Flow Traders Ltd. (FLOW) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Good morning, everybody, and welcome to the 2026 Capital Markets Day of Flow Traders. My name is Dick Peters. I'm the Global Head of Corporate Strategy here at Flow Traders. And on behalf of the entire team, I would like to welcome you today in the room as well as online. Our schedule for today is the following: First, we start with our CEO, Thomas Spitz, who will present the over-group strategy. Then our Co-Chief Trading Officer, Alex Kieft, will talk about our traditional business and our strategic focus. Followed by Mark Jansen, our Co-Chief Trading Officer, who will shed more light on our digital asset business, the convergence to 24/7 markets and our strategic relevance in that space. We will then have a short 15-minute break, after which our CTO, Owain Lloyd, who'll tell you more about technology, AI and deep learning and how this continues to be at the core of everything we do and how it will enable our strategy going forward. I will then share guidance regarding our financial plan and the ambitions that we have going forward. Finally, we will have Thomas to wrap it up with the key highlights of today, after which we will open the floor for Q&A. Before we start, I would appreciate if you could review the disclaimer regarding forward-looking statements at the back of the presentation. With that, over to you, Thomas.

Thank you, Dick, and good morning, everybody. Good to see so many of you in the room, and good for all of you joining online. Thank you for the time you are giving us today. Today, we're announcing a set of decisions that will shape the future of the company. I would like to walk you through them upfront before we go into the details. We are committed to becoming the liquidity provider of choice in a 24/7 global financial ecosystem. The ambition sits behind everything you will hear about today. To deliver on that, we have set 5 priorities. We will expand and scale our retail business. We will continue to grow our digital asset franchise. We will expand into tokenized asset trading. We will build out our quantitative trading capabilities, and we are launching a frontier AI and planning division that will go live in 2027. And finally, we are building a unified 24/7 distribution model to meet the growing expectations of our counterparties. Alex, Mark, Owain and I will go into more detail this morning. Behind those priorities, the 3 financial levers that will drive value for our shareholders. The first is revenue growth by executing on the priorities I just described. The second is operational efficiency by building a leaner and more focused organization. The third is the acceleration of our trading capital expansion by continuing to grow the capital base. The initiatives you will hear about today are what will let us put that retained capital to work faster and at a greater scale. On the back of those 3 levers, we are announcing clear financial ambitions for 2030. Net trading income of more than EUR 1 billion, a return on trading capital of more than 50% and an EBITDA margin of more than 45%. Dick will explain the framework behind these numbers later this morning. Nine months into this role, I would like to mention 3 personal observations on why we believe this is the right plan at the right time for Flow Traders. Flow Traders is a remarkable business. It is profitable. it is global and it is technologically advanced. Over more than 2 decades, it has built a counterparty franchise and a trading platform that very few companies in the world can match. That was my first impression and it has been reinforced ever since. Then on the moment we currently live. Over more than 2 decades, we've seen the market growing at an accelerated pace. But at this moment, we are seeing one of the most consequential period of our industry and one that will reshape the entire foundation. Traditional and digital markets are converging. Trading in moving toward continuous 24/7 innovation operation. And the third is the pace of innovation. AI and [indiscernible] planning are reshaping our work, how we operate, but also how liquidity is provided. Each of these force matters. And together, we believe that will provide a significant redo of the financial market landscape. Flow Traders is well positioned for this transition but positioning is not winning. [indiscernible] in win, we need a clear strategy, a coordinated plan and the discipline to execute. Before I look forward, I want to spend a few minutes looking back. At our last capital markets, we set an ambition of EUR 1 billion of net trading income. We did not get there. We're also committed to expanding into fixed income and commodities at scale. We filtered there too, but we did deliver and deliver well on digital assets where we build a market-leading position on an institutional franchise that very few in this space can match. We continue to expand in APAC, growing revenue from EUR 55 million in 2022 to EUR 122 million in 2025. We did diversify the revenue base. But the overall scorecard is mixed. So the obvious question is, why should this time be different? The third difference is focus. Last time, we tried to do too many things at once. We spread ourselves to sing, and we delivered on to a few. This time, we have made a number of delivery choices Five priorities and a sharper focus on delivery and execution. The first -- the second is building from our strengths. The quantitative trading focus builds on 20 years of accumulated market experience and data. The distribution platform builds on a leading institutional network delivered by a strong and regulated firm. So tokenized asset capability built on what we already do every day in ETFs and digital assets. The third is the external environment I briefly mentioned. The force driving market towards 24/7 operations are real. There is also, as I mentioned, a significant reshuffling of the competitive landscape. It is fair to say that the big has become bigger. But the markets themselves are growing and changing fast enough that our scale, our strength and our plan will give us this capacity to execute successfully. Today, we have a strong foundation. We have a unique position between digital assets and the traditional ecosystem. We have a growing presence in high-growth markets. We have an institutional distribution franchise second to none. We have a global infrastructure spending a broad set of venues across multiple continents. And we have a growing capital base and a robust risk framework underpinning all of it. By 2030, we intend to have extended each of those foundations significantly. And it's true, the distant between 2030 and now is real, but the past is deliberate. The sequencing has been designed, and we plan to execute with a focus and a discipline that, to be frank, was not always present before. That is what gives us confidence in our ability to deliver. Let me come back on a few figures about Flow Traders today. We had over EUR 7 trillion of value annually. We cover more than 25,000 products. We connect to over 150 revenues, and we execute over 440 million transaction every year. That is the activity profile of a globally diversified firm. On the financial side, in 2025, we generated EUR 480 million of NTI. Our trading capital base stood at EUR 1 billion. And we delivered over 50% of return on trading capital and a 41% EBITDA margin. There are healthy metrics. They reflect a structurally profitable business. and they are foundations on which we are building our strategy. On our footprint, we operate offices across the globe. We have more than 600 people coming from 60 nationalities. We are not anymore a European business with institutional satellites. We are a genuinely global firm. Now I want to spend a bit of time on explaining the trends which is driving the market today. We are seeing a number of structural change going through the markets. ETFs democratized diversified and passive investing over the past 20 years. Tokenization is now doing something similar. It is moving traditional assets into digital infrastructure. It enables 24/7 trading. It enables instant settlement. And it will, we believe, broaden access to markets in a form that is cheaper, faster and more transparent for a much wider set of investors. Perpetuals are a clear example of an innovation [indiscernible] crypto that is now slipping into traditional finance. And over the past decade, the crypto market has trained a generation of investors and institutions to expect that anything should be credible anytime, anywhere. That expectation is now migrating to traditional assets. We are seeing growing demand for UCT ETF trading outside of European hours. New platforms, now let investor trade U.S. stocks in Asia, breeding the gap between market close and open. The investor base itself is shifting. A new generation of investor is comfortable with continuous market access. They even expect it. And as global events increasingly occur outside of traditional hours, real-time hedging and investing become less of a luxury and more of a requirement. And we have seen this pattern in other industries. In the 1990s, the conventional view was that nobody needed 24-hour, 24/7 news. Then CNN launch and news became always on. In the 1990s, the conventional view was that nobody would want to shop in the middle of the night. The number on launched and shopping became always on. In the 2000, the conventional view was that people would not want to be connected to friends every hour of the day. And Facebook launched and social interaction became always on. The 2020s, we believe, are the decade in which investing became always -- become always on. We are seeing the early signs already, and we expect them to accelerate from here. Regulation is moving in the same direction. In the U.S., you have the Genius Act preventing a stable on framework, the Clarity Act. In Europe, Mika now provides a clear regime for digital asset market participants and jurisdiction from Singapore to the UAE are competing towards tokenized securities. The technical constraint that historically made overnight market closures and necessity are also being removed. Cloud netting matching engines now alongside traditional revenues. NASDAQ, CME, ICE are all migrating their core system into cloud. The DTCC is moving its settlement into a T framework and is currently piloting [indiscernible] collateral for production this year. Stable coin rates are already setting tens of billions of dollars a day around the clock, with finality measured in seconds rather than days. And finally, AI and deep learning are reshaping the economics of liquidity itself. The same class of models that power Chatgpt now price thousands of correlated instruments in microsecond. The capture signals from filling new executor transactions or on chain data in real time, feeding them directly into pricing engines. Research cycles, we took weeks, now take hours. The result is more efficient price discovery, tighter spread and continuous coverage at the quality that was not available even 4 years ago. Owain will go much deeper into this later. So these are the force reshaping our industry. The question for us then become simple. What does it take to win in this environment? And we are building our answer on 6 pillars: research and technology, product, connectivity, distribution, trading and execution and risk and capital. This is a framework we use internally to assess every market opportunity and every investment decision. None of them is sufficient on its own and they're deeply interloped. Let me share with you my assessment of where we stand today against those pillars. What we have built and where we are focusing our investments. Starting on the established side, where we already operate at scale. We hold leadership position in both ETFs and digital assets. Position recognized by issuers, by investors, by the new and by our peers. We have a global connect infrastructure across every region in which we trade. We have a leading distribution franchise. And we have a mature risk management framework that has been tested across multiple cycles. Our focus now is to accelerate the scaling of our research and technology platform. And that will unlock several levels of growth. It will help us diversify our ETF business in regions where stronger quantitative capabilities are needed such as the U.S. It will support our growth in innovative ETF segment, such as active strategy. It will also build a genuinely new capabilities in quantitative trading that will allow us to deploy additional capital at scale into the opportunities that matter most. What I also would like to highlight is that we are not starting from zero on these dimensions. The deep learning division built on 20 years of market and research we have done. The distribution platform builds on an existing counterparty franchise. The tokenized trading capability being the ETF and digital assets trading where we already have a leadership position. For over 20 years, we have been the capability to profile liquidity even when entering markets are closed and is a strong added value for 24/7 trading. That reduces our execution risk significantly. In this slide, I want to show you how we bring our priorities together and give you a highlight of [indiscernible] capabilities, what's the focus and what are the choices. Our research and technology remains our highest priority. It is what unlocks growth across the entire rest of the business. It supports the latest innovation in ETF markets including deep learning models that improve how we read market movements. It led us under the exponential growth in data as the same underlying risk, increasing trades through multiformat and multiple revenues. And it is the foundation for a new deep learning division and our quantitative trading buildout. On product, we are expanding on several fronts. The ETF market has grown for 30 years on the back of passive index trackers, then sector and then thematic products. The fastest-growing segments, they are different, actively ETF with optionalities. On tokenized and digital assets, we are currently one of the very few market makers active at scale, both in traditional and digital markets simultaneously. That puts us at the center of one the fastest-growing ecosystem in capital markets, particularly in tokenized real world assets. On connectivity, our network has always been a strength. Strong revenue connectivity, combined with cross region, low latency infrastructure that we own and operate ourselves. Because to price consistently across markets and across time zone, you need to move signals between them fast and with high resilience. That is for structures in place and is well aligned with where markets are heading. On distribution, we are creating a unified platform across all relevant asset class, and I will come back to this more in detail. And on risk and capital, we are retaining and deploying capital with discipline for 2030. That [indiscernible] alongside structural cost rationalization, which frees up resources for growth. A quick word on capital because it's a very important matter. We took the decision to suspend the dividend for a simple reason. Because the economics of this business are clear. Every euro of retained capital redeployed into trading compound return on trading capital that has averaged about 50% over the past 2 years. Our trading capital base has become too narrow relative to the scale of the market in ourselves. Returning earnings is what has allowed us to remain competitive, and it will -- it is what will fund and support Horizon 2030. And these priorities will reinforce each other. Better research tightens pricing, tighter pricing at are more flow, more flow strengthened distribution, better distribution, open term more product. and all of it run on the same connectivity layer and the same capital base. They will also diversify our revenue base. Historically, our business has been too dependent on burst of very high volatility. The priorities we have set will generate more recurring and less correlated revenues. Quantitative trading, in particular, will contribute when markets are quite [indiscernible] I want to spend a few minutes on distribution specifically. Because I believe it is one of the most significant value drivers over the next 4 years. And yet from the outside, it is probably the least visible part of what we are building. Let me start off how the landscape is shifting itself. For most of our industry story, the distribution model was simple. The trading price of product execution happened through a traditional electronic channel or a long time ago by voice. And there was multiple layers of intermediation. That model is churning very fast. And there are several forces that are reshaping the distribution at the same time. The first is that institutional channels are deepening and diversifying. The buy side now expects multi-asset, multiprotocol access through simple interface. RFQ, IOI, streaming prices, [indiscernible] execution, connectivity to AP higher fixed, increasingly on a 24/7 basis. The ETF market is a good illustration of how far this has already gone. In Europe, around 70% of ETS volumes now trade off exchange through RFQ OTC revenues and with a growing number of retail and super apps now providing ETF to the retail base. The U.S. market remained exchange and ATS driven, but with relentless product innovation. APAC has been growing at roughly 37% per year since 2019 and is now a $13 trillion market. But the micro structure are very different from China to Korea to Japan, and as a liquidity provider, we need to cater for every one of those connectivity style. The second is a direct activation of retail. For decades, retail flow read the market with layers of brokers and banks, and that intermediation is collapsing. Platform like Ito, BitPanda, Revolut, TradeRepublic, Robin Hood in Europe or the U.S. Momo, Tiger, Weibo across Asia. All these platforms to do outflows that 5 years ago, that mostly with traditional brokers, high transaction count and very small [Audio Gap]

Our Asian baskets or from a European perspective, U.S. baskets. And if you want to trade domestic ETF successfully, you also need to trade the underlying cash equities at the same time. Whereas for international equity ETFs, you need to have global pricing models and global connectivity and that's where we are at the strongest. Also in the U.S., we've seen an explosion in those innovative ETFs. So the U.S., yes, it's a very competitive, but also a very large market and with growing pockets of opportunity where pricing excellence or product complexity can create an edge for us. Then in APAC. APAC is the fastest-growing ETF market from $2 trillion in 2019 to $13 trillion last year. That's a 37% CAGR. And within APAC, it's not one integrated market. Each country is its own ecosystem with our own participants and their own rules. The largest is China with over 79% trading in Mainland China. And within China, it's mostly money market funds, domestic equity ETFs and with a small but growing international equity ETF segment. Second largest market is Hong Kong where we have a very strong presence and where we have been recognized by the Hong Kong Stock Exchange as ETF market maker of the Year for 2 years in a row now. Third largest market is Korea, although this year, on the back of market strength in Korea, Korea has now taken the second spot in Asia. A notable absent in APAC in the ETF market is India. India has one of the world's largest derivative market, but they hardly trade any ETFs yet. So we believe this represents long-term opportunity as we do think that in the next decade, ETF adoption will rise in India as well. So in short, ETF market is different, but what they have in common is that they are all still growing and they all represent opportunities for us. And in this slide, I will show our position in each market. where we lead and what we're focused on to grow from there. So in Europe, we traded EUR 890 billion of ETF volume last year. And we are the largest ETF liquidity provider on European exchanges with over 30% market share. We have a 25% RQ hit ratio towards our counterparties and we get asked on over 90% of all RFQ inquiries. We have very strong issuer relationships. We often partner with issuers and we make sure that we provide prices at the launch when new ETFs are listed, and we have a very high ETF coverage. So this is a position of clear market leadership, and our job is to defend it and to deepen it. In the U.S., our post share is closed the gap. Last year, we traded EUR 898 billion, making this the largest margin by volumes, not by margins. And here, we are also a top 5 RFQ market maker with over 15% RQ hit rate. And in the international ETFs, where global pricing models create an edge for us, we hold a 15% primary market share, that means a 15% creation redemption market share, showcasing our strength also in the competitive U.S. landscape. Where we're closing the gap in the U.S. is in on-exchange trading. It's in domestic and in keeping up with the product innovation and making sure that we cover all those innovative ETFs. APAC has been our fastest-growing region, both by volumes and by revenues. And last year, we traded EUR 152 billion in ETFs. Here, we have one of the regional's largest RFQ franchises, and we also have a 25% ARQ hit rate in Asia. When it comes to China, we are now trading well over EUR 100 million in average daily trading volume, and that represents roughly 15% of our total ETF trading in APAC. In terms of our revenues, it is a similar order of magnitude. We have recently, in China, expanded our exchange connectivity and we also secured additional funding to make sure that we can keep growing in China. Then we come to U.S. overnight trading. This is the first proof point of traditional markets going to '24, 5 trading models. And we are seeing ATSs, and by the end of this year, also U.S. exchanges offering U.S. equities and ETFs on a 23-hour basis. And the biggest driver of that are the Asia APAC overnight trading house. And that's a very natural extension to our business, and we trade well over EUR 200 million every day in that time zone in U.S. equities and ETFs. So across all 3 regions, the direction of [indiscernible] is clear. We defend and deepen where we lead. We closed the gap where we're not yet at full potential, and we build and scale where the growth opportunity is biggest. So let me close this section by outlining the firm-wide strategic focus and how they apply to our traditional business. The 6 concrete pillars each for the clear focus and the clear outcome. So as Thomas said, the key initiative in our firm is in the research and technology bucket, and it's what we call internally the quant enablement program. It means that we will deploy the technology such that we can create systematic pricing at scale for both ETFs and our underlying such as fixed income or cash equities. And this will increase ETF profitability. It will grow -- help us grow our domestic ETF trading, and it allows us to develop new systematic trading strategies, both very short term but also medium frequency trading why we take a bit positions on our book a bit longer. Second is product. So #1, in product is that we will broaden our coverage to all innovative ETFs, such that we can be the first to price them when they launch and create the first mover advantage. And #2 is that we will develop capabilities to trade cash equities better as this will create synergies with our ETF trading as well as laying the foundation to tokenized equity trading. Number 3 is connectivity. So we are seeing a growing trend of off-exchange trading and also of bilateral trading. So the buy side increasingly demands technology directly into a market maker and streaming prices that they can execute. So we are developing that connectivity towards our counterparties. And second, we will take that a step further. We will utilize that technology and create a single unified multi-asset distribution platform like a single dealer platform to become the 24/7 liquidity provider of choice for our counterparties. The 5th is trading and execution. That's our APAC strategy. So we will continue to scale China. We will grow our U.S. overnight trading activities, and we will expand in other high-growth markets in APAC, whether that's Korea or in the long run, India. And this will directly result into increased revenues from the fast-growing APAC region. And finally, we will keep scaling our trading capital base and deploy towards a proven ETF business and the adjacent strategies while keeping the same risk mentality that we have built out over the past 2 decades. So D6, they're part of a coordinated plan. They're interlinked, they reinforce each other, and they are already underway. So it's not just a vision. So with that foundation said, I will hand it over to Mark, who will talk about the next wave of growth in digital assets and tokenization.

Thank you, Alex. So Alex just went through our ETF business, 20 years of building and still a lot of runway ahead I'm now going to dive into the digital asset business and how these 2 businesses are converging. We've been building for that convergence since 2017, in the next 25 minutes I want to show you 3 things. First, what we have built in digital assets. Second, why the timing is right and third, what we are going to do with it through to 2030. We have been active in digital assets since 2017, nearly a decade. And I want to start by grounding everything that follows in what that has actually produced. One in two crypto ETP trades in EMEA goes through Flow Traders. That's 50% market share. Cross tokenized real-world assets and market that barely existed 3 years ago, we already hold a 10% average market share across the markets with trade. Recovering over 1,000 products. Over 300 of them, we are commercially market-making right now. We are connected to more than 60 venues across centralized and decentralized exchanges. Twelve block chains, and we are doing over 300 million trades annually. Top [indiscernible] we have more than 350 active counterparties. As Alex showed you, the total revenue has more than doubled since 2019. What I want to add is what happens inside that number. Digital assets moved from 7% of total revenue to 24%. That's a structural shift in what this company is. But the more important story is the revenue split. We report 2 categories: first, trading revenue, what we earn from proprietary market-making, managing risks and clothing spreads. And second, our commercial revenue. That's the income we generate from being embedded in the digital asset markets itself. For our VC investments, our partnerships, our own chain infrastructure and our market making and token market making agreements. It's contractual, and it behaves differently from trading income. In 2019, our digital asset revenue was approximately EUR 15 million. Today, it is EUR 122 million. But the more interesting story there is not to growth, but it's what the revenue is made of. In 2019, our commercial revenue was approximately zero. Today, it represents 62% of of our total digital asset income. It's contractual, and it's less sensitive to day-to-day market conditions. One thing worth being transparent about on the total market banking side is that some agreements are compensated in the token itself rather than in Fiat. That creates a natural correlation with the outgoing markets. When tokens appreciates, we benefit. When they depreciate our compensation moves with them. We manage that exposure actively, but it's also a real feature of the revenue stream, and I want to be straightforward about that. So concluding, our digital asset franchise is large, profitable, diversifying and structurally improving in revenue quality. So that was the franchise. Now let me show you the environment it's operating in. Because whatever the short-term market conditions, the structural tailwinds behind this business are large and compounding. The 3 forces on this slide. First, the continued crypto growth. Since 2015, the global market cap has grown from $5 billion to over $3 trillion. That's a 9% compound annual growth rate over a decade. Even through the crypto venture in 2022, which tested conviction of the entire industry, the asset demonstrated resilience and recovered strongly. What has changed is the nature of the demand. Institutions are no longer dipping their toes in, they're allocating. For the coin base and institutional survey, 73% of institutional investors say they plan to increase the digital asset allocation in 2026. Not exploring it but actively increasing. And then institutional capital moves with that kind of conviction, it does just not grow the market. It transforms it. Secondly, digital asset growth and innovation. The honest picture is one of significant progress and significant distance still to travel. Regulated custody is live. Crypto ETF AUM has grown from $60 billion to over $180 billion in 2025. But prime brokerage capital-efficient clearing, institutional-grade netting, these are all still maturing. Prefunding is still the norm in digital assets. That gap will close. And when it does, the question is not rule benefits from better infrastructure because everyone does. The question is we entered that more mature market with 9 years of proprietary data, hundreds of institutional relationships and a platform that spans the full digital asset life cycle. You can't build 9 years of experience overnight. We didn't wait for the infrastructure. We built alongside it. And then third, and this is actually the number I want you to sit in with us, the tokenization of real-world assets. In 2022, the tokenized RWA market was approximately $3 billion. By the end of 2025, it has reached $36 billion. The forecast for 2030 is $5.5 trillion. That's 150x where it stands today in less than 5 years. This is the point where traditional finance and digital asset markets stop being separate conversations and definitively will converge. Tokenization enables 24/7 trading of traditional assets and fractual ownership at a scale the existing infrastructure simply cannot provide. Every major trend here on these slides is accelerating simultaneously. Our investment in this franchise is not ahead of the market, but it's validated by it. So everything I just described sounds like forward-looking thesis. So let me show you what has actually happened, most of it in the last 18 months. I have 6 facts here. Exchanges, CME crypto futures are already trading 24/7. The SEC approved NASDAQ for 23-hour trading in April this year. [indiscernible] is approved for 22 hours. On the asset manager side, BlackRock Franklin Templeton, Fidelity and State Street. They're all deepening their tokenization programs. The world's largest asset managers are moving on chain. And when they move, the market moves. On the end side, in March this year, the S&P Dow Jones officially licensed the S&P 500 for perpetual contracts on hyper liquids. The world's most iconic index is now trading 24/7 on chain for the first time in history. On the equity side, we see the same story all of it happening at the same time that doesn't happen by accident. Regulation, the Genius Act, the first U.S. Federal stable coin framework is signed into law. MiCA is live in Europe. The Clarity Act is advancing through the Senate as we speak. Regulatory clarity is not coming, it's arriving. Then on the rail side, the DTCC, the backbone of U.S. market settlements is now tokenizing stocks, ETFs and treasuries across multiple blockchains. When the DTCC moves on chain, the rest of the U.S. financial system will follow. So this is not happening in one corner of the market. It's happening across products, venues and regulators simultaneously. The shift to 24/7 on chain markets is no longer theoretical. The question is not whether it continues. The question is, who is ready when it scales? So why Flow Trades specifically? Because our 24/7 tokenized world, what the 24/7 tokenized world requires is not new to us. It is what we already do. It's applied to new and expanding set of markets. So let me go through that in -- with 6 different examples. First, tokenization is a market structure revolution. Like ETFs before it, tokenization makes existing assets more efficient to issue, trade and settle. Tokenized equities are already live, Tesla, NVIDIA, Apple, they are all trading on crypto venues today, pricing those tokens continuously tracking the underlying share hedging the existing exposure, managing them across close market hours. That's something we do every day inside our ETF business. The skills we have built over 20 years of ETF market making map directly on tokenized assets. We are positioned to be the liquidity backbone of this new infrastructure from day one. Second, we're an early mover of the tokenization is an early mover on the ETF adoption curve. We've seen this before early skepticism then institutional embrace. We were building ETF liquidity infrastructure before most institutions treated ETFs as serious instruments. When we started, the European ETF RFQ market did not really exist. We helped build it. We're in the same position in tokenization today, already active in tokenized real-world assets, while most firms are still writing internal memos about it. Our combined ETF and digital asset experience, positions us to lead as the market matures rather than catch on to it. Third, our ETF experience directly translates into tokenization, minting and burning of tokens is economically identical to ETF creation and redemption. Both are primary processes designed to keep the instrument aligned with its underlying. Think about, for example, BlackRock's BUIDL Fund, a tokenized money market fund on chain. The mechanism, keeping its price packed to $1 is the same arbitrage loop that keeps the ETF tracking its underlying index. Our core pricing mechanisms and liquidity skills apply from day 1 in any tokenized market. Tokenization is not a new market structure. It's the next evolution of one we already master. Fourth, 24/7 pricing is natural territory to us. This is already our core skill. As Alex mentioned, international ETFs are a significant part of our ETF trading revenues, and they never fully sleep. In Asian hours that might mean pricing and ETF with U.S. names in the basket, while the U.S. market is shut. We have spent 20 years answering the question, what is this asset worth right now, even though its primary market is closed. Tokenized assets simply extend that same challenge across more hours and more venues. Fifth, we're built for trading across fragmented venues. Look at the S&P 500, the world's most traded index. Wrapped into dozens of ETFs across the U.S., APAC and Europe in multiple currencies or multiple venues, we trade them all keeping the prices aligned across every wrapper in every region. That's our core business. The same index now trades 24/7 across crypto venues as well. As perpetuals on multiple exchanges and the tokenized products from issuers like [indiscernible] and [indiscernible] We built this capability over 20 years in ETFs and nearly a decade in digital assets. It answers directly. Then sixth, distribution is the next competitive mode. Tokenized markets will only scale with the connectivity to match. Issuers, institutional investors, exchanges, prime brokers, platforms, every participant in the tokenized market need a liquidity partner already plugged in to the rest of the ecosystem. We are that partner. Alex showed you our 1,300 ETF counterparties. Add to that, more than 350 on the digital asset side. And as the world moves to 24/7, we can scale continuous pricing and liquidity across that entire network. Same relationships, same infrastructure just extended around the clock. That network took us years to build. It's not something new. It's not something in new entrants replicates quickly. So we are not pivoting towards this opportunity. We are already operating inside it. Now let me show you where we are taking this. So this is where we are going. Traditional capabilities on the left, digital asset capabilities on the right, converging into a single unified platform. That's powered by research, technology and AI at its core. Five dimensions unified product, connectivity distribution, trading and execution and risk and capital. One platform, one relationship across any asset any venue, any hour. Think about what this means in practice. Continuous liquidity across the markets that matter, on exchange, OTC and on chain around the clock through one relationship. That is our target state, and the next slide will show you how much of it we have already built. So over the past years, we have been busy building and every layer on this slide is live and generating revenue today. This was not designed top down. It was built bottom up through 9 years of commercial activity, deal by deal, relationship by relationship and validated by the institutions that have adopted it. First, VC investments and partnerships. We invest selectively in the protocols and infrastructure projects that will define tomorrow's market structure. We get equity, we get tokens, and we get early access before these markets are established. That positions us as the preferred liquidity provider as those ecosystems grow, and it funds itself through capital appreciation and token returns. Second, unchanged support, we were [indiscernible] We deploy capital as value locked into D5 protocols. This generates revenue and keeps us embedded in the networks we also trade on. We are not just the user of these ecosystems. We are part of their functioning infrastructure. Then third go-to-market support our market-making mandates and token market making agreements contractual revenue from issuers and projects who have chosen flow traders as their long-term liquidity partner. If you take these 3 together, we see investments in partnerships, unchanged support and go to market, those form our commercial revenue base. It's contractual, and it's structurally different from trading income. This is what has changed the shape of this business. Then trading and liquidity. Our core across every relevant venue simultaneously on exchange, OTC, DeFi, on chain operating across both CFI and DeFi with the same risk framework and capital base. Most competitors are one or the other, but we are both. Each of these 4 layers is live. The next step which you will see in the strategic priorities is bringing them together into the unified platform I just showed you. That is the build. And what you see here is the foundation it sits on. Everything I've shown you, the franchise we have built the market tailwinds, the convergence already underway. The platform we operate today leads to 6 specific priorities that take this from current position to a fully unified 24/7 platform by 2030. On the research and technology side, we're applying AI and deep learning to data sets no other firm has. Our own TIC data, order book data, on chain data across CFAD accumulated over 9 years of active trading across 60 venues and 12 chains, better models from better data means better pricing, which means better spread capture and stronger trading revenue. That compounding advantage grows with every trade. The product side, the RWA market is forecast to reach $5.5 trillion by 2030. That is the opportunity. We are already trading crypto tokenized assets and perpetuals today. The work now is expanding coverage as the market grows. On the connectivity side, as traditional and digital asset markets converge, the infrastructure connecting them has to keep up. We are building unified, low latency connectivity across traditional and digital asset values, one network, one infrastructure layer serving both markets simultaneously. On the distribution side, the network is built. The platform is live. The priority now is integrating it into a seamless franchise from token lounge and primary issuance through to secondary liquidity so that every counterparty accesses everything through one relationship. On the trading and execution side, we are already netting digital assets and traditional exposures through a central risk book on a 24/7 basis. That gives us a structural advantage in a converging market, better capital efficiency, better hedging and ultimately, better pricing for counterparties. We remain a regulated firm with capital transparency, no crypto native competitor can match. As institution, no flows as institutional flows into digital assets grow in size and seriousness being the counterparty that Boards and risk committees can improve without reservation is a hard commercial differentiator. So we started building in 2017. Most of our peers did not. That head start shows up in every metric on these slides I showed you. And it compounds with every trade, every relationship and every year of data. Now we scale it. And with that, we will pass for a 15 minutes break. [Break]

Good morning, everybody. So for the next 20 minutes, I would like to take you to the frontier of trading research and show you how the same technology that's behind the AI revolution is being used by the world's leading market makers to transform traditional ways of extracting alpha from markets. Our conviction is simple. Over the next few years, deep learning will become the method that drives liquidity provision. And Flow Traders is building these capabilities now. Let me start with a statement of principle. Technology is not a support function of Flow Traders. It is a large part of our competitive advantage. And now AI and deep learning are central to our 2030 strategy. The way I look at it, there are 5 forces that are reshaping the research that drives our industry. First, research velocity. Machine learning creates a continuous feedback loop dramatically accelerating the pace at which we identify, test and improve trading strategies. The firm iterates the fastest compounds its edge fastest. And to be clear, alongside these frontier deep learning capabilities, we're also building the tools and the infrastructure to bring data-driven research to our existing core trading. Second, is obviously the application of AI and deep learning itself. And here, the trajectory is clear from the original linear heuristic models of 20 years ago, through machine learning and feature engineering and now on 2 large neural networks. It's a natural increase in complexity, and it's changing how the best liquidity providers operate today and it will define who leads tomorrow. Third is an increased and more diversified opportunity set. So AI enables execution strategies to be more tailored towards the counterparty segment or the instrument type or by local liquidity pool. So a broader, more diversified set of opportunities across many dimensions than traditional market making alone. Fourth is increased market efficiency through this, more accurate price discovery and tighter spreads do 2 things at the same time. they improve the quality of service for our counterparties, and they sharpen our competitive position against our peers. And fifth, this is like all the types of data that need to be sucked in to build the models. Advanced Systems now integrate diverse, unstructured data sources to identify hidden market signals more accurately than traditional price feed methods ever could before. And they allow us to combine both high frequency and mid-frequency predictions together in our core strategies. So the message that I want you to take away from these 5 principles is that AI and deep learning are really fundamental to how liquidity provision will be done by 2030. And Flow Traders is well progressed on that journey. So let's look at like how we're investing against the shift, and I'll show you the structure of our technology strategy. It's really in 2 parts. And the first we call the Quant enablement of our trading. And this itself has the 3 pillars, 3 parallel approaches. Firstly, improving the existing business, then opening up new markets and finally, preparing for the future. So I'll explain each of those in a little bit more detail. So the first part is about extracting most value from our existing [indiscernible] business. So we apply a rigorous data science approach to fully optimize what we already do. So having pricing model, every execution algo -- and I mean, maybe it's easier if I give a bit of an analog from outside of our industry. So if you think of these sort of like direct to consumer brands, you see like advertising on social media feeds. So I'm thinking like sunglasses or the thin wallet or whatever. So that is like the most traditional business model you can think of. You make a product in Asia and you sell it worldwide. But the winners that we see that, you're aware of, that's why you're aware of them because they're winning, they use data science to optimize every step of that process. So placement, the promotion, the pricing, the timing, the logistics they basically ring every possible last time out of that traditional model. So this is what we're doing with our core ETF market making. The business model has already proven and moated and the data science ensures that we extract every basis point from it, beginning with the lowest hanging fruit. The second pillar there is think of it as the offense. So we take the same internally developed quantitative tools, and we just point them towards new market opportunities. So these are the opportunities that are only addressable with a quantitative approach. So essentially, the tooling that we built to optimize the core becomes the research engine powering the expansion beyond ETFs. And lastly, the preparation for the future. AI and deep learning, the frontier. A dedicated division built from a clean sheet without legacy constraints. Its purpose is to conduct frontier, deep learning research and monetize it through proprietary trading with a go-live of 2027. So this is our most significant and most differentiated technology investment to date. And as such, I'll spend a lot of the next 15 minutes introducing you to it. A parallel purpose of this on the other side of the slide here is the business process automation for efficiency. So we're deploying agentic AI solutions to streamline the processes across the whole organization in every department. And this matters financially because it's how we recycle savings into strategic investments rather than simply extracting them as margin. And Dick will pick up on the financial mechanics of that later. So in summary, this is a coordinated 4-pillar technology strategy that simultaneously improves our core, unlocks our future and funds the efficiency gains needed to do both. So let me focus on how quant research translates directly into our trading capabilities. And we'll get a bit more specific about the techniques that impact our business. There are 5 strategic objectives that form a self-reinforcing feedback loop and show how the qualitative research and technology translate directly into trading advantage across all products and all markets. Starting by systematically optimizing the trading logic. We continuously refine execution algorithms, pricing models and market-making parameters. The goal is to remove the human bias and embed best practice decision-making directly into our systems. Again, a useful analogy, I think, is if you think about an airline cockpit, the best response to any given the situation has already been studied in advanced and agreed and coded into the system and into procedure, and it happens the same way on every flight, whether the pilot is fresh or exhausted. That's what we're doing to our trading logic. So we take the best decision at our Shoppers trader can make. And after testing it for months on months or years of data, we embed it. So there's no fatigue, no mood, no bias. The next is to be able to accelerate the research velocity and make it self-reinforcing. So the faster we move from a research idea to a live strategy, the more iterations we can run, the better the edge. Shortening this cycle is itself a structural competitive advantage and it compounds. The feedback loop is the point. Every live strategy generates more data that is used to further improve it. And I think we've discussed data on pretty much every slide in the deck. So using all the available data, we integrate every source to form a combination of genuinely private data sets combined with high-quality market data from every market across assets to form the most complete picture of the fair value and we use it to optimize risk management, dynamic quantitative hedging of our trading strategies, responding to market conditions in real time. the most profitable firms out there understand that better risk management is not a constraint on returns. It's a source of them because you can take more opportunity for the same risk budget. And then leveraging AI and deep learning at scale. So applying these frontier machine learning techniques across our full product universe systematically and at production scale. So the message I want you to take away from this is that quant research and technology are not separate from our trading business. They are integral to the engine. Every improvement that we make to the research platform translates directly into better execution, better pricing, better returns. So now going to dive even deeper and give you a window into why this R&D is really so exciting and so critical. The competitive landscape is changing rapidly. So we observe now that the AI native firms are the ones emerging to disrupt traditional market making. And we're meeting this head on. First, the market reality. AI-native liquidity providers are growing at a rapid pace. And they're investing heavily in the key enablers of their business model, namely talent, compute, data and hardware. So the conclusion, I think, is unavoidable, the liquidity providers that do not evolve over time will become obsolete. So we see this emerging in our competitive environment even today. So investing in AI and deep learning is crucial to future-proofing our business model. So our response to this after 2 years of hard work, I'm excited to publicly announce today the Flow Traders deep learning division going live trading in 2027. It's built on the same 4 enablers, and I want to take you through each of those in a bit more detail now relative to us. So I think most importantly is talent, effectively monetizing these advanced techniques does remain a hard problem. -- There's no panacea of just deploying these prebuilt tools. So across disciplinary team are bridging quantitative finance, deep learning and systems engineering drawing people from world-class institutions such as NVIDIA DeepMind. So this combination is rare and it's deliberate. Frontier AI researchers is only monetized when it's connected to deep market expertise and domain-specific production-grade research engineering. We all know how important compute capacity is, training these complex models at scale and at speed requires serious processing power. So again, I'm excited to announce here again for the first time that we've secured this through a dedicated partnership with the largest pure-play AI, Neo Cloud Core weave. They provide the infrastructure backbone behind most of the Frontier AI labs. And this gives us this GPU infrastructure of an AI-native firm without the capital intensity of building the compute ourselves. So carewave if you like, they're the closest thing the market has for a pure bet on AI compute scarcity. Thirdly, data again. We ingest and clean massive amounts of market data, including from alternative sources. And crucially, again, we layer this on top of our proprietary private data estate that costs no shadow on public data, and it's this a state that's an accumulating advantage grows every day that we trade. And lastly, the hardware market making is one use case that we -- it happens in microseconds or less. So we're deploying specialized infrastructure from GPUs on one end to FPGAs and even low latency ASICs to run real-time inference at the latency at this business demands. So the message here is that we're -- and I think this is important that we're not retrofitting AI into a legacy system. So we're building this purpose-built frontier set of capabilities from the ground up. And that 2027 go-live is a commitment, not an aspiration. So what are we going to do with these capabilities? I think it's worth exploring a little bit the opportunity space. And this slide sort of illustrates the multidimensionality of that space that can be explored by the deep learning quant research capabilities to navigate and find opportunities within it. So it spans asset classes, ETFs, equities, fixed income, digital assets, product types, strategy types, market making, stat information sources, the data, also time horizons. So we can be from seconds to days and also crucially, the distribution, so on exchange, OTC, on chain. But the -- before I get to scary, the really important point is that -- and I want to be really clear on this, is that we're not trying to be everywhere at once now. So our approach is systematic and selective. We're now able to identify these intersections where our data advantage and our domain expertise and the technology capabilities combine and create the highest probability of sustainable edge. But what makes us compelling over time is that as our research platform matures, the feedback loops accelerate and the number of viable opportunities within this space, expands organically through all of these dimensions. So the opportunity set essentially compounds with our capabilities. The key point here, I think, is that we have this clear disciplined approach to alpha generation across the expanding opportunity space and the technology infrastructure that we have to execute at scale which brings us probably to the most important question for you listening is what is it about Flow Traders specifically that we think we can win in this space. And I think there are 4 very concrete answers to that. Firstly, it is this clean sheet architecture. So the value of this definitely should not be underestimated. So unlike the incumbents who are retrofitting more modern research techniques on to the legacy quantitative research systems, which may have been around for 10, 15 years and gone through 3 or 4 iterations of architecture. Our research platform is architected from the ground up for the latest generation of tools. And if anybody has any experience in technology, you'll know the sort of structural advantage comes from not having legacy debts. So this is something that capital alone cannot replicate. You can't buy your way out of a legacy stack. This puts us in a unique place relative to each and every one of our significant competitors today. Next is the data that compounds. So years of executing thousands of instruments and counterparties as genuine -- has generated this genuinely private data set. So you saw the over 90% RFQ observability within EMEA. This is our own trades, our own orders, our own timing data. And combined with the ongoing high-quality market data from every venue that we trade all around the world, this training foundation becomes more powerful with every trade that we do. This, again, can't be purchased. It can only be accumulated through active participation in markets. Next is the domain expertise to be used as a research accelerant. So this deep ETF market expertise that's native to the flow gives us strong prior. So we can cut down the research search space and shorten the time to market in ways that pure technology firms can't replicate. This also reduces the compute cost of doing so because we know where to start looking and what to ignore. So I'd like to think of this in terms of like the oil exploration industry. So if imagine you've got like 2 teams with the same rig and the same budget and one of them goes out and drill 100 wells with the state-of-the-art drilling equipment and hoping to strike. The other one reads the seismic data and drill 3 holes. So same capital but completely different returns because one team knows where not to dig. So our ETF experience is the seismic survey. And it tells us where to point the compute where we're not just burning up dry holes. And finally, I think it's the approach that focused beats broad. So rather than competing across all markets, we concentrate these frontier capabilities on specific instruments and venues where we know we can generate superior signal from the same tools. So focus creates the depth and depth creates the edge instead of spreading the resources to thin, which produces mediocracy everywhere. So to wrap up, the edge that we have is not just one thing. It's for that reinforce each other. And the timing also matters. As the advantage shifts to what money you can't buy, proprietary data, domain expertise and a clean platform, that's exactly where we are strong. So yes, it's been my pleasure to share my excitement with you. And with that, I'll hand back to Dick, who will talk about how this adds up.

Thanks, Owain. Now let's bring it all together from a financial perspective. Throughout today, you have heard how we're building the 24/7 liquidity provider of choice. What I want to do in this final section is translate that strategic ambition into a clear financial framework and show you exactly how that converts into value creation. I will walk you through our financial strategy, discuss the key value levers and what that implies in terms of financial ambitions. Furthermore, I will update you on our disclosure and how we want to provide a more comprehensive view on Flow Traders. I hope these insights will give you a clear picture of how our strategy translates into financial performance. With a new and seasoned management team in place, ready to execute on the strategy presented today, we want to emphasize our commitment to delivering increased value creation. To that extent, we put forward a financial framework that, on the one hand, illustrates a level of ambition and on the other hand, is grounded in solid financial planning in combination with realism. We've defined 3 clear levers that constitute our financial framework to deliver sustainable growth. The first one is revenue growth executing on the strategy presented today is imperative to deliver revenue growth that underpins our value-creation narrative. The second is operating leverage. Continued focus on operational excellence is crucial to be able to deliver and create the operating leverage that we need, and we also believe we possess as an organization. The third one is capital expansion. With our trading capital expansion plan in place in July 2024, we've been able to materially increase our trading capital base which is fundamental to driving growth across all parts of our business. For that reason, we continue to focus on driving and accelerating capital expansion to support the strategic ambitions as presented today. We truly believe that the combination of these 3 value levers will drive sustainable growth for Flow Traders and deliver value for our shareholders and other stakeholders. Let me now provide you more color on the 3 value levers. While we recognize that our NTI potential has not been fully realized in recent years, we continue to believe that the implementation of our trading capital expansion plan in combination with the strategy presented today, enables us to achieve our 2030 financial ambition of at least EUR 1 billion NTI. It's the expansion of our ETF franchise across products and markets, the build-out of our digital asset business and tokenized asset trading, the buildout of our quant trading capabilities in combination with a unified 24/7 distribution model, which are the key factors of our growth. That, in combination with the leadership team, delivering on our strategy is the foundation of achieving our 2030 NTI ambition. If we then go into our EBITDA margin development. Besides 2023, our EBITDA margin has been relatively stable, highlighting our ability to actively manage our cost base despite elevated inflation that we've seen in '22 and '23. Since 2025, we have actively increased our technology expense and added relevant subject matter experts to build and grow our business. Even despite this increase in fixed OpEx in 2025, we have again been able to maintain a solid EBITDA margin of around 40%. It's clear that our fixed OpEx will continue to grow over the coming years, in line with the strategy presented today. But we want to reiterate that we remain laser-focused on unlocking greater operational efficiency from our whole organization to drive the operating leverage in combination with targeted investments. With that, we intend to demonstrate that active cost management and facilitating growth can go hand in hand, achieving our second 2030 financial ambition of an EBITDA margin of 45%. Then the question is how do we intend to actively manage our cost base. On the one hand, we've identified 3 cost levers we intend to take decisive action. On the other hand, we're focused on business process automation. Now looking at the cost levers. The first cost lever is our workforce. We're focused on upskilling our people to deliver on the strategic priorities as presented today, while also optimizing the overall workforce composition. We're focused on both elements and initial actions have been taken. While this is an ongoing process. The second lever is our technology cost. We're conducting a rigorous review of our technology cost base, identifying where we can control and we can optimize particularly in the areas of AI and cloud. The third lever is our other expense category. This category captures a variety of costs and we will apply stricter cost control to actively manage and optimize these costs. Besides the identified cost levers, we're also focused on business process automation. To advance our efforts in that area, we have recently hired a new Global Head of Data, AI and automation to drive change as flow traders and support the management team in creating a more efficient and lean organization. ready to deliver on a strategic agenda. With business process automation, we focus on 3 core elements. The first one is process understanding. We will map and analyze all workflows across the organization to identify any inefficiencies and opportunities to automate. Secondly, the latest AI tooling we will deploy AI agents to eliminate any repetitive work and free up capacity for higher value work. Intelligent automation using AI tools to accelerate every team at Flow Traders from document processing to regulatory monitoring. The key concept here is cost optimization. The savings we generate from these different initiatives are reinvested in our strategic priorities as they have been presented today. This is how we intend to fund our growth ambitions without material cost going forward. The third lever is our trading capital framework. Our trading capital framework is the foundation to accelerate growth and increase value creation. Since introducing our trading capital expansion plan in July 2024, our trading capital base has increased by 75% to EUR 1.1 billion, partially driven by the $200 million private credit facility. It's this increased trading capital base and a disciplined deployment that provides us with the financial firepower required to grow our business. The deployment of our trading capital base across these various strategic initiatives is done in a disciplined and economic manner to be able to achieve the maximum return. The buckets to which we can deploy a trading capital base at the following. We can add trading capital to trading desk to structurally grow these desks or enable them to capture opportunities in the market as they arise. We can expand our business into new strategies, such as quantitative trading as discussed today. We can invest in technology capabilities, talent required to structurally build out our business. And lastly, we can allocate capital to value-accretive inorganic growth to the extent they complement and accelerate our strategy as presented today. Given that we see sufficient growth opportunities at appropriate return levels, our current dividend and capital distribution policy remains to reinvest all profits back into the growth of the business. The continued buildup of our capital base is expected to further accelerate our growth trajectory. As we continue to deploy our capital to NTI generating opportunities. These elements constitute our trading capital framework and illustrate that it's not just a financial mechanism but it's the foundation of our strategic execution, which results in compounding value creation. Now let's bring it all together with our financial ambitions for 2030. We will focus on 3 key metrics to drive our financial performance. The first one is net trading income or NTI. The second is return on trading capital or ROTC and the last one is EBITDA margin. These financial ambitions are grounded in solid financial planning and aligned with the strategy and trading capital framework we presented today. They demonstrate our ambitious yet realistic view of our business and the opportunities ahead. Let me take you through them one by one. The first one NTI. Our Q1 2026 LTM NTI stood at around EUR 500 million, and we expect it to grow to at least EUR 1 billion by 2030. As also highlighted by Alex earlier, this reflects the combined effect of the strategic priorities we discussed today. It's an interplay between all those initiatives. Secondly, return on trading capital or ROTC. Our most recently reported RTC is 53%. As we continue to scale our business and grow our NTI, it's our ambition to achieve an ROTC of at least 50%. Lastly, our EBITDA margin. Given our NTI ambition, the continued focus on operational excellence, we target an EBITDA margin of at least 45% by 2030. Then in terms of the trajectory on how we will get to this 2030 ambition levels, we foresee that 2026 in the first half of 2027 will be a transitory period where we will not yet see a material uplift in NTI as we expect the NTI benefits of our strategy and our investments to come through from the second half of 2027 onwards. We expect our 2026 fixed OpEx to end up above the communicated range of EUR 220 million to EUR 230 million due to nonrecurring items and further investments in our technology. These nonrecurring items are driven by the decisive action that we've taken to date, and we continue to take. For that reason, we update our 2026 fixed OpEx guidance to EUR 235 million to EUR 245 million. These financial ambitions in combination with the guidance provided regarding our financial trajectory to provide you with the near to midterm visibility of our financial planning. Lastly, let's talk about disclosure. Let me address how we intend to communicate against the strategy and ambitions presented today. We will have clear and comprehensive disclosure in line with what was put forward today. To provide a more comprehensive view of our business, we will split NTI across traditional and digital assets. The data we provide on our traditional business, as you know it, will remain in place and the data will be complemented with very specific digital asset data that could be used as a proxy for digital asset revenues. Given that we're well aware that our business continues to evolve, we will keep you updated if we deem other metrics more suitable for estimating our NTI. We will provide half year reporting, including progress updates on our strategy as presented today. And in addition to that, we will provide quarterly trading updates. With that, I would like to hand it over to Thomas to discuss the key highlights of today. Thank you.

Thank you, Dick, and thank you, everybody. It has been a long morning. It has been the morning, a hopeful of information. And it has been a morning where we've tried to show you a few things. First of all, our conviction about how the markets are changing. And now we want to benefit from that. The evolution of the ETF market, the evolution of the digital assets, the adoption of tokenized and real-world assets, the buildup of quantitative trading the development of a new generation of investors. The convergence between a digital infrastructure and a traditional infrastructure. It was important for us to spend a bit of time to explain to you that landscape because in fairness, it's a complex landscape. And we see that from our standpoint, a lot of our biggest trends. The knowledge we have accumulated during 20 years of ETF market making and 10 years as a digital asset expert has really helped us understand and embrace those changes very early in their cycle. I also hope that we have made clear where our ambitions fit into that picture. How we want to build from 20 years of market making in traditional markets and close to a decade in crypto. How the long-term commitment we have provided to our counterpart is now positioning us to build that into the one Flow Traders commercial initiatives. How our research and technology focus will not only accelerate our existing business, but to the area where we are going to be quantitative, deep learning and appropriate trading capabilities. But also how growing the capital base will let us take more risk and participate into more actively into more -- sorry, more actively in larger transactions and in other bigger markets. As I mentioned at the beginning, we are also aiming to build a revenue base that is less dependent on large spikes of volatility. That [indiscernible] , where a lot of these initiatives will come into place as this strategic plan is evolving. We want to make Flow Traders, not only highly successful in highly volatile market, but we want to make Flow Traders as a reliable source of NTI generation even where markets are quite quantitative trading, commercial activity, partnerships are going to be key into that focus. I also hope that we made clear that we have a plan, we have a core plan. a plan in place, but more importantly, our focus on execution. Having a clear vision is necessary, but it's by far not sufficient. My focus, the focus of the leadership team and the focus of everyone in this company is going to be around execution. Dick said it earlier, and I want to repeat it, we are fully focused on delivering well delivering fast and delivering at scale. And now before I close, I would like to acknowledge the work of our team. None of this happens with other people of this firm. The 600-plus colleagues across our offices around the world, engineers, traders, researchers, operations, risk, finance and beyond. They are the reason why Flow Traders is what it is today and the reason why it will be successful in the future. So to the team, I say thank you. To our shareholders, our counterparties and our partners, thank you for the trust you have placed in us. We do not take it lightly. I'm genuinely excited about what the next 4 years hold for Flow Traders. Horizon 2030 is about turning a position we have built into a delivery and into sustained value creation for everyone who has invested into this company. With that, Dick will open the floor to questions. And thank you very much.

Okay. Thank you very much, Thomas. Now I'm going to invite everyone back on stage. So I will moderate this session. You can ask a question by raising your hand, and there are 2 microphones on each table. So I know it's not a big room, but for the people on the webcast, it's helpful if you use the microphone when asking your questions. Okay. Yes, Julian, please go ahead.

Thanks for the presentation to all of you, really insightful. I have a couple of questions just to kind of not take up the whole time. I'll probably do it in different rounds. But to start with 3 questions. On the financial targets, they look ambitious, clearly. And I think it's -- I mean, it's pretty -- you've kind of got to play really cautious, I guess, but also aggressive at the same time, rollout of the strategy, just to hit milestones given the fact that I think some of the previous financial targets were kind of missed. But I just wanted to first start with the OpEx. If you're looking at the NTI kind of implied growth your EUR 1 billion, it's about 16%, according to my mouth from the 2025 level. EBITDA that's about 17% CAGR, which would have sort of implied an OpEx growth of just below 16%, so let's call it 15% CAGR. Just wondering if you can kind of unpack that to me seems high, but if you could kind of speak about what are the building blocks of that where can you see a bit of upside to perhaps maybe limit to only 10% CAGR. So that's on the OpEx growth over the medium term. Then on the NTI split, highly appreciating the -- let's say, willingness to share incremental disclosure on especially the crypto part of the business. But looking back on 2025 figures or actually, what is it, Q1 '26, the last 12 months' numbers, I'm just wondering if you could split also the profitability of the traditional and digital assets. And then also, if you look at the EUR 1 billion target for 2030, just wondering if you could share something about the NTI mix across the market making and the recurring part of the revenue base, which would like to scale up. But also if you can have a sort of a bit of a view on how much the mix would look between the traditional part of the business and also in the digital assets part of the business?

Clear. In terms of the OpEx growth, indeed, I think your estimates are in -- it depends where you start, right? If you started Q1 because then the numbers look a bit different versus when you started full year. I think what we've tried to lay out is exactly the point that we're trying to achieve is the operational efficiency, right? Given where we are in terms of our latest -- if you look at full year '25, our EBITDA margin was 41%. As we drive the growth of our business, what we try to do is strike a balance with our targets set. We try to strike a balance between a number of things. One is how do we optimally use our trading capital, right? So that's the ROTC. So what's the optimal application of that deployment. Secondly, when we do so, do we do it in a way that we can actually scale it? So what's the scalability of the trading and the NTI? And thirdly, what is the scalability of the organization. So that's the EBITDA margin. And as I mentioned before, we're well aware that our OpEx base has increased. And as we announced today, also the guidance for this year is increasing. And if you take that into account, I think it's important to be mindful that we are very focused on that and managing that OpEx space, and that's something that's also top of mind for us. So I think that may be question one. In terms of the NTI split on the profitability, that's something I can be pretty sure that's something we don't disclose at this point in time at least. Only the NTIs with [indiscernible] the profitability. And maybe to give you a bit of guidance on the NTI mix to 2030. I think what's important to add to your question is that, when we look at the NTI mix and the NTI ambition that we have for 2030, it's -- we're not going to depict exactly what sits in there if it's traditional DA. But I think what is important to understand and also going back to the point that we made on realism in combination with ambition is that what Owain discussed in terms of the AI and deep learning division that will go live in 2027, that's not part of that number, right? And I think it's important to understand because it goes back to your question on OpEx, right? We are currently already making the investments in that business. We're seeing that back in the current OpEx. But when you look at the ambition for 2030, that EUR 1 billion does not yet reflect that or doesn't reflect it at the moment. Yes, if you could use the microphone.

Hilco smart at Belfond. First, thanks for the presentations. It was quite helpful, a lot of data and information. We have a few questions. First of all, about your AI division, Deep learning division. You put a lot of effort in it. You started with a clean sheet will be live in 2027. But can you tell us how many people are now involved. But do you need how many talented people, you mentioned already was the most important thing is talent. How can you attract talent for that division? How many people do you still need and how many you already mentioned that the OpEx will go up? How many money do you need to finally get the division live? And what can we expect for after 2027? And the competition is fierce. AI is the future also for liquidity providers, confirms, et cetera. So beyond 2027, what can we expect about that?

Yes. So 2 questions. Firstly, on the costs and the scale, we're not disclosing the exact quantum, but other than to say that it's appropriately scaled and comfortably affordable. Same goes for the size of the population. It's a relatively small team. They are like extremely high-performing individuals from a broad variety of backgrounds. And I think to address the question about how we plan to attract people. I mean it's the same answer as how we have attracted people with diverse backgrounds to the core business and also to the deep learning division already. And I think it's -- I mean, the value proposition is to not be a small cog in a big wheel basically. So talent follows a focused mission rather than like the biggest balance sheet. So that's worked for us so far, and we would expect that to continue to work for us. And then in terms of, I think, the -- what shape it takes after 2027, it's when Chat GPT was released, like everyone at OpenAI didn't go home, right? So it starts off with a proven workable profitable use case. That's when it goes live and they continue to work on it and it continues to grow and improve and explore that multidimensional opportunity space. But I think the key thing is that we think of it at the moment as [indiscernible] the core business.

And what can you tell us about the new partnership you today announced with core...

Yes. So I mean the compute is an input. It's not where our edge lives. Our differentiation is the proprietary data, the domain expertise et cetera. So we -- this compute is what we think is the best solution to providing that input right now, but it's not a dependency. So architecting ourselves into anyone's proprietary stack. So if we needed to, we could move and it's the best choice for us right now as we are building. to sort of guarantee that availability of compute.

About your stack, your data stack here, you have your own proprietary own data in-house, but do you use also large language models from Entropic cloud, et cetera, are you agnostic?

So we use those models for the core business efficiency pillar. For the deep learning side of finance, you can think of it as anthropic open AI models are their foundational models and refined post-train models for language. So they predict the next language token. We're building foundational models based on financial data. So we're building those models from scratch. And the scale of them is -- varies depending on the use case between language and financial data, but we're basically repeating that process from scratch.

And how confident are you -- if you look at your fierce competitors, just like Jane Street to keep that advantage in AI?

Yes. So I mean that's an interesting point. And I think it's been acknowledged by the -- I think there's probably like 2 or 3 firms that are well monetizing these techniques already, and acknowledged the same point that it's not a winner takes all situation like a super, super deterministic low latency strategy would have been 15 years ago. So it's a more diverse opportunity space. So I think there's basically room for all players that have talent, skills and put the work in.

Okay. And we have also questions about the geographical split. If you look at in the U.S. is by far the biggest ETF market in the world. Your market share is very small, below 2%. What are you going to do about that?

So on this network, as Alex mentioned earlier, the U.S. market is by far the biggest. And indeed, we are mostly a niche player today in that market. We have a significant market share in what we would call international ETFs to build a more systematic approach to the U.S. So the first thing we need to build is a number of the developments from the quantitative side. It's a very exchange-driven market. It's a very fast market and it's a market where efficiency is much more important than a number of things in Europe. We are not going to plan to target 5%, 10%, 30% in the U.S. So I don't think that's a game we should play. I think we could spend a lot of money trying to do that. So what we have been doing -- what we are building is one our space, we're very good at internet and then we are going to be using a number of the quantitative trading strategy to build into a number of additional capabilities into the U.S. including [indiscernible] in exchange, but also including being more active in RFQ or bilateral on domestic market. But the reality of it is that, first, we have a number of quantitative build to achieve. Then we will focus more on the build of new things in the U.S. We already have a strong franchise we want to protect. We're not to just go and build and try to gain 5% or 10% market share with tech stack we have today. We're very hopeful that for next year, a number of the additional technology capabilities we've built over the past 2 years are going to be able to help us expand in the U.S. The other area for which the U.S. becomes interesting to us is a digital asset part. Because that's where today most of the tokenization discussion convergent is happening most. And that's an area where we already have the relationship, and we have that credibility. So to give you an example, we have moved at the beginning of the year, a number of our digital asset team from Europe into the U.S. especially on the distribution side to cut off for that market. And here, we believe there is an opportunity. But we are not going to go after being a top 3, 4, 5 market share on exchange in the U.S.

Is M&A an option to buy teams, for instance, in single stocks?

So M&A is always an option. That's not an obsession either. So first, we wanted to have a clear plan. We know where we want to go. With the management team, we look at opportunities on a regular basis. But today, we want the team focus on the execution of the plan. If at one point, we see that there is some complementary M&A we could achieve, we will consider them, yes.

Yes, we have a lot of questions, but Rack, you also sorry. We can share the questions. Sorry, Reg Watson, ING. Could you clarify for us, please? I was surprised when you said that the EUR 1 billion NTI number doesn't include AI given that the goes live mid-2027. So why is your guidance that the NTI program really only accelerates in mid-27. What happens between now and mid 27 such that we don't see core NTI improving particularly around the investments. So there's a second question that follows on from that, which is what is going on in the investments. You've got a big increase in your fixed operating cost base coming this year and Julian asked the question about how this then progresses going forward because of the numbers you've provided if we go to the endpoint in 2030, it suggests that this pace of investment continues year after year after year. So it would be really helpful for us to understand what you're investing in, how and why you think it's going to deliver? And then why there's a pause between we actually get the investments in the delivery as well.

So I'll take the first part, and then you'll take more of the financial part. Just to come back on what we say about R&D planning. I want maybe to make sure it well understood. We are applying this technology across the board of different areas. Our current business expansion of our current business and a brand new activity, which is our deep planning trading division. This is a part which is the most innovative. This is a part which is really coming online next year. And this is a part where for the time being, we have decided not to include it into our production. It doesn't mean that some of the other initiatives we're putting towards deep learning or the quantitative enablement for our existing business is not included. It's a brand-new business that we have decided on purpose, not too good. And for a simple reason that we are very confident, given the work we've seen over the past year or 2 years that as it goes online, it will be profitable. But when you're very new into a market, we also want to be mindful and not promising that we don't have already price point or observable data to compute. As we go online next year and we start seeing how we can scale, we may update at one point in the next few years, our guidance and overall, it impacts the business, but we thought it was more realistic to focus on, I would say, existing business and in the expansion than on the brand-new division of trading. And if you want to take on the...

Yes. In terms of OpEx going back to what we discussed before. I think there are 3 different points to it. First one is, if we look at technology expense, as we've indicated, I think quite often is that we are very focused on building out our technology base in terms of actual technology and subject matter experts. So that's one part of the investment we've been very focused on. In addition to that, on the technology side, also as Owain explained, and deep learning division. So that's 1 part of the growth in the expense. Second part, as I discussed, there is a nonrecurring element to it, right, as we try to make the organization more efficient. There are some nonrecurring items we're incurring now that we assume will not happen next year. And then as I also highlighted, we have the other expense category, right? That's a variety of -- it captures a variety of costs. And we have seen that, that line has increased as well a bit, and we're very focused on also managing that actively. So on all 3 lines, we're doing the things that are very important and also on the tax side, and I mentioned it before, we focus on the AI and cloud costs. And just to highlight that point because it might sound counterintuitive to what we've presented today. I think across the Board, just not our company, but the industry, there's a clear focus on actively managing these costs, right? Because the unlimited deployment of AI tools across any organization for a lot of large companies has come at a huge expense. And this is also a part of our focus, being able to have a better control of this AI and cloud costs for the euro cost you make, what is the, let's say, the operational efficiency gain that we're having. So those are the elements that constitute our, let's say, cost management going forward and how we believe we will get to that cost target that we've sort of indicated implicitly in that forecast.

Okay. So I'm a simple man. You're talking about cost optimization, but costs are going up. So could you break it down for me, please? You've given us 3 buckets of optimization, but where is the -- where -- and I appreciate you're doing your best to keep a lid on costs, but they're going up. So where and by how much are these costs going up?

So if we're only looking at the change in our guidance, let's focus on that one first, right? The change in our guidance has gone up by EUR 5 million, right? So that EUR 15 million is roughly 2/3 is technology, 1/3 is nonrecurring items. So I think that's helpful guidance, probably for you to understand how that buildup works. As we've discussed today, if we think about how we want to be competitive long term, as we highlighted, anything around technology, AI and deep learning is at the core of everything we do, so that sits across almost every function, right, from business support to trading to risk management. So that's also why we are investing now today effectively in that area of the business to be able to deliver going forward, right? So we need to make the investment to also be able to deliver. So that's why that -- at a certain point, we will be able to reap the benefits as we discussed in terms of the NTI trajectory. And that's also why we believe that over time, we will be able to manage that cost. But as we indicated today, the guidance for this year is up versus what it initially was at the end of -- what we communicated end of '25.

And then you broke down the increase for us. Can you also break down the year-on-year from '26 to '25 because it's quite a big jump from EUR 205 million to what it was previously the EUR 225 million. Yes. So during our Q1 release -- sorry, Q2 release on the 31st of July, we can provide more guidance and actually what the breakdown of the cost is, right? Because normally, we break it down in technology expense, employee and other expense. And then you will have the insight that you probably need on that cost guidance.

Okay, I've hooked this for long enough. And

I think maybe we can -- like a little bit more detail there with -- there was a question about are we using AI labs. Yes, of course, we are. We use those for the business process optimization. It's actually quite easy to use those tools and get more efficient. The hard part is understanding if you're using them optimally and efficiently. So clearly, just making them available to the entire firm cost money, you have to pay those for those tokens. So -- and likewise, on the quantitative growth project. We have to pay for compute that we wouldn't have done in previous years to do research.

Yes. Again, back to the NTI revenue guidance for 2030. I think in the past, flows obviously quite cautious giving out a single kind of data point in the future, given the nature of the business, are you guys operating in a highly cyclical environment with like market dislocations, volatilities, digital assets, whatever. So I guess that was also the case why, again, in the past, I mean, you kind of refrained from being so bullish on or setting out a data point. But this kind of changed today. And I was just wondering what did change in your thinking that kind of led to this, again, single data point on the horizon, not on average, but just clearly a data point and perhaps kind of the revision of that. So how should we read that through a kind of volatility lens and maybe market volume cyclical lens to understand this figure. I'm just wondering, let's say, if eventually hit like EUR 1 billion, 2030, but because of the volatility, you hit like EUR 900 million in 2031. Like would that be mission complete? Or would that be a bit of a setback on the strategy as a whole?

There is a few things here. The first one is that, indeed, and we discussed that a few times during the presentation, Flow Traders business has been highly cyclical. And while it has provided a base revenue, which other cycles have been growing. It's also a business that has been probably more cyclical than some of our peers. And when you look at that and you look at across these lines, you need to under wonder why and can we mitigate that or change that. So that's one of the reasons, for example, why we're building quantitative trading and quantitative capabilities because this is a business for which revenue are pretty decorrelated from high level of spikes of market collapse or 2020, et cetera. So far as building a quantitative trading capability and a deep learning division, and focusing on revenue based on these kind of techniques and technologies is a business that will provide revenue on a much more recurring basis. You can be very profitable in these businesses, even if you don't have a [indiscernible] of 45%. That being said, in addition to that, we also live in a market where our business traditionally of ETFs and digital assets has been grown to more cyclicality. And it has been prone to more cyclicality for, I think, a couple of reasons. One, when you're more niche, which we have been, which -- and you mentioned it, we are very big in Europe, growing in Asia and somewhat for the time being more muted in the U.S., you're also much more subject to one market or two market. That compounded with our focus on building our sales and distribution is also going to allow us to build some more recurring revenue, just to give you an idea. We see today the trend of market connectivity for retail being one of the most significant change in the market, we're seeing at the moment. As we focus on being able to deliver to this platform, we are not targeting retail directly. We're targeting to support and focus on supporting the platform that need to be able to access ETF for their clients or crypto or tokenization. It's also going to build some revenue flows that are probably -- that are that are much less correlated to our core institutional retail business. So why are we trying to put a target like EUR 20 million, EUR 30 billion? I think because, first of all, the best way to focus the mind is to give targets on a specific date. So it's not meaning -- it doesn't mean that the targets are not credible, but it also means that we want on purpose to build a business and invest in technologies or in people or in business that is providing through the cycle or whether it's volatile or not consistent revenue consistent revenue base. And then a year where you have a lot of volatility, I would expect to make much more. But I think we could not continue to just say, and it's going to be still the case for a few years that our business is completely driven by the rigs going at 45 or 30. It will continue to be correlated, but we are targeting a number of those initiatives are targeted at de correlating it to the high volatility spikes.

Maybe worth adding as well that a lot of those additional opportunities carry the same cost base that we're already incurring.

Yes, we still have a few questions left about your trading capital, your lifeline of the company. You raised last year EUR 200 million. The CFO is in the room, but not on the stage. What is your priority to increase your trading capital? It's EUR 1.1 billion last quarter. But what is the goal if you want to reach the EUR 1 billion net trading income in 2030. And you already mentioned your 50% return on trading capital is EUR 550 million, is it? So what do you need to reach that EUR 1 billion NTI? Is that organically with the EUR 1.1 billion in the net profit around EUR 200 million a year, less or more. And if you look at the past, the last decade, the average of your return on trading capital is 63%. So why at least 50%, why not more, if you look at the deep AI learning division and a lot more to come in the tokenization from EUR 36 billion to EUR 5.5 trillion in 2030. So maybe you can explain more?

Shall I take the question, lease on the trading capital. So as you can derive from the target we put forward the EUR 1 billion NTI at a -- return on trading capital assumes trading capital of at least EUR 2 billion. So that's the focus as to where we want to grow. And then I can also take the question if you want to on the return on trade cap. Tom, if you want to on the [indiscernible].

You mentioned 63% over the past 10 years. Yes. And 2020 plays a big role in the above in the 63%. So again, we are not defining return on trading capital, assuming COVID 2.0 or something similar. Obviously, as I mentioned earlier, is there are years of much higher volatility. We will make more money, but we are trying to think on a base case scar, and I think our assumptions for current projection is in VIX on average around 20%, if I'm correct. Yes. Then you mentioned quantitative learning AI, tokenization, et cetera. Diversifying revenue does not necessarily mean for everything a higher return on trading capital. What I'm saying -- so I'll give you an example. Today, the digital asset business or the tokens market are profitable business, but they don't have a crazy 100%, 200% return on trading capital. The return on trading capital is somewhat around our target. In deep learning, there may be -- there will be businesses with a much higher return on trading capital. But as we mentioned, we also for the time being, on purpose decided to discount this part of the business. So I'm much less focused on saying across a 5-year where 1 year, we will have 100% overall return on trading EBITDA because of COVID, we can get to 60%. I'm more focused on saying we can generate consistently as a baseline, a certain return on treating capital by 2030 and then build upon that. If in the meantime, the market are much more favorable to us, we'll do better. Maybe the market will be much worse. I cannot plan for that. What I can plan is to have a business model, which is more stable on a year-to-year basis and not across the cycle. That's the way we're thinking about our business.

Yes, very good. My other question is about flow traded strategic capital when you started that division or how do you call it? A few years ago, you mentioned an invested capital of around EUR 50 million. If you look in the past, you did [ 15.5 ] or more something investments. What can you say about the total investment you made? And what are you going to do up to 2030 and beyond of that division? So...

I don't think we're disclosing the exact number at the moment on our investment. I would say that today, we have a portfolio which is very focused on supporting the digital asset initiatives, and it will remain like that. So we want to see a number of our current initiatives mature and scale. And recently, we've participated with a couple of scale of existing of our business. We want to be also a bit mindful about growing that portfolio significantly from now on. I mean it's always a question of focus. We have capital to allocate, do allocate it to a VC business or trading business. our technology business. For the next couple of years, the focus is really on the quantitative and the trading business. Supporting our existing VC portfolio, again, if a partnership comes and we see some value, we'll add to it but we are not going to proactively target to expand the DC portfolio for the time being.

So you do not expect a unicorn between now and 5 years or...

In our portfolio, we may, but I'm not going to project -- do a projection in 2030 hoping for unicorn in our portfolio. It will be a good add to the bottom line.

Okay. So our last question is the most important for us is a long-term shareholder since 2016, now more than 10 years. You went public in 2015. The IPO price was EUR 32 a share. We are nowadays thanks to one analyst here, at EUR 25. So if you look back in your ambition for 2013, if you look at your valuation of the company, it's just above shareholders equity book value. If you look at your only peer in the U.S. listed [indiscernible], today, a new record high or less or more, year-to-date, 85% share price increase and a valuation above 4 book value. If you look back at your IPO, it was around 3x book value, you went public. So what are you going to do about that? You did in the past, a small share buyback and to attract people, the best talented in the world working for Flow Traders, one of the best incentives is the share price, of course. You are already, I think, almost a few our shareholders, too, just like we. So what are you going to do with the ridiculous absurd low valuation?

Yes, sure. So I think step one, as we try to today, just want to provide more clarity on what it is we do. what our business looks like in terms of traditional and digital assets, which are -- there's a clear crossover between the business, but also 2 very distinct businesses, potential also from a valuation perspective. Secondly, what we've tried to do today, again, is laying out a strategy how we believe that we could drive value for shareholders, right? And I understand for some shareholders, the value really sits in the dividend or capital distribution. But we believe that our value creation, the value creation story that we have as Flow Traders is that compounding ability of our capital base and deploying that in the right way and also scaling our organization as a whole, right? And I think if you look at what our current plan implies, I think that's probably our answer to your question, and it's really down, I think, to all of us to deliver on that plan and show everyone what that could imply in terms of share price.

And I like a couple of things, maybe from a more strategic or high-level perspective. I think when the Board decided 2 years ago to start the capital expansion plan what it realized and something I mentioned today is that in reality, while huge size does not necessarily matter. There is a certain minimum number of size that you need to be relevant in that business. And we were at the point where our scale was just too small. And we can see it, and I'll give you a very simple example. Over the past 4 to 5 years, yes, the scale of our competitors has grown for some of them 40 times. But it was also massively grown is the size of the market and the opportunities. So today, for example, to capture the most profitable flow. You need to be able to transact on some of the very significant flow. We see more and more of the investor or the market when those big throws comes, it's not EUR 10 million or EUR 100 million. It's billions of on production. And at one point, your capital prevents you to grab these opportunities. So it's not to say that at one point, we're not going to distribute dividend or look at different capital strategy, obviously. But it's also to say that, that one. If you can't even deliver or sustain your existing market, forget about building something else. So what the capital expansion plan in 2024 was allowed. And I mean Alex and Maarten is every day is that it allowed us to also continue to be relevant in a market where skill sets are recognized, our connectivity and our relationship are recognized. But at one point, we are becoming somewhat less relevant for the bigger ticket or the bigger opportunities when they occur. And that is, to some extent, threatening to the whole business model. So that's for me the first thing. The second element is that as we deploy our capital in areas outside of Europe, we talk about Asia. We also believe that it will allow to show that this company is not a purely a European company as it is. And I'm not compare ourselves to [indiscernible] or anything but in reality as well. The multiple -- I mean, you can look at any segment of the market and look at the multiple, I mean I worked and some of you worked in European banks and look at the multiple of pure European banks versus global banks. So we are not going to become a completely global player, but by internationalizing also our business and become more visible and more relevant, it will also, in our view, attract potential investors that are going to see us as a more global company than a pure European one and should attract a stronger valuation.

Yes, clear. About the EUR 2 billion of trading capital 2030. Can you deploy it with the same number of people as of today or do you need a lot more people?

I'll tell you in 2030, I think we made more people, but we are not going to need to double the number of people. And I think there are a few things we need to have in mind on this one. First, automation is really something happening. I mean -- and a lot of the business we do is very manual, and it is also very more automated. Everybody talk about developers and coders but across the globe. But the other element, and sometimes I kind of compare our company to a railway company. So it does not excite a lot of my team when I say that. But we've built a lot of rails and now we need to run trains, but we still need to get our rails fixed and managed and everything. So we have, to some extent, a fixed cost or an infrastructure, then we need to maintain and grow. What we are doing today is building on that and some of them with additional investment, especially in compute we are building on that additional revenues for which one the compute is there, the incremental cost will be lower. So no, I don't expect to double the number of people when you double the capital. I would expect, and it's hard to say, to have a relatively managed number of headcount. The more -- the bigger question or the question you could ask me is -- I'm sorry, I ask myself, it's more the profile of people. And if you look at what we have been hiring over the past compared to the past. We are moving more and more in the quant and reserve side than the trading and operation, and that will continue to happen.

So the NTI per FTE will significantly go up by 2030?

By headcount, you mean? Yes.

Yes. Maybe in terms of time, so we do one final question from the room?

Okay. Now that I've been out it. Okay. I'm going to ask a challenging and personal question to you, Thomas. Your predecessor, [ Mike Kunal ], one of the smartest men I've ever met, stood in a room not dissimilar to this 4 years ago. and said that Flow Traders needed to focus more on where it deployed its capital. I've heard you talk about focus. They needed to be better cost control, which you managed and that he didn't want the business to be known as a volatility hedge and you're saying the same thing with diversification of earnings. And then in order to achieve this more capital as required. I've heard all 4 things from you. He -- his legacy is not a good one. He's failed to deliver on that. He's not here to receive the award. How are you going to deliver where he couldn't?

So a couple of things. First of all, I was not there 4 years ago, as you know. If you have questions to Mike, I'm sure you can refer to him.

I'd like to know what your assessment is, why he failed.

I think there's a few things. The first one, and if I were to be -- my team knows I'm pretty straightforward. I think in 2022, having these ambitions without having a real capital plan set up at the same time, was highly optimistic. It was probably already clear at that point than being able to deliver on EUR 1 billion NTI without having a plan to grow the capital because remember, at that point, a lot of that capital, a lot of that trading income was directly paid into shareholders, and that's fine. I mean -- but it was preventing flow to follow the trend of the competitors. It's as simple as that. So you can have all the ambitions in the world. You need to have the capital plan. So the first thing that has changed, and it was mid-2 almost 2 years ago, you're going to tell me, but is when the board took that serious decision to stop paying to the dividend and grow the capital. Now about the past 2 years, a few things. One, in Europe, in ETF, and Alex mentioned it, we probably have 25% to 30% market share. So if retaining the capital is only to try to grow from 25% or 30% to 35%, honestly, is going to be rare to get EUR 1 billion. So what has started to be built last year on the technology side, what has started to be accelerated in the past year on the DS side is really to also build additional capabilities to diversify our revenue source. So the second point. And the third point, I would make is that when all this happened at the end of the day, and yes, all CEOs, I'm sure say that at the beginning of the tenure, it's about focus on execution. So I'm going to tell you the same thing, it's about focus and execution. I think we have a stronger overall and broader management team that we had 4 years ago. I think we have a more diversified set of experience. We have a strong COF. We have brought efficiency team. We have brought people with knowledge of the region we want to focus in. And as much as technology is important as much as capital is important, if you have the right people to work with the right team, that's also why you deliver. So I would put the initial problem around the capital that was capital strategy in 2022. And then we have been able to start developing through '24 on what we need today, the capital and we can all say, okay, Flow is not performing very well over the past 2 years, but coming back to Europe again. The only competitor we have in Europe in our business today at scale is 40x our size, roughly. I don't have the get numbers on public, but it's [indiscernible] our size. I mean it's -- it's a pretty good success for Flow to still be there. If we can take that success and build upon it, I have no reason to adopt to contracted. But yes, execution will be very difficult. Yes, it will be focused. And yes, it requires some effort from everybody, and that's what we've laid out today.

Thank you. That concludes the Q&A session for today. First of all, I would like to thank everyone here in the room as well as online for joining us today and spending time with us. We hope that we've been able to clearly lay out the strategy of the company, how we expect to execute on it and what it means in terms of value creation and the potential by building a stronger Flow Traders. That concludes our 2026 Capital Markets Day. I would like to invite the people here for a brief lunch for us. Thank you all.