flatexDEGIRO AG

Good afternoon, everyone. We hope you're well. Thank you very much for joining us today and a warm welcome to our presentation of the preliminary results 2025 and our update on our strategic priorities, which we first introduced last year. My name is Achim Schreck. I'm heading the IR department here at Flat-Tex de Giro. Before we get started, let me briefly address a few housekeeping items. First of all, it's my pleasure to welcome today's speakers, our CEO, Oliver Behrens, as well as our CFO, Dr. Benolianos. We will start today's presentation with some few opening remarks by Oliver, after which Benon will present a more detailed overview of our preliminary full year results and also highlight some key developments in the fourth quarter that will surely be helpful to better understand our underlying performance in the last quarter. Afterwards, Oliver will return to provide an update on our key strategic priorities, as we had them presented exactly one year ago, the same space. As some of you might know, the newly endorsed accounting standard IFRS 18 will come into effect in January 2027, having some minor implications on how our P&L will be structured. And we will use the opportunity today to just give you a glimpse into what to expect on this side, which again will be done by Benon. We will conclude today's presentation before we then go into our Q&A with an outlook on 2026 and our guidance, as well as the latest capital allocation policy, which we provided last week to the market as well. After those remarks, as I said, we're looking forward to taking your questions as we speak. As you can see, we have a rather full agenda today. So therefore, without any further ado, I would very much like to hand over to you, Oliver, now with your introduction or remarks. Please go ahead.

Thanks a lot, Rahim. And also a very warm welcome from my side. Thank you all for joining today. Before we go into all the details of our commercial and financial performance of 2025, allow me to spend two minutes on the bigger picture. Global stock markets have been pretty volatile in 2025, and pretty they have been for us indeed, as our business model typically benefits from these kinds of market swings. Our operational and financial performance has therefore exceeded our initial expectations significantly. It has not just been the trading activity of our customers that went up a bit. It was also strong customer growth and high net cash inflows onto our platform, particularly in the first four months of the year. For me as a CEO, what is more important, though, are the things we control ourselves and quite successfully did so in 2025. In the context of fast markets in early April, trading volumes on some days increased by fivefold. Many online brokerage platforms in Germany and across Europe were not able to handle this load properly. Flatex and DeGiro, however, stayed performant for our customers the whole time. This is not something we achieved just on those days. It is the result of diligent work and platform building we have done for years and we continue doing. I will touch on the topic later in my presentation. We are also proud that the first major product rollouts we have brought to the market over the last 12 months. After the crypto start at Flatex Germany, we have brought it to all our major markets. We have started securities lending program in the Netherlands and Spain in October 2025 and have since added Italy and Switzerland. And our first new business process outsourcing customer is about to go live in March, i.e. providing another German bank with a full technical and banking solution to attract retail deposits. We are also already in full swing when it comes to new initiatives in 2026, with a clear focus on the German market, but not forgetting our Digiro business either. So, in a positive market environment, we have shown good performance and have done our homework. But that must not make us complacent. There's a lot more we have to and will do. The strengthened focus on the German market is one element. The completion of the already started product rollouts as well as some new ones is another. The use of new technologies such as AI requires full focus. Used in the right way, AI can become a massive enabler of our execution-only business. For many retail clients, it has the potential to significantly lower the barrier between, I think I should do something for my financial future and I know what to do. And I'm doing it now. And there are, of course, plenty of other areas such as efficiency gains and enhanced customer features one can see clear benefits in. And lastly, we are operating in markets that have clear potential for further consolidation, growth and bolt-on acquisitions to further strengthen our existing business. All this we have factored in when we provided our new capital allocation policy last week. We are a growth company and this is also where we will put our focus when it comes to capital allocation. Our strong cash flows nevertheless allow for a substantial increase of our annual dividend payments without harming this growth. I am absolutely certain there's a lot more growth coming our way. But for the moment, let me close my introductory remarks here and hand over to Benon to first present our preliminary 2025 results. Thank you. Over to you, Benon. Thank you, Oliver.

Good afternoon, everyone also from my side. Thank you very much for dialing in to today's presentation and a warm welcome from me as well. I am pleased to present FlatEx de Giro's preliminary results for the full year 2025, which mark another milestone in our growth trajectory. Please note that these figures are still preliminary. The full and audited annual report 2025 will be published on March 26. In the interest of time, and to keep the focus on the key messages, we will not cover every slide that was uploaded this morning in full detail. Now, let me briefly walk you through our commercial performance in the fourth quarter of 2025, which closed the year on a notably resilient footing. Starting with customer additions, we saw 104,000 customer additions in Q4, slightly above Q3, and broadly consistent with our expectations for a more normalized run rate after the strong start to the year. Turning to assets under custody, we continued to see strong momentum throughout the year, reaching 95.5 billion euros at the end of December. The progress over the course of 2025 was driven by a combination of steady net inflows and constructive market performance, both of which contributed meaningfully to the year-end step-up. This ongoing growth confirms the strength of our franchise. trading activity picked up meaningfully towards year-end. Q4 reached 20.2 million transactions, representing a solid 14% sequential increase and a 20% improvement versus Q4 of last year, which was already a strong quarter that benefited from higher trading activity around the US presidential elections. The uplift in trades was especially driven by an unusually strong October. Turning to slide 8, we ended the year with 3.5 million customer accounts, representing a double-digit increase of 13% year-on-year. Growth remained consistently strong throughout the year, with a seasonally strong January and a strong April driven by Liberation Day. However, despite some peaks, 2025 showed an overall steady pattern. This reflects a structurally high level of brand awareness and a proven ability to attract new clients independent of any short-term volatility spikes. On an annual view, customer additions accelerated versus the prior year, reaching 446,000 for the full year. Overall, 2025 was another year of robust customer expansion, forming a strong foundation for future revenue generation. Our customer base continued to expand steadily throughout the year, surpassing 3.5 million accounts by December 25. Over the past three years, we have added more than 1 million customers, consistently delivering double-digit annual growth. The mix between FlatEx and DeGiro remained stable, with FlatEx contributing around 25% of total accounts. Let me turn to settled transactions, where we saw a clear uplift across both brands throughout 2025, supported by our growing customer base and periods of elevated market volatility. The strongest months were March, April and October, which contributed meaningfully to the overall rise in transactions. Settled transactions increased to 75.3 million in 2025, up from 63 million the year before, which is a 19% year-on-year increase. Both Flatex and Dehiro contributed to this growth with solid engagement across all major markets. Turning to trading activity per customer, we continue to see a healthy pattern across both brands. Quarterly activity levels show an overall upward tendency throughout 2025. As expected, trading intensity remains higher at Flatex due to the demographic profile of those customers, but the underlying trend is consistent across both platforms Flatex and Degeo. On the right-hand side, you can see that annual trading activity increased slightly to 23 trades per customer in 2025, up from 22 in the prior two years. This reflects the combination of a growing customer base and the resilient level of engagement helped by increased market volatility. Let me now turn to our active customer base on slide 12. We have now exceeded 1 million active customers, which is a key milestone for us. As you can see on the chart, activity levels have remained broadly stable over the past three years, with the share of active customers within a quarter holding steady at around 31%. This stability is important, particularly given the significant expansion of our total customer base over the same period. Looking ahead, we see clear opportunities to further increase customer activity rates. We are expanding our product offering to give customers more reasons to engage with the platform on a regular basis, complemented by targeted financial education initiatives that help users build confidence in navigating capital markets. At the same time, we continue to invest in technology, enhancing analytics, improving usability, and personalizing the customer experience. Together, these measures are designed to activate a broader share of our customer base and support more consistent trading behaviour over time. Let me now touch on assets under custody, where we continue to see very solid momentum over recent months. Starting with securities under custody, balances increased steadily throughout 2025, reaching 89.3 billion euros at year-end. This represents a strong uplift compared to December 2024, supported by both ongoing net inflows and a constructive market environment. On the cash side, we also saw meaningful growth, with customer cash balances rising strongly to 6.2 billion euros by December 2025, up 45% from 4.3 billion euros in December 2024. This strong growth has surpassed our initial expectations and is one of the main contributors to our resilient interest income line year over year. Turning to monthly net cash inflows on slide 14, we saw an exceptional start to 2025. From January throughout April, inflows were significantly above normal seasonal patterns, with several months close or even above the 1 billion euros mark. This strong momentum began already in late 2024, following the US election in October, which led to a heightened market engagement and clearly overlaid the typical seasonal slowdown we usually see in the fourth quarter, especially in December. The elevated inflows continued into the first months of 2025, peaking in April around Liberation Day, when customer activity was particularly strong. Importantly, January 26 again started with well above 1 billion euros of net cash inflows. Overall, the pattern underscores the continued trust customers place in our platform. In 2025, 79% of these inflows were invested into securities. Now turning to slide 15, you can see that for the full year 2025, net cash inflows reached 8.1 billion euros, representing a 22% year-on-year growth. This development was driven by three key factors. First, we benefited from a positive market environment, which started to build in October 24 and continued into the first months of 25, supporting higher customer engagement and increased investing activity. Second, customer growth remained an important driver. New customers again accounted for roughly 40% of total net cash inflows, very similar to the patterns we saw in 2023 and 2024. This shows that the growth in our customer base continues to translate into fresh liquidity coming onto the platform. Third, we saw a further increase in inflows from existing customers. On average, annual net cash inflows per existing customer rose to around 1,600 euros, with around half of this, about 800 euros, per customer per year, coming from recurring investments and savings plans. This demonstrates the growing stickiness and long-term engagement of our customer base. Let's first finalize the full revenue picture before we discuss costs and earnings. As usual, we portray our revenue split in the past quarter on slide 16. In Q4, revenues grew by 18% year-on-year. Commission income increased strongly by 31% year-on-year, which is mostly attributable to a continuously growing customer base, an increase in trading activity and higher commissions per transactions. I'll turn to that in a minute. Commission income saw a clear quarter-on-quarter increase of 17%, driven primarily by an exceptionally strong October, which was one of the strongest months we ever had according to number of trades. Trading activity in that month was well above normal levels, supported by elevated market volatility. Transactions in October 25 amounted to 8.4 million trades. Despite a lower interest rate environment compared to last year, interest income remained stable year on year and even increased by 7% quarter on quarter. Higher amounts of cash under custody a growing average margin loan book, as well as our more active Treasury strategy, compensated for lower interest rate levels from ECB. Moving on to the next slide. In fiscal year 2025, we achieved record revenues of €560 million, representing 17% year-over-year growth. This strong performance was driven by two key dynamics in our revenue composition. First, commission income grew by an impressive 31% year-over-year, reflecting both increased trading activity and improved monetization across our platforms. Second, our interest income line demonstrated greater resilience than we initially anticipated, declining only 4% year over year, despite the lower interest rate environment, as I mentioned earlier. One encouraging trend in 2025 was the continued improvement in our average commission per transaction, which reached 4.90 euros, which is a 9% increase compared to 2024. This improvement was driven by two primary factors. First, Our product mix benefited from the introduction of cryptocurrency trading, which carries higher average commission rates, given the basis point fee model. Second, we saw increased volumes in cross-currency trades, especially US trades, where we charged 25 basis points FX fee, contributing positively to our commissions per trade. I'll provide further details on the next two slides. Over the past three years, we have grown our average commission per transaction from €4.13 in 2023 to €4.90 in 2025. This demonstrates our ability to enhance monetization while maintaining our competitive positioning as a low-cost broker. Turning to geographic trading patterns, we saw substantial growth in US exchange activity during 2025. A quick reminder, this is mostly driven by our De Giro customers, as many of our US trades at Flatex are rather done at local exchanges in Euros. The volume of stocks traded at US exchanges increased significantly throughout the year, reaching a peak of approximately 6 billion euros in monthly volumes during October of 2025. The higher volumes and larger trade sizes at US exchanges contributed to our Commission income growth, particularly given the cross-currency FX fees on these transactions that I mentioned before. As you can see on the next slide, we observed this trend despite a continuing shift from US equities to European equities that started during Q1 of 2025. The share of US exchanges in total trading volume, which had reached peaks of approximately 25% by the end of 2024, moderated to around 15% in early 2025 and stood around the 20%-ish line in the second half of 2025. This shift reflected clients' increased focus on European equities during that period. Total trading volumes remained robust throughout this transition, demonstrating the diversification benefits of our pan-European platform with global markets access. We also benefit from FX conversion on all cross-currency trades. For example, when a Swiss or Polish client trades German equities in Euros, we capture FX conversion fees on that flow as well. This is therefore not limited to US exchanges. Now let's focus on interest income, our second most important revenue stream after commission income. Let me address the underlying fundamentals of our interest income generation, which continued to strengthen. Our cash under custody has nearly doubled over the past three years, growing from 3.5 billion euros to over 6 billion euros currently. This reflects both our customer acquisition success and increasing trust from existing clients who are consolidating assets onto our platform. Our margin loan book has similarly benefited from ongoing customer growth and broader utilization of margin loans by our clients. The margin loan book now stands at approximately 1.44 billion euros at the end of January 26. This is providing a stable and high margin revenue stream to us. These fundamentals are critical to understanding our interest income resilience. While rates have declined, the growing asset base has partially offset the impacts from lower rates, which is why our interest income declined only 4% year-over-year, rather than falling proportionally with ECB rate cuts. Now let's turn to slide 22. In the second half of 25, we initiated more active Treasury management activities while maintaining our risk-averse foundation. Let me walk you through our current cash deployment strategy. Of our approximately 6.2 billion euros in cash under custody, roughly 1.3 billion supported our margin loan book as of December 25, while our treasury book has grown to around 1 billion euros. Thereof, 250 to 300 million euros is held in bonds as collateral for settlement and custody purposes at short-term maturities. Secondly, we have made additional investments into high-quality investment-grade bonds, primarily AAA-rated securities, to enhance yield while maintaining a conservative risk profile. This more active Treasury approach, implemented in the second half of 2025, contributed positively to our interest income line in the second half of the year. We expect this Treasury book to grow beyond 1 billion euros in 2026, which I'll discuss further when we cover our guidance for 2026. Of the remaining cash under custody, we keep most of the funds overnight with the German Bundesbank. After a thorough review of our top line, let's move on to costs and earnings. On this slide, we have portrayed our different cost items and their development over the past years. Let me dive a bit deeper into the different drivers for each cost item. Overall, our operating expenses demonstrate disciplined cost management while we continue to scale the business. Operating expenses remained relatively stable at 213 million in 2025 with only a small increase of 2.5% versus 2024. Personal expenses increased from 116 million euros in 2024 to 127 million euros in 2025. our current personal expenses actually decreased from 108 million to 104 million euros in 2025, reflecting our continued efficiency focus with some headcount reductions we have performed over the last months. The overall increase was driven by expenses for long-term variable compensation, which rose from 7.5 million to 23 million euros in 2025. This 15.5 million euros increase was primarily driven by valuation effects, particularly related to our expiring stock appreciation rights plan. This virtual plan is closed for new issuances. No new grants have been issued in this plan in fiscal year 2024 or 2025. The long-term variable compensation impact was particularly pronounced in the fourth quarter, where we recorded 14 million euros in expenses compared to 3 million in the fourth quarter of 2024. It is important to note that most of this increase is directly tied to our positive performance and future earnings per share outlook within the Stock Appreciation Rights Plan. The valuation of these instruments is linked to our share price and EPS, which appreciated significantly during the year. Looking ahead, we would very much like to mitigate the volatility in our personal costs caused by this historic LTI tool. We recognize the value of creating greater predictability in our cost structure and would like to remove this fluctuation caused by the SARS plan from our financial profit and loss statement. To address this, we are actively exploring potential options such as offering beneficiaries with vested stock appreciation rights an early buyback against the premium. The discussions on this matter are still ongoing and we have not yet worked through all the details. However, in order to be prepared for such a potential offer, we have already built a corresponding liability for such a premium, which is included in the Q4 2025 expense for long-term variable compensation with around 1.2 million euros. We'll keep you updated as we progress on these efforts. marketing expenses increased slightly to 34 million euros in 2025, which posts an increase of 8% compared to 2024. There are some effects to take into account for Q4, which I'll explain on the next slide. On the other hand, other admin expenses decreased significantly from 61 million to 52 million euros, a strong reduction of 15%. The increase in previous years was mainly attributable to higher IT costs as well as higher professional services, legal and consulting costs. They were partly related to projects in connection with regulatory requirements. Therefore, our key focus for 2025 was on reducing expenses for professional services, legal and consultancy fees, which we have successfully done. Also, here are some effects in Q4 to take into consideration on the next slide. On slide 24, let me provide additional details on the quarterly cost progression in Q4 of 25, which showed some elevated expenses. Personal expenses in Q4 totaled 38 million euros, with 24 million in current expenses and 14 million in long-term variable compensation. As I mentioned a couple of minutes ago, the increase in long-term variable compensation was driven by valuation effects, particularly in relation to the expiring stock appreciation rights plan, resulting from the positive future outlook reflected in a significant increase in the share price and EPS expectations of flat X to zero. Marketing expenses in Q4 amounted to 9 million euros, which included approximately 2 million euros in production costs for our start of year 26 campaign. Administrative expenses were 16 million euros in Q4, including approximately 1.5 million euros in legal provisions. A final remark on the admin cost line. We actually made the promise during our Q3 2024 earnings call that we would reduce the admin costs by up to 10 million euros in 2025. We can now close the case with a reported reduction of 9 million euros. Excluding the before mentioned legal provision in Q4, we would have been spot on with a reduction of around 10 million euros. Now moving on to our profitability. The strength of our earnings profile is evident in our quarterly EBITDA and net income progression throughout 2025. EBITDA ranged between 63 and 69 million euros across all four quarters. Compared to Q4 2024, we delivered a 32% EBITDA growth. Net income showed similar consistency, ranging between 39 and 42 million euros in the four quarters of 2025. For Q4 specifically, net income reached 40 million euros, representing a 54% increase compared to the fourth quarter of 2024. For the full year 2025, our profitability metrics reached new records that underscore our operational leverage. EBITDA crossed the 250 million euros threshold for the first time, reaching 268 million euros, a substantial increase from prior years. Our EBITDA margin expanded to 48%, compared to 42% in 2024 and 36% in 2023. This margin expansion reflects both revenue growth and our disciplined cost management. Net income reached €160 million, coming in at the top end of our upgraded guidance range. Our net income margin improved to 29% from 23% in 2024 and just 18% in 2023. These profitability improvements demonstrate the scalability of our platform. As we've grown revenues by 43% from 2023 to 2025, our net income has grown by 123% over the same period. Before we close the chapter for our preliminary 2025 results, let's see how we have performed versus our 2025 guidance. Our execution throughout 2025 was strong, which led to two guidance upgrades during the year. We started in February of 2025 with an initial guidance of revenues between 455 and 505 million euros. and net income between 106 and 123 million euros. As trading activity remained very robust, supported by heightened market volatility, and interest income proved more resilient than expected, we upgraded guidance twice, first in July and then again in October. Our final results of €560 million in revenues and €160 million in net income represent 17% revenue growth and 44% net income growth year-over-year. Therefore, we delivered at or above the upper end of our revised guidance range. In short, more trades and a higher idle cash position were the two main drivers for the guidance upgrades. The consistent outperformance reflects not only favorable market conditions, but also our operational execution, product innovation, and the quality of our client acquisition and engagement strategies. Now, I'm very pleased to hand back to Oliver, who will walk you through our updated strategic priorities for the next years. Over to you, Oliver.