Marex Group plc

Hello everyone, thank you for joining us and welcome to the Merrick's Q4 2025 earnings call. After today's prepared remarks, we will host a question and answer session. If you would like to ask a question, please press star 1 on your telephone keypad. To withdraw your question, please press star 1 again. I will now hand the call over to Adam Strachan, Head of Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Good morning, everyone, and thanks for joining us today for Marek's fourth quarter 2025 earnings conference call. Speaking today are Ian Lowett, Group CEO, and Rob Irvin, Group CFO. After Ian and Rob have made their formal remarks, we will open the call to questions, and Paolo Tenucci, our Chief Strategist and CEO of Capital Markets, will join for Q&A as usual. Before we begin, I would like to remind everyone that certain matters discussed in today's conference call are forward-looking statements relating to future events, management's plans and objectives for the business and the future financial performance of the company that are subject to risks and uncertainties. Actual results could differ materially from those anticipated in these forward-looking statements. And the risk factors that may affect results are referred to in Marek's press release issued today. The forward-looking statements made today are as of the date of this call, and Marek's does not undertake any obligation to update their forward-looking statements. Finally, the speakers may refer to certain adjusted or non-IFRS financial measures on this call. A reconciliation schedule of the non-IFRS financial measures to the most directly comparable IFRS measures is also available in the earnings release issued today. A copy of today's release and investor presentation may be obtained by visiting the investor relations page of the website at Marex.com. I will now turn the call over to Ian.

Good morning and welcome to our fourth quarter and full year 2025 earnings call. 2025 was a year of continued growth for Marex. We delivered another year of record financial performance with revenue of over $2 billion. Over the past five years, we have increased profitability sevenfold from $61 million in 2020 to $418 million in 2025. We have done this by broadening our product offering across our four interconnected services, expanding geographically, and combining organic growth with targeted M&A. Acquiring, integrating, and scaling businesses is embedded in the DNA of Marex, enabling us to add clients and deepen relationships across products, asset classes, and geographies. Our platform and organization are difficult to replicate, increasing further the high barriers to entry that we benefit from in our industry. The results we are reporting today demonstrate that our strategy is effective and continues to deliver value for our shareholders. On slide four, you see that we closed the year with record profitability in the fourth quarter. Revenues grew 38% from $416 million to $572 million, and adjusted profit before tax increased 41% to $115 million. We grew EPS by 50% to $1.14 per share. Pleasingly, this performance was not driven by an idiosyncratic market event, but by broad-based strength across the firm. Full-year revenue grew 27% from $1.6 billion to just over $2 billion, and adjusted PBT increased 30% to $418 million. Profit after tax increased at a faster rate, benefiting from an improved effective tax rate, which declined from 26% to 25%, reflecting our evolving geographic mix. Full-year EPS grew 39% to $4.12. We experienced growth across all our segments with continued strength and client balance growth and clearing, strong performance in agency and execution, driven in particular by Prime, which I'll come back to, as well as good momentum in market making and hedging and investment solutions. In clearing, average customer balances increased over the year by 18% to $14 billion in the fourth quarter, with balances growing steadily quarter by quarter. We continue to execute our M&A strategy, strengthening earnings through disciplined integration and development of recent acquisitions. We have developed a repeatable model for identifying complementary assets, acquiring them at attractive prices, integrating them efficiently, and enhancing their earnings power as part of the Marex platform. That capability continues to be a sustainable competitive advantage for the firm. We are very selective in the opportunities we pursue and maintain high conviction in our ability to meet our return objectives and grow acquisitions once integrated. This is evidenced by the acquisitions we completed during the year, which are delivering in line with or ahead of expectations. ARNA provided an opportunity to establish a clearing presence in the Middle East. The day one synergies we identified, which increased profitability by around 50%, were realized as expected. Hamilton Court provides us with access to a number of UK and EU corporates that we did not serve previously. It expands our client base and creates meaningful cross-sell opportunities. Winterflood, which we completed in December, has started strongly and enhances our UK equity market-making franchise while creating cross-sell opportunities with leading UK participants. Following the subsequent sale of Winterflood's custody business, which we expect to complete in Q2, we will have acquired Winterflood at a meaningful discount to tangible book value, a transaction that we believe will generate substantial long-term value for our shareholders. Alongside M&A, we continue to execute a number of organic growth initiatives, including digital assets within clearing, expanding our footprint in Asia, the Middle East, and Brazil, and growing our Prime brokerage and FX capabilities. A meaningful contributor to the diversification of the firm and an example of how we scale businesses once integrated into our platform is Prime Services. We acquired Prime in December, 2023 for approximately $25 million of premium. In 2025, it generated over $250 million of revenue and now accounts for around a quarter of the group's profitability. Prime also adds diversification to our earnings profile, broadening our revenue drivers beyond traditional exchange volume linked activity. Finally, as the breadth of our platform expands, we're increasingly scaling relationships with larger, more sophisticated clients, something I'll touch on in more detail shortly. On slide five, you can see the consistent improvement in our key financial metrics, revenue, profitability, earnings per share, and return on equity. Beyond the headline growth, what is particularly encouraging is the quality of that growth. Full-year revenues increased 27% to over $2 billion. Adjusted profit before tax grew faster than revenues, up 30% for the year, and EPS increased 39%, reflecting the improved tax rate. Reported return on equity improved to 27.6%, underscoring the capital efficiency of the model, and pre-tax margins were 21%. Looking now at the operating environment in more detail on slide six. As we step back and look at the operating environment during the year, it is clear that on the whole, we have enjoyed a supportive backdrop for our services. The spike in volatility in April was notable at the start of the second quarter. While April was a strong month, it was not outsized in the context of the full year. We continued to deliver strong growth, even as volumes and volatility reduced from April's peak, including through the seasonally quiet third quarter and amid the impact of the short report. We also absorbed the impact of lower interest rates in clearing as we grew our client balances, which Rob will cover in more detail. In Q4, exchange volumes increased, up 5% year-on-year and 8% higher than the third quarter, while volatility also picked up modestly. Equity markets, being at or around all-time highs in Q4, helped our prime business, which is a function of customer balances and spreads. It also, to some extent, supports solutions, where we tend to see higher client activity in structured products when markets are rising. In this context, our fourth quarter profits were up 41% year on year and up 14% compared to the third quarter and also above our prior record in Q2. This demonstrates that we are growing faster than underlying market volumes and that we have set up the firm to deliver growth through a variety of environments. I'll now hand over to Rob, who will take you through the financials in more detail.