TMX Group Limited (X) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Good morning, everyone. This is Craig Siegenthaler, North America Head of Diversified Financials at Bank of America. On me on stage, I'm joined by Eli Abboud, who covers the exchanges with me, and we're thrilled to kick off our 2024 Financial Services Conference with the CEO of TMX John McKenzie. TMX is Canada's largest exchange with businesses that span across equities, options, rates, fixed income energy. It is also one of the largest listing venues in the world, providing capital formation to about 3,500 users. John has been with TMX for over 20 years and has worn many different hats over that time. He was the architect of several major acquisitions, including Maple, the Montreal Exchange and Trayport. John, thank you for joining us today.

Thank you. Thank you for having us here.

So let's start with a big picture question on defense. TMX' model offers investors defensive qualities that many financial companies don't. This is really given the business mix and diversification. I was wondering if you could elaborate on this point.

Yes, I'm happy to. And we'll get into this with more of the business as well, but we've been pushing to build a more diversified business portfolio. And part of that starts with having now more of our revenue actually in recurring, growing revenue sources like subscriptions and sustainable sources. So they are not subset same ebbs and flows of the transactional activity. And that we've been working for years. It used to be in the 30%, now it's 53% of the business. And that's data revenues, Trayport revenues, our sustaining fees, those types of things. And then even in the transactional parts of TMX, because we actually do have the whole ecosystem, like you said, the listing franchise, but also the equity trading and the derivatives trading as well, we've got pieces in there that move counter cyclically. So when you look at a year like 2023, which was a really weak year for financing activity, and I think our financing activity very much like the U.S. was down 50% in terms of financing raised. But at the same time, we had a record year in terms of derivative trading because it's the high interest rates that are causing challenges to raise capital are a tailwind to trading more derives products. So we have things that offset within the franchise that way. And also now, we're also in the trust business. So in addition to the services of listings for capital formation, we provide transfer agent and trustee services through our trust franchise that has a net interest income exposure. So now we've got net interest exposure as well that's benefiting from those high rates when you've got the challenge of raising capital at the same time because of the high rates. So it's a really well-balanced portfolio. And I think it really showed through in the results for the business when you looked at 2023 because in light of that really weak equity market, we had our core revenues up 9% last year and really on the strength of strong database, strong derivative franchise and strong returns on the trust business.

Great. I want to go a little deeper on that on the synergy front. So you have a big trading business and then you have the non-trading business. What do you see as the real synergies between the 2?

Yes. It's actually synergies right across the whole franchise. So by the fact that we have all the different elements of the capital market ecosystem in one place. Think about it also in the context, and I know we'll talk about VettaFi more later on, but in the context of the reason we wanted to get into more index creation. If I can create an index and help an ETF provider and create a new product, we'll list it, we're going to trade it, we have the derivative franchise, we could put options on it, we could put features on it and collect data throughout the whole system to create data products that then go into different data feeds and distribution. So a whole ecosystem play all the way through the organization. And the fact that you talked a little bit about the market model at the beginning in terms of kind of the 3,500 users in the capital formation space. One of the reasons we can do that is because we also have a really unique listing model. We have a junior exchange where we can list companies’ very early stage in their development and a senior exchange that they can grow to that would look more like the NASDAQ and the ISI and the other markets around the world. But what that means is, I'm less constricted into in terms of market activity because we can bring companies on to the market through different vehicles. We can help them grow. We can incubate essentially our own pipeline, and we can graduate them on when they're ready. So we've got different levers at our disposal to help build the business in all different markets.

So I have a question on competition. Why do you think most companies decide to list on your exchange? And I'm thinking especially relative to New York Stock Exchange and NASDAQ you have 3,500 companies on your exchange, which I think is more than both of them.

Yes. So I mean, in the junior market, let me start with that. None of those companies would actually be eligible to list on a U.S. market because of their size. And that's the piece that we do uniquely in Canada. We do it really well. And it's not just about what the rules are for the exchange. You have to have lawyers that can work with those companies. You need to have bankers that can actually take them public. So you need a whole ecosystem to support what can be, in some cases, a capital raise of $5 million. You cannot do that with all the overhead of a heavy market infrastructure or your deal costs would use up the whole thing. And so we've built the ecosystem to make it really easy for a company to raise capital to that size and then raise more as they grow. And what we do is then we work with them to help them with their IR program, we help them with the mentoring disclosure tools, things like that as they get bigger. And as they get to a size where they actually can be a TSX-listed company, we're actually already working with them on what that next step is to graduate. So we've been doing this for about 20 years. We've had close to now 800 companies that have incubated up this way and graduated up to the senior exchange. In fact, 20% of the senior index for Canada is companies that started in these microcap companies and grew up through the franchise. So that's unique. It doesn't exist anywhere else in the world. And in fact, in the U.S. market, we have over, I think, 130 companies from the U.S. that are too small to list here that actually listed in the venture exchange north of the border. So when we talk about listing internationally, the U.S. is actually the largest source of those companies, and it could be both mining, tech, industrials, multiple sectors. So that's one. On the senior market, our companies are always getting pitched and marketed to by U.S. bankers. U.S. bankers to say, coming less on NASDAQ, especially if the tech companies. And what we demonstrate for the companies is they actually can get a better experience if they list at home for a number of reasons. If you're going to be a big company in Canada versus a small company on NASDAQ, the amount of exposure you're going to get post listing is dramatically different in terms of the analyst coverage, investor follow on, the ability to raise subsequent capital because some of that, it's not just the IPO, it's the capital you raised in the future as well to keep growing that's important. And also, you're not going to be eligible for the index in the U.S., where if you're going to be a top 60 or 200 company in Canada, you're going to be index eligible for the S&P composite or the 60 and then all of the different ETFs and funds that are going to pick up your stock based on that inclusion. So any time I'm talking to a tech company that says, “We're thinking about listening with you, but we'll probably go to NASDAQ first,” we turn it around and show them the benefit of why they should list in Canada. And at the end of the day, 99% of them do. We actually track every company that's eligible for our market and doesn't list with us, and we always work on them to come back. And it's maybe 1 to 2 per year is all we miss because they're going to get that better experience later on. In fact, I think there was a delisting from NASDAQ in the last week, which was a dual listed Canada U.S. company, they dropped the NASDAQ listing and they kept Canadian listing because they just didn't have the follow-on in the U.S. to support the cost of maintaining it.

Got it. And switching gears, could you maybe touch on your capital management and M&A strategy and how that's evolved over the past few years?

Yes. It evolved quite a bit in the last few weeks because we used quite a bit. But at the end of -- let me start with the M&A strategy and work my way back into the capital management. We've laid out a strategy for growing the franchise in terms of where we want to keep building. So building in capital formation, building in data analytics, expanding our trading platforms and really growing across every part of our franchise. We've laid out some long-term objectives of transforming the business into more recurring revenues, more data-based businesses. So we'd like to see actually 2/3 of our business come from our database businesses, our GSIA segment -- sorry, we want to see half of it come from that. We want to see 2/3 of the revenue come from recurring services. And we want more than half of the revenue come from outside of Canada. That's been a big piece for us. So if you think about when we used to have conversations of exchanges that are merging globally 10 years ago, and that doesn't happen anymore. So we were trying to figure out how we build a global franchise from a Canadian base. And part of the metrics in terms of how you demonstrate you're doing that is more revenue coming from outside of the Canadian borders than inside. And we're getting very close to 50% now. So we set that strategy, we set those metrics on where we wanted to focus, and then when we look at M&A opportunities, they're all about how do we do it faster. So build more index product faster, build more solutions to the listed company faster and expand against those metrics. And that led us to the deal we did earlier this year around VettaFi to do all those things, get deeper into data analytics, deeper into indices, more recurring revenue, more non-Canadian, more global footprint. The balance sheet side, the capital management side, the strategy is to drive that growth strategy. So we want to use that capital management capability to drive our growth strategy and to generate appropriate return for investors. So simple policies around that. We've got a dividend payout target. It's 40% to 50%. I think our last quarter, we were at 49%. And we've got great cash in the company, so we can do that quite flexibly. We've had some limited buybacks over the last few years, but they've been really more designed to offset dilution in the stocks from options than actually do a material use of capital. Our use of capital has really been around driving and building the business, investing in the organic strategy and invest in the inorganic strategy to grow faster.

Got it. And we saw you hired a Head of U.S. trading in October. Can you talk about your plans to expand outside or inside of the U.S.?

Yes, happy to. And to be fair, we actually started the strategy inside Canada first. And so what we are building is we’re actually launched 2 new marketplaces in Canada last year, we called Alpha X and Alpha-DRK, and they're both trading markets designed to improve execution quality for traders, for buy side and sell side. And so higher order, lower market impact, those types of things. And it's actually rare you can launch a new marketplace without the trading community saying, “Don't launch a new marketplace,” because there are so many already. But we had support from the clients because we were solving a specific problem for them. And what we're working on right now is taking that same DNA that we're building in there and porting it into the U.S. market. And so yes, we've hired a new head of U.S. equities and she's focused on building out our U.S. ATS. And we have designed it as an ATS market first, around again the same concept of improved execution quality for buy and sell side. And we're going to build it off the same technology we built for Canada, but use the opportunity to build it on a more modern platform in terms of actually cloud-delivered equity trading, which we haven't seen in a material way in the market yet. So it's a way to test into that in a new build. So that's what we're working on. We're in the process of building the technology right now, engaging with clients. We've been engaging with clients over 1.5 years already on the design of this. And those are clients that are both U.S.-based firms, but also Canadian firms with U.S. operations that we can interact with on both sides of the border. And what we'd like to see is a path on a regulatory process and a product process that kind of gets us ready to go to market at the end of the year. And so we haven't set a time line yet to go forward, but we did give disclosure to everyone this year, so they know at least what are we investing? What's the bet that we're making on building out? But long term, it is a beachhead opportunity. So if we can build a successful new market here, we also have 50% of the BAX option market here. We start to build some building blocks that we can do more within the future. So if we're successful, we can look at other exchange solutions, we can look at how do we support listed companies across border? Et cetera, et cetera. And so that's why we're putting a lot of time attention and getting really good talent like Heidi to do this because it's kind of a building block of what we could actually do in terms of more in the U.S. and more globally if it's successful.

John, let's move on from capital management to expense management. So how do you think about balancing investing versus operating margin? And how should we think about the long-term operating leverage in the business?

Well, one of our core mantras is positive operating leverage. So it's actually built into our plan, both long term and short term every year as we push for positive operating leverage. And the way we think about investing is in a couple of places. So actually, one of the reasons why we actually gave disclosure around our U.S. investment was we wanted to be able to show the investor community, okay, what are you spending to run the business versus what are you adding on to test out in a new marketplace. So in that run the business piece, essentially, we try to manage to inflation or better. And we look for opportunities to create cost savings in the franchise to fund where we want to grow. And so David and I challenge every team in the organization in terms of where can you get tighter, where can you be more efficient because then we can take that funding and we can spend it on investing for growth. And if you look at our Trayport business, that's been a phenomenal example of doing that year after year where we've actually -- we haven't worked on expanding margins materially. We've actually continued to spend up and drive higher percentage growth in that franchise. So that's what we're trying to do, grow the top line faster than the expense line and create that positive operating leverage. Always look at where we're spending, and where we can redeploy. And even last year, I mean, our last year expense numbers, they were higher year-over-year. They were more in the 10% range. But when you start to unpack it, what was acquisition, what was nonrecurring pieces we were managing around those inflationary numbers. So that's what we try to do on the operating spend and where we can fund growth within that through savings we will and where we can't because we're doing something more meaningful like a new market build, we're going to be transparent on what that investment is.

So let's move into earnings quality. So how is your model positioned today between sticky revenue sources and trading volumes? And where do you see the revenue composition migrating into the future?

Yes, I'm glad we can get deeper on this because it is what I was talking right at the beginning that we've worked from being kind of low 30% of our business being sticky recurring revenue sources to now 53% last year. That's going to go up even higher with the addition of our VettaFi acquisition that we brought in Jan 2. That business is about 80% recurring and a long-term objective of 2/3, but that's what we're looking to get to about 2/3 of the franchise in these recurring sticky revenue sources. But more important than the fact that they were recurring and sticky, they're also high growth. And I think that's a really key piece that we're trying to continue to prove in the marketplace. Trayport, the energy data platform we operate is virtually all recurring revenue, grew in pounds during last year at 17% or 22% Canada. We've grown that business double digits every single year since we acquired it in 2017. Our Datalink business, which is historically the more traditional market data franchise, grew at double digits last year, and we've got a long-term objective of having that in our strong growth segment in terms of the mid and higher singles. And that was a deliberate strategy of taking a business that had been more sleepy and investing in, “Okay, we're going to create new products. We're going to do pricing bundles. We're going to add new marketplaces, geographies so we can get that growth rate up and get more users of the data in that." Capital formation over the long term has a big piece that sustained revenue at it. Like that block of 3,500 issuers, you talked about, all pay regular sustaining fees that scale up over time with market capitalization. So they are sticky, they are recurring and they actually build with the market growth over time. So almost like having a pricing escalator built right into it. And so that is, that strategy keep building more in terms of these recurring revenue businesses. It's why we wanted to get deeper into analytics and deeper in indices because they actually augment that whole platform.

I want to follow up on Trayport. This is a bigger reoccurring revenue component. How has the business performed since you acquired it?

Outperformed all expectations. For those who don't know, we bought this business from ICE in '17 because ICE was required to sell it because it plays such an important part in the ecosystem for energy trading. Competition authority didn't want to see one marketplace that was deep in energy controlling it. And so we stepped in, we were able to put together a package and a deal that worked for ICE. We acquired the business, a business that was growing 6% to 7% a year. And since then, we've grown it as I said, kind of a minimum double-digit every single year since we've had it. And the reason we've been able to do that, and we're confident we can keep doing it is twofold. So first of all, it puts a really fundamentally important role in the energy market, particularly in Europe. If you're a European energy trader today, you have to have a Trayport screen. It's the only place you can see every pool of liquidity for everything you're trying to trade, whether it's on an exchange or in a broker. And that's primarily for things like natural gas and power. 80-ish percent of all the trade flow would go through a Trayport screen in those products. So it's very sticky as it is. Within it, it's not a regulated data business. So the relationship with the client is based on the value to the client and to Trayport. So every client in an enterprise arrangement. So we have a price list, we never use it. That's like for a new client coming in. Every existing client has an enterprise relationship based on how they're going to use the product, and it's usually multiyear, and it actually has CPI built right into it each year. So we don't have to worry about pricing discussions. It's actually baked right into the agreement. Candidly, I have 4 clients in the first month of this year renewed with us either on kind of 3- to 5-year terms with commitments in terms of spend with Trayport as much as 30% higher to as much as 80% higher. And that gets to the nature of the product. Once people start using it, they look for how can they use it more in their shop because it becomes an essential tool in terms of how they do business. So the growth that drives it going forward is, yes, it does have that kind of CPI pricing power in it. But if you look at the metrics we show, we're constantly growing the user base of traders that use it, now 8%, 9%, and 10% a year. And that's the biggest driver of long-term revenue. And then on top of that, we're constantly adding what are the new products people can trade on it. So you got the core pieces of energy in the middle, but we also are now trading more renewables, carbon on one end and oil on the other end. The oil market is an interesting market because the big products trade WTI, trades on CME, trades on ICE. But everything else on the oil chain is brokered and it's inefficient. So Trayport can actually centralize it onto a single screen. And that's where we're working in the community to find a solution to do that today. So we're going to keep adding asset classes. We're going to keep adding new trading tools and data tools on top, and that brings up the revenue per user as well. So we were highly confident we can keep growing at these higher rates.

So it seems like Trayport is one of the kind of the best growth avenues at TMX today. But if you had to rank them, how do you think about the biggest growth opportunities at the exchange in your business in '24 and '25.

You're doing, and picked my favorite children now. When you look at our disclosure, we've got a piece in our top bucket, which we call strong growth, which is our businesses that we believe can grow high single and actually consistently double-digit growth. Trayport is absolutely one of them. And quite frankly, we've doubled that business since we've acquired it. The other ones are derivative franchise, and while that's in the trading space, we've still got a lot of runway to keep building it out. And so we've been growing the volume traded on the Montreal Exchange by double digits every year. We've got a lot of runway in adding more volume to the fixed income product we have on the platform. So we've recently launched a 2-year product, a 5-year product, a 30-year product. We're going through a transition in the short-term 30-day product, which is going to add more trading opportunities. So there's a lot of runway to keep building more client adoption and volume in the futures market. And then our option market is underdeveloped versus the rest of the world. The Canadian auction market is -- while it's growing double digits, it's nowhere near the penetration rate of the U.S. or Europe or Australia. So we've got a lot of runway to keep building that adoption as well. So that's going to be a strong double-digit grower as well. The other areas are our long-term view on our trust franchise is one that we're going to keep growing. So the trust business was originally a $13 million transfer agency business that we started with, expanded, built it into a trust franchise as well, so we could actually act for corporate actions and trust issuance. We acquired AST, the Canadian arm, not the U.S. arm. We acquired that a couple of years ago, and then we've ramped it up, and this is a $100 million business now with a continued expectation that we can grow at that high single, low double because we're in this unique position where we're also the marketplace to list the company, we're in a position to provide additional services. So when a new company comes to market, we win more of those mandates than our market share, and we win them against players like Computershare, big global players. So we're going to continue to punch above our weight there and continue to expand. And the last piece, especially exciting for 2024 and '25, is VettaFi, so VettaFi being an index and ETF solution business, not in our 2023 numbers, but this is one that we expect is going to grow at double digits as well. And it's going to grow from a couple of [indiscernible], which is we've got a phenomenal index factory in VettaFi so we can actually keep creating new benchmark indices, thematic indices that ETF and other asset managers can use to build products on. We launched 2 new ETFs in Canada, CI funds, launched 2 ones just a couple of weeks ago based on VettaFi indices, and they were kind of the first to bring north of the border as well. We've got data sets in TMX that are not in any products today that we're working with VettaFi in terms of how do we prioritize them. And we've got ETF solutions there that are going to help an ETF manufacturer reach a broader audience. So one of the challenges of your small ETF manufacturer is, how do I get wealth managers to look at my product? If I don't have like my own bank channel the way that the bank products do. We help them with that with actual digital distribution tools, marketing tools, and these are all subscription-based. So it all goes into that recurring revenue, subscription base, and growing at a rapid pace. And so that's one we're extremely excited about. And inside, we call, it’s our next Trayport in terms of our 2.0, in terms of what we're going to be able to do with that business like we did with Trayport over the last 5 years.

Not only are you guys expanding in the U.S., but you have the U.S. exchanges actually coming to your turf in Canada.

Yes.

Can you talk about how you're viewing that risk?

Well, the interesting thing is, we've been competing with the UX exchanges the entire time. I always remind folks that one of the things when you live north of the border, it is a bit like sleeping next to the elephant. And that was not a political statement on elephants or what's the other one? Donkeys. We've always had to make sure our marketplaces are extremely competitive with the U.S. because the ease of capital flowing back and forth across the border is so seamless. And so that's why when you look at our pricing structure on listing and trading, it's very similar to what the U.S. markets do. Our technology is just as fast, if not faster, in the U.S. market. Our trading capability is as deep as any U.S. market. So we've always had that model. And I think that's why you've seen when U.S. exchanges as come to Canada, they haven't had any particular success in expanding much beyond the base of what they buy. So NASDAQ has been there since, I think, 2015, they bought Chi-X and it's still a good trading venue, we trade probably 15-ish percent in the marketplace. But whether or not they have not made the moves of expanding into things like options or listings because our competitive advantage in those sectors are so strong, it's not a big opportunity for that player in the Canadian market. CBOE’s very similar that way. They came into Canada through the acquisition of MATCHNow, the acquisitions of NEO. But they ought to prove how they can grow beyond that. And it's not just about hanging your name out of the door. You have to provide a better value proposition. And our focus on competition is always try to create the best trading experience for folks, deepest liquidity, order capability, price competitively, and then there isn't a reason for someone to go trade anywhere else. So that's our competitive model.

Got it. And maybe it's worth spending, I mean, on the biggest market structure differences between the U.S. and Canada?

I mean, the biggest market structure difference is, I haven't sued by regulators, and they haven't sued me. So we don't have a payment for order flow regime that would be the biggest thing. So what creates a lot of the noise in the U.S. market, we don't have that regime. It's been more of a fair access, price-time priority marketplace. Most of the other features of functionality is quite similar. And I made it a real point when I took on this job about 4 years ago to really deepen our relationships with the regulatory bodies. So that at the end of the day, we actually have a common objective is to make the market as competitive as possible. And we might disagree sometimes on how to execute that. But most of the time, we are going to agree. So if myself and the heads of the regulators can have open dialogue all the time on where we want to take the market, and it's easier to deal with the pain points when things don't work as well. So if the U.S. moves to adopt changes on minimum [indiscernible], things like that, I would expect we will follow at the same time. The other major change that got driven by the U.S. as T+1, we're going to execute that at exactly the same time. And so most of the time, we're going to look to make sure that the markets are highly coordinated with each other because, again, liquidity can move very seamlessly across the border.

I have a follow-up on that. I don't know if you have a strong opinion on payment for order flow and brokers outsourcing execution and free trading, the benefit of it. I don't know if you have an opinion on that in terms of the U.S. market versus other markets where it's actually the process is banned.

I always worry in those models, does it create distortion? And are the end investors actually getting best execution or not. And so I always like to engage on a best execution model because that's what actually protects the impact for the end investor. And that's the model we've got in the Canadian market. It's best execution based.

Got it. At this moment, let's just see if there's any questions in the audience. So please raise your hand. We'll get you a mic.

So 0 DTE index options have been a huge hit at CBOE. Is there anything that BAX can do to kind of join it on that success.

I think that's premature for me to talk to BAX Strategy. And I mean I apologize for that. And one of the reasons is BAX is a great market. They've done really good work in building out improved execution as it is. Our opportunity with BAX is at the board and the oversight level. So we don't actually operate the business day to day, and only, we own about 50%. But that team is constantly looking at actually how do they create more value in the market? So I'm sure the team is looking at it, but there's nothing that I can share in terms of kind of where they would go with it right now. And then similarly in the Canadian market as well because we have the same in the Canadian market. We're looking at what are the ways you can keep driving volume and adoption in the option market. For the Canadian market, it's been about adopting even more options on ETF and option on indices and even futures on single main product. And so that's where we've gone there. But it's been more of an institutional client-driven strategy than it has been in retail. So the rest of us are kind of in the watch mode and see whether or not the CBO strategies can actually translate into other marketplaces as well.

I actually had a follow-up on BAX. If you look at the kind of near-term volume data, you've actually been picking up some shift. I don't know if you can talk about what's been driving that.

I mean some of that is actually mix. So there's been picking up share in some of the actually kind of more efficient, more competitive parts of the franchise, continuing to drive actually more trading also and actually forex trade as well. And we should always think is a unique piece of our baxes. It's one of the actual markets where we actually built the floor as opposed to close the floor because it provided extra value add. So it's a number of those different strategies that have attracted more volume and more share. And that's why you're seen there's a bit of a trade-off there where you're seeing volume improvement, but a bit of a rate per trade contraction because it is in some of the more highly liquid sell.

Also one more for me. Maybe I'll just kind of ask an open-ended question on sort of crypto. I know you have some futures products already. I don't know if you have thoughts on expansion into spot. And now we finally had a bunch of ETF approvals in the U.S. How does that sort of change the dynamic?

So first of all, we've actually had ETFs in the Canadian market on crypto for about 2 years. So we were ahead of game on doing that. And I continue to believe it is a much better product for a retail investor to be getting in and out of crypto. Because at the end of the day, it's actually more transparent, it's more liquid, and it's security backed. You know the custody is there. So you don't have the same risk of wallets getting in and out, the pricing and doing that and what's actually standing behind it.

They’re synthetic, or they are spot?

They are spot. And some are index-based. So the futures product, I don't actually think we've launched the futures product yet, but we have it in design. And it's actually designed to help particularly asset managers like that because if they've got product in there, how do they actually offset their exposure. And so our futures product design is around those crypto indices that can back some of those products and give risk management tools to the industry as well. We did actually look really deeply around actually adding spot crypto right on exchange. And so we were looked at putting crypto on exchange to trade directly in a spot market and actually centrally cleared in the depository. And one of the nice things about actually having the exchange and the depository actually in the same company is because we actually can drive strategies that go all the way through the vertical where you couldn't do that in the U.S. market without a lot of cooperation with the marketplaces in DTCC at the same time. So we can get all the same people around the table to solution this. The challenge that we found has been more on the custody side. is how do you actually get the proper custody of those assets being able to add to and subtract from the wall, and the pool in a way that's risk managed all the way through the chain. At the end of the day, we decided not to proceed now not because we couldn't solve that. We had a design for it, but the actual client demand for spark crypto pulled back. And when I say the client demand, it's not about the investor, it's about do the banks, to the dealers, who support retail investors do they want to provide that product to the client? That's what we were doing on their behalf. And that demand isn't there the way it was in the same way, and especially now that we get more expansion in the ETFs that cover it, there's even less of a need to trade the actual spot on exchange the way that was before. Should that change? We've got a product design that's ready to go.

Great. Any last questions in the room? So I think with that, we are out of questions and almost out of time. But John, on behalf of all of us at [indiscernible], thank you very much for your time.

A pleasure. Thanks for having us.

Thanks, John.

Thank you.