Botanix Pharmaceuticals Limited

Ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the PLUS 500 H1 2025 interim results. The presentation will commence shortly. After the presentation, we will conduct a Q&A session. If you wish to ask a question, you'll be able to ask a question either through the Zoom webinar link provided separately or by submitting written questions using the ask a question button on the Spark Live webcast page. Please note this call is being live streamed to a webcast for a wider audience and will be recorded. I would now like to hand over to David Shreer, Group Chief Executive Officer, to open the presentation. Please go ahead.

Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining our 2025 Interim Results Presentation. I am David Zrouya, CEO of Plus500, and I am joined today by Elad Evenhen, our Group CFO, and Owen Jones, our Group Head of Investor Relations. During the first six months of 2025, Plus500 is globally diversified. Multi-asset offering drove an acceleration of positive momentum across a number of important strategic initiatives, which we will highlight to you today. Our differentiated offerings, which are powered by our proprietary technology provides us with strong competitive advantages, and we remain committed to delivering seamless and innovative access to financial markets worldwide. The structural growth opportunities ahead of us are compelling, and we look to the year ahead and beyond with confidence. As always, I would like to thank all of the people of Philosophy Fund-RED who once again made these results possible for their hard work and continued dedication towards successfully achieving our collective goals and strategic ambitions. Slide two shows the agenda for today. We will take you to the highlights for the first half and the operating review, followed by a run through of our unique technology and product set, and then continue with the financial highlights. We will then conclude with the summary and outlook section before taking your questions at the end. There are five key takeaways from today's presentation shown on slide four. In summary, we made significant progress in further diversifying our business and strengthening our operational model in a way that enables the group to continue driving compounded shareholder returns. The positive momentum behind our business is accelerating as we build on the growth achieved across our key markets in the first half. We have added to our industry-leading portfolio of global licenses and clearing memberships, continued to build out our product suite with new offerings in Japan, and announced the conditional acquisition of meta-equities in India, further expanding our geographic reach. We drove growth across key markets and regions, including the UAE and the US. This, in turn, led to an excellent set of financial results with revenue and EBITDA growth year on year. We announced shareholder returns of $200 million in February 2025, and we have added another $165 million today, comprising dividends and share buybacks, taking the total announced year to date to $365 million, equivalent to 11% of our closing market capitalization on 30 of June, 2025. And even with such attractive shareholder returns, The group ended the first half with an extremely strong financial position with cash balances of approximately $938 million and no debt. This accelerated momentum and excellent results for the first six months of 2025 build on the significant track record that we have established since our IPO in 2013. Over that period, Plus 500 has generated $3.7 billion in cash from operations, $3 billion in accumulated net profits, and of that, the company has returned approximately $2.7 billion to shareholders, which includes the $165 million announced today, to $1.6 billion in dividends, and $1.1 billion in share buybacks. These shareholder returns have positioned Plus500 as the best performing share in the FTSE All Share Index over the last 12 years on a total return basis with a cumulative total shareholder returns of over 7,900%, an achievement that we are extremely proud of. Earlier this year, the company joined the prestigious Stocks Europe 600 Index and important recognition of the compounding value creation and share price performance we have delivered in recent years. Moving now to slide six, which focuses on some of our operational drivers and outputs for the first half of 2025. Our ongoing focus on customer engagement, product development, and our people continue to drive meaningful results during the period. The drivers and outputs that you can see on the slide are all underpinned by our industry-leading proprietary technology, a key competitive advantage for Plus 500, which allows us to drive deeper engagement with our customers. As a result, 66% of OTC revenue was derived from customers who have been trading with Plus 500 for over three years, which demonstrates the benefits of our strategic focus on driving higher customer lifetime values. Customer deposits more than doubled to $3.1 billion, which is a record level for a six-month period, and this equated to a record of approximately $17,250 per active customer. The strength of our mobile offering was once again highlighted, with 89% of OTC revenue being generated from mobile or tablet devices. Moving now to slide seven. Three years ago, we introduced our strategic roadmap at our Capital Markets Day. Since then, Plus500 has successfully evolved from being a single product provider into a scaled, market-leading, multi-asset FinTech group with increasingly diversified operations, both geographically and across product lines. This transformation has had a significant impact on the growth of the business and underpins our focus on innovation, growth, and continued diversification through the development of new products and expansion into new markets. Furthermore, a crucial part of the group strategy is to deepen customer engagement and enhance customer retention by investing in and developing our customer retention technologies and initiatives. Together, we expect the objectives within our strategic roadmap to position Plus 500 to continue delivering compound returns for shareholders for many years to come. The group's superior proprietary technology and its ability to quickly develop new offerings, such as additional product lines and services, has enabled Plus500 to transform in recent years into a global provider of market infrastructure and proprietary trading platforms with a broad customer base. The Plus 500 of today provides a wide range of products, services, and instruments across its OTC, futures, options on futures, and share dealing verticals. And we operate in strategically attractive growing markets with powerful structural growth drivers. Our OTC business covers seven asset classes, and our futures business can be split further into a B2B institutional and a B2C retail offering, which provides clearing execution services across a growing range of global exchanges. We also include Plus 500 Cosmos here. an industry-leading client portal for our B2B futures customers, which was launched last year. On the right side of the chart, we can see our share dealing platform, Plus500 Invest, which enables customers to buy and sell shares directly. Our overall offering provides customers with a wide choice of products, enabling them to tailor their approach and trading strategies. The diversification of our business is a key part of our success, and we will continue to drive this agenda over the coming years as we seize the attractive growth opportunities in front of us. Moving to the next slide. Here, we show the important role that Plus 500 plays as a provider of market infrastructure. Our role has evolved significantly as the group has diversified its operations, and we now sit at the heart of the financial ecosystem, connecting institutional customers and retail customers to more than 30 different exchanges and clearinghouses. We provide the critical market infrastructure to a global customer base, which includes individual customers, institutions, and other businesses. We remain extremely excited about the potential for this key part of our business, and there is much more to come. Slide 10 shows our current clearing and industry memberships in the future space. With the acquisition of Cunningham Commodities and Cunningham Trading Systems in 2021, Plus 500 became the owner of a fully regulated futures commission merchant, or FCM, in the U.S., enabling the business to become an execution venue for its customers while also offering a full suite of holistic clearing services. The group has secured memberships with some of the largest clearinghouses globally, including the CME Exchanges, Eurex, the Minneapolis Grain Exchange, and most recently, IceClear US in January this year. These clearing memberships, which are difficult to obtain, allow us to enhance our holistic offering and accommodate the need of our customers on a global basis, which is a key part of the growth strategy of our futures business. We will continue to pursue additional clearing memberships with global exchanges during 2025 and beyond. As shown here on the right-hand side of this slide, we are in the process of adding a further six exchange and clearinghouse memberships in India through our acquisition of MetaEquities, which we anticipate completing during the second half of the year. The Indian market is globally significant for both B2B and B2C customers, and we'll return to this opportunity in more detail later. Slide 11 highlights some of our ESG credentials and priority areas. Customer care and education is extremely important to us, and we always strive to provide the highest level of care and services to our customers. Employee welfare and wellbeing remain a key focus area, and we also continue to support the local communities in which we operate. We have an extremely talented and diverse board of directors who have relevant experience across a number of important business areas for PLUS500. We remain committed to being carbon negative by 2030, and we are looking at ways to reduce energy usage, particularly in our data centers. Consistent with this commitment, Last year, we moved our headquarters to a newer and more energy efficient building. I will now hand over to Elad to present the operating review section.

Thank you, David, and good morning, everyone. It is a privilege to be speaking with you all again, and I'm proud to be presenting such a strong set of results. The operating review section will include an overview, of our operating performance in the first half of the year, as well as a closer look at our growing futures business. As David mentioned, the positive momentum in our business is accelerating, and we delivered an excellent operational progress in the first half of 2025, as shown here on slide 13. The operational highlights include Significant positive momentum across a number of important initiatives and strategic drivers. Excellent progress with our growing futures businesses with record customer segregated fund during the period. Optimization of our already market leading online customer acquisition strategies. And the exciting conditional acquisition of meta equities in India, which we announced in March of this year. Turning to the next slide. The acquisition of MetaEquities, which we anticipate closing later this year, represents an exciting step in our strategic ambition of becoming a global futures provider. Leveraging our existing futures platform, we can now establish attractive and meaningful synergies for B2B customers between our operations in the US and India. This will be achieved by providing these customers with more streamlined access to trading products and clearing services across jurisdictions, while also providing them with best-in-class customer service and access to our proprietary customer portal, the Plus 500 Cosmos. And we are really excited about the growth potential of this part of our business. Plus 500 operates in a highly regulated industry and our products across OTC, share dealing and futures are regulated globally by IOSCO with major regulators in each territory overseeing the local markets and ensuring compliance with applicable regulatory requirements. As can be seen on this slide, the group currently holds 15 different regulatory licenses which will become 16 with the expected addition of meta equities this year. These licenses represent an extremely valuable asset and a meaningful source of competitive advantage for Plus 500, as they all serve as a trusted regulatory stamp on our status as a global multi-asset fintech group on our international stage. Most recently, as announced in June, we obtained a new license from the Canadian Investment Regulatory Organization. This achievement marked another important milestone in PLUS 500's ongoing strategic efforts to further expand into North America with the extension of its offering into the well-established and highly regulated Canadian market. With this new license, Plus 500 will offer its services within the OTC market and aims to further expand its local proposition by offering an omnichannel suite of products over time. Our portfolio of international licenses represents a unique asset for the group. Taken together, these licenses serve as an economic mode around our business. raising the barriers of entry to the industry and reinforcing PLUS 500's value proposition. Additionally, our expertise in obtaining regulatory licenses leaves us well positioned to secure additional ones in new territories in 2025 and beyond. For instance, we're actively working to expand our operations in Asia and Latam. As can be seen in slide 16, we offer our services to approximately 32 million registered customers in more than 60 countries. This global scale and local offering is an important source of both current and future value as we focus on driving activation, retention, and monetization of our global customer base by leveraging our highly innovative and agile proprietary technology. Our global offering is further enhanced by our localized solutions, which include support in a customer's native language and products and services fully localized and tailored to the end markets in which we operate. On slide 17, we show some of our operating KPIs, overlaid with some regional performance data. As the group has consistently demonstrated historically, new customer acquisition and deeper engagement with existing customers lays the foundation for future growth, making it an investment today to drive value creation over the medium to long term. In the first half of 2025, we onboarded more than 56,000 new customers and active customers increased to approximately 180,000. Moving ahead to slide 18, we chose customer tenure and longevity. Over recent years, we have made investments in our customer retention technologies and premium account programs to improve customer longevity. The aim was to foster long-term relationships with our customers by providing technology-enabled retention initiatives and by consistently providing our customers with a wide range of products and services supported by robust, secure, intuitive, and reliable trading platforms. These improvements are working well, as shown by the blue shaded areas on the pie charts. For example, in the first half of 2025, 84% of the OTC revenue was generated by customers who have been with us for more than a year, while 47% of the OTC revenue was generated by customers who have been with us for more than five years. This is an excellent achievement, as the equivalent number from 2020 was just 14%. Over the next few slides, I will highlight the impact that a non-OTC business as a whole, and particularly the futures business, has had on the group's revenues, customer mix, and other KPIs. Slide 19 sets out how our revenue and new customer mix have evolved in recent years. When we acquired our future business in 2021, our non-OTC revenues accounted for just 1% of the group's revenue. Since then, our futures business has established itself and grown quickly, reflecting the strength of our offering, both to the retail and institutional customers. In the first half of 2025, non-OTC revenues accounted for approximately 13% of the group's total revenue, which highlights the importance of this vertical to the group. In 2025, we anticipate that the non-OTC business will generate revenues of more than $100 million. From a customer perspective, 17% of the new customers came from the non-OTC businesses in the first half of 2025. This is the foundation which we look to build on over the coming years. Slide 20 shows the progress we have made in attracting higher value customers and how that has impacted our average deposit per active customer since 2021. For the first half of 2025, aggregate customer deposits more than doubled to $3.1 billion, which is a record level for the group over a six-month period. reflecting our increased breadth and scale of operations. And over the last four years, we have more than tripled the average deposit per active customer from approximately $5,000 in 2021 to approximately $17,000 in the first half of 2025. We have done this by strategically focusing on higher value customers, leveraging our superior marketing technologies, and providing a localized offering to customers, which includes local payment solutions and an exceptional customer service. In the next two slides, I will cover the highly attractive opportunities ahead of us in the US futures market, starting on slide 21. Over the last few years, Plus 500 has established its position in the U.S. futures market with a B2B institutional and a B2C retail offering, both of which perform extremely well during the first six months of the year. Across our B2B and B2C businesses, we grew our customer segregated funds to approximately $850 million at the end of June 2025. versus approximately $350 million at the end of 2024, representing growth of over 140%, which is a fantastic achievement. This reflects both the onboarding of new customers and increased trading activity from existing ones. Our U.S. futures business is going from strength to strength. In 2025, we secured a clearing membership with IceClear US, which will allow us to further enhance our institutional product offering to a global customer base. In the B2C business, our trading platform, Plus 500 Futures, which offers a unique, omniscient solution, continues to set us apart from our competitors. And it is clear that our customers value the seamless trading experience which we offer. Moving ahead to slide 22. Plus 500's U.S. operation is regulated by the CFTC and is a member of the National Futures Association and the Futures Industry Association. Plus 500's U.S. operation also holds clear memberships with the CME Group Exchanges, the Minneapolis Grain Exchange, Eurex, and IceClear U.S. We will continue to target additional Clear memberships going forward. This objective will be supported by our robust financial position and expertise in applying for and securing new Clear memberships. Thanks to our proprietary technology, financial strength, customer service, and strategic collaborations, we have grown rapidly in a short space of time to become an established player in the futures market. Additionally, as part of our B2C offering, we are proud to have the Plus 500 futures platform, which has gained good traction with our customers, driven by its OmniSET solution, and the T4 Pro, our trading platform for more professional customers. Our licenses, clearing memberships, strong balance sheet, partnerships, and innovative trading platforms leave us well positioned to generate continued value for all stakeholders. Overall, our expansion into non-OTC products was a key pillar of our strategic roadmap and one against which we are delivering real and accelerated progress. I will now hand back to David, who will take us through the technology section.