Webull Corporation

Good afternoon and welcome to the Webull Corporation fourth quarter and full year 2025 earnings conference call. All participants will be in listen-only mode. Should you need assistance, please signal a conference specialist by pressing the star key followed by zero. After today's presentation, there will be an opportunity to ask questions. To ask a question, you may press star then one on your telephone keypad. To withdraw your question, please press star, then two. Please note, this event is being recorded. I would now like to turn the conference over to Carlos Questel, Head of Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Good morning, good afternoon, and good evening, everyone. Welcome to Webull's fourth quarter and full year 2025 conference call. Earlier today, we issued a press release detailing our fourth quarter and full year results. A copy of the release can be found on our IR website at weblcorp.com under the Investor Relations tab. Please note that this call is being recorded and will be available for replay via our IR website. During the call, we'll be making forward-looking statements about the company's performance and business outlook. These statements are based on how we see things today and contain elements of uncertainty. For additional information concerning the factors that can cause actual results to differ materially, please refer to the cautionary statement and risk factors contained in our filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission and press release, both of which can be accessed via our website. Today's presentation will include a discussion on adjusted operating expenses, adjusted operating profit, and adjusted net income, all non-GAAP financial measures. Reconciliation of these non-GAAP financial measures to their most directly comparative GAAP measures are included in the press release that we issued today. It is important to note that although we believe that these non-GAAP measures provide useful information about operating results, they should not be considered in isolation or construed as an alternative to their directly comparative GAAP measures. Furthermore, other companies may calculate similarly titled measures differently. limiting their usefulness as comparative measures to our data. We encourage investors and others to review our financial information in its entirety and not rely on a single financial measure. With me today is our Group President and U.S. CEO, Anthony Denier, and our Group CFO, H.C. Wang. We will begin with prepared remarks and then take questions at the end. With that, I would now like to turn it over to Anthony.

Thank you, Carlos, and hello, everyone. Thanks for joining us today. Webull's fourth quarter and full year results show strong progress and returns for our first full year as a public company. Our full year results reflect our success as we continue to enhance our offerings for our growing base of active traders and investors, expand our client base globally, and extend our capabilities to new markets, including institutional investors. Following our public listing in April of last year, we have been executing on an ambitious plan to address the growing requirements of our user base of sophisticated, active investors looking for autonomy from traditional brokerages. We're proud to report that we offer that platform today, and it provides our users with a one-stop shop for securities trading, as well as offering in crypto, futures, prediction markets, and more. And what's more interesting is it's all enhanced by AI. AI is dramatically changing the investing industry, and we at Webull are on the forefront of many of those changes. We're proud to be shaping the future of active, self-directed trading through the integration of AI via Vega, our AI assistant for trading and platform guidance, delivering real-time insights and AI-generated trading ideas. Launched at the end of last year, Vega is already integral to our continued growth, providing our users with market data, information, and associated analysis, as well as real-time portfolio monitoring with user-controlled management of positions and risk preferences. Since launching just a few months ago, Vega currently assists 1.2 million global users each week with 10% of weekly active users deploying the tool to answer over 10 million questions since creation. AI deployment across our platform also extends within our organization with AI implementation across customer service, R&D, and internal operations. We're looking to integrate AI into every aspect of our internal business to optimize and scale a global business that provides a differentiated, sophisticated, regulatory-compliant trading platform to users across markets. I'm proud of the Weevil team for a strong first year as a public company. I'm also proud of our leadership and the development of our AI capabilities over the past year. As we establish Webull as a leading investment platform for active traders, I want to be sure you understand how important the scale we have achieved is to our strategies going forward. We are poised to bring our solutions to brokerage firms, high net worth individuals, family offices, and wealth advisors. I look forward to chatting with all you about B2B opportunities in 2026. With that, let me now walk you through the key highlights from 2025 in more detail. Here on slides two, three, and four, I'll walk you through our 2025 highlights. We are proud of our performance in 2025, delivering record revenue and a solid operating profit margin improvement from the prior year. We recorded revenue of $571 million, representing 46% growth from 2024, driven by record trading volumes across all asset categories. First, customer assets reached $24.6 billion, inclusive of approximately $1 billion in assets from the acquisition of Webull Pay, representing an 81% increase from 2024. Second, equity trading volume increased by 59% year-over-year to $732 billion, while options volume rose by 19% to 550 million contracts. And our newer products, including futures, prediction markets, and crypto, all delivered strong growth during 2025. We recorded an elevated but disciplined increase in adjusted operating expenses of $460.7 million, representing an annual increase of 24%, as we continue to invest in strategic product offerings and market expansion to support long-term growth. Operating profitability was strong with a 14.6 percentage point increase in adjusted operating profit margin on our annual basis to 19.3%, representing an adjusted operating profit of $110.3 million for the year. As our industry undergoes structural changes, we will continue to invest proactively to capture outside share over time. Turning now to slide five and our 2025 roadmap. I'm really pleased with this progress. Webull Premium, our subscription-based service for active traders and long-term investors, has reached 102,000 subscribers by year end, surpassing the 100,000 target we set for ourselves. Our premium subscribers contribute 30% of our AUM, 60% of overall margin debit balances, and our most active customers, Looking ahead, we aim to double our premium subscriber base in the coming year while continuing to enhance the product with additional features, making it the best valued product for active traders. One of our proudest moments of 2025 was the introduction of Vega, our AI tool that combines news, earnings, and technical data to deliver a focused, intuitive experience that helps both new and seasoned investors navigate modern trading and make smarter decisions. Since its release, approximately one in eight users have used the Assistant before trading, and Vega continues to play a role in not only bringing people to our platform, but keeping them there, as reflected in the 1.2 million users a week who utilize this exciting technology. We also launched BlackRock Model Portfolios, which provide a robo-advisor offering and allow users to access a range of diversified portfolios across various asset classes, including alternative and digital assets. In line with expanded digital asset offerings, 2025 marked the reintroduction of crypto trading for our U.S. customers with the acquisition of We Will Pay and the launch of crypto trading in Australia and Brazil. We are also actively exploring digital asset licenses in a number of other markets and expect to bring them online in the coming year. The introduction of prediction markets to our asset classes has also been an exciting innovation this year. This offering provides an engaging and accessible trading experience that lowers barriers to entry for users. this quarter more than 152 million prediction contracts were traded with 81 million in december alone we're excited to continue the momentum around prediction markets with the introduction of sports prediction markets across all the major sports leagues and while weevil has always been a global player 2025 has been a year of further global expansion we now have more than 760,000 funded accounts outside the U.S. APAC customer assets have surpassed 3 billion, and our partnership with Merit Financial Group has increased access to the U.S. market for Korean investors. Canada is also on track to soon reach 1.5 billion in customer assets, fast on the heels of surpassing 1 billion only four months ago. Additionally, we launched our platform in the Netherlands and are now licensed in four additional EU markets, Germany, Italy, Spain, and Portugal. We prioritize delivering US products to international markets from the start, and it is just good business to have diversified revenue streams globally. Looking ahead to 2026. On slide six, you'll see that we have identified three main priorities for the year. First, we will sustain and grow our elite offerings for active traders, leveraging AI tools that enhance the trading experience and allow us to maintain price leadership across the market. Second, we will continue growing our global business by cementing our position in existing markets and continuing to add to our localized product offerings. Finally, as I noted earlier, we will be building on last year's partnership with Merit to expand our B2B platform. On slide seven, I'll discuss our growth in both users and funded accounts for Q4. During the fourth quarter, we added roughly 1 million registered users, bringing the platform to a total of 26.8 million registered users. We saw steady sequential growth throughout the year, posting a more than 3 million user increase year over year and representing a 15% increase. Our investments in marketing are yielding results and are indicative of a strong fit between our offerings and market demand. As previously mentioned, Webull's roots as a global market data platform mean there is a significant number of registered users in geographies where our trading platform is not yet available. We continue to offer best-in-class market data and information to all users, regardless of their brokerage status. A feature of our platform has only been bolstered by the introduction of Vega to all Webull accounts. On the right side of the slide, you can see funded account metrics. Funded accounts, defined as accounts where customers have made an initial deposit that has remained above zero for 45 consecutive calendar days as of the record date, showed steady growth. We added approximately 100,000 new funded accounts this quarter, bringing the total number of funded accounts to 5.03 million, an 8% year-over-year increase. As we continue to innovate and enhance our offerings, we're also happy to report that our quarterly retention rate remained high at approximately 97%. Turning to slide eight, Weevil customer assets reached an all-time high of 24.6 billion in the fourth quarter, representing an 81% increase on a year-over-year basis and a 3.4 billion sequential increase. You all know that trading volumes were high in the fourth quarter. Our growth in customer assets reflects this. Customers deposited over $3.9 billion during the quarter, an incredible 225% increase year over year, and a sequential increase of $1.8 billion, bringing cumulative net deposits for the full year to $8.6 billion. Lastly, on slide 9, you'll see trading volumes for the quarter. While we saw strong growth in our newer products, particularly prediction markets and crypto, equity and options remain our core offerings and trading volumes continue to grow. Equity notional volume reached $239 billion, up 87% year-over-year and 17% sequentially. while options contract volume totaled $154 million this quarter, up 38% year-over-year and up 5% sequentially. These results underscore the strength and resilience of our active trader base, which remains highly engaged through periods of market volatility. our customers continue to trade consistently across four asset classes, reflecting a disciplined long-term approach rather than short-term momentum driven behavior. With that, I'll pass the call over to HC for a closer look at our financial results for the quarter.