Virtu Financial, Inc.

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by and welcome to Virtu Financial 2025 first quarter results. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. After the speaker's presentation, there will be a question and answer session. To ask a question during the session, you will need to press star 11 on your telephone. You will then hear an automated message advising your hand is raised. To withdraw your question, please press star 11 again. Please be advised that today's conference is being recorded. I would like now to turn the conference over to Andrew Smith, Head of Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Thank you, Michelle, and good morning, everyone. Thank you for joining us. Our first quarter 2025 results were released this morning and are available on our website. With us today on this morning's call, we have Mr. Douglas Siku, our Chief Executive Officer, Mr. Joseph Meluso, our Co-President and Co-Chief Operating Officer, and Ms. Cindy Lee, our Chief Financial Officer. We'll begin with prepared remarks and then take your questions. First, a few reminders. Today's call may include forward-looking statements which represent Virtue's current belief regarding future events and are therefore subject to risks, assumptions, and uncertainties which may be outside the company's control. Please note that our actual results and financial conditions may differ materially from what is indicated in these forward-looking statements. It is important to note that any forward-looking statements made on this call are based on information presently available to the company, and we do not undertake to update or revise any forward-looking statements as new information becomes available. We refer you to disclaimers in our press release and encourage you to review the description of risk factors contained in our annual report, Form 10-K, and other public filings. During today's call, in addition to GAAP measures, we may refer to certain non-GAAP measures, including adjusted net trading income, adjusted net income, and adjusted EBITDA margins. These non-GAAP measures should be considered as supplemental to and not as superior to financial measures as reported in accordance with GAAP. We direct listeners to consult the investor portion of our website where you'll find additional supplemental information referred to on this call as well as reconciliation of non-GAAP measures to the equivalent GAAP term in the earnings materials with an explanation of why we gave this information meaningful as well as how management uses these measures. And with that, I'd like to turn this all over to Dr.

Thank you, Andrew, and good morning, everyone. Thank you for joining us this morning. In my remarks today, I will focus on Virtue's first quarter 2025 financial and business performance and strategic initiatives. Following my remarks, Joe and Cindy will provide additional details on our results. This morning, we reported $1.30 of normalized DPS on total adjusted net trading income per day of $8.3 million. Quarterly EBITDA was $320 million, and our even down margin was a healthy 64%. This represents our highest net trading income per day since 2021 and reflects the continued long-term improvement of our core business as well as our expansion into new markets. Market making had its best quarter since the first quarter of 2021. Thanks to our continued enhancements, our retail wholesale business was strong and our global non-customer market making businesses continue to outperform our opportunity metrics. In particular, our non-customer global equities, digital asset, and ETF block market-making franchises delivered outsized performances. This quarter demonstrates the benefits of our global diversified market-making operations and highlights its ability to outperform separate and apart from the U.S. retail wholesale business. In addition to our non-customer market-making businesses in the U.S., Europe, and Asia Pacific equities and options, we make markets in energy products like crude, oil, and natural gas, currencies, digital assets, fixed income instruments, and a range of other commodities, including precious and non-precious metals, all of which perform well during the quarter. We continue to extend our listed options business in Asia, India, and Japan, have expanded our coverage of tokens and our ETS block business in Europe. In addition, we had an outstanding quarter in metals given the tumult around tariffs, which has now been implemented. I point this out to underline the fact that while our business does benefit from increased retail activity in the United States, we're also broadly diversified and levered to increase volumes and volatility to execution services' seventh straight quarter of the increasing net trading income, a trend which has persisted through a range of both favorable and less favorable operating conditions. The VES suite of scalable, highly performing products has begun to resonate with our growing and impressive global buy-side and sell-side client list as we continue to make significant inroads through product penetration and cross-selling. We believe our VES business has significant room to grow. Our product line is best in class and our position is rising on broker wheels. We've successfully rolled out Virtu Technology Services, or VTS, with more in the queue. We've deployed an agency fixed income RFQ platform to a handful of clients, building a dealer network of almost 20 brokers on top of our client connectivity. In 2024, we delivered on our plan to significantly increase our sales prowess with a number of key hires, further accelerating our growth in this space, and the results have been noticeable. In addition, Virtue Capital Markets, which has been a pioneer in implementing the market offerings for corporate issuers, What we call VES today is a combination of the Knight Execution Services business we acquired when we bought Knight and ITG's global execution, workflow, analytics, and connectivity franchises. Since acquiring those businesses, we've completely overhauled their respective technology platforms and upgraded the entire suite of products from our outhouse, deposit alert, and our extremely valuable and now multi-asset class workflow and analytics product. The market penetration and adoption levels that VES is realizing today are the culmination of this hard work and our continued investments. Our VES products allow us to achieve deep integration into client workflows, resulting in growth of recurring and reoccurring revenue streams. In addition to these technological and product enhancements, we have also streamlined their operations. We do not break out bottom line results in our segment reporting, however, Suffice to say, our EBITDA margin on these businesses are substantially higher, and depending on the quarters, as much as two times or more than when we acquired them. Given the outline improvements in this business and the outlook and recent performance, we do not see any reason why in the median term we cannot achieve a $2 million per day run rate for VES. Now let me comment on recent market activity. As you know, after the tariff announcements on April 2nd, global markets became extremely volatile. I want to make a handful of comments about the state of the market and our experience in the last few weeks. First, and very importantly, despite some stresses, the market infrastructure performed exceedingly well. We saw no interruptions in our flows, no significant additives or liquidity concerns among any of our counterparties, which include the most important clearinghouses, prime brokers, retail brokers, banks, and trading venues around the world. This performance is the culmination of years of shoring out the financial market infrastructure and sensible and prudent regulation for which we have always been an advocate. This reflects the lessons learned from prior market events and pilots how competition makes markets better by driving brokers, ATSs, and exchanges to innovate and invest in their systems. Our operational performance was outstanding. The past several weeks included the highest volume in volatility days in Virtu's history. I'm proud to say that we had no counterparty issues from a risk standpoint or operational issues that prevented us from servicing clients. While naturally we had increased margin requirements as we anticipated, our liquidity was more than sufficient to meet all associated obligations. Looking at retail participation, As measured by retail shares and quoted spread, the first few weeks of the second quarter were well ahead of 2024 and the first quarter of 2025. Indeed, the last time we saw retail participation at these levels were the pandemic days of 2020. We remain as we have been since 2020, very bullish on long-term retail engagement. Of course, broader market volumes will come down for the most recent elevated levels as one would naturally anticipate. However, If you look at the long-term trend of retail participation, we believe that the data shows a secular uptrend in retail engagement. In fact, if you look at the 605 share volume in quoted spreads over the last six years, you will notice that even after the heightened activity in 2020 and in 2021, the market settled well above its pre-pandemic highs. We also know several market trends, including the strong strong new account opening figures from retail brokers that are indicative of the retail participation continuing apace at the new baseline levels. Finally, I cannot conclude without commenting on our outlook, both near-term and long-term, without reiterating what I just said a few minutes ago. Virtu was built as a highly diversified market-making business and further diversified its business with the growth of its execution services businesses. The current environment is favorable for both our customer and non-customer market-making businesses and our execution services business as well. This has also been an excellent environment for our growing options business, digital asset business, as well as our ETF block business, which in recent days has handled a record number of requests for quotes and working orders from clients. In broad strokes, our growth is driven by three key forces. First, sharpening our edge to better capture opportunities within our existing businesses. Second, extending our edge into new products and markets which themselves are expanding, such as the electronification of fixed income and the growing adoption of digital assets and ETFs abroad. And third, we benefit from the broader tailwinds as market volumes and volatilities rise, thanks to our diverse, global, multi-active class market-making and execution services platform. which enables us to participate in both short- and long-term trends wherever and whenever they emerge. Importantly, the first two drivers are within our control, powered by our execution, innovation, and strategic investment, regardless of how favorable or challenging the external environment may be. I think especially in times like these for our business, it's important to put these things into perspective and know how expansive Virtue's business has become over the years. With more on this point, I'd like to turn the conversation over to Joe Maluso for more commentary. Joseph?

Thank you. We thought it was an appropriate time to revisit briefly some analysis we had included in our supplemental materials and on our investor website in the past that are meant to provide some long-term perspective on virtue and how we have grown business in a deliberate way over the years. So first on slide eight in the supplemental materials, we went back to our IPO 10 years ago and arrayed this data from 2015 until the first quarter. And despite the inherent volatility in our business, there is a clear up and to the right skew to our results. The next slide on page nine is revisiting some perspective on how to analyze a volatile business such as Virtu. The top of the page shows a sensitivity analysis based on adjusted net trading income and the resulting EPS. We introduced the sensitivity analysis about five years ago and have been able to realize results that are consistent with this analysis due to the rigor we have around cost and capital management, things we can control as opposed to the operating environment, which we obviously can't control. Our average daily pro forma net trading income going back to 2019, which was the first full year after the ITG acquisition, has been $6.3 million per day. So through the cycle, through all the ups and downs of different market cycles, our median performance translates into $6.3 million per day, which extrapolated from the chart is $3.40 of adjusted EPS. So we have real growth in our operating model as demonstrated over the long term, which we are accelerating through our organic initiatives as seen in the middle of the slide. Now, going back to what Doug said in his prepared remarks, while our business is volatile, we believe that pieces are in place to continue growing as we further enhance our capabilities and as we extend our abilities to new products and markets. As he mentioned, we believe VES could be a $2 million per day business through the cycle. Add to that the variable yet continuing contribution of our non-retail wholesaling business, and this means you should be able to raise the bar around cyclical troughs over time. The final component of this plan is our continued share buyback. The top-line growth we have realized is significant and enhances our bottom line given our operating level. our share buyback program has and will continue to compound this earnings growth. If you have a desire to look out two to three years, and even if you conclude that our business will continue to evolve and produce a trough year at a given cycle, the cumulative impact of the share buybacks is profound, baking in meaningful growth on top of any organic growth assumption you contemplate. And with that, I'm going to turn the call over to our CFO, Cindy Lee.

Thank you, Joe. Good morning, everyone. On slide three of our supplemental materials, we provided a summary of our quarterly performance. For the first quarter of 2025, our adjusted net trading income, or ANT, which represents our trading gains, none of direct trading expenses, totaled $497 million, or $8.3 million per day. Market-making adjusted net trading income was $382 million, or $6.4 million per day. Exclusion services adjusted net training income was $115 million, or $1.9 million per day. Our first quarter 2025 normalized adjusted EPS was $1.30. Adjusted EBITDA was $320 million for the first quarter 2025, and our adjusted EBITDA margin was 64%. On slide 12, we provided a summary of our operating expense results for the first quarter 2025. We reported $193 million of adjusted operating expenses. We continue to maintain an efficient cost structure and disciplined expense management, which has helped us to control our operating expenses during an inflationary environment. Financing interest expense was $30 million with the first quarter of 2025. With the benefit of our recent refinance and interest rates law contracts that we've entered in the prior year, our blended interest rate was approximately 7.1% for our long-term debt in aggregate. In Q1, we used a portion of our free cash flow to repurchase 1.3 million shares at an average price of $36.44 per share for a total of $48 million. To date, we have repurchased over 52 million shares at an average price of $25.85 per share for a total of $1.4 billion. Quora's share count was 160.2 million shares outstanding. Since we initiated our share repurchase program, we have repurchased over 18.9% of fully diluted shares of Virtue, met after new issuances. We remain committed to our 24 cents per quarter dividend, and combined with our share repurchase program, demonstrates our continued commitment to return capital to our shareholders. Now, I would like to turn the call over to the operator for Q&A.

Thank you. As a reminder to ask a question please press star 1 1 on your telephone and wait for your name to be announced. To withdraw your question please press star 1 1 again. We do ask that you please limit to one question and one follow-up. And our first question is going to come from Chris Allen with Citi. Your line is open.

Morning, everyone. Thanks for taking my question. Maybe just to start out, on the market making an NTI, helpful comments just around the retail sustainability. But maybe when we think about it from a year-over-year perspective, looking at the growth there, 40% year-over-year, can you help us think about the balance between the wholesale business and the on-exchange business? Was there a balance opportunity? Was there a skew? And also the contribution from the new organic growth initiatives, just to help people think about the sustainability of the overall complex moving forward.

Yeah, thank you. It's a great question, Chris. And obviously, we've tried to be more front-footed about our views of sustainability and the cyclicality, if you will, of the retail business. And we obviously, as you know, don't break out customer versus non-custom market making and part of that is obviously it's a little bit competitive, but it's also the businesses are not as separate and distinct as you would think. We've done a lot of great work over the last seven years and certainly within the last two to three years in terms of actually between the various training groups. That involves the customer business in creating an internal central risk book of businesses. So the increase from Q4 to Q1 was pretty diverse and pretty evenly allocated, if you will, between the customer and the non-customer businesses. So it wasn't as if we had some burst of activity in January, February, and March in our Virtue customer market-making segment as opposed to the non-customer market-making businesses. As I noted in the comments, we had some really good days in our precious and non-precious metals business because of the fear of tariffs, which came to be, particularly copper and silver, platinum, So I would say overall that the businesses were quite balanced, and we're trying to emphasize the global diversification and asset scale of this business. I mean, obviously, we don't run away from our wholesale business. It's a great business. We inherited it from Knight, and we have improved it dramatically. We've integrated it with all of the other great things that Virtue had, and it continues to grow in many. For example, when we take customer orders now in crypto ETFs, be they Bitcoin, Ethereum, and shortly Solana, having the ability to market make that on the non-customer side just makes our edge a lot more impressive. Joe, you want to add something?

Yeah, I just wanted to frame, to just underline one thing you said, Chris, in the question when you said the wholesaling retail business and then on exchange, right? So we don't think about it as off-exchange, on-exchange. We think about it as the retail wholesaling business and then kind of the non-customer business, as Doug said. So there is an equity component to it, but there's a U.S. and non-U.S. equity component. Pretty much all the growth initiatives, options, ETF block, crypto, capital markets within BES, but most of those are non-equity businesses. And even some of the examples Doug gave, like metals and foreign exchange and energy, obviously the distinction for us is not on-exchange, off-exchange. It's quote-unquote customer versus non-customer. And obviously you know this, but in multiple asset classes.

Appreciate that. And just on my one follow-up, just kind of noted continued improvement against the opportunity set. So where are we in kind of that continuous improvement? I realize that you have a lot of different areas you can kind of tighten the dials on. Do you still see room for improvement? How does it stand out in the current environment when obviously spreads widen out? Is it more just the environment or just you actually realize increased efficiencies with the environment as well?

Yeah, I mean, it's a really good question. And we measure it in markets that are more benign and markets that are obviously heightened. And you're right, during times of volatility, particularly the last couple of weeks, you see people know Nirvana for a market maker but just in terms of absolute performance and and and growth and I sort of made this point in my prepared remarks but that sure we're very focused on new areas like options ETF block crypto fixed income but there's a continual and a lot of work being being done to more of our I guess I'll just better and more performant. We've added strategies and predictors within our customer market-making segment. We've made our non-customer global equities market-making businesses more efficient. I can't overemphasize that this is a single unitary firm. It really goes back to the DNA of Virtue Financial. We're a single firm. We don't have trading pods. We don't give out trading guarantees. We don't pay people based on books. So there's an enormous within the firm, and that allows for internalization, which does a couple things. It obviously makes you not pay exchange fees and clearing fees and things like that, and Section 31 fees, so by definition, you're going to be more profitable. But it also enables you to execute without having to expose your intentions to the marketplace, and so you can be more aggressive, take in larger blocks, and

Thanks, guys. Appreciate the call, and good luck in the playoffs, Doug.

Thank you very much. And the next question comes from Dan Fannin with Jefferies. Your line is open.

Thanks. Good morning. I wanted to come back to the $2 million per day in the VES business. You know, kind of what gives you that confidence to say this now? You talked about a lot of diversity of products and hiring. So maybe, I guess, where the momentum is, if you could be a little bit more specific, in terms of that business? And as you think about it, is this more cross-selling, more of the same, or are there more things on the come that you expect to roll out?

Yeah, thank you, Dan. We obviously don't typically give forecasts or talk about numbers like that, so we have a high degree of confidence based on a lot of the work that Steve Cavoli and a that we tried to lay out in 2019 when we made the decision strategically to become bigger in an execution services segment. And it's really a number of components, Dan, that adds up. So it's just a bunch of signals. Often we'll take an analytics product and then we try to sell on Triton our execution management system. We've made a huge amount of enhancements and improvements to our workflow solutions and analytics solutions since the acquisition of ITG. Essentially re-platform those and change the guts of them so they're a lot more performant in regular times and in bursts. I didn't hear a single complaint about Triton during this recent April event. I'm sure there were some, but we handled them, but there's no systemic or global issues. And that's a huge improvement, and we've made those products multi-asset class. We are a big believer in distribution partnerships, so we're kind of agnostic. We're happy to have partners, sell-side firms, white-label our products and be a technology provider. And in addition, we've made a number of product enhancements. uses real high-level machine learning and some artificial intelligence to route orders intelligently. We have an agency RFQ product now in fixed income, which was something that the marketplace was asking for. And as I mentioned earlier, we have multi-asset class trading analytics products. So you can go to a large asset manager and say, hey, we can be a one-stop solution for your credit traders, your equities traders, your fixed income, your FX traders. And so all of those you know, one plus two plus three, you know, the singles that we're hitting have really, you know, given us the confidence, if you will, and the results are, you know, the proof is in the pudding. And on top of that, you know, once we made a number of cultural changes, shall I say, within that business segment, we've really done a terrific job. Again, I give Steve Favoli and the guys a lot of credit by having a number of strategic hires. This is ultimately a customer experience facing business and customer service and understanding the products, you know, having folks in virtue execution services, even if they aren't software engineers, they need to understand the products and why.

Please stand by one moment. We are having a technical difficulty, so please stand by for one moment. please stand by for one moment we are experiencing a technical difficulty so please stand by Andrew yes okay are you ready to continue sir yes yeah where did we drop It looks like that you were answering a question for Dan Fannin.

Yeah, okay. Thank you.

Are we back live? Yes, we are. Okay.

Dan, I think I was pretty much done going through the four, five, six elements. I hope I answered your question. I don't know if you had a follow-up.

Yeah, no, we got most of that, so appreciate it. Just as a follow-up, there obviously is a bunch of debate around the sustainability of retail, and you talked about what's been happening more recently. Just want to make sure that there's nothing you're seeing from the flow or other parts of the market that would basically support this idea that retail is slowing or has the potential to slow in the short term.

No, it's a good question. Obviously, we try to be front-footed and address it not only in the script, but we provide it in the supplemental materials data, and the data doesn't lie. Sure, you'll have, as you will in non-customer segments, you'll have surges of interest, but we've seen retail hasn't pulled back. We've seen a very healthy and sustainable level of retail engagement You know, if you look at slide seven, you can see that, you know, the baseline has elevated. And indeed, you know, the key retail brokers have indicated that their account openings have continued to grow apace. So like every part of the markets, you know, you'll have days where there's, you know, 10 billion shares of retail come into the market and other days where there's 2 billion. But at the end of the day, the long-term positive trend here has continued. I think the data is very, very clear and that we provided in the supplemental materials. So I think that narrative is frankly just incorrect and is not supported by the data.

Great, thank you.

Thank you.

And the next question will come from Ken Worthington with JP Morgan. Your line is open.

Hi, good morning. Thanks for taking the question. I wanted to maybe start on I guess what I'll call the core non-customer market making business and was hoping to get more color in terms of, you know, to what extent that that business is sort of building and growing. So if it's possible, you know, are you adding new symbols, new exchanges? Is it more headcount? Is it additional capital? Are there other things that are getting the baseline in that business to grow and or should we really just kind of go back to the other businesses that you talked about and focus on the growth and, you know, VES and the customer business, et cetera?

Yeah. Yeah. It's a great question. Obviously, look, we struggle, you know, to provide as much information as we possibly can to you all to validate that. And every time I, in my prepared remarks, I comment on whether we've, you know, we're very self-critical, if you will, in terms of what should our performance be in terms of capture per unit, whether it's an FX pair, a future or an equity or in digital assets and whatnot. And so we score ourselves every day, and I was very clear in our remarks that we outperformed in just about every non-customer market-making segment that I can think of. And that is really the culmination of a couple things. One, obviously, is investing heavily in technology to make sure that in terms of not only latency in terms of execution, but throughput of market data and connectivity, that we are there. In equities, there's not only now 15 in the United States, there's 15 national securities exchanges, there's 40-odd ATSs that we're connected to that we do quite well on, and we run a very significant single dealer platform. know streaming directly to customers and making sure that you manage toxicity and provide good execution quality to those customers that's something that we strive for and continue to improve on and then lastly i've mentioned it now three or four times it's enhancing internalization within the firm so it's hard to underestimate how important it is and and how vibrant call our legacy businesses are and over you know the last four or five years we have seen a continual shift to the right of those businesses you know in the aggregate sure some will have better days weeks months quarters and years than others but the notion that somehow those businesses are diminishing or not growing is not correct so we're very very focused on continuing to diversify our our revenue streams and add on to that, obviously, some of the new initiatives around options and ETF block, which has grown pretty dramatically in digital assets. Joe, I don't know if you wanted to add.

No, that's right. I mean, your question, Ken, you know, what if we, you know, with new products, new markets, I mean, pretty much everything that we describe or have described in the past as an organic growth initiative is in this non-retail category. ETF block, digital assets option.

Great. Thank you very much.

Thanks, Ken. And the next question comes from Craig Siegenthaler with Bank of America. Your line is open. Good morning.

Thanks for taking the question. This is Eli on for Craig. Can you update us on the product roadmap for your crypto business? Specifically, what exchanges are you providing liquidity on today? For what coins? and then how is that going to build out and expand over time?

Yeah, sure. I'm going to try to be as specific as I can. I'm not the youngest guy in the world, so I can't keep track of all of these coins. Eli, you're a young guy, so you probably have a better handle on them. I mean, a lot of it really has been driven by our partners. So as you know, we're an investor in EDX. EDX has asked us to expand Our coverage both in terms of coins and in terms of hours, so we are now a 24 by 7 firm. We're doing a lot more than the big three, so it's more than Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Solana. We're doing about a dozen or so coins, moving to close to two dozen. We won't go far out on the queue and do some of these, I'll call them fakakta, one-off meme coins, those don't seem appropriate, but anything that EDX and other partner firms like Coinbase, Bullish, I'm trying to think the other venues we're connected to, Binance. I'm sorry? Yeah, so. OKX, Andrew's updating me here. What other venues are we connected to? OKX, Bybit, Kraken. Right, there you go, Eli. In addition, we have now, started a V, like our VFX and VFI, where we stream directly to counterparties.

We have a VF crypto offering.

We've made a couple of strategic hires in that area to build out more of what I will call an institutional business. So streaming directly to buy side firms, either through our own API or using the auspices of one of the aforementioned exchanges. And then the last thing is that this business is a multi-asset class business, if you will, a multi-product business because, you know, every day you turn around, there's a new ETF that's about to be launched here in the United States, thankfully. You'll have levered and inverse products, and then you'll have options on those products. We see the same thing in Europe and in Canada, a little bit in Brazil and in Asia as well. And then there is perpetual futures as well that like EDX has launched, for example. on these products. So think of this as a multitude of coins, ETF products globally, futures products both listed and perpetual futures on other platforms. And then on top of that, we will offer a single dealer institutional streaming as well. So we are, I would say, kind of in the second inning, if you will, of a nine-inning game of building that out. We're happy to be a wholesale crypto liquidity provider. And so this is going to be no different, if you will, from are FX or other businesses that we've built out over the years. And the last thing is, to the extent there's institutional support for this business, there's no reason we couldn't support digital asset products, and we already have a roadmap for this to the extent there's an investor demand on our Triton product. So traders could access markets through our execution management system, and we're more than happy and prepared to have execution service algos So this is truly a product or an asset class, if you will, that spans the firm.

Got it. Thank you. And for our follow-up, there's been some news flow about you guys getting new competition in Virtue Technology Services with Citadel Securities and Jane Street both also looking to do more of that sort of outsourced trading business with sell-side firms. Can you talk a little bit about how your offering stacks up against these competing solutions being rolled out by your competitors?

Yeah, it's a really good question. Look, Citadel and Jane are both terrific firms run by great people, and we're frenemies, I guess, because we collaborate on exchanges and regulatory matters. So I have nothing but respect for both of those firms and their leadership. I've said that many, many, many times. I think it's a very different product offering. Their offering is more of a white label RFQ product that connects to a bank partner and will provide them with liquidity that their partner then can repackage, mark up, and share with their clients. That's a great business. It can be focused on maybe one or two larger dealers. And it's a very, you know, it's a holistic partnership. We've done that before. We did that historically with the bank in New York and in FX, for example. It doesn't scale particularly well and it's very intensive. It obviously can be very profitable. Our business is completely different. It's an offering that is more of an agency aggregation tool. for smaller regional broker dealers and asset managers, and it's more commoditized and it scales exceptionally well. And the benefit of that, obviously, is you have a larger addressable marketplace. It's more of a commoditized product that's easier to get out there and it's easier to support. And it provides us the benefit of being able to if we choose, and obviously we generally choose, to be a liquidity provider with respect to that broker-dealer. But again, we're going to be Switzerland, so we're going to allow them to access. If they want to access Citadel, Jane Street, Hudson River, and all these other great firms, that's their prerogative, will be a liquidity provider on a wheel. But it's really empowering firms that don't have the resources that we do in order to execute liquidity. to provide that capability to their end users as opposed to like a single large partnership. So I think it's a very, very different approach and a very different philosophy, and that's how I would distinguish them.

Got it. Thank you.

Thank you.

I am showing no further questions at this time. I would now like to turn the call back over to Doug for closing remarks.

Thank you, everybody, for joining us today, and we very much look forward to addressing the second quarter in July of this year. Thank you, everybody.

This concludes today's conference call. Thank you for participating. You may now disconnect.