flatexDEGIRO AG

Hello and welcome to the Fladex De Giro Q1 2025 analyst call. Please note this call is being recorded. For the duration of the call, your lines will be on listen only. However, you will have the opportunity to ask questions at the end. This can be done by pressing star 1 on your telephone keypad. I will now hand you over to Achim Schreck to begin today's conference. Please go ahead.

Good morning, everyone. Many thanks for dialing in, and welcome to our analyst call relating to our Q1 2025 results, which we published yesterday evening post-market close. I'm Achim Schreck, and I'm heading the IR department here at Plastics de Giro, and with me today, I have our CEO, Oliver Behrens, as well as our CFO, Dr. Benon Janos, who will lead us through today's presentation. We also have with us Dr. Thomas Lindner, our Global Head of Finance, as well as my IR colleague, Laura Hecker. As usual, we would like to provide a short run through the presentation before we open up for your questions. Without any further ado, I'm very pleased to hand over now to Oliver. Please go ahead. The floor is yours.

Thank you, Achim. Good morning, everyone, and welcome to the Q1 2025 analyst call. Benon will go into detail about the first quarter in a moment. I would just like to highlight a few key points. Q1 was our best quarter to date in terms of revenue and earnings. We increased revenues to Euros 146 million and net income to Euro 42 million. The increase in commission income by almost a third to 98 million is particularly noteworthy. However, this development should not really come as a surprise. Volatile markets always lead to high trading volumes, which is a value driver for any broker. What is probably more surprising is the fact that interest income remained almost stable at Euro 43 million, despite lower interest rates In short, what we lost on interest rate levels, we made up in volume of our margin loan book and in higher cash deposits of our customers. We also have our costs under control. While personnel expenses rose on the back of increased expenses for long-term variable compensation components, this development was much linked to the strong increase in our share price. Marketing expenses were rather stable despite a further acceleration of customer growth, while other administrative expenses fell by 8%. In this operationally busy quarter, we have also done well in our other areas. We have again been awarded the best online broker by thousands of retail investors in key markets. We have successfully divested the remaining real estate loan engagement, a legacy that is clearly non-core to our business, and we received the MICA license, allowing us to internationally roll out of our crypto offerings. Before I get to these achievements, let me briefly comment on the trading activity in the first quarter. We processed 19.5 million transactions for our customers, which is over 20% more than in the first quarter of 2024. This increase alone is impressive, but it even further intensified in early April. In April, we recorded a total of five trading days that ranked among the top 10 busiest trading days in terms of volume. On the 7th of April alone, we saw a total trading volume on our platform of over 5 billion euros. A new record for Flatex Regiro. By way of comparison, we achieved an average trading volume of slightly below 1 billion euros in 2024. The days following the announcement of the tariffs by the US government were extremely volatile and saw heavy trading. Not all providers in the market were able to cope with a sudden surge in activity without any disruptions. but we were. We are proud of the fact that this high throughput did not impair the performance of our systems. Retail investors are clearly aware of these differences in performance between brokers, which is also reflected in the number of new customer additions since the beginning of April. In this respect, I also see the many awards we have received as confirmation of our quality promise. For example, DeGiro again won multiple international awards such as the Golden Steer in the Netherlands and FedEx was again voted the best online broker in Germany by almost 90,000 investors. And for the first time as the best crypto broker, even though, We only launched our offering at the turn of the last year. Crypto is also the key word when it comes to implementing the strategic initiatives we outlined to you at the end of February, which are progressing well. We currently offer trading in 20 cryptocurrencies exclusively to FlatEx customers in Germany. Around 8,000 customers are active here to date. By the end of March, the trading volume had already exceeded 100 million with around 50,000 trades. Considering the nature of the products and the time since market launch, this is a good result. We are now preparing to launch in four additional major markets, France, the Netherlands, Austria, and Spain. This will make our product available to around 2 million customers. The supervisory authority BaFin has already granted us the license for Europe-wide trading based on the EU regulation for crypto assets, so-called MICA. We are now making the final preparations. We want to be the leading investment platform for building wealth. This includes a broad product range for our customers, which we are making even more attractive with the rollout of cryptocurrencies. At the same time, new products and services are important drivers for the sustainable growth of Flatex de Hero. Before I conclude my presentation, let me quickly provide some further details on the full divestment of our real estate credit loan portfolio that I already mentioned earlier. The alliance of our ongoing efforts to streamline our operations and focus on our core activities and getting rid of some legacy alternative credit and investment engagement that are not related at all to our core business. Our alternative portfolio was primarily built during the negative ECB rate environment. Net-net, we have not lost any money with this portfolio, but we can surely deploy the capital better going forward. Therefore, we continue to divest these non-core activities without any pressure. In Q1 2025, we signed and closed a purchase agreement for a real estate credit loan. The sale price of the transactions reflected in the IFRS book value. The repayment at the end of March has led to a significant improvement in our NPL ratio by March 31st this year. Moreover, one further comment before I close my remark. Due to generational shift, our current chief risk officer of FlatEx DeGiro, Dr. Matthias Heinrich, is stepping down from the management board at his own request. Matthias has been a member of the management board of FlatEx DeGiro Bank AG since October 2022. He has focused on the further development and harmonization of the risk function and its alignment with regulatory requirements. We would like to thank Matthias for his contributions over the last years, especially in the light of resolving all major regulatory findings. We will announce his successor in due course. And now, it's my pleasure to hand over to my colleague Benon for further insights into our financial performance in Q1 2025. Thank you. Ben, the floor is all yours.