Deutsche Börse AG (DB1) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Welcome, ladies and gentlemen, and thank you for joining us today for the Capital Markets Day of Deutsche Börse Group. It's great to see so many of you here in the room today, but we would also like to extend a warm welcome to the participants on the live video webcast. We have a full agenda today. The presentations will last for around about 2 hours, maybe a little bit more. And afterwards, there is sufficient time to address all of your questions. At around 2:30 p.m., we are planning a short break. And after that, we will continue with the presentations and the Q&A. With this, let me already introduce our first speaker today, Stephan Leithner, Chief Executive Officer of Deutsche Börse, who will present our strategy, Leading the Transformation, today. Stephan, the floor is yours.

Jan, thank you very much and a warm welcome from me to all of you here in the room in London as well as those that join us by video across the globe. We are very appreciative of your interest in not just short-term update on quarterlies, but truly today about what is our perspective, how do we want to take Deutsche Börse forward beyond what was our strategy to date, Horizon '26. It's been a tremendous first 12 months of transition. It's been a time when we had many of you meetings with us that were often focused on numbers, on short-term developments, what's the impact of what's happened geopolitically, what are new trends on technology over the summer. I think what is really today, as those many interactions come together, a new picture has emerged that is much clearer. That's why we, as a management team here today, after the transition we went through, are very excited to bring to you that wider picture, how can we take Deutsche Börse forward as a growth company. Let me in that sense also start with the key messages. So there is no ambiguity because, certainly, there will be quite a lot of information in the course of the afternoon. But the four basic points that we really want to make sure you take home is the strength of our starting position. We feel very comfortable. We have been consistent in predicting and telling you about our commitment to this year's numbers, but also that we will meet the financial commitments that we have made around Horizon '26 quite a number of years back by now. So we as Deutsche Börse rests on a very strong basis that is very much in sync with the key trends that we see. That's why the second message is really around the growth prospects that we feel are very fundamental and strong for the years to come. That's why an 8% growth of our net revenues excluding treasury results, so the metric that we can really manage towards in a more narrow sense is something that we want to leave with you. This is based on very clear structural trends that we have been positioning for a number of years. They are helping us to scale. They are also driven by our technology progress. But equally, those 8% are driven by what is more. What is the transitions that are going on? What are some of the transformations in markets that we are positioning for? And we want to take you through those today. The third message I want to leave with you, and Jens will talk about it in more detail later, is that this growth comes with a very strong scaling on the cost side. We have achieved a status as a group where we have invested significantly, where we have the size of our individual businesses that we really can take advantage on the cost side of benefit that is lower growth of cost than we had in the past. That's why for the next few years, we talk about a 3% cost growth. That leads me to the fourth point today, what is the important message when it comes then to the bottom line for Deutsche Börse Group. And that's really twofold. On the one hand side, obviously, the jaw between the revenue growth of 8% and 3% cost growth gives us a strong bottom line momentum. We look to the next few years to a margin expansion of around 3 percentage points that we will deliver to you. We will show that to you. But it also comes in that growth with a very strong cash flow generation. That's why the other part of our story is a capital management story. And there we, yesterday, made clear that one of the components besides strong investments organically, besides our M&A capability and besides the dividend we are very committed is a continued commitment to share buybacks. We yesterday talked about a number of EUR 500 million that we will deliver to you in the course of 2026. If I now deep dive into my main cornerstones, the starting point is Deutsche Börse as a group has a unique global operating model that I think we often struggle to really transport in its full beauty. It's anchored in the complete infrastructure footprint that we have. We offer an integrated market infrastructure. We're not a stock exchange in a classical sense. So the four areas that we, with Investment Management Solutions, Trading & Clearing, the Fund Services often felt were relatively small to elevate so much, I mean, by now it's grown to above EUR 500 million, and then at the end of the day, our Security Services, the Clearstream engines, that entirety is the scope that we feel very, very passionate about. It goes back more than 20 years, the basic idea the industry has followed our industry, our strategic concepts here. Now all of that is not just a me-too integrated infrastructure, but we have unique singular assets in each of those areas. If you look at the brands, iconic is often used, but I think Eurex, Clearstream, ISS STOXX, SimCorp, Deutsche Börse as a cash market and EEX in each of their segments, these are truly iconic brands that give us a unique scaling possibility, which we have really started to leverage much better in the recent time. And all of that is always driven by a desire for innovation. Deutsche Börse has been an innovator. We have 25 years when we were the first ones to fully electronicize a cash equity market. We are the ones that have extreme high reliability in our systems, and we really are very, very focused on the technology journey with 74% of our capacity by now in the cloud. We have gained advantages on which we can now build when we talk about topics like AI. And the last component is all of this is based on people. And there, it's so passionately important to me. There's 16,000 colleagues. We call them capital market engineers. At the end of the day, it is a truly global footprint we have, and also that plays into our cost and scaling capability. But it is something that is so differentiated because it really is close to our clients and close to the market. In Europe alone, there are 10,000 of our clients -- of our colleagues. Outside of Germany, there are 6,000 of our colleagues that are close to every single market. Many of them, we are, by a wide margin, the biggest infrastructure provider on the ground close to our clients. So that's why the team that you see here today and the people behind us are really delivering that story that we talk about. Our leadership is based on our people and the quality of our people. And I'm proud that over the last year, we have completed and with the announcement of the extension also of Christoph Bohm's contract by the Supervisory Board last week. And on the left-hand side that you see here is the Executive Committee is complete. That's the team that has, over the last few years, delivered and will deliver into the future. And on the right-hand side, you also see the business heads. And I'm very proud that all of them, as you see them on the chart are here today, I would actually ask them to briefly stand up so you can identify them. Great. So they are visible and seen. We will also have them in the Q&A later. But let me emphasize that our culture around an entrepreneurial operating, these businesses operate in a very much entrepreneurial way, it makes an enormous difference in our capability of innovating in our different markets. And that's why it's so important to have the colleagues here, and they will be available to answer your questions as we move on. So the teams we have today have delivered the past. That's the track record that we have built. If you look at our track record, it's fantastic. I'm truly proud of that. We have two strategy cycles in which we have delivered 11% growth. It's a development that has increasingly become higher quality. If you look at the last versus the two ago strategy cycle, then the contribution that has come from secular growth, organic secular growth has again gone up. And I'm very confident as we look at the next cycle that our organic growth delivery capability is something that is pretty unique in the industry. And it is unique because at the end of the day, our commitment, and that's my first statement that I made today, is around delivering Horizon '26. It's a plan we laid out. We communicated it to you. We are very committed. We will deliver the EUR 6.4 billion net revenues next year. Now the mix has changed. But again, that is a proof to the quality of our portfolio. We have faced on one area cyclical headwinds, particularly from FX. That's true for IMS. But on the other side, we have delivered secular outperformance growth both in Security Services as well as in Trading & Clearing and there, again, in particular, EEX, noncyclical secular growth. The quality of the EUR 6.4 billion we're going to deliver to you will be as good as what we laid out, a bit different mix, but that exactly comes back to the strength of our portfolio. So that portfolio is the four segments that we have been presenting to you. If you look across that portfolio, it is much more balanced than in the past. And with Investment Management Solutions, and I'll come back later and Christian later will, in particular, talk about it. We have opened a totally new environment on the client footprint. As you can see here, the net revenue contribution that is coming from the buy-side exposures is quite material across all the segments. It's something I will come back as a fundamental driver of our growth going forward. But equally across the four areas, we have a lot of commonality in how we attack clients and what we offer to clients just as much as we have the synergies from the platforms across the breadth of our businesses. And that's why we -- when we go into our new strategy, which we call Leading the Transformation, we feel it's truly around this portfolio. We feel comfortable with the remit that we have laid out, and we want to anchor our strategy into commitment from delivery. That's why our starting point for the strategy is the commitment to next year's number, the EUR 6.4 billion. But from there, we think we can really take it forward. And there's four components I would like to highlight to you in our strategy components that we will go into much detail in the course of the day. The first one is the secular growth journey of our individual businesses. That will drive an 8% net revenue growth over the next years until 2028, and I will speak in more detail about that in a minute. But it's not good enough. That 8% is only one part. The bigger picture is that the transformational changes that are going on in our industry, we want to be the leader on, and that's why we have highlighted two of them. One is Europe and the second one is the asset class dynamics. There are many new asset classes that have disproportionate growth, and we want to be leading these transformations as capital markets are changing. In that context, M&A play is a role. I will talk about that in a minute. And all of that is, as I alluded already at the beginning, is anchored in a business model development. We, as Deutsche Börse, not only want to transform the outside markets, but we also will transform Deutsche Börse. And the outcome for you, as investors, is a commitment around a better scaling. We will see a 3% cost growth over the next few years, and that's really anchored in a OneGroup approach. It's anchored in our global footprint on the HR side. That's, again, based on strength and productivity gains that we are going to have from technology. Now all of that allows us a refined capital allocation policy. That's the fourth module of our strategy. That's what we, again, put in place and practiced already yesterday. In contrast to historically where we said there is a clear sequencing, organic investments, M&A, dividends, and if we then have something left over, then we think around buybacks. No. We have gained in growth and size. So we feel comfortable today to talk about the continuity also on the buyback side. And we are able to handle both. We feel we have the right investment capability and we're able to serve you as investors with a higher cash return in total. Let me start on the growth side. On the growth side and our secular organic trends that we are based on are really the ones that we have shown you for a number of years. And again, that's good news. There's continuity. These trends are fully intact. With IMS, we have formed an anchor, a unique anchor for the buy side. The buy-side transformation is intact. I will talk to it in a minute. The digitization journey, I can go back for Deutsche Börse 25 years on that. But much more tangible for the last 3 or 4 years, you heard us in the last strategy talk about the new asset classes, I'll come back to that later in greater detail. But more important, we have proactively invested in the trend of digitization in base platforms. That's what Christoph Bohm and the teams have done for many years now, and we are really benefiting from that at this point. Now then within our own markets, fixed income is a continued trend. The indebtedness keeps going up. It's something that is fueling not only the home of the euro story on the side of Eurex, but it is equally on the Security Services side, a major engine of what's going to come and drive our 8% aggregate growth. The platform importance versus bilateral and OTC activity, it's really something that is benefiting each of our segments, in particular obviously IMS, where SimCorp is a big beneficiary of a front-to-back platform thinking, which we are able to put in place on a simplified way in the cloud, common to all, not tailored, so true scaling. On Trading & Clearing, obviously, we still have regulatory support behind the OTC to on-exchange. But also in EEX, if I just take that example, of how we have moved forward and really captured all of Europe, which was all OTC has moved all on exchange above 90%. What a transformation. And that continues, as I will say, in a minute. And the same is true for Vestima on our funds platforms. Now all of that is traditionally a thinking of Deutsche Börse Germany, Europe. No, it's not true. The global footprint opportunity has really changed in the last 3 to 4 years. Just let me link it back to EEX, that EEX is the leader globally on the electricity side, that the Japanese market is totally transformed and changing rapidly just shows it's plug and play from what we have in experience. That's what those market operators look for in terms of quality of the experiences. The same is true in last year when we had in Security Services and brought to Canada and now to Saudi Arabia our basic framework around collateral management in a wider sense in the market. It's something that is a unique global opportunity that comes without significant additional fresh investments because we have superior concepts. So those trends are really driving it. The one I want to deep dive again is the buy side. I mentioned it two or three times already. The buy-side importance has gone up for market infrastructure. It's a unique opportunity in one simple term because it is a growing industry. It's an 8% growing industry, stronger than the sell side. But we also know it is an industry that is under a lot of pressure. Many of our investors, we often encounter that when we speak with many of you, but fact remains compression of margins is a problem looking for a solution. We are the solution. Why are we a solution? There's accelerated outsourcing. There's acceleration of going direct to market infrastructure. There is acceleration around looking for neutral provider. The asset management industry is very wary about the overlap that exists and competing interests that some players have. We provide a neutral infrastructure perspective. And last but not least, it is sometimes and often supported by regulatory requirements, as we see with the account treatment on the Eurex side. So all of that is a trend which naturally makes us a partner for the buy side. Our transformative step in this context was the creation of IMS, the introduction of SimCorp, together with ISS STOXX, that have given us the proximity, a strategic dialogue conversation at the buy side, which Deutsche Börse historically has not had. So we have started to really monetize that. Today, 36% of our revenues come from the buy side. And the buy side in its quality and our understanding of the buy side has grown a lot. That's why if you walked down the different segments, you see the buy side for us is everywhere. It's something that will continue to drive our growth when we talk about the individual businesses. The second theme that I really want to emphasize around the secular growth and why we have a winning proposition at the end of the day always comes down to our IT and digital capabilities. Now what you see here is in the context, obviously, our product -- close to product platforms are very, very important. In Investment Management Solutions, SimCorp One, the ISS STOXX interfaces in Trading & Clearing, our unique 7 series in a way from trading to clearing to risk. The same is true on the Fund Services side, where some of them have iconic names in the context, like Vestima has in the industry. But the key change in our approach to this has been that we have achieved the platformization across the businesses, that we have created a foundation with the move into the cloud much more aggressive, much more extensive, much more complete and leveraging it for quality and speed. That's what we have done. That's why 74% of our compute capacity in the cloud makes such a big difference, because this has allowed us, together with our multiple cloud partners, to now operate on data. And most important, and I know it's on everybody's mind, how about AI. Our AI starting point is one of an opportunity, not of a threat. AI for us, given the investments we have made is something we can drive and push forward. And therefore, I think at the end of the day, the analysis that we have done around what is at risk has come up with a relatively small amount. And some of those discussions we had in many of the bilateral meetings around the areas that are affected. But again, there, we also are now in the process very much of turning it around. That's why one of the individuals you have here with us today is Daniel Besse. We have created a Chief Digital Transformation Officer to work with Christoph and the businesses to really leverage that AI opportunity for us. The second theme of the year has really been around the volatility, the cyclical exposures. Just two sentences on that. The first one is we have been very transparent and we have been high-quality predictive, if I may say that, in how we looked at the risk and the impact of the NII, of the interest rate developments. But what you see here is exactly the chart we showed you 3 years ago. What you see here is what we have delivered and what we are going to deliver. We think that the amount of treasury results of around EUR 700 million is a pretty stable contribution we're going to see. The second volatility and cyclicality topic, which we feel it every day exposes and it irritates investors, unjustified in my belief, is the equity and the volatility exposure. Yes, there's no question. There are areas that depend on volatility for sure. But the overall exposure that we as a group have has dramatically gone down. What used to be a 40% exposure to equity has come down to 25%. So that's why not only the exposures are very manageable, very clear, but we monitor them and we respond in flexibility on the cost side whenever we face cyclical headwinds. That's what we committed as a team. That's what we have done this year. Not always easy, but we have delivered and we show it in terms of the change. So those trends I talked about are the secular trends we have spoken about for a while. There's two transformational developments that we want in particular to emphasize and bank on for the next years. The first one is Europe. Now on Europe, we can have many discussions, whether Europe is shrinking, collapsing, growing behind the U.S. There's no question of many of those challenges. But always turn it around. Is it an opportunity for us as the European champion, as the leader of market infrastructure? There is no question that the pension and retail wave has fundamentally changed, that even outside of the Nordics and the Netherlands, the young people have started to have a totally changing investment pattern, even in Germany, even in France. And we are benefiting from that very materially. We'll talk later, especially in the context of Clearstream Security Services, how that B2B2C, how the new players in the market directly link into us. The same is true for the flows, the flow and the diversification of global exposures. There's a structural inflow in Europe. There's a structural growth of debt in Europe. There's no question that, that's coming. That's nothing to do with the savings and investment union. All of those are structural trends we will benefit, and they will accelerate when it comes to Europe. Now on top of that is the savings and investment union story. And there, again, we think from the regulatory opportunities, we are benefiting. We have benefited over the last few years. There's a strong desire for EU autonomy. It won't stop with defense. It will go to the financial sector. We will be a beneficiary because we can deliver autonomous solutions in Europe. And last but not least, consolidation, organic and as we will talk about on the M&A side, and naturally, a thing that needs to progress further in Europe, the continent is too fragmented when it comes to capital market infrastructure. So in that sense, these opportunities and trends are accelerating in our belief and they feed every one of our businesses, be it the B2B2C momentum, be it the home of the euro yield curve story that Thomas and the teams have been working so hard on, be it on Clearstream Europe, the only ones to have 20-plus links already today, no talk about fragmentation, just as much as a fund story that is a pan-European. And we will be even more a pan-European story should our plans go ahead. The second fundamental acceleration for the transformation story is really around the asset classes. There are new asset classes which, again, at first sight, somebody could say, you are a stock exchange, you're losing on those. Digital assets, they're done by new players. Alternatives doesn't need stock exchanges. No, we are market infrastructure. And that's why our positioning on the digital asset transformation is one we talked already as part of Horizon '26. We have made enormous progress. We have a hybrid offering. We're able to execute on crypto. We can work with digital money as the recent announcements have shown. We, at the end of the day, have an ability to work in partnerships that gives us a lot of strength as the crypto and digital environment moves into a more classical institutional environment. The same is true in a different way for alternative assets. Alternative assets have been a separate universe. In fundraising, who they go to, how they accounted for, all gone. The integration of alternative assets that is happening around SimCorp is very, very important. That's why when Christian talks later about it, it's a major theme. But it again feeds through our chain. On the fund side, it's going to be one of the main drivers of positive high-margin opportunities when we look at the growth. So that's why if you now take it back to the divisional and segmental picture, we are so confident to give you an aggregation of businesses that delivers 8-plus percent of growth. That's the aggregate we said. And if you look at it, we believe every one of our four businesses with Funds being a clear outperformer as we have shown in the last 2 years with 11%. And I will walk not through all of those because you will hear it from Christian, from Thomas and from Stephanie in a few minutes how the details look like. But it doesn't stop with the organic plans. So 8% is our organic growth plan. We believe and we have been very transparent to all of you that M&A is an integral part of how we look at developing the company. Our rules around M&A and our discipline when it comes to the capital usage for M&A is unchanged. We will be very, very consistent around that. That's why we would do M&A but within the parameter that we have discussed. We will complement organic growth, just like we have done in the Fund businesses already for a number of years, I mean, where we had strong organic growth. We have complemented it with the UBS acquisition, with data acquisitions. So complementarity is important. We want to add capabilities like we did on digital and data on the Fund side, for example, if I stick with the example. And we want sort of a reacceleration of our growth areas. We don't believe that it is, per se, M&A that can reignite growth. All of that will do with high discipline. That's why our financial parameters, and Jens is going to talk about it later again, is something that we closely watch, both being accretive and having to guide capital return. And we will all of that do within our credit rating, which are important for our regulated businesses. So obviously, the world is asking, what does all of that mean for Allfunds? Now we have made the publication. We'll today also not give you any different information or additional information in substance beyond what has been publicized. But at the heart of it, it is fitting every single one of our criteria on the left-hand side. Allfunds is a very exciting company that has a strategic commercial and financial underlying fit that is just very compelling if we take at it. It is, in particular, complementary from a pan-European and a global footprint perspective. That complementarity is important. As you look at the questions around antitrust and considerations, we really believe a lot of prework has been done there also together with Allfunds. But it is really living very much of the underlying trends, and those underlying trends are the ones of the retail growth that I alluded to you. It's the change in Europe of the savings environment, the old-age pension care that needs to happen. So we really are taking a step that is not just talking about the Savings and Investments Union, but supporting, building pan-European singular infrastructure that can support exactly what we're trying to do, which is give investors for all-age savings efficient access to a wide universe of funds. That's what the story is about of our Fund Services business. That is a true pearl in our portfolio. That's what also would be for the combined business. But one more time, it is really driven and based by the 1,000 colleagues of Allfunds that are fantastic capital market engineers. They would reinforce the capabilities we have. They would bring additional product capabilities. They would bring as individuals additional geographic capabilities. That's why we are very convinced of the cultural fit, that jointness around wanting to make markets better for the purpose of a successful development. So that brings me to the last point of our four main elements, which is the capital allocation. I alluded to earlier and Jens will talk in quite some detail around our organic growth, our organic investments. We are very passionate about that. The team that is here, the senior leaders in the business, I can tell you they are full of ideas. They are very demanding in what they would like to do in their businesses. But we are very disciplined. It's one of the themes where we think we have a unique power to invest. We will later describe to you that the EUR 600 million is a number that we invest annually. It's a very material amount that fuels our organic growth. And we, on the other side, were very clear a minute ago of how we think on the M&A side. So those two elements are very complementary. Historically, we have said that we stick and are very firm on our dividend commitment, that we have a payout ratio of 30% to 40% and then have a steady rising dividend. What we added yesterday in our announcement, I today confirm that, is that we have reached a scale as a group in which we are really able to give you confidence that our organic and M&A investment plans fit together with continuity, not only on dividends but also on share buyback. That doesn't mean always the same amount. We need to tailor that to what is the requirements of the business growth, which clearly has priority. But underlyingly, we think there is a different pattern that can emerge. So if I bring it all together, let me leave you again from my strategy perspective, first, with a very passionate statement that we as Deutsche Börse, we will lead the transformation. We'll lead the transformation of markets that is coming that is much clearer than it had ever been before. It's a geopolitical, it is a technology transformation of markets. It will affect European capital markets and it will bring new asset classes. We will lead all of that, and we have proven that before. Building on that, we have an 8% outlook until 2028. Growth will go beyond that. At the end of the day, critical is not that we grow, but we do this in a capital-efficient way. That's why our cost commitment around 3%, using many tools, technology, efficiency, AI, our global operating model, that's what we commit to you. This will give us the margin expansion that I talked earlier on an organic basis, and a 12% EBITDA growth, I think it is a very powerful framework, and we as a team stand here and we're very committed to that. Now you will hear, and I'm glad that Christian comes next because, clearly, IMS has been a big part of our last few years what we built. I'm very -- and we are all very proud of what we achieved. But let me hand it back to you, Jan.

Thank you, Stephan. So the next speaker today is Christian Kromann. Christian is Executive Board Member of Deutsche Börse and responsible for the Investment Management Solutions segment. And Christian today will present the opportunities in the SimCorp business and the ISS STOXX business. Christian, the stage is yours.

Thank you very much. Thank you, Jan. Thank you, Stephan, and welcome also from me to everybody in the room and also participating virtually. So it is indeed 1 year in, if you will. We've been spending quite a lot of time on becoming very crisp on what is IMS and what are the two parts of IMS playing in terms of roles, et cetera. So we'll go through quite a lot of detail, to be honest, a little bit as normal, if you will. But we're going to try to underpin with practical examples on what is it actually we are trying to do for the buy side and what are we trying to do with the rest of Deutsche Börse in that context. But let's kind of start a little bit by reminding ourselves what is IMS except of a 3-letter abbreviation and, yet another one. It really consists of what I would consider already two market-leading companies in their own respect. So we have SimCorp that is our core tech proposition, since a year now fully with Axioma integrated. It's the risk engine of the SimCorp One value proposition. And we are out there selling the combination every single day. So here, also a real proof point of what we set out to do a couple of years ago is now, in fact, happening. There's around EUR 45 trillion of assets now running on the SimCorp platform. So I would say, quite sizable. But of course, as you would all know, still a lot of room for growth. On the other side, also here, I would say we spent good time on fully establishing the combination of ISS STOXX. It's now our mission-critical data, analytics and indices value proposition. And here, we also have some very impressive stats with more than 6 trillion votes being done every year and another EUR 180 billion of ETF AUM. So I would say already there, a really good starting point underpinning IMS, generating around 55% of the buy-side revenue coming in through the door, which also underpins another important fact that, as Stephan alluded to, that buy side is not just an IMS thing. It's actually a group-wide initiative. So let's talk a little bit about the buy side, and some of you are probably even better experts on this than I am. But here are three ways of looking at the buy side, if you will. So for a technology provider like us, of course, it is very important to understand the target addressable market. What we see here is that both the buy-side tech, if you will, as well as the data and indices is growing in high single-digit numbers in terms of market size, which is obviously a good kind of tailwind, if you will, for what we do in the first place. Some very strategic and structural trends are still there. You talked a little bit about it before, Stephan, but let's just recap what they are. Margin compression still exists in the market whether it's driven from higher competition in the buy side or whether it's driven from general macro trends, we leave it to the market to discuss that. But there is an underlying drive of operating model discussions that, in principle, is what we do for a living. So that's a great starting point. The need for customization at a reasonable cost is also out there, and it's an interesting thing because it actually underpins every single part of what we do. It underpins the need for additional products that are customized in certain aspects. It underpins the need for customized indices. But it also now, and we've seen some of that quite recently, underpins the need for customized voting policies according to what is the preference of you as an investor. So that's a very important point that actually goes across. The rise of private markets or alternatives is here. It has been going on for quite a while, but it doesn't seem really to stop. And it's been going from primarily being a private equity-driven asset class to now being a very wide definition of what constitutes private assets. And then finally, we have macroeconomic uncertainty. We can measure that in so many ways, but there's something going on every day. Being a platform provider with a strong risk capability is certainly also a very important part in the world that we are seeing ourselves. On the right side of the slide, I want to make a little bit of a key point around what is the buy side. And we use -- sometimes we say asset managers, then we say asset owners, then we say this and that and everything. In principle, and that's an absolute key fact, when we say buy side we mean anything that is buy side, from large institutional investors, whether they're asset owners, asset managers, it doesn't matter, all the way through wealth and into hedge funds in the end. That's what we mean when we say buy side. And we underpin every single investment strategy, whether it's active or passive or irrespective of what asset class is actually coming in. It was actually kind of a reeling discussion once we prepared for the strategy presentation today that, actually, there is a value proposition for every single subsegment of the buy side. Okay. We have a great starting point, as I said. We have two market-leading companies, because, it's hard to claim that you are a market-leading company without having clients. So it's great to really continue to see both in growth in terms of new clients, but also in growth of what we would do for those clients. And that definition has even taken another layer of both SimCorp being inside Deutsche Börse as well as ISS STOXX now being fully combined. So the value proposition really matters. And that is also underpinned by the fact that our retention rates are really, really high. So we have above 92% retention rate across the two businesses, which is honestly very remarkable. But that's also because we have very meaningful relationships. We have around 800 clients on the SimCorp side and more than 5,000 clients on the ISS STOXX. So a severe footprint in the buy side, we already have. But as I said before, the target addressable market still allows for many more relationships to be built over time. Another key point here as well is also there is a good complementarity, which I'm going to come a little bit back to, between SimCorp starting in Europe many years ago, has now spread its wings across the world, has more than 75 clients in the U.S. But also here, a growing capability. STOXX, obviously, being a European firm to a very large extent, now combined with ISS being headquartered in the U.S. And I would say that is also another good combination just inside IMS, but certainly also across the organization. And that's why you see some, what I would say, really sizable logos here that we are very proud of, but hopefully also something we're going to share a lot. Let me also use this as an opportunity to just introduce the two people that I work spend most of my time on. So Pete recently joined. You were there before when we trained. So now you're there. Recently joined as CEO for SimCorp. You're here for today and stay around for later. So it's great to have you on board. And Gary will join us remotely from New York a little later for the Q&A session as well. So great to have you both here. In terms of where we are then. So as you can hear, a lot of good work has been going on over the last couple of years. So we're really now here to recap our Horizon '26 targets. We have more than 16% ARR growth coming through SimCorp consistently. Some of the years have actually been higher, and we're also tracking quite high now. And what you will see later, it's actually a consistent theme through the entire strategy period. We would have taken severe new market -- new client relationships. More than 30 new clients have joined the platform over the last couple of years since '23. And we continue to see an extremely high recurring amount of revenue coming out of that. At the same time, we have also now delivered all the synergies related to what we said for Horizon. And finally, we see a real sizable margin contribution going forward as we said we would be. We have a little bit of headwind also across the businesses. FX for this particular part of Deutsche Börse plays a quite significant role given that we have so much business in the U.S. And it's not hard to imagine that there is a little bit of headwind going on, on the proxy side at the moment with what you see in the news every day. So looking towards '28 and beyond '26, some really interesting ideas and plans for both businesses. So let's briefly talk about that, and then we will go a little bit more into detail at a later part. So I'd say on the SimCorp side, good growth momentum and really good focus on scale. So it's really the combination but that way around, if you will, continue to grow really solidly, taking market share and then create the underlying delivery engine more and more scalable. That takes me to the first point. And if you go a little bit back, you would know that the absolute key KPI for SimCorp has always been moving all our clients to Software-as-a-Service delivery model. We still allow central banks and other clients that want that specificity to stay in the model they want. But the overall trend, actually helped by the market, is to move all those clients to SaaS. I will come a little bit back, but we are now reaching the 50% point, which was always a very important trigger for our economical model, which is also why we will go back and talk a little bit about that in a couple of slides. Front office is a big investment, has been, continued to be, but it's really to complete the overall value proposition in a cross-asset capability. And then, of course, as we just talked about, private assets is something we're really doubling down on. On the scalability side, needless to say, AI for us and actually for SimCorp, it both has a top line element, but it also has, of course, great scalability capabilities both in terms of how we deliver, but also in terms of how we scale our development teams, et cetera. On the ISS STOXX side, continue the custom product innovation, I would say there, it's both a key capability. But certainly, the way the markets are currently operating, it's driving in that conversation every day. So it's actually a good and even stronger value point than it was even a few years back. Of course, cross- and up-selling now that ISS STOXX stock is intact is really important. But I would even say internally, inside IMS, we also start to see more cross-selling opportunity, even though it's coming from a very low point. Geographical expansion, we talked about that. That actually goes both ways as well as now starting to really see synergies on the scale side. And then finally, AI on the operating model as well. On the ISS STOXX side, as we've seen, a little bit more muted on the growth. But even in that scenario, stocks will continue to deliver margin improvement and more and more scalability. So a really good starting point for both businesses, I would say. There's so many details on these slides. I'm sure you will look at them in detail. But there's a couple of key points that we think is important here. So as I said before, SimCorp started out in Europe many years ago, even further than my age. Strong in Europe, still strong in Europe, very large client base. Started in the U.S. a couple of decades ago. But really, the last 1 to 2 years, real engagement in terms of what we see in terms of taking clients in the Americas. That has been a distinct focus for the team for many years, but now it's really starting to accelerate at a very great rate to see it. So good spread of momentum, if you will. On the ISS STOXX side, it's almost the opposite. Very strong foothold in North America, especially on the ISS side. Of course, strong foothold on STOXX side in Europe. So they really complement each other extremely well from that point of view. Finally, the rest of the world. So here, SimCorp has also led through some really significant relationships both in the Middle East, actually also in Africa now, but also in Asia and in Australia and New Zealand. So those relationships, we obviously want to explore more. APAC is a significant region for SimCorp. But also given the value proposition of ISS STOXX, it's also a real great opportunity to grow that business further. So here, they actually also come along in an ambition to drive rest of the world growth focus, if you will. So good complementary. As a result of all of these things that we put together, we are now seeing that we are going to be around an 8% CAGR that Stephan talked about just before on a pro forma basis. So what does pro forma mean? I will come back to that in a slide or two. And that goes through '28. The pro forma relates a little bit -- or not a little bit, it relates to the fact that we are now at the point of the SaaS transformation that forces us to actually align the business model with the way that our clients is buying from us. But that's the technicality that we will come back to before. SimCorp is targeting in a slightly higher growth than ISS STOXX, as you can see. And for SimCorp, it's very much a continuation of what we've seen in terms of extremely high ARR growth rates that we also continue to see all the way through the period and hopefully beyond as well. On the ISS STOXX side, a bit more muted. There's really good things going on, on the ISS STOXX side. But there are also areas, in particular around ESG and some of the voting and the politics related to that, that we just have to be, I'm just going to say, is a little bit putting the growth under pressure. But especially the indexing side, we have seen really positive momentum this year and also when we look into the next years to come as a great opportunity to further expand. So let me now provide a little bit of more details on the SimCorp side. So let's start with the real technical one. So as you can imagine, you can probably write a book around what we're going to talk about now. I don't think anybody will read that book. But anyway, let us try to explain a little bit why are we doing it? Why does it make sense? And of course, then what are the technical impact of doing that? But it's not -- it's that way around. It's not the other way around. And as I just said, we're now touching the 50% of our clients that are consuming what SimCorp is offering through SaaS. That goes hand-in-hand with a model change to subscription that we announced many years ago that is even further ahead than 50%. So we now have basically a situation where there's a complete discrepancy between the cash flow profile of the way our clients pay and engage with us and the P&L impact of those concepts. And that basically means that in a scenario where ARR continues to be high, and there's kind of technicalities related to that, it's very hard to understand the transition from ARR to net revenue. And I think many of you have asked us that question. I would say behind the scenes, if you will, and that we've also been very transparent about, the way we run the company, the way we incentivize our executives and actually all staff is an annual recurring revenue because that's the only meaningful long-term value-creating KPI that we have. So this is now where we say, all right. Now we've done all the work. We're engaging with the clients in the right way. Now we also have to get the financial in a way so our investors can actually understand what on earth is actually going on. That's what you see here. So the top part of the slide, you've seen many times before, that's the difference between the upfront recognition that we currently do. And the right side is how the revenue actually comes through the door. So quite obvious that there is a difference. So from January '27, all SaaS contracts will now be recognized in the ratable way in line with the cash flow impact that they have. There will still be a portion on on-prem. That will go down over time as we progress our SaaS transformation. And the net effect of all of this is that you're going to see a lot more smoothing of the curve, higher predictability because it literally is in line with the cash flow that comes in. Of course, when you do that, there's a bit of swing created in the curves, if you will. And that's ultimately what you see in the lower part. And the first year, of course, is pretty hard because you kind of take the contract book out and circumvent it, but then you relatively quickly get back into the true growth trajectory, if you will. And that's why you see -- first, you see minus 7% to 9% and then you see 16% to 18%. But as we say here on the left side, we end out with 11% to 13% midterm CAGR, underpinned by 13% to 18% ARR continued growth. So that's the dynamic. So in the end, if we do this the right way, the only number that is interesting going forward is the ARR number. But as I said, I understand this is technical. We will spend all the time needed to talk you through it. I know Jens will talk about it as well, but we do recognize that this is something that needs to be analyzed and pinned down. But now the decision is made. January '27, we will start moving things in what I consider is in the right direction. On alternatives, let's talk a little bit about that as well. The ambition here is to build a complete solution both inside SimCorp, but also with the rest of the wider group of Deutsche Börse. So what does it mean? So the starting point is, as you can see here on the left side, is that we already have 7 of our clients -- 7 out of 10 of our clients, 70% of our clients, which is a very distinguished list of very large investors in the world, is already using their alternatives and private assets inside SimCorp. So a very good starting point. Most of them obviously does it through an investment vehicle. What we needed to add to this was the other side, if you will, the GP mindset. So that both means the GP business inside our investors and clients but, in principle, also serving the GPs as stand-alone. That's the Domos acquisition in a nutshell. That's what that brings to the table. On top of that, as I said, private assets used to be very much about private equity. Now it's infrastructure. But what we've seen lately is a lot of private credit and private debt. It's a very important asset class for the entire group and something we are now channeling quite a substantial investment into making sure we're at the forefront of those capabilities. So I'd really say the combination of the starting point of SimCorp, plus the additional investments, plus the M&A that we've done, and now what becomes really cool is when we then started to combine it with what Clearstream can do on the Fund Services side, because then you start to build an entire ecosystem around private assets. And we have even more great ideas on other parts of Deutsche Börse that couldn't join that ecosystem as the market evolves. AI then. So let's just remind ourselves that SimCorp is a technology firm, right? So here, we actually have two parts of AI that is quite an important part of the strategy. So the first point, let me start with the one that makes me truly excited, which is that we are now building AI into the user experience of our clients. That might even be some of you in the room or some of you listening. The way you act as portfolio managers will be reimagining through AI. We want to be the catalyst for reimagining that. So when you do a decision, you want to use AI to catch the insights that you have and combine it with your rebalancing of whatever the action is, that's what we've done. So we put that into the next-gen front office that we're building, including Axioma sitting there, obviously, through LLMs. That's the lowest part. That's the starting point. But I'll tell you what you can do with that in itself is very encouraging. But then we build in our agent ecosystem around that. We are building agents because we are a technology provider. You build agents because you have the secret sauce. But we also have partners that build agents. And here, it's important to remember, we're an independent technology provider. We don't care about the content. We care about the technology. That's how it works. And of course, that's part of generating top line as well. If you have 1,600 developers that SimCorp has, GitHub actually create meaningful scalability. So when we look at the inside, we want to be as tech savvy as we possibly can. And there, of course, AI plays a major role as well. Let me quickly talk about how we fit in with the rest of Deutsche Börse. We've actually done some really cool work already. So of course, when you trade in our trading venues, for example, in 360T, it instantly integrates into SimCorp. We are now connecting to Eurex on the cleared repo side to create, once again, a combined solution. We are connecting the Axioma capabilities with the STOXX factor indices. But we also -- and then from Clearstream, we actually have a real portfolio of great ideas both on collateral management optimization. We're obviously connecting the Fund Services fully into the universe of SimCorp, allowing full connectivity. And then, of course, all of this together, then means that, once again, the entirety of Deutsche Börse is channeled through a lot of the SimCorp relationships and ISS STOXX relationships into the buy side. So really great progress. It's all currently included in our growth plan, if you will. But we're also starting from a low point. So once it gets traction, let's see how far we can take it. On the ISS STOXX side, so most of you would probably know that there was a distinct Capital Markets Day for ISS STOXX earlier in the year. So there's a lot of detail there. It will be a little bit a waste of everybody's time if I repeated that in detail, so I will concentrate about two of the subsegments. We are still in a kind of parallel mode considering our options. But in principle, we are laser-focused on executing on the strategy. I would say one thing that maybe as a highlight, we've talked a lot about MI, which is a subpart of ISS STOXX. I would say that part is now, through restructuring, which was something we announced, and we're now starting to see that hitting back on the markets. The two parts I really want to talk about is the stewardship side and the index side. So as you can see here, a lot is actually going on. We all read the papers. Reality is the industry needs our data to function. It's as simple as that. We are a data provider. We provide insights. And we have, to a very large extent, listened to the voting principles of our clients and create custom voting policies on the back of that. That's what we do in a tech mindset. Of course, it's investors that needs to navigate the political landscape and choose your preferences. We just in principle, provide the data. That's how we see it. And that's also why we need to be more flexible because our investors needs more flexibility. And we can see that through all the volatility going on. People still need our data. That underlying business is still growing. On the index side, we are, of course, excited about the fact that we see now the ETF market in Europe really taking off. I'm not the only business that see that. So there's other of my colleagues that are excited about that. We start to see active ETFs now coming into Europe, which is another great point that is underpinned by what we do on the indexing side. So I'd say, generally, we have never managed more -- or never seen more assets on our indices than now which, in some context, given what we do is great for Europe. And there, I said the magic word. It's very much a European value proposition. It's very much a European sell-side value proposition also with what we do with Eurex. We spent a lot of time and money on building the buy side of this that we are launching early next year, which also, once again, make sure that, that underpins our buy-side value proposition as we go forward. So here, we actually have tailwind in this particular part of the business. AI on the data business is, of course, important. Here, we generally feel that we are well protected by the various moats that we have. We have a great governance capability. We know how to kind of suck out all that data, handle that data in a regulated sense and distribute that data with all the capabilities that I've just said around custom policies. So we actually feel that, that is very difficult to replicate. But that's not the same to say that it can't be optimized. We have unprecedented investor access and perception. We really have iconic brands around the indexing side. And we are setting the benchmark standard for European liquidity ecosystem. So we're already deeply embedded in that value chain. But there's three areas where we are now investing time into on the AI side, and we are pretty far on some of them, and some of them we are kind of researching in the context of what -- where does it actually need to go, where do our clients want it to go. But the technology foundation is already there. So from that point of view, a good starting point. So it boils down to operations and data efficiency. That's obvious. The research effectiveness, I think we all understand the positive impact on the research. And then, of course, further product innovation as we go forward. So with those words, let me quickly summarize a little bit. I hope you see some real proof points that IMS now exists underpinned by very two strong companies, one being a tech platform, the other one being data and analytics platform. It links extremely well into the rest of Deutsche Börse, both from a value proposition point of view but also from a geographical point of view, and then, finally underpinned by the asset class extension, where we are now putting a lot of focus on the private side, but all in one large technology value proposition.

Thank you, Christian. I'm now introducing our next speaker today, Thomas Book, responsible for Trading & Clearing in the Executive Board of Deutsche Börse. And he will now give you in-depth insight into our financial derivatives, commodities, cash equities, FX and digital asset business. Thomas, looking forward to your presentation.

Yes, thanks a lot. Now it's the powerhouse of multi-asset Trading & Clearing platforms. Hi to everyone also on screen. It's great to see all of you and many familiar faces here. And I have to say, following up to what Christian said, it's really great to see how our buy-side access has been transformed with the access that we have through IMS. And you will hear also in my presentation how buy side is really a theme for all the businesses in the Trading & Clearing division. I'm now very happy to take you through our strategy going forward and each of the road maps that we have planned out. Let me start with giving you an overview of our portfolio for Trading & Clearing. We operate market-leading platforms in each of the businesses that we are in with a full spectrum of instruments paired with a strong global distribution power. And each of the businesses really has a superior proposition for the clients, Eurex, cash market, EEX, 360T and also Crypto Finance. And let me give you some key facts that you can see here for the businesses that we are in. Financial derivatives, with Eurex, we are a global leader with more than 2 billion traded contracts per year, offering the broadest suite of equity index products and the world's most liquid euro-denominated fixed income suite. And Robert, the CEO of Eurex, is here with us today, who can later also in the Q&A speak about some of the aspects. For commodities, EEX is the world's largest power exchange. We're really excited to see the development with a volume of more than 12,000 terawatts per year. And EEX not only operates the sort of European power market, but it has grown beyond with now a global client base of 950 and operating in 42 countries, Tobias Paulun, the CEO of the clearing house and also Chief Strategy Officer, is here with us today. Cash equities operated under our brand, so our nucleus, Deutsche Börse. We are the #1 for German equities with more than 14,000 tradable instruments. But also, we are the European leader in the ETF space, which is noteworthy. And Eric Leupold, our Head of Cash Market, is here with us today. And then last but not least, FX and digital assets, 360T is the third largest electronic FX marketplace globally, serving over 3,000 buy-side clients. And now Crypto Finance is adding our portfolio with institutional-grade access to digital assets, 24/7, Carlo Kolzer, CEO of 360T is here with us today. I'm super proud. We have a very strong, experienced management team, and Trading & Clearing really is the main organic growth engine of Deutsche Börse. And you'll see we have a very strong outlook taking that into the future. On the next page, you see that Trading & Clearing is more than just four businesses with a strong strategic positioning, We really have a strong synergy story across all these businesses. And you see that on this flywheel that we've created here, which shows you, first, we are really serving multi-asset investment strategies across the entire spectrum, positioned in a sweet spot. And we are covering the full value chain from data analytics, trading, clearing, collateral and risk management in our portfolio. But the key value drivers that are really driving the growth of our portfolio are, first of all, leveraging our distribution capabilities across all the businesses, both on the sell side, but also on the buy side. We've heard a lot about that earlier. Using our cross-product innovation capabilities across the group and across T&C. We have many examples. For instance, our FX Futures that we launched together with 360T, working together on the repo side with Clearstream or with STOXX and Eurex to create product innovation on the index side. And then the key value driver is technology leadership. We are very focused on technology. We have created a market-leading technology stack with our 7 series, how we call it, platforms, T7, C7 and also R7, rolled out across all our businesses and giving us the scale to create synergies and scalabilities going forward. And you'll hear later, we are also very focused on new technologies like AI, cloud, distributed ledger. And then lastly, one of our key propositions, you'll hear that in the road maps, is creating efficiency around Trading & Clearing capital, balance sheet, margin efficiency via our shared clearing and collateral management frameworks. But at the heart of everything that we are doing are serving our client needs, very focused on working together in a partnership mode with our key clients. So now let's take a look at our numbers. Trading & Clearing has delivered a 7% CAGR since 2022 and we will surpass the EUR 2.5 billion revenue mark by year-end. I'm proud to say that our portfolio really has a few investment highlights that I believe speak for themselves. First of all, we're a strong organic growth contributor to Deutsche Börse Group. We have delivered more than EUR 450 million revenues in this strategy cycle. And we have very sound and strong business drivers driving our growth, in particular, for some of our double-digit growth stories that we see fixed income, commodities and foreign exchange growing at a fast pace year-over-year. Profitability stands out. We are at a 62% EBITDA margin for Trading & Clearing and, with that, deliver significant free cash flow for the group. And then Stephan mentioned the cyclicality of the business. We have diversified over the years more and more and, with that, can really balance cyclical tailwinds, headwinds in our portfolio and as a result, have delivered very consistently a 7% CAGR over the past two strategy cycles. So in short, the strategy works not just in paper and on slides but also financially very clearly. It sets a strong foundation for our growth in the future. And looking ahead, we are fully on track to deliver on our Horizon target of around EUR 2.8 billion net revenue by the end of '26. And the main contributors of this success, you see on this slide. First of all, financial derivatives, overall, a 5% annual revenue growth. And we spoke about the cyclicality, but below the surface, we see very strong momentum building on the fixed income road map with a 12% CAGR, supported by a lot of cyclical tailwinds but also by fundamental structural drivers around the EMEA regulation, for instance. I'll get to that later in more detail, while we see a little bit softer business development on equity index based on some of the low volatility, as you heard earlier. If we look at commodities, we are very proud. Commodities is an outstanding success story of our business. And it has seen a growth of 19% over this cycle, which is really outstanding, and it's seeing growth among all vectors, clients, regions, products and technology. Later, you'll hear a bit more about that. For cash equities, we have now reached again the record levels of '22. We have been growing since 2022, and cash equity is actually the fastest-growing business this year. And also there, we see structural drivers, increased retail participation in Germany, but also sector-specific stories appealing to many institutional investors, for instance, around the defense sector in Europe. Foreign exchange has shown a steady growth and outstanding track record of 10% for many years. Let me with this slide now look at the next strategy cycle and also refer to the strategy framework that Stephan has introduced earlier in his part. Looking ahead, we expect our growth to accelerate, and our key number is 8% CAGR over the next cycle. And with our new strategy, Leading the Transformation, we believe we can clearly capitalize on three main pillars. The first pillar, as you can see here, scaling our business and also taking benefit of underlying secular trends that, in our perspective, are fully intact and will drive the overall industry and us as well. Buy-side acceleration and more risk-taking, expanded risk appetite on many of the buy-side players in their footprint is one of the core accelerators for us. The side of technology, which I also will speak about later, which is really for us reshaping trading. We have seen electronification and automation and many algorithmic strategies are becoming the norm, but it's now accelerating to a different level. And futurization, a topic that we long pioneered also with Eurex, not only it does create capital and margin efficiencies for many OTC products. It also does allow to scale them in a way that creates much more turnover velocity for many of these instruments. These trends will continue to push the industry and also our business, and they create a fundamental structural tailwind and backdrop for the business, enabling more systematic trading, more hedging and also more demand for clearing services. The second pillar, utilizing opportunities as the gateway to Europe. And in many of the businesses that I earlier introduced, we are in a leadership position in Europe, which gives us a unique advantage to take benefit of the ongoing transformation. Capital inflows in Europe, we've seen strong pickup this year, remaining strong. And initiatives like the Savings and Investments Union are aiming to mobilize trillions of private assets, savings into private -- into productive investments. And you all have seen many of the fiscal packages in Germany but also in the European Union that were put together. All these will expand the debt markets in Europe quite significantly over the years with new issuances. And they are also used, for instance, for the transformation on the energy side to renewable energy. This energy transition alone is estimated to require over EUR 1 trillion annually. All this creates opportunities both for fixed income, but also for commodities and for beyond and for many of the businesses across the entire group. The third pillar is we proactively position ourselves for fast-growing asset classes, expanding our footprint. And that gives us a good position to capitalize from trends of the future. For instance, the trend towards passive investment and the growth of ETFs, we now see a trend into active ETFs that comes into the market. Credit markets, I'll speak about them from our perspective, at an inflection point, strongly growing at the moment and in a push to standardization and electronification. And beyond traditional markets, crypto and digital assets continue to grow. We believe in the tokenization of assets. I'll speak to that later. In all these areas, we are proactively positioning ourselves as front runners to take benefit of future growth. And based on some of these growth drivers that I've just outlined, let me look at where does it take us financially in the next strategy cycle. We are all set to reach EUR 2.9 billion net revenue by 2028 for Trading & Clearing. And this target is not just based on market trends and European tailwind, but it's also based on individual and strong convincing strategic road maps in each of these businesses. I will outline these a little later in my presentation. The four strong cylinders, you can see them on the slide, that we are relying on. First of all, fixed income derivatives. Our strategy, home of the euro yield curve for Eurex, continues to grow and build momentum. We expect 10% to 12% growth with our cross-asset class, value proposition across exchange-traded derivatives, OTC clearing, repo and now also credit. Commodities, we are convinced will remain a success story to grow at 10% to 12%, continue to benefit from the scaling of power. Power will be the energy source of the future, and scaling gas derivatives and expanding our market leadership in an overall environment of energy transition. Foreign exchange, also we believe will continue to grow at an 8% to 10% through the next cycle with product innovation and client expansion. And this does not include further upside that we believe in from digital assets. And then lastly, equity index derivatives. We spoke about it. Our expectation is that we will see returning market momentum, returning to a growth track of 4% to 6% annually. Both the more favorable environment, but also the combination with more structural growth drivers that I will touch on later will further help to get this business to a 4% to 6% growth track. And with that, let me touch on our first and most significant road map, which is our ambitious fixed income road map. Let me, first of all, say we are fully on track to deliver the fixed income road map as promised, we see momentum accelerating across all our four product lines that you can see here on this slide. And let me take you through some of the metrics that we see in each of the businesses. Traditionally, being the leader in fixed income listed derivatives, we have seen this year a new record volume of 950 million contracts traded on Eurex in fixed income with the broadest product coverage out there in the euro-denominated space. And we have also seen building momentum on the short-term interest side, both for STIR, but also for Euribor, something that we've launched with our partnership programs. And that will take benefit of the EMIR account requirement as well. And we believe the increasing European debt levels that I just mentioned will further support the momentum in this space. In September, we launched the European bond future contract on Eurex. It was one of the product launches which I think gained most of the attention over the past years. It now builds on the EU being a new issuer. I'm convinced it has a lot of potential in the next years to grow. With that, let me turn to OTC clearing that we've built as a new product line, as you know, over the past years. The active account requirement has really driven onboarding this year. And we are really happy to see that momentum. We have onboarded more than 650 accounts. And this year, we are now at 2,200 direct buy-side accounts that are connected to the clearing house. And while activation rates are still low at this stage, we already see clearly the momentum in our volumes, both in the notional outstanding where we see a new record with a 40% increase. But also in the ADV, our market share has also grown 4 percentage points this year. And for next year, we expect even more activation in these accounts, very simply driven by the compliance period from ESMA, which will kick in mid of next year. And this makes our delivery a little bit backloaded, but the momentum that we were expecting clearly has built up for OTC clearing and will continue to build next year. For our repo segment, we have seen very encouraging momentum this year with a record notional outstanding in November. But I think even more noteworthy is that we had major client wins this year in this space, and let me just mention here the European Central Bank and also the European Commission who became participants on our platform. It's a clear validation of our business model. And by now, our repo business has the largest client base in the public sector. We have more than 15 public sector entities like finance agencies participating in our business. And the overall structural backdrop of this business is there's a fundamental shift to direct buy-side access that we see in the access models and also a shift from uncleared to cleared repo. And you know all the environment in the U.S., which is spilling over to Europe. All this quite a favorable backdrop to see further growth on the repo side. Credit, we have launched as a new product segment. And as I earlier mentioned, futurization, I think this is a prime example where we can create both margin capital efficiencies but also scaling of products that are then in a more standardized future wrapper based on index constructions. We have created a partnership program with some of the largest dealers out there and have by now on-boarded 70 active end clients. And we believe there is continued further adoption of this product. You all will know it is one of the products which really creates a lot of attention right now on the buy side in their investment portfolio strategies. So overall, if I look at the fixed income road map, we are driven, as you see in the middle here, by our focus on collateral margin and capital efficiencies. We will see further milestones there and expect further advantages rolling out in our bond portfolio margining and cross margining for the repo part across our futures segment, which will come soon with R7. Overall, Eurex is positioned with a clear USP because we are the only exchange, the only clearing house out there with a complete euro-denominated fixed income ecosystem, and that's why we sort of proudly call ourselves global home of the euro yield curve. So overall, I think you see all the fundamentals are there. And by 2028, our fixed income business will be a EUR 700 million-plus business for the group. Let me move on to the equity index business. And we have seen a more muted growth in particular also over the past 2 quarters due to cyclical headwinds on the volatility side. But we are convinced we really have a strong foundation for future growth in place, both when market momentum returns but also with our role as being a product innovator in this space. And why do we see reason for optimism here in this space? Let me take you through some of the points here. First of all, we have very strong business fundamentals, a good foundation. Eurex is the global gateway for European equity and index derivatives. Both -- we have the strongest suite of blue-chip products with the deepest liquidity pools in Europe, but also we have expanded to global benchmarks like MSCI FTSE and, of course, together with our partners from STOXX. We are the market leader in equity options in Europe. And options, as you know, is also a segment that gains more and more momentum. And the focus is and consistently, historically has been for Eurex to drive new product innovation. And let me just mention, we recently launched QIS Futures based on quantitative investment strategies, which are also a futures wrapper for some of the active ETF strategies used by the buy side. And then lastly, I mean, like in the fixed income road map, our focus is collateral and margin efficiency, something that we can create with our portfolio of offerings. Going forward, we will capitalize on this value proposition that I believe is really unique in the market. We are well positioned to capture buy-side investment strategies, like the transition to larger benchmarks with the EURO STOXX -- with STOXX 600 or sectors and expanding our execution protocols beyond just the central limit order book going into IFQ and other protocols as well. So you see we will continue our journey of product innovation to capture more OTC flows into our engine. And the European Savings and Investments Union already mentioned here, mobilizing more retail flows will, of course, also create a positive backdrop for the equity index business. So all the fundamentals are there for the equity index business, liquidity, product innovation and clearing strength to capture industry trends and also benefit from the momentum of a pickup in volatility going forward. With that, let me come to our commodities business. And as you see here in our title, it is a true unique success story. As I said before, it has an outstanding track record over the past strategy cycle, and all the KPIs that we see will speak that this will continue also going forward. Because EEX, if we look at it simply in the commodity space, is positioned in a sweet spot, exactly in the right position to take benefit from the overarching energy transition that we see taking shape around the globe. And this leads to some of strong growth vectors that are in place to drive and scale and leverage our leadership going forward. And let me take you through some of these vectors that are on this slide here. First of all, power derivatives. We've been tripling our volumes since 2022 in this segment. And again, we see here clearly the expectations for continuation of this double-digit growth at a pace of 17% annually until 2028 if we look at all analysis. And in natural gas trading, we have been growing at a 30% pace since 2022, and the market is projected to continue to grow at 18% annually. But at the same time, EEX has been very focused on building a legal -- leading position globally. Nodal in the U.S. has given us a leadership position in the U.S., and Japanese power now that we've built over the years is clearly taking off. We saw a 90% increase in that market. And we have recently launched also Brazil. And you see a very focused strategy where market liberalization is taking off in these power markets EEX is positioning early on. And then we want to capitalize on the shift from OTC to exchange. That is a structural trend that we have seen over the past years taking shape and a trend that we will also see continuing going forward and providing the benefit of gross margin offsets to improve the capital efficiency in that segment. And lastly, a true growth story that we have seen on the energy side is onboarding of clients, something that creates a lot of confidence going forward. We saw a lot of algo and prop trading firms coming into that space, taking benefit of increased liquidity in the power market. So overall, EEX is in a prime position to continue to scale the existing markets, but also to leverage the expertise into new markets and remaining the globally leading power exchange also in new regions. Let me then turn to cash equities, the nucleus of where we are coming from as Deutsche Börse Group. In this space which, as mentioned, where we've seen a good record this year, we see further growth potential, in particular, from three pillars, as outlined here on this slide. First of all, mobilization of private capital. Retail participation in Germany is accelerating and also across Europe. It's a trend that we clearly expect to continue over the next years. And we believe there is a 15% CAGR in Germany alone until 2028. And what's driving it? First of all, technology access via neo-brokers, but also rising income levels and self-directed investment through apps that new generation is using. But on top, we also see some political initiatives unfolding. The German pension reform currently widely discussed will create incentives for private investment in the equity markets. Also in Europe, there's a European pension product being discussed as part of the Savings and Investments Union, all topics that we can benefit in our cash equities space. The second growth pillar, our ETFs. And Christian spoke about it earlier, assets under management are expected to double by 2028 growing at a CAGR of 16%. Here, again, we are in a prime position to capture this growth offering an end-to-end fully integrated ETF ecosystem from issuance to post-trade. And lastly, the primary market leadership, our strategy listed in Frankfurt, makes Deutsche Börse the European -- the leading European listing venue, probably not by the number of IPOs, but by its size and significance. And we really are focused to provide a unique visibility experience, provide access to deep liquidity pools. And that makes us the partner of choice for many companies going public. So all in all, we are very focused here to leverage our position as one of Europe's leading exchange and capitalize on new flows serving the needs of investors throughout Europe. Let me then turn to foreign exchange. And indeed, foreign exchange with 360T has seen an outstanding trajectory since joining the group. It has delivered one of the strongest growth contributions across our portfolio, and we see here momentum continuing along three main vectors. The first is general market growth in the foreign exchange space. We see a consistent growth of 5% to 10% in the foreign exchange market, one of the vastest asset classes out there globally. It is a baseline that we expect will continue also in the new cycle. And our selling point is reputation and regulatory soundness of our offering. These are the key differentiators for 360T. Structural drivers in the industry will help us further. There's a shift from voice to electronic execution, which is at the heart of 360T's proposition. Futurization driving OTC business into cleared environment gains further traction. And fragmented markets, dealer-to-client and dealer-to-dealer spaces create new trading opportunities, and we are well positioned to benefit from this with our integrated ecosystem offering on the foreign exchange side. And then last but not least, there is what we call the 360T formula to outperform. We have seen a continuous outperformance for 360T compared to the competitors in this market, delivering above 10% net revenue CAGR. And we believe we continue -- we have the potential to continue this path going forward, scaling across new regions, Asia Pacific, but also the U.S. and new client segments, the real sophisticated space, hedge funds and asset managers that we are serving now with 360T. At the same time, 360T has been a constant innovator in the FX space and will continue to do so going forward, introducing anonymous spot trading, NDFs but also midpoint matching for swaps. With all of this, 360T is well set to build on the success of the previous cycle and to continue the journey to become the leading foreign exchange platform globally. And now let me take a brief step back and look at the broader industry picture, what is shaping our business going forward. You will all remember in Horizon '26, we defined digital leadership as a core pillar of our strategy. And we were very right to do so. Since then, we have triggered real execution on our technology road map, and you saw some of the successes, for instance, our partnership with Google Cloud. We last year announced 50% of our workload in the cloud, since then have even improved further and launched also our work on the data side strongly. And we, with that, have created a very good starting position for a technology acceleration that we all observe in our sector right now. And this technology acceleration that we see, I think we can here summarize with the three trends on the table here, creates a very positive opportunity set for our business going forward. First of all, AI-driven trading. We have seen the rise of systematic trading, algorithmic execution and also higher turnover volumes over the past year. Now AI-based trading moves automated execution to agentic execution. It will further boost the turnover velocity in our markets with fully scalable systems like ours on an STP basis ready to support this business. Data analytics will become more important than ever. We have constantly expanded our analytics offering and will further do so. It's not just about the speed of information, but now it is about the ability to distinguish between noise and real insights. And then lastly, new assets and workflows are on the rise. Digital assets and tokenization are a key theme in our industry right now. We fully believe tokenization of assets will materialize, and we actively develop this space. And let me move to this next page to tell you how we are positioning ourselves here. Since the launch of Horizon, we have moved from sort of what was a vision to now a tangible business proposition in our digital assets road map. Today, clients can trade 24/7 crypto at Deutsche Börse, crypto spot with Crypto Finance and 3DX. They can use the first 24/7 clearing offering at Nodal Clear in the U.S., hedge with crypto derivatives on Eurex or use Crypto Finance and Clearstream for their crypto custody and settlement. And looking ahead, we are focused on two directions: First, scaling our cryptocurrencies business further; and secondly, becoming a fully digital FMI, creating the bridge between TradFi and DeFi going forward in a seamless way. So for scaling our cryptocurrency business, we are now at a full end-to-end institutional offering, fully regulated with our MiCA license that we have obtained in Q1. And we are really happy. We see now the first real significant client wins with Banco Santander. We had a first Tier 1 client go live. And we expect further clients coming on board, also really creating momentum on our assets under custody and on our activity on the trading side. Secondly, we are now getting ready for digital securities, integrating both tokenization with digital cash. And Stephie will later talk about our progress that we are making with D7 and our recently announced partnership with Circle. In general, we are well positioned. We are ready for digital issuance and will make digital assets tradable on our venues. And this plays into our notion of a hybrid market infrastructure. We are fully committed to providing clients with a seamless access to digital assets irrespective of the underlying technology stack. And I have to say I'm really excited. I think a prime example is the partnership that we have announced last week with Kraken. I think it is really a partnership where two winners get together, bridging traditional and digital markets, and it's also a partnership where we have real tangible opportunities that we can immediately implement. So overall, if you look at our footprint as a traditional market in the digital place, I can only say we are not just making headlines, but we are really building tangible business in this space right now. With that, let me summarize. I know I'm a bit over time. Coffee is waiting for all of you. And let me conclude here. Just reiterating my key messages that I have for you today. First of all, Trading & Clearing is central to DB1's success and the main contributor of our organic growth. We are fully on track to deliver on our Horizon 2026 targets. And beyond 2026, we are well positioned for further growth, scaling our business and underlying secular trends that I outlined to you, benefiting from a European transformation that is happening and also from a proactive positioning in new asset classes. This will allow us to reach EUR 2.9 billion revenues in 2028, driven by our fixed income road map with a unique value proposition and strong underlying macro trends. The extension of our success story in the commodities space with a double-digit growth, capturing renewed momentum in equity index and building our FX leadership through market growth and 360T's edge. And all of this will be amplified by new technology. Digital assets are a key opportunity, and we are uniquely positioned as the only company worldwide to combine institutional-grade custody, clearing and trading under one roof. Let me thank you for your attention. And with that, I hand back to you, Jan. Thank you very much.

Thank you, Thomas. We are now taking a short break around 20 minutes. So we would like to ask everyone to reconvene here in the room at around 3:00 p.m. That's 3:00 p.m. local time here in London. Thank you. [Break]

Welcome back. Please take a seat. We are now continuing with the presentations. The next speaker today is Stephie Eckermann. Stephie is Executive Board Member of Deutsche Börse, and she's responsible for our post-trading businesses. And Stephie will now present our Fund Services and Security Services businesses. Stephie, the floor is yours.

Thank you, Jan. And welcome back. I'm very happy to take you into the second half of our Capital Markets Day 2025. And I must admit, it was really amazing listening to the stories of Christian of SimCorp and ISS STOXX, but as well on Thomas' side, the amazing transformation stories on the Trading & Clearing businesses. So I'm really, really excited to now complete the picture and lay a bit out what the transformation story on the post-trading side is. Post-trading at Deutsche Börse how Stephan called it, the two Clearstream pearls. And it doesn't go without saying, mentioning the Clearstream pearls, also mentioning Philippe Seyll and Sam Riley that are here with us today that are leading these two engines, both engines with a very distinct value proposition. Clearstream Fund Services, led by Philippe. It's really a leading hub for fund distribution and processing, EUR 4.5 trillion assets under custody, connecting more than 1,500 global distributors, asset managers and transfer agents. And Clearstream Security Services led by Sam, a global leader in post-trade security services. EUR 16.5 trillion assets under management, not only the largest CSD in Europe, It's also one of ICSDs in Europe, and it's a global leader in digital securities with more than EUR 60 billion issued under D7 to date. So it's really exciting to tell you more about these two businesses, and let us start with the Funds business. Funds, we heard it. It has really proven to be a growth engine of Deutsche Börse Group. We're well on track to deliver the ambitious growth revenue targets set in Horizon 2026. You see a 9% average growth. This 9% that we're growing on average since 2022 does not reflect the acceleration and the scaling we have seen in that business to date. If you look at the past 2 years, there really has been a double-digit growth. We've grown 12% year-to-date, and we will grow 12% in the final Horizon year 2026. And most importantly, that growth is not driven by cyclical trends. That growth is really structural and with that, very much aligns with our outlook on the industry. If you look beyond 2026, we really see the structural trends for the funds industry to accelerate. There is an outsourcing momentum that we see further accelerate. And while the underlying industry funds as an asset class is growing 6%, we truly believe that our part of the industry is outgrowing given the increased platform penetration we will see in the next 10 years. And also, we think there's a couple of areas outgrowing, like on the emerging market side, where we will grow with local distributors but also grow and outgrow the market with our global mandates. We talked a lot already about the European opportunity. There is a huge opportunity for Deutsche Börse Group. But this opportunity is also really at the core for funds. If you take the EUR 30 trillion of European household assets that will be activated in the light of the Savings and Investments Union to create stronger European capital markets, investment funds are really the major vehicle that are at the core of that retail activation. And if you take a deeper look even, it's ETF, and we heard it from Thomas, it's ETF that is at the core of this development. It has been the fastest-growing asset class and it will grow fastest in the coming years. On the fund side, there is an -- as exciting expansion of the asset class footprint because there is a wealth penetration by private market assets that we've all seen accelerating over the past months. That's an enormous opportunity for us. Wealth penetration is expected to be a global market potential of $26 trillion in the next 5 years, and it's a huge opportunity for our industry to ease the complex processing of these assets. There is digitization. We will talk about it in a second. There is many, many digital use cases that represent an exciting expansion of our footprint along the value chain also in funds. So there is an enormous transformation, and Clearstream Fund Services will lead this transformation. We will deliver double-digit growth also over the next planning cycle and are expected to grow 11% until 2028. This is across three transformational levers, business scaling, the European uplift and the leverage of the ETF opportunity as well as the asset class footprint expansion we see us already in today. And I will take you through the details on how we will execute on this and why we believe that we're best positioned in a second. So we will grow 11% year-on-year until 2028, reaching EUR 700 million of fee revenues. And again, these revenues are not cyclical. They're really driven by structural trends. So on the business scaling. Our business has scaled enormously by very strong global outsourcing partnerships we have with leaders like UBS and HSBC. And we believe that outsourcing momentum will continue and our momentum will continue with us winning the next global mandates. Our white label solutions like Vestima Digital are really a decisive factor in these discussions, and that's something we strongly build on. On the retail wealth enablement, we truly enable the operational scaling of neo-brokers and neo-banks. And on the other side, we really benefit from the enormous growth that is in that client segment with partners like Trade Republic, Scalable, Upvest just to name a couple of the latest additions. And I mentioned emerging markets earlier. There is also a scaling we see in emerging markets. If you just take Asia, APAC as an example, it's a region where we already today have 170 clients in more than 22 markets and have grown our APAC assets by 30% year-on-year, year-to-date. And we will further tailor our offering to the needs of these high-growth emerging markets. Last but not least, it's really the tech-enabled core of Fund Services that is adding to that business scaling. Funds is operating on a digital-native core banking system that we will further build out. We already today run our core solutions like Vestima Digital with a DLT enablement. Vestima Digital enables the complex processing of private market assets with DLT components. And we also invested quite a lot in our data capabilities. We're starting with EUR 30 million of data revenues as of today that we will further build out via our data on demand offering, and you heard Christian talking about offering also these data solutions as an integrated solution to SimCorp clients. So let me take a detailed look on the outsourcing momentum. I mentioned the increase in platform penetration, where you see on the left side of the chart, an increase to 45%. This means our addressable market grows, and we truly believe that we're best positioned to win in this market and to win in this market with the global Tier 1 distributors. Why is that? We really have an equal strength in mutual funds, ETF and alternatives. And I will touch upon ETF and alternatives in a second. We cover at Clearstream the full funds value chain with our outsourcing solutions. And we do not offer superior operational scale, we also offer this outsourcing at the highest asset safety given our captive link to the ICSDs on the Securities Services side. And we have really expanded our connectivity, our distribution -- conditions on the distribution side with now a global coverage of more than 85,000 events. That's an investment we've done over the past years. and that makes us now really competitive. All of this comes with a seamless white labeling setup. I mentioned Vestima Digital already. And that's why we really believe that we're the best partner and we will continue to invest the best partner for these large global mandates Tier 1 distributors. So ETF, we already discussed a lot the ETF opportunity. It will be at the core of the European uplift. Super exciting market potential. And Clearstream is really coming from a very, very strong starting position on the ETF side. We already today custodize more than EUR 1 trillion of ETF, growing at a 30% year-on-year rate. That's an enormous scale we can build on. On the other side, there is a second very, very strong starting point. It's the full value chain Deutsche Börse solutions are offering. Thomas talked about the ETF opportunity, about Xetra being the ETF leader in Europe, the largest venue. But our starting position, the full value chain in Deutsche Börse is not only that unique stock exchange connectivity we have in terms of Xetra, it's really Deutsche Börse Group covering the full value chain from the creation of ETF in ISS STOXX to the portfolio management of in SimCorp to the clearing lending portfolio optimization of ETF done by Europe and Clearstream Securities Services. That's an enormous asset to start with, and we will really leverage that value chain and build in end-to-end solutions for the buy side and the sell side. On the asset class expansion, you really see me excited, you've heard Christian talk about the alternatives opportunity. I'm also super excited. I see only one person smiling even more in the room, that is Philippe. And how could you be not excited sitting on EUR 340 billion of alternative assets under custody. That's an enormous amount already, super strong starting point. North of EUR 300 billion is more than 10x than our next competitor. And this all comes with a very strong legacy in handling the complex life cycle of these assets, dating back to our Citco acquisition many, many years ago. But we also have upgraded our core solution. I mentioned Vestima Digital already. There, we took DLT components to enable the complex processing of these alternative assets. With Vestima Digital, it's possible, for example, to organize the capital calls on the end investor level more efficiently. Super, super highly in demand and it's live already. And I guess the third thing to mention, you see the logos on the chart. We significantly invested and expanded our distribution connectivity on the alternatives side. And you see now general partners like Carlyle, Apollo, Blackstone, Neuberger Berman on our distribution portfolio. So that gives us clearly a very strong starting position to grow in that business. Digital Transfer Agency is something that's equally super exciting and means that we are expanding our footprint into the next step of the Funds value chain. We offer Digital TA as a software-native platform, where participants can realize operational efficiencies of more than 50% in that step of the value chain. And for those among you who know Fund Admin, it is really a headache for the industry. And saving 50% in that piece of the value chain is an enormous benefit we can bring to clients. Digital TA is live with our partner, Standard Chartered, in four countries already. And Digital TA is offered as an integrated solution on the SimCorp side. And starting from Digital TA as an enabler, we're really growing our tokenized fund network. We already today are working with partners like Natixis, ZKB and Azimut on the D2C facilitation along the value chain and also on more operational digital use cases to ease along this chain. And we already today have more than EUR 2 billion of tokenized funds sitting with us. So let me summarize before I come to the next point. I'm truly excited about the organic growth opportunity that's there on the fund side. You've seen the business scaling. You've heard about the enormous European opportunity in ETF, and we will expand our asset class footprint both on the alternative side as well on the digital side. So an amazing organic growth story. Equally excited, we are on the M&A outlook of a potential acquisition with Allfunds. There have been a lot of questions already over the two breaks. But let me tell you, this would really complete the buildup of our Funds business to a EUR 1 billion-plus business. And it is really, really, really contributing to the strategic focus on supporting Europe's Savings and Investments Union. You also heard that before. So looking at the potential transaction, maybe let me just highlight the complementarity of a potential combination of both companies, which we're really, really excited on. There is a high complementarity on the regional strength of both sides on the service portfolio as well as on the client franchises. And if you look at the left side on the chart, it is really a perfect puzzle. And maybe let me just take out the regional dimension that you see a bit and have a picture of the perfect puzzle. It would be a very, very strong regional hub there running on the Southern European side, take Italy, take France, that would then complement our strong home markets in Switzerland and Germany. So there's really a regional complementarity. And there's also, of course, strength on both sides, if you look at emerging markets like APAC, Middle East and Lat Am. So combining the DNA of both companies, we truly believe that there will be a stronger operational and IT tech stack. And we truly believe that the innovation capabilities and the innovation capacity of these companies would be unmatched. Jens will talk about the financial terms and potential timing in a second. So I will spare you that. But let me leave you and conclude that we truly, truly are excited about the complementarity of this transaction. And in combination with the very strong entrepreneurial and innovation mindset that would come with the leaders of Allfunds and its global talent pool, we really, really believe that this is a valuable transaction. So I'll leave it here for the Fund side and now come to Securities Services, and equally super exciting engine. Securities Services is growing or has been growing 9% over the past strategy cycle and with that, already achieved its targets for Horizon 2026, 1 year ahead. 9%, that is an amazing growth rate for that business. If you recall, the growth targets that have been there for Securities Services in previous cycles that were far below, and that is really, really an acceleration of that business. We will grow 8% next year. And again also, this growth is not cyclical. It's driven by structural trends. So looking beyond 2026, we truly believe that the secular industry trends also in this segment of post-trading is intact, and we see really an acceleration on the digitization side. There's two factors that have led to that scaling that you've seen already over the past cycle. There is an upcoming of go direct models, being it the neo-brokers, neo-banks, being it the buy side that is now coming directly to our infrastructures. And there is really Platform-as-a-Service trend that is also coming to post-trade. And these structural trends will really lead to business scaling. The European uplift is equally important on the Securities Services side, as for any other Deutsche Börse business. And on the Securities Services side, it's really twofold. Now it's fixed income and it's the equity and ETF piece. On the fixed income side, we will see a surge in EU public debt until 2030, if you take the number here, EUR 4.5 trillion. And you've all seen today the new numbers that came out on the global international debt levels surging to a top today. And these international debt levels will also shift to us with a global capital shift to euro assets. So that's super exciting, Clearstream Securities Services as a fixed income house will truly benefit from that trend. But as I said, equally on the equities and ETF side, we've seen that scaling from really capturing the retail flows. We've seen it in the growth numbers 2025, and we truly believe that we will see this also in the numbers until 2028. So that's super exciting. And we also believe that we're very well positioned in the infrastructure reforms that are currently under discussion in the European context, and I will come to that in a second. Asset class expansion on the Securities Services side, it's all about digital tokenized securities and digital cash, and that's a huge, huge opportunity for Securities Services. That has clearly accelerated over the past months. An enormous transformation, and we truly believe that Securities Services will lead this transformation. We are expected to grow 8% until 2028, and we will do that by continuing the business scaling by leveraging the European uplift on the fixed income as well as on the equities and ETF side, and we will expand our asset class footprint in digital securities as we are already today the digital leader. Growing 8% will lead us to EUR 1.3 trillion of fee revenues. But you really need to add the NII that has stabilized until then. That gives you then another EUR 0.5 billion of stable NII revenues, so EUR 1.8 trillion for a business that is growing so steady and structural. What an amazing business we're looking at. So let me also quickly go through the details of how we're executing on this. On the business scaling side, I talked about the go direct trend, go direct from the buy side but also, most likely, a go direct from neo-brokers and neo-banks. And we will really invest in our B2B2C plug-and-play access, making it easy that these players and these fast-growing players can directly connect to our infrastructure. And you see live flagship partners like Trade Republic, Revolut, Scalable, these fast-growing players are directly connected to our infrastructure. And it's super exciting to see them grow and grow across Europe where we really support them in their pan-European growth already today. On the collateral management side, it's really exciting to see the quality of our platform. There's really a Platform-as-a-Service trend where others are using our platform as a white label just because they're so superior. It's our white label solution, CmaX, that we're leveraging jointly with partners like TMX in Canada, or Edaa. Edaa, the Saudi Arabian, CSD in Saudi Arabia. And let me already tell you today, there is more partnerships to come that we will announce next year. And again, also on the Securities Services side, there is really a scaling enabled by the next-gen tech we deploy in our infrastructures. We are already with 85% in the cloud and we aspire to be at 100% at the end of 2028. And this being in the cloud gives us an enormous head start in terms of computing times. We, for example, have increased our time to market by 200%. And if you combine it with our investments in data, data governance and quality and AI, that is really the combination of the three topics, cloud, data and AI, that is driving the business scaling. If you take, for example, on the collateral management side, we are the only global player that is operating on the cloud. None of the other three remaining global leaders on the sec lending side operate in the cloud. And our operations in the cloud with the computing times that are really, really accelerated gives us an enormous head start to also apply AI optimization tools in this part of the industry, and this gives enormous benefits to our clients. So we talked a lot about Europe. Clearstream as a fixed income house will clearly benefit from the European uplift on the fixed income side. Clearstream as the largest CSD in Europe already today with more than 50% of the volumes owning the German market will clearly benefit from the uplift on the equities and ETFs side from the new pension schemes that will be decided in Germany and that we heard from Thomas about. But we truly believe that Clearstream is also a winner and uniquely positioned in the current discussions around the market reforms and the consolidation discussions that have been happening around SIU. If you take all that talk about market fragmentation, it's just not true. If you look at Clearstream Europe, we own an infrastructure that is the pan-European settlement system already today. Clearstream Europe is linked to all 24 markets in T2S, and these direct links in T2S have been a long, long, long investment road map that we invested in. And it's a clear head start we're having, because no one else in Europe have these direct links and the pan-European settlement system in Europe. Second, let me also leave you with one thought on the interoperability. You see Clearstream Europe with a direct link to our ICSD Clearstream Global, where we have access to 60 international markets. That's an interoperability between the Central Bank money on the Clearstream Europe side, Commercial bank money on the other side that is really seamless. And no other competitor in Europe has that seamless interoperability between Commercial and Central Bank money. And also on the inoperability side, we really are interoperable, connecting to other infrastructures to the other layers and the vertical layers. And with that, we're really compliant in these European discussions where, in the context of SIU, people are asking for consolidation and asking for interoperability. And maybe the third thing to leave you with, which is also super exciting is T+1. With that setup we're having, seamless access to Europe, this means also a shortening of the chains. And this means that our setup is superior in the upcoming shift to T+1. We're really T+1 compliant already, and we're further investing in the simplification, especially on the German market side, moving even more securities on T2S and, with that, supporting our clients in the shift to T+1. And that's also something no other competitor has. So we truly believe that Clearstream Security Services will leave this discussion around the consolidation of European capital markets with a very, very, very strong positioning. So this is where we stand today, but you will see me equally passionate about the future and the future in Security Services is digital. You've heard Thomas discussed a lot, and you've seen already on Thomas chart that we're more or less ticking already every box in terms of the functionalities, in terms of the custody layer of Deutsche Börse Group digital assets. And this is D7. We touched upon it already a couple of times. That's really a global leader. It's our digital securities platform, where we already today have issued more than 2 million issuances with a volume of more than EUR 60 billion and where we have the ambition to really digitize our CSD in the next 3 years. And digitizing the CSD means the full life cycle, but also the full asset base and the full asset base means that's EUR 21 trillion of securities, EUR 21 trillion of real-world assets that we will make available on chain. Until now, we also have a lot of use cases and business that is coming from the acceleration we all have seen on the digital side. And that's why there is next to the digital CSD ambition we're having also a strategy in bridging the old world and the new world. And that you see on the right side of the chart. We already offer today institutional crypto custody via a link we're having with crypto finance. And with that -- via that link, we give access from the CSD to the chain via crypto finance. We're the only CSD offering that link. That's really unique. Plus there is a lot of discussions and use cases already, early tokenizations of these real-world assets, people that are looking at us like the partnership we have with Kraken. Thomas mentioned it, where people see our real-world assets and starting to having discussions with us how to tokenize, how to make them accessible on the chain. And third, we've talked a lot about partnerships on the stablecoin side. We want to make -- we make already our settlement engine interoperable with stablecoins. There's always a cash leg to the security leg, and we have an interoperability we provide via partners, being it Circle, being it European stablecoin providers, where you can handle your securities on the settlement side with a digital cash leg. We're also working on group synergies, leveraging collateral units. That's something to come and to watch closely. And not to miss that point, we're really, really committed also to the digital euro. We were a very, very early supporter on the CBDC side. Clearstream was the only CSD that has participated in ECB trials very successfully, and we stand ready for the next phase of the digital euro when it is then going into live production in the second half of 2026. So an enormous agenda out there. And you see me very confident that Clearstream Security Services will lead that transformation. So let me conclude, leave you with two things. Clearstream Fund Services, an enormous growth engine, an enormous organic road map we see, but equally exciting outlook on the M&A side. And Clearstream Security really a super engine already today has shaped something in Europe in terms of a pan-European infrastructure and clearly looking into a super exciting future in terms of digital and tokenized securities. Thank you.

Thank you, Stephie. Our final speaker today is Jens Schulte, CFO of Deutsche Börse, and Jens will present the financial perspective on our strategy leading the transformation. Jens, the floor is yours.

Yes. Thank you very much, Jan, and good afternoon, everybody, also from my side. So now across the last 2 hours, you've heard from Stephan, from Christian, from Thomas and from Stephie, how we intend to lead the transformation strategically. Now putting all of these different puzzle pieces together financially, there's basically 2 key messages I want to bring across. The first one is we have a strong basis to build on. And the second one is we have a solid plan based on diversified growth, scaling potential as well as attractive returns to shareholders. Now let's start with the first point, a strong basis to build on. First of all, and you've heard that from Stephan and also from all of the other colleagues, we have delivered so far. We have delivered on our Horizon '26 strategy up until '25. So we have been growing the top line on a net revenue basis by 11% versus a target of 10%. And we've been growing the bottom line EBITDA all in by 12% versus a target of 11%. And that has led to a margin expansion on an EBITDA all-in basis of 58% to 60%. So we have demonstrated strong growth as well as operating leverage. Now what's important about the growth point is also the growth has been of high quality in several respects. First of all, the growth is basically being based on all of the cylinders of our portfolio. And you've heard many of those across the last 2.5 hours. So we have been growing in Investment Management Solutions. We have been growing on the Trading & Clearing side. We have been growing in Fund Services very nicely and also in Securities Services. Second, the growth is based both on an organic component. That's the majority of our growth at the moment and also an inorganic component, particularly within IMS, where we acquired SimCorp, of course, and then also Domos as Christian was alluding to. And then the third element is that through all of that, we have increased the share of our recurring revenues in our portfolio from 60% to 63%, further testament to the resilience of our portfolio. Now going into 2026, you've heard that already. We are fully committed to our targets for Horizon '26. However, the underlying growth drivers will change slightly, as you've heard from some of the colleagues. So we have some parts of the portfolio where we do face headwinds. One element is, for example, the ESG business within ISS, another element is the Eurex equity derivatives business because of relatively low volatility at the moment. On the other hand, we have other parts in the portfolio that do grow more strongly, such as the commodities business, for example, and also both of the Clearstream businesses. I think at the end of the day, that's a testament to the strength of our portfolio. We can exchange strong quality growth in one area with strong quality growth in another area depending on how markets are actually developing. So that's one slight difference that we have. And the second one is also, of course, today, we have a slightly different exchange rate versus than we used to have when we defined Horizon '26. So at that point in time, we were basing our assumptions on a U.S. dollar-euro rate, which is by far the biggest exposure that we have of $1.08. And today, you guys know that we are around $1.16, $1.17. And so that difference actually creates another headwind for the portfolio on the top line of around EUR 70 million. So we intend to compensate for that. So we are committed to our targets despite those headwinds, but it's important to keep that in mind. Now crystallizing the essence of what I alluded to, we have a strong basis to build on. What is the strong basis at the end of the day that we can build on at Deutsche Börse. It's a unique business model. I think you have seen that through all of the presentations that is generating highly attractive financial economics along 3 dimensions. One is sustainable growth in even very different market situations. The second one is scalability. And the third one is financial capacity, leading to attractive shareholder returns. Now let me go through each of these elements in the context of the strategy that you have been listening to. On the first point, the growth, we will continue to grow along all dimensions of the portfolio. So for example, you've heard Christian talk about the fact that we want to build the global one-stop shop for the buy side. This will generate a CAGR growth until 2028 of 8% on a pro forma basis or 6%, including the revenue recognition change that we plan for SimCorp. You've heard Thomas talk about the fact that we are having a multi-asset trading and clearing platform with strong synergies attached, another 8% growth. And lastly, you've heard Stephie talk about the fact that we are a global leader in the funds distribution and processing business as well as on the Security Services side, that is generating another 11% CAGR and 8% CAGR, respectively. We have proven that, and we will continue to work on all legs of the portfolio going into the future. Now one element, and I want to double up on what Christian has been saying here, of course, is IMS. We will continue to grow in IMS as well, including the Software Solutions business. And as Christian was already explaining, we intend to change revenue recognition at SimCorp in 2027. And once again, just to explain that why are we doing that is following our business logic because more -- I mean, the majority of the portfolio is now moving to a SaaS-based business model. So we want to just follow up with that. And then we are just listening to you guys, right? I mean you have all told us that we should be more transparent on that business. We should link ARR growth with revenue recognition basically even more. And so that's what we're going to do. So we will change revenue recognition in January of 2027. And I think there is 2 important things here that I want to make from a finance perspective. One is on a group level, that change is immaterial. So growth differential is less than 0.5 percentage point. And the second point that's also very important is this has nothing to do with underlying cash flow or contract volume changes. They're very important. It's a purely accounting matter, doesn't have anything to do with cash flows. That is the fee-based part of the portfolio. We have also been talking about the non-fee-based or treasury results part a bit throughout all of the presentations, consolidating all of these things. You know that we have 2 elements in our treasury results. One is margin fees. These are basically the fees out of collateral usage in the clearing houses. We model those fees slightly downward over the coming years simply because of more efficiency of our clearing system. So we develop clearing systems in a way that clients need less collateral, and that will have a slight impact. And the second one is the net interest income. And here, we fully stick to what we've said in '23 already when we defined Horizon '26, which is we expect a further reduction in rates, of course, interest rates and against that stabilization or slight increase on the cash balance side. And so with that towards the end of '26, beginning of '27, we would expect that, that part of the treasury result will stabilize around EUR 0.5 billion and then start to slightly go up again into the future. So we would see a going concern part for the treasury result of around EUR 0.7 billion, which is significantly above what we have seen in the past in our business. Moving from the first part of the attractive financial economic model to the second part, which is scalability. And here is something, and Stephan alluded to that earlier today, where we want to do something new. We want to further refine our operating model going forward to something that we call one group. And the essence of one group at the end of the day is to get even more synergies and benefits out of the breadth of our portfolio also on the operational side. That has several elements. One element is that we want to double up on our people development efforts and make a double effort of developing people across the platform and between the different businesses. Second element is technological capabilities. So Stephan was showing you this chart with basically our tech stack. So we want to double up on our efforts of making use of the cloud data and also in the future AI infrastructure across the group. And the third element is that we will also do some changes and refinements to our corporate structure. So for example, we want to make even more and more usage out of our global footprint. Today, we do not only have sites in Europe. We also have the Philippines, for example, we have Hyderabad in India, where we're just ramping up a significant IT development center. And so that's what we're going to do. We will make more use of that. Second, we want to double up our efforts on corporate center scaling with shared services, for example, and pooling. And the third element, of course, also on the operational side is digitalization. Digitalization is a broad spectrum of topics. We have very strategic topics, such as Stephie's digital CSD, for example. We also have more operational things such as, for example, digital process mining and the usage of that in optimizing working capital, for example. So these are things that we're going to do here as well as using AI, of course, in all the areas that you would expect us to do, including GitHub on the programming side, including customer services, everything that can be done with AI. And through all of these elements, we intend to keep cost development at a 3% CAGR going into the future, which compared to our top line growth is pretty substantial. Now one thing that is very important here is scaling requires impactful investing, right? And just to reassure you guys, so we have an investment budget of around EUR 600 million. Stephan mentioned the figure earlier today. So that is actually quite a significant investment budget. And with that organic investment budget, which is actually diversified across the business parts and also across many different projects, we can do everything that is required for our growth. So for example, Stephie was talking about the digital CSD covered by the budget. Thomas was talking about refining our collateral management engines, for example, or further working on crypto finance expansion is covered by the budget. Christian was talking about introducing an AI engine on SimCorp Dimensions front end, it's covered by the budget. So we can do all of these things in growing the company further while at the same time, containing cost growth to 3%. And that -- these two elements taken together, so the top line growth -- the sustained top line growth that we see with 8% CAGR and then a cost growth of around 3% CAGR overall mathematically leads to 12% EBITDA growth, which we think is a very good scaling and that should expand our margin from 58% to around 62% and expansion by more than 300 percentage points -- basis points. The third element of our attractive financial model is our financial capacity. And first of all, let me reiterate that we are a highly cash-generating business. So we will end this year with a cash surplus around EUR 1 billion, and we would add every year just by way of our free cash flow, another EUR 2 billion before capital allocation. So the company will continue to be very cash generative. And I even see further potential here. So for example, from regulatory simplification, you may have seen that we're giving back to banking licenses that has a very specific impact, for example, on required Pillar 1 capital on the CSD side. So we just require less capital. Another area where we can get even more out of this working capital management, so customer receivables and supplier payables, there's also some significant room for optimization here. All of that together allows us to deleverage. We have done that over the last couple of years. We are comfortably within our rating metrics. And on that basis, we are strong enough to keep on investing organically, the amounts that I shared with you and also inorganically. Now on the inorganic part, let me add the third dimension or the third view on the Allfunds potential transaction. So Stephan has been talking about how that fits into the group overall strategy and Stephie, how that very nicely complements our business in Fund Services. Now from a financial point of view, first of all, important message is we do afford it because we have basically deleveraged the company, so we have sufficient means. Second important message is we have crafted a financing structure. You will have seen that. It's a 50-50, 50% equity, 50% cash that very nicely balances cost, risk and rating and also balances the interest of both shareholder groups. And then third, also very important to say it is fully in sync with our financial target metrics for M&A. So Stephan alluded to that, more or less immediate EPS accretion. This business will be able to do so and also return on capital and invested capital above the WACC within 3 to 5 years that will also be ticked on this front here. So we will stay within these metrics with the acquisition. Now let me also say maybe one word on where we stand at the moment transaction-wise. So while we are, of course, in a nonbinding stage, we always, of course, have to basically maintain that. And any transaction is, of course, subject to due diligence and to usual shareholder and Supervisory Board approvals and later on also the closing to regulatory approvals. There's, of course, quite a couple of work that we have been doing up until this point. So for example, we have done quite some significant prework on antitrust to figure out how we assess the overall situation. And so you can assume that we have done that before we started to talk to the target. And the second thing also is, of course, that we see a strong positive momentum on the key shareholder side, and we do expect irrevocables from the 2 or 3 big key shareholders here. So that -- we do see some very good sense and dynamics in that thing, but it's nonbinding at the moment. And the overall basically process length starting from the signing, you can expect somewhere in the magnitude of 10 to 18 months, depending on how the antitrust process on the EU side is working. But as I said, we have prepared strongly for that. So these pieces taken together, we continue to generate very attractive shareholder returns. And here, I come back to another statement that Stephan made initially, that is that we are refining our capital allocation policy. So we will keep the element on the dividend side where we said we stand for dividend continuity and increasing DPS over time. And the other new element that we're going to introduce now is more regular annual buybacks as a constant element of our capital allocation policy. The volume, and we said that also will be subject to excess liquidity at the end of the respective year, but it will become a regular element from now because we feel we are strong enough and we are generating enough cash to also share that with shareholders on a regular basis. And for the next year, for 2026, EUR 0.5 billion, and that will certainly be a question that EUR 0.5 billion, we also see in various transaction scenarios. So even if we would see a very fast track Allfunds transaction if everything went through, even if we had to, for whatever transactional outcomes, buy back our minority share in ISS, even with these scenarios, we can afford the EUR 500 million share buyback. So that is something for next year that we're going to do. Now wrapping it all up, we intend to continue to grow by a strong 8% to scale the company and also to generate very attractive shareholder returns. And that leads me back to the beginning of our presentations today with the midterm guidance that Stephan shared with you. So 8% top line growth on a fee-based basis of our commitment, 3% cost growth, not more than that, leading to overall 12% bottom line growth disproportionately. And if you would include interest rates on an all-in basis from '26 to '28, the respective figures would be 6%, 8% and 10% cash EPS growth overall. And with that, expand our margins, as I said, by more than 300 basis points to 62%. All of that underpinning our ambition to leading the transformation. And with that, we close the presentation.

Thank you, Jens. This now brings us to the Q&A session. I want to ask all the Executive Board members on stage, please. We are taking questions from the room, of course, as well from participants on the webcast. [Operator Instructions] So we start with questions here from the audience. [Operator Instructions] Benjamin, please go ahead.

Benjamin from Deutsche Bank. One question, I might actually take SimCorp, your last big acquisition. You mentioned 1 year ago, you fully integrated and now you target 12% growth into next year, so strategically expect an acceleration. Maybe you can talk about the process of a combined product and you changed some key leadership across management, across sales, the momentum you're seeing acceleration, what is the sales cycle looking? And yes, do you see a pickup momentum and a different perception in the market?

Great question. Thank you very much. The major impact is we exchanged the former CEO, so now performance is outstanding. No, joking aside, so it's been a lot of work actually in reality, most of it started 4 years ago, even before Deutsche Börse got involved. But since then, of course, integrating Axioma fully into the value proposition, but also organizationally was done very quick to the benefit of the fact that we now have a fully integrated risk engine sitting inside SimCorp, which was something SimCorp needed for quite a long time. A focus on North America and kind of reengaging in North America, if you will, and then a full launch of what we now call SimCorp One, which is the full suite in terms of SaaS capabilities, but also the reimagined front office, including AI. So what it ultimately boils down to, I would say, is an uplift in number and average size on new clients, which has been driving the ARR for the last 2 to 3 years. But what we're also now embarking on is to take the rest of the existing client base through that transformation. So most of -- as we talk about half -- roughly half have now done the SaaS transformation, but there's still an uplift in terms of what they use on the licenses side that you basically do as part of the SimCorp One relaunch if not relaunch, but launch. So both driving new logos, but also drive share of wallet.

I think Arnaud also raised his hand. So just a few seats down the row.

Arnaud Giblat From BNP Paribas. My question is on EEX, please. You talked during your presentation about 17% growth to 2028 coming from increased share of clearing, from OTC to exchange and further trading activity in electricity and power markets. I was just wondering if you could unpack that a bit more, give a bit more color. I think Germany is quite mature in terms of on exchange, for example. So I'm just wondering how we get to that 17%. And as a sub question, if I may, on EEX as well, I mean, Japan, for example, as a new country is a big opportunity set. I'm just wondering how you established position in Europe helps you expand in Germany given that the electricity markets are local?

Thank you very much, Arnaud. Very good questions. And let me also again just point out the 17% is a market growth figure, right? And some of the elements of renewable energies are in there. But let me probably use the opportunity here to pass on the baton to Tobias Paulun for the energy side to shed a bit more light also on the aspect of global expansion, but both on the dynamics in the European market. Please, Tobias.

Your answers, actually, you touched on several of the growth dimensions already that then contribute to the overall 17%. First is that the power markets will continue to grow momentum to continue to gain an importance through electrification and decarbonization of the economies actually globally. That's why we're active around the globe by now. Second is that even in Europe in our very core market, we still have potential to grow the market shares. Germany is for sure very mature. So it's Italy, but other European markets still have potential to move to on exchange trading and clearing, particularly the Nordic countries where we are targeting an expansion in the very short to midterm perspective. And third is geographic expansion and launch of additional contracts along the curve of new maturities for power derivatives markets. Geographically, that goes hand-in-hand with Japan, for example, which is by now the fourth biggest power market. We operate that out of Europe. So it's an organic expansion into new regions. We use our existing licenses for that. That's why we have high synergies also within the group, can onboard clients from Eurex, for example, with very low additional effort. And overall, all taken together, that makes a very robust growth in the midterm perspective of about 17%.

Could we move one row back, Hubert Lam from Bank of America.

It's Hubert Lam from Bank of America. I got a question on Fund Services and Securities Services. So those are obviously two key drivers for your target with Fund Services 11% growth. And over the last year, they've been helped because of good markets, which helped boost the assets under custody. Just wondering how sensitive is your target on markets? I know that you said that it's been structural, but as I said, we've seen it being boosted by cyclical drivers over the last year. And also, if you look at some of the all Funds, it has been more cyclical than what we thought it would be over the last few years. So just wondering if you shed some light on market sensitivity.

No, thank you. No, we truly believe on the market sensitivity side that the settlement volumes and the acceleration we've seen that this is clearly something that's there to stay on the Fund side as well as on the Security side. And also, we believe that in terms of sensitivity, these 2 businesses are really nicely hedged. The other part of the revenues come from the asset under custodies and fees on that. You can see that on the Security Services side, these fees are on the nominal. So there is a natural hedge. And yes, on the Fund side, there is part linked to asset valuation. That is clearly a sensitivity we're having. But we believe that we can live with that sensitivity, and there's really a structural growth trend and that we see the settlement volumes today has not been cyclical at all.

Maybe moving to the other side, starting here in the first row. Ian, please.

It's Ian White from Autonomous. My question, please. With respect to the digital solutions and tokenization of assets, what's the overall end game here? And can you help us to understand the journey? Is this about augmentation of the group's existing offerings, offering sort of parallel ecosystems or the substantial replacement of a large part of the existing infrastructure?

I think you -- I mean, many thanks for the questions. I guess with your question, you in part answered. There is a twofold strategy on the post-trading side. We truly believe that Clearstream has a role in the end game -- has a role in the end game on the Fund side and on the Security side. We have a digital securities platform with D7 and have a tokenizer on the funds value chain with funds DLT on both sides. And we truly have a road map also on both sides to digitize the full life cycle of our securities and funds, but also the full asset base. We've talked in a couple of presentations on digital CSD. That's really the ambition to digitize our CSD setup, digitize the EUR 21 trillion of securities we're having, but there is also a DLT component, a tokenization component to it. I know you've seen a couple of weeks ago, we announced in the press that we're live with D7 DLT. So we are also offering already today a tokenized component to these assets. And until then, we really see us as a bridge between the old traditional world and the new world, where we see a huge demand of the tokenization of real-world assets. And Thomas talked a lot about the partnerships we're having, our most important partner being crypto finance, but we're also working with external partners. And the same in terms of bridging the old and the new world, we want to be interoperable on the cash side, we support digital cash, being it digital euro or being it stablecoin providers in U.S. dollar or euro denominated. And so there is also clearly the bridging as a strategy, as you mentioned.

I think, Ian, it's fair to say, clearly, given the legacy sizes that we talk about, the maturities that exist, this is going to be per se, a 10-year journey. That's why the vision of a hybrid underlying capability that we will have, and that is truly unique to be able to operate in both worlds in different environments with partners makes such a big difference because there's no question until all the issuers are ready. We are now talking about Funds. We are talking about retail structured products. I mean the share to full primary tokenization is still at very, very early stages. We know that equities is far away. But at the same time, this is a journey, and they are very attractive niches. They are totally new, and that's handing it back to Thomas. They are highly uncorrelated flows that are coming from these corners. And that's the value. That's why it's so important to access these new investor classes. But again, Thomas.

Yes. And I think that adds back to here the overall notion of our story leading the transformation. We believe DLT as a technology has a transformational character to the industry in the long run. And we see a huge efficiency potential. And there are 2 sides, as I mentioned. One is, now we see a use case around cryptocurrencies that is positioning for fast-growing asset classes. That is for us, where we are positioned for institutional participants moving into that space. And that is, I think, the core of our value proposition. And that's currently scaling for us. And I think the tokenization of real-world assets, as Stephan has highlighted, that's at the beginning of the journey, again, something where we want to position across the entire value chain going forward. And there will be different use cases along the different product categories. So -- and Stephie has outlined some of those that we are currently already focused on.

Staying on the left-hand side, right in front of you.

Ben Bathurst from RBC. My question is on the buy side opportunity. I noticed a step-up in the assumed growth in buy-side revenue. I think it was 4% to 5% in Horizon '26 and now you're saying you're expecting something like 8% growth in that TAM to 2028. I just wondered if you could add any color on what's supporting that acceleration? And then maybe you could just talk about how important that market growth assumption is in terms of feeding into your own revenue growth assumptions? And do you think you can deliver what you're expecting if the buy side doesn't grow at that kind of 8% out to 2028?

Let me frame it and then hand it over to Christian, obviously. The framing is pretty straightforward. I go back to what I said in my opening remarks. I think some of the structural trends that we are seeing, I mean, the entire unsolved, if I call it as such, pension, the environment in Europe that is structurally not at the same level as it needs to be, that is nonfinanceable in public sector environments as we know, all of that is driving a momentum that is also not linked in a narrow sense to regulatory change. Let me emphasize that. What we see with the neobrokers and many other players is we see a momentum that is picking up out of simple realization of citizens of what they need to do for themselves. They're not waiting anymore for what's coming. And that momentum is something that is very broad and very strong. That's a big part of what we see. There is also -- and let me then hand it in that spirit back to Christian. For our assumptions, that market growth is important on funds, but the outsourcing underlying part is as important. There's this margin pressure. There's the change in the industry that grows the TAM for outside players like us. That is a pressure that is just relentless. Consolidation and playing with winners has been a big part. But that's where, again, Christian can break that back then also to what is some of the front-to-back platform dynamics.

Yes, absolutely. So if we start with SimCorp, it is basically in line with what Stephan just said. There's the asset class, there's the margin need on the investment management side, et cetera, and all of that good stuff that SimCorp is in principle, operated in for many years, plus the investments we've done. You kind of get the effect. That was the answer to the other question. If you then do it a little bit more technical, we have to get through the change of rev rec, right? So we have to make sure that there's now an alignment between the way we recognize that makes it easier to connect the dots between the ARR, the relatively high ARR growth that we've had for now years, 16%, 17% and then see that fully represented in the net revenue effect that we go through that circle. There is no other way around it. I also want to say one thing that we sometimes don't talk too much about in the current model. Yes, you book the license component of a SaaS deal upfront. But in reality, there's quite a lot of revenue that is committed that you currently don't see in the P&L because it kind of comes in as the client go live. So there's also that effect that is hard to understand. So I'd say the underlying part is there. The underlying TAM is growing. We generally believe we are very competitive. So in some parts of the world, subsegments, we are taking market share, and that drives ultimately. But that streak we've been on for a while, underpinning the 16% to 17% ARR growth that we are confident will continue for the years to come. On the ISS STOXX side, very confident that we are on a good path on the index side, where we now see the buy side coming back also with the investments we've done there. And we're also confident that some of the parts that has been muted on that side will start to come back towards '26, '27 that also drives an additional growth. So I would say all of these things added up, in our view, will mean that we see a slight acceleration of growth compared to where we're coming from.

Can we have one more question maybe from my left-hand side, Grace, I think you raised your hands already before.

It's Grace Dargan from Barclays. Maybe just coming back on the digital assets and particularly in trading and clearing, it looks very interesting. So how should we think about monetizing these opportunities? And is there anything we need to think about in terms of the economics of the partnerships that you're entering into?

Yes. Thanks a lot for the question. First of all, let me really reiterate and highlight, we look at this as a significant growth opportunity going forward, both if we look at crypto assets, but also if we look at digital assets. And we, in our core value proposition, execution, trading, clearing, but also then the custody layer, there is upside for us in the institutional regulated space where we are -- they're well connected, have a strong client base, a strong reputation. I'm happy here to probably have Carlo as being the Head of Digital. If you would like to add, Carlo, probably a good opportunity for you to share your view.

Thank you very much for the handover. Thank you very much for the question. Yes, it's a future thing. It has 2 components. You have on the one hand side, our traditional customer base that we have today as Deutsche Börse Group, which we call in modern English, pledge high players, traditional finance. And then you have the -- yes, they call crypto native, but let's say, the tech native companies. And the pledge high players still have to come to adopt this business to get into crypto, to get into tokenized securities. And the other group was not traditionally our customer base. But you see with these partnerships on the one hand side with Kraken, Circle and so on, we get into that new customer base. And at the same time, we are well prepared to cater our traditional customers when they are ready to move into this. And yes, right or wrong, some things don't get better if you defy them. For example, a clearing house gets more attractive, the more you put on it. So if there are more products and more customers coming, it creates more gravity. So it's an opportunity here. Also funny enough, I mean, at the moment, we have only USD 1. If this stablecoin invasion keeps going, we might have representatives of the dollar maybe 50 in 2 years that require interoperability that needs to be serviced, exchanged. So there are new business models even coming up that we haven't foreseen plus CBDCs and so on. So there is more coming up. The entire crypto stuff is a new asset class. The stablecoins and the ecosystem that comes with them creates new requirements for interoperability and servicing. Old things like the clearinghouse will get more gravity and more power. So I think that's the way how to read it going forward from the trading and clearing side. A lot of opportunity, I would say.

We have one more question, one row behind Grace, Dirk Becker.

It's Dirk Becker from Allianz Global Investors. My question is about the change of revenue recognition at SimCorp for the SaaS revenue. To be honest, I wasn't even aware that IFRS allows to book upfront revenue for revenue that you haven't earned. So my question is, has this practice overstated the success that you had in SimCorp over the past couple of years? And the second question is why do you decide to terminate this practice now?

Absolutely. So on the first question, clear answer is no, it has not overstated. And quite frankly, the revenue recognition on these contracts in detail is very complex, right, because you have many different components. You have basically components that go over time, you have license components in the beginning and so forth. And what you need to do is without going into too much technical detail, you need to dissect all of these elements and then figure out which part is point in time, which is ratable. So it hasn't been overstated. It is always fully in sync with how we run business, and that's how it has been in the past. And the reason why we changed it is what Christian alluded to is that we are now at a position where the majority of our contracts of our contractual base is now becoming an SaaS type of contract. And so we need to then just follow up that change apart from the fact, as I said, that we want to be more transparent. But we haven't clearly not overstated anything.

Right. Good. Before we move to the room, we have a question here from the audience on the webcast for Thomas. It's regarding our partnership programs. And there's a very established one in OTC clearing, but the question is also with regards to the new ones that are incentivized, whether they are about to deliver similar to the OTC clearing.

Yes. Thanks a lot for the question to those that are not that familiar with the plural of partnership programs. Actually, we really -- as I referred to our clients, we work together with our key client base to build up new liquidity pools to build up new markets in a really joint manner. And the starting point was around OTC clearing, where we have now more than 35 partners in the partnership program where we sort of share the success and also the governance of this effort. And I think if we now look at the progress that we are making just for OTC clearing, for instance, if we see the pickup both in terms of connectivity of buy-side clients that I referred to earlier or the growth in terms of volumes that we are seeing right now, I think this program really creates a lot of momentum for us. We are very happy with that approach, which is also the reason why we then extended it to repo, again, in the same format and then to short-term interest rate derivatives. Again, these are markets which are new for us, which are really building up markets, and that's where we deploy it. And I think we are very happy with what we've seen both in terms of partners that have signed up to the program, right? And are working with us, but also in the outcome and the incentivization that it creates for building liquidity and building distribution with clients. Now the last program, which I referred to today was around the credit index futures, again, a nascent market, right? Credit is more an OTC style market. And again, here, we are working with the large sell-side players to create a wrapper which is allowing to scale, right? You don't need sort of the [indiscernible] or the OTC-style contracts, but you can use a futures wrapper and at the same time, also create the sort of collateral margin efficiency. Again, a program which rewards early movers, helping us to build a sustaining liquidity pool and then sharing success for that. So that is the blueprint of what we are doing. And I think it is in the end to be summarized that we are really working closely together with our key clients as partners in building up new liquidity pools for Eurex.

So back to the room. I think Mike already raised your hand before second row at the end.

Mike Werner from UBS. Just a question on cost development, I guess. You're targeting 8% revenue growth and only 3% cost growth per annum, which is generating a tremendous amount of operating leverage. Maybe thinking longer term, we know that Deutsche Börse invested quite heavily 3, 4, 5 years ago under your predecessor, Jens. And I was just wondering longer term, is this something that you can continue? Or do you see kind of a longer-term investment cycle having to come back maybe even after '28?

Yes, absolutely. I mean that operational leverage journey has several elements, right? I mean, as I said, one element is the technological sphere and maybe Christoph wants to say a word on that, and then I would take up the investment part.

So Mike, thank you very much for that question. What we have done over the last, let's say, 5 years, we have moved away from vertical solutions. We have then implemented per business unit towards horizontal platforms. And this is where our partnerships kicked in. So what we did together with Google, with Microsoft and with SAP allowed us to create horizontal platforms. And the tipping point to really start benefiting from that is, of course, when the majority of what you do is sitting on such a horizontal layer. So 50% plus is the moment in time where the real benefit is kicking in. As you have heard earlier, we are currently at 75%. So we are in harvesting mode, so to say. What we see is that we have built once, deploy many situations. What we also see is that we get scale and speed time to market out of it. And with that comes a strong commitment towards further investments into new technology. And this time, it's different. We are no longer building foundations. This time, we are plugging in capabilities and especially when those capabilities are coming from our partners, it's fairly easy to plug this into the platforms because many of them are bringing prebuilt interfaces with them, allowing us to be super fast, bringing new technology into place. For example, when the rise of the large language models happened, and we wanted to get our hands on that, we plugged this into our cloud platforms. It was available rather quickly, and we could start benefiting from that. This is the approach, how the platforms are working out. And with this, back to you, Jens.

Absolutely. And I mean, from today's perspective, I wouldn't know why that should end at a certain point, right? I think what's very important is that, that's what we try to explain with this one group idea that we come a bit closer together as a group and really get those horizontal synergies out of that. And that has many components. It has organizational topics, but also certainly people topics. And maybe, Heike, you want to say one word on what we're doing there.

Super happy to. And I think the global people model you alluded to before is really one element for us to provide for scalability in using our global footprint. With the acquisition of SimCorp and also ISS, we already expanded our people pool into India, Philippines and lately Mexico, and we're just adding another global tech hub in India. So we really across these hubs together with our European hubs can really provide for additional scalabilities across the business lines, but also combining corporate center activities wherever it makes sense and really provide for additional efficiencies and provide to the 3% cost target with that.

Enrico, one row behind.

Enrico from JPMorgan. Can I ask a question on IMS. If you have to dissect the 16% ARR growth reported between maybe its key components, I'm thinking of pricing, upselling, maybe transition from on-premise to SaaS. Can you give us a rough idea of how growth could be split between these key building blocks? And if you think about the future, how do you think the split is going to look like?

Very good question. So if we start with what has been really kind of a key decision and a key movement since kind of 3, 4 years ago, was really to start to say now we actively start to discuss with our existing clients and moving to SaaS. Before that, it was primarily new clients coming through the door, but actively start to move our existing client base. And as you can imagine, over 2 to 3 years, we now got to 50%. So that's quite significant. I can say also to give a bit transparency, actually, some of the biggest clients moved first. So you actually moved some real sizable chunks on that, and that generates, obviously, ARR in a good pace. Then I would say, for quite a while, it's been very much driving existing clients and share of wallet. You could argue SaaS is also share of wallet. What has really happened in the last 2 to 3 years, we start to see a real uptick again and people that have followed SimCorp for many years would know that these things come from time to time. But we've seen a real uptick in the last 2 to 3 years of new logo generation, new clients that comes in, in particular, North America, but in reality, on a global scale. There is some pricing power built into it, but in all honesty, not a lot. We generally believe in driving these upgrades through value. But I would say, as we now build all of the things we built the last 3 years, Axioma getting in, et cetera, there's now another wave of share of wallet coming through predominantly product upsells and then AI on top of that. But I would say, because it shifts so much, there was certainly a period where SaaS was the biggest and the most dominating pace. Now I would say, the last 2 or 3 years, probably also going into the next couple of years, a lot of new clients. And then you will start to see an uptick in share of wallet again after that.

Are there further questions in the room? Starting back in the beginning.

You mentioned on the trading side, Agentic execution. And the first question that will be what is baked into your plan? Do you expect this to increase trading activity, for example? And then linked to that, you are often the primary market for many of the asset class. How do you think the data you generate is valuable? Can you charge more for that in the world or there's much more demand for data?

Thanks a lot for the question. And actually, I might think we are a bit obsessed on technology, but I think it is really a key shape of our industry going forward and been there for a number of years now. I think we have seen a lot of focus, for instance, on low latency strategies and then on algorithmic strategies. I think what we're now seeing is basically driving 2 angles. One is that we have more diversity of trading strategies if we look at Agentic AI, if we look at the processing of information, which is a good thing for us. If there's more diversity of trading approaches that normally leads, and that's the second factor that we are very much focused on more turnover velocity of how much turnaround there is in comparison to the underlying. We believe there is a fundamentally positive backdrop that we see in some of these assets in some of these markets, which is created by more technology application on the buy side. And that is -- I mean, this is a constant theme that Christian has laid out. There is more sophistication on many of the risk takers that we see, which are on the buy side, might it be the hedge funds or other players in there. So that is clearly a focus that we are running to now going forward and that we also focus on. And I mean, you referred to the data topic, focus topic, and that's also technology. So Chris could speak about that, but we have really launched a big program for moving our data stack into the cloud, into the mesh, allowing us to create much more analytics products going out for the players. So we have a marketplace now that we build a data marketplace, which allows commercialization of these data products in a much more -- with much more breadth on much more sophisticated channels than we did before. And that will, I think, create a positive backdrop.

I think there was a follow-up from Arnaud at the end of the first row. Ian, go ahead.

Ian White from Autonomous. Just one follow-up for me, please. Last week's proposals under the Savings and Investment Union called for growth competition and connectivity within the post-trade layer and CSDs. In that context, how do you think about the possibility to rekindle some of the aspirations you set out previously to act as a consolidator across European custody when we talk about both equity and fixed income?

Thank you, Ian. Very good question. And basically, as I laid out, I think we're very, very strongly positioned in that. Now we offer already today a consolidated pan-European platform that is very interoperable. But I would hand it over to Sam to quickly comment how our model compares to others and why we think we're very much compliant in that SIU thinking.

Thanks for the question. So I think if we go back a year, you will have seen an announcement that we had around NASDAQ joining our connectivity to T2S. And as Stephie outlined, and I think Stephan also touched on it, we're connected to all of the T2S CSDs, which means that the reality is that you don't need to go to the French CSD, the Italian CSD to be able to settle Italian or French securities. You just come to us. And NASDAQ actually is the investor CSD into all of T2S. So we give other infrastructure. So when we talk about consolidation, what we do as a service now today is provide other institutions, other financial market infrastructures, other CSDs, the ability to be able to connect to us and connect to the whole of T2S land. And that's a huge leverage when it comes to things like technology, innovation, all of the things that CSDs and particularly some of the smaller ones in Europe need to do as we move forward. So we think we're very well positioned to be able to help and support that agenda from a European perspective and already have many good use cases around it.

Maybe I'll pick it up and elevate it back in, thanks for the question because so many ask us, how does it come that Clearstream in its underlying momentum has changed so fundamentally. There's a number of those investments. And again, Stephie alluded that building these links was not for free. This was a multiyear journey. We stand there complete today. We are the only one complete today. And that's why I think the momentum we see, the incoming flows and Sam and the teams have done enormous work around that is really driven by that investments to have that full access. We have the direct access with many of the new brokers, many of the new players on the B2B side. We have that European network complete. Now all of that is getting very technical. So we don't dare to invite for the seminar. But on the other side, that is the engine that is really powering these underlying growth numbers, as Stephie showed. These are real transaction volumes that are underpinning this.

If I can, one aspect just to add. I think it's important because for the big sell-side institutions, the ability to be able to consolidate your access to T2S land gives you huge capital balance sheet efficiency. And we're already seeing that with the clients that are onboarded.

So this time it's Arnaud at the end of the first row.

Could you give us an update on your EUR 200 million revenue road map in fixed income to 2026 on [indiscernible]?

Should I start? Thanks a lot, Arnaud, for the question. And let me reiterate what I said earlier, we are fully on track to deliver on our fixed income road map, really happy with the momentum that we see accelerating across the cylinders that I highlighted earlier. And I think we're also seeing the positive macro backdrop for the fixed income business, which will further foster that business. If we look at the progress and if I go through in listed derivatives, as I said earlier, we had a new record this year, a new quarterly record. We see momentum building on the fixed income side. So there really, we see the contribution that is there kicking in, and it will continue, if you ask me going forward with the macro environment. If we look at the OTC clearing business, this was the year of onboarding, and that is, I think, the progress that we have seen there. And then we had the other cylinders repo and credit. And why don't I ask Robbert, who is the CEO of Eurex probably to briefly shed a bit more light on the overall progress there since you are out there.

Thank you very much, Thomas, and thank you for the question. And indeed, as Thomas mentioned, that the fixed income road map has multiple cylinders. I think to start with the fixed income ETD business there, we've seen tremendous growth over the last few years with this year, we're heading for a record EUR 950 million traded contracts. It's a very significant amount. And then when we zoom into the OTC IRS business, Thomas alluded on the high amount of clients that we have onboarded, but there is still very significant potential there as the clients that we have onboarded are subject to a mandatory requirement to start clearing a portion of their business on a European CCP. This year, we have onboarded over 600 European entities who are required to start clearing. The activation percentage of the 600 is at the moment still relatively low at 16%. So that means if we look into next year and the years to come for the feasibility of the fixed income road map that there is very strong potential that this business grows further. And we're in addition, supported by ESMA, by the regulator, who has mandated the clearing to take place. And in addition, we'll start a review next year to assess the compliance with these rules and assess if further measures need to be taken to address the objectives that they have in mind. But that's not only what we are focusing on, the credit index future is really a very strong new product. It's a core futurization product of an institutional swap market, which provides significant capital advantages as it's CCP cleared. We see a lot of clients who have strong interest in this, over 70 already now with double-digit growth numbers year-on-year. And we believe this is really one of the new products that we have launched now, which has a lot of potential. And then to complete the fixed income road map, one of the core components has been the repo product, which is a very instrumental financing product for our clients to transform their cash or their noncash into cash. So we've seen record volume figures now with outstandings of EUR 1.2 trillion in November, and we expect this growth to further continue as firms are seeking very capital-efficient financing opportunities. So we're very confident that we will achieve the EUR 300 million and seek further growth until 2028.

Yes. Thanks a lot. And I think just to conclude, when we use our term home of the euro yield curve, really the value proposition that we see is gaining traction is we are the only CCP where all these products can be cleared on the euro yield curve within one netting set within one margin pool. And that is the real proposition that will continue to expand going forward.

Great. Time for a final question. Otherwise, I would hand over to Stephan for some closing remarks. Thank you.

Thank you very much. Thank you very much, Jan. Thanks for preparing all of this to the teams. But most important, thank you for all of you taking the time today. We very much appreciate that you have dived deep into our business together with us. I said at the beginning, it's been a year full of singular events or asking about what's next quarter. We really appreciate the time by all of you here in the room as well as the ones on the screens. I hope what you take away is really the Deutsche Börse Group has changed over the last horizon strategy cycle very much in size and scope. It's a true champion on a European footing on a global scale. We are very true to our innovation focus. That's why you heard us talk so much about what is the coming world and not just what are we executing today. We are very focused on growth, secular growth, and I hope you have taken away the details behind the plans that we have. Those plans are not just until 2028. Yes, we will deliver 2026, but we have clear plans to '28. We believe the underlying growth journeys go far beyond that. That's what we laid the basis for. That's why we are so focused on Europe, on the new asset classes, on digitization. And all of that will do with a clear financial metric set. 8% growth on our fee-based revenues for the cycle until 2028, combined with 3% cost growth gives us a strong scaling profitability-wise and the cash flow capability, something that Jens emphasized that I come back to where we started the 2 days yesterday with the announcement of a more continuous buyback dynamic. We deeply believe that we can fund the organic growth, acquisitions as well as dividend and buyback dynamics and attractive shareholder profile. So we are truly ready for leading the transformation of capital markets, but also of leading the transformation of Deutsche Börse. And we will need to step up to realize all the benefits that we talked to you about. And I look very much forward together with the team here to not only do that, but stay in an active dialogue with all of you. Thank you for taking the time.