Marex Group Aktie

Thank you for joining us, and welcome to the Marex Second Quarter 2026 Earnings Conference Call.

[Operator Instructions]

I will now hand the conference over to Adam Strachan, Head of Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Good morning, everyone, and thanks for joining us today for Marex's 2Q 2026 Earnings Call.

Speaking today are Ian Lowitt, Group CEO; and Rob Irvin, Group CFO. After their formal remarks, as usual, we will open the call to questions.

Before we begin, I would like to remind everyone that certain matters discussed in today's call are forward-looking statements relating to future events, management's plans and objectives for the business and the future financial performance of the company that are subject to risks and uncertainties.

Actual results could differ materially from those anticipated in these forward-looking statements. The risk factors that may affect results are referred to in Marex's press release issued today.

The forward-looking statements made today are as of the date of this call, and Marex does not undertake any obligation to update them.

Finally, the speakers may refer to certain adjusted or non-IFRS financial measures on this call. A reconciliation schedule of the non-IFRS financial measures to the most directly comparable IFRS measures is also available in today's earnings release.

A copy of the release and investor presentation are available on the Investor Relations page of the Marex website @max.com.

Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining us. Q2 2026 was another record profit quarter for Marex, our sixth record quarter since we went public just 2 years ago in April 2024.

Second quarter revenues increased 39% year-on-year to $696 million, and adjusted profit before tax increased 56% to $166 million.

Adjusted profit before tax margin expanded to 24%, reflecting the increasing contribution from our higher-margin infrastructure-intensive businesses.

Basic earnings per share increased to $2.09, and return on equity was 37.5%. Excluding nonoperating items such as the $35 million gain on the sale of the Winterflood custody business as well as some costs relating to our Bermuda redomicile in the second quarter, adjusted earnings per share were $1.72.

Looking at the first half as a whole, adjusted profit before tax was $319 million, equivalent to the group's total annual profit in 2024.

Adjusted EPS for the first half was $3.29, while reported EPS was $3.61. On a trailing 12-month basis, reported EPS was $5.72. We believe these results demonstrate the increased earnings power of the Marex franchise and validate the strategy we've been executing.

We've worked hard to build a business that is diversified across products, business lines and geographies to support sustainable growth. While market conditions remain important to individual businesses, at the group level, our portfolio of businesses has increasing earnings resilience.

This is evident in the second quarter. Volumes on our key exchanges reduced meaningfully, down 17% compared with the first quarter, while market volatility also declined and interest rates were flat, although commodity prices remained elevated.

Notwithstanding that market backdrop, second quarter adjusted profit before tax increased 9% versus the first quarter. Since the IPO, we have clearly diversified in ways which make our earnings less dependent on exchange volumes.

One of the questions we get asked repeatedly is how much of our performance is driven by the operating environment and how much by structural growth.

When we came to market at IPO, we described our objective to invest in sufficient structural growth to offset the inevitable cyclical impact of our markets on our results.

As we talked about on the previous slide, that doesn't mean the operating environment no longer matters. Of course, it does. But we have now built a platform where the combination of diversified earnings streams and structural growth outweighs the cyclical elements over time.

The evidence of this is apparent in our track record. We've increased profitability sequentially every year over the past 12 years.

Looking at performance at the quarterly rather than annual level. Over the past 5 years, we've delivered year-over-year adjusted profit growth in 19 of the past 20 quarters. This is a remarkable record of sustainable growth.

This includes periods of elevated volatility, lower volatility, increasing and decreasing interest rates, and varying levels of exchange activity.

Since our IPO in the second quarter of 2024, quarterly adjusted PBT has grown at an average rate of 48% year-on-year, with the upper quintile averaging 72% and the lower quintile averaging 21%.

While this is obviously a wide range, it gives us a high degree of confidence in our ability to grow at least in line with the top end of our 10% to 20% growth target range.

On the previous slide, we showed how our business has grown on a quarterly basis. On the left of this slide, you can see the steady increase in monthly profitability over time.

The lower Sharpe ratio for 2026 reflects the exceptional volatility and unusually strong profit month we experienced in Q1. On the right-hand side, you can see the distribution of daily profitability.

Over time, that distribution has continued to shift to the right as profitability has increased. During the first half of 2026, the right-hand tail has become materially thicker, reflecting the exceptional market conditions, particularly in March.

Importantly, those right-tail returns weren't driven by taking more risk or by a single business. They reflected the breadth of the platform with a growing number of businesses, all capable of generating significant returns on any given day when the market opportunity arose.

You can see that in the increasing number of $3 million-plus profit days, which increased to 58 over the last 12 months, representing 25% of trading days.

At the same time, the number of loss-making days remained relatively low at just 11 or 4% of trading days, consistent with what we have seen historically.

So the left tail is consistent and skinny, and the right tail is now quite thick. I expect that as we move past the exceptional conditions of Q1, the distribution will become more typically bell-shaped with the center of the distribution further to the right, reflecting our growth.

We're already seeing that in June and July. An alternative lens on our growth and the increasing breadth and strength of our platform is the evolution of our client relationships.

As the platform has expanded, we've been able to deepen relationships with larger and more sophisticated clients.

In 2026, we have 77 clients generating more than $5 million of annual revenue on a run-rate basis, up from 49 in 2025 and 36 in 2024.

Revenue from this cohort of clients has increased 59% since 2025, reflecting continued expansion of our largest client relationships.

This growth isn't being driven by onboarding new $5 million clients. It's being driven by existing clients expanding the breadth of their relationship with Marex and doing more business with the firm as we continue to broaden our products, capabilities and geographic reach.

The effect is not just with our largest clients. We are seeing clients expand their relationships with us across the board, with average revenue per client up by 34%, demonstrating that clients are making broader use of the Marex platform.

That's exactly the outcome we've been trying to achieve. As clients deepen their relationships with Marex and use more of the platform over time, they become an increasingly important driver of our structural growth.

This is a steady, ongoing and reliable source of growth, which also demonstrates our underlying competitiveness.

Disciplined M&A is a core part of our growth strategy, helping us broaden our capabilities, extend our geographic reach and accelerate growth. That said, most of our growth remains organic.

Around 80% of our year-on-year profit growth in the second quarter, for example, was organic. That's because our approach is not about buying earnings.

The initial contribution from acquisitions is typically modest. The real value comes from integration, capturing synergies and leveraging the power of the broader Marex platform for growth.

Our recent acquisitions demonstrate this clearly. If we look at our larger 2025 acquisitions, we paid a premium of around $60 million for a combination of Arna, Hamilton Court and Winterflood.

At acquisition, based on their prior year's earnings, they generated around $16 million of profit after tax.

In Q2, the 3 acquisitions generated an annualized run rate of around $60 million of PAT, around 3.5x the pre-acquisition earnings. So the annualized returns from these businesses are already equivalent to the premium we paid to acquire them.

That demonstrates our ability to integrate acquisitions successfully and deliver revenue and cost synergies and grow earnings materially over time.

Importantly, we see further upside, particularly at Winterflood, where a number of the integration benefits and synergies have yet to be fully realized.

We focus on the premium paid and return of premium because much of the book equity we acquire in the transaction consists of cash or cash equivalents or very liquid assets.

So while we're attentive to total consideration, our focus is on the recovery of premium. Turning to 2026. We expect BrightPoint, which we announced last month, to follow a similar pattern.

Strategically, it significantly strengthens our global clearing franchise through a larger presence in Asia, adds high-quality infrastructure-intensive earnings, and enhances our access to China through an experienced local management team and long-standing institutional client relationships that would be difficult to replicate organically.

Importantly, we also see opportunities to create additional value once the business is integrated into Marex, including internalizing clearing activity, increasing client balances and cross-selling our broader product offering across the combined client base.

We expect the transaction to complete in late 2026 or early next year. While BrightPoint is a somewhat larger acquisition, it remains consistent with our financial discipline at an attractive low single-digit multiple of premium paid, reducing further once identified synergies are taken into account.

LEvMed and Web Traders are further examples of our approach. LEvMed enhances our market-making capabilities while adding physical commodities and a strong, experienced management team that we know well.

Web Traders similarly adds capabilities in equity derivatives market-making and will allow us to internalize hedging activity within our structured products business, which we expect to support further margin expansion.

As I said at Investor Day, we're increasingly the acquirer of choice based on the successful acquisitions we have enjoyed as part of Marex. Our M&A pipeline remains strong, allowing us to be highly selective and to focus on opportunities where we have a high degree of confidence in the outcome.

It's a disciplined and repeatable playbook: acquire strategically relevant businesses at attractive valuations, integrate them onto the Marex platform and grow their earnings over time.

Finally, turning now to the role we are playing in the evolution of financial market infrastructure. These are exciting times with innovation proceeding at pace.

This is a great time for us as it plays to our strengths as an adaptable and nimble market participant with the ability to get things done effectively for clients.

On this slide, there are 4 examples, which demonstrate how clients are increasingly looking to Marex to help them engage with these market changes.

We are the first and thus far, only firm to have solved the operational complexity of offering cross-margining on U.S. Treasury futures cleared on CME and cash U.S. Treasuries clearing via FIC with DTC. This helps clients improve capital efficiency across their cash and futures positions.

We are live with 3 clients and have more than 10 in the pipeline. In the quarter, we enabled clients to use USDC stablecoins as initial margin under a CFTC pilot program. This assists clients with collateral flexibility.

We also set up and executed an on-chain repo transaction for a key client, utilizing tokenized U.S. treasuries over the Canton network. This capability facilitates the tokenization of a broad range of securities, not just U.S. treasuries.

These are essential building blocks for a robust digital asset prime offering, which we are developing. We are also working to support clients looking for access via an FCM to prediction markets and expect to be clearing on [indiscernible] in the third quarter.

We already have a strong pipeline of clients for this service. These initiatives demonstrate the trust clients place in us and our ability to solve problems to support real-world demand.

These investments are also opening doors to new client relationships and ensure Marex remains at the forefront of market structure innovation.

I'll now hand over to Rob to go through the financials.

Thanks, Ian. Good morning, everyone. As Ian said, we're very pleased with the strength of our performance in the first half of the year, with $1.39 billion of revenue and $319 million of adjusted profit before tax in the first half.

These results reflect the strength and scale of the business. The second quarter was another record for us with revenues of $696 million, up 39% on last year, with each of our segments growing year-on-year.

Total expenses increased by 35%, reflecting higher performance-related compensation on strong revenues, together with continued investment across the platform and the impact of acquisitions.

Importantly, we continue to expand margins with adjusted profit before tax margin increasing to 23.8%. Adjusted profit before tax increased 56% to $166 million and was 9% above Q1 this year, our previous record.

Adjusted return on equity remained very strong at 37.8%, while adjusted basic EPS increased 59% to $1.72 per share.

Turning to reported results. Profit after tax was $155 million, which included $28 million of nonoperating items, including a $35 million gain recognized on the sale of the Winterflood custody business.

As the custody business was classified within discontinued operations, the gain is excluded from our adjusted results. However, it increases our profit after tax and therefore our shareholders' equity and is available to be deployed to support future growth.

I'll now take you through the performance of each business segment, starting with Clearing. Clearing delivered another strong quarter with revenue increasing 16% year-on-year to $161 million.

Average clearing client balances grew to $19.1 billion in Q2, significantly up from $14 billion in Q4 and the Q1 average of $16 billion. This drove a 31% increase in clearing net interest income as balance growth more than offset lower rates year-on-year.

As we discussed on our last earnings call, the first half has been an unusual market environment that included increased activity from some of our larger trading clients as well as higher exchange margin requirements.

We have seen structural growth in balances from expanding relationships with existing clients and strong balance growth from new clients.

The latter added around $1 billion of net new balances through to the start of August, and we remain confident in our pipeline for the remainder of the year.

Net commission income remained stable despite a reduction in contracts cleared compared to the second quarter of 2025, which had elevated volumes as a result of heightened activity following April tariff announcements.

In Q2 2026, as expected, client activity moderated somewhat from the exceptionally strong levels seen in the first quarter.

Adjusted profit before tax increased 12% in the quarter, with margins at 49%, demonstrating the underlying profitability of the Clearing franchise.

For the first half, revenue increased 16% to $299 million and adjusted profit before tax increased 8%. This includes the impact of the isolated client default in January.

Turning now to Agency and Execution. Agency and Execution had another outstanding performance with revenue increasing to $351 million, up 35% compared to the second quarter last year.

Securities revenue increased 68% to $283 million, led by strong growth in prime, FX and equities. Prime revenue increased to a record $120 million, driven by strong client demand and deeper institutional relationships.

FX also delivered an outstanding quarter, benefiting from an expanding European client base and the continued success of Hamilton Port, while equities continued its strong momentum, particularly in derivatives.

These performances more than offset lower energy revenues following an exceptionally strong prior year comparator and lower market-wide exchange volumes compared to the highs of the first quarter this year.

Overall, these results demonstrate the benefits of the investments we've made over a number of years. Prime Services has become an increasingly important contributor to the group, supporting both revenue growth and a higher-margin business mix.

As a result, adjusted PBT increased 69% to $117 million in the quarter, with margin expanding to 33%. Market Making also delivered another excellent quarter with revenue increasing 106% year-on-year to $118 million.

Performance was once again broad-based with particularly strong contribution from Metals and Securities. Metals strength reflected continued client activity across both precious and base metals as developments in the Middle East created favorable trading opportunities.

Securities also continued to benefit from the successful integration of Winterflood, which is performing strongly while creating new opportunities across the broader Marex platform.

Energy benefited from higher client demand for hedging and favorable trading conditions compared to the prior year, albeit down from elevated first quarter levels.

As a result, adjusted profit before tax increased to $45 million in the quarter, with the margin expanding to 38%. Finally, Solutions, which delivered another strong quarter.

Revenue increased 74% in the quarter, reflecting continued growth across hedging solutions and financial products, supported by favorable market conditions, while the prior year period was affected by lower client activity following the April 2025 tariff announcement.

Hedging Solutions continued to benefit from strong client demand across commodities and FX, while financial products reflected continued strong demand from clients in structured products and the investments we've made in our technology platform.

As a result, adjusted profit before tax increased almost fourfold to $25 million in the quarter, with margin increasing to 35%. Turning now to net interest income at the group level.

In the second quarter, NII was $30 million compared to $35 million in 2Q '25 as higher interest expense more than offset the growth in interest income.

Interest income grew by $24 million, reflecting $6.8 billion of higher average balances, which more than offset a 70 basis point reduction in the average Fed funds rate.

However, higher interest expense related to the group's 2 $500 million senior debt issuances completed in May 2025 and April 2026 and structured note issuance in solutions reduced net interest income overall.

As we've said previously, we continue to hold significant liquidity headroom. While this creates a modest near-term headwind to group NII, it is a deliberate choice that we view as a sensible insurance cost, positioning us to support clients and pursue future growth opportunities.

NII decreased by $11 million compared with the first quarter, primarily reflecting the strategic deployment of excess liquidity into our market-related businesses.

While much of this activity can be self-financing, our strong liquidity position enabled us to deploy house cash to support a portion of this growth.

Although this can create some quarter-to-quarter variability in reported group NII, the economics remain highly attractive, with the benefits of this liquidity deployment reflected in our strong trading revenues.

Importantly, our focus remains on growing sustainable, client-driven NII as demonstrated by the continued strength and growth of clearing NII.

Turning to the balance sheet. Approximately 80% of our assets continue to be directly driven by client activity, which is highly liquid and largely self-funding in nature.

Total assets increased to $42.1 billion at the 30th of June, reflecting continued growth across the franchise, particularly within our prime business.

After netting client assets and liabilities, the residual balance sheet is primarily comprised of corporate cash and other assets funded by group liabilities, including our structured notes and senior debt issuances.

To support the continued expansion of our client franchise while maintaining leverage metrics consistent with an investment-grade profile, we issued $500 million of hybrid capital during the quarter.

The hybrid strengthened our capital base and provided additional balance sheet capacity to support client growth. We continue to take a disciplined and prudent approach to capital and liquidity management.

Following our Bermuda redomicile, while we are no longer subject to consolidated FCA capital and liquidity requirements, our philosophy remains unchanged, and we intend to continue to internally manage the business to similarly conservative standards.

Turning first to capital. We continue to hold significant excess capital relative to our previous regulatory minimum. However, as you know, our key benchmark for capital allocation remains maintaining sufficient capital to support our investment-grade credit ratings with both S&P and Fitch.

On that basis, our RAC ratio, or risk-adjusted capital ratio, at the end of June was approximately 12%, comfortably above the 10% level S&P defines as strongly capitalized and supportive of our investment-grade credit rating.

Given our strong M&A pipeline and organic growth opportunities, we're comfortable with this headroom. On liquidity, we finished the quarter with $8.1 billion of funding sources, up from $6.2 billion at year-end.

Liquidity headroom increased to $1.8 billion, providing substantial capacity above our internally assessed liquidity required and reinforcing the resilience of our funding profile.

We also successfully issued $500 million of senior unsecured notes during the quarter, extending the maturity profile of our funding.

Both the hybrid and senior debt issuances were significantly oversubscribed, attracting new investors to the Marex story, and were executed at materially tighter spreads than our previous issuances, demonstrating the continued strength of market demand for our credit.

Taken together, these actions further strengthen our capital, liquidity and funding position, leave us exceptionally well positioned to support our clients, capitalize on growth opportunities and continue executing our strategy from a position of financial strength.

Finally, closing with risk management. Average daily VAR increased to $5.8 million in the first half, reflecting the increased scale of the business and the exceptional market environment and opportunities.

Importantly, 87% of trading days were profitable, with every week and every month generating positive revenue. On credit risk, we again had no realized credit losses in the quarter.

Now I'll hand you back to Ian.

Thanks, Rob. As you've heard, we continue to build a broader and more diversified business with significant structural growth and a growing contribution from higher-margin infrastructure-intensive activities.

This is increasing the earnings power of the firm, supporting margin expansion and making our profits more resilient. We're deepening relationships with our largest clients, expanding our capabilities through disciplined acquisitions and investing in technology and market structure innovation.

In the second quarter, we have also positioned ourselves to support future growth and client activity with additional equity and more liquidity through the issuance of $500 million of hybrid capital and $500 million of senior unsecured notes.

Our track record demonstrates the effectiveness of our strategy with year-on-year profit growth in 19 of the last 20 quarters through a wide range of market environments.

We are very pleased with the progress we've made, see considerable opportunities to continue growing from here, and remain very confident about our future prospects.

With that, we'd be happy to take your questions.

[Operator Instructions]

Your first question comes from the line of Bill Katz with TD Cowen.

Just maybe a big picture question for you. When you guided to feel comfortable at the high end of the 10% to 20% range, what kind of M&A contribution are you anticipating?

And then secondarily, your margins came in quite strong quarter-on-quarter, year-on-year. Maybe update us on your thinking on where the long-term trajectory might sit.

Thanks, Bill. So I think in terms of the growth, I think that we're not anticipating any kind of shift in how relevant that is in the sense that it's around 20% of our growth in the second quarter.

While there's probably going to be some variability, we wouldn't anticipate any real change there. So we have a really robust pipeline. We have some really attractive companies that we're looking at.

We're actually really excited about the M&A that we're closing in 2026. So I wouldn't expect anything different, and it's broadly in line. In terms of the margin, I think we're at the 24% range. That's higher than we've been operating at, as you know.

The things that are driving that, I feel like they are still in place. So I think all the things that we've talked about in the remarks will play through going forward.

So I think that what we're seeing in terms of mix, in terms of where the business is operating, the progress we're making with some of our investments, the way in which the investments are starting to generate returns. None of that, I think, is changing.

So I think that we're comfortable with where the margins are now. And over time, I could see those potentially continuing to increase. But if it is going to increase from these levels, in all likelihood, it will be slow and steady rather than something that's dramatic.

Just as a follow-up, I have a question. One thing you mentioned that the skew of your adjusted profit before tax continues to move to the right, and you expect more of a bell curve, including into July, if I heard you correctly.

So I was just wondering if you might be able to give us an update of how third quarter trends are unfolding relative to maybe pacing coming out of the second quarter.

Sure. I mean, essentially, what we're seeing in July and into the short portion of August is just a continuation of what we saw in the first half. So it's just a maintenance of exactly what we've experienced.

And while there's obviously some potential for things to change, based on what we see at the moment, we see the firm continuing to operate at the levels we operated in the first half.

Your next question comes from the line of Alex Blostein with Goldman Sachs.

I wanted to go back to Slide 8 with some of that incremental client-level disclosure, which is definitely very helpful.

Ian, could you maybe expand on sort of sources of growth in the larger client bucket? So when you talk about 57% growth in those clients that are generating over $5 million of revenues, can you just provide a little more granularity in like the types of clients, the category of clients where you're seeing the most traction?

That's the question that probably comes up the most with investors.

Yes. Thanks, Alex. Well, look, I mean, I think that the 59% includes the fact that there are more clients that are doing more than $5 million with us.

So it's about the cohort that is delivering more revenue for us. So some of it is just the fact that more clients are in that cohort than were there previously, and that's a big part of what's driving it. The average is actually very consistent.

So essentially, what's driving it is more clients operating in that bucket.

The range of clients in the bucket, though, is very heartening to see because it ranges and includes commodity producers, commodity consumers, and then a large number of financial players, whether those be other banks that are looking for access to market liquidity, whether those are asset managers, whether those are some of the hedge funds, whether those are some of the real money long-only funds.

So there's actually a very broad range of clients that are all seeing essentially the same thing, which is an opportunity to engage with the firm to a greater extent as we expand out into more products, more geographies, and we deepen the relationship. We establish increased credibility.

So what we're seeing is the most established clients are actually increasing their business with us, and they're doing that in part because they're seeing such great service from us.

And then there's a new group of people that are coming into the $5 million-plus bucket. They're almost naturally at the low end of that because they've just come in. And those are ones that we also look to grow over time.

My second question is around your prime brokerage business. It's been an incredibly solid environment for PE businesses really across the street.

You've seen spreads and funding spreads and equities widen out quite substantially. And there are clearly concerns or questions around perhaps just capacity- balance sheet capacity with some of the larger banks.

So to what extent does that give you guys an opportunity to see more structural growth in PB as capacity perhaps becomes more limited with some of the larger players?

And then secondly to that, I would love to get just a little more granularity on the composition of the PB revenues and how much is coming from the levered ETF community.

Sure. So I think that I mean what we're seeing in this business is maintenance of what we've seen in the third quarter as continuation of the second. So we're not seeing a drop-off in balances.

We're seeing maintenance of balances, and we're seeing maintenance of the spreads. As a business over that time period, it's probably double where it was a year ago. So we are seeing substantial growth.

That growth is coming by broadening the number of players we have participating in the business as well as increases in balances. But it's not just because we're getting bigger with a few players.

It's actually that there's a broader group of people that now see us as an extremely credible player in the space and are coming on to the platform. I'm not quite sure what the drivers are here, whether it's lack of capacity at some of the big banks or whether it's the very specific capabilities we bring here.

But I think that to the thrust of your question, I don't really see anything in the short or medium term that's going to cause us to not be able to continue to grow this in a sensible and prudent way.

So I think that there are tailwinds rather than headwinds with regard to this particular business. But obviously, we are cautious, or not cautious. We're careful in how we look to grow that out.

I think actually, Alex, you did ask a little about additional components of it. I think what's really important to understand is it's not just one thing either. I mean, we have an outsourced trading business.

We have a prime or prime business, and then we have an on-balance sheet prime business. And all 3 of those are growing and expanding. And that's our intention: to build a broad capability that can service clients in a lot of different ways.

Your next question comes from the line of Chris Allen with KBW.

I wanted to ask a little bit about the clearing balance growth. You noted driven by new client wins, increased client balances, and higher margin requirements.

Just trying to think about the run rate going forward. I think Rob might have talked about $1 billion from new client wins. Can you just confirm that? And then we think about margin requirements; they've been up, but they tend to normalize over time.

So maybe you could help us think about the impact there and just your pipeline for continued growth from here.

Yes. All right. So I think that in terms of the client balances, we would say what drives the margin requirement is actually more price than volatility.

So while volatility might normalize if prices remain in and around the levels that they are currently, then I think margin balances will stay, or margin requirements at the exchanges will stay broadly where they are at the moment.

I mean, what we see at play in terms of these balances is the factors that you described. So as prices are moving up and margin requirements are going up, that's certainly a driver of what the clients have to post to the exchange to support their existing business.

Clearly, business is growing, and that's making a big difference for our existing clients. And then there are new clients. I think as Rob said, we've added about $1 billion this year, and we see a healthy pipeline for the rest of the year.

I think there probably are some unusual levels of trading activity from some of our clients in the first half of the year that potentially come off some amount, but we would hope that the other factors could offset what will essentially be a more normalizing set of environmental factors.

So we've seen a lot of growth. I think we think that these are reasonable levels to maintain and potentially grow. What would you add to that, Rob?

I'd say the only other thing I'd add, Ian, is that the majority of the growth in the second quarter came from outside of the U.S., which is very positive to see and underlines the strength of our franchise.

And then just as a follow-up, I wanted to ask about compute futures, which both CME and ICE are launching.

Wondering if your clients are focused on it and how you think about the potential opportunity there?

I mean, I'm not that familiar with compute futures, but I mean, as a general matter, I think that what we see is clients having genuine interest in having access through an FCM to alternative venues.

And whether those are prediction markets or those are other venues that they can participate in, there does seem to be genuine interest. And that's partly the market-making firms that want to have access to those.

Then there's a decent amount of hedge fund and other institutional interest. And so these don't feel like flash-in-the-pan kind of things. These feel like, so long as they have support from the regulators, these will be real markets that will have a lot of interest in them.

Does that address your question?

Your next question comes from the line of Ben Budish with Barclays.

Maybe first, perhaps you could talk a little bit about the metals market-making business. It looks like your revenues pretty meaningfully outperformed both CME volumes and LME volumes.

So I know there's always a function of volumes; it has to do with spreads, but maybe talk about what you saw in the quarter in that line item.

No, I mean we're obviously extremely pleased with metals market making and market making more generally under Simon's leadership.

I mean, I think part of the insight there, and I'd rather go into slightly dangerous territory with this based on how people felt about these terms when I showed in Q1.

I mean, extraordinarily high levels of volatility are not necessarily the best environment to be operating in, particularly in market making.

So in many ways, the second quarter, which had high levels of volatility, but didn't have quite the same extremes, may actually be a better environment for market making.

And exactly to your point, it's not just about volumes. It's also about what the spread is and the success that you have supporting your clients around their trading, and what it is they're looking to do that determines where you come out.

And then maybe on the Solutions business, you called out some pretty robust growth in the first half of the year. I mean, it looks like things have really structurally stepped up.

You alluded to a pickup in client activity, but you've also, in the past, talked about expanding distribution in Latin America and some other geographies.

So maybe similarly, if you could unpack what you're seeing there? Are we at the right run rate? And how much is maybe new geographies, new distribution partners versus just heightened levels of activity?

Yes. I mean, I think that what we see in solutions is the output of a variety of factors. And again, I think it all speaks to our confidence in future growth for that business.

So I think that it's some of the factors that you've asked about, which is we are expanding. We're adding headcount. We're adding capabilities in different geographies.

We're adding product capabilities. But what you also have over time is just an acceptance of the name, and the calling efforts often just take a while to generate initial interest.

And then once you've sort of done the first trade, you really are in a position where you can establish a relationship and sell additional products to that relationship.

So some of this is just a natural evolution of a business that has to establish itself in a geography or in a particular product. I mean, the other thing that I would say about solutions is we did invest in essentially completely replatforming the business.

That was a distraction for a period of time in the sense that management needed to spend a lot of time making sure that that went well. But what that has also done is created a lot of capacity and capability.

And so we're supporting much higher volumes. And when you couple that capability, the emphasis in the business on creating straight-through processing and the opportunity for clients to essentially structure things themselves and then execute on our platform, that's supporting a lot of additional volume that doesn't require a lot of intervention from any of the folks in the solutions business.

So the combination of all those things- the investment, the expansion, the ongoing acceptance of the Marex name, the progress that the team has made with clients as well as the investments we've made in technology and making that technology available to our clients.

That, in combination, is what's driven the growth, and I don't see that stopping. We see that continuing.

Your next question comes from the line of Alex Kramm with UBS.

Just wanted to come back to the slides with some of the new initiatives. And I know you just addressed this a little bit when Chris asked this question, but a couple of things here. One, on the treasury clearing, good to see that you're a frontrunner there.

So any early reads of what is happening there? I mean, are you actually monetizing this? I know it's early days, but are people putting more balances to you?

Are they trading more because they are having savings? So just a little bit more color: what exactly is happening on the treasury clearing side?

And then broadly on that slide, which one of those do you think can actually scale the most of those opportunities from a revenue and earnings perspective? What are you most excited about, I guess, on those 4?

Yes. All right. So look, I mean, with regard to the cross margining, I mean, I actually think that the biggest impact of that will be just the credibility that we build in the marketplace with sophisticated players.

I mean, CME and FICC have been trying to have this cross margining available to clients. And we were the ones who figured that out for our clients.

I think that, that just positions us differently in the eyes of clients and that in and of itself is the thing that's going to probably be the most consequential outcome of this.

What we are seeing, though, to your specific question, is we are seeing larger shares of people's business in this particular space, and it does monetize effectively.

It's not going to be an enormous mover of revenue and profitability, but it's attractive, and it's good business. And most importantly, it establishes us with some of those clients.

I think as I described at Investor Day, the whole set of digital asset prime brokerage capabilities is one that I believe is important for us to participate in.

In the sense that there's an ecosystem out there and a set of people who sort of play in this particular space. And by providing this set of services to them, you can actually generate a really nice business.

If it turns out that this actually is the beginning of, I don't know, rewiring the financial infrastructure, and it's all going to go tokenized, then we'll be extremely well positioned.

So we're not doing this because we're evangelists on this, and we have a clear view that that's going to happen. I mean, it might happen, it might not happen, I don't know.

I do have a very high degree of confidence that we will make good money for those people who clearly do believe that this is what their business is and what they want to do. And so it makes sense for us to do that, and it will be a profitable business, I think a highly profitable business probably.

That's really the basis on which we are making that investment. Prediction markets are interesting to me in the sense that, of all of these things, I think that depending on how different parts of this play out, this potentially could be very large.

I think it could represent a change in where liquidity resides. Now from our perspective, if we're providing the layer that connects people to essentially exchanges, we're largely indifferent between where that volume actually resides.

I mean, I do think that it will reside on regulated exchanges rather than the offshore venues. I mean, there will be demand for offshore venues in the sense that there will be some retail players for whom that will be fine.

But I think for most institutional players, they're looking for rules around [indiscernible] and protections and visibility and all that kind of stuff. So I think the whole institutional market will remain with exchange-line venues.

But whether there's a multiplicity of exchange venues over time, I can't say. But broadly, however that evolves, I think Marex is going to be in a very good place.

Depending on how much prediction markets capture or are responsive to real demand that exists for hedging products and other things, this could actually be quite large.

And so we're excited about being able to start to clear some of the protection markets in the third quarter, and we have a lot of interest from clients to gain access to that.

They don't want direct access. They want to go through an FCM. And again, that is helpful from our point of view.

And just a very quick follow-up, maybe a little nitpicky, but obviously, good traction on the margins, but I think the one soft spot is in the clearing segment.

I think those margins have actually trended lower on a trailing 12-month basis. Maybe just tell us what's happening there? Are there more investments? Are you bringing on new teams that are maybe not profitable yet?

So yes, just what's going on? And is this something that could still scale higher?

Yes. I mean, the real answer to that, Alex, is just we had an idiosyncratic loss in the first quarter, and that dropped margins in the first quarter.

And so if you look at our margins around the other quarters, it's actually 49%, 50-ish over the entire period. So I mean, there's really nothing that I would draw attention to, to say we think that the underlying margin in the business is declining.

It feels like it's 50-ish, and that's a really healthy margin for that business.

Your next question comes from the line of Dan Fannon with Jefferies.

I was hoping to discuss a little bit more about the Prime business. Obviously, a lot of growth. You talked about some of the durability.

I was hoping to maybe unpack that a bit in terms of the type of customer and firm that you're having most success with and where you have the right to win.

And ultimately, just trying to get a little bit more context around the durability of these balances as you think about the diversity in other areas.

Well, I think that in terms of durability, I think that what we're seeing is share gains. And I don't think that I think that in almost all environments that I can envisage, I see the share gains persisting.

We're not competing for the largest prime mandates, which I think end up with the large banks.

We are taking share with funds and with hedge funds that are in that $500 million to $2 billion range, where we're providing them with the products that they're looking for, and we're also providing them with very high-quality service.

And I think that as more and more people are aware that we're extremely skilled in the space. We know what we're doing. We're reliable. We build more records with more clients.

I think that that's going to drive ongoing share gains. So it's now an extremely diversified business. I mean, it's covering an enormous number of stocks, lots of different providers.

And so I think that it feels like the durability is there. I mean, obviously, what we saw in the second quarter was balances increased and then dropped a bit as a result of adjustments in pricing in some of the more volatile stocks.

But on average, this thing is double where it was, and we don't see anything that's going to cause that to really change in any obvious way.

And then within AGC and Execution, you had another really strong quarter.

FX was a bit of a standout. Anything in particular that you could point to that drove that in the quarter?

Yes. I mean, you saw it on that M&A slide; Hamilton Court has really turned into a real gem for the firm.

I think it shows the power of taking what's a good business, but one that's struggling because it's just not that big and how effective it can be when you put it inside Marex, and it gets the benefit of our risk frameworks, our way of operating, the discipline that we have as a firm, the fact that they don't have to focus as much on those things as a business and they can focus more of their attention on winning clients and doing more business with them.

So what you're seeing in the FX is partly what we've seen in Hamilton Court, which is just a great success and a very substantial growth in earnings.

Your next question comes from the line of Patrick Moley with Piper Sandler.

A lot of great questions asked here. Maybe just one on the M&A pipeline. Curious how much of the focus going forward is going to be on adding capabilities to deepen wallet share with existing clients versus expanding the funnel and opening yourselves up to new client verticals that are somewhat untapped.

And then maybe if you could just also talk about which new verticals, asset classes you're most focused on today?

So I think it's hard to take what's like a whole portfolio of M&A opportunities that we're evaluating and say how much is in increasing the funnel versus positioning ourselves to deepen.

I think most of what we would be doing, though, is in the increasing the funnel, whether that's a geographic expansion, which I think of as predominantly about adding new clients or some of the things that we're considering, which at their heart is about getting us into new activity that we're not in or we're in very small scale and what it does is it adds clients.

So I'd say probably some genuine skew towards increasing the funnel rather than putting us in a position to deepen.

I think that in terms of some of the things that we're focused on, I think as we look across the platform, particularly in the capital markets area, some asset classes where building it out organically is slow and hard work.

If we could accelerate some of that with acquisitions, then those are things that, if you can get the right firm at the right price and the culture is a match in the right way, that's probably where, if you could only do one thing, you do that thing rather than something else.

And then you made another interesting comment talking about prediction markets and some of the new market structure initiatives and said that the new client relationship that it's opening you up to.

I'm just curious about maybe prediction markets in general and those clients wanting access to an FCM that can get them access to the liquidity pool. How much of that is coming from customers that might not typically be in your core customer base of commodity producers and consumers, asset managers, market makers?

How much of it is from a more diversified set of corporates where this is maybe just a totally new greenfield opportunity?

Yes. I mean, interestingly, when I was making that comment, I was thinking more about the digital asset stuff.

So when you're thinking about some of the very sophisticated hedge funds that you don't have a natural in with at this point, the capabilities around digital assets are often the thing that is intriguing to them.

The fact that we're offering that is often the door opener for us to other broader business. That's probably more true than what I would say around prediction markets.

Again, our engagement with prediction markets at the moment is quite limited. So in terms of the pipeline for prediction markets, some of it is our existing clients.

In a few cases, it's new clients. But in there, it's financial players we would have wanted to have as clients more broadly, but the entree for us is that they're looking for access to a prediction market.

There are no further questions at this time. I will now turn the call back to Ian Lowitt, CEO, for closing remarks.

Well, thanks, everybody. Thanks for all the questions. I mean, as I'm sure you've appreciated, we're very pleased with how we did in the second quarter. We're obviously very pleased with how we did in the first half.

We drew attention to elements in our track record, which, again, we have a lot of pride in the 19 out of 20 quarters being up year-on-year. And hopefully, what you've gathered from the answers to the questions is we're excited about the second half and then where we're able to take the firm.

We see a lot of momentum. We see a lot of positivity, and we're in a virtuous circle of making progress with clients that creates more opportunity, and then that in and of itself sort of creates more growth and creates a basis for additional investment.

So we're very pleased with where we've got to and extremely excited about our future. So thank you all.

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

Hello, everyone. Thank you for joining us, and welcome to Marex's First Quarter 2026 Earnings Conference Call. [Operator Instructions] I will now hand the conference over to Adam Strachan, Head of Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Good morning, everyone, and thanks for joining us today for Marex's First Quarter 2026 Earnings Conference Call. Speaking today are Ian Lowitt, Group CEO; and Rob Irvin, Group CFO. After Ian and Rob have made their formal remarks, we will open the call to questions. Before we begin, I would like to remind everyone that certain matters discussed in today's conference call are forward-looking statements relating to future events, management's plans and objectives for the business and the future financial performance of the company that are subject to risks and uncertainties. Actual results could differ materially from those anticipated in these forward-looking statements.

The risk factors that may affect results are referred to in Marex's press release issued today. The forward-looking statements made today are as of the date of this call, and Marex does not undertake any obligation to update them. Finally, the speakers may refer to certain adjusted or non-IFRS financial measures on this call. A reconciliation schedule of the non-IFRS financial measures to the most directly comparable IFRS measures is also available in Marex's earnings release issued today. A copy of today's release and investor presentation may be obtained by visiting the IR page of the website at marex.com. I'll now turn the call over to Ian.

Good morning, and welcome to our first quarter 2026 earnings call. Thank you all for joining us today. Q1 2026 was a record quarter for Marex, materially above our prior record in Q4 2025 and somewhat above the top end of the profit range we provided at our Investor Day on March 26. This was a quarter of high exchange volumes and extremely elevated volatility, an environment in which we performed very strongly. Our performance is a result of both a supportive market environment, albeit one with significant potential pitfalls and the ongoing structural growth of our franchise, evidenced by new client acquisitions, customer balance increases and share gains. As you see on Slide 4, first quarter revenues grew 48% from $467 million to $692 million and adjusted profit before tax increased 59% to $153 million. This record performance includes the impact of a client default in January that we described at our Investor Day and which Rob will cover in his comments.

We grew EPS by 55% to $1.52 with trailing 12-month EPS of $4.66. Return on equity was very strong at 34.4%, up 570 basis points. Adjusted PBT margin was 22%, up on last year's 21%. Importantly, and consistent with prior quarters, this performance was broad-based with all our businesses contributing strongly. Clearing had an outstanding quarter with high levels of client activity and new client onboardings. Market Making benefited from the elevated volatility and performed strongly, particularly in metals and energy. Agency and Execution also delivered a strong quarter, driven by volatility across energy and financial markets. Prime saw some modest negative impact on client balances from lower equity markets in February, but it was still a strong quarter, up materially over last year's. Underlying client demand remains robust and Q2 balances are at record levels. Solutions had a record quarter, driven by high levels of client activity and the investments we made in technology and platform capabilities last year are now clearly bearing fruit.

As we described on our last call and discussed at our Investor Day, Q1 was a challenging environment for managing credit exposure. The small number of clients we mentioned who were illiquid but not insolvent as a result of the elevated volatility and price movements have now resolved their situations. And aside from the loss in January, we have seen no further material credit issues. Our record performance in Q1 was a result of both the supportive market as well as structural franchise growth. First quarter exchange volumes are up a lot, up 32% on Q4 and 24% year-on-year. Cleared volumes in March were around 25% above the record levels in April 2025, evidencing the operational resilience of the firm and the scalability of our platform. Volatility, as measured by the VIX, increased by 15% to an average of 20% for the quarter and 26% on average in March. Commodities pricing was up on average 13% on the fourth quarter and was over 20% higher in March, remaining at these elevated levels through April. This was a period of extremely elevated volatility within certain asset classes.

In natural gas, at the end of January, we saw multiple days of 2 or 3 standard deviation price moves, which together represented a 1- in 35-year event with prices experiencing one of the largest 5-day rallies on record. We also saw significant volatility in oil markets through March with crude prices increasing by around 70% to well above $100 per barrel, which we navigated without any material client events. This backdrop is supportive for the business overall, driving higher activity in clearing, agency and execution brokerage and match principal as well as market making and solutions. Equity markets were softer in February, which impacted prime client balances, although overall markets remained strong over the quarter. Interest rates also remained supportive. Against that backdrop, we grew adjusted PBT 59% year-on-year and 33% on Q4, demonstrating that we are growing faster than our underlying markets. One of the clearest indications of structural franchise growth is in our clearing client balances, which I'll cover on the next slide.

Clearing client balances grew to an average of $16 billion in the first quarter, up from $14 billion in Q4, and our run rate at the end of the quarter was above the average. This growth is a result of 3 effects. First, exchange margin requirements have risen to reflect the higher volatility and that increases balances. Second, we continue to win new larger clients. We are already ahead of our annual target for net new balances and our pipeline of large client opportunities for the rest of the year remains strong. And third, some of our larger trading clients are taking advantage of the current environment and increasing their margin balances with us. We expect balances to continue to increase, although the pace will likely moderate. Turning to Winterflood, which is included in our numbers for a full quarter for the first time within Market Making this Q1. The business has started strongly ahead of our prior expectations, and we see opportunity for margin expansion as we scale the business. Regulatory approval for the sale of Winterflood's custody business has been received, and we expect closing in the second quarter.

Under the terms of the transaction, this will generate around $40 million of capital benefit. This will increase reported earnings for Q2 and creates equity, which will be deployed for growth. This is another example of our disciplined approach to M&A as we will have acquired Winterflood's market-making capability, which is performing strongly on the Marex platform at a material discount to tangible book value. We also completed a successful $500 million senior unsecured debt issuance priced 50 basis points tighter than our previous deal, and the deal was highly oversubscribed. We are becoming a regular established issuer in the U.S., and this further diversifies our funding while reinforcing the strength of our balance sheet. We continue to make progress with our proposed redomiciling to Bermuda, which we expect to implement in the second half of 2026. The proposal is subject to shareholder approval at our AGM on May 21 and subject also to regulatory approvals.

To recap what I said at Investor Day, we believe this is the right structure for the next phase of our growth, aligning the group more closely with how the business is managed and enabling us to scale more effectively across regions. This also helps simplify the unintended complexity that comes from being a U.K. incorporated company, which is U.S. listed. We're very mindful of preserving shareholder rights and protections in the new structure. And critically, there will be no change to the underlying business model or operations. I'm pleased to share that April has continued the momentum we experienced in Q1.

It is tracking above last year's April, which was a very strong month given the liberation day volatility and volume spikes. We are running above February's level of $38 million, but below March's exceptional $78 million. Turning to the outlook for the full year. While individual quarters are hard to forecast, our underlying trajectory, balanced growth, client wins, platform scaling is very positive, and we've had a very strong start to the year. As a signal of the Board's ongoing confidence in our growth outlook, we have announced an increased first quarter dividend of $0.16 per share. Now I'll pass over to Rob to go through the financials.

Thanks, Ian, and good morning, everyone. First quarter revenue grew by 48% to $692 million with growth across all of our business segments, driven by higher client activity and a supportive market environment. Total expenses increased by 44%, reflecting the higher revenues as -- total expenses increased by 44%, reflecting the higher revenues as well as ongoing investment to support growth, including the impact of acquisitions completed since the first quarter of 2025. As we've said before, our cost base remains highly flexible with around 55% of expenses variable and linked to performance. Adjusted PBT margin expanded to 22.1%, delivering a 59% growth in adjusted PBT to $153 million. Our adjusted return on equity remained very strong at 37.4%, and we grew basic EPS to $1.52 per share, up 55% on last year's Q1. This is an excellent start to the year.

Looking at each business segment in turn, starting with clearing on Slide 9. Clearing revenues increased by 15% to $137 million, driven by record client balances and an increase in contracts cleared with heightened client activity throughout the quarter. Net commission income increased 30% to $88 million, reflecting higher client activity in a volatile market as well as our broadened product offering across the regions. Average clearing client balances increased to $16 billion from $12 billion in the first quarter of last year and up from $14 billion in the fourth quarter. This reflects higher margin requirements, new client wins and an increased activity from some of our larger trading clients, as Ian has already discussed. The material growth in balances drove an increase in net interest income to $68 million, more than offsetting the 70 basis points reduction in average Fed funds rates year-on-year. These revenue increases were partially offset by the natural gas client default Ian mentioned, which resulted in a total loss of $34 million in clearing.

This included trading losses of approximately $28 million, driving trading revenue to negative $18 million and a credit loss provision of approximately $6 million. These were partially offset by lower variable compensation, around 20% within clearing and another 20% in control and support. Despite this loss, our strong underlying performance meant that adjusted profit before tax still grew 2% to $58 million, reflecting continued franchise growth, including new client onboarding and strong balance growth. Turning now to Agency and Execution. Revenue increased 35% to $322 million, driven by broad-based revenue growth across both securities and energy. Securities revenues increased by 42% to $214 million driven by market share gains in equities, increased client activities in rates and continued momentum in FX following the integration of Hamilton Court, which is performing very well and adding new clients. Prime revenue grew 41% year-on-year, reflecting the continued strong client demand for our services, although Prime revenue was down on the back of a very strong fourth quarter.

This reflected more mixed equity markets in February, as Ian mentioned. However, our pipeline remains strong. Energy revenue increased 20% to $106 million, reflecting strong growth across the business. Performance benefited from weather-related disruption in the U.S. in January and heightened volatility following the conflict in the Middle East in March, both of which contributed to record energy revenues for the quarter. Overall, adjusted profit before tax increased 61% to $91 million, with margins expanding to 28%, reflecting growth in higher-margin activities, particularly Prime. Market Making revenue grew 164% to $140 million, driven by an exceptional performance across the business, particularly in Metals and Energy. Metals had a record quarter with revenue more than doubling to $65 million, driven by increased volatility and strong client activity. Energy revenue increased more than 3x to $32 million, reflecting elevated hedging activity from clients, driven by volatility from the conflict in the Middle East.

Securities revenue also increased 127% to $33 million, reflecting the inclusion of Winterflood following its completion in December with the business performing strongly. Adjusted profit before tax increased to $56 million with margins expanding to 40% as strong revenue growth more than offset higher front office compensation and the additional headcount following the Winterflood acquisition. Finally, Solutions, which delivered another record quarter in Q1. Revenue more than doubled to $93 million, reflecting growth across both financial products and hedging solutions. Hedging Solutions revenue increased to $36 million, driven by higher client demand for hedging products across both commodities and FX amid the high volatility in the market. Financial products revenue also increased to $58 million, reflecting continued strong structural products issuance volumes, supported by the rollout of our new technology platform last year. Adjusted profit before tax increased nearly threefold to $33 million as margins improved significantly to 35%, reflecting strong operating leverage in the business.

Turning now to net interest income at the group level. First quarter 2026 NII was $41 million compared to $53 million in Q1 2025 as higher interest expense more than offset the growth in interest income. Interest income grew by $17 million, reflecting materially higher average balances of $22 billion, which more than offset a 70 basis point reduction in the average Fed funds rate. However, higher interest expense related to the group's $500 million senior debt issuance in May 2025 and structured note issuance in solutions brought net interest income down overall. As we've said previously, we continue to hold significant liquidity headroom. Whilst this creates a modest near-term headwind to group NII, it is a deliberate choice that we view as an insurance cost that strengthens the balance sheet and positions us to support clients and pursue future growth opportunities. NII increased by $15 million compared to the fourth quarter, predominantly due to the $2 billion of growth in clearing client balances in the first quarter.

Looking now to our balance sheet, which I covered in detail at our recent Investor Day. As you remember, one of the distinguishing features of our firm is that around 80% of our balance sheet is directly driven by client activity, which is highly liquid and essentially self-funded. This quarter, total assets increased to $36.5 billion at the end of March, driven by growth in clearing client balances. After netting client assets and liabilities, the remaining residual balance sheet primarily consists of corporate cash and other assets totaling $7.5 billion against group liabilities of $6.2 billion, including our structured notes and senior notes issuance. Turning now to capital and liquidity. We continue to manage capital and liquidity prudently, maintaining substantial headroom above regulatory requirements to ensure resilience across market environments. At the end of March 2026, regulatory capital was $1 billion against a requirement of $403 million, representing a capital ratio of 253%.

This provides a substantial buffer and supports our investment-grade credit ratings. Total corporate funding increased to $6.7 billion, up from $6.2 billion at year-end 2025, and we maintained significant liquidity headroom of approximately $1.4 billion. As Ian mentioned, we announced an increase in quarterly dividend to $0.16 per share for the first quarter to be paid to shareholders on the 3rd of June. Finally, closing with risk management. Average daily VaR increased to $5 million in the first quarter, reflecting the extreme levels of volatilities in the commodities market and set against a trading profile that included a higher number of days generating over $2 million of revenue with only 6 negative trading days. This remains at a very low level relative to the performance delivered by Market Making this quarter, reflecting the client flow-driven nature of our business. In terms of credit risk, we had no realized credit losses in the quarter. Now I'll hand you back to Ian.

Thanks, Rob. In closing, we are 2 years into life as a public company and have consistently delivered. Every quarter has been ahead of the same quarter in the prior year with growth averaging well above our stated long-term guidance. Quarterly earnings have increased from around $55 million pre-IPO to over $150 million in the first quarter of 2026. The opportunity ahead remains substantial and exciting. High barriers to entry, structural shifts in bank focus and the increased demand for our services create a long runway for growth, and we are better positioned to capture it today than at any point in our history.

On margins, the combination of AI-driven productivity, a growing proportion of earnings from high infrastructure businesses like clearing and Prime and the operating leverage of the platform gives us confidence in continued margin expansion over the medium term. The consistent growth we are delivering is not a function of any single market environment. It is the result of the platform we have built, the clients we serve and the organization we have built over many years. 2026 has started extremely well, and we're excited about our prospects for the rest of the year and the future. With that, I'll hand it over to the operator to open the line for questions.

[Operator Instructions] Your first question comes from the line of Chris Allen with KBW.

I guess I just wanted to start out with April and just the commentary there tracking above last year. And maybe you could help us think about what it looks -- what April looks like from an organic perspective because the comps last year weren't exactly easy. And then what's been the incremental impact from inorganic or just build-out of different capabilities and segments?

Sure, Chris. Thanks. So look, as we mentioned, we did have a strong April. I think the -- so the backdrop here is, as you'll be familiar with exchange margins -- sorry, exchange volumes down on March as well as sort of the first quarter. So no sense in which those extremely elevated exchange volumes have sort of maintained themselves nor would we really expect that. But sort of notwithstanding that, we do have an April, which is sort of stronger than last year and it has been a strong month. The opportunities in sort of market making and probably somewhat lower just as sort of the market is sort of pausing some amount.

But what we are seeing is real interest in the prime. The clearing volumes are up the -- and the clearing balances are up. And so essentially, the diversified platform is working out. We are seeing nice contributions from some of the acquisitions that we closed last year. So Hamilton Court, in particular, has had a very strong April. But the business is performing as we would hope, not at the levels of March, which I think were somewhat unsustainable over the longer term, but certainly very strong performance in April. And that gives us confidence for the second quarter as well as for the rest of the year.

Got it. And just as a follow-up, maybe we could dig into financial products a little bit more. Obviously, you've seen really nice growth trajectory here. You know the impact of the new tech platform. Maybe you can just discuss whether there's specific client opportunities here, regional opportunities. Any additional color would be helpful.

Yes. No, certainly. Look, as you mentioned, we did invest a lot last year in upgrading our technology, our infrastructure platform, which will -- which enabled us to support a much larger number of sort of products and be able to bring products to market more swiftly. In addition, we've been consistently investing in sort of building out some of the regions. And certainly, with financial products, there's been a lot of take-up in Asia. And then although it's very early days, we've been investing in the U.S. markets.

And while those are not really relevant in the first quarter numbers or even in April, and we actually have a lot of confidence that, that's going to deliver. So what's really going on, I think, is just the output of a lot of effort to sort of invest. Undoubtedly, the market environment in the first quarter was sort of helpful for that particular business. But I think that most of what it represents is just the ongoing investments that we've been making in the product. Probably not going to -- it's going to sort of be hard to maintain the growth rate that we saw in the first quarter, but we still see it as likely to perform very strongly through the rest of the year.

Your next question comes from the line of Alexander Blostein with Goldman Sachs.

I wanted to start with a question around operating leverage, really strong margin, 22% in the quarter. Obviously, the revenue environment was very helpful and the sources of revenue growth have contributed to that. But curious if you could expand on ability to sustain these type of margins for the rest of the year as the environment perhaps kind of normalizes a bit? And then ultimately, as you look forward, what the scope is for incremental margin expansion over the next couple of years?

Yes. Look, I think that as we indicated at sort of Investor Day, we do think that the way in which we're growing is likely to be increasing the margins. So we expect that our growth to be -- will be differentially in infrastructure-intensive businesses like prime and clearing and those, I think, to sort of naturally increase margins. And I think that over time, we will start to see more economies of scale. At the moment, as we've grown, we've grown essentially to look to diversify adding new products, new geographies. Over time, I think more of the growth will be by getting bigger in things we're already in rather than just simply adding new things. And I think that in and of itself lends itself to sort of higher margins. And then although it is not reflected in the numbers at the moment, but I think it will be over a period of time.

As we look at the potential for AI to enable us to not only do functions better and more efficiently, but potentially reduce some amount of cost, that feels like it's very early in what will be a long game. So the combination of all those things, I think, put us in a position where we're pretty confident that over a 3-year horizon, the margins are likely to be in sort of the mid-20s, somewhere in and around there. And as we look at this year, I think that continuing to operate at these margin levels is quite plausible and feasible. Again, first quarter was not a quarter where we had particularly strong sort of Prime, obviously, it was up a lot on the prior year, but it wasn't up on the prior quarter. And I think that for the rest of the year, we actually anticipate that Prime, which is a very high-margin business for us, will actually be growing. So I think that maintaining the margins at these levels and then seeing them grow over the next 3 years to something like mid-20s is sort of sensible expectation.

Great. Super helpful. And then for my follow-up, I wanted to touch on some of the corporate actions you guys have announced. I guess, one, just want to make sure whether there are any implications from a business perspective from redomiciling, whether it's incremental operational efficiencies or any capital benefits? And then related to your authorization coming up -- share buyback coming up in May, just curious how you're thinking about utilizing buybacks as part of the overall growth algorithm for the company going forward?

Sure. Well, with regard to the redomiciling, we're very explicit about it's not changing the operating model. It's really about just sort of the location of the holding company. It will mean that we will have 4 regional holdcos, and I think that will promote the right longer-term sort of structure and focus for us. It is not likely to -- and it was never motivated by a desire to capture sort of capital efficiencies. And while I think there will be some operational efficiencies, we expect them to be relatively modest. And they will mostly arise as a result of the complexity of operating as a U.K. domiciled company as well as having a U.S. listing.

And that complicates a variety of matters, including sort of compensation and other things and typically involves having a lot of legal help with ensuring that what you're putting in place really works for all of the various requirements. So I think we expect relatively modest improvements in operations. We're not doing this for tax reasons. We remain U.K. tax domiciled. We don't anticipate sort of capital advantages, but it is consistent with where we're looking to evolve the firm, and there will be some limited cost savings as a result of it.

Share buybacks. Share buybacks.

Oh, so I think that -- I think people are sort of aware that we don't have an authorization currently. And I think that there's a sense that's pretty widely shared that what we want to have is the ability to buy back our stock if it's sort of sensible for us to do so. And particularly when we saw the stock drop a reasonable amount last year, I think the question was, should we, in fact, have been in a position to buy back our stock.

It doesn't represent a shift in our view that our current capital allocation is, in fact, the right one, which is ensuring we can maintain our investment-grade rating, maintaining the dividend and using excess for acquisitions. And as long as we're seeing acquisitions at the kind of prices we're seeing them at the moment, we think that's the best way to create value for shareholders. But operating in a world where you don't even have that authorization seems to us to be an error. And so we're hoping to get authorization from our shareholders to enable us to buy back stock if it was sort of necessary or the Board felt it was sort of sensible for us to do so.

Your next question comes from the line of Bill Katz with TD Cowen.

Just coming back, I just want to make sure I understand the April framework. I was wondering if you could unpack that a little bit. I joined a moment late, so I apologize if you covered this busy morning. I heard that April is looking somewhere between February and March. I was wondering if you might be able to unpack that a little bit further. Obviously, a pretty wide spectrum underneath that. And maybe what you're seeing just in terms of client behavior, client margin balances and within that, any sort of shift in risk just given the loss in the January month?

Okay. So look, I think that as you point out, the range between February and March is quite large. I mean I think that to sort of give everybody a sense of where within that range we are. If we were able to continue the rest of the quarter at the level of where we were in April, I think we'd be in and around what we did for the first quarter in aggregate. What's underpinning that strong performance is obviously client balances have been very strong. So that's been supporting our clearing businesses. We've seen a great deal of interest in sort of the prime product. And so that's certainly been helpful. I think that there is retrenchment just in the marketplace generally from some of the market makers in some of the commodity products.

So while spreads remain quite wide, volumes are somewhat lower there. And so while revenues are quite strong, they're not at the levels that we saw in March. So I think that that's broadly what we're seeing. We're certainly not seeing sort of increases in risk. We're not seeing concerns with sort of credit as I sort of indicated in the remarks, those are essentially all of those situations have sort of resolved. So we're feeling that it's just indicative of the ongoing strength in the franchise and the ongoing progress we're making with clients. I don't know if there's sort of anything I haven't covered within your sort of multiple question there.

It was one long question, just following my peers. Second question for you is just on deals. At the Investor Day, I think you had mentioned that the pipeline is pretty robust. I was wondering if you could give us an update on maybe how that pipeline has seasoned since the Investor Day and maybe frame out maybe size of opportunities and what specifically you might be looking at?

Sure. Look, I mean, I think that since the Investor Day, some of the companies we've been talking with, things have progressed in a positive way. So I think we're sort of closer to sort of reaching terms on those or completing diligence. So that feels like we're actually making good progress in moving all of that forward. I think that what it looks like is we'll be able to deliver very comparable levels of sort of acquisition in aggregate as we did last year. So again, acquisitions in the clearing space, acquisitions in -- we will have Webb Traders, acquisitions in sort of the market making space.

I think all of those are likely to complete this year. And then I think that in aggregate, it's likely to have very comparable impact of what we saw in '25, maybe somewhat more. So we're very pleased with how that all goes. We're able to increase diversification, particularly geographically. So one of the acquisitions we're looking at is in Asia. One is in Brazil, some are across regions. They're probably sort of focused on clearing bolt-ons like the Aarna acquisition, but it's essentially a range of acquisitions, which will strengthen all parts of our business.

Your next question comes from the line of Alex Kramm with UBS.

Just digging a little bit deeper in, I think, the first answer you just gave to Bill and specifically on the energy trading environment. We know that it's a little bit softer. And this is not just a Marex, but also an industry question. So I think you mentioned market makers maybe a little bit less active. There were some well-documented losses in the space, not the one that impacted you, but just in general, some of the larger trading houses and macro funds. So just wondering what you're seeing out there? Anything that makes you worry a little bit more than usual after these kind of volatile quarters? And maybe any expectations when you think things will be ramping again and even any signs of things ramping already again?

Yes. I think so what we're seeing is less activity from sort of the pure traders and the market makers and ongoing engagement from participants in this marketplace that are typically buyers or sellers of the commodity itself, so oil or the various derivative products. As you would expect in these environments, the margins on transactions tends to be higher. Volumes tend to be lower at this point in the cycle. At the point at which those market makers or that speculative capital comes back into the marketplace, I couldn't really say. But certainly, what we're seeing is those people who are buyers or consumers are almost of necessity quite active in hedging in an environment where there's this much volatility and uncertainty. So that's really what we're seeing. It's most pronounced in energy. There's less but still some in the metals markets as well. So somewhat less activity, but the spreads are wider, and that obviously helps maintain -- offset the sort of impact of lower volumes.

Okay. Very good. And then maybe more in terms of growing the franchise with new client onboarding. You made some comments already. Maybe you can be a little bit more specific. I think at the time of the Investor Day, there was a really big pipeline of some, I think, near-term large onboarding. So just wondering, have a lot of those now happened? And then with maybe that behind us, how would you describe the kind of pipeline over the next couple of quarters? Any specific comments around, obviously, clearing and prime where it matters the most?

Yes. So I think that the good news is we did -- we have onboarded some of those larger mandates. So they're onboarded. The pipeline remains quite robust over the next series of quarters, but not -- as you will appreciate, Alex, the clearing pipeline has a great deal of visibility because people work on these arrangements for many, many months, sometimes quarters. And so you have a pretty rich sense of it. So the good news is it's being realized about as we would expect. And it does also mean that we can see that over the subsequent set of quarters, there still are a number of really interesting clients that should come on to the platform. So that feels exciting. And we talked about customer balances being up about $2 billion.

Some of that is existing clients with more balances. Some of that is new clients. And that level of activity, we would expect to increase over the course of the year, albeit perhaps not at the same rate. And then with regard to Prime, there was a bit of a dip in February as the market dipped, but that is -- that business is now operating at record levels and has a robust pipeline, a very robust pipeline over the rest of year. And it really is -- it's a part of the firm that offers diversification when exchange volumes might be sort of coming down. We saw that in the third quarter of last year. And certainly, we're seeing the very positive impact of Prime in April, and we expect that to continue into the second quarter and beyond.

Your next question comes from the line of Dan Fannon with Jefferies.

Just wanted to talk about some of the new -- the recent acquisitions and their contribution that you mentioned Hamilton Lane (sic) [ Hamilton Court ] and Winterflood. Can you talk about kind of how those have tracked as they've been onboarded versus expectations? And then remind us if there's any cost benefits that maybe still could come through to think about maybe margin enhancement as those businesses continue to scale?

Yes, sure. So it's Hamilton Court. And Hamilton Court is performing very strongly. So it may actually operate at a level which is almost double what it was prior to acquisition. So we're actually really pleased with how Hamilton Court is operating. I mean it's just an example of how you take a sort of strong business, a strong capability and you put it on to the Marex platform where it has advantages in terms of how it hedges out its positions, its terms of trade with The Street, the ability to generate liquidity, the comfort that clients have with you. And that just has created really considerable scope for growth. And I think the team is doing a very good job of sort of capturing that. With regard to Winterflood, it closed in December.

The sale of the custody business to Epiris now that regulatory approval has been obtained, will be happening this quarter. The revenue performance of that business is strong and ahead of what it was prior to acquisition. We have -- we need to complete the sort of splitting of the business into the market making piece and the custody piece and move and have the sort of Epiris sale complete. And at that point, we do believe that there will be some opportunity for margin expansion. We did indicate that we thought that Winterflood would get to 20% margin, it's operating below that. So there is some scope for margin expansion within the Winterflood business as we change the support model and are able to capture some of the sort of synergies that would exist as part of Marex.

Understood. Okay. And then following up on some earlier comments, just on the hedging and investment solutions business, which continues to be on a really robust growth rate. Can you just maybe frame what is the best backdrop for those products to be sold and adoption? Clearly, we've been in a volatile one. I just want to make sure I understand kind of the macro components that increase or drive demand or we shouldn't think of it that way? It's just more of what you guys are doing in the blocking and tackling and executing.

Yes, I think it's probably a combination of those 2 things. So the business comprises 2 elements. One is essentially OTC hedges for clients. So clearly, the more volatile environment, which creates a sort of more requirement for people to hedge out commodities exposures and that is helpful to the business as a sort of general backdrop. And then within financial products, which is the structured note component of the business, the backdrop, which is higher volatility, but probably also sort of stable or increasing equity prices, those are probably -- that's sort of the helpful backdrop. I think that the improvement quarter-on-quarter and year-on-year in that business is a function of both a supportive environment as well as sort of structural improvements in the business.

And the investments we made last year in infrastructure, which are really very significant in this. I mean, not only because this year, we're now able to free up all the bandwidth of the senior management team that were involved in ensuring that, that infrastructure build-out was successful, but also with that infrastructure build-out has been an ability to have more products, bring products to markets more swiftly, be able to do that with high levels of confidence around controls. And so I think it's the combination of the investments we made, the ongoing investment in staff, the broadening of the business geographically, the progress we're making over a period of time, most noteworthy in Asia, but not uniquely in Asia. With the sort of backdrop, which is sort of helpful to that business. All of those things have contributed to a very strong sort of quarter in that business.

We have reached the end of the question-and-answer session. I will now turn the call back to Ian Lowitt, CEO, for closing remarks.

Well, thanks, everybody, for joining us. Another really strong quarter for the firm, a record by some margin. It's obviously partly a function of an environment that was supportive for our business but it also, I think, reflects the ongoing improvements we make quarter-to-quarter, just improving how we operate, and that combination has delivered the record results. We're obviously pleased with how the business has performed in April, which is a less supportive environment, but one which we continue to perform strongly. And that gives us sort of confidence for the second quarter, and it also gives us a lot of confidence for the rest of the year and beyond that. So it's great to be able to continually come and describe record quarters to you all. And hopefully, we'll be able to continue to do that. Thanks, everybody.

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

Welcome, everybody, to our 2026 Investor Day. It's great to see so many familiar faces, and we appreciate the effort you've made to join us here today. It's almost 2 years since our IPO in April of 2024. And it's instructive to cast one's mind back to that time and how we describe Marex to gain a sense of how much we have accomplished during that 2-year period. For me, more important than the outperformance itself is understanding what it is that explains, why we've been able to grow so much more successfully than we expected because that provides the basis for our assessment of how we will deliver the next phase of our growth. Our goal has always been to build a resilient business, capable of sustained double-digit growth for a range of market environments.

Since our IPO, we have delivered that consistent growth with every quarter ahead of the same quarter in the prior year. It is that consistency, which is one of the clearest indications of how much the firm has strengthened and underpins our confidence in our future. it's instructive to look back at how we conceptualize our opportunity and describe the investment case at our IPO. The foundation was the same then as it is today. We were looking to build an increasingly diversified and resilient firm capable of growing through a range of different market environments by diversifying by product and geography within a frame of 4 interconnected and reinforcing services.

We had a huge TAM estimated at $70 billion and a low circa 2% market share. Our business was about servicing the flow of our clients, facilitating activity in exchange-traded products. We described ourselves as a Clearing-led business, connecting clients to exchanges and Clearing houses through our 4 interconnected services. As a large global clearer, we had built a set of very hard to replicate sources of competitive advantage. The strong barriers to entry included our extensive global connectivity, deep client relationships, expertise in exchange rules and contract settlements and nimble technology. The exchange-traded derivatives that were the basis of our business had enjoyed an 8% growth rate over multiple decades and we saw secular trends supporting that growth. And unusually for a fast-growing business with high moats, our marketplace was characterized by declining competitive intensity as smaller players were unable to provide the capabilities clients increasingly looked for and exchanges demanded and banks focused relentlessly on larger clients and deemphasize the services we provided.

We had a track record of successful growth, having increased profit in each of the prior 8 years with a CAGR of 35%. We had enjoyed success augmenting our organic growth with acquisitions and presented this as a way to increase the 10% target organic trend growth, potentially increasing our growth rate to 15%. Our forecast was 12% growth, a level we had high confidence we could meet. That was the basis of our successful IPO.

Since our IPO, our performance has materially exceeded those expectations. Even at the 15% annual growth, which at the time would have been the high end of what was expected of Marex, our 2025 earnings would have been a little above $300 million, and we delivered $418 million. What is interesting to me is analyzing what underpinned this outperformance. What was it that we didn't anticipate or emphasize at the IPO.

Importantly, the outperformance is not a function of markets being better than we forecast. Exchange volumes over the past 2 years have grown at around 10%, broadly in line with what we expected at IPO. And similarly, interest rates have performed much as we anticipated based on the forward curve back in 2024. There are a number of factors that explain our growth, which were, however, not anticipated. Although we had closed the Cowen transaction in December 2023, the business was still settling in during the first half of 2024 and was during that period, performing below the level prior to the acquisition.

So while we still believed it would be an important strategic transaction for us and described it as such, we did not anticipate how Prime would become so important to the firm and the extent to which it would increase both growth and earnings resilience. As I will discuss later, the share of the firm that is infrastructure-led is considerably higher than we had expected. At IPO, we never anticipated that a combination of our own capabilities, our improved brand following becoming a public company and clients' openness to growing their business with Marex would create an avenue of growth including the largest clients choosing to clear and grow their business with Marex.

At the time of the IPO, we never anticipated competing for and winning the largest mandates in the face of this competition. Today, it feels we are competitive in almost any bid. And while we continue to grow with highly valued smaller and medium-sized clients, it is success with larger clients that are powering our growth. And then M&A has proven to be more powerful lever than we had anticipated. At IPO, I would have expected $15 million to $25 million of inorganic PBT growth in 2025 on a run rate basis, it's more like $50 million, all of which is within our existing capital envelope. And an acquisition like Cowen, which now accounts for 25% of profit shows how if you get it right, you can acquire a very valuable franchise at a very reasonable price.

So while our strategy hasn't changed, how it manifests itself in our business today is somewhat different. There are 6 things to highlight, and this will structure the rest of my remarks: First, we are scaling with larger institutional clients, which is now a key driver of growth. Second, the mix has shifted towards infrastructure-led, high-margin activities such as Clearing, Prime and financing. Third, M&A is contributing more meaningfully not just adding capabilities, but driving earnings.

Fourth, our geographic footprint has expanded, and our brand and positioning have strengthened, helping us win larger mandates and attract talent. Fifth, technology, particularly electronic execution and AI is opening -- is operating as an accelerant to growth. And finally, new opportunities, particularly in digital assets are expanding our addressable market. The evolution of our client base is one of the clearest indicators of how the franchise has strengthened. Overall, active clients grew 19% in 2025 and revenue grew 32%. The most significant acceleration is with our largest clients. Our $5 million-plus client cohort increased from 36 to 49 clients and revenue from that client segment grew from $368 million to $674 million, so over $300 million of incremental revenue. It's important to understand how that growth occurs. This is not the result of us prospecting and finding new $5 million-plus clients each year.

All of the 49 clients now generating more than $5 million a year of revenue were existing relationships in 2024. 17 grew into that category from lower tiers, while 4 moved out of the bucket during the year, but remained important clients for the firm. This reflects a consistent pattern in the business. Growth driven by clients increasing their activity over time. Today, we have around 250 clients in the $1 million to $5 million revenue tier, which represents a meaningful internal pipeline for future growth.

Notwithstanding this growth would remain highly diversified with more than 3,400 active clients and no single counterparty representing undue exposure. The top 10 clients generate around 1/3 of our revenue. It is also instructive to look at the business through a somewhat different lens based on how infrastructure-intensive the underlying activities are. Growing a proportion of our profit -- sorry, a growing proportion of our profit is now generated from what we think of as high infrastructure-intensive businesses, which include Clearing, Prime services and our financing activities. These are high-margin, stable and highly recurring revenue businesses, requiring connectivity, capital, technology, regulatory standing and balance sheet capacity where we have a clear specialization and a durable right to win.

Of the $188 million increase in PBT between 2023 and 2025, around $150 million of that growth comes from these high infrastructure, high-margin recurring revenue businesses, which now represents 70% of our profitability. Our medium infrastructure businesses, comprising solutions and market making, contributed approximately $22 million of that growth. These remain important parts of the franchise, and we expect their contribution to increase in 2026. Our lower infrastructure, match principal and brokerage activities in securities and Energy contributed around $16 million of the incremental profit over the same period. Match Principal and brokerage remains an essential part of the platform. It is often the entry point for client relationships generates significant trading flow across the franchise and remains a very high ROE business.

However, the incremental growth of the firm is increasingly coming from infrastructure-intensive activities, which tend to be recurring deeply embedded and more scalable in addition to being high margin. This shift in the mix of earnings is one of the key reasons our earnings profile today is more resilient than it was at IPO, notwithstanding the expected headwinds from lower interest rates on our Clearing business. One of the consequences of the shift towards higher infrastructure activities is the increased quality and reliability of our earnings. You have seen this slide before, but it remains one of the clearest ways we have to demonstrate that particular point. On the left of the chart, you see the consistent growth in average monthly profitability over the past 5 years, alongside the relatively narrow band for our monthly profit, as measured by standard deviation. That combination drives a sharp ratio of 6.2% for 2025, which is remarkably high.

The key takeaway is that profitability is not concentrated in a handful of exceptional months. It is delivered consistently each month and within a relatively narrow band. And on the right of the chart, you can see the distribution of daily profitability. The distribution in 2025 has shifted to the right by approximately $400,000 a day from roughly 1.3 million to 1.7 million, reflective of our growth. Importantly, the left tail remains small with only 6 negative days in the year. At the same time, the right tail has expanded which reflects the increasing scale of the franchise and our ability to execute larger transactions with more sophisticated clients as our relevance increases. M&A has been highly impactful for Marex and this represents a distinctive source of competitive advantage.

What has changed over the past 2 years is the position we now have in the market. We have become a buyer of choice. We are seeing a significant increase in inbound opportunities with multiple unsolicited approaches each week from companies looking to join the Marex platform. At IPO, we had assumed acquisitions might contribute around $10 million to $15 million of earnings annually, the scale of contribution we are now generating materially exceeds that expectation. A good example of this is the Cowen transaction in 2023, which strengthened our prime and institutional franchises and importantly, created the foundations for the on-balance sheet prime business we have today.

In 2025, we deployed approximately $80 million of premium, including the sale of Winterflood's custody business across bolt-ons, which are expected to contribute approximately $35 million of run rate profit after tax in the first year. What we've shown over time is that you don't necessarily need to spend very large amounts of capital to create meaningful value. The Cowen transaction is a good example of that. We paid roughly $25 million of premium. And today, that business contributes around 1/4 of the group's profitability. Our pipeline today remains attractive. Over the past year, we have screened more than 100 opportunities, more than double the number we would have reviewed around the time of the IPO. More importantly, we now have real choice. At IPO, opportunities felt more limited and somewhat opportunistic.

Today, we're able to be much more selective. We remain disciplined in how we approach acquisitions. We look for scalable businesses with good cultural fit, targeting over 20% PBT margins, over 20% ROE and payback of premium in under 3 years. We are acquiring high-quality businesses at fair prices, which once integrated onto our platform, deliver very attractive returns. This disciplined approach to M&A has been an important driver of how the firm has evolved. Another development we did not anticipate at IPO was the rapid evolution of AI. The more I learn about AI and see the impact at Marex, the more I am convinced of its potential. I know as investors, you grapple with AI as a potential threat to business models, how it could impact existing barriers to entry and who will be the winners and losers as this plays out over the next series of years.

We are similarly focused on those questions and want to share our experience and explain why we see AI as a growth accelerant and why we believe the winners in our ecosystem are likely to be incumbents with nimble organizations just like Marex. The impact of AI on productivity in particular areas and scope to improve margins is the most obvious impact of AI and where we are currently seeing the largest impact. For example, on a major system build for a new product, AI tools have transformed productivity, but even 2 years ago, would have likely taken 50 people 2 years to build, will now with the AI tools available, take 20 people 6 months. What this experience demonstrates for me is where the source of competitive advantage now resides. In this case, we will have coded 1.5 million lines in just 6 months, but we could only do that because we had deep internal domain knowledge, understanding all the use cases, the complexity and how the system needs to be connected across the firm. That knowledge and expertise is not in the public domain. So what AI does both in this situation, and I suspect more broadly, is to create opportunity for nimble incumbents with fully functioning business systems to accelerate their growth. We have built a platform at Marex which is difficult to replicate with industrial scale capabilities, proprietary systems and deep connectivity across exchanges, geographies and clients.

That moat is underpinned by long-standing exchange relationships, which require credibility, expertise and regulatory approvals that can take years to establish alongside deep client trust and a broad service offering. What is valuable is deep domain knowledge. That is not widely available elsewhere and institutional capabilities, both of which we have firm wide, and they don't exist in the hands of just a few people.

I believe AI compresses advantages built on generic information but amplifies advantages both on infrastructure, connectivity and expertise. The winners in businesses like ours will be nimble, ambitious incumbents. It is also intriguing to imagine how AI might, over time, transform how business is done. We are actively experimenting. Nilesh will be talking about more -- we'll be talking more about how we are developing AI agents and tools to enhance how clients interact with our platform. And this is just one actually of very many examples of things that we are doing with AI within the firm. You will hear more on digital assets after the break. It's an interesting ecosystem as it operates on an uncorrelated basis with traditional asset classes. So it acts as a diversifier for our business. I believe digital assets will coexist alongside traditional markets as an additional asset class, one where clients will require execution, clearing and financing capabilities, just as they do today in other products. If the market evolves and broadens beyond its current scale, we'd be well positioned. Equally, if it remains within its current ecosystem, we see an opportunity to build an attractive business.

The move to a 24/7 market structure is also important, enabling developments such as prediction markets as well as broader trends like tokenization and digital collateral. What is notable is that 2 years ago at IPO, we would not have expected Marex to have the level of engagement we do with many of the most innovative participants present in this space. Our goal has been to build a resilient business, capable of sustained growth through a range of market environments. Since IPO, every quarter has been ahead of the same quarter in the prior year with quarterly growth ranging from 16% to 55% and averaging a very impressive 38%. I'm particularly proud of how we performed in the third quarter of 2025 and a quarter characterized by materially lower exchange volumes and the publication of the short report, yet we still grew 27% and increased client balances.

That was an important indication of how much we had diversified the firm. The first quarter of 2026 is another test of our resilience. It is a quarter characterized by extremely high volatility at a level which creates significant pressure on some clients. While we still have 4 days ago in March, we are now forecasting a very strong quarter with record adjusted PBT of between $140 million and $150 million, up 45% to 55% on last year's first quarter and comfortably above our record fourth quarter of 2025. As I described on the fourth quarter earnings call, what we're experiencing now is not Goldilocks volatility. We have seen, for example, the sizable losses reported by some of the most sophisticated hedge funds in March.

While these firms remain very strong with sizable equity and liquidity positions, market moves in the quarter have affected smaller less diversified clients adversely. It is worth noting that this is not new. We have experienced periods of heightened volatility before during COVID, the Ukraine invasion, the nickel price shock and various extreme moves in natural gas and rates. These are challenging environments, which create both opportunity and stress. They tend to be correlated with very high exchange volumes, which is good for our business and enhanced market-making opportunities but also liquidity pressures for select clients. Client defaults when a client cannot meet a margin call, given the impact of extreme price moves on their position is an inherent part of the Clearing business. Defaults are rare, but they do happen. Over the past 5 years, we have had 3 or so cases where clients couldn't make a call, was clearly insolvent. And consistent with the conditions of our client agreement and with the support of the exchange, we took the position into the firm and had to manage down the risk.

Typically, we're able to manage the risk with limited P&L impact. In Q1, a client defaults by a natural gas market maker coincided with what was described as a 1 in 35-year event in price moves, and we incurred a loss. Notwithstanding this loss, we are forecasting another record quarter. Importantly, while March is particularly strong, each month has been a solid contributor even with the January impacted by the loss. We made around $38 million in January post the impact of the credit default. $37 million in February, which was a slower month due to Chinese New Year and are forecasting between $65 million and $75 million for March. This would make March a record month by some margin ahead of last October.

Customer balances continued to grow through the quarter, increasing from the $14 billion on average in Q4 2025 to around $16 billion in the first quarter of 2026. As we approach the end of the quarter, the spot balance is materially higher than the average. This includes the impact of higher exchange margins as well as important new client wins. Cleared volumes in March were around 25% above the record levels in April 2025, which we're able to process successfully again confirming the operational resilience of the firm and the scalability of our platform. Liquidity surpluses through the quarter also remained strong and consistent with prior quarters.

So while periods like Q1 are demanding, there are opportunities to demonstrate to the market the strength of our model. As we did last year, I want to illustrate how we think about the potential scale of Marex over the next few years. We have maintained our growth framework. We continue to target over 10% organic growth annually, augmented by disciplined M&A, creating a 10% to 20% target corridor for growth. As we have demonstrated over the past few years, we have delivered materially above that range. To illustrate what that means in practice over the next 3 years. At 10% to 20% growth, we would expect adjusted PBT to continue compounding meaningfully from 2025 levels driven by the structural themes we have discussed today. At 20% growth, those numbers would be approximately $500 million of PBT in 2026, $600 million in 2027 and $722 million in 2028 with EPS of roughly $4.94, $5.84 and around $7.01 in 2028. There is a more optimistic case where we are able to replicate 2025 30% growth, which would clearly transform our scale with PBT of over $900 million and around $9 of EPS in 2028.

Investors often ask me about my outlook for margins. Our objective has been consistent to deliver steadily growing earnings supported by scalable and increasingly efficient platform. As you would expect, a growing business benefits from returns to scale with higher margins on incremental activity. To date, that effect has been offset in part by investments, which include the following: as we have grown, we have deliberately invested in control infrastructure and systems required to operate a larger and more complex public company.

This, for example, includes our sizable investment in SOX compliance. Given our efforts to diversify by product and geography, we do not get the returns to scale, which might be anticipated and may even experience diseconomies while businesses and regions are growing. This, to my mind, is a sensible trade-off as we grow earnings resilience via diversification. We're also carrying a lot of investments in new capabilities and businesses to ensure we can deliver structural growth. And as we have grown, we're doing more of this as our ambitions increase. The outcome has been slowly improving margins over the past 5 years from 15% to 21%, and we expect that progression to continue with a path towards the mid-20s over the next 3 to 5 years. The drivers of further margin improvement are increasingly clear. The combination of AI improving productivity, together with a greater proportion of growth coming from infrastructure-led businesses, such as Clearing and Prime means that as the platform scales, the underlying economics become more margin accretive over time.

Taken together, these factors give us confidence that margins will continue to improve as the business scales. I want to introduce a new element in our evolution as a firm to you, a proposed re-domiciling to Bermuda. As we have grown both organically and through acquisitions, the group has become more complex, both operationally and from a regulatory perspective. And as we have grown geographically, there is increasingly a need for stronger regional structures and decision-making, which is consistent with how regulators increasingly expect firms like ours to operate. We are now a global business with increasingly substantial regional franchises, and the structure needs to evolve with that.

Our proposal is to redomicile to Bermuda, creating a new holdco and 4 regional subgroups reporting into the new holdco. We believe this is the right structure for the next phase of growth, aligning the group more closely with how the business is managed and enabling us to scale more effectively across regions. This also helps simplify the unintended complexity that comes from being a U.K. incorporated, which is U.S.-listed. Bermuda provides a legal and governance framework that aligns naturally with our NASDAQ listing and is operationally more efficient to manage within including reducing some of the structural and administrative costs associated with our current setup.

Critically, this is not a change to the underlying business. There's no impact on our listing, our board, our management team, reporting lines, risk management, our clients, our people, our financials or our tax position. We're also very mindful of preserving shareholder rights and protections in the new structure. The proposal is subject to shareholder approval at our AGM in May and subject also to regulatory approvals, and we expect implementation in the second half of 2026. Overall, we see this as a sensible and necessary step that supports the next phase of our development, reducing complexity and enabling us to operate more effectively as a global firm. Material is describing this proposal in greater detail will be distributed to shareholders in April.

So over the past 2 years, we have executed the strategy we set out at IPO and have built a much stronger platform. We are operating at greater scale with broader capabilities, deeper geographic reach and more embedded client relationships than we anticipated at the time of the IPO.

Our opportunity set is larger, our competitive advantages are clearer and the organization we have built is materially stronger than it was 2 years ago. We've become better at all elements of acquisitions, better at winning client mandates, better at managing risk and better at attracting and developing high-quality talent.

We've also been able to address in part the question of how the firm will perform in more challenging environments. In the third quarter of 2025, we grew strongly despite lower exchange volumes and the short report. In the first quarter of 2026, we're performing very strongly in a quarter of extreme volatility even after a client default. We have exceeded our own expectations, not because of tailwinds, but because the firm has more scale, more capabilities, greater geographic reach and critically a stronger organization and culture than we anticipated. We're extremely excited about the opportunity ahead of us.

So with that, we're very happy to take some questions from you.

Bill Katz from TD Cowen. So Ian, maybe you could just sort of talk a little bit about the default a little bit and maybe expand beyond that 1 client, how we should think about any kind of risk profile among maybe the smaller clients even as you continue to migrate your business to the larger platforms?

Sure. Look, I think that defaults of the kind that we had in the first quarter are sort of extremely rare. We do -- when you're in the Clearing business, recognize that there will be on occasions, clients having some challenges, but our experience, as you've seen from our track record of credit losses, it shows that this impact is extremely occasional, and this was very unusual. The scale of it in our sort of Clearing business is on a revenue basis, somewhere in the sort of mid-$20 million to $30 million. Obviously, that gets comp affected both in the front and in the back. And so the margin of the loss is somewhere like 70%. So it's sort of something like $20 million in aggregate.

And just to make the point obvious, we've managed out of the risk completely. It's a January effect. And within January, we still did $38 million, which I think it would have been sort of our fifth highest month as sort of a public company or as a company. So it is going to be -- these sorts of challenges are going to be correlated to high volatility environment. And certainly, when we look at March, for example, the clients have actually performed extremely well in March. Does that cover your question, Bill?

Can you -- I'm sorry, Mike -- can you just sort of go down a little bit in terms of maybe the profile of some of these forward clients so how should [indiscernible] incremental risk relative to the migration to [indiscernible].

Yes. I think that I mean even -- as I sort of think about March, which was a very -- a period of very high volatility, all the clients, including small clients, have performed pretty well. And so I don't think, to the thrust of your question, that is in what we're seeing sort of a concern of anything that feels systematic or sort of problematic and I've actually been really pleasantly surprised by how well clients have managed through this and have been able to make margin calls. And the number of sort of missed calls is less than I would have expected based on, for example, what we saw in the Ukraine crisis. So I think that the default feels like a rare -- a default that sort of leads to us having to take a position on to our books and manage it out is very rare and we don't see anything like that in the portfolio based on what we're seeing in March, which was quite a difficult environment for some set of clients.

Alex Kramm, UBS. Probably a little bit of a follow-up. Maybe just in terms of the first quarter, can you just help us as we think about, I guess, our numbers. What's been good, what's been helping so maybe by business, where are you seeing the most strength and maybe any areas that are outside of what we can observe looking at public volumes, et cetera. And then I think this is a follow-up to Bill's [indiscernible]. But like as you think going forward, are you seeing any sort of not signs of stress, but you see a little bit of wound licking right now are people stepping back a little bit. Is this another example of [indiscernible] in April, May, we're going to be looking at softer volumes not anything structural, but just do you see some of that already happening right now?

That's sort of a compound question. The first part of it was?

Just a little bit more color on ...

What you saw on 1Q.

On the positive side.

Yes, that's fine. So look, I think that when we look at the quarter, exactly as you would expect, if you -- given how strong the quarter is it's up circa 50% on where we were a year ago, every business and segment is actually performing strongly. So what you're seeing in agency and execution is just sort of increased flows as a result of the volatility leading to more and more clients wanting to sort of transact and so agency and execution is looking extremely strong. Within clearing, you will see that in the balances, you'll see -- you've seen how our CFTC balances have grown. We've had sort of similar growth maybe even heightened growth in our non-U.S. businesses. So the Clearing franchise is extremely strong. We saw 25% plus increases on certain days in March relative to the levels that were set in April of last year, which was the previous high watermark for us. And operationally, we were able to sort of deal with those very successfully. But the Clearing business that away from the impact of the default has been sort of terrifically strong in the quarter. Our solutions business has done extremely well and is I think, reaping the benefits of the investments we made last year in the underlying infrastructure, which did consume a lot of bandwidth, but we are now sort of more able or better able to sort of deal with the increased volumes that are coming through and that business is thriving.

And then exactly, as you would expect in an environment which is characterized by heightened volatility, our market-making businesses have done extremely well. So what you have is all elements of the firm performing really well. And actually, all regions are performing really well. In terms of what sort of the impact of this heightened volatility, the sort of uncertainty around sort of setting price, what's that sort of doing to volumes? And are we anticipating anything different for April and May. So I think what we have observed in the oil markets, in particular, is a lot of activity from producers and consumers of oil and that has sort of continued all the way through this period. There's definitely been some amount of pullback from the sort of more speculative money. But again, that's not really a big driver for us, but we certainly noted that as not unexpected consequence of the losses that some of these desks have experienced in March. But when I look at March, I'm not seeing sort of a big turndown in daily performance. We're actually -- so it's not a case of the first 2 weeks were fantastic, and then it's all sort of turned down. We're seeing continued higher levels of performance through the whole month. So I don't know what -- how this sort of plays through in April and May, but we certainly have not seen evidence of slowdowns over the course of the course of March. [ Phil ]?

Okay. So just big picture. You have now more inbound coming to you in terms of opportunities for inorganic growth. It could be more selective. Could you maybe talk about priorities geographically product, distribution client channel? And then the second part of the question is, given where the stock is trading, how are you balancing de novo versus inorganic growth, maybe perhaps repurchase given shares seem to be so attractive at this price?

Well, hopefully, that's not going to last and the stock price actually moves out very quickly. So I think that the -- I mean, the benefit of having a lot of inbound is sort of worth teasing out. I mean, part of it is those tend to then become bilateral conversations. So you're not part of a competitive process. You could rapidly determine whether there's sort of a meeting of minds around price. You can sort of engage in ways that are just sort of very efficient. In many cases, the acquisitions are people that we know and our sort of clients olefin. So that's always an additional benefit because you've had experience working with them in a capacity and you see how they operate, you have a sense of what their culture is and how well they run their particular businesses. And so I think that that's hugely beneficial in so many different ways. With regard to what we're looking to do, I would say that we recognize the benefit of acquisitions, particularly in the sense of in certain jurisdictions like Brazil, Middle East, even that are in Asia, growing these things organically is just super difficult.

So some of our interest in acquisitions is sort of driven by a recognition to try to grow certain things organically is hard. If we can grow it organically, I think we -- that's our preference. But we're also very honest with ourselves about what we're likely to be successful with and what's likely to be sort of hard for us. And if it's easier to do this through an acquisition, then we're very open to that. I mean the other benefit of acquisitions is you get to do real diligence on what it is that you're acquiring, which in contrast to sort of team lift where you don't -- you're not able to ask about the clients and you just don't know in quite the same way. You do get sort of a genuine benefit.

In terms of what we're looking to do, I think that there's probably sort of 2 themes here. We do see opportunities for all of our segments. And I think Palo is probably going to talk a little bit to that. But our -- as you gathered from my remarks, I mean, our recognition is that the path to growth, if you sort of choosy one goes through infrastructure, intensive activity that sort of fits well within what we do. And so as you would probably expect, the priorities we have are sort of clearing businesses in geographies that are hard to build those out.

So in Latin America, in Asia, in certain niches, product niches where we don't actually have those. But we're open to opportunities in market making and actually some of the acquisitions. Obviously, we have trade that we announced and another acquisition that we're working on is in the market making space. We're looking to get some things in the solutions space. And then there's a raft of things in agency and execution that we're looking at.

So we see these as parts to continue to diversify the firm, add resilience add geographic diversification and sort of just accelerate our growth. And that's how we have approached it in the past, and that's how we'll continue to approach it.

Ben Budish, Barclays. Can you give a little color on the tail of smaller clients. I guess for the clients that are currently paying you under $5 million? How do you think -- or can you talk about maybe the average size of that client group? I mean how many is there a potential to see things scale up meaningfully? How many are large clients allocating sort of a smaller portion of activity versus smaller clients allocating a lot of their activity?

Yes. I mean, look, I mean, hopefully, what I was communicating is the sense that medium and small size clients are actually really attractive and valuable tides in the firm. I mean it its -- and so it's not a case that we are just sort of shifting the firm to a small number of large slides. We are keen to add clients in -- at all of these different sort of revenue points. I mean, I think if it's sort of less than $25,000, we're increasingly thinking we'd want them to be above that level. But we are actively looking to add small and medium-sized clients. When I look at the sort of 250 clients that I referenced in the $1 million to $5 million bucket, I would say that the preponderance of those are clients that there is quite a lot of scope to grow as opposed to the sort of small clients and they're sort of at the maximum level that you could imagine them operating given their scale, what they do and being on the Marex platform. So I mean, I'm sure that sort of within the [ 250 ] there are a few that sort of fall into that category. But certainly, we have a plan around 100 of those that we're looking actively to cross-sell. And all of those all feel like they could be materially larger clients.

So -- but it's not a case of we've shifted our strategy to just focus on large clients. It just turns out that given the range of capabilities we have, there is a path to growth, which involves doing a lot more with those larger clients. And we are take advantage of that. But it's not as though we've changed our prospecting efforts and we are sort of cutting off smaller clients because we're keen to service people at a whole range of different points. All right. Why don't we move on to Rob. Thanks, everybody.

Thanks, Ian, and good morning, everyone. Over the next couple of slides, I want to cover how we've continued to diversify and grow our business, but spend the majority of the presentation unpacking our balance sheet and how we think about our cash flows and capital allocation. Following the short set of report last summer and discussions with many of you, it became clear to us that our cash flow presentation included within our accounts is not intuitive, while it obviously fully compliant with the accounting rules. So today is about providing you with a clearer and more intuitive way to think about it. Investors have also wanted to understand how much of our capital generation is required to support organic growth and how much is available for acquisitions and we have reworked our capital layout for you to address this question.

Over the past 5 years, we have grown our profit sevenfold. And as you've heard from Ian, we've exceeded the growth expectations we set for ourselves at the time of the IPO. As we have grown, we have diversified our business and added complementary high-quality revenues, making our earnings even more resilient to different market environments. Our resilience also extends to our balance sheet as we have maintained a strong capital ratio supporting our investment-grade credit ratings as well as maintaining a prudent approach to managing our liquidity.

And as you will hear, we continue to be disciplined in our capital allocation, balancing our capital position with the growth opportunities in our business, both organic and inorganic as well as returning capital to shareholders. All of that underpins the strong profit growth that we have delivered over a long period and the impressive performance in 2025. 2025 simply put, was another record year for Marex. We delivered strong revenue growth, up 27% year-over-year to just over $2 billion with growth across all of our business segments. We grew adjusted profit before tax by 30% to $418 million, demonstrating the strength of our client activity. Basic EPS increased to $4.12, and our return on equity was 28%. Importantly, this performance was delivered across a diversified set of businesses and regions, reinforcing the strength of our franchise. The Americas now represents nearly half of our profitability demonstrating the growth we have experienced within this large market.

This slide brings together the 2 core components of our P&L strong, diversified revenue growth and a cost base that remains flexible as we continue to scale. All of our segments have delivered meaningful growth since 2023 through growth from existing and new clients as well as continued expansion of both products and geographies. At the same time, 55% of our cost base is variable, which continues to give us flexibility as we grow. Where we have invested, these have been deliberate choices including in our control and support functions as we mature as a public company as well as building out new capabilities across the platform.

Turning now to our balance sheet, which hopefully you will recognize, but I want to spend a little bit more time on it today. This slide presents a summary of the audited balance sheet, but more importantly, breaks it down to show how the business is funded. As you've heard before, one of the distinguishing features of our firm is that around 80% of our balance sheet is directly driven by client activity which is highly liquid and essentially self-funded. Let me take you through the key components. First, client balances. These represent amounts posted at exchanges to meet margin requirements for our clearing clients activities. On our balance sheet, treasuries posted an exchanges sitting cash and liquid assets and cash posted exchanges sit in trade and other receivables.

Importantly, these assets are fully funded by our clients, so they offset on both sides of the balance sheet. Second, repurchase agreement. This is a match book activity within our capital markets business, which is self-financing. We act as a facilitator for clients typically hedge funds, to access collateral or finance collateral, whilst taking a small spread. This business is often linked to their futures activity, which supports clearing. Third, security activities, which again, primarily sit within our Capital Markets business. These are equity hedges for client activity in our equities and prime businesses and the associated financing of these high-quality assets predominantly through stock lending. These also include our prime services and associated financing activities, which are recorded within trade and other receivables and trade payables. Well, much of this is self-financing. Given our high level of liquidity, we have chosen to deploy some of our house liquidity in order to capture enhanced spreads.

Importantly, though, we have the flexibility to fund this fast stock loan if needed and improve our house liquidity position. Fourth, derivatives which are primarily from our solutions business. In Financial Products, we offered structured notes to clients, and in hedging solutions, we offer clients access to markets to manage their risk. These derivatives arise as a result of our hedging of this client's activity, not from taking proprietary risk. Fifth, settlement [indiscernible] up. This reflects fixed income trades in our capital markets business that have been executed, but have not yet settled at year-end. We act as a principal on a matched basis but take no direct market exposure, settlement risk is also assumed by the underlying clients. Outside of the client activity, the main corporate item is our debt funding, which supports the business for example, being able to front intraday margin requirements on exchanges and our liquidity buffer. Overall, the key takeaway is that our balance sheet is client-driven highly liquid and conservatively funded with limited net leverage.

Turning to cash flow. This is where I really want to simplify things for you. There are 4 key components to consider: Firstly, the cash generated from our day-to-day operations; secondly, working capital movements; thirdly, financing activities and fourthly, investing activities, starting with operating cash flow. The first takeaway is that Marex is highly cash generative. In 2025, we delivered profit after tax of $308 million, which translates to $365 million of cash earnings once you adjust for noncash items such as depreciation and amortization as well as the equity deferrals for senior staff compensation. So we converted more than 100% of our profits into cash with a very little unrealized P&L.

The next piece is working capital. As a financial institution, we raised debt to fund our client activities. Debt funding increased by $2.2 billion during the year, driven primarily by $1.5 billion raised through our structured note program and a further $500 million from senior debt issued in May last year. The proceeds were added to our central liquidity resources. We used the majority of this funding to support client activity, most notably to fund the high-quality securities we hold to hedge client positions in our agency and execution business. As I mentioned on the previous slide, where much of this activity can be self financing, we sometimes choose to use our own liquidity to enhance returns.

In total, we generated cash inflows of $713 million from our operating activities, representing the combination of cash generated from our operations and net positive movements in working capital. This cash was first used for our financing activities, covering AT1 and ordinary dividend payments of $56 million as well as for our share-based payment schemes, where there was no cash outflow at the point of deferral when they vest, we use cash to settle the associated tax obligations.

After these financing activities, we retained significant capacity for discretionary investing. In terms of these investing activities, the main use of cash was our acquisition activity. We spent $115 million on the premiums and $127 million acquiring the net assets of the businesses we purchased. We finished the year with $2.8 billion of cash, an increase of $325 million year-on-year. This uplift flow directly into our total available liquidity resources allowing us to continue to operate with significant headroom of over $1 billion relative to our regulatory liquidity requirements.

A key question we're often asked is how do we balance organic growth, M&A and capital returns. Our North Star is maintaining our capital sufficient capital to support our investment-grade credit rating with both S&P and Fitch, while supporting organic and inorganic growth and returning capital to shareholders. To frame this, I will focus on our S&P RAC ratio, although I would highlight that under the FCA's investment firm regime, our capital ratio is 230% of our minimum regulatory requirements, providing us with significant headroom.

I'll first discuss our sources of capital. In 2025, we generated $253 million of capital from our operations after dividends and AT1 coupons. After taking into account other reserve movements, capital increased from just over $1 billion at the end of 2024 to $1.3 billion at the end of 2025. This growth in capital provided capacity available to deploy into M&A. Importantly, this is not a one-off. Our model consistently generates excess capital after funding dividends, organic growth and maintaining our investment-grade credit rating. This provides us with the ability to deploy capital into M&A on a recurring basis, driving additional profit growth over time.

There were 2 components to our uses of capital, our risk-weighted asset requirements and premiums paid on acquisitions. Our RWA requirements consists of 3 parts. Firstly, credit risk. This is calculated by applying credit risk weights to our balance sheet assets. This requirement increases with both balance sheet size and the risk profile of the relative asset.

Second, market risk, which reflects capital held against trading positions; and thirdly, operational risk which is driven by the scale and mix of our revenues with more stable income streams such as commissions, attracting lower capital requirements. The increase in our capital requirements from $894 million at the end of 2024 to just over $1.2 billion at the end of 2025 reflects our strong organic growth and the impact of our strategic acquisitions. Around 50% of this growth related to organic growth, reflecting the strong performance of our businesses last year. After funding organic growth, we used $170 million relating to M&A activity, comprising $115 million of acquisition premium, most notably from Aarna, Winterflood and Hamilton Court together with $55 million of additional capital required to support the RWAs of those businesses.

At the year-end, sources of capital, less our uses of capital led to capital surplus of $58 million, equating to an S&P RAC ratio of 10.7%. This is comfortably above the 10% threshold that S&P defines are strongly capitalized, which is supportive of our investment-grade credit rating. On a pro forma basis, including the expected sale of the Winterflood cost business in the second quarter of this year, our surplus increases to $98 million and our RAC ratio to 11.1%.

So what does this mean? Our capital allocation approach is simple. Firstly, we maintain a strong capital position to support our investment-grade credit rating. Second, we invest organically to support our growth. Thirdly, we return capital to shareholders through dividends, reflecting the Board's confidence in the earnings trajectory of the firm. And fourthly, we deploy excess capital into very disciplined M&A. In addition, to give ourselves more flexibility going forward, we are looking to put in place a share buyback authority subject to AGM -- subject to AGM approval in May. Finally, as you've already heard from Ian, we expect the first quarter to be a very strong quarter for Marex, another record. Whilst we still have a few days to go before we close the quarter, we would expect revenue to be between $667 million and $697 million and our adjusted PBT to be between $140 million and $150 million.

At the midpoint, this would represent growth of nearly 51% in profit and 56% in revenues, which reflects, as you heard which reflects, as you heard from Ian, the strong broad-based performance across the group.

We are really pleased with the continued momentum in our business and remain confident in our growth outlook for the remainder of the year. With that, I'll now open up to Q&A with myself, Ian and Paolo before we break for coffee.

Yes. Patrick Molly, Piper Sandler. In your prepared remarks, Ian, you mentioned that you expect the margin to kind of move from around 20% to the mid-20s over the next 3 to 5 years. I think you cited AI efficiencies and the benefits of scale. Could you maybe just break that down for us a little bit more, where are you expecting to see benefits from AI in the business and maybe if you could just talk about how you would see that ramping in terms of the margin. Could some of that flow through earlier? Is that going to be a later thing. Any color there.

Yes. I mean it's a great question and one that, as you can tell, we spent a lot of time sort of thinking about. So I think what as I sort of think about it, we clearly have some accelerants that were not present as we were addressing this question a couple of years ago. So I would say that it's more likely that we get to the sort of higher margins. So sort of think of it north of '25 sooner if these things play out in the way that I would expect them to. No, obviously don't know exactly how it plays out. But whereas 2 years ago, I think the central tendency was we would get to sort of the mid-20s and I had high confidence we would. Now I think there is sort of meaningful probability that we get higher. And we're seeing the impact of AI in -- and it feels very early days, right? But we see it in the impact of productivity in a whole range of places.

So we see it in interesting like audit. We see it in surveillance. We see it in on-boarding. We see it in IT, although that productivity increase is just being reinvested in more capability because we see so much benefit of having more output in the technical space, particularly as we're growing infrastructure-intensive businesses. And then clearly, it seems to me that we may just get to some kind of tipping point as more and more of the growth is coming in higher margin activity and the amount of investment we have to make in the ways that sort of, I laid out for you, just don't keep pace with how much the rest of the firm is growing. So I do see sort of a meaningful probability that in that 3- to 5-year time frame, we're sort of in the higher 20s rather than in the mid-20s. Not that I have a specific light path to it. But as I see the sort of the forces at work, that's what I see as the more likely outcome now.

Chris Allen, KBW. Maybe just following up on that AI is one part of the margin improvement story, but scaling up the recent deals that you've done over the last year, 1.5 years has probably another and building them out and also realizing efficiencies there. Maybe if you could talk to where you are in terms of the more recent acquisitions in terms of fully building out those business to where you think they can get to and how much of an impact that could have on margins?

Yes. Thanks very much, Chris. I think if I sort of focus on the sort of 3 larger acquisitions. I think it's a good sort of illustration. So the acquisition of Cowen, I think, is has still got significant potential. So I think we're adding to our capabilities we have more credibility with the clients and we're adding products. So there are a few areas where we are, I would say we're either sort of under underweight in terms of our capabilities to some of the sort of fixed income Prime brokerage would be sort of an example.

And I think that probably allows us to be in the 20% to 30% growth for some period of time to not be in the medium term. Hamilton Corp, which is an FX business, we're going to rebrand all of that under Marex. And I think that we bought a business which was operating at around, let's sort of say, $80 million of revenue. I think that -- the combination of all FX is going to grow at again, 30-plus percent a year. I think that's -- if it wasn't a $200 million business in a couple of years, I'd be surprised and disappointed.

And winter floods, which is a very established business in the U.K., I think, has capability to extend internationally. That brand has got, I think, sort of residents, particularly but it's actually got good technical capability. So again, that's -- we've seen growth. I think that is another where you'd hope to be growing sort of 20% to 30% a year. So there's still some way to go with all of them. Behind the growth in revenues lies investment the technology and in the capabilities. So we haven't really sort of called that out or drawn that out. But there's significant investment in being able to support these new asset classes and doing so on an efficient basis.

When we first entered this business, our sort of capability is pretty rudimentary and some of the costs are quite high. So I think that, that will not just add the ability to scale to do more business for clients, but it will make it much more efficient. So I'm very optimistic about those. And then as Ian said, we've got very strong pipeline. It's 5 transactions, which are in advanced stages. We've got another 15 or so in slightly early stages of discussion.

So very optimistic about being able to close those and those being those being efficiently integrated, perhaps more efficiently integrated than we've had with the -- with past few just because I mean as an example, when we bought ED&F [indiscernible], we didn't have a broker-dealer, and all of the infrastructure of broker-dealer has had to be built. We didn't have a Prime brokerage business that infrastructure has had to be integrated and extended. Once you have that, it's much easier to add clients on to the platform.

I think the only thing I'd sort of add to that is I've been sort of amazed and surprised at what the sort of opportunity in FX is. I mean, somehow you -- from the outside in, you just assume that it's an extremely efficient market with sort of tons of providers and then it would just be a space that's sort of very difficult to make money. And actually, what we found with Hamilton Court is there -- it's a good business, but there's also really substantial opportunity to grow and be competitive. And that's actually just sort of really heartening. So many of these acquisitions, you go into them thinking they can be good businesses and to themselves and there's opportunity to generate sort of good returns just in an M&A sense.

But with many of these things, as you get into them more and you realize if you combine it with other things at Marex and then just work it in with sort of the culture of Marex, the market opportunities are often way better than you would have anticipated going into it.

Alex Kramm again. This is a 2-parter again, sorry. But one, just on a follow-up on the M&A. You did mention Prime at the end there. Is Prime an area that you can scale inorganically or is it just more organic? And then the second question, I'll ask it once. It's just the new Bermuda-based structure, just as a little bit of a clarification. I think, Ian, you made a point that the 4 regions, U.S., U.K., EMEA and Rest of World you said something, this is already how the business is organized or operating.

So I just wanted to clarify that. To what degree are you actually operating international and how much of these businesses are really siloed because I assume some of your clients are looking increasingly international. So just wondering if you're behind on that or if that's just maybe something I didn't understand, right? So maybe just talk about the global ability to kind of basically be a global firm for compliance.

So I'll cover the Prime question quickly, which is, yes, we're looking at inorganic opportunities as well as organic opportunities. We don't have much of a presence, for example, in Asia. And so that will be a sort of a natural place for us to try and acquire a business and a client base in Prime.

So actually, thanks for that question around sort of how we structure it and how we think we're going to move forward with the sort of new structure. So I think that 1 of the things that is the case in terms of our evolution as a firm is that we've now moved to a point where, for example, the Americas now generate more profit for us than Europe did. So we always, for example, anticipated that there would be a substantial opportunity to grow our U.S. franchise, and we're now at a point where our U.S. franchise is not quite 50% of what we make, but it's actually bigger than what we make in the U.K. and in Europe.

We've had success growing in Asia. We're having success although it's off a small base, growing in the Middle East, growing in Brazil. So there's definitely a sense inside the firm that what we're looking to do is to grow geographically. Now at the moment, what we do is we run as I think you're aware, sort of global businesses were sort of a regional overlay. So it's all a matrix, but they are definitely global businesses. What we recognize that the regulators are looking for is strong regional management that can sort of face off against a local set of regulators and can sort of legitimately talk to and express what's going on within each of those regions. And so the structure that we're going to put in place is we still have a TopCo in this particular case, it's going to be in Bermuda. And then you have sort of regional holdco. So there'll be one in the U.K., one in Europe, one in the U.S. and one in sort of Asia that Europe will cover the Middle East as well.

And what you will have there is management and risk folks who can deal with sort of the local regulators and be responsible for that as a unit. What we do find, which is interesting, is we do service clients across multiple regions, and we do have sort of global clients. But what we also have are a set of clients that are sort of keen to just have -- just being a little careful in what I say. Just want to sort of have nexuses that are either just Asia nexuses or Middle East Nexuses and not have, for example, a U.S. nexus. And so I think that this also supports the fact that some of the clients want to be clients of an Asian business that sort of feels like an Asian business and some people want to be clients of the Middle East business that feels like the Middle East business. It's part of the motivation that you want to be in Dubai, you want to be in Abu Dhabi because the large clients in those locations are not going to deal with you out of Europe just by way of example.

So part of this is driven by just sort of the administrative and complex nature of being both U.S. listed on NASDAQ and running a firm that's subject to the U.K. Companies Act. And that just creates a certain amount of administrative burden and sort of complexity. But most of what's motivating this is sort of a view of this is the right next strategic step for the firm.

There's a lot of organizational and in particular, sort of regulatory complexity that comes from our current structure and this new structure will allow us, I think, to sort of manage that more effectively. So that cover your point?

Now it's a broader panel. Maybe a 2-part question for me as well. Ian, in your commentary, you mentioned that digital assets could accelerate the opportunity set for you. One of the debates, I think, in the market is pre, post-trade impact of tokenization and digitization. I wonder if you could talk -- maybe break down your comments a little bit further there, number one. And then number two, philosophy, to the extent you get approved for a buyback program at the General Meeting in the spring. How should we be thinking about sort of capital management priorities? Is there a targeted payout ratio? Would buyback take precedence over the dividend? What's your mindset -- what's the board's mindset around sort of the path to deployment on that?

Yes. The way we think about digital assets is in sort of 3 components. There's the sort of cryptocurrencies, which is sort of in of itself for a large asset class, and Nilesh will talk to this in more detail. There are -- there's tokenization, which feels as though it's going to enhance volumes and activity, but is more is more a matter of extending the sort of trading day and improving settlement rather than in of itself generating a very significant change in the underlying nature of assets and then there's stable coins, which I think, again, sort of fit into some combination of settlements and payments. And we are operating on the basis that all of those are going to evolve and be meaningful to clients. We are working with the clients.

So this isn't us just building the capability sort of in a vacuum in isolation. This is really very much client driven. And we're seeing high levels of interest. We also see that others are behind us. So I think in each of those categories, we think that there's an opportunity to win business. I think probably on the tokenization and the stablecoin side, it's more it's more an important lever to win business than a generator of profit in of itself, whereas in sort of crypto, I think as an asset class, $3 trillion of crypto assets represent a sizable asset class in and of themselves. And we're seeing adoption and more sort of trading activity, which is obviously being reinforced by the platforms becoming more established.

Yes. I think that just sort of adding to that, I mean, my general sense of this is this is a very sensible place for us to invest. I don't think of us as sort of crypto or tokenization evangelists. I think of us as sort of recognizing that there's a lot of interest from a set of important clients to provide them with some set of capabilities. And that in and of itself is going to be a profitable and sensible investment to make. And then if it does turn out that some of the more optimistic cases around tokenization in particular are realized, then we'll be sort of in the forefront of that. So it's -- to my mind, it's sort of optionality if the world does, in fact, evolve in that way. But if the world doesn't evolving that way, it doesn't matter because the things that we're doing are going to generate attractive returns unto themselves, and it also represents a diversified earnings stream. So the path that we're on is strengthening our relationships with key clients, leading the market in a series of things that even if they don't grow beyond sort of what we see today will still be very profitable for the firm.

And then it creates optionality if, in fact, it does turn out that the world evolves in a way where these things become massively more important. And my expectation is it will just be an ecosystem that works on to itself and is an attractive business where we can actually be a leader, but if that's wrong, and it turns out that it really does -- there is sort of some major shift to more stuff happening through stable coins, more stuff happening through tokenization will be extremely well positioned with regard to that.

With regard to your question around buybacks. I think that we certainly felt at the time that the short report came out, the fact that we did not have an authorization to do buybacks felt like a real gap. And I think it's in part in the spirit of addressing that concern that we're going to come to investors and ask for permission to be able to buy back stock. I mean, as a sort of general matter around capital management. And again, this obviously is a decision that the Board will have to take, and it has not been taken.

But my general view of it is that we see so much opportunity to create value for shareholders through acquisitions that I would imagine that we would remain on that path where to the extent that we have excess capital relative to maintaining our investment-grade rating and supporting the organic growth, as Rob sort of described, that we will find that the M&A opportunities represent better value for shareholders than buying back stock. But if we were in a world where for whatever reason, there was a big dislocation, you'd want to be in a position where you could buy back your stock. And I think that's how I would certainly think about it.

Well, thank you all. And coffee is at your disposal. And if you -- if there are any questions you didn't want to ask in the broader forum, obviously, please just come and speak with Rob or Paolo and myself. Thanks.

[Break]

Good morning. Good morning. I realize I'm wearing exactly the same outlet that we did when we had the IPO. So yes, Clearing business, 2 years on, same shirt, probably longer hair. I'm Tom Texier. I'm the Group Head of Clearing, and I'm here to talk to you about how our business has grown since the IPO, along with my hair. I will talk a bit about the evolution of market structure as well in the next few minutes. So first of all, a little reminder about the business and our priorities. As you know, Clearing is very much at the core of Marex and it's the heart of what we do. We are a highly profitable and scalable business with high barrier to entry. We diversified across asset classes, geographies and client types. In 2025, we generated $528 million of revenue with a 50% profit margin. We have #14 billion current balances at year-end. Now in this quarter, we're closer to $16 billion, as you've heard from Ian, given sort of market volatility and also recent client wins.

We're positioned for the mid-market. We're seeing, as you also heard from Ian, much increased traction amongst the sort of larger clients. We're an infrastructure-led business with long-term sticky client relationships. And those relationships are held at very senior levels within our clients. We have a clear and consistent strategy. We add clients. We grow our balances, we grow volumes. We expand our product set and our regional footprint, and we invest in our growing scalable platform, all organically and also via acquisitions. We are the largest nonbank FCM globally, and we have greater brands and expertise in most of our peers, both large and small. We cover 60 exchanges across 20 countries, and we have double reach and asset coverage.

So if we look at our competitive position, echoing what you've heard previously, I don't know what I'm pointing that when Ian is over there. But we are -- our competitive position is stronger today compared to 2 years ago. What we said our IPO remains true. The industry is consolidating, the barriers to entry are high, and we have a strong competitive moat. The banks are retrenching to focus on their largest clients, and they are underinvested in our core competency.

Our mid-tier competition is constrained by scale. They either have only regional reach or lack of capital and liquidity to effectively compete against Marex. Marex's competitive position and right to win strengthened post IPO, are the brand and the public company status really contributed meaningfully to this. We are now seen as a credible nonbank alternative as France looked to diversify their exposure and the counterparty risk from banks. We're winning RFPs that were previously out of reach resulting in big client wins and big client mandates and our right to win is real. And we'll talk a little bit later about why that is.

We cover the retail segment and its growth, but we focus essentially on servicing retail aggregators. We do not deal directly with retail. Digital assets are also proving to be foot in the door against major incumbent players. So the business has transformed in the last 2 years since the IPO. Pre-IPO, as you can see from this chart, we were quite narrowly focused with focus on energy and ags, and relatively small in financials. Our client balance is around $10 billion in 2023. The acquisition of ED&F was quite pivotal in 2022 as it accelerated our access to financial futures and in overall institutional clearing.

Today, as you can see, our initial margin mix has grown materially in financial products and digital assets, and we continue to grow in the other asset classes. We are resulting in a scale and diversified business across all asset classes. And this price of product coverage also allows us to have larger city for mandates. Digital assets are now 20% of our initial margin, and we're a very established player in the digital asset space, and we'll talk about this further. We still see opportunity to grow in our core business, and we also see opportunities to develop capabilities in FX and credit.

Our geographic diversification accelerated since the IPO. America is now our largest region, and it still represents a significant growth opportunity. The Middle East has strengthened through the acquisition of Aarna and is very important for the customers in the Middle East to face us directly in the region. APAC is a very strategic growth area as well. It's benefiting from our new memberships in SGX and ASX, and we see very meaningful momentum now starting to come through in these exchanges.

We continue to expand our footprint selectively. We are exploring opportunities in Brazil, Hong Kong, Japan and Canada. Alongside this, we have a very strong pipeline of M&A opportunities across Brazil, Asia and Europe, and we have -- we feel we have a high probability of execution, which will allow us to fill our targeted gaps. In terms of market coverage, we're also seeing -- we're doing a lot of firsts. We were the first 1 on FMX, the first in coin-based -- and we're the first nonbank clearer of LCH swabs. And that allows -- highlights our ability to win new business and deepen client relationships with these new initiatives. Overall, our global footprint supports the growth of the business.

So now turning on to our client balances. We've consistently grown balances. We have 20% CAGR in client balances since the IPO. And importantly, we also have very consistent quarter-on-quarter growth. The underlying growth remains -- the growth trend remains strong despite short-term variability from margin and market conditions. We are the largest non-bank clearer provider globally. The CFTC ranking reflects only U.S. balances. A lot of our growth is also coming outside of the U.S. and it's not necessarily reflected in the CFTC balances. We target between $500 million and $1 billion of net new client balances annually. We have a very strong 2026 pipeline with good visibility, and we're confident we're going to achieve this target. At this point in the year, we're already very well progressed. We are -- as you can see from the ranking of our competitors, we are gaining share in a very highly concentrated market.

The top 10 players in the Clearing hold 75% of the balance is in the U.S. They are predominantly large banks, and this is our opportunity to take further market share. We are taking market share from -- with larger and more sophisticated clients from these banks. We are very well positioned for future industry consolidation as well. I'd like to spend a little bit of time to talk to you about our technology. We're a very highly scalable platform, underpinned by modern technology. Our volumes are scale significantly faster than our head count.

You can see here we are now are Clearing 4.6 million contracts per FTE against a 3.2 million at IPO. We operate a single global operating infrastructure, which is extremely scalable. That infrastructure allows us to have a very low marginal cost of trading and Clearing and it allows us to add clients and exchanges at very low cost.

So this is also one of the reasons why we are very often 1 of the first layer into new venues because our technology is flexible and scalable. We also have a state of the start of the art client portal in Neon, which is a key part of the client experience, clients who have access to a lot of data through Neon as well as real-time indicators around their P&L and their margins, all of this in real time. So Neon is deepening client connectivity and is also enabling greater self-service functionality from the clients, and this is a customer requirement.

The platform is able to handle significant volume, including the current volatility we see in the market without necessarily adding any incremental headcount. So we have the capacity to continue growing without fundamentally changing the operating model and we're extremely scalable.

Let's talk about risk management. So Clearing is fundamentally a credit intermediation business due to the live leverage involved in the products. Managing credit risk runs through the core of the business, all that has a Clearing in the regions within Marex are former risk managers. So the risk discipline starts at onboarding. We're highly selective on the clients we take on, and we try to understand how they trade and why. The fact that we understand these customers and -- really with deep understanding of their strategy, allows us to manage high periods of volatility like we have experienced recently and to best risk manage them.

Obviously, we have access to real-time monitoring and intraday margining and we apply very strict collateral management, and we apply margin multipliers when it is appropriate, depending on the market volatility. We also monitor very closely concentration and position limits, and we have at all times full visibility of our client exposures. Credit losses, as you heard from Ian, credit losses are inherent parts of the Clearing model, but they're expected to be infrequent and well managed within our disciplined risk framework.

So let's talk about all right to win in Clearing. And as you know, this is the bit that excites us the most is when we are growing the business and winning client mandates. So our -- we really believe that our market coverage and a level of understanding of these markets is second to none. We have extreme expertise in many areas of the Clearing space, and our clients are reacting very well to it.

So we tend to lead with areas of real strength of the firm where we can differentiate ourselves as a nonbank or as a specialist. I will give you some example, Clearing metals, energy, digital assets or interest rate Clearing of real areas of strength of the firm. We also provide leverage and financing for the clients, which is a requirement for dealing with large institutional customers. These are typically pain points for the clients with their existing providers, and they are very receptive to the Marex offering in this respect. These areas of expertise allow us to get our foot in the door with these clients, and we open large relationships, and we then expand them further. We also have proven to be agile and innovative to support our client needs.

So we will respond quickly to the customers asking for new markets. Overall, we also pride ourselves in providing an excellent client experience and to be very responsive. Finally, we look to expand our relationships across the firm and cross-sell other Marex divisions. So another example -- an example of this interaction is our relationship with Trafigura, which is 1 of the largest commodity trading firms globally. I'll let you read the quote. This was unedited and straight from that person's e-mail. The Trafigura is a long execution client of our energy desk. They have been a customer for a long time. Historically, they've only cleared and dealt with bank FCMs.

So in 2022, during the Ukraine crisis, Trafigura required additional Clearing capacity, which we were able to provide them at very short notice. At that time, it is the made this decision to add a nonbank clearer as were we experiencing constraints with banks and looking to diversify away.

This relationship has since developed into a large Clearing relationship across multiple commodities in Clearing as well as bespoke hedging services with solutions. It demonstrates both the stickiness and scalability of our client relationship. And more broadly, this is a good example of how we grow and how we deepen our relationships across the platform.

Turning to digital assets. We have established a meaningful institutional presence here with unique and very differentiating capabilities. As I said earlier, digital assets represent about 20% of our initial margin. The margin does move around the valuation and the cash margin we hold for clients is quite sensitive to movement in crypto prices. Our approach is institutional collateralized actions clear, as you would expect, in our Clearing business. We operate in regulated markets, and we are a meaningful volume player on these key exchanges. For example, we hold a top 3 position across the crypto products on CME and also on SGX. We are #1 in terms of volume clear on bitcoin futures and CME, as you know, this is the main product used by institutional players approaching crypto.

This is a real advantage with institutional clients. They are not being serviced currently by the the banks, and they're also very reluctant to go to digital natives or some of our peers with a lower credit profile. So we have a very strong right to win in digital assets, and it's proving to be a very meaningful door opener for institutional clients and hedge funds in particular, to come in trade with a clear with Marex.

So let's talk a little bit now how we are positioned for the evolution of market structure. We've seen meaningful innovation in the world recently due to the rise of digital assets and production markets. So 24/7 trading, digital collateral, tokenization, our reshaping client activity and how derivatives are processed. Marex is very well positioned for these new market developments. We are enthusiastic about the changes as they bring meaningful benefit to Marex. So for example, digital assets allows you to receive collateral and margin in real time or over the weekend, which we see as meaningfully reducing risk.

We are already live on 24/7 coverage, and we're also the first FCN, part of the CFTC power program on accepting digital assets as collateral. This positions extremely well as well for production markets, which are also 24/7. So we're well positioned across all the outcomes, whether adoption is gradual or accelerates. We're often asked whether organization presents a threat to the Clearing model, and we don't believe this is the case for several reasons.

Clearing is already 24/7, and it's already real time, and we manage plant margins on a continuous basis. So unlike settlement cycle for cash equities, for example, the Clearing market is already real time. It would not necessarily meaningfully benefit from tokenization.

Clearing is the credit intermediation business. And as you know, the exchanges don't want to face our clients and the value of the FCM is intermediating the credit. In the digital space, we're seeing more and more demand for clearing houses rather than less. Also in the production market, we've seen [indiscernible] being very keen to have Marex on board and they have approached us to become an SEM in order to manage in codetermination as they themselves move into the margining and leverage well. We see the opportunity of 24/7 to be an opportunity for rate of volumes rather than less and an improvement in credit risk management if margins and payments are available 24/7.

So in conclusion, Marex is a scale player in global Clearing. We are one of the leading nonbank FCM. We have a greater breadth and expertise on our peers, large and small. We've grown our balance sheet materially since the IPO, particularly with large clients. Clearing is a key driver of the firm's growth and infrastructure-led business. We have a scalable and efficient technology platform, and we manage -- we keep managing our risk very tightly, particularly in challenging environment. We still see an opportunity to continue growing using our strengths. Thank you. Questions?

Ben Budish from Barclays again. Just curious on the digital asset contribution to Clearing. It seems like it's -- you're looking at this like a pretty interesting growing opportunity. How do like collateral requirements in that business compared to other asset classes you service? I'm just curious like prices are down quite a bit from the top, if there are pretty significant portion of balances, like how much do they impact your overall? I think it's like small but growing. So over time, how should we think about how volatility impacts what we're going to see.

Well, I think what you can see -- what you've seen in the recent history is that the prices of crypto have gone down. And as you know, the margins on crypto are function -- essentially a function of prices, right? Because the margin requirements are a percentage of the initial value of the contracts. And so even the prices of crypto have gone down, we've managed to continue increasing our balances overall. So whilst crypto is a sort of meaningful portion of our balance is not everything. And so it's been compensated by other increases in other activities and also new fans.

Actually, just one other thing to say with that. I mean I think that the margin multipliers we apply on sort of crypto or higher and more consistently applied than other products. So even though the exchange margins are about 25%, we would often be applying 10% or 15% on top of that just because of the volatility in the underlying asset. And so that actually plays through a little bit in terms of the balances as well.

Thanks. Thomas, you mentioned that the -- your capabilities in digital asset have maybe helped you get a foot in the door, a lot of hedge fund customers you said. Could you talk about how much of a differentiator that's been? Is that something that your competitors should close the gap on you pretty quickly? How much runway I think you think you maybe have there?

I think we still have quite a bit of a -- we still think we have a bit of a head start. And I think the larger the institutions you face, the more they are sensitive to the creditworthiness of the counterparty and the agility. So we still think we have a lot of runway. We're engaged in multiple compositions. We sort of essentially larger hedge funds. We are looking to Marex because we have a very unique set of sort of products and offering, which I think it will take a little while for our competitors to catch up on. So I feel quite confident about this scope. And once the relationship is initiated on -- we've seen it multiple times, you initiate a relationship on crypto and then they sort of taste -- they get a taste of the Marex service and all the other things we can do. And then we have concession around other asset classes. So we've had some large -- very large hedge funds who are now giving us sort of equity PB balances and we're also a lot of these hedge trends are very interested these days in the sort of the repo Clearing, changes in mandate, and we have, again, a very meaningful advantage there. So we are -- what we've seen is just this is an entry point and then we're adding all the services further on.

Sorry, this is a quick one, and I'm sorry if I missed this, but did you also give how much revenue comes from digital assets and how that has changed? Because I mean ...

I think Nilesh is going to cover that a little later. So look ahead, sorry. It's a teaser.

If I just sort of make an additional comment in response to that last question. I don't -- we just don't see others investing in sort of building out these set of services for hedge funds in the way we are. So I mean, while it's possible conceptually that others would close that gap, we're just not feeling it. I mean there are clearly some of the big banks have big investment programs in very particular niches, but it just doesn't have the feel that there's sort of a broad-based effort to invest in these products. And the advantage that I think we bring here is we're not developing the stuff like a field of dreams. We're building it and hope that it sort of works out. And we were working with some of the leading innovators in the space and solving a problem for them. And if you're solving a problem for them, you're probably solving a problem for others. And so while -- to the rest of your question, not only are we not feeling sort of like a bunch of people on our heels looking to catch up, it just doesn't feel like people are seeing it as an opportunity in the same way we are.

So I'm going to talk about capital markets, which is essentially an amalgam of the businesses that we service around financial asset classes. So the -- it's not the way that we report the business in public filings, but it is the way that we manage the sort of combination of services across these asset classes. So what you'll see is that these -- the capital markets business shows up in both agency and execution on the security side, and it shows up in market making. And both of these are very much fundamentally client flow-driven activities. It's not risk taking. We're not looking to benefit from proprietary positions. Where we're involved in market making is very much in niche markets where there's sort of not sufficient liquidity just to provide sort of agency or execution service, but the sort of predominance of what we have is low risk flow driven.

It spans execution, financing Prime services, and it covers all of the main financial asset classes. So that's equities, equity derivatives, rates, credit, FX. And importantly, we are moving into digital assets as well. The way that we manage this and why we manage it on a holistic basis is important. And it's about the connection that you have with clients, certainly for the most sophisticated clients for the largest hedge funds for the largest asset managers.

They want to have a service, which is multiple asset class. And they want to have a service which is not just sort of singular, it's not a monoline surface in terms of execution. It's a service that can provide Prime brokerage can provide Clearing, can provide direct pricing can provide financing where that's needed. It's very much moved from being a voice-led business, and you'll sort of see how we've sort of evolved financially. But it's not -- this is not a voice-led broker business. I think the sort of the sense of this business being relatively low margin and sort of more comparable to the traditional interdealer brokers is a bit a little bit misunderstood.

That is not -- that is not really our business. We are an all-to-all business. We are servicing end clients, and we're increasingly doing so by providing infrastructure. So the strategy is -- the strategy is simple. We look to acquire or to service high-value clients. And you can see in terms of the numbers, we've made very significant progress.

I made this point partly because -- I mean, it's become a very meaningful part of the business. We're now the largest revenue contributing area and we're close to the largest profit contributing area. The point here is more -- less about how relevant that is in and of itself, it's about how large the market opportunity is because we really only initiated this activity a few years ago, and we've been able to sort of grow it to the sort of largest revenue stream within the sort of Marex business.

Within that, Prime has been extremely important. And you can see the stats around Prime that we've grown the assets under management to $28 billion. We'll talk about assets under management, we're talking about client assets. It's not amount that's on our balance sheet, balance sheet usage for this business is actually relatively limited.

It's really where we're providing financing.

Beyond that, we are taking -- we're taking ground in terms of a number of our services. So we are the #1 broker on CBOE. We are extremely active in a wide range of option products. U.S. option products. We are the fifth largest nonbank Prime broker.

Now I think that sort of probably understates at least Prime time tell me understates how relevant we are just the way that they collect this data, but there's clearly room for us to move them. And the next sort of competitor we would hope to overtake the next competitors of the likes of Jefferies and BTIG.

And we are taking ground as were our clients. The majority of the business, as I say, is reported within agency and execution. That includes our Prime business. There is some within market making. As I say, the sort of the overlap between those or the distinction between those 2 services is actually quite small. We're providing -- we're providing direct pricing, it's because there isn't sufficient liquidity in the market.

And certainly, on the capital markets side, a good example is winter floods, which has a very large number of client relationships and provides direct pricing. That is the way the market works. There isn't really a broker version of that service. We manage as a single integrated platform. And the investments that we make are in building greater levels of connectivity to our clients. So I'll talk a little bit later about the way that we try and embed ourselves in the workflow and in the life cycle, which means that we're moving away from being a transactional business, more towards being a repeat revenue business. And I think that has been an important component in improving the levels of profit -- recurring profit stability.

Prime very much sits at the center of that. So the Prime service is very comparable to Clearing, but it's providing the full range of support for clients that transact in securities. And there's obviously an enormous number of securities and an enormous number of markets. The focus has been on the U.S. market, in particular, where we've been able to develop an internalized offering, but we're going to extend that into other markets. It includes execution. So we'll provide outsourced trading for those counterparts that that require that financing?

And then obviously, there's a very strong interaction with with Clearing. As this platform grows, it's a very meaningful contributor to this infrastructure heavy, high-margin and recurring revenue stream. So just to give you a sense of how much has changed since IPO. At IPO, we were much more focused on the sort of narrower voice-led execution-type business. We had made a couple of acquisitions that were predominantly offering that type of service. And they had very good sort of levels of market penetration.

Since the IPO, we've really focused on growing our capabilities and our products at adding clients both within the sort of existing geographies and in new geographies. And then sort of transformational point, I think, for the business was when we were -- when we made the acquisition of Cowen so at the end of '23. So '24 and '25 have been the sort of the launch point for a much broader -- for a much broader offering. And it really has sort of transformed I think the nature of our interactions with clients sort of transactional nature of sort of agency execution is very much hand-to-hand combat, whereas once you have a Prime relationship, you're much more embedded into the full workflow, the full sort of service of clients. And it's just -- and it's not just about the sort of direct Prime offering, but it's also the link that you have to the other activities of this fund. So it's been very supportive for a lot of our option execution just as an example.

We're still very selective with where we choose to compete. We've traditionally focused on sort of midsized hedge funds and the economics are attractive for those hedge funds. We are moving up as in Clearing. We're moving up the size spectrum in terms of the clients that we're able to service and our own sort of level of sophistication supports that. And as we look forward, there are sort of a few areas where I think we're still somewhat underrepresented. So credit, fixed income Prime FX, and I'll talk a little bit later about our investment in a payment platform.

So just to sort of step back and look at the range of offerings that we have within capital markets. And you also then get a sense of how much more opportunity there is. We have capabilities in cash equities in listed derivatives and in equity financing. But in cash equities, it's in a relatively narrow set of geographies and products. In credit, we have capabilities in corporate bonds in structured products and trade facilitation. Again, a very large market, lots of opportunity to expand our offering. In rates, we're very well established, and we probably have the largest sort of rates platform.

In FX, we made some acquisitions, but that's, again, another area where we expect there to be real opportunities for growth. And Prime Services, I've talked about digital assets. within the Capital Markets paces about providing liquidity. So we are launching a series of offerings, which will allow clients to access pools of liquidity. And that's sort of typically how we operate as a sort of an aggregator of sources of liquidity. What we're not is an interdealer broker and we're not either a full-service investment bank, capabilities were probably lean to more towards being investment bank like than being an interdealer broker. But where we're focused is not the full range of those services. It's very much on execution, access to liquidity and supporting clients with their execution needs and with financing, where that's an important component. That breadth has been really important to attracting clients. The most sophisticated clients, they want that consolidated relationship.

They want that offering. They're not going to onboard providers that are too small, don't have the credit worthiness or don't have that sort of range of offering. So whilst sort of each of the products has its own sort of particular characteristics, it's really important that we are able to sort of offer something which access to products, which is very broad. The expertise that we provide is the differentiator, we are able to offer some amount of balance sheet, but we're not leading with balance sheet, and we're not really competing in terms of balance sheet. We are providing price transparency, liquidity aggregation and expertise in execution.

And as I say, Prime brokerage sort of is the combination of all of those skills and all of those capabilities. In terms of sort of trade life -- so the trade life cycle, it's important to sort of know that these are not -- these are not capabilities which everyone can offer. We've sort of divided this between the sort of 3 phases of trade being completed. And the -- this is really important, particularly to sort of the largest, most active transactors. So pre-trade is providing access to pricing and liquidity Execution is an ability to find that liquidity to put people on to the right platforms and to fill the orders and post trade is really important because a lot of these sophisticated players, they want real-time risk positions, they want real-time connection and establishing that level of connectivity is not again straightforward.

It's not open to others. So it creates a sort of -- it creates a protective moat for a lot of this business. So if I turn just back to to Prime Services, which you've heard a lot about over the sort of past few quarters. But just to put some some numbers around it. We are now at $28 billion of client assets, and that's that's sort of been growing as we've added clients.

Within that, there's about $6 billion of borrowings. So there's $6 million of borrowing is sort of probably the most relevant driver in terms of the financing revenues. The client asset figure is the total amount of assets that the clients leave with us. They may need security. So it has a slightly different reporting dynamic to the Clearing side, where it's typically cash that's left with us. The business has been growing through a combination of adding new clients and expanding what we do with those clients. And it's probably a fairly even mix in terms of where the growth has come from, from both new and from existing clients. It's very well diversified. We don't have high concentration on any one client. We have a very large number of relationships that we're supporting. It's very conservative in terms of the level of leverage and the sort of risk exposure. As I said, we're sort of ranked as the fifth largest non-bank Prime broker, but we -- as we have with Clearing, we can see the opportunity to move very quickly through the ranks.

Offering that type of service moves you much more into the higher-margin infrastructure, heavy side of the business. We've made very significant investments. And as I sort of mentioned earlier, there's still more to do because the infrastructure that we acquired was relatively undeveloped. And so I think whether it's in sort of fixed income products or whether it's in digital assets.

There's investment to be made, and we expect that, that will result in high levels of recurring activities, stronger retention and an ability, obviously, to then cross-sell -- so I say, I mean, in total, as you know, and as you've seen in the numbers, Prime is really an important contributor to our success.

Yes. And in numerical terms, we bought a business that was generating about $80 million annually in revenues. That is now contributing a little over $250 million, and it's growing every month. As said earlier, I think the sort of sustainable rate of growth for these businesses somewhere in annually for some period. We have broadened the platform very materially since we bought it. We've been able to -- it was primarily a sort of Prime for Prime model. So essentially, the business that we bought was introducing clients into a Prime offering from -- that was being provided by 1 of the -- 1 or other of the larger investments what we've been increasingly moving towards is where we provide the Prime service and that obviously increases your opportunity to sort of generate revenues and generate margins.

We now think that we have a very competitive range of products and markets we can offer access in almost any form of cash synthetics through futures in almost any geography. But with there's investments to be made to ensure that we do so on the most efficient basis and that makes -- that sort of -- that will improve our margins and will improve our overall scalability.

So we are making meaningful investments the infrastructure to support that level of growth. That business is now about 1/4 of the overall group's profit. So you can sort of see that we're getting a very good return on those investments. And whilst the 20% or 30% at lower rate than we've achieved in the past, it's off a much higher base. And so it is a very important sort of component in achieving the target growth that we talked about earlier. So what began as a relatively sort of focused or relatively narrow capabilities developed into something which is broad and covers a very wide range of products, and it's become a really important driver of growth and profitability.

In terms of risk management, it's a very similar position to the one described by by Tom. We start with the client. We're on -- we're very selective with the clients that we onboard. We're not -- and I see this sort of every day, we're not willing to interact with some range of clients either because of creditworthiness or the nature of their activities. There's a very selective on-boarding process. We only will onboard if we're getting the right risk characteristics as well as the right economics.

Once they're on-boarded, this is a collateral-led business, a collateral-first business. And so you're typically well protected in terms of the level of collateral that you hold. We have a very limited, very rigid and limited set of limits in terms of the amount of leverage that we'll provide. So the sort of average are very low in terms of the sort of client leverage.

The maximum leverage we provide is actually low relative to relative to what you will see for some of the banks, so somewhere around 6x is the maximum leverage and there's very few counterparts where that would be available to them. It will be very dependent on broad portfolio and the right quality of assets. It's consistent with risk. I think 1 is always exposed to some amount of credit risk. But I think in this case, with clients that we have that risk is really minimal. And it has been tested periods of extreme volatility. And we haven't seen any issues with clients' performance, whether that's margin calls or cash withdrawals or sort of movements of collateral.

The example we have here is similar to the on e that Tom I had for Trafigura. Kettle Hill is a client that we have -- it's almost a poster child of our target hedge fund. It's a midsized hedge fund. It's one that's sort of grown very steadily. It sort of almost was incubated as part of the sort of initial offering. And we do see quite a lot of opportunity in that type of client set. These are the most underserved hedge funds, those are relatively small balances. And now it's doing a wide range of business with us. It has about $1 billion of assets under management. And you can see that sort of description is one of having been supported through their growth. We've -- we are able to service the full range of requirements from these clients. So now it's moved from being just traditional Prime broker to -- we're supporting in terms of their trading activity.

So where are the growth opportunities? I'm going to sort of focus on 2 areas where I think there's really very meaningful opportunity to grow sort of beyond what we talked about in Prime. So the first is FX. We started with an FX business, which was essentially, this is on the left-hand side, the EFX, essentially a price aggregation business, you can execute on a very efficient basis, and you can go through our pipes.

We added corporate FX, which is slightly different in terms of the sort of nature of not just the nature of the clients, but there's a nature of their needs. It's more like a treasury service, but again, I mean, these are repeat flows. These aren't transactions, which that are one-off. We've adding an institutional FX business, which is, again, really for to support the most sophisticated -- the most sophisticated transactors.

Again, it has a very specific -- it has a very specific need. And we've built a payments capability, and this payments capability will come online in the next few weeks. It's a very important component to embedding clients into that FX activity. It's not a remittance business. It's not a retail remittance business it is not Western Union. It's about supporting large banks and institutional clients predominantly. But an extension of that is that it will also be important in supporting the FX activity we have with corporates. And many of you will know the sort of names at the bottom of the page and the fact that these are very, very large, profitable, high-margin activities.

And it was Ian's example of where we were able to build something in 6 months that have taken a competitor of ours at least 2 years and 4x the amount of resource. I mean it's a sort of very clear example of the ability to build these types of services and deploy them rapidly, and we're waiting for the regulatory licenses to come through, and then we'll be able to roll that out. So it's a really important sort of part of the FX process. But again, it's an example of we are building infrastructure, which supports repeat business.

And then the sort of last area that I wanted to cover was electronic trading. And as I sort of hopefully have sort of indicated to you, we are embedded into the flows, the transaction flows of a lot of our clients already in a way which I think is probably a bit under or underplayed, but we will be building -- we've sort of branded it, Marex One and maybe [ MX1 ] when Nilesh talks about it. But we are building a platform, which will sort of unify all of these all of these offerings. So again, supporting these very -- the very sophisticated needs of these clients. It's a sort of moved into electronic venues than you've -- than perhaps you've seen before.

We've recently hired Christoph Rupe, he was the CEO of Market Access in Europe. And we believe that we can sort of compete very effectively in this electronic access venue. So that's something that we are also investing. So the sort of summary of the points I'm going to sort of run through them. I'll just leave it to Q&A.

Thanks. Alex Kramm, UBS again. Not sure if I fully understand the scope of Prime. So hopefully, this question makes sense. But can you talk about the Prime of Prime versus Prime? I mean, again, I think when you bought [indiscernible], it was mostly Prime of Prime. That's what you said. So how has that evolved? Can you talk about the revenue contribution and better profitability? And then Again, I'm not sure if this is correct, but like is the Prime of Prime eventually like a funnel to get full Prime? Like is it a different sales process where you're saying like, "Hey, look, we've been doing this for you in Prime of Prime." But now it's like, actually, we can do this ourselves for you, and that actually becomes a really nice sales funnel all the time. So maybe just talk about this a little bit.

You are absolutely right, Alex. So the -- I mean, the [ Prime of ] Prime model is that you act as a sort of underwrite or introduce to other providers of Prime services. So there's a couple of versions of this, sort of the U.S. version is a little different to the sort of European version, which is more like an omnibus arrangement. But essentially, you are underwriting those clients that would typically not be banked by those organizations. And these are your employer as an example. So UBS is one of the providers of that service. When you all provide that service, you're really essentially limited to -- with the capabilities of that group, you're limited to the sort of the capacity, the willingness to support that activity and you're also not in control of pricing.

So you want to move to something which is more -- it's got more self-determination, and that's what we are now able to offer. So when we talk to clients, we aren't just saying, well, we're just going to introduce you to UBS or Goldman. We are actually able to service you directly. And most of the revenue opportunity is having the ability to service those directly. And that really means providing the financing and the execution and where we -- which is not to say that we don't value and plan on continuing to use the services of the third-party providers because there are some markets where we won't be able to provide that service.

So we're just -- we're rolling that out. But it has been a very useful -- it's been an important -- it obviously gives you a client base that you can immediately go and try and move on to your own platform. I don't want to say that it's sort of competitive with these because what we really want to have is clients to grow to a point where they're going to need multiple Prime brokers. And so this feels more like a partnership, and it feels like we're sort of in competition.

Sorry, is there a percentage where you are today and portfolio of those two models?

Yes. I mean the profitability is very much weighted towards where we are managing this. I would say it's probably like 60% is on the sort of self-primed business and 40% on the outsourced.

I wanted to circle a little bit on the growth opportunities. You talked about FX, building out payments, you have other capabilities. I'll love to hear kind of what the next steps are, it is blocking and tackling, cross-selling opportunities within FX? And then on the credit side, you've added a new hire there. What are the capabilities that you need to build out there to monetize the opportunity?

Yes. I mean in terms of FX, I mean, we're waiting for the payments license to come through, you need to have sort of regulatory payments license. We actually -- we have one, but in the sort of wrong entity. So this will allow us to unify our offering. It will mean that all of the clients that we have corporate clients, Clearing clients, solutions clients actually able to interact through the same entity on a sort of consistent basis. So that's the big mix the sort of big step in terms of capabilities. The payment platform will be technically ready in a few weeks. And in terms of -- at that point, it's sort of less about blocking and tackling and more about pushing out a new product.

And to a slightly different customer base. But it will be very comparable to what some of you will have seen as the [indiscernible] capability. In terms of credit, the -- I mean...

But better?

Yes, obviously, goes without saying it's going to be much better. In terms of credit, I mean, it's $14 trillion, $15 trillion market. We're not looking to sort of compete in every asset class. But it's an area -- it's an asset class which we're certainly sort of subscale. So yes, we have made some hires. There's quite a lot that will be happening in the credit spectrum. It overlaps with our existing client base is basically it's the same asset managers that we interact with in a lot of the execution areas.

Just curious if you could comment on competitive intensity in this segment. I mean, earlier in the presentation, you talked about declining competitive intensity across Clearing. There's definitely a couple of firms in the list of competitors that are growing rapidly, interactive brokers is public. We all kind of know them and hear what they're talking about. There's another -- it was on track to go public that has also been growing rapidly. And maybe some of the other ones in the middle, not quite the same, but it seems like we kind of hear more about from not just you guys about an opportunity to serve hedge funds. So I guess, how would you describe that? Is it getting more competitive? Or do you see it as enough white space? Or is -- am I thinking about it incorrectly?

Yes. I mean I think it's certainly competitive. There's -- and we're the fifth -- in the U.S., we're the fifth largest nonbank and there's a lot of banks that are larger than us. So the largest clients, it's competitive. It's the same with Clearing. The ability to win that business requires you to be -- to have a superior surface and that's not -- shouldn't be a surprise.

I think that we've taken a slightly different path to Clear Street who are presumably the company that you were sort of referring to. I mean we've got a broader range of capabilities, a broader set of markets. they're very much focused on a sort of singular platform and technology. But there's a lot of overlap there. I think we've got our credit rating. We've got more resources. So I think we're going to compete very effectively. But we do need to invest in that continue to invest in that capability and the sort of technology, having a unified offering.

But yes, it's competitive. I think that we've got a couple of competitors that are probably slightly distracted and that's in one case, because of an acquisition and the other because of sort of business challenges. So I think we're quite optimistic about being able to win business.

The only thing I'd sort of add to that is it actually feels to me a little like where we were 2 years ago with Clearing where it felt like we didn't really feel like for the largest mandates we were really going to be competitive who were bidding for those. And 2 years on, I think we now are. And I think that when we -- when I think about where we're having success. We're having success with funds that are in that $0.5 billion to $2 billion range, which are sort of underserved, and I don't think that the others who are trying to serve them in the way we have a product that is sort of superior to ours. We still -- for the really large Prime mandates, I mean the banks have a really strong product and a series of advantages that at least at this point, it seems very hard to that we're going to sort of compete for those mandates on equal terms.

But 2 years forward, when we're sort of sitting here again on whatever it is, the fourth Investor Day. I mean, hopefully, we'll be able to say in that circumstance, we are a competitive for those mandates. I don't know. But like right now, yes, I mean, they're really big mandates. The banks dominating and it's hard to see right now that we would win those, not trying. But to Paolo's point, there's just -- it does feel in the -- for the client set that we're competing with, the product that we have is as good or better than what's available targets.

So unlike Tom, my hair didn't grow in the last 2 years. I'm Nilesh Jethwa. I'm the CEO of Marex Solutions, but today, I'll be presenting a firm live view of digital assets. Ian mentioned the just in his opening remarks, and you heard both Toma and Paolo talk about how important digital assets have become to their businesses. I want to explain how digital assets really fit into Marex more holistically across the firm. And in particular, how is we're making money today, how we see the product sets evolve through time. And perhaps most interestingly, what is our right to win? What is our source of advantage. So what I call Marex helps clients get access to markets and digital assets are a market it's already pretty big, but it's growing quickly and it's gaining increasing institutional adoption. I just want to be clear that we're not evangelical about digital assets. We're not Bitcoin maximum [indiscernible]. Our approach has been to ensure that the infrastructure, the risk management capabilities, the client services that we apply to traditional assets can be extended here too, not as a sort of separate isolated business units, but we'll leave a natural extension of everything that we already do, just another asset class. Institutional clients are increasingly coming to Marex in this space. partly because of our innovative adaptable approach culturally, but also because of our institutional status, being an investment grade globally regulated, listed firm, name for our competence in traditional asset classes sort of assures institutions that they can trust us here too.

And that's really the foundation that everything I'm about to walk you through. So let me give you a sense of the scale of this market. The market cap of digital assets is now around $3.2 trillion. And every day, there's about $180 billion that gets traded, $80 billion of those are in derivatives. There's no longer a sort of a niche market. There's a few reasons for that growth, and I'll highlight 4 of them. From a regulatory perspective, the clarity provided is growing. You've seen Mike in the EU, the Genius Act in the U.S. The start from policymakers is getting sort of firmly constructive. The ETF boom is also really contributed. You can now buy access or get access to digital assets without the need of a wallet and a private key. BlackRock's IBIT ETF, which tracks Bitcoin is the fastest-growing ETF in history. Also the business is -- the market cap is growing from $800 billion in 2023, 2 years later, it's $3.2 trillion, it's quadrupled.

That just gives us just more relevance. If you add those 3 things together, you get to the fourth, which is increasing institutional adoption. Institutions are in 1% of Bitcoin in 2023. It's now 8% at the end of last year, and that trajectory is clear. So our strategy is to position Marex as the natural home for institutional clients looking to access this market, partly because of our institutional status, our deep sort of expertise in digital assets, but also a culture of of innovation being adaptable and nimble around the product sets.

The IPO, digital itis was not really a big feat. It didn't really feature in our presentation. We didn't have a lot of revenue coming from it. What we have done in the years before that are planted several seeds and invested a lot in the infrastructure of digital assets. So anticipating that eventually institutions would actually come on board. And that work we are now seeing the benefit of today. We trade around $400 billion of digital assets across 20 [indiscernible]. And last year, we made about $150 million of revenue.

And it also forces to reassess how we operate as an organization. If they digitize themselves are 24/7 products. So have to upgrade our risk management systems to also be 24/7 and that's a sort of direction of travel for many other asset classes as well. An example of this is prediction markets. So prediction markets are becoming increasingly popular because they allow -- they allow people to take a much easier -- it's easier to take a view on the market than it would be otherwise. If you want to take your view on the midterm elections, the traditional approach is you come up with a basket of maybe oil stocks or bank stocks and you start to see how they may play in your favor, but with prediction markets, there's a much cleaner route from your view to the outcome of that view. So we see prediction markets gaining in popularity, but to be able to deliver those, you need to be 24/7 ready. And because of digital assets Marex now is.

Tokenization is another sort of hot topic at the moment in the digital asset space. Our view is that, yes, we'll have an increasing population of securities transacted in tokenized form, but we don't think everything moves across all at once. And actually, sort of traditional assets will live alongside digital assets, which makes our role as the bridge between the trade fire world, if you like, and the digital native wells sort of makes that relevance. But if we're wrong and if actually many more securities move onto the blockchain faster than we anticipate, we're actually pretty well positioned given the investments you've made in previous years. Now this slide really illustrates how Marex has come together across all the divisions to offer these services to clients. Every single business within Marex, every sort of division, has extended its offering to enable digital assets to be more easily transactable with a client base, but it's been also done in a sort of joined up way.

We're now clearing listed derivatives on traditional exchanges and on digital venues, bespoke and standardized, structured investment products, Prime brokerage, total return swaps. The combination of all of these services together is what enabled us to make that $150 million last year. But looking ahead, we are still investing. We're applying for licenses, for example, the 5 MLD license in the U.K., which allows us to sort of move assets from one to another. These licenses take sometimes 18 months to get. You heard from Thomas talking about the importance of the tokenized collateral to move value around. If you can receive collateral instantaneously that obviously reduces cost, but also risk -- reduces risk. And clients love that we can increasingly sort of net down digital asset collateral with traditional assets.

That creates capital efficiency for both sides. Paolo talked about the payments business that we're spinning up and overtime that will increasingly benefit from blockchain rails. We can now actually use stable coins to new value between countries and quantitative investment strategies for custom indices, this is a $1 trillion industry today. Marex is still young in this journey, but we like it because it's very high-quality revenue. It's recurring revenue. It's sort of almost asset management like in the sense that you sell an index, it stays with you for many years, and you're charging basis point fees on that volume.

Now right now, it's a very onsite equities and fixed income. And our idea to take strategies which we know work in equities and just apply them to digital assets, where we have an edge, using digital assets as a door opener for other products is a theme we'll come back to.

Now the digital asset world is really split between digital asset native and traditional finance operatives or [indiscernible]. And the digital asset native tend to be sort of very fast and creative and disruptive. And they've done a great job in, frankly, building out this industry. Marc will not be as fast as many of those participants. What Marex does have is institutional acceptance. That if you're an institution coming into this space, you want to work with someone who you feel understands regulation, understands operational robustness, credit, liquidity, capital.

Now our NASDAQ listing, our investment-grade rating, our global regulatory oversights. Now these credentialize us with an increasing institutional population, which just feel reassured by that package. The speed to innovate is important. But once the product exists, clients just want it to work. Now amongst our traditional finance peers, we also performed well versus that audience because I think it's our culture of agility and adaptability, this is a fast-growing area, and you need to be able to evolve very quickly. We have a very flat hierarchy with a short decision chain, which allows us sort of play well here. And that's why a lot of the larger institutions are coming increasing to Marex and you had it from union earlier to kind of solve their problems and partner with us. And beyond purely culture, technology as well.

We're increasingly using AI to cheapen the cost of experimentation and delivering these capabilities to clients. Our approach is -- our approach entirely is incredibly collaborative. We have a group-wide steering committee, which evaluates the opportunities in front of us, allocate resources and ensures alignment and clients really respond to that joined-up approach to representing.

Here's a sort of short video, hopefully, that sort of brings together some of the topics we discussed.

[Presentation]

So it's getting increasingly clear that digital assets are starting to influence how traditional markets operating. And I'll give you a couple of examples of that. So we've heard a little bit of really about how -- sort of 24/7 digital asset is. In the traditional sort of credits or Clearing model you calculate client risk overnight for a batch process. So the next morning, you send them a margin call and it typically you have a day to pay you. So if the market moves late on a Friday. Monday morning, you tell the client will happen on Tuesday, hopefully, you get the money. So from Friday night to Tuesday, you're running a bit of risk. And given how the speed at which things move today, that's quite a lot of credit risk.

A real example is in digital assets, we had a client who was margin call at 20 plus 1 in the morning on a Saturday. And within 20 minutes, the collateral was in our accounts. So of course, you can see the efficiency gain, but also the risk reducing nature of that. The second is sort of cross-business energy. There's a Clearing account who's a good client of Clearing and seeking to do more business with us, but didn't have enough fiat currency to support to more transactions. What they did have is a lot of digital assets which they had no intention of selling.

We just said, well, give us the digital assets and we'll net that collateral down with your Clearing activity. Now what that means is the client takes sort of essentially a dormant assets and makes it useful. They can now do more activity with our Clearing business. And from a Marex's perspective, we reduced the risk, the credit risk towards that counterparty is that kind of joined up thinking across the firm that clients really respond to.

This next slide is something I feel strongly about. And you've heard it from both Thomas and Paolo already. Digital assets is increasingly a door opener for other business lines. There's -- I don't there's a G-SIB bank with a large wealth management arm in Asia. And you can imagine they're sort of well served by everybody. So we turn up and say, we'd love to add our product to your shelf, too, and they're like, yes, but we'll see you in a few years' time, we'll never be the top priority for them. But then their clients came to them and said, we would like a digital asset products. And Marex is one of the few places in the world where we can get that.

So suddenly, now we're in a situation where we are now being on-boarded so shaving years off the process. The digital assets was our foot in the door. But now you're in the room, you can now compete on all products. Now for existing clients are already clients of our equities business or fixed income or commodities, we'll namely horizontally into digital assets, we are now seen as a partner that can help them on that journey. And by helping them now, you sort of strengthen the relationship, we feel that Marex has the more multi-threaded you are with the counterparty, the more reasons you have to speak to them.

The multidimensional that interaction is, you move away from being in a transactional relationship to one of much of a partnership. Now the opportunity for digital assets is moving really quickly and we don't actually know with 100% confidence what that product set looks like in a few years from now, which is why being innovative and adaptable and moving where the time is important.

And we talked about the importance of culture the culture of March, which really lends it off into that. But there's also another aspect here which is technology. And Ian talked about the increasing use of AI across the firm for both productivity gains, but also products. I wanted to give you a bit of context about how we're creating client capabilities using AI now.

So there are 3 agents we're spinning up. Agent 1 looks -- scans the entire market and looks for opportunities. Does Ethereum looks cheap versus bitcoin? For example. And we'll have that thesis over to Agent 2 who'll say, how can I turn that thesis into a very simple investable products. Agency 2 hands that product over to Agent 3, who will scan all of our clients and say, which of these clients are most suitable for that product, you would be interested. And all of that process can take a few seconds and then -- and run on a 24/7 basis. And that than me talking about it, let me show you a quick video of what this might look like.

[Presentation]

So just so grateful the videos or fin. So just to bring this together and summarize the digital assets are a large and growing market with increasing institutional adoption. There are a catalyst for how Marex operates 24/7, collateral and moving quickly within minutes on the blockchain. We're not IDO. We are here to provide clients with access to markets, which includes digital assets because that's what clients want us to help them with. And we do this holistically across the firm in a very joined up collaborative way, and clients really love this. Marex is well positioned, and we combine our sort of institutional governance and credit quality with an understanding of how digital assets work, plus our sort of genuine ability and agility to adapt quickly to market evolution.

And lastly, it's a client acquisition tool. We are building -- we're gaining relationships and deepening existing ones because of digital assets. And that approach collectively enable us to make this $150 million we mentioned in 2025. The foundations are in place. The momentum is building, and we feel confident we can continue to execute whichever way the market evolves. Thank you very much. I'll take any questions.

All right. Hey, maybe as it comes back to the question that I asked earlier wasn't answered. But can you break down the digital asset revenues because you basically said it's across the whole firm, the $150 million, which is, I think, 7% of revenues last year, right? So is it mostly on the Clearing side and on balances? Or is it just basically where does it sit? And then has that changed that number last year? I mean are we actually now at 10%, 15% of the business? Or how has that changed over time?

So the number is growing a lot. So comparing it over time isn't that relevant. I think the revenue pre-IPO is almost negligible. So it's growing fast. I think that breakdown is sort of roughly about half is in the primary, I'd say, more or less maybe a core to each in between sort of the Clearing and the solutions business is a very rough idea.

Is it higher now like due to exit higher in 4Q or how are you [indiscernible].

Yes I say it because going to one of the questions earlier was what -- the fact that sort of Bitcoin, for example, is at its highest, does that impact our volumes or anticipated revenue. I think the phase of growth we're in right now, that isn't the case. We are seeing more demand from institutions to find ways to -- and this way, you see interoperability between these 2 asset classes between [indiscernible] and digital assets. We're seeing more use cases for people trying to take dormant assets and use them in the traditional finance world.

We're in the phase now, we're just doing more business with more people, and that growth is beating the sort of the total growth in sort of Bitcoin Valley, for example. The Bitcoin is a crypto asset and that's not digitized asset, that's just one small segment of the digital asset ecosystem that we hope to participate in.

I mean -- Alex. I think we'd be -- I'd be surprised if sort of quarter-to-quarter, it's probably growing at the same rate of the firm rather than its gaining share relative to the growth in all the other assets is my sense over a 3- to 6-month period. I mean over long term, I suspect it may grow faster. But at the moment, it feels like it's proportionate.

Maybe just in terms of like native digital assets versus tokenized [indiscernible], can you talk about the split between the 2? And when you think about the growth opportunity, how much comes from tokenized equities Clearing tokenize collateral versus trading of in crypto native assets, which I think it seems like the narrative from the industry at all the [indiscernible] players has sort of switched from interest in digital assets to interest in tokenized traditional assets. So which do you see is more important, which has been a bigger contributor for you? And how do you think about over the next couple of years look like?

So there's about 7 questions in that. I'll try to [indiscernible]. So I think that the estimates -- like I said before, they've been very quick to spin up opportunities. But as opportunities emerge, the institutions are now entering the space, probably just feel more comfortable dealing with Marex than someone who maybe has better technology potentially or quicker to innovate, but that is not the security, the stability and we maybe not be as quick, but when you come here, it's going to work, and they sort of feel assured by that. And you're not taking an investment grade credit risk. And often, this involves people giving you value and giving them value back. If you're giving value to Marex, that's one thing. If you get to someone who's got a crazy idea, but it's new.

So I think we have quite an interesting position where we are established as an institution. But amongst the other [indiscernible] players, we're just going to be a bit more adaptable and nimble, we can sort of be more helpful in that regards. So I think that applies to all of the sort of the questions you mentioned some of -- the tokenized one, in particular, I'll pick on question 6.

There is a big push towards tokenizing securities. There's at least a lot of hype around it. And we are positioning ourselves well to the extent that, that actually does take off and suddenly everyone's trading tokenized equities on a Sunday. I think we're better positioned than most to be relevant in that. But that's again another example of having a bridge between -- having a serious equity offering first, positions you well to then have enabled people on the tokenized equity side. Just having one piece of that isn't that interesting.

So being again that bridge between the tokenized equity world, and we have to say, we payout the equity on the other side, that's where we can always play a part. So I feel like we just -- I think we don't know the direction this goes, but I think we're well positioned sort of whichever direction it does go into.

I think our basic view on that is that we see those as like tokenized equities will be a small niche market appealing to a particular set of investors that will live alongside the more traditional markets, we'll be in a position to offer that service, and it could be to the earlier points, profitable in its own right. And then if it turns out that, that does take off in some way. Then we'll be well positioned. But we're not of a view that, that's going to sort of take over the world at this point. But we do think there's going to be a -- there's a fair amount of work going on to sort of establish that as a alternative. And again, it allows some group of people to trade over weekends, late at night.

They'll probably trade with much wider spreads. It will be an attractive enough business, but we don't start out thinking that's going to replace the existing way of operating, but it almost doesn't need to because there's not a huge amount of competition to Nilesh's point for the kinds of people that are going to want to face off for that service to an institution and so we'll do well out of whatever that turns out to be, and then we'll have the optionality if it turns out to be bigger than we currently anticipate.

Maybe I can just -- a real example of that right now is you have trade houses who are client of ours already today, anticipating that retail people, to Ian's point, and there'll be some -- some subset of people, you want to trade equities in a tokenized format on a weekend. And they're looking forward to offering those wider spreads and benefiting from that on the weekend. But someone has to finance that. If we have to do that in a fully funded format, they don't have the liquidity or the return on equity looks worse comparatively for them. So I think it comes to Marex, we can actually help finance those activity. That's actually really attractive. And there are very few people who have all the aspects of that ability and that knowledge and know-how and that willingness to try that. We are sort of just well positioned for that growth if it does materialize. Thank you very much.

So thanks, everybody. Thanks for joining us. Thanks for all the questions. I think when -- sort of reflected on what were the themes of our presentations, a lot of what I wrote about in my remarks, and I think it was replicated in -- as a structure within the other presentations was this notion that 2 years on where we've made enormous progress relative to where we were at the IPO and that our opportunity set and the set of advantages we bring to bear today are just so much greater than we had at that point. And so our performance of the firm has also had the sort of multiplier effect, and it's a virtuous circle, and we're now better able to compete going forward.

Listening to the presentations though I think there's another element of this that hopefully comes through to all of you, which is just almost like the reason behind that performance? What is it about our culture? What is it about how we approach these opportunities and how to make that sort of come alive for you? Because what I was hearing is just sort of this huge sense of opportunity, people being extremely well organized to go after it, very ambitious. Nobody is trying to figure out how do we grow at 5% a year. Everybody is trying to figure out how you're going to grow at 20%, how are you going to grow at 30% a year. How do you not be slower than the rest of the firm?

And the kinds of questions you ask yourself when that's what you're trying to accomplish are just very different. And so hopefully, in addition to taking away a sense of how far the firm has come and also having a feel for how much better positioned we are to grow from here on in. You also have a feel for how the firm operates when it looks for opportunity and then sets itself up to capture those. And whether those are the opportunities that Paolo was describing in Prime or in payments or in FX or the opportunities that Thomas was identifying by expanding in product sets or by making more progress with clients or it's in digital assets, as Nilesh was describing. I mean what you're almost getting a feel for is how it is that the firm thinks about and sets itself up and how ambitious it is to take advantage of these opportunities and how the improved position that we've created for ourselves 2 years on, puts us in a position where we really can grow and thrive.

So there's an enormous amount of entrepreneurial energy inside the firm. There's an organization that's actually very skilled at taking advantage of those opportunities. And the sort of growth rates that you've seen, I mean, it's not sort of -- it's not sort of an accident. I mean, it happens as a result of a lot of work and a lot of advantages that we sort of bring to bear and the way in which our culture positions us to take advantage of those opportunities. So thank you for joining us. Thank you for making the time to learn a little more about Marex. I mean we have lunch, and we're happy to sort of handle questions that you might have. Thank you to our investors for your support for the sort of feedback you give us. Thank you to the analysts for their sort of insights and sort of the engagement they have with us and obviously, to our Board and our management team who have been here today. And obviously, Adam and Mary, who have sort of pulled this all together with Nikola and others in a sort of support team who have made this such a successful day, so thank you all.

Hello, everyone. Thank you for joining us, and welcome to the Marex' Q4 2025 Earnings Call.

[Operator Instructions] I will now hand the call over to Adam Strachan, Head of Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Good morning, everyone, and thanks for joining us today for Marex' Fourth Quarter 2025 Earnings Conference Call. Speaking today are Ian Lowitt, Group CEO; and Rob Irvin, Group CFO. After Ian and Rob have made their formal remarks, we will open the call to questions; and Paolo Tonucci, our Chief Strategist and CEO of Capital Markets, will join for Q&A as usual.

Before we begin, I would like to remind everyone that certain matters discussed in today's conference call are forward-looking statements relating to future events, management's plans and objectives for the business, and the future financial performance of the company that are subject to risks and uncertainties. Actual results could differ materially from those anticipated in these forward-looking statements. The risk factors that may affect results are referred to in Marex' press release issued today.

The forward-looking statements made today are as of the date of this call, and Marex does not undertake any obligation to update their forward-looking statements. Finally, the speakers may refer to certain adjusted or non-IFRS financial measures on this call. A reconciliation schedule of the non-IFRS financial measures to the most directly comparable IFRS measures is also available in the earnings release issued today. A copy of today's release and investor presentation may be obtained by visiting the Investor Relations page of the website at marex.com.

I will now turn the call over to Ian.

Good morning, and welcome to our fourth quarter and full year 2025 earnings call. 2025 was a year of continued growth for Marex. We delivered another year of record financial performance with revenue of over $2 billion. Over the past 5 years, we have increased profitability sevenfold from $61 million in 2020 to $418 million in 2025. We have done this by broadening our product offering across our 4 interconnected services, expanding geographically and combining organic growth with targeted M&A.

Acquiring, integrating and scaling businesses is embedded in the DNA of Marex, enabling us to add clients and deepen relationships across products, asset classes and geographies. Our platform and organization are difficult to replicate, increasing further the high barriers to entry that we benefit from in our industry. The results we are reporting today demonstrate that our strategy is effective and continues to deliver value for our shareholders.

On Slide 4, you see that we closed the year with record profitability in the fourth quarter. Revenues grew 38% from $416 million to $572 million, and adjusted profit before tax increased 41% to $115 million. We grew EPS by 50% to $1.14 per share. Pleasingly, this performance was not driven by an idiosyncratic market event, but by broad-based strength across the firm. Full year revenue grew 27% from $1.6 billion to just over $2 billion, and adjusted PBT increased 30% to $418 million. Profit after tax increased at a faster rate, benefiting from an improved effective tax rate, which declined from 26% to 25%, reflecting our evolving geographic mix. Full year EPS grew 39% to $4.12.

We experienced growth across all our segments, with continued strength and client balance growth in Clearing, strong performance in Agency and Execution, driven in particular by Prime, which I'll come back to, as well as good momentum in Market Making and Hedging and Investment Solutions.

In Clearing, average customer balances increased over the year by 18% to $14 billion in the fourth quarter with balances growing steadily quarter-by-quarter. We continue to execute our M&A strategy, strengthening earnings through disciplined integration and development of recent acquisitions. We have developed a repeatable model for identifying complementary assets, acquiring them at attractive prices, integrating them efficiently and enhancing their earnings power as part of the Marex platform.

That capability continues to be a sustainable competitive advantage for the firm. We are very selective in the opportunities we pursue and maintain high conviction in our ability to meet our return objectives and grow acquisitions once integrated. This is evidenced by the acquisitions we completed during the year, which are delivering in line with or ahead of expectations.

Aarna provided an opportunity to establish a clearing presence in the Middle East. The day 1 synergies we identified, which increased profitability by around 50% were realized as expected. Hamilton Court provides us with access to a number of U.K. and EU corporates that we did not serve previously. It expands our client base and creates meaningful cross-sell opportunities. Winterflood, which we completed in December has started strongly and enhances our U.K. equity market-making franchise while creating cross-sell opportunities with leading U.K. participants.

Following the subsequent sale of Winterflood's custody business, which we expect to complete in Q2, we will have acquired Winterflood at a meaningful discount to tangible book value, a transaction that we believe will generate substantial long-term value for our shareholders.

Alongside M&A, we continue to execute a number of organic growth initiatives, including digital assets within Clearing, expanding our footprint in Asia, the Middle East and Brazil and growing our Prime brokerage and FX capabilities. A meaningful contributor to the diversification of the firm and an example of how we scale businesses once integrated into our platform is Prime Services.

We acquired Prime in December 2023 for approximately $25 million of premium. In 2025, it generated over $250 million of revenue and now accounts for around 1/4 of the group's profitability. Prime also adds diversification to our earnings profile broadening our revenue drivers beyond traditional exchange volume-linked activity. Finally, as the breadth of our platform expands, we're increasingly scaling relationships with larger, more sophisticated clients. Something I'll touch on in more detail shortly.

On Slide 5, you can see the consistent improvement in our key financial metrics, revenue, profitability, earnings per share and return on equity. Beyond the headline growth, what is particularly encouraging is the quality of that growth. Full year revenues increased 27% to over $2 billion. Adjusted profit before tax grew faster than revenues, up 30% for the year, and EPS increased 39%, reflecting the improved tax rate. Reported return on equity improved to 27.6% and underscoring the capital efficiency of the model and pretax margins were 21%.

Looking now at the operating environment in more detail on Slide 6. As we step back and look at the operating environment during the year, it is clear that on the whole, we have enjoyed a supportive backdrop for our services. The spike in volatility in April was notable at the start of the second quarter. While April was a strong month, it was not outsized in the context of the full year. We continue to deliver strong growth even as volumes and volatility reduced from April's peak, including through the seasonally quiet third quarter and amid the impact of the short report. We also absorbed the impact of lower interest rates in Clearing as we grew our client balances, which Rob will cover in more detail.

In Q4, exchange volumes increased, up 5% year-on-year and 8% higher than the third quarter, while volatility also picked up modestly. Equity markets being at or around all-time highs in Q4 helped our Prime business, which is a function of customer balances and spreads. It also, to some extent, support solutions, where we tend to see higher client activity in structured products when markets are rising. In this context, our fourth quarter profits were up 41% year-on-year and up 14% compared to the third quarter, and also above our prior record in Q2. This demonstrates that we are growing faster than underlying market volumes and that we have set up the firm to deliver growth through a variety of environments.

I'll now hand over to Rob, who will take you through the financials in more detail.

Thanks, Ian, and good morning, everyone. I'll take you through our financial performance for the full year and the fourth quarter following the same structure as usual.

For the full year, we grew revenue by 27% to $2.02 billion with growth across all our business segments. Total expenses increased by 24%, reflecting the higher revenues as well as ongoing investment to support growth and acquisitions during the year. Adjusted PBT margin expanded by 60 basis points to 20.7%, delivering a 30% growth in adjusted PBT to $418 million. The effective tax rate for the full year decreased from 26% to 25%, reflecting mainly the geographical mix of our earnings. This is an excellent result for the year, capped off by the fourth quarter, which was the strongest quarter in our history.

Q4 revenue of $572 million was up 38% versus last year, while total expenses grew 36%, broadly in line with revenues driven by higher compensation costs and ongoing investments to support growth. Adjusted profit before tax increased 41% to $115 million as margins increased 50 basis points to 20.1%. Our adjusted return on equity remained very strong at 30.8%, and we grew basic EPS to $1.14 per share, up 50% year-on-year.

Focusing now on our segmental performance, starting with Clearing. In the fourth quarter, Clearing revenue increased 10% to $137 million. This was driven by growth across all revenue lines, higher volumes and continued momentum in client onboarding, particularly large institutional client wins during 2025.

Average Clearing balances increased to $14 billion from $11.9 billion in the fourth quarter of last year, reflecting the contribution from Aarna and new client wins. Net commission income increased 6%, reflecting higher client activity as well as our broadened product offerings across regions. Net interest income was stable at $59 million, the durability of Clearing NII, even as rates have declined, shows how well this business is positioned as growth in client balances offset these rate pressures.

Adjusted profit before tax for the quarter increased to $67 million with margins at 49%. For the full year, Clearing revenue increased 13% to $528 million with sustained growth in client balances, new client wins and an expanded product offering. Adjusted profit before tax increased to $262 million, with margins at 50%, reflecting disciplined investments to support growth. Overall, the fourth quarter capped a year of sustained momentum in Clearing with strong client acquisition, higher balances and disciplined investment, positioning us well going into 2026.

Turning now to Agency and Execution. This quarter, we're providing a more granular breakdown of performance across the asset classes to reflect the continued expansion and diversification of the platform. The fourth quarter was another strong period with revenue increasing 51% to $290 million. This is driven primarily by strong growth in securities, reflecting the continued strategic expansion of Prime alongside more modest growth in energy. Securities revenues increased to $209 million, reflecting broad-based growth across the platform, with all major asset classes contributing.

Prime was again a standout performer, with revenue increasing to $87 million, supported by a significant increase in clients on our platform and continued expansion of our securities-based swaps offering. FX also performed strongly, benefiting from the integration of Hamilton Court, which completed in July and growth across the broader FX platform. In energy, revenue increased to $76 million, driven by higher activity in U.K. and European gas and power markets and continued capability expansion. Adjusted profit before tax increased to $89 million in the quarter with margins expanding to 31%, reflecting growth in higher-margin activities, particularly Prime.

For the full year, Agency and Execution revenue increased to $1.05 billion, with strong contributions from both securities and energy. Adjusted profit before tax increased to $281 million reflecting the continued build-out of a more diversified, high-quality platform with Prime central to that transformation. The structural improvements we made are now clearly visible in the margin profile of the business, which expanded to 27%.

Turning now to Market Making. Fourth quarter revenue grew 83% to $81 million, driven by a particularly strong performance in Metals and Securities, partly offset by softer conditions in agriculture and energy. Metals delivered the second-best quarter on record with revenue increasing to $50 million. While supportive market conditions and high volatility provided a favorable backdrop, performance was driven by increased client activity across both precious and base metals.

Securities revenue increased to $20 million, reflecting the inclusion of Winterflood following the completion in December, alongside improved performance from our FX and credit desks. In energy, revenue was lower year-on-year as the prior period benefited from elevated volatility and large client flows, whereas the fourth quarter in 2025 saw more muted Hedging activity.

Agriculture also moderated year-on-year, reflecting a more challenging macro backdrop and elevated commodity prices although performance improved sequentially from the third quarter as conditions stabilized. Adjusted profit before tax increased to $27 million, with margins expanding to 33%, a strong revenue growth, more than offset higher front office compensation and the additional headcount following the Winterflood acquisition.

For the full year, revenue increased to $236 million driven primarily by strong performance in both Metals and Securities, which, more than offset softer conditions in agriculture. Adjusted profit before tax increased to $69 million with margins at 29%, reflecting investment through the year and the mix of revenues across the platform.

Finally, solutions, which had its strongest quarter on record in Q4. Revenue increased by 57% to $63 million reflecting growth across both Financial Products and Hedging Solutions. Hedging Solutions revenue increased to $23 million, supported by institutional client wins and higher activity in energy and FX, more than offsetting softer agricultural markets.

Financial Products revenue increased to $40 million, reflecting continued strength in structured products. Performance was supported by improved market conditions, expanded exchange access and regional expansion, particularly in Asia. The rollout of our new technology platform also supported higher issuance volumes and broader product accessibility. Adjusted profit before tax increased to $14 million, with margins improving to 23% despite continued investment in technology and headcount. For the full year, revenue increased to $197 million reflecting sustained growth across both businesses. Adjusted profit before tax increased to $44 million, with margins at 22%, reflecting our investment to support long-term scalability.

Turning now to net interest income at the group level. For the full year, NII was $153 million compared to $227 million in the prior year. Interest income increased 4% year-on-year as $4.8 billion increase in average balances, more than offset 100 basis points decline in rates. However, interest expense increased 21%, reflecting $1.5 billion of additional average structured note balance and senior debt issuance, which, more than offset the increase in interest income.

NII for Q4 was $26 million, down $13 million compared to Q3 2025, primarily reflecting the further 40 basis point decline in the average Fed funds rate during the quarter. Interest income was $181 million as lower rates offset growth in average balances. Interest expense was broadly flat, with a decrease in rates being broadly offset by higher structured note balance.

Throughout the quarter, we continue to hold significant liquidity headroom, while this creates a modest near-term headroom to group NII, it is a deliberate choice that strengthens the balance sheet and positions us to support clients and pursue future growth opportunities.

Importantly, as we highlighted in the Clearing segment, Clearing NII remains resilient. Average Clearing balances increased to $14 billion in the fourth quarter, and that growth has continued to broadly offset the impact of lower rates.

I'll briefly touch on expenses as it's important to understand how our cost base evolves as we grow. As I've said before, our cost base is highly flexible, with around 55% of total expenses in Q4 variable in nature, which are linked to the performance of the group. In the front office, variable expenses primarily flex with revenues, while back office variable expenses flex with the overall profitability of the group. Given the strong revenue performance year-over-year, $54 million of the increase in total expenses was driven by higher variable compensation, which included variable compensation for recently completed acquisitions, a further $18 million related to the fixed costs associated with the recently completed acquisitions.

These acquisition-related costs are not the one-off transaction expenses, but the continuing operating costs of growing these businesses, which generate revenue and drive overall profitability, and an additional $50 million to support the future organic growth of the organization and investment in control and support, notably technology. These investment decisions are deliberate choices we have made to support the future growth of the organization.

Looking now at our balance sheet. As a reminder, approximately 80% of our balance sheet supports client activity and consists of high-quality liquid assets. Total assets increased to $35 million (sic) [ $35 billion ] at the end of December, driven by growth in Clearing client balances and securities activity, including Prime. After netting client assets and liabilities of the remaining residual balance sheet, primarily comprises of corporate cash and other assets against group liabilities, including our structured notes portfolio and senior note issuance.

Turning now to capital and liquidity. We continue to manage capital and liquidity prudently, maintaining substantial headroom above regulatory requirements to ensure resilience across market environments. At year-end 2025, regulatory capital was $927 million against the requirement of $403 million, representing a capital ratio of 230%. This provides a substantial buffer and supports our investment-grade credit ratings.

Total corporate funding increased to $6.2 billion, up from $3.8 billion at year-end 2024, primarily reflecting structured notes issuance and a senior debt issuance of $500 million during the year. We maintained approximately $1 billion of liquidity headroom at year-end. In line with the growth of the business, we have increased our liquidity stress testing limits and associated buffers to ensure we remain well positioned to support higher client volumes while maintaining a conservative risk profile.

While carrying excess liquidity creates a modest drag on net interest income, maintaining substantial headroom remains a deliberate and conservative choice that strengthens the balance sheet and ensures we're well positioned to support clients and navigate periods of market volatility. Overall, our capital and liquidity framework remains robust, scalable and aligned with our growth ambitions.

Finally, we announced again a quarterly dividend of $0.15 per share for the fourth quarter of 2025 to be paid to shareholders on the 31st of March this year. Finally, we have a proactive and involved risk management approach at Marex. In Market Making, we're a client flow-driven business and do not take a directional view on prices. However, we do carry a small level of inventory to source client demand and capture the trading spreads. Average daily VAR was $3.8 million for the full year and remains at a very low level relative to the growth in the overall business. In terms of credit risk, we had a realized credit loss of $800,000, representing less than 0.1% of revenues.

Now I'll hand you back to Ian.

Thanks, Rob. Let me spend a moment on clients because this is the critical component of the Marex growth story. As our platform has expanded, particularly since we went public, we are increasingly having success with larger and more sophisticated clients. You can see on Slide 19 that while active clients, which we now define as those generating over $25,000 in annual revenue, grew 19% year-on-year, revenues grew 32%, and average revenue per client increased 11%.

Consistent with my commentary throughout the year, that growth is particularly evident amongst our largest clients. Our $5 million-plus client cohort increased by 36% and revenue from that segment grew by over 80%, with average revenue per client up 35%. Today, those top circa 50 clients generate on average $14 million annually versus $10 million last year and drove over $300 million of our revenue growth in 2025.

Importantly, this does not mean we are becoming overly concentrated. The top cohort represents around 1/3 of firm revenue, but we remain diversified across, more than 3,400 active clients and no single counterparty represents undue exposure.

We included Slide 20 at last year's Investor Day and again at the half year results. We think it is a helpful way to demonstrate the quality and reliability of our earnings. On the left-hand side of the chart, we show the consistent year-on-year growth in our average monthly PBT, and the relatively low variability in distribution, driving an extremely high Sharpe ratio of 6.2% for the full year 2025. This shows that our profitability is not driven by a few exceptional months. It is stable and in a narrow band, demonstrating high-quality earnings.

On the right of the chart, we show the distribution of our daily profitability for the full year versus last year. You can see the distribution has shifted to the right by around $400,000 year-over-year from around $1.3 million to $1.7 million. The left tail remains very small, with only 6 negative days during the year. In the right tail, you can also see how we have successfully captured market opportunities with more above-average profitability days. This is not just successful Market Making. We are doing more larger transactions with clients as we become more relevant to sophisticated market participants.

So in conclusion, at our Investor Day last April, we described our goal of delivering sustainable profit growth with roughly 10% organic and 5% to 10% from selective inorganic opportunities. 2025 performance reinforces our belief in our competitive position and ability to continue to deliver growth. Structural shifts in bank focus, high barriers to entry, the breadth of our capabilities and the quality of our service creates opportunities for Marex. Our M&A pipeline remains attractive. The opportunity set continues to expand as our scale and reputation improve, and we are increasingly seeing inbound opportunities.

As a result, we are able to be more selective, executing only those transactions where we have high conviction in our ability to enhance returns through integration and scale. Our digital assets initiatives continue to progress well, as we are seeing growing engagement from clients coming to us to solve real-world use cases for them.

We already have 24/7 trading capability in place for our digital assets offering and solutions and plan to extend this imminently to Clearing, where we clear crypto futures for clients primarily on CME. This will also give us the ability to support prediction markets at limited additional cost.

Towards the end of 2025, we went live as a day 1 clearer for SGX derivatives launch of digital asset perpetual futures, meeting institutional demand for transparent access to regulated crypto derivatives, and we are actively involved in the CFTC's pilot program for the acceptance of stablecoin and crypto as collateral for futures, and we expect to go live with this at the end of March.

While still early days, we believe these initiatives position us strongly as market structure continues to evolve, and they represent a meaningful long-term opportunity for the firm.

Artificial intelligence is clearly a major theme in the markets today, and given how topical it is, I would like to address it. We see AI as an accelerant to our competitive advantages and are already deploying it internally to enhance productivity, improve risk management and deepen client engagement. As a vertically integrated firm with deep expertise and institutional knowledge of market infrastructure, and strong client relationships, we believe our competitive moats are reinforced, not threatened by the technological advancement.

Looking ahead, we remain confident in our ability to continue to deliver sustainable growth across a range of market environments. For 11 straight years, we have reported to our Board and shareholders that Marex has delivered record profitability. We are extremely proud of that track record, and we feel confident in our ability to continue that trajectory in 2026 and beyond. We remain committed to disciplined capital allocation, excellent client service and long-term value creation for shareholders.

Finally, you may have seen, we announced a second Investor Day on March 26 in New York. We look forward to seeing as many of you as possible there later this month.

With that, I'll hand it back to the operator to open the line for questions.

[Operator Instructions] Your first question comes from the line of Dan Fannon with Jefferies.

Ian, I was hoping you could just talk a little bit more about the current environment given we're in early March and a lot has changed, not only recently here in the last week or so, but just even year-to-date, given volatility. So I was hoping to get an update just in terms of how clients are behaving, maybe balances or any real changes in the environment that you've seen so far?

Dan, yes, look, as you say in your question, it's been a very interesting couple of months. And certainly, it feels like there's a great deal going on at the moment. I mean, I think, that there are a series of things that I would regard as sort of tailwinds for our business, and then a series of things that probably sort of feel more like headwinds. The tailwinds obviously increased exchange volumes, which are actually quite a bit higher this year than they were last year. Volatility has been a lot higher, particularly around commodities.

I mean, I think, as we've spoken on this call a few times, when we think about volatility, there's sort of a Goldilocks level of volatility, which is sort of active volatility, but it's not sort of excessive or too high. I think the volatility that we've seen in January, and we're seeing, again, in March, it doesn't fall into sort of the Goldilocks category. It's pretty high, and it makes a big difference and puts a lot of pressure on clients.

So I think that it's very active. I think there's a lot of uncertainty in the marketplace. I think that the demand for our services is high. And I think that consistent with the message that we had in the prepared remarks, we're very confident with regard to our ability over the course of the full year to deliver growth in the sort of corridor that we previously indicated to the market. Exactly how that sort of plays out through the course of the year is obviously sort of possible to tell, but we feel very good about our business, our business model, our competitive position and the opportunities ahead of us, given how diversified our business is.

Understood. And then just as a follow-up, I was hoping you could expand on the growth and outlook for the Hedging and Investment Solutions business. Obviously, I think you said a record quarter, really strong 4Q results. Just to get a little bit more underneath that in terms of what's driving that and the sustainability of that as we think about 2026.

Yes. I mean, I think that as I think about all of our businesses in 2026, I have sort of quite a lot of confidence that all can continue to grow. I mean the management team in each of those businesses is sort of ambitious. They all sort of see opportunity, and we see ourselves as sort of broad-based and looking to ensure that all the elements of the firm are growing. Your question is about solutions specifically, and I think that what we're seeing there is the impact of sort of global expansion as well as sort of the addition of additional products, and then additional penetration of clients. And I don't see anything that will undermine that over the long term. And I think that we should and expect to see sort of solutions continuing to grow, consistent with broadly how the overall firm is expecting to grow.

Your next question comes from the line of Bill Katz with TD Cowen.

I apologize for any background in transit this afternoon. I was really keyed in on your commentary around just sort of the growth in some of the larger accounts and not a lot of concentration in that. Could you unpack that a little bit, maybe where you're seeing the greatest rates of growth, either by the distribution channel, geography, the segment of the business? I'm sort of curious what some of the underlying drivers are in the process there?

Sure. Well, I think that, anecdotally, what I've been sharing with people is sort of client wins that we've been enjoying with prominent hedge funds and with some of the largest and most sophisticated players in our space. And we've had traditional strengths with commodity producers and consumers. And as you're aware, as part of our efforts to diversify the firm, we were looking to expand out the products that we could offer sort of leading financial players. And I think that what we're seeing now is the sort of fruit of that, and it doesn't feel like it's sort of the end. It feels like it's sort of building momentum.

So who are the people in that $5 million-plus sort of category. It's the largest financial players in the world. It's the largest commodity producers and consumers. I think if there was a geographic focus, it's probably in North America, which, again, I think is not surprising just given the preponderance of large players in the U.S., and I think the success we've had sort of growing our U.S. franchise. But it's -- the growth has been with financial players sort of banks, hedge funds, large asset managers, more than in any other sort of product type or -- sorry, client type. And those are all clients who are engaging with us across a number of different segments and a number of different desks.

So part of what's sort of driving that growth is just sort of the cross-sell so that those players who are able to engage with us across a lot of products and do so in size are increasingly doing that.

Great. Just as a follow-up, I'm very intrigued by the digital opportunity, the stablecoin crypto, what have you. A lot of debate, just in terms of the impact of tokenization, just on the ecosystem at large. I was wondering if you could maybe break down where you sort of see the opportunities for tokenization at the front, maybe that's already on sort of expanded trading activity, but maybe post trade, how we should think about the durability of the business to the extent that tokenization continues to sort of mature and season into the market structure system.

Sure. I mean, look, I think that -- I mean, what we're focused on is what I think we described last quarter as our digital Prime brokerage offering. What we're very keen to be able to support for clients is our ability to take sort of digital assets as collateral with all the things that sort of go with that to ensure that, that's sort of viable and supported. And there's a lot of work that sort of goes into that, and we've -- that's really been our focus, more than around what our view is with regard to the long-term sort of prospects of tokenization.

I think my expectation of this is that there will be sort of weekend trading, I think it will be done in sort of tokenized form, I think it will just live alongside the exchanges for some period of time, maybe forever. And it won't sort of replace it, it will just sort of exist as a separate world, meeting very specific requirements of a specific set of investors.

How tokenization moves into post-trade, I don't really have a specific perspective, and we're not sort of currently investing in that. But I think that, if that does turn out to be more relevant, I think we'll be in a position to take advantage of it. But really, the emphasis at the moment is being able to create some products for clients, which are more around being able to take digital assets as collateral.

What I would add to the answer, though, is we've certainly seen with some of the sort of the digital asset products that we've been involved with, the ability to collect margin real time, and in particular, over the weekends, is really a very attractive feature in terms of risk mitigation. And so as I sort of think about the impact on Clearing as a sort of general matter, the ability to get collateral or sort of get payment 24/7, I think, is actually a really attractive risk mitigant. I don't know if you have anything to add to the color.

Yes. I mean, just a couple of points. But it's a good question, Bill. I think just to extend Ian's point on where we're focusing. The key components of both the Clearing and the Prime offering. One is more futures oriented and the other is more securities oriented is that we can receive the collateral and recognize the collateral, which I think there's been significant progress both with the exchanges and on the regulatory side, that we can provide a combined sort of margining on a risk basis, which includes the sort of activities, the risks and the collateral that we can provide all of the reporting and the reconciliations.

And I think that in each of those dimensions, we've made significant progress. We have applied for a license, which will allow for the conversion of -- for us to provide the conversion between crypto and fiat currencies. And we hope that, that will come through in the next few weeks. We have got the infrastructure in place, and we've partnered with very established players to establish the infrastructure both for Execution as well as for Clearing.

And that sort of extends to tokenization where we're working with some of our most sort of progressive clients to ensure that sort of all of the rails for tokenization, whether that's for sort of post-trade or whether that's for the sort of 24/7 activities supporting 24/7 activities. So I think we've moved a long way. And I think -- now my sense is relative to where the rest of our competitor group are, we're probably towards the front, if not at the very sort of front of that queue.

Your next question comes from the line of Benjamin Budish with Barclays.

Maybe first, Ian, I was wondering if you could unpack a little bit more the comment you made earlier in the Q&A around this sort of not being a Goldilocks volatility kind of environment. Maybe talk about like what do you typically see when there are volatility spikes in terms of either exchanges, collateral requirements or how customers respond. And I gather, or I think your comments, maybe you were referring to mid-February, but obviously, things have changed a little bit more in the last couple of days. So just curious how to think about. We can see your collateral balances daily through your website, but things have changed more in the last couple of days. So if you could unpack that a little bit, that would be helpful.

Sure, Ben. Look, I think it's a really good question. So look, at times of very high sort of volatility, a couple of things are sort of happening. So one is either we're increasing margin multipliers or the exchanges are often increasing their margins. And you certainly saw that in January. So people are having to put sort of more margin up against sort of the existing positions.

The other thing that sort of plays out is in terms of their own existing risk models, they have limits and what kind of positions they can maintain relative to the risk that they've been authorized to hold, they tend to reduce the positions in order to remain within sort of their risk limits. I mean the other thing that is just sort of an obvious consequence of extremely high levels of volatility is it impacts how people choose to hedge and how they think about Hedging in the sense that they have to decide what their entry points are, they have to decide how long they're willing to hedge for. And just as we saw in April of last year with a Liberation Day when people are sort of unsure where -- what's driving pricing and where it's going to settle, their reaction is often to shorten the duration of the hedges or actually just be unsure about when to begin to hedge.

So they're also sort of -- they got to manage their liquidity carefully in addition to managing their risk carefully. So all of those things play through where you have those volatility spikes. And just to put that in perspective, I'm sure you sort of appreciate that. But some of the moves in some of these commodity contracts were 1-in-35-year events that were sort of playing through at the end of January. I don't know in terms of over the last few days, and where this thing is going to go whether we're going to see volatility of that magnitude. But certainly, in the natural gas prices, we're seeing price moves that are not dissimilar to what we saw with the Ukraine invasion. So that's really a bit more color on what's actually involved when you're operating in a world of extremely high volatility.

All right. Understood. That's very helpful. Maybe just a follow-up, a separate topic. You mentioned briefly prediction markets in your opening remarks. And just curious, from your seat, how do you see this evolving from an institutional perspective? It seems like from all the data that's trackable, most of this is happening in sports and in the retail channel, but there's a big question mark around how and when this might evolve into something broader. So just curious, what does institutional interest look like? Where in prediction markets are you guys looking to participate? How do you think this plays out over the next year?

Yes. I mean that's sort of interesting to us is if this results in contracts that are really listed on the sort of principal exchanges. So whether CME or ICE or CBOE, end up listing a series of contracts, which aren't sort of sports-related specifically, but our sort of financial instrument related, which I think is certainly a direction that people are looking at. And we also believe that there's interest from retail aggregators for this particular product. So I do believe that we will see these products listed on exchanges so that you deal with sort of the credit risk associated with some of these other venues. And you will, I think, see experimentation with financial instruments and sort of strategies expressed as event contracts in the sort of coming quarters, maybe it will take a little longer than that, but I think that's my expectation.

And I think there's a variety of people who are interested in experimenting with it. And at some level, you could imagine these contracts actually being quite intuitive ways for retail investors to express certain investment thesis they have. And so I can see that actually taking off. But you don't want to deal with the sort of credit risk associated with some of these sort of venues. And I think that the exchanges will naturally evolve into that space.

Your next question comes from the line of Patrick Moley with Piper Sandler.

Yes. So I know the Middle East has been an area of focus for you, and it's a place where you found success, especially with the Aarna acquisition. So just curious, with all the geopolitical turmoil going on, if we do see an extended conflict in the Middle East, how that impacts Marex' business and just the overall strategy there?

Look, I think that we -- the answer clearly depends on what actually happens with regard to this conflict, whether it sort of resolves relatively quickly or not. I mean, certainly, we see that opportunity as attractive, sustained and certainly, we're hopeful that there's nothing that sort of undermines it, and there's not knowledge at the moment that it might undermine it. But there's obviously a lot that we don't know. I don't know what you'd add, Paolo.

Yes. I mean, it's difficult to have certainty about the sort of longer-term impacts. But so far, I mean, we've got a very broad-based business in both Dubai and Abu Dhabi. Volumes have been sort of consistently increasing the sort of breadth of product offering has been consistently increasing. It doesn't feel as though that trend is going to change, but we may have obviously some disruption in the short term just as we all watch what's transpiring.

Okay. And then you mentioned in your prepared remarks, the pipeline of opportunities that you're looking at from an M&A perspective. Can you just update us on, maybe what's in focus right now in terms of both asset classes and geographies? Any color there would be great.

Yes. Yes, absolutely, Patrick. We have continued, I think, the sort of pace of acquisitions that we've seen for the last couple of years. And we've had a couple of announced transactions this year. So we most recently announced that we will be purchasing Web Traders, which is an option market-making group. So somewhat sort of away from the Clearing and Execution or Agency and Execution areas where we've had sort of traditionally more focused on acquisitions. Winterfloods also is a market-making business. So it sort of shows that there are opportunities across all of the different sort of service lines. I think we remain of a view that we were buying the capabilities and not just the revenues and the capabilities and include both the sort of geographic coverage as well as sort of product capabilities. And I think that there are opportunities across each of the service lines. But I think that you will see both Clearing and Agency and Execution businesses being added in the next couple of quarters.

And from a geographic perspective, I think whilst it's really hard to know -- to predict exactly when these opportunities will arise, we are still focused on both extension in Asia where we have probably a slightly subscale -- slightly subscale business, certainly on the sort of capital market side and in Latin America, where we bought Agriinvest last year. We're really pleased with how that's going. That's obviously an agricultural-focused business, but we're seeing opportunities on the sort of financial side as well. So the geographic focus remains the same. It's just sort of -- it's hard to say exactly when those will sort of come to fruition, but we're seeing good opportunities here.

And I think the thing I'd just sort of add to that is we're always just looking to sort of fill in holes where within a geography, we don't sort of have the product. And if we think we could build that organically, then that's typically what we would choose to do. But in many cases, and particularly, as you try to expand geographically, that's just very hard to do organically. And those are the places where we would typically focus around acquisitions.

Your next question comes from the line of Alexander Blostein with Goldman Sachs.

This is Anthony on for Alex. I wanted to hit on Prime Services, which continues to see solid growth. How much of this growth has been a function of maybe existing clients doing more with you versus kind of onboarding new accounts? And what does the pipeline of new clients look like today?

Anthony, thank you for the question. The -- I'm going to sort of split the answer into the sort of longer-term trend and into what we saw in the fourth quarter. So in terms of our annual accumulation of new clients, we are adding about 30%. We have a growth rate of about 30% a year on a gross basis. And then we lose about 5% of our sort of clients because they sort of cease to be active or they move into sort of different structures. So the long-term trend is around that type of growth rate. In the short term, where you see a bit more volatility is with existing clients, which have relationships and are unable to sort of to ramp up.

And so I would say in the sort of in the fourth quarter, there was more increase in activity from existing clients or more impact from existing clients increasing activity than there was from new clients. But the trend over the longer term, and I think you'll see this over the course of both '25 and '26 is that we're adding clients, and we're adding them at about a 30% annualized growth rate.

That's helpful. And maybe just a follow-up on the kind of the M&A you either completed or announced in 2025. Could you talk about the aggregate kind of annual impact on run rate earnings from these transactions and where you think they might scale to over the next few years as you realize revenue and expense synergies?

Yes. I mean, I think the majority of the earnings increase in this year was actually organic, but that did include the impact, as we've talked about very extensively of the prime business. And that comes through on the organic side because we've owned that for some time, and it's really been about our investment in the sort of products and capabilities. But the platform, it's obviously very important. It's the sort of basis upon which we have been able to develop that business. I expect the split between organic and inorganic will be sort of somewhere in the range that we've had before.

Yes. So this year, Paolo, the growth was sort of like 75% organic and 25% inorganic.

There are no further questions at this time. I will now turn the call back to Ian Lowitt for closing remarks.

Thanks, everybody, for joining us. I mean, obviously, very pleased with sort of the full year numbers that we're able to deliver. Really pleased that it was another record, really pleased that we had a record quarter in the fourth quarter. And as I've indicated, we really are quite excited about our sort of prospects over the course of the year and our ability to continue to grow in 2026 and beyond. So thank you for joining us. And hopefully, we'll see as many of you as possible at our Investor Day.

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

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for joining us, and welcome to the Marex Q3 earnings call. [Operator Instructions]

I will now hand the conference over to Adam Strachan, Head of Investor Relations at Marex. Please go ahead.

Good morning, everyone, and thanks for joining us today for Marex's Third Quarter 2025 Earnings Conference Call. Speaking today are Ian Lowitt, Group CEO; and Rob Irvin, Group CFO. After Ian and Rob have made their formal remarks, we will open the call for questions. Paolo Tonucci, Chief Strategist and CEO of Capital Markets, will join us as usual for Q&A.

Before we begin, I would like to remind everyone that certain matters discussed in today's conference call are forward-looking statements relating to future events, management's plans and objectives for the business and the future financial performance of the company that are subject to risks and uncertainties. Actual results could differ materially from those anticipated in these forward-looking statements. The risk factors that may affect results are referred to Marex's press release issued today. The forward-looking statements made today are as of the date of this call, and Marex does not undertake any obligation to update their forward-looking statements.

Finally, the speakers may refer to certain adjusted or non-IFRS financial measures on this call. A reconciliation schedule of the non-IFRS financial measures to the most directly comparable IFRS measures is also available in Marex's earnings release issued today. A copy of today's release and investor presentation may be obtained by visiting the Investor Relations page of the website at marex.com.

I will now turn the call over to Ian.

Good morning, and welcome to our third quarter 2025 earnings call. I am pleased to announce another very strong quarter with our performance at the top end of the preliminary range we published on October 8. As you will see, we have continued to outperform. And in today's remarks, I will look to explain how we have evolved the firm to generate this growth and how we've increased our earnings resilience.

In the first 9 months of the year, we generated an adjusted profit before tax of $303 million, up 26% compared to the same period last year. This included $101 million in the third quarter, up 25% year-on-year. We have maintained our momentum from the first half of the year despite the more challenging operating environment for some of our businesses. Given the slowdown in exchange volumes since April, some typical summer seasonality as well as the distraction and disruption caused by the short report, we are extremely pleased to have delivered such a strong quarter, our second highest on record.

We are grateful for the engagement we've had with our clients and investors and for their support during what has been a challenging period, one we are pleased to have put behind us as reflected in our performance.

Our Clearing segment continued to perform very strongly. Average clearing client balances have increased every quarter since Q1 2024 and grew again this quarter, up 4% from Q2, notwithstanding some modest impact from the short report, which has since normalized. We experienced one of our highest ever client onboarding quarters, converting several new large clients during the summer from the strong pipeline we previously highlighted. This reflected in increased commissions and higher clearing net interest income as growth in client balances offset the impact of lower rates. Our balances will, of course, fluctuate to some extent with asset prices and exchange margin rates, but we aim to deliver continued growth in balances to offset further anticipated rate cuts.

Our Prime Services business continued to be a standout success and a driver of growth and margin improvement for our Agency and Execution segment. As a reminder, this is a business that had $85 million of revenue when we bought it from TD Cowen in December 2023. On the Marex platform, it has generated $171 million of revenue in the first 9 months of the year. As the Prime business grows across each of its 3 components: Outsourced trading, prime of prime and on-balance sheet prime, we remain attentive to the associated risks. The primary risk is client leverage, which we manage carefully and keep at a relatively low level. The on-balance sheet business is very diverse, both by client and the portfolio of positions.

Our Hedging and Investment Solutions business delivered a strong performance as market conditions became more supportive after a challenging Q2. We also continue to expand our product capabilities and geographic reach to access more clients. All of this more than offset a weaker quarter for Market Making in what was a challenging market environment. We continue to see opportunities for growth through disciplined M&A and have an attractive M&A pipeline for the remainder of the year and into 2026.

We recently announced the acquisition of Winterflood, which we expect will provide us with an opportunity to transform our existing U.K. equity Market Making business. The Aarna and Hamilton Court acquisitions are performing well, while Agrinvest is providing opportunities to expand our business more broadly in Brazil. These M&A opportunities, along with our organic initiatives are contributing to our geographic diversification as our international investments are starting to bear fruit, particularly in the Middle East, APAC and Brazil.

Rob will provide more details on our segmental numbers shortly. We believe this quarter's strong results validate our strategy.

On Slide 5, we have laid out some of the key metrics that we use to assess our performance. Third quarter revenues grew 24% to $485 million, delivering an adjusted PBT of $101 million, up 25% year-on-year. Revenues in the first 9 months of the year grew by 23% to $1.45 billion, while margins expanded to 20.9%. Revenue per front office FTE increased to $1.31 million on an annualized basis. Our growth is driven by the addition of new producers as well as our improvements in producer productivity. For the first 9 months of 2025, productivity improvements accounted for around half of our growth.

Looking now at the operating environment in more detail on Slide 6. As I mentioned earlier, we are pleased that we've been able to maintain our momentum from the first half of the year even in a more challenging market environment in Q3. In Q3, exchange volumes were down 8% year-on-year and 14% lower than in the second quarter, while volatility also declined to its lowest level in the past year. On the positive side, equity valuations were buoyant with markets at all-time highs, which is supportive of our Prime business and to a lesser extent, our Solutions business.

With this backdrop, our third quarter profits were up 25% year-on-year and down just 5% compared to our record second quarter, which included record volumes in April. We aim to set up the firm to deliver growth through a variety of market environments, and our third quarter performance is evidence of our success. This is partly due to the evolution of our business mix, as I'll describe on the next slide.

Over the past 2 years, we have looked to strengthen our earnings resilience through product and geographic expansion. Our evolving business mix is now more diverse than it was at the time of our IPO. In 2023, around 70% of our profitability came from Clearing and Agency and Execution in energy, both of which are strongly correlated with exchange volumes. An additional 10% came from Agency and Execution in securities, which was also somewhat correlated with exchange volumes. While every area of the firm has grown since then, the share of profit that is strongly linked to exchange volumes is now around 54% today.

As we've described in previous quarters, the most significant incremental contribution has come from Prime Services, which now accounts for nearly 1/4 of our total profits. Prime profits are like Clearing, recurring and dependable and based on client balances. They are high-quality, durable earnings that generate high returns. Within Agency and Execution in Securities, we have grown businesses such as FX, which provide trading revenues that are not captured in exchange volume metrics. These efforts to diversify our firm are not accidental, but rather a deliberate strategy to grow in a way that enhances our earnings resilience.

It's also worth noting, as Rob will discuss in more detail, that within Clearing, NII has remained essentially flat in the $50 million to $60 million range despite rates being down 100 basis points from the peak in Q3 2024. Our ability to grow balances has offset those rate reductions and commissions have increased with client balances. This helps explain our strong performance in Q3 and how we've been able to outperform during a period of somewhat lower exchange volumes.

With that, I'll hand it over to Rob, who will take you through the financials in more detail.

Thanks, Ian, and good morning, everyone. We are very pleased with the strength of our performance this year. We generated $1.45 billion of revenue and $303 million of adjusted profit before tax in the first 9 months of the year. As Ian mentioned, we achieved this performance despite operating in a less supportive environment for some parts of our business.

In Q3, we delivered both revenue and adjusted PBT at the top end of our previously announced preliminary range. Q3 revenue of $485 million was up 24% versus last year. We saw continued strong growth in Clearing and Agency and Execution as well as a strong performance in Hedging and Investment Solutions. Together, these more than offset a softer performance in Market Making, demonstrating the value of our diversified model.

Total reported costs grew 24%, in line with revenues. Front office costs were up 23%, reflecting strong revenue performance and continued investments in future growth. Control and support costs were up 26%, primarily driven by higher compensation costs tied to strong performance and investments in our support functions, which include investments relating to recent acquisitions and our compliance with Sarbanes-Oxley.

Margins were broadly stable versus the third quarter of last year at 20.7%, delivering adjusted PBT of $101 million, up 25% year-on-year. Our adjusted return on equity remained very strong at 27.6%, all of which meant we delivered an adjusted basic EPS of $1.01 per share, up 23% year-on-year.

Focusing now on our segmental performance. We're showing performance over the last 5 quarters to give you a clearer sense of the trends within each business. Starting with Clearing, which grew 14% versus the prior year, driven by growth across all revenue lines, record client balances and higher volumes. I'd highlight the stability in Clearing net interest income despite the continued downward trajectory in interest rates as we have grown client balances to more than offset this. And our new client pipeline for the remainder of the year remains strong. Adjusted profit before tax margins declined slightly to 50% due to continued investments in regional expansion, including APAC, South America and Continental Europe.

Agency and Execution continued to deliver strong growth with revenue up 52%, reflecting the breadth of our client franchise and strong client engagement. Securities was the largest overall driver of growth in this segment with revenue up 82%, driven primarily by Prime Services. As Prime has become a more meaningful contributor, we've provided a quarterly revenue breakout. In the third quarter, Prime revenues rose to $57 million, reflecting continued client growth and momentum.

Securities ex Prime also delivered strong growth, notably in equities, rates, credit and FX. The acquisition of Hamilton Court, which completed on the 1st of July, contributed $20 million in revenue this quarter, in line with our expectations. Energy grew 7%, driven by continued growth across our large oil, energy and environmental desks. Versus the prior quarter, Energy declined as activity in the third quarter moderated following record volumes in the first and second quarter.

Adjusted profit before tax margins improved from 15% to 26%, driven by growth in higher-margin activities, particularly Prime Services and productivity gains from restructuring.

Turning to Market Making, where revenue declined by 16%, reflecting challenging market conditions across different asset classes. Robust performances in Securities and Energy were offset by weaker results in Metals and Agriculture. Securities saw growth from equities, credit and FX. This is also where you'll begin to see contributions from Winterflood once the transaction closes. Energy performed strongly, benefiting from higher client hedging activity versus the prior year. Metals declined in the third quarter amid ongoing uncertainty surrounding global tariffs as well as a tough comparison.

Base metals, where we have significant footprint, was soft due to reduced client activity and lower volatility of precious metals, where we currently have lower exposure, performed well, supported by price strength in silver and gold. Agriculture remained under pressure as ongoing tariff-related uncertainty and elevated commodity prices, particularly in cocoa and coffee, which reduced liquidity and open interest. Our performance was broadly in line with the second quarter. Adjusted profit before tax margins reduced to 16% reflecting lower revenues.

Solutions revenues grew 36%, delivering its strongest quarter on record with growth across Financial Products and Hedging Solutions. Hedging Solutions grew 20%, driven by robust client demand and continued momentum in FX. Financial Products grew 54%, reflecting strong performance in equity-linked structured notes. Margin rose to 25%, reflecting the strong revenue growth. Despite this margin improvement, we continue to incur elevated costs associated with platform investment and new hires to support future growth.

Now looking at the first 9 months of the year. Clearing grew 15% on last year with growth across all revenue lines. The addition of new clients has led to higher volumes and client balances. Margins remained strong at 50%. Agency and Execution was the strongest performer with a 51% increase in revenues and strong profit growth as margins expanded to 25%. This was driven by growth in both Securities and Energy. We saw strong performance in all asset classes within Securities and strong demand in Energy, reflecting record volumes in the first half of the year.

Market Making revenues decreased by 6% as lower revenue in Metals and Agriculture were partly offset by growth in Energy and Securities. Finally, Solutions revenue increased 10%, mainly due to growth in Financial Products, where margins were lower from the ongoing investment in our new technology platform. Previously, I presented our volume data at this point. However, given the evolution in the mix of our business that Ian spoke about, we plan to update this as part of our year-end process. You will still find the exchange volume data slide in the appendix for consistency.

Turning now to net interest income. NII for Q3 was $38.6 million, down $25 million compared to Q3 2024. Interest income was up modestly at $194 million, driven by total average balances growth of $4.8 billion, which broadly offset a 100 basis point decline in the average Fed fund rate. Interest expense increased to $155 million as we had an additional $1.7 billion of average structured note balances and 2 senior debt issuance. We continue to hold significant levels of liquidity as we went through the third quarter, allowing us to position the firm strongly to support our clients and grow organically, which creates a headwind to NII.

Compared to the second quarter, NII was up $4 million, driven by growth in average Clearing client balances. Clearing balances increased to $13.3 billion as we continue to add new clients, resulting in stable Clearing NII as this growth has more than offset the reduction in average Fed fund rates.

Looking now at our balance sheet. As a reminder, on this slide, you can see that 80% of our balance sheet supports client activity. These are high-quality liquid assets. Once we net off assets and liabilities by client activity, we are left with a corporate balance sheet that carries corporate cash and other assets against group liabilities, including our structured notes portfolio and senior note issuance.

Total assets increased to $33 billion at the end of September, driven by growth in client balances and Clearing and growth in Securities, which includes Prime. We continue to manage our capital and liquidity risk prudently, maintaining significant headroom above minimum requirements to ensure we are well positioned in periods of market stress. At the end of the third quarter, total corporate funding was $5.8 billion, up from $3.8 billion at year-end, with $1.5 billion of surplus liquidity above our regulatory requirements. This also supports our investment-grade credit ratings from both S&P and Fitch. In September, S&P reaffirmed our rating, reflecting our robust performance and strong balance sheet.

Finally, we announced again a quarterly dividend of $0.15 per share for the third quarter of 2025 to be paid to shareholders on December 3. We are a proactive and involved risk management approach at Marex. In Market Making, we are a client flow-driven business and do not take a directional view on prices. However, we do carry a small level of inventory to source client demand and capture the trading spreads. Average daily VAR was $3.9 million in the first 9 months of 2025 and remains at a very low level relative to the growth in the overall business.

In terms of credit risk, we had a realized credit loss of $800,000, representing just 0.1% of revenues and reflecting our proactive and disciplined approach to credit risk management.

Now I'll hand back to Ian for concluding remarks.

Thanks, Rob. So in conclusion, at our Investor Day in April, we outlined our expectation of delivering sustainable profit growth in the 10% to 20% range. Around 10% of this is expected to be organic, with the remainder, which we estimated to be around 40% of our total growth coming from inorganic opportunities. We have a strong track record on that front and remain confident that we can continue delivering given the pipeline of opportunities ahead.

Since going public, we have consistently outperformed market expectations, and we're particularly pleased to have maintained this outperformance during the current quarter despite a less supportive market environment. This success is due to the diversification of our franchise. Of course, we remain mindful of headwinds, including rate reductions and lower exchange volumes as we have seen this quarter.

As you've heard on this call, we're delivering consistent Clearing NII despite rate cuts as our growth in client balances has absorbed this. And our diversified business has continued to perform strongly despite weaker exchange volumes as we have continued to add new clients and capabilities. Together, this demonstrates how we position Marex to outperform this quarter and how we have set up the firm to continue to grow through a range of market environments.

I'm pleased to report that the fourth quarter has started very strongly, and we remain optimistic about the remainder of 2025 and the year ahead. We're in the middle of our 2026 budget process, and it's exciting to see all the opportunities before us as our markets develop. Settlements in stablecoins, event contracts, crypto prime brokerage, there are just so many opportunities for us in addition to all the other organic opportunities we've discussed with you before.

With that, I'll hand it back to the operator to open the line for questions.

[Operator Instructions] Your first question comes from the line of Chris Allen with Citi.

I guess I just wanted to start off on the fourth quarter commentary, noted off to a strong start. Maybe just if you could provide some color just in terms of where you're seeing improvement? Is it from an environmental perspective, client additions or just some of the new acquisitions coming up to speed?

Chris, yes, look, I think we're seeing sort of strength across interestingly, all of our businesses. So we're actually seeing strength in Clearing. We're seeing strength in Prime. We're seeing strength in our Agency and Execution. We're seeing strength in elements of our Market Making, and we're seeing actually record levels in our Solutions franchise. So it really does have the feel of all of the parts of the firm are sort of performing well.

I mean, I think when you look at exchange volumes, they're up marginally on sort of the prior month. So really, it just feels like the momentum that we had as we came out of sort of Q3 has continued into Q4. October was a record month for us. And I think on the basis of what we saw in October and what's continued, albeit it's only 2 days into November, I think we would be certainly expecting -- notwithstanding the fact that we don't know what will happen in the last 2 months, we would certainly expect on the basis of October to have a record quarter in the fourth quarter.

And then just for a follow-up question. Obviously, you're seeing good client additions in a couple of different businesses. Maybe you could talk to the pipeline for clients, specifically in Clearing and Prime in the months ahead.

Let me take the question on Clearing and then Paolo is here, and he can sort of talk to the opportunities in Prime on the client side. I mean, what we're seeing is really just a continuation of what we've been describing to you for quite an extended period. So what we're seeing is a combination of the normal addition of small and medium-sized clients that are looking for essentially single clearance. And then we're seeing our ability to bring on board some of the sort of largest, most sophisticated sort of players. And those have very long sort of lead times to them. So just in the last couple of weeks, we've brought on board one client that I think we've probably been talking to for almost a year, very large client, and they're just coming on now.

So the good side of this is you have a very accurate sense of the pipeline. And it just feels like the same things that we've been seeing before are playing out, which is there are a bunch of large players that are looking to diversify their clearing. They're looking for a firm with the skill set that Marex has, its orientation around client service. And they find our offering sort of intriguing. And we're just having more and more great conversations with clients. And as we grow out globally and as we add more products, we can solve more of their problems and we're winning more mandates. What would you add to that?

And just in terms of the Prime business, similar to Clearing, very strong pipeline, probably as strong as we've ever seen. And the mix of those clients is also, I would say, sort of improved. So more interest from the sort of larger and more active participants in the market. I mean, certainly, going back to your earlier point about what's driven performance, what's likely to drive performance. Certainly, the fact that equity markets have been so buoyant has helped. But I suspect that actually most of -- the vast majority of our improvement has been driven by the incremental clients that we brought on.

Your next question comes from the line of Ben Budish with Barclays.

Can you guys hear me okay?

We can, Ben.

Maybe my first question, it sounded like at the end of your prepared remarks, you mentioned crypto as an emerging opportunity in addition to Prime and other sources of organic growth. Just curious, I think you do a small bit of that currently. Could you maybe just give us a little color on what your exposure is today and how you think about that opportunity set maybe over the next few years as the regulatory environment is clearly changing in a more constructive way?

Yes. I mean, look, I think we actually have built a lot of the building blocks that we need to be able to offer clients a pretty comprehensive set of services in the space. So the focus of our efforts to date has been around sort of clearing crypto futures on exchange and supporting our clients with regard to that. And we've also provided our clients with a series of services around certain sort of settlement capabilities they've been looking for with regard to ETFs that they have launched, and that's been sort of another area where we've participated.

We're in a position where we can sort of cross-margin clients with sort of their crypto margin posting together with sort of other products. And then within our Solutions business, although it's not sort of a big part of what we do, we've needed to build out capabilities so as to sort of custody assets in part because while it's not a big part of what we do in structured notes, some of the structured notes issuance that we do has returns that are linked to crypto.

So the opportunity that we really see for ourselves is essentially fleshing out the range of services that might loosely be termed sort of prime brokerage for crypto, which are probably not very different to the set of services that clients look for when they look for sort of FX prime brokerage. So they're looking for you to be able to buy or sell sort of crypto. They're looking for you to be able to take on stablecoins. They're looking for you to be able to take stablecoins or crypto as collateral. They're looking for you to be able to settle across multiple exchanges on their behalf, just as you would as a prime broker.

They're looking for you to potentially be able to provide them with limited amounts of leverage. And I think that we're in the process of sort of building all of that out. And it's a very exciting opportunity. The market is changing. The world feels like it's moving to 24/7 trading, including sort of tokenized versions of treasury or equities. And it feels like a set of opportunities that on the back of our client relationships and the capabilities we have and our sort of scale as an organization that we'll be able to take advantage of.

All right. Very helpful. Maybe just one follow-up. Just coming back to the Prime side, and all the extra disclosures and commentary quite helpful. Can you just maybe talk a little bit about where the customers have been coming from? I think it's a lot of U.S. business, but have they been sort of cross-sells against the existing customer base? Has this been the result of maybe a business that needed some investment, which you've then done since you acquired that business a few years ago? And then going forward, similarly, do you see this as a cross-sell opportunity? Is it organic, net new? How do you think about those bits and pieces in terms of go-to-market?

Yes. Thanks, Ben. I mean, in terms of the geographic split, the majority of the growth has been in the U.S. I mean, it's where we have a more mature offering and where we probably have the majority of our sales teams. It's not to say that there's no growth in other areas, but I mean, the proportionate growth has been in the U.S.

In terms of the mix of sort of new clients versus existing clients that are being offered this service, that's actually been a pretty even split. A lot of our clearing -- a lot of the relationships have been introduced by Clearing. They're clearing relationships that have been servicing businesses that have needs for a broader sort of prime offering. So I would think half of our new clients have come from that source.

The other half are sort of a mix of opportunities and relationships that have sort of been worked on for some time. And for a variety of reasons, we weren't able to offer the full set of services. Some of those are ETF managers. ETF managers have become a sort of an interesting sort of subsector, but the sort of traditional prime clients still represent the majority of assets under management. And that's just the sort of typical range of hedge funds and family offices, some trading groups that we can now offer them a much more comprehensive set of products, I think, is the sort of main driver. And then the stability of our offering versus what they've sort of experienced in the last couple of years, I think, has been very helpful.

Your next question comes from the line of Alex Blostein with Goldman Sachs.

I was hoping to expand a little bit on the earlier discussion around crypto coins, prediction contracts, but maybe as it relates to retail investors, in particular, I guess, what role do you guys see Marex playing in that ecosystem? How are you thinking about connecting to some of the retail brokerage platforms where a lot of their activity obviously originates. So maybe help us kind of think about what you see the addressable market really here for your business and which part you're looking to participate in?

Yes. I mean, I suspect that the opportunities are a little different in the different parts of that ecosystem. So if you're just talking about, for example, event contracts, I think that this is -- it's an area that is generating quite a lot of interest and excitement. There's a lot of work that's going on with regard to potentially having some of those contracts listed on the actual exchanges, in which case, there's sort of a requirement for an exchange clearer.

So we are in discussions with some of our clients who are aggregators of retail flow, particularly the ones outside the U.S. who are interested in being able to offer those types of products to their clients. So [indiscernible] contracts, either for financial instruments or if it evolves into a series of contracts that are broader than just financial instruments. They would want to be able to offer those to their clients. And that's the way in which we've chosen to participate with retail flow. So we are the clearer for a lot of the retail flow aggregators outside the U.S., and that's a way for us to participate in that.

I mean, in terms of, for example, stablecoins as payment, I mean, there may be a retail angle to that. It's not one that we're exploring at all. But we engage with many of our clients who have shared with us what appear to be some genuinely interesting use cases with regard to payment and stablecoins and are engaging with us in helping them to provide those services. So I believe quite strongly that, that will sort of take off over the near term and that will represent an opportunity for us.

I mean, obviously, coming off stablecoin as a method of payment will be a view that people want to have stablecoins available as a source of collateral. That creates sort of a set of opportunities, which is how do you convert a stablecoin into something that generates interest, if it's going to be utilized for the purpose of collateral. Then if you're dealing with that, there are a whole slew of additional prime opportunities that I think sort of arise with that.

But that is -- that at least for us at the moment is much more of a sort of sophisticated financial player opportunity. So the retail stuff feels like it's around event contracts, and we will be working with people who clear through Marex to get access to exchange. And these other opportunities, we're likely to pursue with some of our more sophisticated sort of financial counterparts. Did that answer your question, Alex?

Yes. No, that makes a lot of sense. Second question, I wanted to just follow up on the point made earlier around liquidity buildup, and you guys obviously issued a little bit of debt early in the year. You continue to utilize the structured notes as part of the funding as well. Where are you sort of in building some of the maybe excess capacity? I don't know if that's a good way to frame it.

But as you think about sort of excess capital that maybe exists within the ecosystem today, that's kind of truly deployable, what's that amount today? What is the ROE you're targeting for that? And is that sort of enough to support the business over the next, call it, 6 to 12 months? Or do you see yourself sort of coming back to market seeking incremental liquidity? I don't know if that makes sense, but that's the nature of the question.

Yes. I mean, I'm very sensitive to the differentiation between sort of liquidity and capital. I think of capital as equity. So there's sort of a question about equity, and then I think there's a question about liquidity. So I think that -- where I think we are with regard to liquidity is the following. We want to establish ourselves as a regular issuer in sort of the U.S. so that there's just sort of a broad sort of understanding of our credit and broad acceptance of our name so that we are able to tap into that market if we ever want to. So if there was a big acquisition or whatever, that sort of tapping into a large investment-grade pool is available to us.

And that's a strategic objective that we have. And so this year, we sort of issued into the U.S. even though we didn't have a specific need for the cash, we felt that, that was something that we want to do. And I'm almost certain that we would look to sort of continue that into next year. So establishing a debt program in the U.S. is very important to us. And if you're not issuing sort of $500 million slugs, you really don't have the kind of size that's interesting to investors. And so that's what I think you should anticipate, not for any reason other than you need to be a frequent issuer in order to establish yourself.

I mean, you've got a sense of how fast the firm is growing. So even in a year like this, it looks like we've been growing near the sort of 25%. And hopefully, you have a sense from sort of the commentary that we're pretty excited about sort of the prospects we have next year. And we recognize that as we grow, we want to maintain the firm as sort of super safe from a liquidity perspective. So I think you should expect that we will come to market for debt, notwithstanding the fact that we already have sizable surpluses, mostly because we're comfortable carrying those surpluses and we want to sort of be in the market and a frequent issuer.

With regard to equity, we do recognize that as sort of the constraint. There has to be one on the firm, and it's equity. So we have to be very mindful of how we deploy it. We're running quite a bit above sort of the 10% strongly capitalized level on the RAC ratio, and that represents sort of excess that we are carrying, but we're still generating 27% ROE on average. And as we look to deploy our equity, we really don't want to be dilutive. So we're looking for plus 20% returns when we're talking about acquisitions or internal deployment of that capital.

And as we look in our budget process and we look at our opportunities next year, then certainly over sort of 6 months or longer, we are confident that we can continue to support that growth with the internal capital generation that comes with the level of earnings that we're also delivering.

Your next question comes from the line of Dan Fannon with Jefferies.

I wanted to follow up just on the competitive environment. You guys have obviously been having success in adding clients and clearing balances. Just curious if you've seen any change in dealer behavior given the regulatory changes that are softening up for them? Or any shift in the competitive backdrop as you think about the prospects of additional market share gains going forward?

I mean, it's sort of interesting. I mean, this is sort of my perspective on it and then interested in Paolo's perspective as well. I mean what we see from the banks is much more active involvement in trading and looking for us to help them access market liquidity, which is completely noncompetitive activity and actually help support our business.

What we are not seeing is a sort of different level of competition for sort of clearing, which, again, as we've shared on some of these calls, is not a surprise to us because of sort of the very long lead time associated with clearing mandates as well as the fact that you need to make a lot of investments as well as the fact that you need to invest in organization and sort of capabilities. So we're not seeing a change with regard to that. And we're not really seeing a change with regard to sort of pricing on structured notes or any of these other products.

So at the moment, it does not feel as though the lower sort of capital requirements that are sort of being imposed on banks by this current administration's regulators is affecting our prospects. I don't know what you would...

Yes, no, I'd agree with that. I think we've seen 1 or 2 spots where there's been a little bit of incremental competition. On the stock lending side, we've seen a couple of new entrants somewhat aggressive with pricing. But that doesn't really -- it's not really disrupted our progress with acquiring prime clients. I mean, it has a sort of very marginal effect. You can see a little bit of that in the third quarter versus the second quarter where there was a bit of sort of rate compression, but very much at the margin.

Beyond that, I think the sort of the combination of sort of expertise and the sort of quality of the offering sort of remains a really important differentiator. And we typically are seeing, whether it's sort of clearing or prime, pretty consistent competition. It is competitive. It's not that we have a completely free field, but no one sort of competing really on pricing other than, as I said, a little bit of sort of compression on some of the stock lending.

Great. That's helpful. And then just as a follow-up, you talked about an active potential M&A pipeline. I just would like to get a little more context around that versus prior periods. And as you think to 2026, do you anticipate that being a more active year than what you guys have done so far or will do in 2025?

Yes. I think it's all lining up to be a very active '26. I think there's still a couple of months left in '25. So we're still hoping to sign at least a couple of sort of agreements, but '26 really is sort of lining up very well. I think the continued sort of interest from companies in joining the sort of Marex organization and being sort of part of our platform really has driven a lot of that sort of reverse inquiry. So we're benefiting now from many companies wanting to be part of Marex and sort of coming to us.

And even in the competitive processes, and you will be aware of some of those, even the competitive processes, we often start in a very good position because of the sort of track record of successful M&A. So I think '26 will be a strong year.

Your next question comes from the line of Bill Katz with TD Cowen.

Ian, just maybe a qualifying question first. You mentioned that, obviously, we still have another 2 months to go, but it could be a record quarter. Is that revenue, volume, earnings, all of the above? I'm just sort of curious of where you -- I just want to make sure I understand where the deeper momentum might sit. And then I have a bunch of follow-ups.

Yes. I mean, just when I say records, I actually just care about profit. So I think it's -- when I say a record quarter, it's a record profit quarter. That said, I mean, I think we'll be on track for a record revenue quarter as well. So it will be a combination. But really, when I say record, my focus is on profit.

Okay. Maybe a broader question for you. A lot of my other questions were asked already. Just as we think through tokenization and blockchain technology, could you talk a little bit about maybe the pros that you could see for the business? Does it unlock any efficiencies for you that could also potentially accelerate the M&A pipeline for you? And then conversely, is there any risk to any of the businesses as things move from sort of the TradFi into the DeFi platform?

Yes. I mean, here's sort of what we see at the moment. So I mean, around tokenization, the big benefit is that these markets can sort of operate 24/7. And so in one form or another, we think that the way that is likely to play out is that people will be able to transact not just sort of crypto 24/7, but there will be tokenized versions of treasuries and equities and a range of other assets. And it's sort of hard for me to see how you do that away from sort of tokenization.

So I think that, that's clearly going to be an opportunity. And to the extent that there's sort of more activity in the world because people are trading more days and more hours, I think that's good for our business. I think that there's also sort of a tokenization opportunity around sort of stablecoins and again, the fact that it's sort of 24/7, and it means that people can make payments weekends, they can make payments at night. All of those kinds of things, I think, will also add to the activity and out of payments in stablecoin will come a whole sort of slew of other services that people will look for with regard to sort of stablecoin. And again, I think that, that's additive to our business.

In terms of the concern that somehow we move to tokenization for everything and that, that potentially disrupts sort of clearing and the clearing ecosystem, I must express some level of sort of skepticism around that. I do think that the activity is going to sort of continue -- or a lot of that is going to continue to be cleared on exchange. If we get sort of our cash sooner rather than later, that's a good thing rather than a bad thing. And I've never understood how for very, very large sets of data like a clearing house, you sort of have benefit of being tokenized where what you've got to do, you've got to sort of keep track of more and more nodes and at some level, that feels like that should not give you economies of scale, but at some level, this economies of scale. So it's conceivable that there are changes to the exchanges and the exchange ecosystem, but we can't anticipate what those are. We don't see those as sort of being real. What we do see, though, is a series of opportunities. And we believe that we're setting ourselves up to capture those, and we think we have sort of the organizational nimbleness to position ourselves well.

And critically important, we have relationships with a series of the most sophisticated players in the space, and we're working together with them. And that's an absolutely massive competitive advantage for us as we determine how these things are likely to play out because you're not sort of building things with a view that at some point in the future, somebody might find it useful or interesting. You're engaging in things that sophisticated clients are talking to about today that would be very helpful and that they're willing to engage in, in size.

Okay. If I could maybe squeeze a third one in, I apologize for maybe overstaying my welcome. But just another big picture question for you as you sort of think through 2026 and very encouraged by the momentum of the business and the pipeline. So maybe a two-parter. Can you give us an update on just how things are progressing with Winterflood, Valcourt, just in terms of initial expectation that you've had a little bit more time to work with those platforms a little bit?

And then the broader question is, as you look to next year, how do you sort of see the interplay between revenue growth and margin opportunity? I appreciate that some of these deals come on at suboptimal margins, take some time to get you there. But how do you sort of see the interplay driving profit before tax growth year-on-year?

Yes. Thanks, Bill. I mean, in terms of the progress that we have made with all of the acquisitions, I mean, including those that are closed, Aarna, which was the Abu Dhabi acquisitions, now Marex Abu Dhabi, that's sort of -- it's on track. It's in line with our expectations. I think the Hamilton Court acquisition has outperformed expectations, and they've had also a record month in October. And I think we're starting to see some of the benefits of linking that into our wider client base.

And the margins there, you can see that will improve. Margins are somewhere in the sort of high 20s, low 30s. I think that, that will sort of improve with revenue growth as they settle into being part of the bigger platform, Winterfloods, I expect will show a similar pattern. From what we can see, although we don't have all of the details, it looks like they've had a very strong last quarter. Certainly, it looks like it's, from a revenue perspective, one of the best quarters they've had in the last 3 years. So we're quite optimistic that, that business is actually building up some momentum and we'll accelerate that.

But it will start a relatively low margin. It's not going to -- we're not going to be getting a 30% -- or a high 20% PBT margin. I think from an ROE perspective, it will probably be quite accretive, though. So I'm optimistic about that. Valcourt is a small business, but where there's more value in the accounts that are opened up, and we're seeing that coming through, but that won't move the needle. That won't move the needle in terms of profit or margin.

And generally, I think the trend that we're seeing has been an improvement in margins. The improvement in margins has been sort of very broad-based. But obviously, the area where we still have the lowest margins are the Agency and Execution ex Prime. And that, I think, benefits from some of the new desks settling in and maturing. And we have had a large number of new desks. And we've -- as you've seen, we've become much more active in credit, much more active in FX.

So I think you can expect some margin improvement, I think, from the sort of low to mid-teens up into the sort of higher teens. And that will drive the overall group's margin improvement because they're quite large revenue streams.

I mean, just sort of for clarity, we haven't closed Winterfloods yet. So we're waiting on approval from the regulators. But obviously, to the point of your question, we are engaged with some of the folks there. And so we are learning more about their business. But obviously, that hasn't closed yet. We hope to close this year, but if that doesn't happen, we would expect it to close early next year.

I think with a sort of general point with regard to 2026, I think that as we've indicated, we expect that -- we're hoping that margins will improve, but we really are not looking to improve margins dramatically because we continue to invest. And we think that that's the right decision to make to position the firm for long-term success.

And so while we hope that margins improve and they should, as a result of some of the things that Paolo was describing and other things that we have going on inside the firm, we don't see ourselves dramatically changing margin in part because the business mix doesn't change that quickly. And also we want to continue to invest in support and control. We want to continue to invest in opportunities that are likely to generate returns for us in the future. And we're confident that, that's the right way to sort of operate. So '26, we'd expect margins to get better, but not dramatically better.

Your next question comes from the line of Ben Budish with Barclays.

Ben?

Please, Ben, go ahead. It seems like Ben Budish has disconnected. We'll go to the next question coming from the line of Carlos Gomez-Lopez with HSBC.

The first question is about the fact that you are a frequent issuer in the debt market. Have you considered to retap the AT1 market as well? And what do you think of pricing in that space?

Second, in terms of the long-term ROE of the business, when you went public, I think you were comfortably at something like 20%. You are now comfortably around the 27%. I know that you are more focused on margin than ROE, but where do you think you will stabilize in the long run?

So with regard to AT1, I mean, I think we remain sort of interested in AT1. And at some point, it will sort of come back on to the menu of things that we might do. I don't have a sort of current price of where we think we'll be able to bring AT1. I don't know, Paolo, if you have...

Well, yes, but we sort of -- we stay close to all of these issuances and prices are interesting, but we don't need to issue at the moment. And we have a maturity in 2027. So we have a little bit of time before we have to make that decision. But we're certainly close to that market.

Yes. And then with regard to ROE, I believe that we can continue to operate in and around sort of the current levels of ROE, so somewhere between 25% and 30%. I mean, as you say, we don't manage to it. So I'm comfortable, for example, that we're carrying some amount of excess equity, which is, I think, desirable and creates optionality for us. I mean, we could be driving up our ROE if we reduce the level of equity.

But I think that equity represents -- it's sort of critical to sort of support the growth of the firm. And so I think we're sort of happy to do that. But given the mix of what we do, which is essentially supporting flow rather than holding any positions, that's an inherently high ROE activity. And my hope and expectation is that we'll continue to operate in that 25% to 30% range.

That's very clear. And if I can follow up, and I'm sorry to ask this, but can you give us an update on all the litigation that you as a public company now you have to face and how much that is costing all of you, the management team, in terms of time and effort. And again, sort of I guess that's something we need to be updated on.

Yes. I mean, look, I think that -- I mean, one of the things that sort of happens with a short seller report is there are -- these class action lawsuits that sort of follow inevitably with those. Our lawyers in New York are extremely confident that they will be able to get that dismissed because it's sort of groundless. The costs associated with it are not significant. And so it feels, at least at this point, more of a sort of distraction and sort of a nuisance more than anything else.

And so I wouldn't draw much from it. It's just a natural consequence, the same law firm sort of follows all of these sort of short reports and sort of files these class action lawsuits. Obviously, we don't know exactly how that plays out. But at least based on the advice that we have received so far, it doesn't feel like it's sort of consequential.

Very clear.

All right. Well, thanks, everybody. Thanks for joining us. Thanks for all the questions. We look forward to continuing the conversation with the analysts and with investors over the next period. We're really, as you've hopefully got a sense of from the answers to the questions, sort of excited about our prospects, both in terms of sort of newer opportunities as our markets evolve as well as the sort of standard opportunities that come from sort of share gains in our products. And so we're excited about and enthusiastic about where we think we'll end the year and then our opportunity set in '26.

So thanks for joining us, and we look forward to continuing the conversation with you all.

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

All right. Good morning, everyone. Welcome to our next session here. I'm Ben Budish, I cover the U.S. brokers, asset managers and exchanges here at Barclays. And with us for the next fireside, we've got Ian Lowitt, CEO of Marex.

Ian, welcome. Thanks so much for being here.

Thanks, Ben. I'm really excited.

Maybe just to start it off, Marex went public last year. You saw a lot of nice growth since the IPO. Just for anybody who's less familiar with the business, can you give a little bit of an overview of the story?

Sure. Yes, I think as you said, we went public towards the end of April of last year. Stocks performed very well. We were up 85% year-on-year and performance has been very strong. So I think pre-IPO, we're making sort of $230 million of PBT, and we're 75% ahead of that on a run rate basis this year with essentially doing a little bit north of $200 million in the first half of the year. So performance has been strong since the IPO and the stock performance has sort of reflected that, and we're obviously very pleased with that.

In terms of the narrative. I think that post the IPO, we've really sort of delivered in a way that's sort of consistent with what people would have expected. Our business is one that is essentially about providing a really important part of the connectivity in the sort of ecosystem where people need to connect to exchanges. So people, I think, are very familiar with the exchanges and the clearing houses, what they may be a little less familiar with is how do clients just connect to those exchanges in a world where it's listed derivatives, so futures and options. And essentially, you need a clearing member if you're anybody other than sort of the very, very largest players in order to connect to the exchanges.

And what Marex has done is built a business which is centered on our ability to connect clients to those exchanges. And that's a very sticky relationship. It's a very profitable relationship. It's a high-level relationship with those clients, and you can cross-sell very successfully execution services and additional hedging services. So it's in market infrastructure component of the market and one where it gives you a lot of opportunity for clients to come in and provide -- and you can provide them services either by providing access to market liquidity or clearing.

Before we dig into the business a little bit more, earlier this year, Marex was the subject of a short report, which made a number of allegations about firms accounting practices, among other things. I thought you provided a pretty strong reputation in the last earnings call. But since then, you've had more conversations with investors. Are there any lingering issues or outstanding questions you've been hearing that you'd like to address?

Yes. I mean, look, I've been very vocal about the value of being a public company. And I think we've got enormous benefit as Marex in terms of our brand and the way in which the firm is sort of perceived as a result of being a public company. Now being a public company means people can short your stock. It also means that there can be short reports without any sort of requirement to be accurate, but that's just all part of how the overall market functions.

As you say, we refuted the sort of the points in the report. And I think that the investors who read the report looked at the points quite carefully and determined that there wasn't substance to the points that were sort of being made. And the conversations that we've had subsequent to the report coming out have actually been very heartening. I mean people took it seriously as did we. And we needed to and did sort of address the sort of concerns of investors, of debt holders and of our clients. And there really has been very good receptivity to that. I think people ask the questions, and they're very comfortable with the answers. And we've continued to see sort of clients coming on to the platform, increasing the amount of business they do with us, increasing the level of balances they have with us.

And there really are no lingering questions from any of the constituencies based on all the conversations I've had and senior management have had with clients.

Great. Okay. So back to the business. The macro backdrop has been quite supportive, a lot of healthy volatility. Can you give us an update on what you're seeing most recently in terms of the operating environment? How is Q3 shaking up? Anything you can share there?

Yes. I think that the environment has been attractive in the sense that exchange volumes have been increasing quite steadily over a number of years. And certainly, over the last few years, we've had interest rates sort of rising and being quite a lot higher than they had been 5 years ago, even 4 years ago. And for our business, that's an attractive backdrop. And we've also had, historically, it's quite high volatility and volatility again, is sort of helpful to our business.

As we think about the current quarter, it doesn't appear to me as though sort of the headwinds are sort of influencing us in a particularly negative way. And more to the point, the underlying momentum that we have in gaining share is offsetting some of those headwinds. I mean we always anticipated that rates would come down. They've obviously come down in '25 versus where they operated in '24. And I think that there's more conviction now that rates will come down again this year. And that's not something that we weren't expecting.

But the effect on our economics is relatively modest. I mean I think we've estimated that 100 basis point reduction in rates over the course of a full year, something like $20 million of PBT. And our current run rate of circa $400 million, that represents sort of 5%. So it's not nothing, but it's not something that is overwhelming relative to other things that we could actually do to offset it. So the environment is probably going to be a little more challenging. But we've been growing the firm at 35% a year for the last sort of 10 years on average.

We've had sequential growth every year. Certainly, based on the first half of the year, it looks like this year will be another year of fairly substantial sequential growth. And so we see sort of enough momentum in the franchise and the share gains and the extension into new products and new geographies and the impact of acquisitions that we have confidence that we're going to be able to continue to grow well.

So a lot of your growth historically or maybe not the majority, but helpful amount has come from M&A. You have a history of successful M&A, both on the top line and scaling up margins. Talk a little bit about the strategy there, your approach to integration. And maybe give us a little color on how some of your more recent acquisitions have been performing.

Yes. I mean acquisitions are an important part of how we're looking to grow. And I think that it's not so much that we're looking to grow through acquisitions as much as we're looking to grow the firm. We're looking to grow the firm because we see lots of opportunity for us to expand what we're doing with our existing set of clients and also to add new clients onto our platform.

If you can broaden the set of services you can provide to clients, then that's a great vehicle to sort of grow. And if you can add new clients, that's again a great way to grow. Now you could do that organically, and we certainly have a lot of initiatives underway that will broaden our sort of product offering, in particular, as well as, in some cases, geographically. But we also recognize that to grow organically in some of these circumstances, particularly as you look to grow in certain geographies. It's just really, really very difficult.

And so we look for acquisitions that are going to bring new capabilities and new clients and often give us presence in geographies, which we just see real challenge in building ourselves. So for example, earlier this year, we closed on a clearing business in the Middle East called Aarna. We were challenged by our Board when we brought that acquisition to them to say, well, could you have built this organically. And I think as we assessed it, we thought that it would be very, very difficult to build that out successfully. And that 3 years forward, we'd probably be way worse off than we would be if we made the acquisition, by way of example. So we made the acquisition.

We were also anticipating fairly sizable day 1 synergies on the revenue side because they're a smaller firm, so they were generating less interest income on their client balances. And they're sort of terms of trade as a small firm that needed to go through clearing members also meant that they were making less on the clearing activity than they would as part of Marex. And as part of Marex, we actually saw almost immediately almost a 50% increase in its profitability just because they were making more on interest balances and they were paying less in order to get access to clearing exchanges. So that's a perfect example of us recognizing that it would be very difficult to build it ourselves and being able to acquire it.

We've also made an acquisition in Brazil, another marketplace that we're very excited about, but also recognize that it's difficult to build. And probably the most significant success we've had recently is with sort of the acquisition of Cowen's prime brokerage business. We always anticipated that, that was a gap in our service provision that if we could offer that to clients would be something that we could make very profitable. The Cowen business was making something like $85 million of revenue when we acquired it in December of '23. And in the first half of this year, the revenue run rate of that business is about $200 million.

So it does show how when you bring a sort of capability, you extend that capability and then put it on to our platform, it can actually generate meaningfully higher levels of profitability. And it's that combination of adding clients, adding products, broadening the firm geographically that we think acquisitions really advance our strategic agenda.

And maybe just following up there, can you talk a little bit about the current pipeline? I think you recently commented maybe 6 or 7 deals potentially live. So what kind of businesses are you looking at? And maybe how do you also think about larger-scale M&A? We saw one of your competitors not too long ago do a larger acquisition versus the smaller tuck-ins that have been more common for you?

Yes, look, I mean I think we have a very healthy pipeline. We often get questions about whether we think there's sort of some natural point where we won't be able to continue to grow as effectively through acquisitions. Our goal is to have 40% of our annual growth comes from acquisitions and 60% come organically. So if we're thinking about it in the context of our current levels of earnings, which are, call it, sort of 400-ish. That means that you're looking to add $80 million to grow at 20% a year, and we think that 40% of that should come from acquisitions. So we're looking to add circa $30 million to $40 million of earnings from acquisitions and then make those much more profitable in subsequent years as a result of being on the platform.

We are seeing many, many opportunities. Those include some subscale sort of boutique capabilities where people believe that they'll be a lot more effective as sort of part of the Marex platform. It includes some quite successful midsized sort of companies. And then to your point, we are certainly open to larger acquisitions, but we also want to remain sort of very disciplined around returns. And we also want to make sure that whatever we acquire sort of fits very effectively within a Marex culture. I mean when we make an acquisition, we look to integrate it as quickly as we can and make it just part of Marex rather than run as a separate activity or business sort of stand-alone, we want to integrate everything quickly.

And as a result, we also want to make sure that it's going to fit well within Marex. And those are all critical components in making those assessments. In the case of the acquisition that you referenced, it was one that we were aware of. It's one where we engaged. We didn't get very far down the road because I think we didn't think it was a good cultural fit for us. But certainly, it's an interesting acquisition for our competitors, and I know they're sort of very excited about it.

But what we saw in the case of sort of Cowen is we were able to acquire something for $25 million of premium that it's now generating circa $100 million of earnings for us. So you don't have to go out and spend $1 billion to get $100 million earnings if you can get the right property and also integrate it and grow it effectively. So we don't feel sort of enormous pressure that you have to do the big deals, but we certainly are open to the big deals. And to the extent that those would fit well with our culture, and we think that we'll be able to deliver with a high degree of certainty on our financial targets, we'd certainly be open to those.

But acquisitions are just part of the DNA of the firm now, we're looking to do 4-plus acquisitions a year. We have a very substantial pipeline. We have a large number of opportunities, and they go to all elements of the firm. So we see opportunities in clearing. We see opportunities in Agency and Execution. We see opportunities in market making, and there are even some acquisitions that would help our solutions franchise. So a broad range of opportunities. And I think as we have more and more success with acquisitions, it actually becomes a virtuous circle. And instead of seeing fewer, you end up seeing more.

All right. Maybe digging into a couple of your business segments, starting with clearing, sort of your largest part of your business. You've show some pretty meaningful balance in revenue growth over the last few years. But maybe just to start, how do you think about competitive differentiation in this business? Like what makes one clearing front better? How do you think about Marex's competitive advantage there?

Yes. I think that when we speak to clients and they explained to us why they're sort of coming to Marex, the themes are really the following. I mean they -- I think are enormously impressed with the range of sort of product capability that we have. So if you come to Marex as a potential clearing client, we can connect you to 65 different exchanges, and there's almost no products that we can't cover. So what clients say to us is they literally don't see a broader product offering than they see at Marex.

Now what they also see at Marex is clearing being the heart of the firm and sort of the -- it's a thing that we devote an enormous amount of time and effort to be just absolutely expert at. And so when we're sort of competing for mandates, we're competing often against banks where -- so the clearing client -- the clearing offering is maybe the 10th or the 15th most important offering they're considering for a particular client. Whereas for Marex, it's the core of what we actually do. And I think clients feel that there's a level of expertise that we bring to bear when they talk to us about metals products or agricultural products or energy products or many of the financial products that they just don't see replicated elsewhere.

Our systems are also newer, and so we can be more adaptable in terms of making adjustments to meet specific client requirements. And then the whole notion of how we service those clients and bring them on and their onboarding experience, I think, is also sort of differentiated. So because it's the heart of what we do, I think we're just differentially good at it, and we can offer sort of a broader and higher-quality sort of product than others. I think the fact that we're not a bank is seen by some clients as quite important because they don't want to only have banks as sort of their clearing provider. They like the fact that they're getting an investment-grade counterpart that is a nonbank FCM and isn't going to respond to periods of stress as banks do in aggregate and that, that diversifies their service provision.

And for many clients, they've indicated to us that, that's critically important. So those are really the main ways in which I think our clearing offering is differentiated.

And maybe thinking from a P&L perspective, can you talk about the key revenue drivers. What are you seeing in terms of new customers, cross-sell versus kind of organic growth and existing products where they're active, adding new customers and maybe unpack a bit how this sort of sets the foundation for the rest of the business.

Yes. I mean it's a little hard -- what we're seeing is sort of a lot of clients looking to come on to the platform. And so every year -- and our pipeline is -- because it takes quite a while to onboard clients and clearing. We have a pretty rich sense of what that pipeline is and how many clients are likely to sort of join over a 6- to 12-month period. So we have sort of a sense that we're probably adding something like $750 million to $1 billion of IM from new clients each year. And that remains pretty robust in the sense that we're seeing more and more sort of clients being open to and sort of coming on to Marex.

So just by way of example, one of the large trading houses that I think has only used banks historically and has -- is now coming on to our platform in Australia at some point in September. And some of the hedge funds who, again, have typically only cleared banks are moving books onto Marex -- and some of our -- and one of the sort of big trading houses has just moved another one of the sort of larger books sort of Marex. So we're gaining new clients and we're adding to the level of business we actually do.

And then the other variable is just how much business individual clients are doing sort of within any particular area. And that's hard to differentiate between that and how much sort of cross-selling is going on. But there's a lot of cross-selling. There's a lot of new clients. And all of these things feel like they're virtuous circles, which mean that as I sort of look out over the next sort of series of years, I see those things as not diminishing, but actually getting larger. So as we get more credibility, as a clearer, it sort of opens up a bigger TAM and more large hedge funds or more of the largest trading houses will consider sort of coming to Marex.

As we get better at sort of cross-selling and engage more with clients around the range of products that we have, that feels like it's accelerating, not decelerating. So that there is a number of reasons to feel that there's a lot of positive momentum in what we're doing.

Just following up there, one final question on the clearings side. So one thing we've noticed is that your transaction growth is outpacing your revenue growth, the revenue per transaction is coming down. Can you speak to that at all? Is that a function of product mix? Is it a function of serving, as you noted, larger hedge funds and trading firms? What are the key factors?

Yes. I mean what it absolutely is not is as a result of sort of pricing pressure per se. So what we find in sort of the clearing world is for smaller clients who, at their scale, it only makes sense for them to have a single clearer, there's almost like a market clearing price for clearing. And so long as you're within that band, you don't actually compete on price, you compete on service and a series of other sort of factors.

And then if you're talking about the next level of clients who conceptually is big enough to have 2 clearers, there's another sort of pricing band that you have to operate in, in order to be competitive. But at that point, what sort of determines where the business goes, it's more a function of sort of the quality of service and the range of services you can provide. And then if you're talking about the largest clients who would typically have 3 to 5 clearers, again, there's a sort of pricing that's expected. And so long as you were in their pricing, again, you can win the business based on the quality of your service.

And so what you're drawing attention to is the fact that our volumes are growing faster than our revenues because we're making sort of cost per contract. What we're also seeing is they tend -- we've also been making a lot of progress with clients who are more financially oriented, so people who are trading fixed income or trading some of the equity options. And there, the sort of price per contract is also lower. So what's driving this is not price pressure per se. It's about mix shift in terms of the size of clients, but also a mix shift in terms of the product.

And the combination of those things is quite rapidly increasing revenues, quite rapidly increasing balances, but faster growth in volumes than revenues, but that's not concerning to us because our infrastructure is extremely scalable and the cost of servicing that extra volume is very low.

That's a good segue into the Agency and Execution business. And securities, in particular, you mentioned you're seeing a lot of growth in equity derivatives and things like that. So your securities business has grown quite handsomely over the last couple of quarters. Maybe talk about what you're doing to kind of drive that ramp? And what more can you kind of be done to continue that growth?

Yes, I mean, I think we made a strategic decision a number of years ago to sort of grow what we think of as sort of a financial franchise. So essentially clearing and doing agency and execution in financial products, whether those are sort of equities, fixed income, credit rates, even FX to augment what we were doing in commodities. So I think we thought -- at the core of the firm and its history has been around commodities. We recognize that if we really wanted to be able to deliver sequential growth through a whole range of market environments, it was necessary for us to diversify away from just commodities and to extend into sort of financials.

I think we've had a great deal of success in that. It's a combination of acquisitions that we've made that have sort of created sort of a basis for that business, and that's been augmented by a number of sort of organic initiatives. And that combination has got us to a point where financials are now something like 40% of the firm. We think that you could get to 50% or even above 50% of our revenues coming from financial products. And it was a deliberate effort to diversify the firm to put us in a position where our earnings were more resilient across different cycle. So we've been able to increase profitability sequentially for the last 10 years. This year, it looks like it will be another sequential increase. And we want to set up the firm so that through a whole range of environments, we will be able to do that. And this investment we see as critical.

And a lot of what we've been able to do in terms of driving growth and in particular, profitability is acquire businesses which were not at their full potential and restructure contracts with producers, improve the quality of businesses, sort of upgrade productivity, just make it part of Marex. And a lot of that growth is a function of being able to integrate those acquisitions successfully and expand them.

One of the concerns or questions I get a lot on the securities business is that it's perhaps more competitive, maybe more commoditized than some of your other offerings. I guess what would your response be? And how do you think about Marex's differentiation in trading securities specifically?

Yes. Look, I mean I think that what I would point to is just the success we've had in growing that out and getting our margins up sort of into the 20s. If we weren't competitive, then there's no way we would have been able to succeed in that particular way. So the question for me is almost a different question, which is what is it that we're actually doing that is what we would need to have done in order to generate that type of performance. And clearly, it can't be just providing very commoditized product in the face of sort of very extreme competition from very large players with some set of advantage because if you were in that real world, you just wouldn't be able to show the growth that we have been able to show.

And I think that where we found those opportunities in the following places. And we see a big opportunity in Prime, competing directly with sort of the Goldmans or the Morgans sort of the world in terms of their prime offering. But in providing Prime or sort of firm somewhere between $100 million and $1 billion worth of sort of requirement. And that turns out to be a very attractive place to participate. You're not competing directly with what are very skilled and effective competitors, but they're not interested in clients of that size. So that's what we've done in Prime, and that's been very successful.

I think the other thing that we've realized is the Agency and Execution business in securities is quite an attractive business and one where you can -- there isn't the same level of competition. There's a requirement for equity options, for single stock options, which is not met successfully by others. And when we've talked about it with some of our investors around sort of clearing single stock equity options by way of example, they say, well, we put out an RFP. We only had one person respond to it, it would be great to engage with you.

So I guess the point I'm making is that there are components within the securities business, which are not just low-margin, heavily competed places. That's not where we play, and it's not where we would be -- expect to be successful. But there are many, many ways in which we can participate, which we are able to generate attractive margins. I mean one of the areas that just a surprise to me is just sort of the whole FX world to it. I would have thought from the outside in that would be it'd be very, very difficult to create profitable FX businesses, but it actually turns out that the spreads in the FX business are still sort of surprisingly robust, and you can actually develop quite an attractive FX business, even in a world where when you look at it from the outside in, you would think that there'd be very little chance.

Interesting. Okay. So maybe moving to market making. Q2 was pretty volatile for all asset classes, but I think your revenues were flat year-over-year. You had some very tough comps from 2Q of last year. Maybe just a high level, walk through what's important for this business. How do you benefit from volatility? What matters from a macro standpoint?

Yes. So look, I think that within market making, there's 2 things that drive it. I mean one is just sort of the volume of opportunity in market making. And then the second is, what's the bid offer spread that you're able to extract in making those markets. The higher levels of volatility usually or maybe almost always lead to higher bid offer spreads. So the environments that are attractive for market making are ones where there's a lot of volatility, there's a sizable bid of spreads and the volumes are quite high.

So the comparison for us, which was the second quarter of last year was a particularly attractive marketplace in metals. And that was a combination of high levels of volatility, a lot of activity. And because there was uncertainty, many players who typically provide market making capabilities we're restricting how much they were willing to do, and that created even more opportunity for a firm like Marex.

Now what we saw in the second quarter of this year, as you point out, was quite a lot of volatility. That was sort of helpful. We had our second best quarter in metal. So our metals franchise performed very well. The investments we've made in creating some market making capabilities in energy were also meant that we actually had good results in energy. Now that's not sort of competing with the big trading houses, but in some of the refined oil products.

And the area that was just very tough in the second quarter, as I think we talked about on the earnings call, was in ags. So that's -- what you do find in certain markets is you're going to have high volatility and very low levels of activity because there's just not a lot of flow. Those are sort of the hardest markets to operate in. And that's broadly what sort of characterizes the ags markets at the moment.

Maybe moving on to how you finance the business. You've issued some senior debt recently positioned a little bit from a heavier reliance on the structured note program. How do you think about the funding mix over the longer term? And what should investors expect in terms of more issuance?

Yes. I mean, we want to establish a very robust U.S. issuance program. I mean part of the reason that we came to market in April with the debt offering was the view that we need to issue each year. And while we didn't have a need for the liquidity at that point in time, we did want to go out and sort of raise money in part to sort of broader the participation in the name, but also to get the market to a point where it sort of expected that we were going to be a regular issuer. And we're not going to get our spreads down to the levels we think they should be at until we have a very robust issuance program that sort of multiyear and the balances are sort of quite high in the levels of liquidity in our name or quite high.

So we saw this as an investment in that, and it's a multiyear effort, I'm sure. And so we do expect to continue with that. I mean we were quite happy to do the issuance, it was $500 million. I mean, at that point in time, we really were unsure what the market changes were going to be with sort of tariffs and all of that good stuff. And we always felt that even if we didn't need it because the world was sort of very dislocated, we would be able to deploy that liquidity even if it was with a bit of a lag. So we're very comfortable doing that. And the market, I think, should expect that we are going to look to grow our public issuance programs.

Structured notes are an important part of the firm's liquidity, an important business for us. So we're not looking to sort of changed that in any fundamental way. But I do think that the share of our liquidity that comes from public, the issued debt will go up relative to structured notes just simply because it will grow faster than structured notes will. We have just set up a capability to issue structured notes in the U.S. So we are investing in that and looking to broaden it out, but it won't grow as fast as the public issuance.

Maybe on the other side, in terms of allocating capital, we talked earlier about the M&A framework in terms of how much PBT you're looking to add or how much revenue you're looking to add every year. But high level, how do you think about the balance between M&A or other types of capital return, dividends or anything?

Yes. I mean, I don't think we've changed our approach to this. So what we described to the marketplace at the time of the IPO, I think remains the case, which is if we're making, call it, $400 million of PBT, we're going to be making whatever that is, $320 million, $330 million of profit after tax. That's a lot of capital generation.

The first use of capital is to support organic growth and maintain an investment-grade rating. Beyond that, we look to return some amount of capital to investors in the form of dividends. We pick dividends as a way to return capital because we thought the signaling effect, particularly as a newly public company, was really, really important. And dividends were the most effective way for the Board to signal its confidence that the firm would be able to continue to grow to the marketplace.

We do see substantial opportunities to deploy capital to create a lot of value for our investors through the M&A process. And while we see those opportunities to acquire things that call it 3 to 4x, so the goodwill -- the premium that we pay is sort of 3 to 4x what we're acquiring and then the opportunity to grow that as part of the Marex platform. That's a hugely value-creating way to sort of deploy capital, and we would look to continue to do that.

The last sort of element of this is what about buybacks. And I think up until this point, our view has been that what we really wanted to do was create more liquidity in our stock and that buying back stock was really undermining that. Our hope would be at the time of the IPO to get to a point where we had $20 million of trading in our stock each day. Now we're over the most recent period, been operating well above that, so sort of probably closer to $50 million on average today. So I think that, that whole question of liquidity in our stock has sort of been addressed through managing down the overhang as well as sort of the interest of investors in Marex and the fact that we're now part of the Russell 3000 and a series of other steps that we've taken.

And so now I think the whole idea of buybacks, while, I don't think we've changed our basic position on it, I think it just becomes something we would need to consider potentially differently to the way we have. But at the moment, our view is we can deploy the excess capital that we're generating very successfully in acquisitions, and that's the most value-enhancing thing we can do.

Maybe just one final question. You talked about this a little bit, talking about M&A and growth initiatives earlier. But can you kind of unpack what you're seeing and what you're doing more recently in some of the newer geographies, Middle East, your APAC expansion. You talked about being able to scale up through M&A, but where are you today versus where you want to be? How do you think about the sort of near-term, longer-term opportunities in there?

Look, I mean, what we've been trying to do in our strategy is increase earnings resilience, increase the diversification in the firm and create a firm that is able to continue to grow sequentially through a whole range of different market condition.

Geographic expansion, to my mind, is really critical to that strategic objective because I do believe that there will be -- there just isn't the same level of correlation across the different geographies. And I think that there are clients -- really, really attractive clients in all of these different geographies that are looking to do business with firms that will feel sort of local to them. So if you're trying to clients in sort of Abu Dhabi, while they might actually be willing to set up with you in Dubai, in most cases, they just want to deal with an Abu Dhabi-based entity.

So you really have to -- if you're going to attract and then service those clients, you do need to sort of broaden yourself out geographically. And we see tremendous opportunity to grow in the Middle East. It's a really attractive set of clients, very interested in the set of services we provide, very relationship oriented. So the Middle East, we think is a very, very attractive environment. And it feels like we're pretty early in our development. I mean we have quite a large office in Dubai. We now have an office in Abu Dhabi, but we really see a lot of opportunity there.

I mean, similarly in Brazil. I mean, Brazil is a really viable marketplace, particularly for commodities. We have any presence there, but it's one of those areas that I think could grow very substantially. And similarly, Asia, we're very excited about the possibility of growing out there. And then the United States remains the largest market in the world by some substantial margin. And while we've made a lot of progress, we still see very substantial opportunities there.

Well, we're out of time. We'll leave it there, Ian. Thank you so much.

Thanks, Ben. Thanks, everybody.