MarketAxess Holdings, Inc.

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by. Welcome to the Market Access first quarter 2026 earnings conference call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. Later, we will conduct a question and answer session. As a reminder, this conference call is being recorded on May 7th, 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 First Quarter 2026 Earnings Conference Call. For the call, Chris Kincannon, Chief Executive Officer, will provide you with an update on our strategy and our business. And Eileen Feazell-Buehler, 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 31, 2025. 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 very strong financial results for the first quarter of 2026. 2026 is all about the execution of our long-term strategy, and that is exactly what we did in the quarter. Turning to slide three. we grew total revenue by 12% to a record $233 million, including very strong 20% growth in product areas outside U.S. credit. Record total revenue was underpinned by record total trading ADV, driving record commission revenue. Momentum continued to build with our new initiatives and generated approximately 50% of total incremental revenue in the quarter. Strength on the trading side was complemented by 10% growth in services revenue, helping to drive trailing 12-month free cash flow generation of $316 million. We continue to be disciplined with our expenses, with 8% growth in non-GAAP expenses. And underlying these strong results was the strong progress we made in innovating and growing our franchise. First, we significantly enhanced the market access advantage by expanding our global network, enhancing our differentiated liquidity, and fortifying our high-value proprietary data and analytics by expanding the use of AI. Next, we continued the rollout of our new enhanced X-Pro front end that is changing the client experience. And last, we are continuing to invest in our technology modernization, which includes our recent strategic hire, Will Kwan, who joined us as our Chief Technology Officer. So I for highlights the market access advantage, where we are increasingly using Ai to leverage our sizable proprietary data set to deliver unique data and analytics to clients to enhance their trading outcomes. Our global network of the largest fixed income investors and the most active fixed income liquidity providers. generates deep vertical IP that gives us a significant competitive advantage in generating critical analytics and insights for our clients. In 2025, our global network generated over $5 trillion in notional inquiry information and over $34 trillion in notional response information, all of which is proprietary to market access. This unique data set across US credit, emerging markets, and Europe gives us a special AI opportunity to interpret the markets in real time, to assist in clients' portfolio construction, and to deliver a unique and enhanced execution experience. We have already delivered AI-driven data solutions like the award-winning CP+, CP Plus for Blocks, Depth of Book, Sense AI, and AI Dealer Select. We are now exploring the next level of AI-enhanced data products. What is critical to remember is that AI solutions are only as good as the data they are trained on. We have a unique advantage given our global proprietary data set. Slide five provides an update on the macro backdrop of the first quarter end April. Recent geopolitical events drove higher levels of volatility and wider credit spreads in the quarter. The initial jump in volatility and widening of credit spreads was short-lived and credit spreads moved back to historically low levels in April. Open trading penetration and U.S. high yield increased to 47% in the quarter, the highest level since 2023, reflecting increased demand for differentiated liquidity. Despite these shocks, the market has remained very healthy, with historic levels of new issuance in the first quarter continuing into April. New issue pricing concessions are up modestly from lows, and deals continue to be approximately four times oversubscribed, reflecting the very strong focus on new issues. All of these factors generated record results in the quarter, but the return to lower volatility, tighter credit spreads, and strong new issuance in April, combined with tougher year-over-year comparisons, were key drivers of the decline in trading volumes in April. Slide 6 highlights the shift in segmentation of US high-grade trace market ADD in April, including the strong focus on the new issue calendar, which reduced our estimated market share. We believe there were several factors that reduced our estimated market share in April. First, duplicate reports in trace have been increasing over the past several quarters, and we estimate that they inflated US high-grade trace volumes by up to 8% in April. Adjusting for these duplicates, consistent with FINRA's recent proposal to suppress duplicate reporting, we believe our estimated U.S. high-grade market share would have been approximately 160 basis points higher in April. Next, April's historically high new issuance further reduced our estimated U.S. high-grade market share in April. We generally have lower levels of market share in new issues during the first two weeks of trading. When our clients are very focused on new issues, we believe it can crowd out some of their secondary trading activity on our platform. In summary, while there was considerable noise in the denominator used to calculate our estimated market share in April, we are now addressing the challenges of the new issue calendar with our new issue trading solution. Slide seven summarizes the record levels of trading volume across our credit products, and the strong growth in U.S. Treasuries. We delivered double-digit growth in ADD across most credit products and U.S. Treasuries and double-digit growth in variable transaction revenue. U.S. high-yield liquidity provision by our long-only clients increased almost 80% compared to last year. This increase in unique liquidity is delivering a greatly improved execution experience for our high-yield clients. Slide 8 highlights the record levels of trading volume and revenue we generated in our emerging markets franchise. Over the trailing 12 months, our EM franchise has generated $20 million in incremental revenue, representing 68% of total credit incremental variable commission revenue. This reflects the success we have had with our investments in the EM business. In the quarter, we expanded our EM global client network to a record 1,547 active client firms and 3,410 international active client traders. Total trading volumes were up 30% in the first quarter to record levels, with record levels across both hard currency and local currency markets and across all regions. We grew our hard currency revenue with high fee per million by 15%, and we grew our local markets revenue with lower fee per million by 56%. Total EM fee per million is down only 4%, in part because of the mixed impact of the local markets fee per million, which is over 40% lower than the hard currency business. Fee per million is simply an output that reflects the mix of business being executed while we are still focused on maximizing revenue. Slide 9 and 10 highlight how well we are executing our new initiatives across our three strategic channels, including record levels of credit automation trading volume. On slide 10, in the client-initiated channel, we continue to make strong progress with block trading globally. We generated 35% growth in ADV to a record $7 billion of block activity across U.S. credit emerging markets, and euro bonds, with record block trading ADVs across all three products. Importantly, in U.S. high grade in March, dealer algos won 30% of block trades on the platform. In the portfolio trading channel, we generated a 51% increase in total global portfolio trading ADV to a record $1.9 billion. U.S. credit portfolio trading market share increased by 100 basis points year over year. In the dealer-initiated channel, we generated record levels of ADD with record Mid-X ADD as well. And in April, we delivered Mid-X volumes of $6.7 billion, the second highest level of monthly activity. Last in our automation suite, We had another record quarter as clients continued to leverage automation, even in more volatile periods. We saw $144 billion in automation volume, helped with a sizable increase in adoption of our adaptive algo solution. Slide 11 shows the strong growth we have generated in U.S. credit blocks, as well as the new protocols and workflow tools we are developing to attack this important segment of the market. We are starting to crack the block market, and now we have expanded the toolkit for clients to trade blocks. We are continuing to invest in block automation and targeted RFQ solutions, but we also recently launched targeted access, and we expect to launch our new issue block trading solution in the second half of 2026. Now let me turn the call over to Eileen to review our financial performance.