MarketAxess Holdings, Inc.

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by and welcome to the Market Access fourth quarter and full year 2025 earnings conference call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. Later, we will conduct a question and answer session. If you would like to ask a question during this time, simply press star followed by the number one on your telephone keypad. To withdraw your question, press star one again. As a reminder, this conference call is being recorded on February 6th, 2026. I would now like to turn the call over to Steve Davidson, Head of Investor Relations at Market Access. Please go ahead, sir.

Good morning and welcome to the Market Access fourth quarter and full year 2025 earnings conference call. For the call, Chris Contanan, Chief Executive Officer, will provide you with an update on our strategy and our business, and Eileen Feazell-Beeler, Chief Financial Officer, will review our financial results. Before I turn the call over to Chris, let me remind you that today's call may include forward-looking statements. These statements represent the company's belief regarding future events that by their nature are uncertain. The company's actual results and financial condition may differ materially from what is indicated in those forward-looking statements. For a discussion of some of the risks and factors that could affect the company's future results, please see the description of risk factors in our annual report on Form 10-K for the year ended December 31st, 2024. I would also direct you to read the forward-looking statement disclaimer in our quarterly earnings release, which was issued earlier this morning and is now available on our website. Now let me turn the call over to Chris.

Good morning, and thank you for joining us to review our fourth quarter and full year 2025 financial results. We are pleased with the progress we achieved in delivering new protocols and functionality in 2025 and excited about our prospects and plans for 2026. First, we enhanced the market access advantage in 2025 by expanding our global network, enhancing our differentiated liquidity, and strengthening our deep proprietary data and analytics. These key components of the market access advantage are further complemented by our investment in multi-protocol solutions for the buy side and for the sell side. We've made significant progress in 2025, delivering and growing protocols across our three channels, portfolio trading protocols, block trading protocols, dealer matching protocols, automation protocols, and our closing auction protocol. Next, we have a clear and achievable technology and product roadmap that positions us to achieve our three-year targets that we announced in December. In 2025, we delivered critical protocols and workflow tools that will help achieve the first year's milestones. Now, 2026 is about execution and building on the momentum we had as we exited 2025. Turning to our financial results on slide three, in 2025, we generated record revenue of $846 million. including strong 10% growth in product areas outside U.S. credit. Record total revenue was underpinned by record total ADV, driving record commission revenue combined with record services revenue, helping to drive record annual free cash flow generation of 347 million. Momentum continued to build with our new initiatives last year. We exited 2025 with a 29% increase in block trading ADV, including record block trading ADV in emerging markets, 28% estimated market share in U.S. high-yield portfolio trading, and over $3 billion in trading volume in our new dealer-initiated protocol, Midex. We continue to be disciplined with our expense management, with 5% growth in non-GAAP expenses in 2025. We have returned a total of $474 million to investors through $360 million of share repurchases and $114 million in dividends. In addition to establishing our three-year plan, we announced an enhanced capital return plan of $400 million, including a $300 million ASR. We just completed the ASR earlier this week with the final delivery of 360,000 shares. Through the completion of the ASR, we have now retired 1.7 million shares to date. In summary, I'm encouraged by the significant product deliveries that we made in 2025 and the progress we achieved across our strategic channels, portfolio trading, dealer initiated, and block trading. The investments that we are making to help drive higher levels of revenue and market share growth in U.S. credit are beginning to show some progress. I just wanted to provide some context for our January trading volume statistics that we released yesterday. In January, we generated record total credit ADD, driven by strong growth across all credit product areas, with record ADD in our emerging markets business up 50%. Strong market volumes, combined with the continued momentum in our new initiatives, helped drive strong growth in our total credit preliminary variable commission revenue. Estimated market share in U.S. high-grade was lower than we would have liked, but it was negatively impacted by a 92% increase in new issue block activity. While this has a temporary impact on share, it is good for overall market volumes and turnover growth over time. U.S. high-grade turnover increased 95% in January, levels we have not seen since approximately 2011. Before moving to the next slide, I wanted to welcome two new members to our board of directors, Doug Sifu and Ken Schigiano, who will be joining our board as of March 1st. Doug brings deep FinTech market structure and regulatory expertise from a major global market maker, and Ken has three decades of experience in FinTech and private equity. Both will be integral to the board and me as we continue to execute our long-term strategy. Slides four and five really drive home how well we have enhanced the market access advantage in 2025. Most of the KPIs on slide four show healthy growth rates reflecting the underlying health of our franchise. This shows that the investments we have made to enhance our products and provide clients with new workflow tools and protocols are paying off. While we are pleased with these results, U.S. credit market share continues to require attention and focus. good news is we have a detailed plan to address it which is embedded in our three-year targets slide six and seven highlight how well we are executing on our new initiatives across our three strategic channels including strong growth continuing in our automation suite on slide seven in the client initiated channel we continue to make progress with block trading globally our block Solutions continue to grow in U.S. credit, emerging markets, and euro bonds, proving that blocks will move from phone to platform. We also recently launched a new axe trading solution for dealers to send axes directly to specific clients. The rollout is in progress, and the client feedback has been positive. We generated 24% growth in ADV to a record $5 billion of block activity across U.S. credit, emerging markets, and euro bonds. with record block trading ADV across all three products. Our U.S. credit ADV record was driven by record block trading ADV in U.S. high grade of over 2 billion, which represented an 18% increase. Our ADV record in U.S. high yield of over 800 million in block trading represented an increase of 19%. The strong growth continued in January, with a 56% increase in block trading ADV last month. Block trading in U.S. credit, emerging markets, and euro bonds now makes up about a third of our credit ADV and represents the next step in the growth of electronic trading. In the portfolio trading channel, we generated a 48% increase in total global portfolio trading ADV to a record $1.4 billion, with record U.S. credit ADV and market share. U.S. credit portfolio trading market share increased by 270 basis points in 2025. In January 2026, total portfolio trading ADD was up 126%, and market share in U.S. credit portfolio trading increased by 620 basis points. In the dealer-initiated channel, we generated a 33% increase in dealer-initiated ADD for the year. And we exited 2025 with a strong contribution from our new U.S. credit Midex protocol with over $3 billion in trading volume in December alone. Again, this strong growth continued into January with a 13% increase in our dealer-initiated ADV. Total Midex trading volume was a record $7 billion, representing an increase of 383%. Last in the automation suite, We had another strong year as clients continued to leverage automation, enabling them to do more with less. Additionally, we were very pleased to see a significant increase in adaptive AutoX algo trading volume in the fourth quarter. Several key clients adopted more customized adaptive algo workflows to increase execution performance and generated over 8 billion in trading volume in the fourth quarter. I'm also happy to report that our pragma acquisition, which is powering our recent algo success, is fully accretive while also adding strategic value across our matching and automation technology modernization, including driving growth in our rates complex. Slide eight shows the strong growth of our new initiatives with our top 25 clients. Our top 25 clients have been driving our growth in portfolio trading within 85% increase in PT volume coming from the top 25. While our top 25 clients have been leveraging our platform for portfolio trading, they've also been leveraging our automation suite for block trading. Automated block trading volume from our top 25 is up over 125%. And not surprisingly, Given the benefits of ExPro in managing RFQ and portfolio trades with our rich proprietary pre-trade analytics and data, trading volume through ExPro is also up 80%. Slide 9 highlights the increase in market share in U.S. high-yield portfolio trading in the second half of 2025 as a result of several enhancements we made last year. The enhancements allow clients to better evaluate the pricing they receive for their high-yield portfolios. While this chart highlights the dramatic increase in estimated U.S. high-yield PT market share, we have also seen our traditional RFQ high-yield market share increase by approximately 100 basis points in the second half of 2025. Slide 10 highlights the increase in the long-term E-trading opportunity that we have seen in just the last several years. This is a point worth emphasizing that I believe many market followers have been missing, particularly with our recent growth in blocks. While total electronification percentage rates may have plateaued in U.S. credit over the last year, the U.S. high-grade market overall has increased by approximately 52%, and U.S. high yield has grown by approximately 28%. We believe that we are well-positioned to capture this expanding E-Trading opportunity as a result of the new initiatives that we have in the market right now, as well as the ones we plan to deliver in 2026. This is why we feel good about our position and our ability to return to higher levels of revenue growth in the coming quarters. Now let me turn the call over to Eileen to review our financial performance.