidation event in history. It's important to note that we did -- it did not negatively impact us, and we came out with a profit, underscoring the robustness of our trading and risk systems.

Moving on. Here, we see the NTI per region and per asset class. On the left, we see it regionally. So Americas and Asia together account for 40% of group NTI with continued momentum coming from Asia. On the right, we see the asset class mix where FICC, including cryptocurrencies, accounted for 41% of total group NTI, highlighting the diversity of our trading business. Furthermore, our global or our flexible trading allocation model allows us to quickly allocate capital where opportunities arise, both geographically or regionally or by asset class, while at the same time, making sure that we can always provide liquidity to our counterparties and on the exchanges even in more quiet times.

And with that, I'll hand it back to Thomas for the next few slides.

Thank you, Alex. I'm moving to Slide 8. As shown on this slide, our fixed operating expense were EUR 52.4 million in Q4 and EUR 204.1 million for the year, increases of 17% and 15%, respectively. These increases were driven primarily by higher employee expenses and ongoing technology investment and are consistent with our growth plans, which we highlighted in our press release.

We delivered 41% EBITDA margins in both Q4 and full year '25, underscoring the strength of our variable compensation model and our high operating leverage. We ended the year with 635 FTEs, and we continue to focus on targeted hiring to support strategic initiatives. Fixed operating expenses guidance for the year 2026 is EUR 220 million to EUR 230 million, driven by continued technology investment, selective headcount addition to support growth initiatives as well as inflationary pressures.

Moving on to Slide 9. This slide illustrates our structural growth in NTI relative to implied market volatility. Our investment in training capabilities across region and asset classes will continue to enable us to capture opportunities under varying market conditions, supporting steady performances even during period of lower volatility. Over the past decade, we have delivered an average EBITDA margin above 40%, demonstrating the strength of our operating model and flexible compensation philosophy. Full year '25 performance remained resilient and consistent with our long-term trends.

Turning to capital. As you know, the trading capital is core to our business. Our trading capital expansion plan first announced in July 2024 continued to strengthen our balance sheet. In addition, in October 2025, we secured a $200 million Private Credit Facility and a $75 million Revolving Credit Facility, significantly enhancing our financial flexibility. As a result, trading capital increased 35% to EUR 1,044 million, the highest level in the company's history.

Shareholders' equity also reached a record EUR 868 million, up 13% year-on-year. The return on average shareholders' equity was 16% for the year, a solid result given market conditions. Expansion and capital strategy ensure that we are optimally positioned to capture opportunities across asset classes and geographies and to continue to support our diversification strategy.

That concludes our prepared remarks. We would now like to open the floor for questions. Operator, please go ahead.

[Operator Instructions] Your first question comes from Julian Dobrovolschi from ABN AMRO-ODDO BHF.

I have 3 to begin with. Maybe if you can share anything around the experience you had from deploying such a sizable amount of additional trading capital in Q4. Just for us to understand how do you actually manage that given the fact that this was a bit of a new, let's say, experience for you? And maybe a bit of an indication how did you manage that across different -- the liquidity across different desks and whether that was actually well absorbed by the existing team, so they had to hire more traders across regions. So that's the first thing.

The other one, I've seen some comments about you developing some deep learning initiatives with an intent to apply that for developing your midterm trading strategies. So just wondering if you can kind of speak more about generally the whole idea or concept behind it? And how do you think this is going to roll out in 2026? And finally, on prediction markets, just wondering how meaningful can this become in the NTI mix going forward? And generally, if you can speak about the structure of this market in terms of competition, returns on capital and perhaps anything about capital intensity overall?

Okay. Thanks, Julian. I'll take the first question about capital. So indeed, we now have over EUR 1 billion in trading capital. As communicated earlier, as we increased our capital by almost 80% year-on-year, we always anticipated a bit of a ramp-up in terms of our ability to quickly deploy it. But we have seen that especially in periods of high activity or in around one-off or multi-day events that we're already actually able to deploy almost everything. We have a strategic capital allocation per business line to make sure that we can always provide liquidity to our counterparties and not just when it suits us.

So that is the minimum that every unit requires. Then tactically, we can very easily deploy it where it is most accretive. And as we are extremely collaborative and we have a global model, we just optimize for wherever we see the highest returns. And that's how we will continue to do so, while at the same time, of course, ensuring that we diversify and continue to refine our trading strategies so that long term, we're in a position to deploy all the capital as well as the increase in trading capital that we still foresee in the future. And we can also still at a later stage, expand either the current debt or other forms. So that's also still on our agenda.

I will take the second question about deep learning initiatives. So the way we think about it is -- as the market continues to evolve, there is a number of market-related, technology-related or quantitative related technologies that are happening and really shifting how markets operate and how they behave. As you very well know, our historical trend has really been in this kind of market shifting product, which is ETF.

What we have now been observing over the past few years is more and more importance being given to be capable of managing very, very large amount of data, either data that are from exchanges or data that we see from our flows, analyzing them and use them for trading in trends, analyzing market but are also critical for some of our initiatives that want to deploy. We mentioned cash equity trading. We could mention a few others. So the way we are thinking about deep learning is really, we have started to be really as an applied research approach technology.

So we're not doing deep learning for the sake of pure research. We're doing it with a very intense focus that over the next few quarters, we're going to start rolling out our results into live proof of concept across our trading environment. It is obviously a multi-quarters and multiyear initiatives, and it is something that will become over time more and more strategic, both of our existing businesses such as ETF to become more and more precise.

For example, in market analysis, it's also going to become more and more strategic in a 24/7 world where at the same time, people want to be able to trade all the time, but also not all markets are still open at the same time. And also, you have more and more diversity of agents trading and agent behavior. So for us, it's a long-term strategy. It's a long-term investment, and it's part of some of the road map that we will be expanding more upon -- during our Capital Market Day.

And then finally, the question on prediction markets. So it is, for us, very interesting to connect to those markets both from the market data side. So the information that is disseminated there through the expression of many investors in their -- in probabilities around market teams or market moving teams.

We can use that in our trading decisions, either systematically or discretionarily. And we are looking into whether it makes sense for us also to become actively trading participants on those venues as well. So for us, it's still too early to comment on the predicted return on trading capital, et cetera, but it's definitely an area that we look at from a market and pricing perspective, and we are exploring whether to become active there as well.

[Operator Instructions] It appears that we currently have no more incoming questions. Therefore, I would like to hand the word over to Caroline for any closing remarks.

Thank you, operator, and thank you all for joining today's call. We appreciate your continued interest in Flow Traders and look forward to speaking with you again when we release our first quarter 2026 results. This concludes today's presentation. Have a great day.

Ladies and gentlemen, you may now disconnect.

Hello. Welcome to the Flow Traders Third Quarter 2025 Results Conference Call, hosted by Eric Pan, Head of Investor Relations. [Operator Instructions]

I would now like to hand the call over to Eric Pan. Mr. Pan, please go ahead.

Good morning and thank you for joining Flow Traders' Third Quarter 2025 Trading Update Conference Call.

As you will have no doubt already seen, we released our trading update first thing this morning, along with the financing announcement. I am joined here on the call by Flow Traders CEO, Nominee, Thomas Sitz, as well as our Co-Chief Trading Officers, Alex Kieft and Marc Jansen, who will run through this results presentation. We will be happy to take any questions you may have after the presentation.

Before we begin, let me draw your attention to the disclaimer on Page 2. Please be advised that if you continue to listen to this presentation, you are bound by this disclaimer. Also, please note that the results we will discuss in this presentation are unaudited.

With the formalities out of the way, I would now like to hand over to Thomas for his opening remarks.

Thank you, Eric. Good morning, everyone. First of all, I would like to honor to be nominated for election as Executive Director and CEO of Flow Traders at the Special General Meeting later today. I've met over the past 2 months, many talented and ambitious people, and I'm impressed by the achievements we have made over the past 2 decades, establishing Flow Traders as one of the leading market makers. I'm excited about the company's future growth and eager to contribute my experience and expertise to help Flow Traders to the next level.

Moving to the trading update. In the third quarter of 2025, the trading environment was less active. Volatility continued to drop following the slowdown in May and June, impacting all asset classes and regions. This resulted in a decrease of our net trading income to EUR 78.3 million, lower compared to the second quarter and when compared to the same period a year ago. Both periods were marked by significant strikes of volatility.

Flow Traders ETP value traded increased by 17% in the quarter compared to last year. Total income came in at EUR 80.5 million for the quarter, which included a EUR 2.1 million gain in other income. Our fixed operating expense this quarter came in 14% higher than the same quarter last year and 3% higher than the second quarter this year. This increase is in line with our plan, and we continue to invest in having talent in targeted areas and scale our technology.

Additionally, this quarter, we had EUR 0.3 million in impairments on intangible assets tied to our digital assets trading group. Given our relatively fixed cost base and high operating leverage, we generated an EBITDA of EUR 19.4 million in the quarter. Year-to-date, EBITDA came in at EUR 149.8 million. Net profit for the quarter came in at EUR 10.9 million with a basic and diluted EPS of EUR 0.25. Year-to-date, net profit came in at EUR 98.5 million with basic EPS of EUR 2.26. Finally, earlier today, we announced in a separate press release that we secured 2 new credit facilities.

I will now hand it over to Alex for the next few slides.

Thanks, Thomas. Good morning, all. As indicated at the top left of this slide, market ETP value traded increased by 47% year-over-year and by 5% compared to the previous quarter. Implied volatility measured by VIX decreased by 7% from last year and by 32% from last quarter. Furthermore, total ETP assets under management grew by 7% this quarter and 21% year-over-year.

We're approaching EUR 16 trillion AUM, driven by ongoing fund inflows and overall market strength. ETP velocity slightly declined from last quarter, but remained higher than last year, driven mostly by the U.S. and Asia. In summary, the long-term industry trend within the ETP universe continues to be strong.

I will now move on to the dynamics within the fixed income and crypto markets and hand it over to Marc.

Thanks, Alex. Over to the fixed income and crypto markets. Credit market trading volumes rose compared to last year but fell from the previous quarter. Volatility, as measured by the MOVE Index, significantly decreased both yearly and quarterly. Trading volumes in digital assets increased both compared to last year and last quarter. With cryptocurrency prices almost doubling, global crypto ETP turnover more than doubled compared to last year in the second quarter. However, Bitcoin volatility saw a significant decline, both annually and quarterly.

Let's move to the next slide. Here, we present an overview of regional performance for the quarter. As mentioned earlier, the market ETP value traded increased substantially compared to the same period last year. This was largely driven by the Americas and Asia. Quarter-on-quarter, it saw a modest increase driven fully by China.

Let's start with Europe. We kept our position as a leading ETP liquidity provider with over 25% market share. The quarter led to lower-than-expected results, resulting in a lower contribution from one of our key profit centers.

Now to Americas. Volatility continued to decline over the summer months following a volatile start to the year. As a result, our third-quarter results came in below expectations versus last year, given the volume levels.

Moving to Asia. The results reflect a more muted quarter compared to last year, largely because of the DOJ event in August and the anticipation of China's stimulus that boosted activity in 2024. Most of the volume increase in Asia came from onshore ETF trading in China. Our participation there is still limited due to capital constraints. The APAC region remains a key focus area for the firm.

On digital assets, increased volumes and prices led to significant increases in crypto ETP value traded. However, this was offset by lower volatility, both year-on-year and quarter-on-quarter. Therefore, performance levels were relatively comparable to last year. We are focusing on expanding our partnerships to advance the tokenization of real-world assets and to deepen liquidity across key crypto platforms.

Moving on to the next slide. Now let's look at expenses. Fixed operating expenses in the quarter increased by 14% year-on-year and 3% quarter-on-quarter. This was mostly due to increased employee and other expenses and was in line with our plan. We delivered a 24% EBITDA margin this quarter, and this reflects our flexible compensation philosophy, which aligns us with our shareholders.

Moving on. At the end of the quarter, we had 622 full-time employees. This is up from 607 at the end of the second quarter. Looking ahead for the year, we expect our fixed operating expenses to be between EUR 200 million and EUR 205 million. The main drivers are investments in technology and hiring experts in key growth areas. We also expect some savings from better operational efficiency.

I will now hand it over to Thomas for the next slide.

Thank you, Alex and Marc. Here, we are looking at the progression of our trading capital base, the return on trading capital, and respectively, the growth of shareholder equity. At the end of the third quarter, we have increased our trading capital 36% since the announcement of our trading capital expansion plan in July 2024. We have overall generated a 68% return on average trading capital over 12 months despite such a rapid increase. This does validate our decision to retain additional earnings for reinvestment into trading capital.

Our shareholders' equity also continued to grow, increasing by EUR 13 million to EUR 830 million at the end of the quarter. Due to the more quiet market conditions during this quarter, our return on average trading capital slightly decreased to 68% and our return on equity decreased to 22%. In addition, and as mentioned earlier, we have just secured a EUR 200 million private credit facility and a EUR 75 million revolver from Benefit Street Partners and Stone Point Credit, 2 leading private asset managers.

Altogether, these different initiatives increase our trading capital by more than 70%. This will allow us to increase our capacity to provide more liquidity, be more active as a market maker, and support our growth. We are also confident that we will continue to generate over 50% return on trading capital over the course of our business, given our existing trading strategies and capabilities.

I will now hand the call back to Eric.

Thanks, Thomas. This concludes the formal part of our presentation. We would now like to open up the floor for any questions you may have. Operator?

[Operator Instructions] Our first question comes from Julian Dobrovolschi from ABN AMRO-ODDO BHF.

Maybe to start with, Thomas, a warm welcome from my side, and good luck at Flow Traders. Before diving into the numbers, can you kind of share with us what appeals to you at Flow Traders in the first place when you took the CEO role?

And broadly, if you can speak about the company's strengths from your point of view now that your kind of in the job for a couple of weeks? And then also, if you already identified a couple of pockets of improvement in the business. Just curious how do you broadly look at the company? And then I have a couple of follow-ups on the quarterly performance.

Thank you, Julian. And thank you for the welcome. And overall, I'm going to use that call to thank all our employees and partners for the very warm welcome and support I have received over the past few weeks.

I think Flow Trader has a unique USP, which is that we are an incredibly talented and knowledgeable company that has been a specialist in ETP for now 2 decades, with this market developing at accelerated pace, not only in the traditional environment, U.S., Europe, but also in new markets like Asia. And I believe that this historical strength is extremely important.

The second element we have been very impressed about is that as much as we talk about investing more in technology, and we will continue to invest more in technology, I have found a team of professionals from front office to risk, to back office to legal, the team in Europe, Asia and the U.S. that are extremely committed to deliver on the commitment that we made to the Board when the capital expansion plan was delivered. So, we have a very motivated and enthusiastic team that is ready for the new challenge and the new development we're going through.

If I were to pinpoint a few additional points that I find very interesting with Flow Traders, one of them is obviously our historical presence, not only in the U.S. but in Asia, which is a key area of focus for us for the next few years. And we've been a market maker in Asia for a long time. And I will also add the incredible connectivity both from a technical standpoint in terms of market and technical connectivity, but also the great relationship we have formed over the past few years and few decades with most of the strategic counterparts and players in the market we want to invest in.

And last but probably not least, I think we also need to acknowledge that Flow has been one of the early movers and early believers into the digital assets and crypto market. And while maintaining our traditional risk profile, we've managed to develop knowledge and capabilities in this fast-developing market that are probably second to none today in the market.

Clear.

Have I answered everything, or did I forget something?

Yes. I think I was also curious if you already kind of identified some, let's say, low-hanging fruits in terms of improvement. And if you can share that with us already.

I think everybody wants low-hanging fruit. I would say that for me, the lowest hanging fruit, maybe the one I feel very comfortable with, is that we need to acknowledge that it's a company that, up until the summer of 2024, was used to work in a very capital-constrained environment. And thanks to the work by the Board, thanks to by the team, thanks to the work by the finance team, we are now in a world where our expansion in terms of capital is very, very rapid.

And I think, to some extent, low-hanging fruit I can see is how to make sure that the way we organize our set, we allocate the capital dynamically, we get used to be a bigger trading firm and we maximize every single opportunity we have is probably one of the low-hanging fruit because we have the knowledge, we have the skill set, we have the product.

We are still learning how to maximize this inflow of capital, and it will be a learning curve that I'm going to take with me and the leadership team. And also, I will use my background as a former trader and market guy for 20 years to really support the management team and the trading to make sure that we maximize these opportunities over the short term, while we also use that capital to build a number of new products, strategy, technology over the medium to long-term.

Clear. So, I think what you said in the last -- let's say, in the last sentences is pretty much kind of an extension to my questions, predominantly on the trading capital itself.

So, if you can kind of run us through the strategy of this EUR 150 million net. So, if you take out also the EUR 25 million that you're going to pay back to the banks, so EUR 150 million net on trading capital strategy in terms of deployment. And maybe if you can say something extra on the regional allocation, asset class allocation, perhaps something on returns on trading capital, et cetera. So, anything that you can find interesting regarding the strategic deployment of this extra buffer, I'd appreciate that.

And then also next to that, what kind of operating leverage do you think you can achieve after the full deployment of this trading capital? And perhaps operationally, what do you think Flow needs to change to be able to actually deploy successfully this extra capital buffer?

Alex, do you want to take it?

Yes, happy to take question, Julien, about the EUR 150 million net. So, we -- this is a facility we secured for the long term. So, it will be a -- it's a 6-year facility. So, we believe that if there's now a bound of volatility, we can deploy everything at very accretive returns. But at the same time, we will -- we aim to increase the baseline and to find new strategies where we gradually deploy the rest of the capital.

So, in -- we're confident that also with the generation of additional profits and this facility that speed things up, we will grow into new strategies are able to trade bigger sizes. The ETF market alone still is growing 10% to 15% per year. So that warrants a bigger book and more trading capital. And then we have specific growth areas like, for example, crypto. Asia is a big strategic area for us. So there, we'll deploy the additional capital.

And maybe another question you had is that I don't feel like our current operational setup or organizational setup is not allowed to cater for this additional capital. We have -- obviously, as a market maker, we have a very much tech-orientated business. So, we can scale our operation, we can scale our volumes we can scale our sizes without significant additional cost to put in. Our risk framework and our risk management, our compliance framework and compliance management, our operational framework are more than capable of absorbing this additional trading activity.

Perfect. And is there then kind of an indication that it could give us regarding the cost guidance for '26?

Not yet. I've just been here for 2 months.

The next question comes from Mike Werner from UBS.

Welcome aboard, Thomas. Two questions, please. First, when you talk about the expansion into Asia, I think you mentioned earlier that a good portion of the volumes are currently happening within China. And obviously, there's certain capital controls there. How important is China to that expansion in Asia for you? That's the first question.

And the second question, we've seen a number of companies reporting Q3 results. Trading activity, revenues tended to be pretty good, obviously, not as strong as Q2, but definitely higher than where we were last year. I saw from some of the listed market makers as well. And again, Flow Traders' decline in revenue is a bit of, I guess, kind of stands out given the trends that we have seen elsewhere.

So, I was just wondering, was there anything specific in terms of the mix or products or strategies that Flow was implementing where, yes, on a year-on-year basis and relative to the past couple of quarters, and again, not just Q2, we saw a decline in NTI.

I will start to answer a bit and then I will let Alex and Marc complete. So, regarding Asia, and again, when we say Asia, as you rightly mentioned, Asia is a big continent with a lot of different countries. China is part of our strategic focus. We are very aware of the capital constraint and the capital controls. As part of our business development, we have also managed to set up new structure and financing capabilities for Asia in general that will be able to allocate our -- across different activities.

To answer back to your specific question, yes, China is one -- will be one of our strategic country of focus. I've already been in Hong Kong meeting our teams in September, and we're going to have some dedicated focus. So, we're having some dedicated focus on the most efficient way to deploy over there. But Asia in general, China in particular, but not only is an area where the West is growing very fast and an area where the development of markets has caught up over the past few years to European and U.S. market. One of the key player in that market in Asia, including in the China market.

Regarding the questions about our performance, and I will let Alex and Marc reply to a little bit better. Yes, we would have liked to do more. Is it the best quarter we have ever had, I would say, in terms of performance? No. On the other hand, we don't see that at all as a structural headwind. It does happen from time to time that for one quarter to another, we underperform our peer, or we underperformed our expectation, which has been the case in Q3. I don't see that the management team doesn't see that as a structural issue.

And maybe Alex and Marc can say a bit more about it.

Yes. Yes, let's not forget, indeed, we have just had three running quarters over EUR 100 million. Our business, the quarter-on-quarter can be a bit more volatile. As said, we're not happy with the results. But Q4, while still young, already shows an improvement from the performance. So, we don't see it as a structural thing. We're still committed to our key markets as well as new growth initiatives that we have on the agenda.

All right. We can now head to the written questions that have been submitted. The first question reads, we know Flow Traders' model is well suited to periods of market volatility. I'm curious about the upper end of that spectrum. How do you manage and mitigate risks during moments of extreme market turbulence? Could you comment on how the firm managed through the crypto volatility on October 10?

Yes, I can take that question. The question is, I believe, from Igor. Great question. So let me help to explain the answer to the question. Our systems are optimized for any level of volatility, and we perform very well in those moments of volatility. Everything in our system is automated. Our risk management is optimized over decades, and the team has multiple decades of experience. After every event, we improve our strategies and risk controls such that we will be even better on the next event. In the crypto volatility of October 10, we saw extreme situations and our systems performed well. We came out with a profit.

Given that we don't have any more questions, I just wanted to add a few words before Eric can conclude the call, sorry. So, first of all, I would like really to thank the team and their commitment in welcoming me. I would like to give a special thanks to the -- all the teams in finance, legal and as well as our 2 partners who have successfully closed this strategic financing for Flow Traders that will help us accelerate our growth.

I would also like to thank all the key partners that have been able to meet and have still much more to meet over the next few weeks that have shown their commitment and their trust in Flow Traders. As we have also mentioned in the document published, we will organize next year Capital Markets Day where we will be presenting an update of our strategy, our ambition and our expansion plan.

Give me a few months. Again, I still have a lot to learn, and the team is really working hard to putting me up to speed. But overall, I'm extremely confident that we are one of the European and one of the global leader in our markets. I'm very comfortable. I'm very confident with the support I've received from the exec teams. I would like also to thank the Board for their support over the past 2 weeks, and I'm very much looking forward to the SGM in a couple of hours, who hopefully will confirm me as a new CEO. Thank you very much.

Eric?

Great. So, thank you, everyone, for dialing in today. Please note that we will host our next analyst call when we release our fourth quarter results next February. Details and timing for the call will follow in due course. This now ends the call. Thanks, and have a great day.