IG Group Holdings Stock

Great. Thank you, and welcome to those of you in the room, and welcome to those of you that are joining us online. You'll all be relieved to know as I was, that no AI was injured in the making of that video, although one of the characters apparently only had three fingers in the first edit.

So I'm excited to be here today. I think this is an opportunity to show you what we've built, what we're building and where we go next in terms of the next phase of IG's growth. Over the next 45 to 50 minutes, you'll hear from me and some of our colleagues. And then we're going to go straight into questions from the room and other questions from those joining us online.

If we go back to March, on the next slide, please, we initiated a strategic review. I felt given the momentum in the business then, there was an opportunity to do that and in truth the necessity to do that to think about what this group would look like in the years to come. As we kind of formally conclude that review now, we are announcing or have announced three material decisions. I guess starting at the end, the acquisition of Underdog will change the group for the future. Our U.K. revenue base will be now about 25% of the group rather than the historic focus and dependency in the U.K. And in that context, the redomicile to Jersey gives us strategic and financial flexibility in the years ahead. And with that review, we did work on what the company looked like on the inside as well that led to a refreshed organizational model that you will hear more about today. We think now more than ever that high-quality decision-making needs to be made at pace to best address the customer needs across the different verticals that we operate in.

And we think then that we've made good progress. And I'm very happy with that progress. Back in July 2024, we talked about needing to close product gaps and simplify our propositions to address customer needs. We've shown we can acquire customers efficiently and at a scale we haven't in many years. We've shown that we can grow trading revenues. Like markets, turnaround operating businesses don't move in a straight line, and we fully recognize the disappointment of RtV, return to volume, that was delivered in Q3, and we'll talk more about that as you'd expect today. But I'm happy with the progress that we're making. I'm proud of the momentum in the business, and I'm looking forward with excitement to the years ahead.

If we go then to -- this, I think, is a key slide. We've talked for a long time about how active customer numbers shows evidence of progress and retaining those customers as we are and increasing engagement with those customers through multiple products as we are is a core platform is a core part of the premise as we look forward. And you'll hear more this afternoon about the progress that Michael Healy and his team have made in the U.K. and how we have confidence from that in how we can roll that out in other geographies around the world.

And as we said two years ago in July '24, we have to close product gaps to grow active customers. Our -- we will talk more about this in the next few minutes, but our unified proposition is now live in the U.K. We're bringing together trading, investing and entertainment. This is a significant milestone for IG, and Michael will talk more about that. And the acquisition of Underdog, once delivered, will further add both scope market to grow in, but also capability to accelerate that growth.

Now you've seen a version of this slide before. We operate in very large addressable markets. Our penetration is low. Even modest share growth can transform the economics of this business and we're making progress. Our focus is on delivering great product at pace to capture this share growth. U.S. adds more -- sorry, Underdog adds more verticals, adds access to U.S. fantasy sports, gaming and prediction markets that broadens our opportunity and expands our reach geographically, specifically into the United States.

And we believe, as we've said before, that strong structural drivers underpin growth in these markets. Governments are increasingly incentivizing savings and investment. People are increasingly trading and investing more for themselves and a younger mobile-first generation is now engaging with markets in a different way than previously. And we're positioning IG to capture more of this opportunity, giving customers the products they want to manage their own finances and to act on their own views or their own opinions of these markets.

And we talk then about convergence, and I think it's worth explaining what we think that means and why it matters for IG. But the same customer wants to do several things. We're long past the kind of Benjamin Franklin view of the world, and we have customers now who want to trade in some markets, invest in others, hold crypto, take positions on the outcome of an event or even a sports event. And the lines are blurred between trading, investing and entertainment. And IG is well positioned to capture that. We have a global multi-asset platform that serves people who want to engage, who want to trade, who want to invest, who want to take a position. We have trusted brands that have been built up over years around engagement, education, around entertainment. And with Underdog now, we have access to fantasy sports and prediction markets. Delivering on this opportunity needs the right organizational model and the right team.

And this team here, you know Clifford, you know me. Some of you have met Michael before. You'll meet some more of them of the team today. Jeremy Levine presented on the 8th of October, and some of you met him around then. But I also want to call out a few other people who aren't with us in the room today. Sarah Gore Langton, runs risk for us has been with IG for 10, almost 11 years. She and her team add value day-to-day by challenging our thinking, by helping protect our customers, by helping protect our employees, by keeping us on the right side of regulators in terms of compliance, in terms of risk, in terms of trading. And doing that with centers of excellence in London allows us to accelerate our growth around the world. Louisa Meyer has a background in media, has a background in betting. She's worked in industries that have consolidated. And if you go back to the slides of the summer of '24, we talked about the cultural change that was underpinning the growth we were pursuing. And as we think harder about compensation, as we think harder about incentives, as we think harder about culture, she and her team are also helping drive the transition that's necessary to deliver on the potential for the company.

So then turning to our priorities. Each division has its own priorities. The team will bring those to life today. Together, they underpin what you can expect from IG financially. that's strong diversified revenue growth, greater efficiency, enabling us to further invest in growth and a commitment to disciplined capital allocation.

And with that, I'll hand you over to Michael Healy. All yours.

Thank you, Breon, and good afternoon, everyone. I joined IG at the start of 2025, having spent the previous 15 years working in fast-growing and entrepreneurial consumer-facing businesses, including Deliveroo, Flutter and Ryanair. My experience is centered around P&L management and delivering strategic change. I initially joined IG to run our U.K. business, our largest and most mature market. I was attracted by the structural tailwinds Breon articulated earlier, the latent potential of the business as well as the team's clear appetite for growth and change. In July, my remit grew to cover all our direct-to-consumer business outside of North America.

Today, I'll cover the playbook we built in the U.K. and how we now take it across all of IG Consumer. First, a quick look at what IG Consumer is today. IG Consumer is a scaled, self-directed online investing and trading business across the U.K., Asia Pacific and Europe, with total revenue over the last 12 months of GBP 878 million. It's highly profitable and cash generative with outstanding unit economics. Our brand is trusted and our derivatives and regulatory expertise is hard to replicate. The strong foundations are not enough. We want faster growth, and we want greater relevance, and we've begun to deliver both.

This slide shows the U.K.'s journey over the last 21 months. When I arrived, U.K. growth was low, and we were a narrow OTC specialist. Competitors were moving faster and spending more in marketing, and we've been slow to respond to changing customer needs. I was convinced we had a clear right to win in the U.K., but we have to change how we operated. Our North Star is now sustainable, active customer-led growth. A multiproduct proposition, which complements rather than replaces our OTC business is how we deliver it. We have changed how we acquire customers from a narrow fixed budget approach to spending that flexes with demand and customer value. More than 50% of new customers now place their first trade outside OTC. And these are the next generation of retail traders. They underpin future growth in our OTC business. And encouragingly, those customers that have cross-sold to OTC products to date are worth the same as the retail OTC customers we acquire directly.

We've done this with commercial discipline and stronger marketing, tech and analytics, which gives us the confidence to keep investing. And our strategy is working and growth is accelerating. U.K. active customers are up 22% this year after 3% growth last year and a decline the year before. The quality of actives growth in the U.K. is also superior to that in other markets. The actives growth is converting into revenue growth. Since the playbook launched in early 2025, the U.K. has grown revenue twice as fast as the rest of IG consumer on a CAGR basis. We believe this approach transfers internationally, and our new consumer organization lets us apply it more broadly. The engine is the same everywhere, one platform, a data-led acquisition model and a digital-first service model. What changes locally is product range, tax wrappers, regulation and brand awareness. Consolidating around a single international platform gives us additional capacity to address these local nuances.

We're now rallying IG Consumer around one vision to build a leading international platform for active investors. Our U.K. success -- or sorry, we choose these words carefully. Our U.K. success comes from focusing on the customers where we have the most experience and credibility, active investors, people who have a view and choose to act on it in the markets. We're not trying to serve everyone. Mass market access is crowded and not our core focus. Instead, we build for engaged investors. And we say investors, not just traders because our customer base and our product range is broadening. International platform means one platform that scales across all of IG Consumer customers and markets, giving us more pace and higher operating leverage.

We deliver on this vision through three priorities: broaden and enrich our proposition, invest in our brand and enhance efficiency. Turning first to broadening our proposition. Over 18 months, we've built -- we've rebuilt our customer-facing apps and websites from scratch. One platform now covers CFDs, spread betting, shared dealing, crypto and from later in Q4 2026, prediction markets. It is mobile first, shaped by customer research and designed to drive multiproduct use and cross-sell. The rollout is underway in the U.K. and reaches our international markets during 2027. Early results have been encouraging. And this product matters for three reasons: a much better experience for existing customers, access to a broader target market and faster product delivery on a single, more reliable code base. Here's a short video.

[Presentation]

I want to spend a moment on our first move into prediction markets outside of the U.S. We see strong appetite for this product in the U.K. Customers find it appealing and traffic to prediction market platforms is growing. But the U.K. is different. Regulation is split between two regulators and retail customers cannot trade binary options. Despite this complexity, we have found a route to market with a regulated product that addresses this growing customer demand. Prediction markets will launch later in Q4 2026 for professional investors initially, offering 24/5 tax-free trading across a range of financial assets. We've also applied for a U.K. gambling license and expect to broaden our target market and add politics, entertainment and sports markets in early 2027. This planned launch also shows a change in culture. We used to hold back where regulation was uncertain. Now we embrace and solve for changing customer needs.

The completed and planned upgrades we've made to our proposition are guided by our desire to build a compelling platform for active investors. Active investors are more likely to use several products, and those customers are worth more and stay longer. In the U.K., we can see this working. First trades on the second product are up 65% year-on-year. Multiproduct customers currently generate nearly 3x the ARPU of single product customers and our 12-month retention is 52% higher. And unit economics have to date held as we have scaled acquisition. The customers who cross-sell into OTC products are worth the same as the retail OTC customers we acquire directly. This creates a flywheel, more multiproduct customers, higher value and retention, faster paybacks and more capacity to invest in marketing. We expect product improvements like our unified proposition will also support improved cross-sell rates over time. This flywheel already powers the U.K., and it's still early in our international markets.

Our priorities from here are clear: roll out the unified proposition internationally, broaden the markets, instruments and tax wrappers available to customers, enrich the experience with better tooling and expand into adjacencies such as predictions. Together, they deepen our share of wallet and open IG to new customers.

Turning to our second priority, investing in our brand. Our unit economics give us the confidence to invest. Marketing pays back in about six months and customer value over the first 36 months of our lifetime is currently around 4x acquisition costs. We've held these returns while raising marketing from 6% of revenue in 2024 to 10% in the first half of this year and while simultaneously attracting a more diverse customer mix. The peer average is 16%. So we believe there's room to invest more at attractive returns, and we will keep scaling only while paybacks hold at acceptable levels. That step-up rest on a rebuilt marketing engine powered by data, analytics and AI. We've widened our reach. We compete where new investors start such as shared Ding and spot crypto. And we now use more than 15 channels, up from 6, including AI search tools. We shift spend in real time towards the channels, products and markets that convert best and bring in the most valuable customers. Onboarding is now largely automated. 89% of Africans are verified instantly. And so far, this has been built mostly in the U.K., but is now mature enough to roll it out across other markets.

Alongside that, we are being bolder with the IG brand so that it stands out. We speak up for customers in the media and with regulators as a distinctive voice for wealth creation. And partnerships across traditional and new media reach a much broader audience. Here's an early reveal of our new TV ad, which is being finalized ahead of a rollout across the U.K. next month.

[Presentation]

U.K. where we track this best shows the clearest evidence of progress. Compared with last year, U.K. brand search is up 26%. Awareness is up 29% and consideration is up 48%. And importantly, that interest is converting. First trades across IG Consumer are up 81% at the paybacks I described. We are unlocking the potential of the IG brand.

Our third priority is efficiency, which helps us fund growth ourselves. I'll start with pricing. We've made our pricing smarter, so the spreads we offer better reflect market conditions and the underlying costs to hedge. That allows us to consistently offer deep liquidity and wide market availability, including 24/7 markets, weekend markets and pre-IPO markets. We've also reinvested part of the gain in accessibility, such as lower minimum trade sizes and zero commission share dealing. Overall, customer income per GBP 1 million traded is up 11% and customers' perception of value has also improved.

On costs, we are reshaping our cost base to fund the next phase of growth. Our recent reorganization removed layers and increased talent density in fewer locations. It targets a reduction of about 30% in IG consumers' workforce. Part of this is enabled by automation and AI, which are lifting productivity. AI has delivered an eightfold gain in engineering productivity in parts of our tech organization and 72% of digital chat queries are now resolved by AI. More is to come from integrating free trade and independent reserve, optimizing marketing and from further rollout of our AI-first service model. As a result, cost to serve per customer is down 10% year-on-year, and U.K. Net Promoter Score is up 6 percentage points. We're encouraged by the progress, and we see more to come.

Our confidence in delivering the plans we just discussed rests on our reshaped talent profile. We have augmented our historic strength in derivatives and trading capability with talent from high-quality and high-growth tech organizations. The capability these colleagues bring play a key part in delivering our future growth.

There are four things I want you to take away from this part of today's presentation. First, we have shown a credible path to sustainable actives-led multiproduct growth in our core market, the U.K. Second, we're upgrading this playbook with the rollout of our unified proposition, our most material proposition uplift in over a decade. We are also rolling out our approach across IG consumer. Third, our unit economics support continued investment. And fourth, we see a meaningful opportunity to fund much of that growth through efficiency. Our task is clear: build on this progress and scale it across IG Consumers markets to become a leading international platform for active investors.

I'll now hand over to Andy Biggs, who's going to cover IG Securities.

Thanks, Michael, and good afternoon. I'm Andy Biggs, CEO of IG Securities. I spent my career in liquidity, trading and risk management. I've built a business from zero to trading $20 billion a day and spent eight years at Finalto, a nonbank liquidity provider and trading technology business, including the last two years as CEO. Leaving was a tough decision, but I joined IG in April because I saw a huge opportunity to improve our trading strategies while bringing trading and technology closer together so that improvements in one can drive improvements in the other.

IG Securities brings together three capabilities: trading and liquidity provision, Prime, our institutional and B2B2C business and the platform technology that powers the group. The people who price and manage risk now work alongside the people who build the systems they use. These parts reinforce one another. Retail flow enables us to create unique liquidity for Prime and institutional flow helps us diversify and manage retail risk. Platform technology is a solid base of IG runs off from security -- from infrastructure and security to data and core trading systems. I'm looking forward to explaining why we're confident in our market-making approach. I'll cover how the model works, what the data shows, including Q3 and what we're changing.

Market making is the core of what we do. We give our customers a price increasingly 24/7, so they can express a view on the market. We do that in over 15,000 markets, and we cross tens of billions of dollars of notional volume every day. Market making at IG comes down to three decisions: pricing, risk management and hedging. We compete on the quality, speed and consistency of our prices and execution. Our core income is the fee and commission on each OTC trade, including funding costs. Each trade offers an opportunity to capture the transaction fee or spread. How much we capture is supported by risk management and hedging. Our clients are buying and selling all the time and much of it nets off or offsets. For the remainder, we have a choice. We can hold the risk for longer, which gives more time for flow to offset, but exposes us to more market risk or we can hedge it with counterparties. Hedging studies our revenue, but is costly. We strike that balance asset by asset within board-approved limits.

So how does this show up in our P&L? Client income is the fee, commission and funding income we make on every trade. In our OTC business, we deduct our hedging costs and then add or subtract performance from any unhedged market risk. What's left is net trading revenue, which we measure as return to volume or RtV, net trading revenue as a percentage of client income.

In relation to RtV, let me show you where we were, where we are and where we're going. The approach we used before July 2025 served IG well, but we saw an opportunity to improve it. At the end of the first half of 2025, we rolled out measures that increased LTV by capturing more spread income and lowering hedging costs. We aligned our spreads more closely with the underlying market. This improved the experience for customers trading in larger sizes whilst better reflecting the cost of hedging.

We also widened market risk limits and deployed new algorithms let us hedge more passively. Looking forward, we're building three capabilities: First, sharper low latency pricing, allowing us to go from making 10 decisions a second to 1,000. Second, risk management strategies extended across more asset classes and types of flow, for example, managing B2B and B2B2C differently. Third, more efficient hedging, which lowers our effective cost without taking more market risk, giving us more options on strategies. In short, we've chosen to hold more risk, and now we're continuing to build the capabilities to price and hold it better.

Since July 2025, RtV has averaged around 80%, above our long-term average. As we said at the time, we expect a higher average over time with greater short-term variability. LTV is influenced by product mix, products with wider spreads are generally more volatile and more expensive to hedge. IG's flow tends to weight towards indices more than peers. 2026 is lower than 2025 so far. Q1 saw extreme swings in commodities, including bullion and oil, which are expensive to hedge. Q2 was strong. Q3 was the softest quarter of the year, which I'll come to shortly. The next slide puts that variability in context. In July 2025, we changed how we manage risk. We chose to hold more risk for longer.

This slide shows what that's meant for RtV. Each curve shows the range of quarterly RtV outcomes we'd expect based on actual trading results. The gray curve is our previous approach from 2018 to mid-2025. The blue curve is our new approach. Two things stand out. First, the average has moved up from 75% to 80%. Second, the range has widened. The gray curve is cool and narrow, predictable but capped. The blue curve is lower and broader, and most of that extra width sits above our historical average, not below it. This is the trade-off we choose deliberately higher long-term average in exchange for more variation from quarter-to-quarter. And that variation will show up in individual quarters. Q3 2026 at 70% is a good example. It sits within the modeled range. And on the next slide, we'll show you what drove it.

Every strategy has conditions it finds harder. Q3 was one of them, and these two charts show why. Our business earns more when clients have more to trade. For most of the quarter, implied volatility was subdued with the VIX averaging closest to its lowest level in two years. That gave clients fewer opportunities to trade and lowered our rate of internalization. At the same time, the NASDAQ moved within a narrow range, which made it harder for us to capture the full transaction fee. Lower volatility, combined with range bound markets is the most challenging environment for our strategy.

So how is our historical strategy fared in the same conditions? Our back testing indicates it would have delivered a Q3 RtV of around 70%, broadly in line with what we achieved. Q3 performance reflected cyclical market conditions. We're confident the model is working as expected, and we continue to work on enhancing it. Over time, we expect to deliver a structurally higher RtV with greater variation quarter-to-quarter.

Turning to platform technology. Everything I've just described depends on technology. In our business, it isn't a support function. It's how we price, manage risk and deliver for our clients. Three programs give trading the stability, speed and foundation to price and manage risk and hedge in more ways. First, modernization. This simplifies older systems and improve stability and security. It's also one of the places where we're using AI at scale today. AI-assisted tooling is preparing our services for cloud migration and moving them on to modern deployment pipelines. We readied 640 services in six months, cutting the time per service from days to hours. That frees our engineers to focus on what differentiates us, and it means each engineer can deliver more. Second, trading system uplift brings faster pricing and better tools. That's what enables the sharper pricing and broader range of risk strategies I described earlier. Third is cloud migration. This lets us deliver products faster and scale easier with improved security, while latency sensitive pricing stays on dedicated infrastructure. All three are being delivered within our existing investment plans.

IG Prime brings the pricing and risk management I've spoken about earlier to institutional clients. In my prior role at Finalto, I gained significant experience in how best to run and scale businesses similar to our Prime business. I see a lot of potential here, and it's one of the important reasons I joined. Liquidity and trading is its established core. As we move to more advanced market-making approach, we see real potential to deepen that with strong products and greater wallet share. Prime brokerage diversifies us into reoccurring revenue from financing and custody, which is less dependent on trading outcome. And white label puts IG's technology in the hands of partners under their own brand, opening up new geographies and client segments without us having to build that distribution ourselves.

In May, we launched our first with Investec Prime Services. Prime is a small part of IG today, but we start with real advantages. IG's reputation as a leading retail broker, our balance sheet strength, proven technology and the depth of liquidity our retail flow provides. The operating model to bring this all together is built on traders, quants and engineers working as one team. We have four dedicated asset class desks that have embedded IG knowledge. We're pairing that with a London-based quant team with new expertise and engineers working alongside both. We're investing in our quant team with talent from the likes of Citadel Securities, Qube, Susquehanna. It's important to say that we're not trying to compete with these firms. We recognize that the external market talent can be used to improve how we manage retail flow and the liquidity proposition for Prime. Bringing engineers to work alongside trading and quant teams to shorten the time from research to production from weeks to days, giving us faster iteration on improving aspects of trading. All of this happens within clear limits. We measure risk thoroughly and hold people accountable, which is what allows us to take more risk with confidence.

I'll leave you with four key takeaways. IG Securities prices and manages risk on IG's customer flow, builds the technology the group runs on and runs IG Prime. Since mid-2025, the enhanced measures have, on average, delivered an RtV above our long term -- our long-run average with more variability. We expect sharper pricing, a portfolio of risk strategies and more efficient hedging to improve RtV over time. Prime brings the same approach but to a broader institutional business and gives us exposure to reoccurring revenue and stronger growth. Thank you.

I'll now hand over to Mike.

Thanks, Andy. Good afternoon, everyone. I'm Mike Vaughan, CEO of tastytrade. My career has been split between building and backing companies from early-stage start-ups to growth stage businesses in Silicon Valley, New York and now in Chicago. In my recent operating role as COO of Venmo, I helped take the business from its early days through its acquisition by PayPal, then scaled it to more than 40 million active users and over $100 billion in annual payment volume, making it the category-defining P2P payments product in the U.S.

I saw something rare at tastytrade, a highly profitable business, customers who are quite loyal in a market that is growing with significant upside potential. There aren't many places where all those factors exist. I was brought on 12 months ago to shape a team and a product that will capitalize on this opportunity. I'm excited to share more about where tastytrade has been and where we're going.

Tastytrade is in a strong position today. We operate in a fast-growing market where U.S. options volume is up over 75% since 2021. tastytrade's revenue has outpaced the market, up 92% since the IG acquisition in the same year. Our core customer is an experienced options-focused trader, which has allowed us to build a business with compelling economics. Our marketing spend is highly efficient with a 7-month payback, more than 3x LTV to CAC over 36 months. And if we look over a longer time horizon, our LTV to CAC increases to over 6x, which speaks to the stickiness of our core customer. Even as revenue has nearly doubled, EBITDA margins have held in the mid-40s.

Now one thing you'll notice in the options volume chart is a rapid expansion over the last two years. The question is, what's happening and how do we get a bigger piece of that pie? Let's start with the first part of that question. What's happening? Younger investors are trading options in record numbers, and we're underrepresented with them. Traders aged 18 to 34 make up 39% of U.S. options traders, nearly double the share on tastytrade's customer base. At the same time, 46% of active U.S. investors now place trades on mobile compared with 29% of tastytrade customers. Traders increasingly work across asset classes. Those who also use other platforms average 3.4 products versus 2.5 for those who are exclusive to us. tastytrade built a best-in-class options platform when trading derivatives meant options and futures. The market has expanded. And by bringing that same quality to stocks, crypto, prediction markets and perps, we can meet that demand, build deeper, more valuable customer relationships.

Now how do we get a bigger piece of the fastest-growing part of that pie? Let me be clear upfront. This doesn't change our focus on our core options trader. We'll keep investing in what they love, tools, execution speed, customer service, community and education. Where we go next is a natural extension of that. We're building a more accessible, still sophisticated platform for trading more assets in more ways. We're not chasing beginners buying their first $10 of Tesla. We're building for investors who are ready to level up, meeting them earlier in their journey so we can acquire them efficiently and keep them as they grow into our core customer. We'll do that in three ways. First, a new mobile experience. It doesn't replace desktop, but it's built mobile-first with native AI, so traders no longer need desktop as a crunch. Second, product breadth, stocks, options, futures, crypto, prediction markets and more. That lets us acquire beyond options, cross-sell as traders explore and keep our core on our platform. And third, a refreshed brand with education and content at scale.

Tastylive was tastytrade's foundation from day 1, but it hadn't kept pace with how people consume content. We're rebuilding it to reach the next generation of traders wherever they are.

Now all these initiatives unlock a more efficient acquisition engine, open new cross-product opportunities, which helps us build a larger, more diverse customer base and leads to a more durable business. Critically, we can pursue this growth while maintaining our operating margins and relative cost structure because of the way technology and marketing are delivered today, lets us scale in a fraction of the time and in a fraction of the cost.

So how do you build a great product and a high-growth business? You start by building a great team. We've added people with experience taking businesses from zero to tens of millions of users at firms like PayPal, FanDuel, Robinhood, Fetch, Uber and others. They've lived the growth playbook. We've also brought in key talent from across the industry, companies like E*TRADE and Schwab to complement the experienced team we already have here at tastytrade. These are builders who know how to scale tech companies and operators who understand the active trader inside and out. tastytrade has never had this type of team, and these are the people who will take this business to the next level.

Now a little history. tastylive is our financial media network and content engine with daily live shows, YouTube streaming, newsletters, market coverage and education. It's where traders come to learn and where it all started for us. 15 years ago, tastytrade pioneered this category. We become the home for options education. This is still a strong pillar for us, but traders won't find us by accident. It's harder than ever to get your content to stand out. We've moved from one voice and one way to trade to an open collaborative platform. We now bring in experts from across the industry with different perspectives and different strategies. That gives our viewers more compelling content and gives us more reach through our collaborators' own followings.

The early results show that we can win beyond the core option trader. We've had triple-digit growth in organic views and engagements and millions of views from new audiences. tastytrade is taking the same path, modernize the experience, sharpen what our core loves, earn a wider customer base. tastylive shows it works. I hope that gives you a flavor of what we're doing at tastytrade. We're building on a profitable core options business while creating the experience to reach a new generation of traders younger, mobile, AI native and trading in new ways. And we've assembled a brilliant team to capture that growth without sacrificing our operating margins. Thank you.

I'll now hand it over to Clifford.

Thanks, Mike, and good afternoon to you all. I'll wrap up with the final segment on financials. You've heard the commercial priorities of each division. These will deliver the financial objectives set out here. First, strong diversified revenue growth with greater exposure to structural growth. Michael, Andy and Mike have set out how they're delivering this and Underdog adds further growth and diversification. Second, efficiency and profitability, lowering our cost to serve, investing efficiently in product and marketing and maintaining strong margins. And finally, disciplined capital allocation, an investment-grade credit rating, a progressive dividend per share and a clear M&A framework with excess cash returned to our shareholders.

So taking each in turn, starting with revenue. I'm proud of the progress we've made growing and diversifying the business. You can see here on the left that organic revenue has grown every year since 2023. Q3 revenue this year was disappointing and has explained why as well as our confidence in delivering a structurally higher RtV over time. We're operating within our expected parameters with room to improve further. Freetrade and Independent Reserve have been important steps in diversifying our products and customer base. Performance here has been mixed and the strategic logic remains sound and deeper integration will unlock their potential, as Michael set out. You can see here on the right, our revenue mix is developing well with contributions from those acquisitions.

In 2023, OTC derivatives were around 70% of revenue. Pro forma for Underdog in 2026, that falls to around 50% with fantasy sports and prediction markets at around 25%. That makes IG less reliant on any single product, more exposed to faster-growing markets and more resilient through the cycle. IG and Underdog's revenues show no correlation. So together, we expect lower revenue variability. Our sustained growth is valuable, provided we can deliver it efficiently, and we're all committed to strong cost discipline.

Our high-performance culture is driving down our cost to serve. I'm pleased with progress and clear that there's more for us to do. Here's what we've already done. Michael took you through it in consumer. We've simplified the operating model and taken out management layers, streamlined our office footprint and deployed digital servicing and AI. As a result, you can see on the left, the average headcount has fallen even as the business has grown. And on the right, cost to serve the customer is coming down nicely.

Here's what's still ahead, and it's meaningful. As Michael set out, our refreshed organizational model will deliver a reduction in the IG consumer workforce. We're scaling our AI-first servicing model, driving engineering productivity and further integrating free trade and independent reserve. We have more to do on efficiency in the U.S., a clear focus for me and the U.S. team. As revenues grow faster than costs, we open the jaws between the two, and that operating leverage funds our investment in growth while safeguarding margins.

Let me show you how we're putting that efficiency to work on the next slide. The slide here shows how we've reduced fixed remuneration as headcount has come down and reinvested those savings in marketing. The chart on the left shows that operating costs as a percentage of revenue have fallen between 2024 and the first half of this year with fixed remuneration and other costs down 5 points and marketing up 3. On the right, you can see marketing spend rising as a share of total revenue. And this is marketing that works. The lifetime value of an IG customer is a strong multiple of the cost of acquisition and our paybacks are under six months. Michael and Mike showed you the engine behind that in both consumer and tastytrade. So we intend to keep going. We see a clear room to invest more where the returns are this strong, funded from the efficiencies in our operating model, growing the business faster whilst protecting our margins.

Turning now to capital allocation. This slide shows the refinement of the framework that we set out in July last year, the principal change reflecting the Jersey redomicile, which I'll come to on the next slide. First, a strong balance sheet and a commitment to an investment-grade credit rating. To date, we've defined our strong balance sheet by reference to regulatory capital requirements. We've refreshed this as regulatory capital requirements after the Jersey redomicile will no longer apply at the consolidated group level. Second, we're maintaining our policy of a progressive dividend per share. Thirdly, disciplined M&A. Again, here, our policy is unchanged. We assess every opportunity against our clear return criteria. And finally, return capital not required for these priorities. We expect buybacks to resume in 2027, depending on share price performance and other demands on capital. In the past five years, IG has returned over GBP 1.6 billion to shareholders via dividends and buybacks.

Now a few moments here to explain the redomicile to Jersey. Today, the whole of IG Group is subject to capital requirements set by the U.K. FCA. This means non-U.K. businesses are required to meet capital requirements at the local subsidiary level and also fall into scope for U.K. capital requirements at a consolidated group level. That made sense historically when almost all our revenues came from the U.K. Following the Underdog transaction, the U.K. will account for less than 1/4 of group revenue, so a U.K.-wide group capital rule no longer fits the shape of our business.

Moving our holding company New Jersey creates a simpler structure aligned with our global footprint. Each of our regulated subsidiaries carries on and before complying with local regulation. What changes is that the U.K. capital requirements no longer apply across the entire group and only businesses with a U.K. parent will be subject to U.K. capital requirements. The result is a simpler, more capital-efficient structure, giving us greater financial and strategic flexibility as a group, where we remain fully committed to an investment-grade credit rating. We expect the redomicile to complete later this year or in early 2027, and the refined capital allocation framework takes effect after that.

Today, we're also reiterating our existing financial guidance. For 2026, on the left, we continue to expect mid-single-digit total revenue growth and a group EBITDA margin in the low 40s. This guidance is unchanged from the trading update we issued on the 2nd of October and three weeks into Q4, we're confident reiterating this today. Over the medium term, we're maintaining our stand-alone guidance of at least 10% compound annual revenue growth with a group EBITDA margin in the mid-40s, both excluding Underdog. To be clear, this is growth over the medium term, not a commitment to at least 10% in every single year. We'll continue to see revenue variability quarter-to-quarter, reflecting market conditions. Our confidence in the medium term is underpinned by customer growth, product expansion and by our ongoing work to increase OTC, RtV over time. We do expect some further restructuring costs, and we'll report these as they go. Underdog then takes the combined group higher. We expect it to lift our revenue growth rate above the stand-alone 10% over the medium term with the pro forma group margin initially below IG stand-alone and expanding as underdog scales.

So to conclude, our financial priorities are clear, strong diverse revenue growth, efficiency savings that fund investment in growth and disciplined capital allocation. Our financial framework is only as good as the businesses behind it, and you've heard today our confidence in our business. Michael showed how the U.K. playbook is driving active customer-led growth where he's now scaling across IG Consumer. Andy set out how IG Securities is structurally lifting OTC, RtV and building a stronger institutional business. Mike showed how we're positioning tastytrade for a broader market opportunity in the U.S. And Underdog adds to the group's growth profile. It's this team and these businesses that will deliver the numbers. I'm proud of what we've delivered and clear that we have more to do and excited about where we're taking IG.

With that, I'll hand back to Breon for closing remarks.

Thank you, Clifford. So you've seen each of our divisions has clear priorities. The business has momentum, and we're building from a position of strength. Thank you all for joining us, and we would be very, very happy to take some questions.

If I just ask that you -- there's a mic and if you press the button, then the people on the call can hear you as well. Maybe just introduce yourself so my colleagues know who you are as well, please.

David McCann from Deutsche Bank, if I may, to start. The first one is just on the short term. Clifford, you mentioned just then you're sort of reiterating the guidance for the full year as things stand three weeks in. I mean the mix has overall remained quite muted. There's been a couple of days where it spiked up a bit, but it's been muted. Your guidance does imply a return to somewhat more normality in Q4, certainly compared to Q3. So I mean, do you see any risk to that guidance, I guess, is the question. I appreciate we're early on, but that's the first one.

So going back early in the presentation, second question, you said that you're sort of no longer waiting for regulation to be certain and clear in certain areas. And obviously, you've entered the U.K. prediction market announcing today there. So, with that in mind, are there any risks we should be conscious of? Is there anything meaningful that's unresolved here as far as the regulators are concerned for the entry into that business?

And then I guess the final one for me. You put that sign up again where you showed that the cost to serve compared to peers is still quite high and presumably over time will come down. And it looks like you could roughly halve it if you kind of deliver on that. But I guess you're keeping the EBITDA margin guidance similar at mid-40s. I guess some of that's reinvestment in marketing. But over time, presumably, there's a bit more you could unlock there if you really did deliver on that cost to serve. So maybe just bridge that one for us as well.

Thank you for the questions. Clifford, would you take the guidance one, Michael, would you take the reg one and also just talk about your confidence in how we could drive more efficiency, and then I'll wrap up with how we'll reinvest that.

Yes. So, on guidance, we first stated our guidance three weeks ago. We're confident enough to reiterate it. We're traveling comfortably. Is there any risk? Sure, there's risk. I think Andy did a clear job of explaining how market conditions drive our result, but we're comfortable as we stand today.

Yes. So addressing the two points in turn. So starting with regulatory risk. I guess what we're trying to get at is that we think there's an opportunity to innovate with inside the regulatory perimeter, and that's what we're trying to do in the U.K. So we're extremely confident that the product we are offering professionals is absolutely fine in the context of regulation. Our expansion into sports and entertainment politics is clear. There remains a level of ambiguity around retail customers, but we'll work with inside the regulatory perimeter to allow us to expand products as and when we can.

Addressing your point around efficiency, I guess there's three points that would give me confidence around our ability to drive further efficiency. The first is that we, like many other businesses, are seeing technology and in particular, AI transform our ability to do work that materially impacts us in technology, but also in operations. So that gives me the significant headroom there. We've talked about seeing initial productivity gains. The second is we're shifting the way we service customers towards one that's much more graceful, much more orientated towards self-serve, much more orientated towards digital servicing. So there's significant operating leverage in that. And the third point is culture. Ultimately, we've shifted the ambition in the organization focused around growth. The conversations we've had to you today about marketing efficiency are conversations we have internally. When our colleagues can see there's an opportunity to grow by finding the capacity to invest in marketing, it changed the mindset around how you spend money. And ultimately, we become much more excited about freeing up capacity to drive future growth.

Yes. So just to pull that together, we could run this business. We said now for the last couple of years, we could run this business more leanly, but we think in the service of our shareholders, we should reinvest with confidence. And I hope after the last hour or so, you see that we have confidence investing in product, in marketing and talent to further accelerate growth to make this business stronger in the years ahead. Because we will hope to drive future growth even faster through the whole cycle.

Thank you. Anybody else? Lady at the back.

It's Haley Tam from UBS. Could I ask three questions, please? First of all, one for Michael, please. You talked about seeing some share of OTC revenue growth coming from customers who had their first trade in a different product. Could you talk to us about what that portion is now and where you'd like that to be in the future?

Second question on the IG Securities business and the revenue retention, the RtV, so return to volume curves. You talked about an improvement in that to see the curve shift further to the right over time. And I just wondered if you could give us any framework for thinking about that. You obviously mentioned as well that you're looking at improvements for how you might deal with new asset classes, flows and market conditions. have we already had improvements that would mean that if you saw Q3 again, you wouldn't see the same sort of output?

And then the third and final question for Clifford just in terms of the guidance. Can you give us any guide on how to think about the shape of EBITDA growth near term? So are we looking at more cost growth now and not necessarily an improvement in EBITDA margin in '27?

Haley, thank you, and thanks to UBS for hosting us here. The guys are -- Clifford different will do what he wants on guidance, but Michael and Andy will be careful about future guidance. But do you want to take those questions in sequence?

Yes. Thank you for the question. So we haven't disclosed that number. I don't plan to. I think maybe just to add a little bit of color to your question, we balance carefully the opportunity to grow our business, but also making sure we have a sustainable business. So we only cross-sell where it's appropriate to do so. Having said that, what's encouraging as we've expanded the jaws and the reach of the brand and accelerated our rate of acquisition, that rate of cross-sell has remained relatively constant as have our appropriateness standards, which is important to say.

We think as time progresses and as we further develop our product range, we can cross-sell in multiple directions, both from non-OTC and OTC and vice versa. And we think that will increase the stickiness and ARPU of our customers as well. But that's also wanting to be cautious around how we guide that there's various factors going into ARPU. It depends on how diverse your revenue -- your customer base comes as well. So I won't give you specific numbers, but just saying it's held constant as we've expanded our acquisition.

So on improvements in framework, I think I can answer both pretty much at the same time. So the framework that we think about internally is about improvement in pricing, risk management and hedging. As we improve pricing and hedging, we should see a better performance in the same market conditions. The risk management will, however, add that variability. So it is possible for the improvement in pricing and risk management to be overcome -- sorry pricing hedging to be overcome by the risk management side.

But to answer you directly, if we saw Q3 again with what we're releasing in Q4 and Q1, we would expect a better outcome. And as we add more risk strategies going forward, we would expect to be able to handle more market conditions more closely.

I'll pick up EBITDA. I mean, Haley, you'll recall Page 54, I think David was sort of referring to that earlier, where over the period '24 to '26, we've effectively reinvested a little over half of cost savings and operating leverage into marketing. I think as a rule of thumb, we see opportunity to broadly offset them. So we've got a growth in revenue, medium-term guidance of 10% plus. and we'd like to see EBITDA following that trend 10% plus.

We see -- you saw the paybacks and the lifetime value multiples from the team. Those are -- we believe it's in our shareholders' interest to invest in that marketing and build growth, build value. And we think saving to invest is kind of the right way to do it. Hence, our focus on holding our mid-40s EBITDA margins. And we recognize there's a bit of a nuance to that in '26, '27, given we'll be a bit south of that. Going forward, I'd like to see us migrate back to the mid-40s and continuing to take cost out and dial up marketing.

It's Ben Bathurst from RBC. I've got questions in three areas as well, if I may. Starting with consumer and the single scale platform. It sounds like a seamless rollout is expected there. Who are you using for the technology? And should we think about that as a sort of a third-party outsourced arrangement? Or have you invested in your own proprietary tech to deliver that?

And then secondly, on, I think, institutional, where would the white labeling for a D2C opportunity sit within the new organizational structure? This has been, I think, a decent source of growth for some of your traditional peers. Is it a market that you intend to compete more in actively, say, looking forward? And have you got the capability to compete there, do you think?

And then finally, just on financial reporting, do you have any plans to change how you report to meet the new structure you've outlined today?

We just -- they're all very straightforward questions, Ben. Thank you. Do you want to, Michael?

Yes. So first question, we built the unified platform in-house. We have -- we focus our engineering efforts on the user experience and our core OTC engine. We're willing to partner selectively in areas, but fundamentally, that platform is an in-house capability because we think that's a source of significant strategic advantage in the years to come.

Just before you go, Andy, I mean, if you go back a couple of years ago, we talked about how there was both cultural and engineering work to be done in technology, how we had complicated monolith addressing the over-the-counter customer base. Much of that has now been reworked. There's still work to go. But at the time, the sell-side asked us that we need to do a hard greaves type thing and carve out time and money, and we chose not to do that. And I think that -- I said that also in the context of we can constantly invest in making this a better business as we go. That's what we've been doing. That's what we continue to expect to do.

Do you want to take the?

Yes. Thanks, Ben. On the white label side, so we launched our first with Investec Prime Services in May. It's an area we see significant opportunities for growth. We think our right to win comes down to our reputation as a leading retail broker, our balance sheet. And with the retail flow we have, the fairly deep liquidity we're able to provide to white label partners. It is still fairly new product for us. We do expect to roll it out quite widely into geographies and client segments where we can't build our own distribution.

We've had -- just to add on that, we've had people come to us or licensed operators in different geographies come to us even since the announcement of the underdog deal because we're now seeing to have a broader product range than we've had in the past. And as you can imagine, there's demand for -- even from our traditional institutional clients, there's now stuff we can do for them in crypto that we couldn't have done 12 months ago and potentially an opportunity to do stuff in production markets as well.

The third question, Clifford is you, I think.

Yes. So, Ben, we will continue to evolve our disclosure to reflect the change, principally the IG Consumer, IG Securities change. I'm pleased with our disclosure to date. So we're committed to transparency and also will provide as helpful as we can any transition because we know you and others want to model things. So I think we've done a decent job on that in the past, and I'm happy to commit to doing that going forward. And frankly, we'll welcome any feedback to Martin between now and early reporting in the new year.

Just to build on that, maybe going back to Haley's question, because I think it's relevant to cross-sell. Before pulling the divisions together under IG Consumer, we had three different leaders running local geographical businesses with slightly different strategies. That led to relative underperformance or outperformance in different places. I think now we've centralized decision-making there. Michael is pretty obsessive about how we allocate time and capital. And I think, therefore, cross-sell has to be -- will be optimized going forward, which may look slightly different than how it looked a year ago. And you'll see that in the actives per asset class under the prior disclosure.

Adrian Cattley from CapeView Capital. And this is for Michael and Mike. As we're moving from a world of Google search-led customer acquisition to a broader range, potentially LLM-led. One, how do you think about that? And secondly, are you seeing any change yet in consumer behavior of the people who you're either attracting or once you've attracted them, how they then trade?

If I may, Michael, maybe you can talk about what we're doing in the U.K. And Mike, do you want to talk about some of the work that Alex is doing in Chicago, yes? Yes. And actually, that's also relevant to the trading side because how we think about how customer behavior might change over time is something Andy worries about a bit as well.

Do you want to go first, Michael?

Sure. I think it's a good question. So I think when you start on the acquisition side, yes, we're seeing change in behavior across the board. And I talked a lot in my presentation about meeting traders where they are. And that is part of that acquisition strategy, whether it's paid search, organic search, earned media, in our case, the education platform, you have to meet them where they are. And that is if they're searching on ChatGPT, if they're doing Google Search, however they consume their content.

So I think that is a broader concept of just always keep pace with where the market is going and don't assume it's going to stay static. And then I think the way traders engage with the product is changing. And so that's another concept of we keep talking internally about meeting folks where they are. And that's the mobile experience, that is MCP servers so they can create their own agent strategies. And that will continue to evolve, whether that's in agent chat windows like ChatGPT and Quad or they're writing their own scripts that are engaging with the MCP server. So I think that is a continuous evolution that we just have to stay ahead of.

Yes. I mean, Mike said a lot of what I would say there's relatively similar trends, but I mean a couple of little builds. We have obviously rebuilt the capability in the team, so they're very progressive around these areas, and they lean into AI very heavily to power the work that they do. So they're naturally very, very curious around how clients and prospective clients engage with things like LLMs.

What's interesting about LLMs currently is there's a slight disconnect between search and then attribution of click and activity afterwards because there isn't that many ads or that many links in it. So you need to really understand is what are they looking for and how well do you reference against that. So we're onboarding tooling to allow us to do that. And we work very hard to build our credibility in the sources that LLMs draw their information from. So for example, two years ago, IG didn't care about PR. We're now the second largest -- we have the second highest share of voice in PR in the U.K. And it's largely driven by the obsession that LLMs will draw referential points from media and earned media, particularly versus paid media gets much more -- much higher weight. So everything we've done is curated through that lens.

Did you want to add anything or you could do...?

I'll add on the trading side, it's just an interesting evolution that we're monitoring of the flow that we see from clients will be more and more informed by large language models. So our market making is going to have to be geared towards market making large language models as opposed to purely humans.

And I had a follow-up just on actually the internalization. As you expand the range of markets like prediction markets, how well do you think you're positioned to be able to internalize and capture the revenue from those compared to how the business has run historically?

That's going to be very geographic specific. In the U.S., very comfortable with what we've seen of underdog so far. And I think, Michael, you would say that right now, you'll correct me if I'm wrong, but right now, we see those as top of funnel, so market share expansion, but the core monetization engine will still remain the work the teams that Andy has reporting to them. And we'll see if opportunities come out of the production market stuff in the U.K. and further afield, we'll focus on that if it's worth it. But right now, even if that just expands our brand makes it a bit more relevant to a broader audience, that's already an exciting enough place to go. Happy with that. Yes. Yes. Just the man behind you there first.

Alex from KBW. I have two questions, if I may. Just firstly, on Page 35, your page with the pricing risk management and hedging splits, that kind of right-hand side column around future sort of projects you're working on, like is the sort of time frame or quantum of benefit you can put around those pieces of work that you're doing? I'm sure internally, you've had discussions around why do them?

And then sort of second piece on the same subject is you talked about kind of more short-term volatility, but then also kind of structurally -- structural improvement in RtV over time. Over what time frame should we expect to see that structure improvement come through? Because we do have some quarterly volatility in its shorter term. Should be judging this on a yearly basis, multiple years? Just any kind of color you can provide that would be helpful.

And just on the sort of second subject, from the real work that you've done, -- is there any change on thinking around how you prioritize marketing spend between geographies, product types, brands, et cetera? Any kind of thoughts there would be helpful too.

Thanks for those questions. Andy, you have the first one.

Thanks, Alex. So, on the time frame, the trading will be continually evolving. So we will be releasing new features and new strategies effectively as quickly as we're able to. We see the first iterations of the new strategies being released in Q4, Q1 and Q2. And in terms of the impact we think they'll have, I think I can speak to that in terms of we expect them to shift that distribution to the right. And then on the time frame to look at it, I think annually is -- would be how we would tend to look at it, but it's annually is the best way of looking at it, I would say.

Just to build on that, just because it's obviously -- we're encouraged by the work that Andy and the team are doing, but have one eye on Page 37, the probability distributions. That's what we look at internally, right? So when we look at an initiative or a set of initiatives, we look at what is it doing to that. And you can see this is very macro, but you can see the blue line above the gray line on the right-hand side is a big area, but it's only modest on the left side. So we think that's a good trade. That's -- those are all the initiatives we've done over the last 18 months. But we look at -- when we look at initiatives, we look at it through that lens. And you can see at least looking back, the probability of a lower RtV is lower, right, as you shift it to the right. But we're very sensitive to that and the sequencing of how we implement things.

To your second question, the guidance we've given today is for IG Group ex underdog. I think it's a legitimate question in the years to come, how do we best allocate capital in terms of marketing spend primarily across geographies. But right now, given the paybacks we're seeing, we're happy to invest aggressively. And as we're funding that through efficiency, we're very happy to invest aggressively. Personally, I'm excited about the diversification of revenue stream. When we look at search terms for trading phrases, that is cyclical based on volatility and other things and seasonality or taxi or seasonality. But the sporting calendar is just a completely different world. So we see diversification there that we think shareholders will benefit from in the long run.

So I think as we do presentations like this in the coming years, probably we will be able to give more precise answers to the relative trade-offs of capital allocation. But these are growing markets. We have momentum. We've got a team of, quite honestly, elite competitors that want to get on with it. And I think giving them the rock to get on with it is the right thing to do rather than constraining them kind of artificially right now.

And just one quick follow-up. How quickly can you pivot that marketing spend? So if an opportunity does something appear in one part of the business, how quickly can you redirect it to that part to maximize?

Michael, do you want to just talk about the IG Consumer?

Yes. So within the band of IG Consumer, we optimize for returns and it's more customer and geography product is a bit of a misleading because often customers are multiproduct. So we think about customers holistically, and we think about optimizing for returns. The pace at which we can move marketing dollars is it's real time and often doesn't involve a human. We look for signals around value and demand and our spend responds to it. So it's automated largely.

And just more generally, one of the benefits of the strategic review was it enabled us to talk to companies across industries and geographies. We have seen how businesses that went to brand-oriented or to digital-oriented got stuck when market conditions change. So we want to bake that flexibility in as he just suggested. But we now have diversity by revenue line and geography, which puts us in a pretty unique position to build a resilient business over time.

One more point to add.

We're warming up here now, guys. Sorry about this. We're here for a while.

We like within the consumer, I want teams to compete for capital, and they compete in the basis of returns. So we -- that's also baked into how we set up the culture of the organization. It's all about trying to drive the best outcomes. And those who will do will get more and those who don't will get less.

Okay. In the middle there.

Simon Gergel from Allianz Global Investors. Just one really on -- is the road map for IG consumer converging with the road map for tastytrade? And -- or is it very different because of the fundamental derivatives backing of tastytrade? And if they are converging, at some point, do they become sort of one business ultimately?

Yes, I'll take that. They start in very different places, right? tastytrade is all exchange-traded derivatives. IG in its core is over the counter. The customer doesn't necessarily understand the difference of that. And I think if you go forward three, four, five years, we're already thinking about shared technology components. But if you go forward three, four, five years, you might possibly expect more of that and possibly even brand convergence. But I think that's outside of the -- we have enough work to do today and tomorrow and indeed next year, not to worry about that. But as the North Star, you might expect greater uniformity of tech and brands over time. But that is medium to long term rather than short term.

Thomas Ryan from Davy Capital Markets. Just one, if I may. With the prediction market launch in sports in the U.K., do you see that acquisition strategy focusing maybe on a more younger potentially male audience? Or do you see an overlap in interest between prediction markets and sports and your core customer group?

So I think the honest answer is we don't know. When we see the demographic profiles in the States for prediction markets, it's certainly younger and certainly male, certainly more mobile orientated in our customer base. So that's attractive to us because ultimately it can help us extend our brand into a broader audience. The way we will manage the business in reality is that we will -- the same as we do in everywhere else. We will look for return, we will look at the response, we will look for value, and we will optimize for that. So part of being early and innovating is that you have to work your way through those points, but we're quite confident we can do it.

I've got two, please. I'm Melwin Mehta from Sterling Investments. My first question was, historically, I mean now between retail and institution, what portion of our trades do we internalize before it hits the market? And what's the plan going ahead? And the second question is, in terms of changing this interface, and I was specifically speaking to only gold clients here of yours, who -- I mean, how do you think they'll react to an IG app or a system that looks different from the past?

I don't think we're going to go to percentage of trades that's internalized. It's something we think about. But...

I'll answer the second thing.

Yes. And I just don't think there's value in that. We're pretty obsessive about active customers. We're pretty obsessive about retention. We're pretty obsessive about giving the customer what they want. They don't always value the nuance that we might think of. Do you want to go to that because it has relevance in cash equities as well, yes.

Yes. So the way I was going to answer your second question was the approach the team has taken has been built in customer feedback. And the whole purpose and design of the products are gracely scales for different use cases, different types of customers. And our existing clients have been heavily involved in that process. The way we derisk this from a business perspective is that we migrate in batches. We don't migrate in one single big bang. We bring customers on the journey with us. And so that we build them feedback loops in the way as well.

So we're confident this is a relatively well-trodden path within e-commerce. We've got an experienced product and engineering team. We're confident we can work through that journey with customers. But we think we will deliver a better experience broader, faster, more streamlined, better UX, we think clients will respond well to it. And so far, as I said in the presentation, the signs are encouraging. We're not going to put any numbers around that, but they're encouraging.

I'm Tanzila from Peel Hunt. So I have one question on the revenue side. So for example, in Q3, the revenue on the U.K. direct platform, if you look at from year-to-year, it fell about 45% to about GBP 7.5 billion, whereas if you look at the asset side, the assets on the platform grew by 34% to GBP 9.3 billion at the end of September. And if you analyze the quarter, that takes the revenue yield, for example, on assets from roughly 79 basis points to about 32 basis points. Is it possible like from a modeling perspective, if I have to model it, is it possible to split that decline between, let's say, the interest pass-through and the trading activity? And do you expect the structural yield to settle in the long run?

I might ask Martin. I want to just go through the model part of that question with you later, but do you want to just address that at a strategic level?

So look, thank you for the question. And I kind of appreciate that you zoomed out and kind of identified that AUA is up and particularly in IG brand, the active client base is also up. So the underlying health of the business is good. As I kind of referenced earlier, I think it's also important to understand that stockbroking has much more value beyond the direct revenue we generate from it. It actually feeds our OTC business through the cross-sell mechanism we talked about earlier.

There's part of your question is very straightforward to answer to actually answer to the disclosure. So net trading revenue excludes NII. So you should be able to see the portion that's related to interest pass-through and interest rates and cash balances. The remaining part to explain Q3 performance, there's a few different factors going on. The first is that most of the revenue we generate from stockbroking is based on transactions. It's principally monetizing international equity transactions through an FX charge on both brands. In Q3, as there was this concern around the valuation of AI and tech stocks, we saw the shift towards domestic equities. I can't really give you guidance as to how that will play out over time. I wouldn't be doing this job if I could. But ultimately, I'm not concerned it represents a sort of structural weakness in the franchise.

One other factor to call out within the quarter -- sorry, two others. We made some pricing changes, most of which we're happy with, one of which we reverted. That was a test to establish price elasticity demand. And secondly, in free trade's case, we're booking incentives in the revenue line, and we've been aggressively driving AUA growth. We manage that incentive through the returns framework. We talked about it more broadly around paybacks and LTV to CAC, but it does have the impact of short-term depressing revenue growth because we wouldn't have had the same factor in previous years.

Okay. I possibly have some calls online, if there's nothing else in the room. Sorry, let me take that question there. Maybe you can queue up if there is someone online.

Yes. Sorry, Dave McCann from Deutsche Bank. Just come back for the second part cherry, if that's okay. But just a couple more, probably for Clifford. Curious, you mentioned obviously the redomicile to the Channel Islands, and this will mean you no longer have to abide by the sort of regulatory capital requirement of the U.K. for the group as a whole. Just curious as to how much capital that move will actually free up for the group as a whole.

And I guess the follow-on more strategic question that goes beyond this. I mean, are you done with sort of larger M&A now? Is the group basically the shape that you now want it? Or is there something else that's perhaps missing in the pipeline?

I'll take the second one, but do you want to go to the first one?

I'm not going to quantify it. But I would say it's meaningful, it's material. It's quite a change for the group in terms of getting the governance sorted across the various layers. So we obviously looked at it very carefully. There are a number of peers out there who've done similar redomicile. So I'll take a look at that. And we'll get back next year where we said that we would expect to resume buybacks, and we can start putting numbers on things at that point.

Thanks. To the second question, I don't think there are gaps in the group. This is a very dynamic industry and scale matters. I think there will be opportunities in the years ahead. And I think other operators will realize that one needs the fullest set of products and that one also needs scale. And that's part of the rationale behind investing in the tech and team that we have today because I think it is inevitable that consolidation will happen at some stage. But specifically now, I think post the cash equities acquisition, post a crypto deal in a number of geographies and the product capability and mindset that underdog brings, I don't think of us in terms of having obvious gaps that we need to remediate.

Are there any questions from online? Who has got the mic for those?

We do. [indiscernible] One for audio question. [indiscernible] Question is coming from Hal Potter of Bank of America.

Just a couple for me. First one on the RtV [indiscernible] a little bit is the challenging market? And on those challenging markets, could you just give us a sense between your asset classes, which environments are more or less challenging? You've called out equities and an equity index in the presentation. Could you talk to many others? And then finally, on prediction markets, can you just talk to your [indiscernible] U.K. Obviously, gambling markets shape in the U.K. versus the U.S. So any color there would be helpful.

Sure. Andy, do you want to have a crack at that and then Michael finish up?

Sure. So on the asset mix, let me start with the first part of that question. So across the -- this year and these quarters, I think there have been different reasons for the relative RtV in Q1, reasonable RtV in Q2 and then the low RtV in Q3. Part of that is a product mix challenge as we particularly in Q1 trade more commodities. We have a structurally lower RtV in commodities as the spread is generally wider, meaning it costs us more to hedge and there is a little bit more volatility in it before we're able to hedge.

On the asset mix more broadly, I won't go through each individual asset class. generally, anything with low volatility and a range of markets will be difficult for us to manage or will be the worst conditions for the current strategy. I think over time, we are always learning. We will constantly learn. I would put it more down to market conditions, but it allows us to learn from those market conditions in order to improve in the future.

On prediction markets, when you think about the range of markets that these platforms are making available, you could create a bit of a laundry list of potential competitors across a whole spectrum from gambling operators all the way to financial service providers in the U.K. And truthfully, we won't know what the mix will look like until after we've launched a product and we've established land.

But what I think you're really competing for is space in the consumer's mind. Like ultimately, it's a mindset around consumers who want to express a view on the world around them. So it's competing within that space really as opposed to saying it's competitor X or competitor Y and the economics look like Z or whatever. It's much more specific around a consumer mindset.

Thanks, Michael. Is there any other questions online?

Yes, we do have another one. We have, it's coming from Ian White of Autonomous Research.

Just a few follow-ups from my side, please. Just firstly, in markets like the U.K. and Continental Europe, can the gambling, CFD trading and financial investing comfortably sit within one franchise? Do the regulators think products for different types of customer? And if they do, then how do you navigate that from a marketing customer acquisition perspective? That's question one.

Just secondly, on Slide 23 on the payback figures can you help us the definition there? Is that CFD customers and stock trading, for example, taken together? And on Slide 24 just to be clear, is that trailing 3-year measure that ratio. I guess we don't know what that ratio is there for the new cohort that the increased marketing investment you made in the recent question to clarify that please.

And just finally, does the positive value for money perception that you set out on Slide 28, does that actually mean lower prices overall? [indiscernible]

You might take them in reverse order, I think.

Yes. Okay. So the value perception is straightforward. So what that means is that customers feel we are giving them, I think, is good or very good value for money. So we ask them in a survey. So it's not a reflection of us reducing prices, it's a reflection of what value consumers perceive we are giving them as a service provider to them. So they are essentially saying they are happier with the experience from a value for money perspective.

The second one is around LTV to CAC and there's sort of multiple questions in it. The first bit was, is it blended? Yes, it is blended. And we obviously think about capital allocation in different ways. But ultimately, as I was saying earlier, our customer is also blended. A lot of our customers cross over between different products. So also we're quite thoughtful around different sources and what the returns are, and we optimize for that. I would be somewhat discouraging of people being very focused around product level paybacks where it's not appropriate to do so.

The second bit was around is it 36 months trailing or forward-looking? It's forward-looking. Ultimately, some of the investment we've been making, which I referenced in the slides is around building out the capability, having very high-quality data science models to be very confident in our customer lifetime values. And we track cohorts very, very carefully, and we've been doing this in the U.K. for the last two years. So whilst there's an element of it being forward-looking, it's also quite significantly grounded in quite a long time of data as well.

The other point as well is that we operate at very strong unit economics. So whilst it's important for us to be accurate around our modeling and our forward look, in the end, we're quite a way away from the place where I would be uncomfortable with our paybacks. I think we're more marginal I'll be more concerned about being ultra, ultra diligent on our forecasting capability.

The last question is around whether effectively gambling products and financial service products can come together. I think that's something that we think about and perhaps it is something that regulators think about, so we should address that bit second. I think customers don't always care as much as we think. I think we've seen that play out in America, where some very successful online trading platforms have launched a heavily sports-orientated prediction market product. And indeed, in one case, it has been called out as the fastest-growing vertical of this business has ever launched, and they've been very happy to do so.

Historically, IG has had a gambling license in the U.K. There are competitors who have gambling and financial licenses still in the U.K. So I think there's precent that regulators will accept that as well. I think what regulators will look for is ensuring that we are very thoughtful around things like target market and comply with all of their obligations. To date, I have not heard any expression despite engaging with multiple regulators in this country that they're uncomfortable with us doing both side by side.

Yes. I mean, Ian, Michael has answered the question, but you referenced Continental Europe in particular. I think there will be cultural nuance to this on a geography-by-geography basis. But I think Michael has nailed it. The consumer wants to express opinions or express views across multiple asset classes, and that now increasingly involves live sport. Historically, companies like ours have advertised heavily in sport. We are very respectful and quite dependent on the good relationships we have with regulators. But ultimately, it's the consumer dragging us in this direction that we have to and we have to be attended to their wants and needs.

Are there any other questions online? Or can we -- but there's no other questions online. Are we close to done in the room as well? Bertie from Goldman wants to go back to work.

So thank you to everyone for your time today. I hope you can see that we're excited about the next stage of growth, and we look forward to you updating you on our progress as we progress. Personally, I think the opportunity ahead of us today is more clear and more obvious than it has been. So thank you for your support. We're looking forward to going back to work, but follow up with us through usual channels if you'd like some more detail for models or just a chat. Thank you all.

Thanks to my colleagues in the room and the broader team who've done an enormous amount of work to make this pretty seamless and relatively painful over the last couple of weeks. Thank you all.

Good morning, and welcome to the Underdog Shareholder seminar for IG Group. [Operator Instructions] I would like to remind all participants that this call is being recorded. I will now hand over to Breon Corcoran, CEO, to begin the presentation. Please go ahead.

Thank you. Good afternoon, folks, and thank you for joining us. Jeremy Levine here on my left, Co-Founder and CEO of Underdog and Clifford Abrahams, IG Group CFO on my right, to join me today. We announced the Underdog acquisition at the end of July, and I recognize that it's incumbent on me to explain clearly the conviction I have and that we have that the Underdog acquisition will create real value for you, my fellow shareholders.

In a few minutes, we'll take you inside the business and later take questions. But before we do that, I'd like to briefly comment on IG's Q3 trading statement issued last week. I'm more convinced than ever of the business that we're building. As I said in July 2024, we needed to close product gaps and simplify our propositions to grow active customers sustainably. In Q3, organic active customer growth was 17% year-on-year.

In July 2025, we announced measures to increase revenue retention in our over-the-counter business. Since implementation, over-the-counter revenue retention has averaged 80% through the end of Q3 2026. We're pleased with this, and we see the potential to increase it further over time. Q3 results themselves were disappointing, reflecting customer positioning in the period, although consistent with our modeling of possible outcomes. Our model is working as expected, and I remain convinced it will deliver better returns over the long term.

This slide, which you've seen before, summarizes why we're doing this transaction. Underdog gets us into a high-growth adjacent category spanning daily fantasy sports, prediction markets and more. Prediction markets are growing quickly, led by sport and Underdog is built and designed for sport.

Underdog performed well in Q3, heading into its busiest quarter of the year, which includes more of the NFL season and the start of the NBA season. The business has strong momentum, and I remain convinced that Underdog will accelerate IG's scale and growth profile. With that, let's start with a short video introducing the company. And after that, Jeremy will take you inside the business that he has built.

[Presentation]

I'm really excited to be doing this, my first one of these public market events. So I'm looking forward to see you back after. Hopefully, I can help answer your questions and give you some context on Underdog and why we're so excited about our performance and the opportunity ahead.

I'm going to take you through a bit of our history, how we win with product, and our results year-to-date. And I'll make sure to answer the questions we've heard most since announcing our deal. How do we succeed in a competitive environment, how we capture margin and how we're well set up for the regulatory developments to come. One thing to keep in mind as we go, at its core, Underdog has been built for fans to express their opinions on sports. We've always had the view that it's our job to handle the underlying regulatory complexity gracefully so that the customers can express the opinions they want.

Today, I'm excited to show you how we've done that. First, our team. There's 2 things I talk about every company in all hands, people and product to the point where the company is definitely sick of hearing me say it. I'm very proud of the team we have at Underdog. My background quickly, I sold my first company, StarStreet to DraftKings in 2014, my second DRAFT to Flutter in 2017, and that's where I met Breon. At StarStreet, we had built the first Pick'em fantasy game. At DRAFT, we built the first mobile draft game, both games we now offer at Underdog.

At Underdog, we were the first to offer peer-to-peer Pick'em and later the first sports operator to put prediction markets in our app. A few key folks to highlight on the team. Nick Lundgren, our Chief Legal Officer, led the first self-certification of sports event contracts while at crypto.com. His doing so largely created the sports prediction markets category. Will Twinn led risk and trading for FanDuel and now runs our market maker. And my co-founder, Brandon, is the best product mind I've ever worked with.

We've got an amazing team of innovators, domain experts, and we've leaned aggressively into AI across the business, especially in how we develop software, and we've seen our velocity improve massively as a result. Through our first 6 years, we were the fastest-growing sports gaming company in U.S. history. Net revenue grew from $9 million in 2021 to $441 million in 2025. We grew fast even though we were limited in what we could offer by the regulatory frameworks we operated under.

Our core product was a fantasy game called Pick'em. In Pick'em, customers pick how players will perform for set stats. They must always pick multiple players from multiple teams. That's what makes it fit under the Fantasy Sports regulatory framework. There are no game outcomes or team options at all, and they have no ability to make just a single selection. They had no ability. With Pick'em, we were able to offer about 1/3 of the experience sports fans want in about 2/3 of the states. It was enough for us to grow extremely fast, especially in the states without legal sports betting, but there was more our customers wanted.

You can see on this slide some examples of what our customers could do in the fantasy regulatory framework versus what is available via online sports betting. In sports betting, customers can pick a team, a single player, players and teams together, players all from the same team, all things we couldn't offer. That is, until prediction markets. Once sports event contracts became possible, it was clear we could offer a better product to our customers, especially in the key states like California, Texas and Georgia. So we ran at it.

In 10 months, we've moved to 3 structures: a technology partnership with Crypto.com, our FCM connected to Kalshi and our own full stack exchange UDX, which we launched in July. Each step improved the product for our customers and improved our economics. We've now got the full stack of necessary pieces, all 3 of the critical U.S. derivative licenses, an FCM, DCM and a DCO. We're the only sports-first operator live with all 3.

Owning the full stack allows us to offer the best customer experience and capture structurally higher margins. A key piece of our offering is our proprietary orchestration layer. Via the orchestration layer, we're able to route customer orders depending on where the order is and where it's made, depending on what the order is, where it's made, all in service, we're providing the best experience to our customers. You can see here how owning the full stack and having the orchestration layer shows up for our customers. All those entry types from a few slides up that our customers couldn't do earlier with us, now they can.

Singles, combos of any kind, players are from the same team, a single player, really any opinion they want to express, now they can. The orchestration layer is the plumbing. It handles the regulatory complexity, so the customer never has to think about it. And it all sits in a seamless single app with one account and one wallet. A customer in California used to have player picks only. Now they have players, teams, singles, combos and everything just works, the full offering in almost every state.

Now that we have the core experience nailed, we get to focus more on net new innovation. Since we announced the deal just over 2 months ago on July 30, we've launched 2 new games, Crash and Rips. And this month, we're launching Supercharge, a new market type we think our customers will love. Games are driving more and more of our activity, and they're a great example of our product velocity and how it's a key driver of our success. And just like the core experience, everything we offer is seamless in the same app.

Hopefully, you can see we've consistently innovated across regulatory frameworks. We started offering single-player fantasy. We then built Champions, the first peer-to-peer Pick'em game to help satisfy some regulator concerns. We launched sports betting under the state regulatory framework. But then when prediction markets came, we quickly sprinted towards the opportunity, operating as a technology service provider and FCM and now a full stack exchange, leveraging our DCM and DCO.

Our product ability and velocity is a massive advantage in our ability to navigate uncertain regulatory environments. And there is, of course, uncertainty with prediction markets. We believe the uncertainty is likely to be largely resolved by the U.S. Supreme Court, and we think the final resolution is quite likely to come next year. There are 2 directions of travel, and we're well prepared no matter the direction. If federal oversight holds as is, you've seen how we're set up in that direction. If the Supreme Court defers authority to the states, there's different variations to what could happen, but would largely go back to the setup that made us the fastest-growing revenue company in the category through our first 6 years.

Because of the way we've built our product, any change in the regulatory environment will be seamless for our customers. They'll be in the same app, same account and wallet, same core experience. And in our key states, it's just a question of which markets are available to them. Do they have team markets or if there are no sports prediction markets, only player markets. We look forward to the clarity the sooner, the better. 2026 has been a year of transformation for us. Last NFL season, prediction markets reset what could be offered to sports fans across the U.S. We put our heads down the offseason and spent the first part of the year rebuilding our product, as you've seen.

Given the product transition we had to make, we deliberately slowed investment, taking marketing spend down over 30% year-to-date. We wanted to make sure we are back to having what we believe is the best product for our customers before spending more aggressively on marketing. The signals from month 1 of NFL season are very strong, and we're confident that, again, we have the best product for our core customers. Customers are engaging more, handle per customer is up 165% year-over-year in Q3. Average deposits per customer up 109% in that same period.

Net revenue in our slowest quarter of the year, Q3, was $105 million, up 118% year-on-year. Handle grew even faster and monthly actives grew 13%. I do just want to caveat the year-over-year revenue growth in Q3 benefited in part by the sporting calendar as we had some World Cup in Q3 and by us lapping an unusually bad margin period at the end of last Q3. Also worth pointing out, our business does have variance and volatility tied to sports results.

Our results are impacted by the outcomes of games and player performance. So when there are unusually high scoring games or favorites consistently win, we'll see it in our results. But over time, we have a lot of confidence in our trading ability and our structural edge. Given the product transition we just made and the KPIs we're seeing, we're feeling great about accelerating customer growth as we head into the most exciting sports calendar of the year with NBA season starting in just a few weeks and NFL a month into its season.

To close, Underdog is the fastest-growing sports gaming company through our first 6 years with over 5.5 million deposit customers. We're the only sports operator -- sports-first operator live with an active FCM, DCM and DCO. We offer nearly 100% of the sports experience in almost every state in one seamless app. Our revenue is well diversified, and we're well set up to succeed under any likely regulatory outcome. And we now head into our biggest quarter of the year with the best product we've ever had.

And with that, I'll hand it over to Clifford.

Thanks, Jeremy. Let me remind you of the financial highlights. We're comfortable the acquisition will deliver strong returns for IG in line with our M&A framework. The TAM is large and growing. You've seen how Underdog has delivered very strong revenue growth. We believe that Underdog can succeed in different regulatory scenarios. We're excited about the prospects for the business.

Finally, the transaction is structured to incentivize the team to deliver. Underdog more than doubles IG's U.S. revenue and increases U.S. monthly active customers more than tenfold. On a combined basis, the U.S. contributes 41% of revenue, up from 19% now. Underdog also diversifies IG's revenues by product, which we expect to reduce short-term variability as underdog's revenue streams are largely uncorrelated with IGs.

Following the transaction, Prediction Markets and DFS would represent 27% of combined group revenues. So IG relies less on any one single product. In summary, the transaction brings strong strategic and financial benefits. It accelerates IG's growth, diversifies our products and meets our return targets. Next, a reminder on structure. The $1.1 billion upfront reflects the enterprise value for 100% of Underdog at closing or 2.4x net revenue for the 12 months to June 2026.

IG will settle the equity value in 2 parts, 60% through the issue of 24.1 million new IG shares, a number fixed on 30th of July 2026. To be clear, the number of shares we're issuing does not change with the IG share price. The remaining 40% will be paid in cash funded initially through a bridge facility. On top of that, an earn-out tied to 2026 revenue achieved of up to $200 million.

Separately, there's a management incentive plan, which sits outside the purchase price. It rewards eligible employees when underdog delivers 2028 and 2029 EBITDA targets and Underdog's own earnings will fund it. The earn-out and the management incentive plan pay out only as Underdog delivers. We'll now have plenty of time to answer your questions. Just a reminder that IG has another Capital Markets event on October 22, focused on IG's existing businesses. So the 3 of us are available now to answer all your questions regarding Underdog.

With that, I'll ask the operator to open us up to questions.

[Operator Instructions] Our first question comes from Ian White from Autonomous Research.

Slight confusion because my name is not Ian. It's Haley Tam from UBS. Could I ask a couple, please? Firstly, thank you very much for laying out. Let me understand regardless of whether this is a UDX or crypto or Kalshi ultimate venue for trading, the user doesn't see any difference in the app. If I can confirm that's true.

And I guess the second question is, when we look at the data you published, we can see that the UDX portion has grown from, say, around 50% of your volumes 2 weeks ago to now over 75%. I just wondered what your vision is, Jeremy, for where the percentage should land. And when you say structurally higher margins from owning the whole stack, could you give us any more color on that, please?

Yes, of course. Thank you for the question, Heidi (sic) [ Haley ]. So your first question was, does the customer see any difference? They do know what venue their trade is executed on, but the core UX, the core flow is the same no matter the venue. And that's a really important part of the orchestration layer and the product we've built is it's totally seamless for the customer to express their opinions. It's something we're really proud of.

I think your second question was the comment on UDX's growth, and we have seen UDX scaling up nicely since we have launched it. So we're really excited about that. But no specific guidance on the right mix. The mix is ultimately around what provides the best experience to the customers and ultimately the best economics. So we're going to let the data continue to drive us in real time on that.

And is there any comment on the structurally higher margins you get from owning the whole stack?

Yes. I mean if you think about a broker trade versus a trade that executes across every lever, there's ability for economics at every lever. So because we have every single lever there, there's the ability to capture more economics. We're not giving specific guidance or details on the margin at each level.

And Haley, if I may add to that, because the technology is in-house and the licenses are in-house, we have greater flexibility and critically also the ability to change things more quickly than we might in a slightly different world. And we believe that the economics -- the net customer economics will benefit from some of the ancillary products we offer around this, which is the point Jeremy was making about diversification.

So to your first question, customer behavior will determine the end mix of prediction versus DFS. But we will -- we are almost agnostic to that over time. And as we broaden the product range around the core stack, we believe we will evidence better retention and better economics per customer.

Our next question is from Ian White from Autonomous Research.

Hopefully, you can hear me okay. It is actually Ian White this time. Three questions, please, if I can. So Jeremy, please. Simply, what most excites you about the combination with IG Group? What does IG bring that improves Underdog, in your opinion, please?

Secondly, can you talk a bit about your experience running a commercial sportsbook, which I think underdog did for a little while. How much cross-selling did you sort of see at that time during the period you ran that offering. Obviously, you would have had a broader suite of products, at least for some customers. Did they start doing more with you and move away from other sportsbook providers? That's question two.

And lastly, can you help me understand what makes you confident you can sort of sustainably internalize volumes onto your own exchange when there are established sort of liquid markets to some of the products that you might want to offer. Can you just help me understand that, please? I'm thinking around basically best execution on the last point. Interesting thoughts there. Thank you.

Yes, for sure. Thank you, Ian. Glad we finally got you. So let me start with your first question, just what makes me most excited about IG. And I think it's a few -- there's kind of some gating factors when we decided this -- we wanted to team up and then there's a few key pieces. So the gating factors obviously are the belief in the team, Breon and Clifford. The business led by Michael Healy, Andy Biggs, Sarah, on the compliance and legal side has been a great partner already for us. So just seeing the caliber of the people, the culture the team there is building gave us a lot of belief in IG and the business, which obviously, if we're going to be part of the business, we want to really believe in it.

So that's a big part of it. But that's kind of the gating factor. Really, a big part of what drives, I think, the reason this makes a lot of sense is -- we believe in this coming convergence. Actually, it was Breon, who kind of first shared the vision with me a while ago of the convergence of the different ways a customer can express opinions, not just in sports, but we've got kind of sports as our DNA on one side. And obviously, IG's business is another DNA kind of in the financial markets almost on the other side. And it's very clear there's this coming convergence that I think we, as a combined company, are really well positioned for, and it's going to be a really big opportunity we talk more about over the next couple of years. So that was a big driver.

The question you asked about when we operated in a licensed sportsbook in America. So I think it's worth sharing a bit of what our strategy was when we operated mostly under the state regulatory framework. Our strategy largely was use our product, use the Pick'em product, to acquire customers, of course, across the country, but really focused on the states without sports betting. About 40% of the country doesn't have legal online sports betting. That's big states like California, Texas, Georgia. In those states, we were the best legal way for a customer to express their opinions on sports. And as a result, we had tremendous growth in those states.

There was always the belief that over time, states that didn't have legal sports betting would legalize sports betting. And our strategy always was to then offer that in a seamless experience, all in the same app, where the customer effectively, not much changes for them, except they now have more markets. They now have teams and some of the restrictions that they had to do or they had to kind of stay within the fantasy regulatory framework, those restrictions are all gone, right? So now they can do anything they want.

So that was the strategy. When we launched Sportsbook in the one state we did in North Carolina, we obviously saw a ton of cross-sell because we didn't have to move a customer from one app to another, from one account or one wallet to another. We didn't have to move them at all. We just were able to put more markets there and take away restrictions. So customers kept on doing largely the same things with more options and a lot of them cross-sold into what was then OSB because in that case, we turned off fantasy and it all became OSB.

We had -- if you think about our customer history, there -- what they do in fantasy, it always has to be multiple players. So it's very similar to what a sports betting is considered a parlay. We had in sports betting, I believe, the highest parlay mix across the category because that's what our customers were used to doing in our app, and that's really what our interface was built for. We've seen a very similar thing if you kind of think about the same strategy. We've now got to deploy that with prediction markets.

So in our app, in California, customers went from before last September, it was only players now to having players and teams. All the restrictions that were there in fantasy sports removed from them, and now they can express whatever opinions they want. And we're seeing that show up, obviously, in our data. I think your third question was around how are we confident in our ability to have volume on the exchange and execute trades on the exchange. And look, it's about the customers and what the customers want to do. What is offered across prediction markets, the currently, the markets themselves are largely commodities, a big part of the markets, our singles certainly are.

And then you can think about combos as more bespoke. But really, again, it's about the customer, owning the relationship with the customer and what that customer wants to do, which is express an opinion on sports, right? It's not for them about what venue do they execute on, what regulatory framework is that under? It's about, "Hey, are the Patriots?" I mean, Patriots, I'm going to use them as my references all the time. Are the Patriots going to win today and how are the players going to do?

So just to build on that, Ian, as you know, some of us have experience from the Betfair Exchange days and whilst it's important, liquidity is very important, liquidity doesn't predetermine -- doesn't necessarily predetermine success. So we think there will be multiple exchanges. And to the specific question about best execution, without -- just going back to what Jeremy said, we obviously have considerable experience of operating in regulated financial markets where things like best execution are core to the product offer.

So I think as this market evolves over the coming months and years, we will bring some capabilities to the table to bolster the incredible customer centricity and product velocity that Underdog brings.

Can I follow up just briefly on the final point? Is it -- just is it about what customers want to do? Or is it about sort of what is required by regulation basically? Can customers say, look, I want to execute on underdog or do they just sort of hand you a position and say, I want the best price for that. And you have to kind of work out the answer to that, whether it's internal or third party.

And then just on the point that you made, Breon, am I sort of hearing correctly that you're really talking about -- here about offering proprietary liquidity, your own market making basically to boost on -- own venue. Is that where this is likely to go?

Yes. So the customer -- to be clear, the customer does know it's there in the text, what venue their trade is ultimately going to execute on. But a customer is not coming into underdog saying, "I want to execute on UDX. I want this to be fantasy. I want this to be on a different platform. They're coming in and saying, "I want this combination I want or I want this single, the Patriots to win that I want.

And of course, they're going to want the best price at the amount they want for that. And so that's what our orchestration layer does seamlessly behind the scenes, so they don't have to think about it. Again, it's about the opinion the customer wants to express. We handle everything gracefully behind the scenes, and it's a huge part of the value stack for us and the value we built in the product. And on the liquidity part, I mean, as we bring on more and more market makers, obviously, there's growing liquidity. And we've got a lot of customers that as well provide the liquidity into the platform.

It can be dangerous to be seduced by all the similarities. But I think there's a probable end state here where customers express, to use Jeremy's words, customers express opinions and they get filled through a selection of exchanges, where there are varying mix of market makers depending on what customers are expressing an opinion on. And that resonates a bit with putting the Sportsbook on top of the exchange at Betfair, where we were able to offer different product to differentiate ourselves from Sportsbooks and to differentiate ourselves from exchanges because we had product flexibility and promotional flexibility that people who just operate in one reg stack or one tech stack don't have.

In terms of the opportunity for IG, whilst these are enormous markets, we can transform the prospects for IG shareholders by just being an active growing profitable part of them. And I do think this is not going to be a winner take all. I think there will be multiple winners in the coming years.

Our next question is from Jordan Bender from Citizens.

I maybe want to start on the customer acquisition. You guys sort of talked on it, Jeremy. But with the products that you're now adding to the platform, we think the Crash product, Pack Rips, are you seeing customers that you're acquiring from those specific categories maybe less sports-minded customers coming on to the platform? Or is it still the main funnel here coming from what was legacy DFS going into PM and then into those smaller product offerings?

And then on the second one, I think you guys just kind of touched on it a little bit if we can elaborate a little bit more around the promos or the financial incentives. You own the whole stack in theory, that could allow you to freely give more money or customer incentives towards your customers or retain more of the economics in the long run. Jeremy, can you just kind of talk about the strategy there and maybe the advantage that gives you versus your peers?

Yes, absolutely. Thank you for the question. Thank you for tuning in Jordan. So first question was on what we're seeing in the early data for customer acquisition for kind of our new games products. And Look, we've only had a month with the games for the most part. So not ready to share a lot of data yet, but you asked about cross-sell specifically, and we are seeing really nice signs of cross-sell both ways, but we've got a lot to develop, a lot to learn on that.

Your second question, I think, was just about the optionality and the opportunity kind of we have by owning the full stack, and it's obviously a really key part of what our strategy has been and what sets us up for success is the full stack and the seamless integration of payment methods, promo mechanics, again, the ability for the customer to simply want to express an opinion and have that executed best for them.

And then obviously, in owning each of the vertical pieces of it, we've got so much flexibility to be able to provide the best customer experience and as I obviously talked about in the presentation, our North Star always is how can we offer the best experience possible to the most customers. And we think as long as we follow that North Star, it will continue to drive us obviously, to the economic rewards as a result.

Just to build on that, Jordan, we expect customers to come in through all of these different top-of-funnel devices. We see customers come in through the Rips Pack, which you'll probably know is a very fast-growing adjacent category in the United States. We also see customers migrate and change their behaviors who started in a daily fantasy background.

We also see customers coming from states where daily fantasy previously wasn't a thing. And I think the trick to maximize value creation in the coming years will be to really understand the unit economics for customers coming in through different parts of the funnel who then will cross-sell to varying degrees to other parts of the business. And you referenced promos in particular, doing that properly, cognizant of regulatory constraints as and when they evolve, I think will be part of the way we'll capture value for shareholders and maximize the experience for customers in the coming years.

Our next question is from Ben Bathurst from RBC Capital Markets.

Hopefully you can hear me okay. Great. So I was wondering if you could just talk a bit more about your vision for the business in the sort of more adverse scenario for prediction markets, so scenario B. Am I right in saying that you envisage opening back up into DFS products in those states where you've recently surrendered licenses?

And also, if the Supreme Court does ultimately rule against sports prediction markets, might you consider moving into regulated gambling to sort of broaden your target market? And just if not, why not?

So I'll take the second one. Jeremy, you take the first one. It's too early to say what will happen at the Supreme Court. And since we announced the deal on, I think, the night of July 30, there's been an awful lot of news, legal and political. We were expecting a lot of noise. There's been plenty. Probably one of the things that has changed since July 30 is the split court decision looks like that will be an accelerant to getting to a Supreme Court judgment.

So probably end state certainty is coming sooner rather than -- sooner than probably we had -- we might have anticipated. I think that's a good thing. But Jeremy, I think, is now going to talk to the flexibility of the product and the team. I think it's too early to judge it. I think irrespective of the Supreme Court outcome, we will have a customer base. He's referenced 5 million depositing customers already of young typically 20 to 40, typically male people that are interested in sport that we know are also trading on other asset classes.

But guessing what will happen at the Supreme Court and what we will do thereafter other than hoping to remind people that we have considerable optionality, I think it's just too early to say what the end state will be. But do you want to take the first question about DFS?

Yes, for sure, Ben. I'll take your question kind of as what do you do if the Supreme Court does defer authority back to the states. And your question and kind of answered it, yes, we'll shift more of our flow or predominantly all of our sports flow back to the fantasy sports, the DFS regulatory framework. You asked about the states that we recently surrendered licenses in.

So let me just explain that. We surrendered licenses in 7 states recently. We did that because in conversation with those regulators, those regulators are not fans of prediction markets. And if we wanted to offer prediction markets, they would have preferred or kind of we would have preferred given the relationship that we're not also offering fantasy in those states. 6 of those 7 states, we did not offer the core Pick'em game that I've taken you through in this presentation. We only offered our DRAFT game.

And while we love the DRAFT product and the community that comes with it, it is a very, very low immaterial piece of our revenue mix. So in surrendering 6 of those states, it was essentially no revenue surrendered if we have to go back to fantasy if prediction markets go away. And then there's one other state where we have a lot of confidence that if prediction markets go away and we want to reenter that state, there is a fast path to doing so. So that's on the fantasy side.

As Breon kind of articulated, we've built a new capability recently, obviously, with our exchange, and there is a lot that can be offered on that exchange via prediction markets and other asset classes if and when or even without sports prediction markets going away in either outcome. And that is something over time, we obviously will develop. We're also, as shared in the presentation, now able to spend a lot more of our time and energy on new games and experiences as we really feel good about our core product offering. So that will continue, and we'll continue to develop more resident games there that give us more ways to acquire customers, retain customers, engage customers, monetize those customers and obviously help diversify our revenue.

And then you asked, would we go into regulated OSB? And that's absolutely a question that we'll answer and evaluate, and we certainly have the capabilities to do so if that's what's best for our business. So again, we feel really well set up for any outcome, and we certainly kind of like the uncertainty or the limbo to get answered sooner than later because we feel really good about either path for ourselves.

Our next question is from David McCann from Deutsche Bank.

A few questions from my side. A couple on the numbers, if that's okay. So the first one, we add up the Q1 and Q3 revenues you've given us $355 million, and you said that Q4 is typically 1/3 of the revenues historically. And that implies you'll get to maybe $533 million for the full year, which puts you right on the cutoff of the earn-out. I mean, is that how you see things? How likely is an acceleration in Q4 in order that you achieve the earnout? That's the first question.

Then thinking about the $400 million and $700 million EBITDA implied by the management incentive plan payout, what kind of revenue growth do you need from this year to actually get to those points? And I guess what gives you the confidence that you might be able to do that? I appreciate that's the very upper end, but what kind of revenues the business actually need to deliver to get there?

And then final one really for me on this. How much of the growth to get there comes from new products to the existing customer base versus customer growth? Where is that growth really going to come from?

Jeremy, I'm going to try and take those, Clifford, I'm going to let you take the middle one, I think. The third one, I appreciate people would like to model the business. But this business is young and rapidly changing in a rapidly changing legal and political world as well. So without oversimplifying, I think Jeremy's job and what Jeremy's success and his team's success to date is to navigate customer demand by building great product. And that gives us confidence that almost irrespective of the product mix, to your third question, that we can build a business together that delights customers and retains them in the medium term.

To go back to the first question, which I think was about the likelihood of hitting the earn-out, we use this -- we correctly used the phrase that Q4 last year was more than 1/3 of revenues. I actually think -- and I actually think it was closer to 40% of revenues last year, but last year was also a high growth year, and we thought it might be sensible to call out that tempering that optimism about Q4 seems wise. We've looked at other public companies as you can to see their sports mix and Q4 is the most important quarter for most of these American sports-focused businesses.

The NFL is 3 weeks old at the end of September. The NBA starts, I think, on October 20. So this is the critical time in the year and the seasonality, even speaking as a former bookmaker, the season -- the seasonality of the sporting calendar in the United States is something to behold.

Your middle question, which I'm going to pass to Clifford was about, in some ways, the likelihood of addressing the earnout. You can get there many ways. And Jeremy and indeed his colleagues have got there in one way. We think about it in similar but different ways. Clifford will frame it in a way that perhaps is tidiest for you. But I look at the TAM of the listed U.S. Sportsbook businesses, FanDuel and DraftKings, let's call that $7.5 billion. They're the vast majority of the market, probably 80%, but they're only in 30 states. And then you layer on top of that daily fantasy, prediction markets and some of the other ancillary products.

So you've obviously got an enormous TAM and are growing quickly. This team year-to-date, despite extraordinary change in the business, have grown at 30% year-on-year. So I think they should have confidence to back themselves to grow at a similar kind of rate to that, which should get them deep into the money. Do you want to be a bit more specific? Or would you rather...

Well, I think we've -- we know -- we've guided somewhat around what we think revenue growth can be. So we said that it would accelerate IG's growth and that we expect at least double-digit medium term from IG. So we're looking to -- Underdog to accelerate IG's growth. I think in terms of the modeling, we felt that we collectively felt that an earn-out in this year made sense as the business is building its revenue and customer base, that next year is an opportunity for the business to really scale and accelerate. And then having alignment around EBITDA kind of makes sense.

It gives the business enough time and the team enough time to deliver good margins and profitability and it aligns, let's say, the underdog team with IG more broadly and shareholders in particular. If you look at some of the consensus and some of the models out there, I'm sure you've done your own model, you can see that some of the sell side have modeled 20% plus revenue. That's a bit lower than what the team have delivered over the last few years and margins in the sort of high teens. I guess those sell-side analysts have looked at other comparables and peers.

So I'm not -- and I think when you model that out, actually, that gets you okay returns, maybe not quite double digits and a little bit south of the EBITDA numbers that we've targeted the team to deliver. So that gives you a bit of a framing. I'm highly confident you can run your own models to do the sort of revenue growth versus margin optimization to see where that gets you. But it's really impressive how aligned and motivated the team have been. We've got to know the team well through the transaction in the last few months, and we're looking forward to delivering.

Our next question is from Alex Bowers from KBW.

So 2 questions, if I may. Can you hear me?

Yes.

Two questions. Just firstly, can you talk a bit about the marketing strategy for the business and in terms of how you think about customer acquisition costs and kind of the marketing ramp-up over the next few quarters?

And then just sort of secondly, kind of the point that was made around IG Group's overall double-digit growth aspirations, which includes, I guess, includes Underdog. Could you just kind of confirm whether kind of the revenue retention point for IG Group, like how material that is to that aspiration? Or was that kind of excluded from that kind of double-digit aspiration?

Thanks, Alex.

I'll take the marketing one, second. Do you want to take the retention one first?

Yes. I mean you saw our trading statement last week. I mean we were disappointed with Q3 retention at around 70%, but we also reconfirmed our medium-term guidance because we feel that we know that retention can be volatile within any particular quarter, but we're comfortable in our risk management approach. We're looking to improve it over time, of course, but we don't think they're necessarily related. So we reconfirmed our medium-term guidance reflective of that risk management approach.

I think it's important that we understand our medium-term guidance is just that, not a commitment or a guidance in any 1 year. It's subject to market conditions and will move higher and lower accordingly. And clearly, we expect more volatility around retention in any one quarter than in any one year. So we maintain that guidance, and we'll clearly -- that's one thing that we'll talk about at our event on October 22, where we'll talk about the future prospects of the business, including Underdog. But we do feel, as we indicated at the end of July, that Underdog's growth rate will accelerate the overall growth of the group.

Thanks, Clifford. Alex, you asked about marketing and our marketing strategy. And I think obviously, a handful of pieces to this. So we very much view Underdog as I think you can tell from the presentation as a product-led company, and we view marketing very much through the lens of product-led growth.

Historically, over 1/3 of our customers have come from directly attributed referrals from other customers playing on Underdog. So we do a lot to build an experience that people want to play with their friends, share with their friends and do so. And that's always a focus. Also an experience that people enjoy, have fun with leads to that virality. We have a real philosophy in marketing of our job is to show and make sports more fun. It's to be part of the sports moments in a way that enhances the experience for our customers. And our marketing, as you can imagine, is very seasonal, right? It's very based around the sports calendar, the key sporting events, the key sporting moments.

And so you'll see that in the summer. It's at a lot lower when football season pick up, start to picks up when NBA season adds in is when it really accelerates. We're now obviously heading into the most important and biggest piece of the year by far. So you'll see hopefully more and more, especially if you're in the U.S., you'll see more and more of Underdog, our brand, our campaigns, some of the really fun creative things we do.

We've got a team we call the Rascals that kind of does guerrilla marketing. And the key there is to really know sports. We always say we know ball is kind of a principle of our marketing to know sports and make sure we show up in the sports moments in a way that make it more fun for our customers. We've done that in a bunch of ways to date. I'm sure you can see or hopefully have seen some of the ways that we've kind of cut through with marketing messages that often don't cost much money at all, but make us really part of a key moment. And there's hopefully a lot more of that to come as well.

And just to -- if I may, just to build on that, I think one of the places -- it's a crowded market in the United States. You've got some of the prediction market businesses that are about everything rather than sports. You've got some of the legacy online sports brands that customer research suggests have become a little dated. There's Underdog, maybe there's PrizePicks. But one of the areas where Jeremy's colleagues have been most keen to get support from us is just on how you scale marketing through the year and in a somewhat crowded market.

And one of the things we're very proud of -- I'm very proud of at IG over the last couple of years is as we've run the business more efficiently to fund marketing, the returns on that have been very encouraging as well. So I think that's one of the IP synergies that we hope to be able to mutually support each other over the coming years.

[Operator Instructions] Our next question comes from Haley Tam from UBS.

Sorry for coming back for a second pass. Can I just follow-up on some of the questions you've already had. In terms of the different regulatory scenarios that you highlighted, I guess the simple question is how quickly do you think you could pivot from prediction markets back to, say, daily fantasy sports?

Then there's a second question actually more about Q3 that you've just done, the $110 million of revenue. Can you give us any more color on how much of that came from daily fantasy sports versus prediction markets? And perhaps within prediction markets, how important to your revenue line, the different types of trades are, so parlays versus single game or player contracts, that would be interesting.

Thanks, Haley. And apologies, I think I called you Heidi earlier. So on the Q3 revenue mix, I don't think we're going to disclose the specific revenue mix. On the regulatory, how quickly could we pivot if something changed. If that change happened right now, I'd make a phone call and probably within -- certainly within 30 minutes, our app would be working under that new regulatory framework.

We built the app seamlessly for that with the orchestration layer. And it's something as we navigated different kind of state environments, we often had to have different configurations in different states. So it's something our product back end and as a result, obviously, the front end is well built for. So it's a real kind of key of the orchestration layer, the seamless single app and the whole strategy is how quickly we can pivot to any effective outcome.

Just to -- Haley, to add to that, I think mix questions, I understand the rationale behind them, but they're going to change enormously over the coming few months. I think that's probable based on Jeremy and I sat down and looked at the product pipeline for the next 3 months a few times over the last few days, and that's going to change things plus how effective we are at spending marketing dollars even on a geographical basis will change mix as well.

So I really think that level of granularity is unhelpful and that the big picture is just a little bit more helpful for right now. Whilst he says he can change things in 30 minutes, that is true. We were astonished at how quickly they could launch the exchange. And the fact that I think in the end, you were 4 days late, the fact that anything could be 4 days late and that they would feel slightly aggrieved about that when I'm more accustomed to things being slower and later. But part of the complexity here is we don't know the end state. We think the end state will be some kind of hybrid. We think there will probably be some kind of local taxation.

But we have as many of the tools as we can envisage built in-house, controllable by us with the ability to flex, not in the way that kids use the word flex, but with the ability to pivot probably more quickly than any of the large legacy orgs and with that -- but also as a regulated OSB admittedly in only one state. And we think that we're uniquely qualified. We feel that we should take a certain amount of comfort from that and that we're close to uniquely qualified to compete irrespective of the regulatory end state. So maybe it's not 30 minutes, but it should be as fast as anyone out there. And maybe it is 30 minutes.

I really appreciate the full answer to that question. If I can be cheeky and just ask one more. You said you expect the end state to be some kind of hybrid. Can I just confirm that, that was absolutely the case when the deal was originally struck?

I mean this -- we have been talking for a very long time. I think it's improbable. This is a personal view, but I think it's improbable that -- I think it's highly improbable that someone can put lightning back into a bottle, having spent -- spending a lot of time in the United States, the prediction market has caught a Zeitgeist in maybe the way that crypto did a number of years ago.

I don't see how this goes away. But equally, as ever, one should follow the money. And I think that will lead to some kind of taxation somewhere. I think that's the highly likely end state. But that's a personal view. I can't read the minds of the Supreme Court judges, and they will ultimately determine.

Our final question is from David McCann from Deutsche Bank.

So a couple more, if that's okay. Just wanted to follow up actually on Haley's question around the mix, but I appreciate you've kind of given an answer to this. But I think where perhaps some of us are a bit nervous, you did articulated this when you announced the deal that the revenue margins that you get from some of the new products like Prediction are lower than what you get from the legacy book.

So as the business does continue to transition, which you obviously hope for, what are the risks that particularly, as you know, you have on the public markets, people are going to look at the quarterly numbers rightly or wrongly, that we do see some revenue headwinds quarter-on-quarter or even year-on-year as that transition goes through. So how are you thinking about managing that messaging risk? That's the first question.

On the deal more broadly, I mean, to what extent, Breon, is this a defensive deal because of concerns you might have about the long-term growth of the existing group businesses and the risk of prediction markets increasingly become ways for your existing customers to express their opinions on financial markets versus some of the other reasons you've articulated well for doing this deal. So how much of that played into your mind when you're doing the deal? And then I guess, finally, probably again, one for Breon. How are you going to keep Jeremy and his team at IG beyond 2029 given, let's say, the history of moving on?

Do you want me to start with the mix and then you take the final...

No, you do the final one. So you do the final one. Why might you stay? Jeremy is a lot younger than he looks. And he's got lots and lots of runway ahead of him. And actually, he successfully built 3 start-ups -- and I think you meet the caliber of his team, and I really mean it that they are -- I'm very proud of the caliber of the team we're building in IG, but the caliber of the people at Underdog is enormously exciting.

And I think if we can find a way, and I believe we can, if we can find a way for Jeremy to deliver on his customers' desires and his ambitions within IG, first and foremost, in sports, I'd hope that there is -- I don't think we're in any way opportunity constrained by the group, and I think there'll be more than enough opportunity for Jeremy and Brandon and the rest of his team over time. But maybe he should address that at the end.

To go back to the first question was margin, yes.

Yes.

So guidance, maybe I was a little casual, a number of our shareholders were shareholders in Betfair, Paddy Power or Flutter or indeed, some of them are still shareholders in Flutter. We felt that there was a reasonably good read-across the FanDuel business from U.K. shareholders. And perhaps then -- and there was some debate about this internally, so kudos to Martin for trying to make me do more of this.

Perhaps I could have focused more on the seasonality and just helping people build the sports model so they would understand the Underdog revenue mix over time. I think -- so that's a gap that perhaps I could have done a better job on back in July. I think the margin issue is interesting, but not as defining of the outcome as people might think. The prediction markets, specifically Polymarket and Kalshi, both private companies. They are talking up their notional traded volume with great gusto and great effect.

And if one goes even superficially into kind of the Twittersphere about how people are talking about this, it's hard to substantiate exactly what the economic value of some of that notional is. Closer to public company terminology is handle, which we've used in the slide to reflect the actual dollars that customers are staking. And then ultimately, we get to a revenue or net gaming revenue. I think the key metric here is NGR, is net gaming revenue. And handle will go up over time and indeed, notional on prediction market exchanges, if people have 100-leg parlay, a $1 bet can have a notional into the thousands or even tens of thousands. So we think you have to look at revenue.

Now frustratingly, right now, we're the only real public company -- we're the only public company that's talking about revenue currently. I think Robinhood will have done in the past and will talk about revenue from prediction markets over time. But reconciling the difference between notional, handle and revenue is tricky, and we will work with shareholders and sell side to best understand that as time passes.

And those conversations are already underway. We've got work to do, but I think shareholders will understand the complexity of modeling this and giving the right guidance on this because of where you anchor in terms of what stage of the revenue line or the notional handle revenue line.

To your second question, which is kind of the strategically interesting one, was this defensive? If you go back 2.5 years at IG, we were effectively seen as a bet on a mono product, an old U.K. legacy product, over-the-counter CFDs and largely we're a U.K. play. That was very much the case before tasty. This puts us -- and there was considerable -- there was some concern with shareholders about the concentration associated with being as U.K.-centric and as CFD or spread betting centric.

And you might remember the budget last year, the kind of relief rally after the budget showed just -- I think there was a 10% rally in the share price, which showed just how concerned shareholders were about our exposure to regulatory or political events in the U.K. And since the summer of '24, so just after I joined, we talked about filling out product gaps. And then by the summer of '25, we were talking about adjacencies. We have wanted to diversify this business for the good of our shareholders. We wanted to get into a brand and product suite and a regulatory suite that resonates with a younger customer base. And I think prediction markets in the United States fits very well there.

I think Michael Healy will do -- I'm very excited about the job Michael Healy will do on the 22nd of talking people through the growing momentum in the core IG business and how that's also led by product and marketing and the cultural change that he's orchestrating. But I think even in addition to the progress we're making at IG, the opportunity on a sensible deal structure and what we think is a sensible price to get our shareholders' exposure -- to give our shareholders exposure to as faster-growing customer base and revenue and profit stream as prediction markets in the United States, we think that's something we're very excited about. And we think in time, our shareholders will be increasingly excited about as well. Do you want to build on that or we good.

I think it was good. One comment I'll make, I mean, we are -- we have the discussion, obviously, in the process through the announcement of the transaction. And we've engaged with the team around trading since then. I'm really satisfied, frankly, with the shareholder value orientation, the discipline around marketing that the team shows that we have the same conversations around CACs and LTVs and so on.

And ultimately, we'll need to deliver revenue and we'll need to deliver EBITDA. And then that's how we've incentivized the team, and we'll be pleased to pay out as and when the team deliver on those stretching targets.

Yes. David, just to build on the first part you asked around just the mix. I mean, we very much view it as our job to continue to offer more and more to our customers so that they can engage more. And that's something we obviously focus a lot on. And as Breon mentioned and rightfully so, the focus on handle and obviously, the focus on net revenue that comes from that. We're really excited about the handle growth we're seeing as our customers are able to engage more and more. Now of course, the margin is not always going to go up as handle growth is going through the roof. But if you ask us, hey, can we have -- do we want 3x the handle at half the margin?

Of course, we do, right? And that's a trade we'll take every day. So there's obviously a balance in what we offer and how we offer it. It's something we're really thoughtful about. But we're really keen to just keep on offering more and more we can to our customers. And I think you can track that in handle over time. And then you asked what keeps us here in the long term. And obviously, the deal structure has plenty of incentive for us to really drive this business and drive growth over the next few years. But look, I think the important part always is that the team we have -- that we're having fun, and we have an uncapped opportunity to do this.

And I can say that I'm having some of the most fun I've ever had as there's so much in front of us, so much to build such an amazing time and kind of the sizzle reel at the very jump of this, hopefully captured that, but that's what it feels like at our company, and we're all having a really, really good time doing this. And so long as that's the case, I want to be doing this forever.

Thanks, Jeremy. I think we're going to wrap up. Nothing like the enthusiasm of founder in his 30s to make me feel like an old man. So Jeremy, thank you for that, and thank you to our shareholders on the sell side for joining us. The business gives us access to a large, fast-growing TAM. The team are executing well, and they're heading into their busiest quarter with real momentum.

I'm very, very excited about what comes next. For our IG business, we will do a strategy update on the 22nd of October. We'll talk about the progress we're making in the core business. We'll address some of the other questions that have come up in recent months. We appreciate your time today. We look forward to talking to you some more on the 22nd. Thank you all.

Good morning, and welcome to the Investor and Analyst Call for IG Group's Half Year 2026 Results Presentation. [Operator Instructions] I would like to remind all participants that this call is being recorded. I will now hand over to Breon Corcoran, CEO, to begin the presentation. Please go ahead.

Good morning, and thank you for joining us. I'm here with Clifford Abrahams, our CFO. You'll see the agenda we have on the screen. We will take questions at the end. This has been a strong first half, broad-based growth and clear evidence that the strategy we set out in July 2024 is working. Starting with customer acquisition. We delivered the sixth consecutive quarter of sequential growth in active customers, the single best indicator of the health of the business.

Organic active customers up 13%. Organic first trades up 74%. Second, growth was broad-based across every product. Faster product velocity, disciplined marketing and supportive market conditions resulted in organic total revenue up 17% and 20% organic net trading revenue growth. As set out in May, our upgraded outlook targets organic total revenue growth of at least 10% a year beyond 2026. Third, we sustained strong margins. The first half EBITDA margin was 44% with continued investment in our propositions, higher marketing spend and costs associated with the strategic review, partly offset by a lower cost to serve.

Fourth, Underdog transforms our future growth. The acquisition opens up the large, fast-growing U.S. daily fantasy sports and prediction markets. It transforms our U.S. footprint and accelerates stand-alone revenue and EPS growth. Fifth, the strategic review we announced in March is now substantially complete. This month, we set out plans to Redomicile to Jersey and a refreshed organizational model.

We've also announced the acquisition of Underdog. Our listing venue will remain unchanged as a result of the strategic review. We continue to explore future growth and efficiency initiatives, and we'll present a refreshed strategy and a strategy update on the 22nd of October. Let me hand over to Clifford for the financials.

Thank you, Breon, and good morning. You've seen the headline numbers, growth across our key measures. The first half confirms that our investment in product, marketing and people is translating into stronger financial performance. Growth was broad-based. Marketing generated attractive returns and margins remained strong as we invested for growth and absorbed the cost of the strategic review.

Starting with the headlines. Total revenue was GBP 643 million, up 18% and up 17% on an organic continuing operations basis. The EBITDA margin was 43.9% against 49.6% in the first half of '25, reflecting consolidation effects, strategic review costs and a deliberate choice to keep investing behind growth. I'll come back to costs shortly. Adjusted EPS was up 21% and 22% organically, supported by share buybacks.

In line with our progressive dividend policy, the Board has proposed an interim dividend of 14.46p per share, 30% of the prior year full year dividend on the group's old 31st of May year-end basis. Turning now to customer metrics. Growth accelerated through the half. Organic first trades, our lead indicator of future growth, were up 74%. Active customers were up 13%, accelerating to 15% in the second quarter, the sixth consecutive quarter of sequential growth that Breon mentioned.

On a reported basis, growth is higher again, reflecting Freetrade and Independent Reserve. Next, on to platform assets under administration and flows, an increasingly important driver for the business. We're pleased to see that assets under administration on the IG platform reached GBP 21.5 billion, up 34%, driven by sustained net inflows across our stock trading and investments proposition, including Freetrade. The standout is our U.K. direct-to-consumer platform. First half net flows were equivalent to around half of our opening assets under administration, roughly 6x the pace of the market, with IG now capturing an estimated 8% of U.K. market net inflows.

We're building a genuine challenger position in U.K. investments. We've broadened the proposition. Customers are looking for better value than the incumbents offer, and we'll keep investing behind it. Turning to the P&L. Net trading revenue was GBP 589 million, up 21% with growth across every product line, reflecting both higher revenue per customer and a larger active customer base. This reflects the hard work of our teams delivering more product to more customers much faster.

Net interest income was down 10% as higher customer cash balances were more than offset by lower rates and greater pass-through to customers. Total revenue was GBP 643 million, up 18%. Operating costs before depreciation and amortization were GBP 362 million, up 30% reported and around 25% organically, reflecting higher marketing, continued investment in product technology and nonrecurring strategic review costs.

EBITDA was GBP 282 million, up 4% and up 7% on an organic continuing operations basis. Below EBITDA, other net losses reflect 2 key items: first, a GBP 19 million revaluation of the Payward stock received as part of the Small Exchange disposal last year. Second, an impairment relating to Independent Reserve, partially offset by a release of deferred consideration given more challenging cyclical conditions in digital asset markets.

Adjusted EPS, which strips out nonrecurring and nonunderlying items was up 21% to 68.9p. Next, performance by product in the first half of 2026. Growth was broad-based across every product. That breadth matters. It shows our growth isn't reliant on any single product, and it reflects the work we've done to broaden our propositions, widen our appeal and deliver more consistent sustainable growth.

It's the same picture by division. Organic revenue growth everywhere, which is really encouraging. U.K. and Ireland net trading revenue was up 22% organically. APAC and Middle East up 27%. The U.S. was up 18% and Europe up 10%, a broad base of growth, not reliant on any single market. Moving now to costs. Total operating costs increased 26% or 19% organically. Marketing was up 51% to GBP 75 million, driving a 107% increase in first trades with paybacks under 6 months and lifetime value around 4x acquisition costs.

Fixed remuneration was up 15%, driven by the consolidation of Freetrade and Independent Reserve and including GBP 6 million of restructuring under our refreshed operating model alongside inflationary salary increases. On an organic basis, headcount was down 10% even as revenue grew 17%, reflecting our focus on a lower fixed cost to serve and on automation.

Legal and professional costs increased, reflecting the nonrecurring costs of the redomicile, restructuring associated with our refreshed organizational model, together with the strategic review and technology consulting to build our product engineering capability. This slide breaks out the cost movements in more detail. Strip out acquisitions and nonrecurring items and underlying costs were up 12%, well behind our revenue and active customer growth.

The larger driver was marketing. We increased spend as planned, and we're seeing strong returns. The rest of our organic business as usual cost base grew 6%, mainly reflecting inflationary salary increases, continued investment in technology and higher market data and revenue-related costs. Beyond that, the remaining movement is acquisitions and strategic review costs, a full 6 months of Freetrade this year against 3 last year, Independent Reserve from the end of January and nonrecurring costs, which I mentioned earlier.

On capital, our position remains strong. Solvency sinks comfortably above the top end of our long-term target range, and we expect to return within it by the end of 2026 pro forma for the Underdog acquisition. As Breon mentioned, on July 8, we announced plans to set up a new Jersey Incorporated holding company. Around 2/3 of group revenue is now generated outside the U.K. So a Jersey holding company better reflects our international footprint and gives us a simpler, more efficient structure with greater strategic and financial flexibility. Following completion, we keep our London listing, our eligibility for the FTSE U.K. indices and our U.K. tax residency.

There's no change for customers or employees and no change to our operations from the redomicile. The redomicile will be implemented by a scheme of arrangement subject to shareholder and regulatory approvals with completion targeted for the fourth quarter. The shareholder circular was published on the 16 of July and the EGM takes place on the 3 of September. With that, let me hand back to Breon to cover our strategic progress.

Thank you. Back in July 2024, we set out what we believed was needed to fix across product, culture and efficiency. This is where we are now 2 years later. On product, we've closed the priority gaps across our markets, including stock trading and crypto and our unified proposition is on track to launch early in half 2, starting in the U.K. market. On culture, our refreshed organizational model reduces complexity and sharpens focus, and it's already delivered a step change in product velocity.

On efficiency, we've lowered our fixed cost to serve through digital servicing and lifted customer income retention. The outcome is in the metrics. Organic active customers up, revenue per customer up sharply and cost to serve down materially versus 2 years ago. Now to product velocity, which is critical in this industry. We've made good progress on competitiveness. In the first half alone, we brought almost as many new products and features to market as we did in the whole of 2025.

Here's what this looks like. I'm encouraged by the wide range of product enhancements delivered in the first half. In the U.K., we materially upgraded our investing proposition, a much broader range of global stocks, ETFs, mutual funds, fixed income, tax wrappers plus fractional shares. In crypto, spot trading is now live on our FCA-license platform with over 150 coins alongside perpetual futures, crypto swaps, transfers and advanced charting.

We also rolled out spot crypto trading in France and completed the acquisition of Independent Reserve in Asia Pacific. In the U.S., tastytrade recently launched prediction markets. Following the removal of the Pattern Day Trading Rule (sic) [ Pattern Day Trader Rule ] in June, it also saw an encouraging pickup in options activity from customers previously constrained by that rule.

Staying with product, the biggest unlock this year is our unified proposition, launching initially in the U.K. in the coming weeks. It brings trading, investing and crypto together on a single platform and is built to allow the addition of new products quickly. It expands our addressable market, improves acquisition effectiveness and speeds up product delivery. Multiproduct adoption in the U.K. is already up strongly year-on-year and the unified proposition will put more of our products in front of more of our customers.

Turning next to culture. We streamlined from 5 divisions to 3, IG Consumer, IG Securities, our platform Technology institutional business and IG North America, including tastytrade. Dedicated commercial, product and compliance teams stay embedded in each division, so we keep our customer focus while taking out a layer of complexity that was slowing us down.

Turning now to efficiency. I'm pleased that we've made further progress on cost to serve with organic fixed cost to serve per funded account down a further 15% in the half. That's funded higher marketing spend at attractive returns. There's more to do, but these returns support continued investment. This brings me to the strategic review we launched in March. It's now substantively complete and has delivered 3 key outcomes: the proposed redomicile, a refreshed organizational model and the acquisition of Underdog.

Together, these set the group's direction for the next phase of growth. We continue to explore incremental growth and efficiency initiatives, and we'll set out our refreshed strategy, guidance and capital allocation framework at the strategic review on the 22nd of October. Let me turn to Underdog. We launched our strategic review in March, which prioritized acquisitions aligned with our M&A framework. We've looked at very many opportunities, prioritizing growth and innovation and Underdog stood out.

We're clear-eyed about the risks, including the fast-moving regulatory environment. And Underdog's product and leadership team are well placed to win, and we've structured the transaction around performance. Underdog is a leading U.S. prediction markets operator, spanning both daily fantasy sports and prediction markets. This is a landmark deal for IG. It establishes us as a leader in U.S. prediction markets, one of the most significant opportunities across trading, investing and entertainment.

It gives us entry into a high-growth adjacent category initially in sports and then later into financial markets, culture and politics. Underdog brings nearly 1 million mobile-first monthly active users. It has strong brand equity in sport and a fully integrated license stack spanning brokerage, exchange, clearing and market making. This gives it full control over product economics and risk. Underdog is growing rapidly with significant potential in a large and fast-growing market.

Net revenues for the 12 months to June 2026 was $466 million, up 21%. That continues a strong trajectory from $9 million in 2021 to $40 million -- $441 million in 2025, growth of 63% in that final year. Monthly active users reached nearly 1 million, up 39%. Daily fantasy sports has been the engine of Underdog's growth, but as a game of skill, it's limited to around 1/3 of what customers want. Prediction markets change that, simple addressable format for customers used to sports gaming.

Prediction markets have grown very quickly with sports by far the largest and fastest-growing part with more than 50 million U.S. sports betters and daily fantasy players already comfortable with this [ style ] of risk taking. It's a pre-converted pool Underdog is well placed to capture. Turning now to how Underdog fits with IG's strategy. This deal is firmly aligned with IG's strategic focus on product, culture and efficiency. On product, it closes a gap in a high-growth category and broadens our appeal to a younger demographic.

On culture, it brings a share obsession with customers and product velocity and a strong culture of ownership. On efficiency, it's a vertically integrated scalable platform with attractive marketing payback. Together, we unlock a large mobile-first user base. We can scale Underdog's product through tastytrade in the U.S. and over time through IG's unified proposition globally. As one business, we can grow it faster and generate more value than either of us could alone. With that, I'll hand over to Clifford.

Thanks, Breon. The acquisition of Underdog doubles IG's U.S. revenue and increases our U.S. active customers more than tenfold. On a pro forma basis in 2025, the U.S. would have accounted for around 40% of group revenue against around 22% stand-alone. The acquisition diversifies our growth drivers by product. Prediction Markets and DFS would have represented around 25% of combined group revenue.

It also transforms our demographic profile. Over 60% of Underdog customers are under 30 and over 80% are under the age of 40, lowering IG's average customer age from around 42 to 34 on a pro forma basis. Strategically, Underdog delivers the vision from our strategic review, positioning IG at the center of the convergence across trading, investing and entertainment with a category leadership position in a structural growth market.

Financially, our stand-alone revenue guidance, which we upgraded in May, is unchanged, at least 10% organic total revenue growth a year and Underdog growing faster is expected to lift the combined group above that level. The deal is broadly neutral to adjusted EPS in year 1 and double-digit accretive by year 3 with return on invested capital exceeding our cost of capital by year 3. We're maintaining our progressive dividend policy, and we intend to pause our current share buyback.

We expect to be in a position to consider resuming this in 2027 following completion of the redomicile and subject to share price performance and other demands on capital. The consideration aligns a meaningful share of value with future performance through the earn-out and the management incentive plan and Underdog will continue to operate as a commercially stand-alone business, mitigating integration risk. With that, back to Breon for some concluding remarks.

Thank you, Clifford. We delivered strong first half results with growth across every key metric, revenue, customers and returns and momentum building through the period. The strategy we set out in July 2024 has delivered a step change in performance, including stronger customer acquisition, broad-based revenue growth and sustained margins as we invest. And with Underdog, we've announced a transformational acquisition that will drive our revenue and earnings growth in the future.

The strategic review we announced in March is now substantially complete. We continue to explore incremental growth and efficiency initiatives across the group, and we look forward to presenting our refreshed strategy, capital allocation framework and guidance and a strategic review on the 22nd of October. Thank you. We'll now take your questions.

[Operator Instructions]

Our first question is from Ben Bathurst from RBC.

Hopefully you can hear me okay. Question in a couple of areas, if I may. Just starting on costs. I just wondered, do you have any visibility on the nonrecurring costs that you expect to incur in the second half of 2026? And if so, could you give a guide on what level that might be?

And then secondly, just moving on to Underdog. On the call last night, Breon, I think again earlier, you mentioned that you entered into the deal clear-eyed as to the regulatory risk. Can you just share briefly what you see the key risks as being there and how you've gotten comfortable over those risks in doing the deal? And then also on Underdog, you referenced 1 million Underdog users. I just wondered what proportion are currently using the prediction market product versus the daily fantasy sports product of that 1 million users? And what do you see as being the more important lever for growth in the short term? Is it increasing the prediction market penetration of that 1 million customers? Or is it about adding new customers altogether?

So thanks, Ben. We highlighted the nonrecurring costs on Page 13 for the first half. I'm not going to guide the nonrecurring costs for the second half. But as you know, today, we reconfirmed our guidance that we set out in early July in terms of growth, we're comfortable with consensus, and we've stuck with our guidance of mid-40s EBITDA margins.

Thanks, Clifford, and thank you, Ben. clear-eyed might be one of those phrases that I'll have to listen to for a while. If I point you to Page 31 of the appendix on the Underdog deck, it kind of goes to some of the regulatory matters. But there's a shift from state-by-state licensing of daily fantasy, sports betting, gaming towards the federal CFTC licensing structure. That shift is well underway and the CFTC has a clear mandate to regulate event contracts, prediction markets in particular.

Some of the states are defensive about their heritage in licensing and one might opine that, that could be about tax protection or that could be something as philosophical as a states' right matter in the United States. So there is regulatory uncertainty here. And with uncertainty, I guess, comes some risk. When we say that we went into this clear-eyed or open-eyed about the outcomes, I think I'd ask investors to focus on the fact that today, we're buying 100% of a business that is a market-beating team.

It's a product-led company. It has quickly and in a capital-efficient way, built a brand that resonates and is relevant to several million customers in a competitive market in the United States. And these customers on a daily basis, express opinions around sports and increasingly do that through CFTC prediction market rails. Much of that is synergistic, strategically synergistic and capability synergistic to what we do at tastytrade, where we have a deep expertise-led business that in truth has slightly struggled with relevance for a broader customer base.

So I think in the medium term, as we see more convergence of trading and betting or more convergence of people expressing opinions in high engagement markets, I think a team that's product-led that has built a contemporary dynamic brand fits very well with the expertise and competency and compliance capability that we have in Chicago at tasty. And that's kind of why we're excited about this deal irrespective of the regulatory end state. To your question about the mix on prediction markets, and I think we talked a little bit about this on the call last night. We're expecting over time that what Underdog have done is they pivoted from the daily fantasy model, they skipped online sports betting and are now moving to prediction market rails.

They did that first with Kalshi with Crypto.com, but they're now moving to their own fully owned licensing stack. I'm sure we'll come into some of the detail on that later over the coming days. But on Slide 30 of the Underdog deck from last night, there's an indication of the handle, so the volume going -- the notional volume going through the different models. And whilst it's only a tiny amount now on their own prediction rails, I mean, that literally is -- now is the point of explosion and that is literally a traffic that has started to move through their rails in the last 2 weeks, and we're very, very excited about how that growth will explode from here on out.

But we're not giving guidance on customer numbers. We don't have that visibility as yet. But what I think we have here is a monetization mechanic for people who currently express opinions on sports. And I think in due course, will allow us to monetize how people express opinions on financial markets as well.

Our next question is from Hal Potter from Bank of America.

Just 3 from me. One of them is on marketing efficiency. So you mentioned the 6-month payback and LTV to CAC ratio at 4:1. That's the same as we had at 2025. I think they rounded figures. Can you give us any comfort around your marketing becoming more or less difficult in the face of heightened competition?

And then on capital allocation, what can we read into your shift from what I suppose is a dependable buyback into M&A in a relatively volatile space with that regulatory overhang? How are we supposed to think about capital allocation going forward? And then a little bit on capital allocation even further. Regarding the redomicile, are we expecting a bit of excess capital to be unlocked? And how would that feed into your policy going forward?

If you don't mind, take the redom and the capital questions. On the marketing efficiency, I don't love these numbers in that they're rounded and very summary in nature. And at any point in time, we're using different levers, and we're using different levers in different geographies with different competitive dynamics. So there are times when product does more of the work, product releases does more of the work. And you've seen the progress we've made on that and just even in the U.K. over the last couple of years. But there are other times when marketing does more of the work.

And even within that, there's a mix between brand spend out of home, for example, and performance marketing online. So the number is there to give investors comfort that we're still in the same ballpark. Sometimes it feels a bit better, sometimes it feels a bit worse. But it is a very aggregate number. And I think in truth, going into much more detail and would not be helpful. And we call out -- and I think we stressed it appropriately. We call out the 6 sequential quarters of actives growth in actives.

And I think that's the number that one should look at. And in the round, we will spend -- we will increase marketing as we run the business more efficiently. We've said that we think we're underspending relative to a lot of the competition. We've increased marketing spend dramatically, but I think there's opportunity to spend more and to fund more spending from the business growth and from continuing to run the business more efficiently. But I think directionally, that numbers give investors comfort that the story is largely intact rather than to encourage much more specificity around either geographies or a short sample of time. I can't remember the question.

Yes.

I can't remember the question.

Capital allocation. I'll pick that up.

No, sorry, it was about the buyback. Just on the buyback, look, some customers -- some shareholders have talked about the importance of the buyback in the investment model, and we understand that. And I think we bought back since the beginning of calendar '24, some GBP 550 million worth of stock. So we and the Board have shown evidence commitment to buying back when the time is right. But as stewards of this business in the long term, the relevance of this business and these brands for our customers in the long term matters as well.

And the history of IG in recent years has been, as you know, to lose market share in a number of our territories. And the purpose behind this acquisition is to back a team that have grown their customer base in a capital-efficient way, largely through product-led growth. And I think as we can bring that DNA into more of the IG businesses, I hope that, that will be transformational in the years to come.

Yes. So to build on that, in July last year, we set out our capital allocation framework. And M&A, inorganic was very clearly part of that. We talked about regulatory capital requirements. We have our target range, regular distributions, inorganic and then after that, additional distributions. We also set out our M&A framework and Underdog is very consistent within our capital allocation framework in terms of disciplined deployment of capital inorganically.

And it fits our M&A criteria. We set out in the pack, but in particular, we expect the acquisition to deliver the returns that are comfortably in our M&A criteria. So expect inorganic to be a continuing feature of how we grow the business. And as you know, we announced in March our strategic review and acquisitions was very much part of that. We're mindful of returns and buybacks, and we said today that we would expect to resume buybacks next year, subject to all the usual caveats.

We announced the proposed redomiciliation to Jersey, and we talked about capital flexibility. There are a number of other financials listed here and elsewhere that have such sort of topco structures. So by all means look at that. We have our strategic review update after the summer in October, and I'll be happy to give an update at that point.

Our next question is from Ian White from Autonomous Research.

Three from my side, please. Firstly, how would you compare and contrast the Underdog acquisition with IG's previous acquisition of tastytrade. I'm wondering if there are perhaps some similarities in that you bought a, I guess, what I'd describe as a scale challenger in a fast-growing market, where I think the main part of the sort of value proposition here is access to an attractive market where organic entry would have taken too long or been too risky. But maybe you can just help us to think about how this deal is kind of similar and also different, please?

Secondly, what assumptions underpin your conviction in ROIC exceeding WACC by year 3? I'm thinking revenues will probably need to double from 2025 levels at Underdog -- and I'm wondering if you see that being market growth, market share, cross-selling or greater wallet share with the group's existing client base. Can you just help us with some of the thinking around that, please? That's question 2.

And just finally, what sort of investment might be needed to achieve your goals with Underdog over the coming years? Is there anything on technology that needs to be revised? And on marketing, how would you assess Underdog's capabilities? Can you just scale up marketing spend, for example? Or is there a period of kind of recalibration as you've had with IG? That's my final question.

Do you want to take another one? I guess there are some similarities to the tasty deal. It's a fast-growing U.S.-based asset. I think we're -- I wasn't around at the time of the tasty deal. I think we're particularly excited here by the quality of the team, the evidence of progress they've made and the opportunity -- the nascent opportunity in the prediction market space in particular. And I think as people have a chance to read more into Underdog, the fact that they're monetizing a few million customers already as effectively as they are already in a short period of time and by some definitions, third in the market after Kalshi and Robinhood is quite encouraging. The tasty business is one that I have a lot of time for, but is, unfortunately, a little bit more niche than we would like. And as we focus our attention on growth and sustainability for this business in the medium term, I think backing a team, investing in a business that has more mass market appeal is mobile first, is a younger customer base with high engagement is -- that's an attractive place to deploy capital.

I'll pass over to Clifford on the second question. But on your third question, Ian, the business has been capital -- the Underdog business has been capital efficient to date. I would expect that to continue to be the case. We're excited by the deal structure because effectively, aside from the relatively small earn-out on the -- at the end of this financial year, this calendar year, the team is very motivated to hit EBITDA targets in '28 and '29.

And they will do that through marketing spend. I would expect marketing spend to increase from where it is currently, but they will do that through product-led growth primarily, which is how they've grown this business so far. And when -- it's not just that we've seen what they plan to do over -- it's not just that over the last few months, we've seen what they plan to do and their ambitions in product. This is a business I've known well for quite a while and that we've been talking about IG for probably over a year now.

So seeing how they've grown their business and how efficiently and quickly their product -- how impressive their product velocity is, I think that will continue to drive a lot of growth in the coming years as they attempt to maximize the value of that incentive plan.

Thanks, Ian, for your question, which is really around sort of how we expect to deliver that guidance in terms of delivery of returns in excess of ROIC (sic) [ WACC ]. I think there's a bunch of backup in the presentation of yesterday at the appendix, which will give you some of those drivers. We're not giving a guidance on revenue beyond saying sort of strong double digits. I think there are a few things that give us confidence about revenue and that revenue dropping to the bottom line. So if you look historically, the business has delivered revenue through its position as #2 in the daily fantasy sports business.

So that's GBP 0.5 billion of revenue, if you like, from the heritage business. As Breon said, the business has transitioned to prediction rails over the past year, but only just recently has been able to drive that volume through its own predictions exchange. And that will very much assist in monetization in terms of our ability to deliver gross margins from that flow. We also see as the transition of the business model takes place from DFS to prediction models, there's a liberation for some number of the restrictions in terms of the format of propositions that Underdog offers its customers. And so that we believe will drive the handle or the sort of the dollars wagered significantly up for Underdog closer to some of the existing players in the market.

So all of that gives us confidence in revenue growth in the predictions market itself growing strongly, but broadening the proposition and that dropping through in terms of gross margin monetization. And then finally, you've got the operating leverage of a scale business that has the infrastructure in place that's already spending quite a bit on marketing. But as the business grows strongly, we expect EBITDA margins to match that and pick up from here, and that will drop to the bottom line and give us that healthy ROIC that we've guided to.

[Operator Instructions]

Our next question comes from Alex Bowers from KBW.

Just 3 from me, if I may. Just firstly, on the finance costs from the GBP 950 million bridging facility. Can you just confirm how much that would be and also whether that will be included in your adjusted EPS metric? Secondly, just on the buyback, I know a question has already been asked on this, but just in terms of being in a position to resume in 2027, can you just give a bit more clarity on that? Are you like intending to potentially reinstate a buyback at the '26 results for '27?

Or is this something that will come later on in '27 once you've kind of been through the redomiciling process, et cetera? And then thirdly, just on -- I'm actually you kind of mentioned in previous results, the OTC customer revenue retention metric, which I think was like 83% at FY '25. Has there been any improvement on this in H1 '26? And is there any guidance you can give in terms of further revenue growth from this metric in H2 and in FY '27?

Yes. So I'll pick up those questions. Look, we're not going to guide to finance costs in particular. What I'd note is that some, that GBP 950 million you referred to is essentially a committed facility. So we wanted to announce the transaction with a facility to draw on to execute the transaction. We have other opportunities to deliver that cash over time to refinance that bridge facility to move cash around the group. So we'll obviously seek to optimize that. The adjusted EPS would be after the cost of funding, which itself would depend on how much we needed for, for example, the earn-out.

So we've got flexibility and our guidance that we've talked about reflects all of that. In terms of buybacks, look, we're not going to give a commitment, as you'd expect, on timing of buybacks. We will update our thinking around capital at the October strategic review update and obviously, at the full year and ongoing as we do at every reported period. What I'd note is we do expect the [ redomiciling ] to Jersey to take place around the end of the year, hopefully, during this calendar year, subject to regulatory approval, and we've guided to when we expect this transaction closing.

So some of those elements will have been much clearer by the end of the calendar year. I think around retention, look, we're comfortable with retention. It's volatile. So it's -- the team is delivering as expected, but we don't report quarter-on-quarter. I think in terms of the expectations for steady improvement there, we're encouraged by, in particular, our new Head of IG Securities, Andy Biggs, and he's building his team. He arrived during the period, and that itself sort of underpins our long-term confidence in this area.

Our next question comes from Julian Roberts from Jefferies.

I've got a couple on the regulatory front. First, are you able to tell us what proportion of Underdog's customers or handle come from American states where sports betting is presently not allowed? And given that some states are challenging the rules around prediction markets, what do you think is the level of risk of that being referred to the Supreme Court and there being a negative outcome from Underdog's point of view?

So the inference behind the first question is correctly that there is specificity on a state basis. And some of the states where prediction markets have grown have not had a history of legalized sports betting or daily fantasy. We're not going to be drawn on individual state mix at this stage, partly because it changes. The point behind the second question, I think it's largely expected that there will be -- there's a growing expectation that this will go to the Supreme Court in the United States.

And commentators, there's quite a broad variance in when that might happen. But -- so I'm not going to -- I mean, my guess is no better than anyone else's actually less well informed than many. But I think this ultimately will go -- this may ultimately go to the Supreme Court in the United States for resolution. And for those that aren't as close to the detail, the decision will be whether this should be regulated, whether sports, in particular, should be regulated by individual states or whether the CFTC has the right on a federal basis to regulate contracts, event contracts, which currently are seen to include sports.

So I think in the long term, we will get clarity around that, possibly even in the medium term, we'll get clarity around that. And then at the end of this transaction, we will own a brand and a product that allows young -- a younger demographic of customers to express opinions on sports. That's kind of the core legacy of the Underdog brand, as Clifford mentioned earlier, some $400 million or $500 million in revenues a year.

We also own a full -- a relatively rare full stack, an FCM, a DCM and a DCO, which allows us to take regulated event contract bets through the CFTC rules on sports and other things. And we kind of have a bet now on prediction markets in sports and ultimately on prediction markets on other types of events as well. So the backstop here is the brand and the product and the team and the demand across all of the United States from customers to express opinions on sports.

The upside is the extreme upside is the CFTC federal regulation for all of these contracts that liberates customers from some of the limitations that previous state licensing held. That will play out over the coming years. I'm very confident that we have had a thoughtful investment in that space and that our deal structure protects our shareholders, rewards our colleagues very generously if they deliver the heroic growth expectations they've signed up to in '28 and '29, but protects our shareholders in the event of -- protect our shareholders given the regulatory uncertainty over the coming years.

There are no further questions. I will now hand back to Breon for closing remarks.

Thank you all for joining us this morning. We've delivered a strong first half, and we look forward to updating you on the next phase of growth at our strategy update in October. Martin, Clifford and I and the rest of the team are available to take questions over the coming days, and we look forward to chatting with many of you. Thank you again.

Hello, and thank you for joining at such short notice. We launched our strategic review in March, which prioritized acquisitions aligned with our M&A framework. We looked at very many opportunities, prioritizing growth and innovation, and Underdog stood out. We're clear-eyed about the risks, including the fast-moving regulatory environment, and Underdog's product and leadership team are well placed to win, and we structured the transaction around performance.

Today, we're pleased to announce the acquisition of Underdog, a leading U.S. prediction markets operator. It's a landmark deal that establishes IG as a leader in one of the most significant opportunities across trading, investing and entertainment and accelerates our growth in one of the world's largest and fastest-growing consumer finance markets. I'll take you through why we're doing this, and then we'll take your questions.

Underdog gives us an entry into a high-growth adjacent category, spanning both daily fantasy sports and prediction markets, initially in sport and then in time to come across financial markets, culture and politics. Prediction markets are growing fast. Notional volume traded in 2026 is expected to nearly triple on the prior year, with around 85% currently in sport.

Underdog is one of only three fully vertically integrated providers competing meaningfully in sport, and it brings nearly 1 million mobile-first monthly active users with strong brand equity. What's particularly valuable is the license stack. Underdog owns a fully integrated set of licenses and market infrastructure spanning brokerage, exchange, clearing and market making. This gives it full control over product, economics and risk across daily fantasy sports and prediction markets.

The transaction structure aligns a substantial share of value with delivery, split between an upfront payout and earn-out and a management incentive plan. We expect the acquisition to be broadly neutral to adjusted EPS in year 1, double-digit percent accretive by year 3 and to deliver return on invested capital in excess of IG's weighted average cost of capital in year 3.

Together with the proposed redomicile of IG's parent company to Jersey and our refreshed organizational model, the strategic review the Board launched in March is now substantially complete. We continue to work through incremental growth and efficiency initiatives, and we'll present IG's refreshed strategy, guidance and capital allocation framework at a strategy update on the 22nd of October.

Underdog is growing rapidly with significant potential in a large and fast-growing market. Net revenues for the 12 months to June 2026 was $466 million, up 21%. That continues a strong trajectory from $9 million in 2021 revenues to $441 million in 2025, growth of 63% in that final year. Monthly active users reached nearly 1 million, up 39%.

Underdog is the second largest operator by revenue in its heritage product, daily fantasy sports. And since launching prediction markets in September 2025, it has traded the third highest U.S. regulated notional flow in the U.S., including prediction and DFS combination trades behind only Kalshi and Robinhood. This shows how quickly its daily fantasy sports heritage and installed user base are moving on to prediction market rails.

Let's now look at the customer base. Underdog's strong revenue growth reflects a large and rapidly expanding customer base. Cumulative depositing customers have grown from just over 14,000 in 2021 to just under 5 million at the end of last year and active customers, those trading at least once in the year from 14,000 to 3.2 million.

This base has been built efficiently through a differentiated product-first proposition and a strong brand. And it's a young audience delivering that growth, with over 60% of monthly active users under 30 and over 80% are under 40 years of age. A mobile-first community comfortable with fast duration -- short duration risk taking and complementary to IG's existing customer base.

Daily fantasy sports or DFS, has been the engine of Underdog's growth, so let me start there. DFS is a skill-based contest format built on athlete statistics. In the U.S., it has long been treated as a game of skill, a status that predates and is distinct from state-regulated sports betting. But that format is also a constraint. It limits Underdog to around 1/3 of what its customers want. Prediction markets change that.

Underdog now owns the full license stack across three critical functions, giving end-to-end control of product, economics and risk across both DFS and prediction markets. It owns the FCM or the brokerage, which takes customer orders and the DCM, which is the CFTC licensed exchange that lists and trades event contracts.

It also owns the DCO, which is the clearinghouse, which holds collateral and settles trades. Vertical integration across these three pieces of market infrastructure unlocks a complete sports offering delivered through event contracts in around 50 states under a single federal regulatory regime.

Turning next to what Underdog has achieved to date and how that's translating into a step change in growth. Underdog launched prediction markets in limited form in September 2025 and expanded to 30 states, including prediction market parlays in November. In April, it integrated Kalshi into its FCM brokerage, giving customers access to a broader range of contracts. Uptake has been rapid.

The next leg is Underdog's own exchange, which launched this month. As Underdog has given customers more, they've engaged more. In Q2 2026, average monthly handle per active customer was up over 50% year-on-year and monthly active users was up over 60%. This early progress is very encouraging.

Prediction markets offer a simple, intuitive format, highly accessible to novice and experienced traders and to customers used to sports gaming. Prediction markets are growing fast, and sports is the largest and fastest-growing part of this market. With more than 50 million U.S. sports bettors and DFS players already comfortable with the style of risk taking, there's a huge pre-converted pool that Underdog is well placed to capture.

We recognize this is a competitive landscape, and we admire the companies on this slide. But Underdog has a clear right to win. It is built for sports. It has a large sports-first customer base. We're used to fast real-time risk taking. The wallets, the KYC, the brand are already in place. So moving into prediction markets is close to friction-free. That's what sets it apart from competitors, which are built for more sophisticated traders than for sports fans.

One of the keys to Underdog's success is its product engineering capability and product velocity. Its founder-led product-first culture has delivered a differentiated proposition in sport, driving exceptional growth and strong brand equity. And that's what we're acquiring here, not just the license stack and market infrastructure, but an exceptional team that ships category-leading product fast.

If sport is where Underdog has won, it's not where the opportunity ends. The infrastructure is category agnostic. The same licensing stack, exchange and clearing capability, the same intuitive product, none of this is specific to sport. A single outcome event contract works just as well on an economic data print, election or cultural moment as on an NFL game.

So the platform Underdog built for sport is a platform for trading events of any kind, and this is where IG comes in. Financial markets are our home turf, decades of expertise in pricing, risk and regulated trading. Underdog brings industry-leading product velocity and an engaged audience. We bring deep markets capability.

Together, there's a genuine right to win as prediction markets expand into crypto, financial markets, politics and culture. Sports is the beachhead, but the prize is far bigger.

Turning now to Underdog's leadership team who are critical to drive the growth of the business. Underdog is a founder-led product-first franchise. Jeremy Levine, Co-Founder and CEO, previously founded DRAFT. That was a business I brought to Paddy Power Betfair as CEO in 2017. Jeremy also founded StarStreet, which was acquired by DraftKings.

Underdog's Co-Founder and Chief Product Officer, Brandon Stakenborg, was part of the early team at DRAFT. They're backed by a strong leadership team. I've known this business for many years and invested in Underdog as an early-stage investor well before I joined IG. I retain a small holding in the business, which I disclosed to the Board when this transaction began. That long association gives me strong conviction in the team and the opportunity ahead. I'm particularly looking forward to welcoming the Underdog leadership team to IG.

This deal is firmly aligned with IG's strategic focus on product, culture and efficiency. On product, Underdog closes the gap in the high-growth category and broadens our appeal to a younger demographic. On culture, it brings an unrelenting focus on customers and product velocity. On efficiency, Underdog is a highly scalable platform and attractive marketing paybacks.

Together, we unlock a large mobile-first user base, and we can scale Underdog's product through tastytrade in the United States. IG's compliance capability will help underdog move faster. As one business, we can grow faster and generate more value than either of us could alone.

You've seen a version of this slide before. Underdog materially broadens IG's addressable market alongside our existing exposure in OTC derivatives, futures and options, stock trading and crypto, prediction markets add a fast-growing and new fast-growing category. It meaningfully increases our combined TAM and our ability to accelerate top line growth further into double-digit territory.

With that, I'll hand over to Clifford to take you through the financial highlights.

Thanks, Breon. Underdog more than doubles IG's U.S. revenue and increases our U.S. active customers more than tenfold. On a pro forma basis in 2025, the U.S. would have accounted for around 40% of total group revenue against around 22% stand-alone. It also diversifies our revenue by product.

Combining Underdog's 2025 results with IG's, prediction markets and DFS would represent 25% of combined group revenue, reducing reliance on any single product line. It also transforms our demographic profile, lowering IG's average customer age from around 42 to 34 on a pro forma basis.

Let me walk you through the structure. The $1.1 billion upfront is fixed. The enterprise value for 100% of Underdog at closing are 2.4x net revenue for the 12 months to 30th of June 2026. On top of that, an earn-out contingent on 2026 revenue and positive EBITDA and capped.

Separately, a management incentive plan that sits outside the purchase price, rewarding eligible employees for 2028 and 2029 EBITDA delivery and self-funded by Underdog's earnings. On funding new IG equity alongside new debt, a bridge initially, then longer-term financing to pay the cash to sellers and refinance Underdog's existing borrowings. We remain committed to our investment-grade rating throughout. We expect pro forma gross leverage to be under 2x EBITDA at the end of 2026, deleveraging from there with our solvency ratio within the 160% to 200% target range.

Next, lock-ups. The consideration structure is designed to retain and incentivize management. Underdog's founders receive around 2% of IG's enlarged share capital on completion under the longest lock-ups. Five institutional shareholders receive around 3% in aggregate released on a faster schedule. Smaller holders are largely unrestricted. The management incentive plan, or MIP, adds a further layer of alignment. Closing is expected in late 2026 or early 2027, subject to regulatory and antitrust clearance.

Now to how this deal meets our M&A criteria. Strategically, Underdog delivers the vision set out in our strategic review. Financially, the deal meets our M&A criteria on EPS accretion and returns. Finally, the transaction structure aligns a meaningful share of value with future performance and Underdog will operate as a commercially stand-alone business, mitigating execution risk.

Let me turn to what this means for our financials. Starting with revenue. Our stand-alone guidance is unchanged and Underdog adds to it. It's growing at a stronger double-digit rate. So once the deal completes, we expect the combined group to grow above our organic stand-alone level of 10%. On earnings, as Breon set out, the deal is broadly neutral to adjusted EPS in year 1 and double-digit accretive by year 3, with return on invested capital exceeding our cost of capital by that same point, fully in line with our M&A criteria.

On the balance sheet, we stay disciplined and remain committed to our investment-grade credit rating. On capital returns, our dividend policy is unchanged. We intend to pause the current buyback, expecting to consider resuming it in 2027 following completion of the redomicile and subject to share price performance and other demands on capital.

With that, I'll hand back to Breon.

Thank you. To conclude with this slide, which you've seen before, Underdog gives IG entry into a high-growth adjacent and prediction markets and diversifies our revenue growth drivers. It brings a complementary customer base and one already comfortable with short duration risk. And it comes with a valuable integrated license stack, which gives us full control of our product, economics and risk across DFS and prediction markets.

And as Clifford has set out, the return profile is attractive. Before we wrap up, a brief word on our H1 results, which we've also announced today. We'll cover these in full on another call, so I'll keep it to the headlines. It's been a strong first half. Our strategy has delivered a step change in growth, and Underdog will take that further.

Starting with customer acquisition, we delivered a sixth consecutive quarter of sequential growth in active customers, the best single indicator of the health of the business. Organic active customers is up 13%, organic first trades up 74%.

Second, growth was broad-based across every product. Faster product velocity, disciplined marketing spend and supportive market conditions resulted in organic total revenue up 17% and 20% organic net revenue -- net trading revenue growth. As we upgraded in May, our outlook targets organic total revenue growth of at least 10% a year beyond 2026 from our 2025 base of around $1.1 billion.

Third, we sustained strong margins. The first half EBITDA margin was 44%, with combined -- with continued investment in growth, higher marketing spend and costs associated with the strategic review, partly offset by a lower cost to serve.

Fourth, Underdog transforms our future growth. As we set out, the acquisition opens up a large, fast-growing U.S. daily fantasy sports and prediction markets. The acquisition transforms our U.S. footprint and accelerates stand-alone revenues and EPS growth. Finally, this month, we set out plans to redomicile and a refreshed organizational model.

Together with the acquisition of Underdog, the strategic review we launched in March is now substantially complete. We continue to explore further growth and efficiency initiatives, and we'll present our refreshed strategy and a strategy update on the 22nd of October.

In summary, these are a strong set of results and a strong platform from which to acquire Underdog. Thank you for listening. We'll now take your questions.

Good morning, and welcome to the investor and analyst call for IG Group 2025 Results Presentation. [Operator Instructions] I would like to remind all participants that this call is being recorded.

I will now hand over to Breon Corcoran, CEO, to begin the presentation. Please go ahead.

Good morning, and thank you for joining us. I'm joined by Clifford Abrahams, our CFO. I'll begin with the highlights and update on our strategic delivery. Clifford will then take you through the financials. I'll return later to cover our 2026 priorities and the strategic review we're announcing today before we open it up to questions.

Here, you can see that 2025 was a year of strong execution. I'm pleased that our strategy is gaining traction. New customer acquisition was up 54% on an organic basis. Active customers were up 6%, and that growth is accelerating into double digits in 2026. We delivered organic revenue growth in line with our medium-term guidance ahead of schedule and did so while continuing to invest for growth and maintaining strong margins. That accelerating commercial momentum gives us the confidence to upgrade our guidance to the top end of the mid- to high single-digit target range.

We returned GBP 321 million to shareholders in the year and are today announcing a further GBP 125 million buyback. Cash generation is strong, and we entered 2026 with a healthy surplus capital position. The markets we operate in are large, fast-growing and being reshaped by structural drivers, and IG is well positioned to capitalize. Our progress gives us confidence to set bolder ambitions. And today, we're launching a strategic review to ensure IG maximizes shareholder value. More on this later.

Let me now take you through how we're delivering against the priorities I set out in July 2024. This slide shows the journey. On the left are the foundations we've built over the past 19 months, investing in our product to close gaps in our offerings and user experience, embedding a high-performance culture and increasing efficiency. Execution against these priorities is now translating into the record results you've just seen.

On the right, our next phase. The Board's objective is to maximize long-term shareholder value. We'll explore all routes to achieve this through the strategic review this summer. This will look beyond the current plan to identify the best routes to maximize long-term shareholder value. I look forward to sharing the outcomes of this in the autumn. In the meantime, we're focused on maintaining the strong commercial momentum we've built.

This slide puts the detail behind the headline numbers I shared earlier. The standout is the trajectory in customer acquisition. First trades, our lead indicator for future growth, went up 54% organically. That's a step change from the flat or declining trend we started with and as a result of closing product gaps, broadening IG's appeal and deploying marketing investment at strong returns.

Net trading revenue crossed GBP 1 billion for the first time. Funded accounts increased to over 1.3 million. These are respectable milestones, but what matters more is the momentum behind them and the scale of the opportunity still ahead.

Let me now take you through how we're building on this, starting with product. This chart tells an important story. Between 2022 and 2024, IG shipped fewer than 20 new products or features across 3 years, and we were losing market share. In 2025, we delivered 37 with fewer people. That's a reflection of the cultural transformation underway, stronger talent, clear ownership and fewer barriers to getting things done. Product velocity is critical in this fast-moving industry. I'm pleased that our offering has come a long way in under 2 years, and there's more to do.

When I joined, I saw missed potential in the business. IG stock trading was limited and uncompetitively priced. Spot crypto was absent outside the U.S. We needed to broaden our offering, make it more accessible and move quickly. It's imperative that we keep doing this. In stock trading, our zero commission offering is now live in the U.K., in Ireland, in Singapore and in France. We acquired Freetrade, and we're investing to take it to the next level, launching Zero Commission mutual funds and SIPs and capturing strong transfer demand as we disrupt the U.K. self-directed investment market.

In crypto, we became the first U.K. listed company to receive a full FCA crypto asset license, and we also secured a European license under MiCA. In January, we completed the acquisition of Independent Reserve. We launched spot crypto trading in Australia earlier this month, powered by Independent Reserve, and we'll expand to Singapore and the UAE in the second half of 2026.

In over-the-counter, we added 24/5 trading, a much broader range of weekend and pre IPO markets and an enhanced offering for professional customers. Early traction in newer markets is encouraging. In Singapore, stock trading has attracted well over 2,000 active customers in a few months, growing at double-digit week-on-week -- double-digit percentage week-on-week and with significant multiproduct take-up. In France, our stock trading offering has exceeded 2,400 active customers with the base doubling every 3 weeks.

Underpinning all of this is a unified platform launching in the coming months. One app, bringing together all our products for the first time, a step change in our proposition that will significantly broaden our addressable market. Good progress and more to do.

Let me now turn to culture. You've seen the impact of our cultural transformation in the product and customer numbers. This slide provides further evidence. Net Promoter Scores are much improved. Customer satisfaction is up. We're generating more revenue and profit per colleague than before. This all gives us confidence that our decentralized operating model is working. Divisional leaders have the autonomy to compete and win locally, and this is now being evidenced in our results.

Since June, we've hired over 300 people from leading organizations and sharpened how we link pay to performance. As momentum builds, we create more opportunities for our people and continue to reward high performance.

Now to efficiency. The savings we're generating are funding our investment in growth. They don't show up as margin expansion in the P&L. We've reinvested them in marketing, product and technology while maintaining strong margins. Organic cost to serve per customer is down 13% since 2023. Good progress, but still significantly above industry norms, so more to come here. Automated account opening and KYC times are much improved, and this matters commercially. Customers who are automatically activated are roughly 3x more likely to trade.

IG had virtually no digital servicing capability when I joined. Today, our subservice rate is over 70%. We've broken the link between customer growth and headcount. That provides scope for operating leverage as we scale. AI is also contributing beyond cost reduction, helping customers identify trading opportunities, prescreening marketing assets for compliance and clearing PEP and sanction screening in seconds rather than in days.

We've also focused on converting more OTC customer income into net trading revenue using better data and analytics to take more market risk where appropriate within Board-approved limits. This means net trading revenue will be more volatile from quarter-to-quarter, but structurally higher over time. We're pleased with our progress here and convinced that there's more upside ahead.

Let me hand over to Clifford for the financials.

Thank you, Breon. Good morning. You've seen the results, record revenue, organic growth hitting our medium-term guidance ahead of schedule and strong margins. Adjusted EPS is up, supported by buybacks, which have reduced our share count by over 16% since May 2022. Looking ahead, we're investing more because the returns justify it.

Payback periods are short and will increase investment this year while sustaining EBITDA margins in a mid-40s percentage range. Before the P&L, I want to start with how our revenue model is evolving. Assets under administration on the IG platform reached GBP 18.2 billion at year-end and hit just under GBP 20 billion at the end of last month. AuA generates recurring revenue, subscriptions, interest and the trading activity from engaged customers with assets on our platform. As our stock trading and investments business scales, AuA becomes an increasingly important driver.

Turning to our revenue mix on the right-hand side of this slide. All our products are growing. We've returned OTC derivatives to faster growth. It's 74% of net trading revenue today, and we expect growth momentum to continue. The bigger long-term opportunity lies in futures and options, stock trading and investments currently 7% and crypto at 4% pro forma, all addressing larger, faster-growing markets.

In the U.K., our combined OTC and spot crypto revenue is growing 30% to 40% year-on-year, and we estimate around 5% share of U.K. direct-to-consumer crypto trading revenue. As we scale these propositions globally, their share of revenue will increase, making IG's earnings more diversified. We're confident that our investments will structurally improve the quality of the business.

Turning to the P&L. Record total revenue of over GBP 1.1 billion with net trading revenue passing GBP 1 billion, up 10% organically, more than offsetting lower net interest income. Costs up 13% reported, reflecting increased investment in technology, propositions and marketing. We plan to invest further in 2026 to support product launches and further accelerate customer growth. EBITDA margins of over 47% reflect that choice.

As we've said consistently, we launched our strategy, we're prioritizing revenue growth, and we're confident of sustaining margins in a mid-40s percentage range. Below EBITDA, the small exchange disposal contributed a GBP 76 million gain. Stripping that out, profit after tax was broadly stable, reflecting the benefit of revenue growth, offset by lower finance income due to lower rates on our own cash and title transfer balances and the interest cost on the GBP 250 million bond issued last May. Adjusting EPS excludes the small exchange gain and grew 5%, driven by buybacks. In summary, record revenue and maintaining strong margins while investing in stronger future growth.

Next, performance by product in 2025. Growth across every category. OTC Derivatives net trading revenue was up 8%. For context, this business was declining at a 3% compound annual rate between 2021 and 2024. We've returned it to growth and intend to build on that. Exchange-traded derivative revenue up 3% reported. That reflects our exit from Spectrum at the end of 2024, which contributed approximately GBP 15 million of revenue at broadly breakeven margins.

Stripping that out, organic growth from continuing operations was 15%, driven by tastytrade, where U.S. active customers grew 12%. Stock trading and investments nearly doubled to over GBP 68 million, including 41% organic growth. These growth rates give us confidence to invest more this year. It's clear that our proposition is resonating with customers who want better product and better value for money. We'll continue to compete hard and take share.

Crypto revenue remains early stage. We launched our U.K. proposition midway through last year. On a pro forma basis, including Independent Reserve, crypto trading revenue represented around 4% of group net trading revenue in 2025. We now have the licenses and capability to scale this meaningfully. First trades were the strongest in many years, giving us a strong base as we deliver our multi-asset unified platform and ramp up marketing.

Turning now to divisional performance. It was good to see growth everywhere. U.K. first trades more than doubled organically and multiproduct adoption is outpacing acquisition, which highlights that we are deepening engagement on our platform. U.S. net trading revenue grew 18%. Tastytrade has significant runway in a large, fast-growing market. APAC was steady on revenue, but first trades grew 54%, a strong indicator as we launched crypto and expand stock trading across the region this year. Europe delivered 23% organic OTC growth and further upside as we roll out new propositions. Every division has room to grow, and we intend to back them with investment this year.

Next, I want to recap on tastytrade's recent performance because it highlights the quality of the assets within our portfolio. Trading revenue last year grew 23% with second half growth accelerating to 32% in local currency. Customer assets reached over $7 billion, up 23%. Active customers grew 13%. This is a business with distinctive competitive position, a recognized brand, proprietary technology, a differentiated content-led acquisition model that delivers high retention customers at low costs and a growing asset base generating increasingly diversified revenue.

The U.S. retail trading market is one of the largest and fastest evolving in the world, and tastytrade is well positioned to capture a larger share of it. We're pleased to have new divisional leadership in place and the priority is clear, simplify the proposition, broaden the appeal and accelerate growth.

Next, our recent acquisitions, a proof point for how we allocate capital. Freetrade is scaling rapidly with total revenue compounding at 25% and AuA up over 34% on the prior year on a pro forma basis. The commission-free mutual fund proposition is gaining real traction since we launched it in October. We now offer over 760 funds across 40 managers, including strong coverage of the best buy lists that drive flows in the U.K. market.

Fund assets are compounding at a strong double-digit rate month-on-month. The launch of SIPs in January triggered a significant acceleration in pension transfers with over GBP 0.25 billion in the pipeline and net funding on track for a record month in March. Independent Reserve delivered revenue growth of over 45% in 2025 and is on track against our acquisition case.

Digital asset markets have softened entering 2026, and we structured the deal accordingly. Cyclicality is reflected in the purchase price and deferred consideration. Our conviction in the long-term opportunity is unchanged and the acquisition brings crypto-native expertise and license capability across Asia Pacific that would have taken years to build organically. These are well-executed transactions at sensible prices directed at our most promising growth markets.

Both closed priority product and geographic gaps, both are on track to deliver returns above cost of capital within 3 to 5 years, and both are integrating well. We're putting our M&A framework into practice, and we'll maintain this discipline in the future. Costs are up 13% reported, reflecting 3 key drivers. First and most significantly, marketing, up 31% across the group, contributing to 54% growth in first trade on an organic continuing operations basis. Returns are strong, payback is short, and we plan to spend more this year.

Second, Freetrade. We're scaling a disruptive proposition into a U.K. market where incumbents are cutting fees to defend their positions. This is exactly the right time to be investing and the growth confirms it. Third, legal and professional costs up to GBP 62 million. Roughly half of this is ongoing. The rest covers M&A-related costs, technology consulting and early work on evaluating the group's domicile and legal entity structure. We think that work can free up capital and give us more capital flexibility for the future. No decisions yet, but we see enough potential to justify it. We've maintained strong margins whilst delivering an extensive product pipeline and investing behind the momentum we've built, all while continuing to return capital to shareholders.

Now to capital. The key message here is that we have the firepower to invest in growth, pursue M&A and return capital to shareholders. Our pro forma solvency ratio of 197% is comfortably at the upper end of our 160% to 200% target range, which is stated after our new GBP 125 million share buyback announced today. We've proposed a 7-month dividend of 28p, equivalent to 7/12 of the dividend that would have been paid for the 12 months ending the 31st of May 2026. But capital returns are only part of the story. Our strong balance sheet gives us optionality to invest organically behind our fast-growing propositions and to act on M&A where we see the right opportunities.

Turning to trading for the 3 months to the end of February. Conditions varied across the quarter with elevated volatility in oil and bullion markets, gold and silver, making conditions harder to monetize relative to prior quarters. Despite that, momentum continued to build. Net trading revenue was up 5% on the prior year or 4% organically. Customer growth accelerated further with organic first trades up 57%, building on the strong second half of 2025 and active customers up 10%. March has been stronger still. Recent geopolitical developments, particularly in the Middle East, have contributed to elevated volatility across a range of markets, driving strong engagement on IG's platforms.

Our platforms have performed strongly throughout, available 100% of the time and giving customers deep liquidity when they need it most to access markets and manage their portfolios. To give you a sense of momentum, we expect total reported revenue for the first quarter of the 2026 calendar year to be approximately GBP 300 million, close to a record for the group with organic active customer growth accelerating beyond 10%, a strong start to the year and clear evidence that our strategy is working.

Turning to the outlook. We entered 2026 with strong momentum. Organic revenue in 2025 was approximately GBP 1.1 billion, ahead of prior guidance, reflecting stronger trading at the second half of December. From that higher base, we now expect 2026 organic growth towards the top end of our mid- to high single-digit range. On a reported basis, revenue will also reflect a full year of Freetrade and 11 months of Independent Reserve.

We expect net interest income to be approximately GBP 110 million in 2026 based on current interest rate expectations and anticipate EBITDA and adjusted EPS to be in line with current market expectations, which are available on our Investor Relations website. Beyond 2026, strong commercial momentum gives us confidence to upgrade our medium-term total revenue guidance forward towards the top end of our range. We expect EBITDA margins to be sustained in mid-40s percentage range with investment in growth offset by structurally declining cost to serve, enabled by AI, digital servicing and automation.

With that, back to Breon.

Thank you, Clifford. Let me address what comes next, our priorities for 2026 and the strategic review we're announcing today. You've seen this slide before. Our addressable markets are large, growing rapidly, and our penetration remains low across every category. What's changed is the pace of convergence and the rate of change in adjacencies, including prediction markets. The structural tailwinds are strengthening and the opportunity is getting bigger.

This slide shows the journey from the gaps we identified in July 2024 to where we expect to be by year-end. The progress has been significant. And by December, the core gaps will be largely closed. The biggest unlock this year is our unified multi-asset platform launching first in the U.K.

Next, I'll cover our 2026 priorities and then the strategic review. Our focus remains on the 3 pillars we presented 19 months ago, product, culture and efficiency. On product, as I mentioned, we're launching our unified platform in the U.K. in the middle of this year. This follows our rebrand, which positions IG as the investors champion. We'll continue scaling stock trading and crypto into new markets and spend more on marketing to drive growth where the returns justify that.

On culture, we're moving faster, and we're closer to what customers want. The priority now is product engineering capability. We've established dedicated AI squads across onboarding, servicing, compliance and trading to accelerate delivery. We'll continue targeted hiring and building on our high-performance culture. On efficiency, we've made good progress on our cost to serve, but it's still above best-in-class. There's more to do. In 2026, we'll go further on AI and digital servicing to narrow that gap.

Initiatives designed to further enhance revenue retention continue, and we remain focused on directing capital towards our highest returning opportunities. Let me spend a moment on our unified platform because it's an important product launch coming later this year. From a customer perspective, this means one app to trade leveraged products, invest in stocks and ETFs and access crypto with a single wallet and seamless movement between products. New features and asset classes roll out in the same app, meaning faster uptake and better marketing payback.

Multiproduct adoption in the U.K. is already up 138% ahead of new customer growth. We're confident that our unified platform will accelerate that further, deepening engagement and extending customer lifetime value. We've been clear that we're spending more on marketing, and I want to explain why we're confident in that decision.

Marketing payback is around 6 months. Lifetime value to acquisition cost is about 4:1. As a percentage of revenue, marketing rose from 8% to 10% in 2025, and we expect it to increase again this year. Our peer group averages around 16%, not our target, but it demonstrates that we have plenty of scope to do more. We've also transformed our marketing capability. We're using AI for creative testing and life cycle management. We're spending more, but we're spending smarter and the results are showing in first trades and active customer growth.

Let me now focus on where AI takes us next. In 2025, we built the infrastructure, agentic screening in onboarding, AI-powered servicing across digital channels, compliance automation. In 2026, the focus shifts to extracting commercial value, churn prediction, next best action models and ultimately, a fully agentic onboarding and servicing platform. The goal is a customer experience function that generates revenue, not just savings. In Australia, we've launched DiscoverAI, a large language model powered tool that lets traders search for opportunities across stocks, ForEx and commodities using natural language, scanning global news in real time.

Every improvement here frees up capacity for marketing, supporting customer acquisition while protecting margins. This slide shows how our revenue growth is accelerating. Our organic revenue CAGR has moved from 3% to 6% and industry tailwinds continue to strengthen. A generational wealth transfer is driving a shift to self-directed investing. Trading, investing and gaming adjacent experiences are converging. AI is lowering barriers and reshaping how people engage with financial markets. And a more supportive regulatory backdrop is emerging in some jurisdictions. There are structural trends, which will endure for decades and benefit businesses with the right products, technology, scale and regulatory credentials. The question is how we capture more of it, and that's the purpose of the strategic review.

We operate in large and fast-growing markets, shaped by the structural trends I've just described. And as I said at the outset, we're well positioned to capture this opportunity. We delivered against the priorities we set out in July 2024, stronger customer acquisition, and growing active customer base, organic revenue growth in line with our medium-term guidance, strong cash generation and surplus capital. That track record gives us the confidence and the platform to set bolder ambitions.

So today, we're launching a strategic review to ensure IG captures the full long-term opportunity ahead of us. This review will evaluate routes to maximize shareholder value. That includes acquisitions to accelerate growth. It covers our domicile legal entity structure and listing venues to unlock capital and enhance strategic flexibility. And it will consider whether combining parts of the group with other industry participants could create additional value.

Our execution path through 2026 is clear. The strategic review looks beyond that horizon. Strong near-term delivery gives us a platform from which to pursue greater long-term ambition. The foundations are in place, and we have strong momentum behind us. This review will ensure we find the best path to realize IG's full potential. I look forward to updating you on the outcomes in the autumn.

Finally, to summarize, we've delivered record financial results. We've moved faster on product. We're reshaping our culture. We're driving efficiency gains. We've delivered a step change in customer growth. The new year has started strongly. Active customer growth has accelerated further into double-digit territory this month, giving the confidence to upgrade our revenue guidance. Our strategic review will ensure we maximize long-term value for our shareholders.

Thank you. We'll now take your questions.

[Operator Instructions] The first question is from Ian White at Autonomous Research.

Maybe I can start with 3, please. First of all, can you maybe just say a little bit about the indicators you have of the quality of the new clients that have come in and the conviction that you have that those are similar to those you onboarded previously with respect to lifetime value. That's question one, please.

On the strategic review, can you just set out for us what is it here that really marks a departure from your previous thinking? I'd understood openness to inorganic opportunities, you had the acquisition of Independent Reserve. That was already part of your thinking. And should we anticipate any new targets being announced as part of that review?

And just finally, could I ask for maybe a few more details or thoughts on AI-related opportunities and maybe specific cost-saving opportunities there. Is it right, for example, that IG should serve significantly fewer clients per employee than some of your other peers, for example, or are there opportunities to really close that gap?

Ian, thank you for the questions. Clifford, I'm going to ask you to take the second one. I'll take the first and the third. And perhaps we might just ask other analysts to -- maybe let's do the questions around the numbers first or current trading first, and then we do the strategic review ones at the end. It might just flow better for everybody.

On the specific issue of customer value, we have high confidence and improving confidence that marketing spend is being properly used. We have very good visibility internally, obviously, on expected lifetime customer value for the retail cohort and the professional cohort. And we can track from early indicators of behavior, we could forecast with some certainty as to the future value of customers.

We are quite disciplined and somewhat self-critical when we see pops in customer -- new customer activity. And sometimes, we do trigger customers that are less value to us. So sometimes we do some marketing stuff that is quite effective, but the customer value is not what we would hope. So all of that in the round, that is an increasingly well-oiled machine, both through the marketing functions and with a feedback loop through finance. So increasingly, that gives us confidence that the marketing money has been better deployed and that these customers will be valuable to the business in the medium to long term. All of that feeds into the guidance, and I don't really think we should go to much more detail than that now.

Do you want to take the strategy question and then we come -- sorry, let me talk about AI for a second. So I think it's fair to say -- I think it's fair to say that the last couple of years have kind of been a cultural journey as much as a commercial journey. And we needed to reimpose kind of commercial discipline on the business and a customer centricity, which was a slight change from maybe where the business had been before that.

2 years ago, 12 months ago, we were still very disciplined about customer centricity and not getting distracted by bright, shiny objects. So therefore, we weren't solving for -- 2 years ago, there was much talk about R&D and projects and AI trials, and we basically shut a lot of that down to get back to doing the basics properly. And we're quite disciplined about a mentality of, first, you must crawl, then you can walk and then you can run.

As we're evidencing more momentum and as the team is coalescing around kind of commercial targets, we're now using AI across the whole pitch. We're using it in marketing. We're using it in compliance. And increasingly, we're using it in product and engineering. So it's too early to say what that might lead to in terms of efficiency gain or productivity gain. But in the round, the guidance we give today and the confidence we have in upgrading the guidance today is the sum of where we see the momentum in the business and where we see the opportunities for future deployment of resource either into product or into marketing or indeed into talent.

So the guidance, I don't want to get more specific on the guidance. I think that would be unwise and unnecessary. But in the round, we're happy with the marketing spend. We think we can get better. We're beginning to use AI across the business, and we think we can get better. Do you want to take the strategy?

Yes. Ian's question was what's different about the strategy review relative to what we've said in the past. But we set out our strategy in July 2024, and we're delivering well against that. And you're seeing the results come through in the numbers and also in our product velocity and our propositions. So that really gives us the confidence to be more ambitious. So expect greater ambition and materiality.

In our RNS, we talk about some of the things we're considering. It's really quite broad. We've got an open mind about some of those things that we've set out. But the North Star very much is maximizing shareholder value.

Operator?

The next question is from Haley Tam at UBS.

Can I ask a couple, please. Firstly, just in terms of the convergence of the trading, investing and gaming industries now that you've mentioned the new part, if you like, of the backdrop. Are there particular key opportunities you'd highlight for us here? And any thoughts on how we should think about your timing or regions this might apply to? That was the first question.

And then the second question, if I can, just on the strategic review. We understand the outcomes won't come until the autumn. But I think could you maybe just give me some color on the reason why capital flexibility perhaps from a change in domicile or legal entity structure is important now, perhaps where it wasn't 2 years ago?

I'll let Clifford take the second question. But to be fair, Clifford has only been on the team 15 months. So it's kind of unfair to ask him or indeed me to opine on capital structure from a number of years ago. On the convergence thing, this is most clearly evidenced in the United States, where with the new -- with the still relatively new administration and the kind of shift to being more crypto and the very -- the way that prediction markets, in particular, seem to have captured or seem to be perfectly aligned with some kind of zeitgeist, we see this convergence.

We see similar trends in other geographies, but not as pronounced. The business -- the IG business is a healthy, growing, very profitable business. I think we have the right -- I think increasingly, we have the right -- the necessity and indeed the right to try and be more ambitious. And to go back to Ian's question, by being a little bit more overt about this, we will be able to get access to opportunities that we haven't previously seen. We're still below the radar in conversations, and there are still things happening in the world that we don't know about as early as we would like.

So I can't really say what the end state is yet. We will do -- we have been working on this. We will do considerable more work over the next few months. And hopefully, we will have a more coherent view of the end state to share with you by the autumn.

I pick up the capital side. Haley, thanks for the question. We refreshed our capital allocation framework last year. We think it's working well. And you can see we've now announced a buyback that brings us into our announced range. So we're looking really -- we're doing more work to explore our thinking, what can we do now to further strengthen our capital flexibility. We've seen what some of our peers have done, some of the financials have done here in the U.K., and we think it's something we should look at.

Now no decisions have been taken. So no commitments there, but we gave it as an example of the things we're looking at. So we're looking at matters affecting the business and the portfolio, but we're also looking at ways of how we can drive the balance sheet harder to deliver on our goal to maximize shareholder value.

The next question is from Hal Potter at Bank of America.

Just 2 from me. So first of all, you mentioned strong performance so far this quarter. Could you just give us a sense on which divisions, products and assets you're seeing particular strength in? And then as well, a little bit strategic review related. You've mentioned prediction markets as an interesting adjacency before, and you've again reiterated it today. How are you progressing in your ambitions? Is it going to form part of the strategic review? Or could something happen sooner there?

Thank you for the questions. The business is in about 15 geographies. And within each of those geographies, we're increasingly multiproduct. I really don't think it's hugely helpful to go into too much detail on that. But across divisions, we're growing. I said there's a slide in there somewhere that talks about this and largely across products we're growing. Obviously, crypto has been a bit soft since the start of the calendar year. But the upgrade is off the back of growing confidence in the underlying momentum of the business, evidenced by the leading indicator of new customers, evidenced by the growth in active customers and increasingly the confidence we have in the monetization of that customer flow as well.

So it really is -- I can go to the individual products in the equities product launch in France, the equities product launch in Singapore, where admittedly from small bases, we're seeing very positive trends. So in the round, we're very happy with the growth, and that is more broadly evidenced rather than just in 1 or 2 places.

On prediction markets, we have talked about that in the past. We have done work on that. By most estimates, there's now about 20 operators offering some kind of prediction markets in the U.S. in particular. Many of you will know that prediction markets are just a different title for what used to be binaries in Europe or indeed what used to be probably some betting exchanges in Europe as well. So we have capability in the space. We have some capability with some IP, and we have not yet launched a product. We continue to work on that, as and when we have more to say about that, we will share that with customers first and the market second.

The next question is from Ben Bathurst at RBC Capital Markets.

Two questions from me, if I may, starting on the financials. Looking at customer income retention. I just wondered to what extent does the guidance for growth that you've given prospectively for FY '26 incorporate an assumption of further improvements in that metric. I think it was 83% for calendar year '25. Or is that a good rate to expect moving forward?

And then moving on to the strategic review. You've obviously given some color of the types of routes that, that review might take. You haven't referenced disposals or separate listings parts of the group. Are those actions off the table? Or will all possible actions be considered?

Would you take the first question?

Yes.

On the -- all is a very small but enormously powerful word. So I don't want to say all actions are on the table, but we want to be comprehensive in how we think about this business. We continue to believe that this business has very encouraging underlying momentum is in fast-growing and very dynamic markets. But we're not seen as -- we're not as -- we want to -- we have ambition to play a bigger role here. And the reason for breaking cover and saying this that we want to have this strategic review over the next number of months is to focus minds, competitors, shareholders, regulators, employees, even customers to focus minds on the fact that we have ambition for this business, and we believe it can deliver more than incremental growth.

And accordingly, there are conversations that we would expect to have over the next few months of the type you mentioned and others. And there are other conversations that we hope to have that we don't yet -- that we're not yet party to over the next few months. And we will announce back. We will come back to the market and talk about progress as is appropriate. Do you want to take the first question?

Yes. So that guidance does reflect a modest further pickup in we call RTV. And the teams have been doing a lot of work in that area. We have a pipeline of ideas and initiatives that are well underway. We talked about it last July, which is why we reconfirm that now.

I think it's important, though, to see the group as one that can deliver growth in all market conditions and across propositions. So beyond that RTV retention benefit, we do see further growth from a client income perspective. We talk about some of the customer proposition initiatives. I think in market conditions such as we're seeing now, our platform is really engaging well. So we give our customers and traders lots of opportunity to trade, including over the weekend. So there's some top line benefit there.

And we have delivered and are delivering further growth in the U.S. exchange traded derivatives, and it's really pleasing to see really meaningful millions of pound growth coming through stock trading now. So really quite a breadth of growth drivers. Obviously, interest income is not an area where we're looking for further growth. While we're seeing cash balances come through, we're passing more of that on to our customers. So you can see our guide there for no growth coming through that line item.

[Operator Instructions] The next question is from Zach Wirtz at Autonomous Research.

Just 2 more from my side, please. The first is on the zero commission stock trading offering. You've obviously seen very good traction in the U.K. and Ireland post launch. Can you give us any similar detail around what you've seen in Singapore and France? And are there rollouts planned in any other markets at this stage? And finally, just if so, is there any reason you wouldn't expect to see a similar uptick in activity in those markets?

The second question is on potential M&A. Can you just give us your current thoughts on what sort of capabilities or geographies you might be interested in adding inorganically?

Let me try the first one and then you might get us both chip in on the second. I don't want to go to -- Zach, thank you for the questions. And I understand they're legitimate. The problem I have is that our market position in France and our market position in Singapore are both very different from each other and indeed very, very different from the U.K. And in the old days, maybe 2 years ago, we used to break out customer numbers by geography. And you'll know from that, that the actual -- the underlying customer bases in some of those geographies, France and Singapore, in particular, are not very high numbers.

So while the traction is very encouraging, there was a question about the long-term materiality of that. I think we've shown a few things. I think we've shown this company can actually ship product. There's a slide in there that's a tiny bit self-congratulatory, but really is a credit to the team, the engineers and the product and the commercial teams that are actually shipping product at velocity we haven't in years.

I think we've shown that the brand stretches away from the very sophisticated customers that we were associated with in the past. And I think Slide 27 is the slide which talks about -- we don't normally talk about what we will do next. We don't normally casually give hostages to fortune. But Slide 27 is about the growth we've shown so far is basically off the back of a somewhat dated technology stack where for the purpose of speed to market, we built new stuff out on top of that.

We're now getting to the stage where we can start to integrate technologies with greater ease than in the past and get to a unified proposition. I think that will lead to future growth as well. So all of those things in the round give us confidence in the guidance and the upgrade that we've given this morning. But I think in the context of a strategic review, I think it would be -- I think we have to look at this as a group rather than on an individual or geography-by-geography basis, which kind of gets to the second question. I don't want to be drawn on product.

We're attracted to product capability, that kind of product and capability where we can get that through acquisition. That was behind the Freetrade acquisition, which has traded well and the IR acquisition, where they brought crypto and geographical mouse to us in a way that was helpful. But I think our primary 2 geographies are the United States and the United Kingdom and M&A that will allow us to either go faster there or have more scale there. It's hard to pass by opportunities there to pursue ambitions further afield.

Yes. On M&A, Zach, I'd highlight Page 40, actually in the back of the presentation, we've repeated our M&A criteria. So whatever the commercial case, we're very focused on a consistency regarding our M&A criteria. It needs to have a good -- any acquisition would need to have a good strategic fit, which Breon has talked about, but also the return profile and the delivery criteria that we've set out.

We're pleased with the progress of Freetrade and Independent Reserve. You've seen the figures in the pack growth coming through. So that won't change in terms of our criteria and our discipline regarding any M&A.

There are no further questions. I will now hand back to management for closing remarks.

Well, firstly, thank you for the questions and your presence on the call this morning. In summary, we're very happy with the momentum of the business. We're very appreciative of the efforts our -- appreciative for our customers. We're also appreciative of the efforts our colleagues are making to turn this business around. But we think this is a unique time in a large, fast-growing and very dynamic market, and we want to be more ambitious than kind of incremental year-on-year growth would suggest.

So we look forward to having those conversations with you over the coming weeks. And if there's any particular technical questions you have, please send an e-mail to Martin or Clifford to myself this morning. Thank you all.

Thank you for joining today's call. We are no longer live. Have a nice day.