Swissquote Group Holding Aktie

Ladies and gentlemen, good morning. Thank you for joining us to our press conference for our first half results 2026. We are here at our headquarter in Gland, and I am with our CFO, Yvan Cardenas, and we will go through the presentation. I hope you had a chance of downloading our PowerPoint presentation. Otherwise, you can follow this here on the screen. We will go through the slides and then at the end, we'll have time for some questions.

I will immediately start with the first slide. We had a good half year in terms of growth. The client assets are at the absolute record level. We're now close to CHF 100 billion of assets at CHF 96.3 billion. That's a plus of 19.8% compared to 1 year ago. And also in terms of net new money, we had -- it's almost one of the best half year we ever had, purely organic growth of assets at CHF 5.1 billion. So in total, we now have more than 1.2 million accounts and the revenues we generated with our clients amounted to CHF 364.2 million of net revenues. That's also a plus of 1.7% compared with the figures 1 year ago and a good pretax profit of 50.2%.

So on the next slide, the net new money. I said we had -- sorry, we had CHF 5.1 billion of net new money in the first half. And if you see here on the left, that's almost one of our best results. I think it's the second best. It was only surpassed by H1 2025, where we had CHF 5.2 billion. So the growth story continues, very good results in terms of number of accounts. We added 64,000 new accounts in the first half 2026 for Swissquote and 24,000 new accounts for Yuh. And you see here the final results at CHF 1.2 million.

You also see the difference between classic trading accounts with Swissquote, where the average asset is at CHF 115,000 compared to Yuh, where logically, the asset is much smaller. It's a neobank. So people have less assets on the account, but still CHF 9,500, that's probably if you compare this with our international peers, that's much higher than what you can find at other neobanks. So a nice growth of 6% from -- on number of clients from H2 2025 to H1 2026. In terms of net new money, this is famous CHF 5.1 billion.

I was mentioning before. So we have our 3 hotspots where the main growth is coming from. So Switzerland is still our most important place where we are CHF 2.7 billion of net new money in the first half and Europe with CHF 1.7 billion. For Europe, we wanted to show you where actually the growth is coming from. So it's mainly Benelux, France and Germany, up to 74%. This is where we are concentrating our biggest sales and marketing efforts, and we had quite a success in those countries.

Then Middle East, Asia, this is mainly our subsidiaries in Dubai with CHF 0.5 billion, CHF 587 million. That's also a very good number compared to previous to previous half year. And the rest of world is a little bit more modest, but it's more driven by some selective outflows organized by our company. We are a little bit more selective on our clients in terms of revenue potential than before. And from time to time, we do close a certain number of client relations.

So CHF 5.1 billion, again, it's really a very good number. And you see the global dispatch here, we have 54% coming from Switzerland and 46% coming from our international operations. And also in terms of distribution, 54% is B2C. That's still our main driver and the rest is B2B or B2B2C is 46%, so a very good distribution in terms of net new money and also something that makes us really positive over the longer term in terms of our growth engine is thriving. And this is also the reason why we do not change our forecast for 2028. We still think that we will make CHF 0.5 billion of profit in 2028 and with about CHF 900 million of revenue.

And this is purely based on asset growth forecast over the next year. With CHF 5.1 billion, we are in advance. Our average forecast that we use to forecast our future numbers is a growth of CHF 7 billion a year. And you see here that with CHF 5.1 billion, we are really ahead of our plans. Client assets here has now reached CHF 96.3 billion. Of course, it's the highest number ever. It has been a little bit helped with good market.

And as usual, we have 15% of those CHF 96.3 billion that are deposited in cash. It's also the one element which is pushing us towards a category 3 bank in Switzerland. We are not far away. The one element that we are measured on to become a category 3 bank is the total balance sheet, and we are at CHF 16.9 billion and the trigger is CHF 17 billion. So we are really very close to becoming a category 3 bank.

Here, the average assets has slowed down a little bit. This is not last due to lower volatility. So it's a weak -- it's a very short-term impact, and it will recover in the coming half year. The distribution of revenue shows a little bit what happened in H1. So we had good growth in fee and commission income. We had good growth on interest and stable revenue for eForEx and trading, but what really was missing in the first half was the revenue on crypto assets. There, we had -- we were -- in our budget, we estimated that in 2026, we will do CHF 85 million compared with what happens over the last 2 years, but we only did CHF 14 million in the first half, and this really is due to a very low volatility.

If you follow a little bit the what's happening on cryptocurrencies, and the biggest one of it, Bitcoin, it almost didn't change. It stayed around $63,000 to $65,000 for Bitcoin and very stable, very low volatility. And this, of course, is not favorable to trading with such a low volatility. So it's a little bit difficult to forecast the Bitcoin volatility over the next year. What we did for the second half 2026, we stayed a little bit conservative to say, "Okay, let's just double everything and more or less, and this is the new guidance for 2028."

Now of course, if volatility would come back on our cryptocurrency, then this would completely change the figure. But again, we rather stay conservative there, and we estimate that the second half will be like the first half. Next slide is the net revenue by customer profile. Here on the left side, you really see the domicile where we are making our money. It's still a Swiss business to 56%, but Europe is now picking up. It represents already 25% of our revenue. This is the place where we have a strong growth with our bank in Luxembourg.

And it's also something where we do invest a lot. We invest in staff and people and systems in Luxembourg because we think we have a very good product that is appealing to European mass affluent market, and this is our strategy for the coming months and years is to continue pushing our brand and our products, and we know and we can see that we are successful there.

Then number three is Middle East. That's mainly our operations in Dubai that represents 12% of our total revenue. Now by customer type, this is on the right side. And this also is a very stable figure. It's about -- 2/3 is the B2C business, that's still our main business dealing with direct clients and then 28% that's the institutional business or the B2B2C business. And this is a figure that is very stable and hasn't changed a lot over the last years. A look on the revenue by asset class. It's -- on the left side, you see that it's a well-diversified picture.

Now the crypto assets here, as mentioned before, represents only 4% of our revenue. We estimated that it would represent about 10%. So it's not a crypto story anymore. So it can only be good news if suddenly the crypto revenue or the crypto stock would gain in volatility, then you would certainly see this 4% growing again. But again, that's difficult to forecast, and let's see what the crypto market will do in the second half.

Then the revenues by type of business, and we distinguish between transaction-based and non-transaction-based business. This is -- again, CHF 364.2 million revenue for the first half and about half of it, a little bit more is transaction-based, 52%. But the non-transaction based, which is the interest income, custody fees, the securities lending business this represents 48%. So a good development here, and this is also something we want to keep and even push a little bit the nontransaction-based revenue in the future.

One of the initiatives we have that is working very well is the securities lending business that is now picking up. We have a very good solution, very attractive to our clients as we are sharing the revenue with our clients on a very good model. They get 50%, we get 50% and this is a very secure model that we have organized over the last 2 years. The headcount in -- as of 30 June 2026, now we have in total 1,511 full-time equivalent.

This is a distribution here on the left, you see it's mainly technology driven. So we are a tech bank, and we are proud to be a technology bank. That's our DNA. That's where we make our difference with all the banks in Switzerland and in Europe, 35%. And then sales -- the sales part represent 18% and 15% in our foreign offices. And then -- and this is a place where we have invested a lot in the past years and mainly to get ready for this category 3 bank status that we now have or soon have. This is now 15% of our headcount is in risk and compliance. That's also quite normal for a bank -- for a bank of our size.

Now if you look at the variation in headcount compared to the -- compared to December 2025, you see that the biggest part, 34 of the new headcounts we hired is in our growth initiatives, so mainly technology we hired 17 people. The growth of our foreign office, mainly in Europe, also pushed the headcount there at 15 and then a small growth on our Yuh staff with 2 additional people. And that gives us a total of 1,482.

And then the others, as mentioned before, this is growth due to our bigger status as being a bigger bank. And there, we hired 29 people. And in total, we have 1,511. So what's a little bit the forecast? We think it will slow down in the future. We have prefinanced the biggest part of our readiness to be a category 3 bank. That should be okay now. And we also think that AI will bring a lot of additional efficiency. So we do not forecast to have the same rate of headcount growth over the next year until 2028. That's the strategy of our company. We think that we now have a good size to be able to manage the mission and the growth pattern of our bank.

About the profitability, if we start from the CHF 96.3 billion of client assets, on average, this generated 79 basis points of revenue and this is the CHF 364.2 million of revenue we generated and then 40 basis points on the CHF 96.3 billion is the pretax profit margin. And you see here on the right, the evolution of our profit. You see, first of all, that it did grow and it's now stabilized a little bit here. It's CHF 153.6 million net profit compared to H2 2025.

But there in H2 2025, remember, we had this special one-off that was linked to the acquisition of the 50% of Yuh from our joint venture partner, and that triggered this exceptional one-off in 2025. So we should rather compare our numbers with H1 2025. And then you can see here that we are stable at a high level, which I think is a good performance given the current economic situation, the uncertainty and also the special situation with cryptocurrency.

For us, this is a good sign. So we are able to generate high profit even in difficult market conditions. But again, more important for us really is our growth engine. We want to grow the assets. We want to grow the net new money half year after half year. And of course, also, we want to get -- to have new good clients who are joining our system, and this has been achieved in the first half of 2026.

Now about Yuh, is our neobank that is now owned 100% by the group with 423,000 clients. We are the biggest neobank regulated in Switzerland. We still have a target of about 0.5 million clients by the end of 2026. So we will accelerate the growth a little bit. And for that, we have signed a contract with Young Boys. It's very important to us because it's -- football is a good brand carrier. And we think that Yuh goes very well with one of the most important and largest football club in Switzerland.

And you see here a few pictures of our sponsorship agreement with Young Boys, and we're very excited, and we think this will be a great way of pushing the brand in Switzerland. We're not sure whether we have to because the growth is coming by itself. But I said in the second half of 2026, we want to accelerate the growth and go beyond the 6% growth we had here from H2 2025 to H2 2026. Very important for us also is that we're not only getting clients, but we have clients that are bringing their assets and they're also investing in securities.

And out of the CHF 4 billion, you can see here on the left that about half of this 54% is in cash. That's a very different picture from the one I showed you before where the cash part represented only 15% overall for Swissquote. Yuh, of course, it's a payment app, so the cash percentage is much higher, 54%. And it's mainly in Swiss francs. Of course, we are based in Switzerland, and most of our clients are Swiss, so up to 85%, sorry, in Swiss francs, the rest 12% in euro and 3% only in U.S. dollar.

But on the right side, investments in securities represent 46%. So usually, people do not transfer assets -- their securities directly to Yuh, they transfer the cash and then they invest in securities. And here, you see the very nice evolution over time. At CHF 4 billion, it's a very good number divided by the number of clients we have. This is -- this 9,500 average deposits per client, which if you compare this with N26, for example, you will see that this is much higher. So we have richer Yuh clients than the rest of Europe. And this is not surprising even the possibility and what we can do with our Yuh account.

The headcount on the left, speaking about Yuh is that we have 64 people. They're now mainly located in Zurich, where we have our headquarter of Yuh. You see that the split is between customer care, that's the biggest part, 60% and then Products and Marketing is 32%. All the Operations and bank accounts are outsourced to Swissquote Bank. Yuh is not the bank. It's a neobank, but the banking activity as such is performed by Swissquote.

Now the things that we are very proud of is our AI agent. We call it Yuhlia, and it's really working. It's actively used by our clients. And you see here on the right side, the number of conversations that are now taking place with Yuhlia. And it's a very good figure for us because, of course, whenever you do a conversation with Yuhlia, you may not call the call center because with Yuhlia, you can, of course, ask questions about the performance, about your portfolio, but you can also ask questions about general questions, customer support questions.

And this, of course, is one call less in our call center each time our clients ask the question on Yuhlia. It's the version 1. We will strongly develop our AI capacities there because, of course, we think this is the future, and we are just at the beginning of what AI can bring to such an ecosystem.

Now we have a few slides on our balance sheet. And for that, I will give over to our CFO, who is sitting next to me, Yvan?

Yes. So a few words about the balance sheet. So the balance sheet has continued to grow. In the first half, we can see that there was a 5% increase in the total balance sheet. So we could increase the cash deposits of customers in all currencies, which is positive, in particular, as interest rate expectations have changed as well during the period of time. I will highlight 2 particular categories, loans that are mainly Lombard loans. We have a plus 12% increase in Lombard loans.

So we see that the appetite of customers to invest this year and a 12% growth in the 6 months, I think it's a positive development. We have continued to increase the investment securities portfolio. So we use part of the balance sheet to lock duration. We could find nice opportunities during H1 as interest rate expectations have been changing from time to time. So I think we've been good in selecting the right timing and the right time of opportunities. As Marc mentioned, interest income is over initial guidance and we will most likely have a higher interest income in 2026 compared to 2025, which is as well a positive development.

Last comment on the liabilities. You see the structured product business that we have. So we as well issue our own structured product business, our own structured products. And you see that there is a 21% increase. So it's growing. We could see before that structured products represent something like 5% of net revenues. These are popular products in Switzerland and while the volume of issuances is growing positively. Total assets, we are at CHF 16.9 billion at the end of June. So very close to the limit to be classified as a category 3 bank. You can imagine that the 17 have been most likely crossed in July when you look at the growth of the balance sheet in H1. So most likely, as I mentioned in the press release, we should be classified in H2 as a category 3 bank.

If we move to the next slide, this is the usual slide that we propose on every conference. Again, volumes are higher than initially expected. Interest rates have developed better than initially expected. Swiss franc remained flat. We think that Swiss franc will remain flat in H2. Interest rates in USD have not decreased. That was what the initial guidance expected. They remain relatively stable, and we had a hike on euro interest rates.

So the positive aspect on the interest income is that, interest income is likely to be higher in 2026 compared to 2025. And we will enter 2027 most likely with higher rates than we entered 2026, which was something that we were not expecting. At the same time, the margin lending portfolio and the investment securities have continued to grow. So we could as well secure interest income for the future.

Okay. Thank you, Yvan, last slide.

Yes. So on the equity side, I would say no major change. Capital ratio remains solid and relatively stable. You can see that the equity has not grown much. This is mainly explained by 2 items, while the dividend payment that we paid during H1 in accordance with our dividend policy. And as well, you can see that we slightly increased the portfolio of treasury shares that we have. We've invested something like CHF 55 million to CHF 60 million in treasury shares in H1. We are now above 3% of the share capital. So overall, the equity remained solid, stable and no particular change in the capital ratio.

Okay. Thank you. I'm coming back to comment a little bit our investment in AI. So as we mentioned many times, we are -- we think that AI will change the way we do banking. We also think that we are better prepared than other banks because we have developed sovereign infrastructure at Swissquote. We have invested in technology. We have invested in systems. We have invested in people. I should give a number over the last 18 months, we have probably invested about CHF 30 million in our AI capacity with staff and CapEx.

So what are we doing with those investments? We have the 4 pillars that you can see here on this slide. The first one, which is kind of obvious, this is the client interaction automatization. So I already mentioned Yuhlia before that, but we also have chatbot developments for Swissquote. So when you want to go in contact with our agents, you have the possibility to address the issue you may have with our chatbot. So it's an AI chatbot. It's very different from the previous chatbots you could see. It's working well. We have above 70% of the feedback rate the conversation they have with the chatbot as good. So meaning that the issue is solved. And we are, of course, working hard to develop the Phase 2 of our chatbot. This is due to be delivered in December 2026.

Then internally, AI-assisted software development. So it first shows that we have a potential of 25% to 30% reduction in development cycle time. So that is -- it's very important for us. We are pushing our engineers to use AI as a tool. It's not automatic. You have to -- you first have to organize your network, you have to organize the software, you have to acquire a license and then you have to train your people to use AI capacity, but we really think this is the future. We also think that we will reach full AI maturity in our development staff by 2027, 2028.

By then, we think that AI has the capacity of doubling or tripling the productivity. This means that we will be able to bring new softwares and solution 2 or 3x faster to the market. It's not free of charge. It's really a dedicated investment in people, technology, infrastructure, and we think that we are very well prepared and organized for this AI change that is affecting -- that will affect, as you know, many industries in many different sectors.

Then one very important element for us is the -- we call it payment intelligence. It's related to the monitoring of everything that is happening on our accounts. So it's -- we now have 100% AI coverage. So each time you do a payment or you do a transaction, we have the capacity of monitoring these transactions using AI tools. So we have developed many tools to do this, and there's one specific development we call it Diego internally. We think that the AI agent will be a breakthrough software solution to secure the transactions.

You are aware that -- we are in a market that is challenged by fraudulent activities, account takeovers, mule accounts and banks like us do need to invest in technology to secure completely this part of their business. And they also have tools that are very advanced and using frontier technologies to secure our banking activity.

And then last but not least, for the products. So these are the product-facing tools. If you are a client of Swissquote, you have certainly noticed a lot of changes. We have developed widgets that do analyze AI, do analyze stocks with AI capacities, and we have developed many, many different tools -- and this is -- there, we expect a lot of new things to come and tools that are very advanced for our clients.

Now revised guidance 2026. So again, we haven't been very creative to have a full guidance for 2026. We basically took what happened in H1 and we doubled it, and this is the results for the full year. Now the latest guidance, CHF 730 million and CHF 365 million pretax profit margin for 2026, a little bit on the conservative side, I have to say, especially given the lackluster trading activity in crypto, but at least this is something we know that we can achieve in 2026. And so we'd rather stay there a little bit conservative.

So I have mentioned it before. We haven't changed anything on our guidance 2028. We still think that we can do CHF 0.5 million -- CHF 0.5 billion pretax profit in 2028. We are reassured by our growth pattern that is unchanged in the first half of 2026. So we're quite confident that we can achieve revenues of CHF 900 million with a pretax of CHF 500 million in 2028. A look on the margin on assets here, not much to comment here on this slide. You've certainly seen it and also are classic in our presentation in 2026.

Maybe, Yvan you want to say something on that?

No, yes, it's more to basically help to understand how we see the distribution of the net revenues. And now with the revised guidance, obviously, I think if we will compare...

As I mentioned, I'm not sure whether you could hear me, is that the revised guidance for 2026 is based on doubling the H1 2026 figures. So we haven't been very creative there. We just have taken our numbers and we multiplied it by 2. It's a little bit on the conservative side, especially if you think that, for example, cryptocurrency could revive a little bit in the second half, but let's stay conservative. We know that we can achieve CHF 730 million of revenue in 2026 and CHF 365 million of pretax. That would be about the figures we achieved in 2025. If we take away the one-off on the profit side we had in 2025.

And here, Yvan, maybe comments on marginal assets.

Yes. So here, you have a bit of details to how compute the net revenue distribution that we have now included in the revised guidance 2026. So here, you have a comparison between the new guidance and the previous years. I think what I could comment is the changes between the initial guidance and the revised guidance. So you see that on interest income side of things, the situation is better than initially expected. We were expecting a decline in interest income in 2026 compared to 2025. Now we expect the interest income to be higher in 2026. So there is a positive development on interest income.

On the crypto assets, as many times commented during the conference, the environment was weaker than expected. So there is a change compared to the initial guidance. We think there could be a recovery somewhere in 2026. But we, for the time being, do not rely much on it. And any recovery will probably not be early enough to compensate the delay we have on the crypto asset income.

One last comment is about client assets. So having in mind the target of CHF 7 billion per year that we have, it means that with the current level of client assets, we could be very close to CHF 100 billion in 2026, which is significantly ahead of what we expected. So on client assets, the positive aspect is, we might be significantly ahead of plan at the end of 2026.

Okay. Thank you, Yvan. And I will just comment a few slides in the appendix. The first, this is something we have a very precise look. We want to know if the clients we hire, the new clients joining the system, if they are equally as profitable as the old clients. And you can see this here. So among the 797,000 Swissquote accounts, we had a growth of 7% in the first half and also 7% on the new accounts.

Now this 7% transform into revenues. And you see here that with 7%, we made 4% of revenues. Why not 7%? Well, this is a normal distribution. It's -- of course, the clients we hired on the 30th of June didn't have time to contribute to the figures. So normally, you should expect these numbers divided by 2, so 3.5%. So you can see that in terms of revenue, it's a good number. So we have normally active new clients, so a very stable figure there.

About the market share, we tried to measure our market share in Switzerland. This is a stable figure. So first of all, you can see that the addressable market is growing. So this is according to many studies we have seen. So the addressable market for us in trillion is growing over time, and it has reached now CHF 2 trillion, and that's only for Switzerland, of course. And the good news is that our market share is growing in a growing market. So we now reach 3% overall market share in Switzerland. So it also means that, first of all, we still have a high growth potential here in our home market in Switzerland, and we are growing our market share, which really is basically good news.

Now a few last information about our road map, development road map in H1 2026. First of all, we're very proud of having achieved a CASP MiCA license that was very important to us in -- as we have an active crypto business. You know that now if you don't have a license, MiCA license -- CASP MiCA license in Europe, you're not able to provide cryptocurrency trading as of 1st of July. And writing time, we have received our CASP MiCA license. We have also developed the trading in silver. It has been very attractive lately. And of course, as mentioned before, we have developed a lot of new enhanced security features on our -- for our bank accounts.

Okay. Now our last look, and then we go to the Q&A session. There will be many occasions to meet us. We are present at the UBS Best of Switzerland Conference. And then also in September [ 23 ], we have the Bank of America Annual Financials CEO Conference. We will be at the ZKB Swiss Equity Conference. And then in March 18, we'll have already the presentation of our full year results for 2026. So thank you for joining us here this morning. I guess we have now time for a few questions.

[Operator Instructions] The first question comes from Tam Haley from UBS.

My 2 questions then, please. Firstly, the 2028 targets, I think you've been very clear about those. I mean that is very strong growth from your implied 2026 guidance to be 17%, I think, every year in pretax profit over the next 2 years. Could you confirm for us what your assumption is for crypto as a percentage of the 2028 target?

And then my second question in terms of the net new money, very strong, CHF 5.1 billion. I think you've consistently beaten that CHF 7 billion target now for 3 years, I think. Was there anything unusual about the H1? Was there something in the Middle East or the Dubai flows that were elevated? I know there's usually an H1, H2 seasonality, but just trying to understand how we should think about this sort of level of flow going forward beyond 2026.

Okay. I'd take the second question and give the first one to Yvan. So for the second question, I think you -- it's true that the Middle East helped a little bit and -- but not massively. Actually, you can see here the uptick in the net new money was at CHF 0.5 billion, CHF 587.3 million to be precise, and that's higher than the previous half year.

And this really is due to the situation in the Middle East where people or expats where they tried to put the money offshore, and this helped a little bit. But of course, compared to the CHF 587 million to CHF 5.1 billion, so this is only 10%. So really the growth is coming from our main jurisdictions where we are, which is Switzerland and Europe.

Yes. So to comment on 2028 and perhaps to add on what Marc has just mentioned, Haley, I think that well, we have, let's say, unfortunate crypto volatility in H1. On the other side, what is interesting is to connect this trend with the level of net new money. We near record levels. The record was last year -- in H1 last year when we had a strong momentum on crypto assets. And when -- I think what H1 has demonstrated is while there is a diversification in the business model, while we could not more than compensate, we could compensate this decline in crypto assets.

But there is a low correlation between the capability of the group to acquire new customers and crypto. And I think this is something that was a bit challenged back on time is how much Swissquote is relying on crypto momentum to acquire new customers. And now we see that we could most likely 3 years in a row, overachieve net new money targets, whatever crypto environment. And from my CFO perspective, this is something extremely positive as a learning lesson from H1, is, well, even with a very weak environment of cryptos, we're very close to record levels of client acquisition.

Now to come back to your question on 2028, well, we remain confident and we think that the assumptions are intact mainly because of what I've just been mentioning. If I remember the assumption that we have published back in early 2025 for the guidance, supporting the guidance 2028, the first key assumption was net new money, CHF 7 billion per year of net new money. We will most likely overdeliver 3 years in a row. So we overdelivered in 2024, in 2025 and most likely in 2026.

And I think the growth will have been to have a slowdown in client acquisition. So this one, I think we're very comfortable. And most likely, we will overdeliver on the level of client assets. We cannot predict market impact, but we could easily be at least CHF 10 billion above the initial level of current assets forecasted for 2028. And this will help to compensate if we have a bit of pressure on the revenue margin on assets. As well on the mix of revenues, the mix of revenues was 60% transaction-based, 40% non-transaction based.

We see that we are now already at this level. It's even a better mix than we initially targeted for 2028. This is certainly supported by interest rates and interest rates are basically staying much longer high than we initially expected. So we'll provide probably more information with the full year results 2026, but our confidence comes to the fact that the critical assumptions for 2028 -- they are intact and we most likely are overdelivering.

But for sure, in 2026, we have a short-term volatility, but this we knew it. I mean we never expected the journey to 2028 to be linear. We knew we could face more adverse scenarios. We could face short-term volatility. But what we have tried to do is to protect the most critical underlying assumptions. On the level of crypto assets for 2028, initially, we had in mind they could represent 10% of the CHF 950 million. This is something that we'll update with the full year results.

I think that while we could challenge the ability of Swissquote to reach this 10% with crypto assets, I think it's still feasible, easily feasible. On the other side, the share of interest income could be probably higher than initially expected. So I think one could compensate each other. And we see at the same time that we have new revenue streams growing, structured products, securities lending. So we have initiatives that should as well help and should be significant in 2028 compared to 2026.

The next question comes from Christoph Blieffert from BNP Paribas.

The first one is on net interest income. Your NII guidance basically implies a decline in the second half versus H1. If you could share the underlying assumptions with us, this would be helpful. And the second question is on crypto. You have been highlighting a CHF 5 million loss on crypto inventories in the half year report. And if you could help us better understanding your market-making activities and the remaining value at risk, this would be helpful.

Yes, Christoph, thanks for the very key questions that you're raising. So the net interest income forecast is built by the CFO. And historically, I think the net interest forecast is relatively conservative. So I think the positive aspect is we expect interest income in 2026 to be higher than in 2025, and this was not what we initially expected. H1 was extremely positive. Balance sheet was growing. Interest rate expectations were volatile and changing, so we could capture as well good opportunities.

In H2, interest rates could still continue to grow. There could be a hike in euros. In USD, we have not bet on these increases. So we have assumed interest rates to remain flat in H2, and we have been slightly more conservative in the growth of the balance sheet. At the same time, we know we have a few expirations in investment securities in H2, and we have been as well a bit conservative in our capability to renew these expirations at the existing rate. So I think we have a good level of interest income for H2. This is much more than initially expected.

Then, yes, for the time being, it's slightly below H1, but it's still an excellent number compared to what we had in mind 6 months ago. The other question about the crypto assets, I think it's important to highlight it. We have reached more or less CHF 14 million of crypto assets income in H1 2026, but the level of brokerage was higher because we have these above CHF 5 million negative mark-to-market. This is sort of a one-off that is impacting the numbers. CHF 5 million is not significant when we look at overall net revenues, but it's significant when you do CHF 14 million of crypto asset income.

Where does it come from? You know we have this as crypto exchange. So in an exchange, you basically have sellers and buyers. You need liquidity. This liquidity is provided by market makers. But what we do is we as well bridge our exchange with other exchanges. Could it be coinbase? Could it be other venues, other exchanges that are known in the market? So to ensure we always have the best bid-ask spread across all these venues, we basically have our own internal market-making technology that is here to bridge the liquidity from our exchange to another exchange.

And there is no way to bridge liquidity between 2 order books without basically bearing a certain risk. So the initial bid and half that we have on an exchange is provided by the Swissquote crypto inventory. And when you offer 52 crypto assets platform, even if you will buy 100,000, 200,000 for each crypto asset, basically, it creates an inventory of around CHF 5 million to CHF 10 million. And this inventory is fair valued every time we close the books. So last year, it was slightly positive -- no, I think it was CHF 2 million positive, but we did 85, it's not significant.

In H1, prices have decreased by 40%, 50%. And I'm afraid then we had to recognize this negative mark-to-market that we're not forecasting to happen anymore in H2. And this is important when understanding the numbers we have forecasted for H2. The total value of this crypto inventory at the end of June is CHF 8.9 million. So this will be technically the maximum additional downside that we could face. Should the situation recover, let's say, should prices recover, we will probably have more volume activity and as well recover part of this unrealized mark-to-market. I hope it's clear enough, Christoph. I know it's a bit technical.

And then, I would add that, of course, the -- for the inventory to go down to 0 would mean that the entire crypto market would go down to 0, which is not our baseline as such.

The next question comes from Daniel Regli from Zurcher Kantonalbank.

I have basically 2 follow-up questions on previous questions from other analysts. One is on net new money. Obviously, last year, we also had a very strong H1 and then the second half year was, let's say, more "normal." Should we expect kind of a similar seasonality this year? Or was there anything which would lead you to assume that H1 could continue to be much stronger than H2? Or is basically the jury is out for H2, and it could well be that we see another CHF 5 billion of net new money in H2?

And then my second question is following up on the kind of CHF 500 million guidance for 2028 and the assumptions behind. Obviously, I think you originally had assumed a 90 bps margin on assets for this CHF 500 million. And can you just tell me, do you kind of still commit to this 90 bps longer term? Or has this kind of changed? Or have your assumptions changed in this regard?

Okay. Thank you, Daniel. Very good question. So I'll take the first one, and Yvan will take the second one. So about the net new money, it's true that we have a little bit of seasonality, but it's not systematic. In H2 2023, was less good than H1 2023. And then the situation completely reversed in 2024, where the second half was the strongest. In H1, it went in the other direction. So it's a little bit difficult to forecast. It -- sometimes it's a little bit market dependent. But I think really the growth and especially the growth coming from Europe is pushing net new money.

So we are anticipating good net new monies for 2026. Now whether it will be just double, it's difficult to say. Our average forecast is that we will be able to reach half of what we are expecting for the year, the CHF 7 billion. So that will be at least CHF 3.5 billion. So CHF 3.5 billion and CHF 5.1 billion, that would be at CHF 8.6 billion, that would be also a super good number, but that's probably the lowest number we can achieve. Potential good news there in the second half.

On your question for 2028, Daniel. So currently, we stick to the 90 basis points. Why? Because we have, and we will roll out more and more products and services that are not necessarily related to the level of client assets. And Yuh will be helpful in this regard. So 90 basis points remains the underlying assumption. I think when we look at mid-2026, I understand it could look challenging, but we have growing products, and we have as well more products and services that are not necessarily correlated with client assets.

That being said, I think if somebody would be skeptical about the capabilities of Swissquote to reach 90 basis points, I think the level of client assets and the level of net new monies we have is likely to compensate in such a scenario. Basically, net revenues will be a function of client assets and revenue margin. So you can over-deliver on client assets and slightly underdeliver on revenue margin, you may reach exactly the same number of net revenues.

The next question comes from Rene Locher from ODDO BHF.

So a few questions on -- or 2 questions on costs or expenses. So the first one, Slide 22, Marc, I was wondering have you already expensed the CHF 30 million investment in AI? That's my question. Because actually in an interview, I guess, was in [indiscernible], where you mentioned that you're going to spend CHF 30 million in AI, but over the period 2026 to 2028. So again, my question is, already expensed and now we get the benefits? That's my first question.

And the second one also on expenses. I got some pushbacks actually on operating leverage. Now if we dig a little bit deeper into operating expense, I can see that depreciation is up quite heavily, and I assume that was depreciation of proprietary software. So, what was the reason here? And also marketing expense was up 14%. Just wondering -- yes, was it the contract with the Young Boys?

Yvan, do you want to take the second one? I'll shall the first one.

So I'll start perhaps. So,, on the marketing -- well, first of all, I have to say that the level of client acquisition is very positive. And this is the most important for me as the CFO. Then on the marketing spend, we now consolidate Yuh. And when you look at the numbers of Yuh, in the tables, in appendix, we show basically the incremental contribution of Yuh. You see that, Yuh, in its level of maturity, is spending a significant amount of marketing. The incremental contribution of Yuh, when you compare it with the incremental revenues, you're close to 50%.

So Yuh is growing. And I think they grew accounts by 20% last year. So they're growing fast, and this needs to be supported by marketing. You need to establish a brand in Switzerland. So this probably explains a bit the fact that -- I understand you are surprised by the level of marketing expenses. On depreciation, what you have to keep in mind, and I think we've mentioned it in the communicated press as apparently you read the French, Rene.

And we say that during the acquisition of Yuh, you have this accounting specificity of purchase price accounting, we have recognized intangible assets. We have recognized goodwill, but as well intangible assets that we have to depreciate. And the goodwill is not depreciated, but we have recognized certain number of assets that have to, and they will temporarily increase the depreciation cost of Swissquote. So this is coming from the acquisition of Yuh. Have a look and very happy to guide you more into details later on after the call if needed. And now I give over to Marc.

Yes. Thank you, Rene. So when we speak about AI expenses, there are 3 segments to consider. The first one is staff, many people. You hire the specialists that are able to deal with AI, mainly building the infrastructure, building the data infrastructure and also building the gateways to the various AI and large language models. Then you have CapEx, you need to build your infrastructure. So even though a large part actually is happening in the cloud, but we -- if you want really to build a sovereign data warehouse and the AI system, you also need to buy hardware.

So we did acquire H200 systems and chips in -- mainly in 2025. And then the last figures, these are the consumptions. So whenever you go outside of your internal systems, you consume tokens and these tokens are expensive. They're going up and up. And by the way, this is the biggest threat for the industry in general, not only banking, but the industry, you're getting addicted to these systems that are sold at a discount price for now. But sooner or later, the price of tokens will go up and these companies will want to make a business out of that.

This is a huge difference with an Internet infrastructure. So Internet was a common good, whereas the AI infrastructure is mainly in hand of private companies, mainly U.S. company based. So this is -- it shows even more -- it's even more important that you can build your own internal AI infrastructure because when you consume -- when you have large language models that are built in your premises, then the tokens are almost free of charge. So on one side, staff, CapEx and tokens.

So staff, we -- I think we hired now most of the people. So this -- and -- and to give you a few numbers, overall, in 2025, we invested CHF 20 million in those 3 segments, I mentioned before. In 2026, we will invest CHF 15 million, and then it will go down to CHF 10 million and 10 million for '27 and '28. '27 and '28, the expenses will mainly be the cost of tokens. This is the part where we are consuming tokens of those frontier models, even though we try to throttle it.

But when we say we will -- we are installing or using the autopilot or advanced systems to double or triple the efficiency of our development team, it comes with the cost and the cost is the consumption of token. So the number you read of overall CHF 60 million from '26 to '28, this is correct. But it's probably more in a little bit of CapEx and lots of token consumptions rather than stuff. But if you -- in your assumptions, if you take CHF 15 million, so that would be CHF 5 million more of what we have already expensed in 2026. And then as of '27 and '28, you can add CHF 10 million in our cost for AI.

The next question comes from Miriam Killian from Deutsche Bank.

I have a question for Yvan. As you're approaching the CHF 17 billion threshold for FINMA category 3 banks, could you maybe quantify the potential incremental capital requirements and cost burden associated with that? That would be helpful.

Yes. So thanks for the question, Miriam. I think it's very close to questions we received on the Q&A chat. So -- we most likely are today above the CHF 17 billion. When you look at the growth of the balance sheet in H1, basically, you can assume that in July, we have most likely crossed this threshold. So will be notified soon, I think, by FINMA that we are now officially a category 3 bank. However, my understanding is that we have been treated as a category 3 bank for a certain time already.

And we have increased headcount in control functions in the last month. We did so as well in H1. So obviously, when you are a category 3 bank, you have more regulatory scrutiny. The regulatory is looking more closely at you. I think this is already the case for a couple of months. It was the case in 2025, and I think it is the case in 2026. So the main change is the minimum capital ratio that will increase. We already commented about it in the full year results, but the category 3 bank has at least a minimum capital ratio of 12%.

And as well, there is increased regulatory supervision. Should you go to the website of FINMA, you can, for example, see that category 3 banks are basically subject to on-site visits of FINMA. They do -- generally, they rely on external auditors, but they will -- as a category 3 bank, they will as well do their audits themselves. And in 2026, for example, we have scheduled 3 on-site visits from FINMA, which is generally between 2 and 3. So I think today, the numbers of 2025 and 2026, they already reflect the cost of doing business as a category 3 bank. This would be my CFO estimate.

We now have a follow-up question from Tam Haley, UBS.

Yes, just a follow-up actually on the capital allocation strategy. Can I just confirm there's no change to your internal 18% minimum capital ratio target and the idea that if the growth buffer reaches CHF 500 million, you could do additional distributions. I just wondered whether you could give us any color on when you think it might be reasonable you'd reach that sort of level.

Yes, Haley. So I confirm there is no change. If not, we will have -- make it explicit. In order to connect as well your question with the one that we have in the chat, you can see that we have purchased a few treasury shares in H1, as I mentioned, for CHF 50 million to CHF 60 million. This is mainly correlated to the employee stock option plan that we have. So we basically provide employees with a long-term incentive plan, and this is hedged with the purchase of treasury shares. So when they will be later exercised and we basically get rid again of the treasury shares.

As -- so we have this capital allocation strategy. I think obviously, we'll grow the capital buffer in 2026 compared to 2025. We'll see where we stand at the end of 2026, but my guess is we'll probably be very close to the CHF 500 million somewhere in 2027. And then the idea was exactly to contemplate additional distributions. Could they be in the form of share buyback program? This is very likely, but this is a decision of the Board of Directors, and they will basically conclude on the discussion the day we are at CHF 500 million. But no change on the capital allocation strategy at this stage.

There are no more questions from the phone right now. Back over to you, Marc, for any written questions from the webcast.

Yes. So I can group them for you, Marc, if you like.

Yes.

One question is a bit perhaps specific, and related to the marketing is, how much is the cost of sponsorship with Young Boys?

Yes, I think I can disclose these figures. It depends a little bit of the performance of Young Boys. So when they participate in Champions or Europa or Conference League, there is a premium that we pay what we have budgeted now for a full year starting as of 1st June. So from 1st June 2026 to 30 -- 1st July 2026 to 30th June 2027, it's about CHF 900,000 because unfortunately, for now, Young Boys are not qualified for any European competition. So there is bad news on one side because the brand will be less visible, but it's good news on the other side because we'll not have to pay the premium. So we -- in our budget, we'll spend about CHF 1 million, so to say.

Then I'm taking them a bit as I see them. Well, this one is, can you describe the main difference between Yuh and Swissquote in terms of offering and price? What will be the incentives for Yuh clients to move to Swissquote? Any cannibalization?

Okay. Well, the main difference is the investment universe. It's a reduced investment universe on Yuh. Well, you have the most attractive shares, but you do not have the CHF 3 million of products and securities we have on Swissquote. And this is by design. So the investment part in Yuh is reduced to -- mainly to securities, mainly to shares, and it's some kind of an entry solution, if you want to invest in part of your wealth in the financial markets. So Yuh is still to the biggest part, payment application. It's linked to a debit card.

And we -- and of course, the investment in securities is less expensive than is on Swissquote where you have the full set of products and services and the full set of -- on the investment possibilities. So that's also the reason why we keep both brands apart. We think it also protects us a little bit against the -- against the fight on the cost for transaction fees. So this is our response to the deep discount brokers that you can find in Europe. So there, we actually compete on the lower side with Yuh. And so that also helps us protect our margins on Swissquote.

Then we have another one that is very close, perhaps this one. Can you share your view on how market dynamics are changing, particularly with respect to competition. With Saxo Bank stepping up its marketing efforts in Switzerland and neobanks such as Revolut expanding their footprint, are you experiencing any pricing pressure on your core brokerage or transaction fees?

Yes, it's a good follow-up question. And we think that as well as Saxo, as Revolut, they are actually competing more on the -- with our neobank application. And none of those competitors in Switzerland do have the sophisticated -- the full set of trading and investment services we have on Swissquote. So competition has always been strong in attractive markets and Switzerland is an attractive market.

What is little bit bizarre is that Revolut is able to have such a position in Switzerland without having the proper license. That is maybe something that will be solved in the future, but it's a little bit bizarre because -- because on the other side, if we would enter European markets without having a proper license, that's, of course, something that is not acceptable and is not accepted in other jurisdictions. This is a little bit something particular here in Switzerland. So we are aware of competition, but we don't think that the current competitive landscape will change anything in our growth patterns in the future.

Another one, Marc. You work with -- and I think it's a good one in relation to AI initiatives. You work with very sensitive data in banking. Can you tell us a little bit about your AI setup? Do you run a model on-prem? It looks like the person is quite aware of the aspects that are key in AI and how do you make sure the data is handled diligently?

Yes. So that's exactly what I mentioned before. This is why it's so important to have a sovereign system and that you understand what you are actually doing. Temptation actually to send everything in the cloud is very high. Of course, our key data and -- are not shared with the outside world. It's completely hermetically distracted from our cloud application. This is why also we invested heavily in the past to build up this infrastructure so to make sure that no sensitive data are going outside.

But it's really something that you have to build up by design in the beginning of your AI infrastructure, because otherwise -- because the temptation to do it differently is, of course, very strong. Everyone can have a large language model and then start to share clients' data or -- of course, in our internal system, this is very strongly controlled and we have put the filters and the structure in place so that no sensitive data is leaving the bank.

Okay. There's still a significant number of questions. A quick one about the instant payments in Switzerland. Any impact on the technology of the bank? So this was already implemented in Europe, but any thoughts about on instant payments in Switzerland?

Yes. So instant payment is a new technology. And so every bank in Switzerland needs to be ready on the inbound side. So this is what we have and now we are accepting instant payments inbound, but we are a little bit reluctant to do it on the other side because you need to create some frictions and some latencies in when you -- if you want to control the flow, the payment flow.

So it's good for the clients, but it's also a challenge for the banks, especially in a situation when you have lots of cyber fraud and cybercrime. There are even some jurisdictions, Singapore, for example, where they have now mandatory friction in their payment system, and they really go away from instant payments just to better secure the transactions.

So as we have seen international peers posting fairly good growth numbers, can you talk a bit about the competitive dynamics and your assessment of the market share development in H1 2026? I don't know if you have something to add compared to what has already been said, Marc?

No, the only thing we can say is that, of course, the market is very dynamic. The market in Europe is super competitive. So our intention is not to compete on the deep discount brokerage side. I don't think there is many space left in Germany, for example, if you want to compete against the flatexDEGIRO or against Robinhood or against the Trade Republic. These are deep discount brokers and their business model is based on very cheap execution. We think that our system is more sophisticated, is to offer a very broad range of products and investments.

And then also to be fair, when you share revenues, for example, if you do securities lending because many of those deep discount brokers they have embedded securities lendings in their regulation and their bylaws. And usually, they do not share the revenue they made with the clients. So for us, we have a different approach. We are targeting in Europe, not the retail segment, but more the mass affluent segment business. And there, we have a very transparent and fair revenue sharing model in securities lending, for example.

I'll group a few questions, Marc. Can you share your thoughts on competition from new products such as perpetual futures, prediction markets? Are prediction markets an area you intend to add into your offering?

Okay. So we're a little bit reluctant on offering prediction market. We think that there is a current loophole in those markets in Europe, but we don't think that this loophole will stay open very long. It's a little bit like a payment for order flow. There was also some kind of a loophole, but then it has been closed by the regulator. I think prediction markets will go in the same direction. So we do not intend to invest strongly in that product. And what was the other product?

Perpetual future?

Oh yes. This is already part of our offering. We do have this not directly with Swissquote internal products, but with products from our partner.

One about AI. Given the targeted AI productivity increase of 2 to 3x in the future. Does this have any implication on workforce going forward?

I think the implication is that the growth will be -- the growth in headcount will be much reduced with what we have seen in the past. So we don't think there are any layoffs. That's not the case. We think that the headcount will still grow but at a slower pace. Of course, if you have 2, 3x the productivity you had before, you could say, okay, you can reduce your headcount. But don't forget, I mean, the competition will also have productivity gains. And simply the entire system will run faster.

I'll give you an example. If you're using AI to reply to an e-mail at a personal level, so just to illustrate with a very simple example. So you think that you're gaining productivity because you can reply faster to incoming e-mails and in different language. But don't forget that on the other side, the one person you send the e-mail to is also using AI. So he may reply to your AI-generated e-mail with another AI-generated e-mail much faster. So it's simply the world will run faster in the future using AI and productivity will be -- the gain in productivity will be normal. Now, where the danger come from is when you're not part of the gain in productivity because then you'll be a lagger and you have the risk of being overrun by competition.

I think we have 5 remaining. We'll try to go fast. Over the last periods, B2B and B2B2C contribute to roughly to half of the net new money flows, while accounting only for around 30% of revenues. How should we think about the revenue yield and the economics of these assets compared to the traditional B2C business? I can take it, yes. I think -- so the B2B2C business model is interesting because it's a diversification. We target self-directed customers with the help of B2B2C customers, we can target customers that may need more support, advisory, wealth management services, et cetera.

So when we partner with the B2B2C, we obviously share a bit of margin that we have, but we can as well attract customers that will not necessarily fit what Swissquote is today. So Swissquote is a digital multi-asset class platform for self-directed customers. But with the B2B2C, they provide the relationship, we provide the technology. We have to share the margin. This is why the contribution to revenues is slightly lower. We have to share this margin, but we attract assets that are as well more interesting and as well that provide probably a higher revenue margin because now the revenue is much more accurate.

The 2 that are a bit more technical, what revenues you make on securities lending? While this is not -- we don't provide the detail, I can tell you it's growing interestingly. In H1 2026, we did the same amount of revenues that we did in the entire 2025. And what we target for 2026 is between CHF 10 million to CHF 15 million revenues in securities lending. Another technical one, cryptos was 4% of net revenues in H1. How much of pretax profit? What I can say is, well, the pretax margin of the crypto business is relatively high. It's not 100%, but it's certainly above 50%. So the impact of these revenues is quite significant, generally speaking, on the pretax profit.

There is one about -- perhaps you can take it, Marc. Could you please talk a bit about more -- about foreign currency designated trading in H1. What proportion of trading is in -- currently cross-border securities? And how does this compare with history? How do you expect it to develop over time? And how should we think about the impact to foreign exchange income?

Okay. That's probably a one that we should answer it through an e-mail. We have to number crunch it a little bit. So who was the question from?

[indiscernible] from Jefferies. I can take it directly in a separate channel. Same for the last one of Manuel Peter from Helvetische Bank that is about the technicalities of the consolidation of Yuh. I invite these 2 people to contact me directly, and I'm very happy to guide them a bit more into details separate to this conference call.

Okay. Very good. Well, this was then the last questions we have received on the system. So again, thank you so much for joining us this morning for this press conference. I wish you a wonderful day. And of course, if you have additional questions, please don't hesitate to join us or to call us directly, either through e-mail or through telephone. With that, I wish you a great day and see you soon.

Good morning here to our Annual 2025 Results Presentation. Here from our headquarter in Glam, we have our CFO, Yvan Cardenas; and myself, Marc Burki. And we will guide you through the presentation that you may follow here live. It's quite an extensive presentation. So we'll try to go swift through the various slides. But of course, at the end, we'll be open for discussions. And also after the press conference, please don't hesitate to call us if you have any questions.

So let's start with our full year 2025 results. So 2025 was an amazing year for Swissquote, the best in our history that follows another best in our history in 2024. So this company is growing at a very strong rate in an environment that is influenced by reducing interest rates, 0 on the Swiss francs, which makes it even -- which makes the results in 2025 even more amazing.

So in a nutshell, what happened in 2025, we realized CHF 723.3 million of revenues. This, of course, is the best results ever. We realized a pretax profit of CHF 420.2 million, also our best results today. We had CHF 8.5 billion of net new monies accumulated in 2025. This also is our best result ever, and we added 506,000 new accounts, which, of course, is also our best results in our history. Now 500,000 new clients needs to be taken with a pins of salt since this incorporates the acquisition of -- the full acquisition of Yuh and therefore, all the clients, the 400,000 clients by the end of 2025 we had in our Neobank.

On the headcount, we added 60 additional staff in our technology stack and more on that in a few slides. The net revenue of CHF 723.3 million, you see here distribution in our revenue segments and also a distribution over time. You see how steady the revenue is growing over the last 6 years from 2019 with CHF 230 million at that time to to more than CHF 720 million in 2025. And you also see that a good distribution in our revenue segments. There is no revenue segment exceeding 30%, and that's a very sound and very solid distribution and also a good base for our growth over the next years.

The net new money is the figure we are most proud of because this proves that we do not only acquire new clients, but they're also using our bank and our financial system. So we had a very strong money inflow in 2025. This is purely organic to be mentioned. So we had similar numbers in the past, but usually, it was with external growth, but this is not the case here in 2025. This really is purely organic. And you see that it's a good distribution from the money between our 2 hotspots, which is Switzerland and Europe with respectively, CHF 4.7 billion and CHF 3.3 billion of net new money. And then we have the Middle East Asia with CHF 400 million and then a little bit smaller number for the rest of the world.

On the number of accounts, we crossed the 1 million accounts threshold in 2025. also for the first time ever with the help of the acquisition of -- the full acquisition of YUH. YUH remember that we -- was a joint venture between Postfinance and Swissquote. We owned, respectively, 50% of that joint venture. midyear 2025, we came to an agreement with Postfinance, and we acquired the remaining 50%, which also created a one-off on our -- in our profit of CHF 50 million. We're coming to that point a little bit later. But of course, it also generated the additional clients in our total number of clients.

And you see here on the right side of the chart, you see the distribution between traditional Swissquote clients in orange and then in blue, the Yuh clients and altogether, we have -- we now have 1.15 million clients. So a strong growth here over the year.

Another number to mention is the average assets per account. This has always been something very strong at Swissquote compared to other online bank or online brokers. So the average assets per client is higher than CHF 100,000 here at CHF 112,000. And you see really the difference between our Neobank where the average assets per account is much smaller, which is absolutely logic and expected here at CHF 9,150. And this is really the idea is that we have a neobank that we use to pay, save and invest, and it's also an entry point to our other services when the client is getting more wealthy and more mature. So we are able to serve a very large range of service for a very large range of clients.

Client assets at CHF 88.7 billion. This also is our best results ever. It has been triggered by good markets in 2025, but of course, also by this increase of CHF 8.5 billion. And you see that the margin on assets is quite stable. We had -- in our forecast, we do have bandwidth between 85 and 95 basis points. And here, with 88, I think we are exactly within our bandwidth. So this is important for us because this shows that we do not only collect assets, but the assets are then also transformed into revenue for our bank.

And the trade Invest Bank, this is for Swissquote, this is what we stand for. We offer services to -- for our clients to e-trading, so to buy and sell financial securities. We're also a bank where you can invest for the longer term your assets. And of course, since a few years now, we have started a transformation. We want to become the prime bank relations with our clients and we had success in that over the past year. This also explains why the net new money has been so strong in 2025.

From a pure growth here, the client assets grew from 2024 to 2025 by 16%, which also is a very good number for Swissquote. If you look at the customer profile, it's interesting to note that Switzerland is really our key market. 56% of our revenue is generated with clients domiciled in Switzerland. And you see here also that the growing importance of Europe with 19%. And on the right side, if you look at the revenue by customer type, so we -- this also is a figure that is quite stable over time. We are a retail bank. The B2C represents 73%, but we now have a decent 1/3 almost of revenue that comes from B2B2C and B2B clients.

The net revenue by asset class on the left side, this also is a chart we're very proud of. It shows that we have a good distribution in revenue by asset class. This is very important because we, of course, are exposed to volatility. And if there is no volatility in an asset class, then, of course, our clients to trade less. But the fact that we are so diversified means also there is always a segment that is more active and where the volatility is different.

To give you an example, currently, of course, the trading in commodities and precious metal is very high. And there, of course, we have a very good offering. Also interesting to note that the structured products and derivative represents now 5% of -- in our revenue segment, and this is the highest number ever. And our turnover at increased from 2% to 3.8%. Now we are the 6th largest bank to trade structured products and derivatives according to statistics from 6, and we were nowhere 3 years ago, and now we are almost in the top 10. We are in the top 10 of all the banks in Switzerland.

On the net revenues by nature, this is also a very important figure for us. We aim to have balanced revenues by nature. So it's not only transaction-based that represents 53%, but the nontransaction-based revenue segment is about half, 47%. This is mainly interest income, custody fees, management fees or securities lending revenues, for example, would apply to this segment. It's very important to have a balanced revenue scheme there as it guarantees and secures revenue for 2026 and the years to come. The headcount did grow in 2025 by 19% compared to 2024.

Now it has to be noted that about 1/3 of that or 25% of that growth is coming from the full integration of you. So the the clients were not counted previously in our headcount and the 62 full-time equivalent we now have through the acquisition of you is, of course, participating to the increase. Now if you have a more precise look, where does the increase in staff mainly come from, it's mainly technology driven. So we hired 16% additional staff in our -- for our staff tech stack and tech team. We now have out of the 1,450 staff, about 500 are in technology team, and you see the distribution here. So this is no surprise. We are coming from the tech sector. We are a bank that believes in technology. And with all the AI revolution coming, we, of course, want to benefit from that changes, and we think that we have a very good system in place to be the one bank in Switzerland that can profit the most from these massive changes that will influence the bank of the future. So we are very well placed for that.

And the Other growth segment here, foreign offices now represents 14% of our total staff. And there also, we had a strong increase. This is driven by the growth we experienced mainly in Europe, where we had quite an increase in number of staff. So this is a tribute to the success of our bank in Luxembourg, but also the other part of the world, mainly the Middle East and Asia are growing at a strong rate, and this explains a little bit our growth of headcount in 2025.

Now the profitability has been incredibly solid. If we start from the CHF 88.7 billion of client assets, we generated a margin of 88 basis points to this CHF 720 million and this generated this CHF 723 million of revenue. And out of the CHF 88.7 billion, 51%, 51 bps transformed directly into pretax profit. 420 million of pretax profit in 2025. Again, here, there is a CHF 50 million of one-off due to the acquisition of Yuh. And this also obviously pushed the pretax profit margin to 58.1%. Otherwise, the pretax profit margin would have been closer to 51%, which is in line with our expectation for 2025. So here also, you see over the last 6 years, the very strong growth in pretax and net profit over the years.

Now speaking about Yud. Growth story of Yuh has been amazing. We have had a growth in number of clients of 40% from 2024 to 2025. That's more than 100,000 new clients, and we expect to grow at the same rate in 2026. And so we expect to be -- to have 0.5 million clients by 0.5 million clients by the end of the year. Yuh has become the #1 regulated online or Neobank in Switzerland, and the growth has been absolutely amazing. The customer profile is different from the one of Swissquote, and this was the aim and the objective of us creating this Neobank. You see we have more Gen Z and millennials in our customer base that represents more -- almost 70% of our client base and to be compared with probably less than 50% at Swissquote.

The distribution ageender is also more positive than the one of -- in our Swissquote clients category since 30% represents our female clients and new, and that also is one of the objectives we had with Yuh. The client assets are growing. We almost added CHF 1 billion net new monies in 2025 and total assets under custody are now at CHF 3.7 billion for 2025. This also compares favorably with other Neobanks, and we are -- among the neobanks, we are the clients with the more -- with the wealthiest clients, if you compare us with other neobanks in the market, you will see that hardly anyone do have an average client asset close to CHF 10,000. It's a very stable number here, around CHF 10,000. And we also see that in the new clients we onboard on average, they are bringing CHF 10,000. So if we grow by the 100,000 new clients in 2026, so we also expect to have CHF 1 billion additional assets that would then bring the total assets to something close to CHF 5 billion by the end of 2026.

The one element we are very proud of, I think it's currently being rolled out. We have created an AI agent embedded into our application. We call it Yuhlia. It's a very nice feature. It handles routine customer requests. You can ask complex questions, you can -- or simple questions. For instance, you can ask how many dividends payments you have received in our investments in Yuh. You can ask how many fast food expenses you have with your credit card. You can ask questions about the specific stock. You can ask questions about your bank account. This is a beta version that we are rolling out, and it's built in-house using, of course, available large language models in the market, more than one actually. And we think that these type of developments are a little bit -- a window into the future of how the bank applications will change.

So if we -- just a few words about AI. So AI, we don't think that AI will change the financial products as such. It will, however, change the way our clients consume financial products, and it also will change the way banks are organized and we expect strong efficiency gains by using AI all across the board in a company such as Swissquote.

The current headcount here, there is no tech team at Yuh. Obviously, it's mainly customer care operations, product and marketing is because the bank account is actually run by Swissquote, where we have the bank license. And so all the banking services and also the tech developments are made in-house at Swissquote and basically Yuh is a marketing organization. And by the way, we are relocating our headquarter of Yuh, which currently is in [indiscernible]. We are reallocating our headquarter to Zurich at the brand-new location. This simply because the majority of our new clients are in the Swiss German part of Switzerland and with a strong concentration in Zurich. So it makes absolutely sense to put our headquarter where our plans are.

I've spoken already a little bit about now the new ecosystem we have with our 2 brands and 2 platforms. If on the scale here from retail to high net worth, we are dealing from very retail clients to mass affluent that is now our very large segment. We start with Yuh or one can start with Yuh as of 14 already, you can have an account with Yuh. And then on average, people are 40 years old. And then on the other side, when you're getting wealthier and a little bit older and have more complex financial needs, then you can use our full bank Swissquote. And you see here on the banking services side on the other scale from brokerage only to full-fledged banking services, we are somewhere in the middle. So we are not the universal bank yet, and we don't think that we should become a universal bank.

However, we offer many bank services and our clients can very well live with having Swissquote as his prime bank relation, and that's a little bit the aim of our strategic mission at Swissquote. So the customer journey is also interesting because we can get the clients in a very young age. They start with Yuh. So the digital natives it's a good entry point for them. It's very attractive, very easy to use. And then while you grow with the ecosystem and while your financial needs expand, then you may use the more complex services of Swissquote.

And of course, between the 2 platforms, Yuh have cross-selling facilities and many of our clients are using both actually. For example, I have an e-trading account at Swissquote, of course, but also a strong user of our Neobank application. Now looking at the balance sheet, CHF 16.1 billion of assets -- total assets at the end of 2025. So this is a growth of 21%. So we added almost CHF 3 billion of assets in our balance sheet at CHF 16.1 billion. So we're not far away from becoming a Category 3 bank. We're not there yet. We're still a Cat 4 bank, but we're getting ready. It should happen at the rate we're growing, it should happen in 2026. So the threshold there is CHF 17 billion. And this, of course, are points were being discussed with FINMA, and we're getting prepared for that change.

Being a Category 3 bank is, of course, a tribute to our growth. We're becoming one of the largest bank in Switzerland. And -- but of course, this comes with strong responsibilities and also more investments in staff and in our organization, but this has been anticipated. We are preparing that step since more than a year already, and we are -- from an organization standpoint now, we are ready to become a Cat 3 bank.

Now why does our balance sheet grow? It's mainly due to customer deposits. Here on the liabilities and total liability side, Yuh see that the growth in Swiss francs has been massive from CHF 5.5 billion to CHF 7.1 billion. We had the same growth in other currencies, which here is a little bit misleading from the fact that we are reporting in Swiss francs and what happens to the euro and U.S. dollar compared to the Swiss franc. So we had growth in all our main currency segments, but of course, reporting it in Switzerland, you may see a drop here, which is explained by that.

So what are we doing with the cash of our clients? Well, a big part is simply at with central banks here, CHF 4.8 billion. We have CHF 660 million in treasury bills and other bills and the CHF 2.5 billion are deposited with other banks. We also have a strong investment securities portfolio that grew by 63% from CHF 3 billion to CHF 4.8 billion. And we also increased our normal loans in 2025 from CHF 1.1 billion to CHF 1.7 billion. This is a strong growth of almost 50%. And this also shows that our clients are active traders. They want to use the system. They think that 2025 will have interesting opportunities and they ask leverage on their deposits with us to be able to benefit from that increased volatility. So it's good news for us on this CHF 1.7 billion because that generates, as you will see later in the slides, decent revenues there.

And that's it here for this slide. Have a look at the various ratios here, 6.7% for the leverage ratios, high above the minimum of 3%. Our liquidity ratio very solid as well, 339%. And the other ratios are also well within the criteria, 226% for the funding ratio and 1.4% for the interest rate risk above the high below the maximum of 15%.

Now looking at the interest rates income distribution, our traditional slides that I comment from left to right. So on the left side, you have this CHF 88.7 billion total assets. 15% of this CHF 88.7 billion are the cash part. This represents CHF 13.4 billion here in the middle. Out of this CHF 13.4 billion, about half, 49% are invested in loans and investment securities. That represents CHF 6.6 billion here on the right, distribution then CHF 1.7 billion in our margin lending portfolio, the longer loans we're giving to our clients and then the investment securities, almost CHF 5 billion.

And you see here the quality of our investments, it's 99% investment grade. And this portfolio generates the revenue, which together with the liquidity portfolio generates a net interest income in 2025 of CHF 217.6 million. So the other part of our assets, so the 51%, again, the liquidity portfolio, that's CHF 6.8 billion here, and you see the distribution in Swiss francs, U.S. dollar and euros mainly. That's the 3 main currencies our clients have. And here, the rates we're earning are, of course, came down compared to 2024, but still generates good revenues in 2025.

And in interest rates -- in a reducing interest rate market, we obviously secured some revenues already by increasing our investment security portfolio. Now this CHF 217.6 million is added to the CHF 505.7 million for other revenues, excluding the net interest income. And then altogether, this makes this CHF 723.3 million record revenue in 2025.

Look on the equity. The equity reached CHF 1.4 billion. Of course, this is the highest number in our history. This is driven by the constant profit we're making since many years now. So we have a Tier 1 ratio now of 25.0% and this is after the payments of the expected payments of our dividend that our Board of Directors has set at CHF 7.40. This is the amount that will be proposed to the general assembly. And if approved by the general assembly, then of course, this will be paid out. This represents about 30% of our profit in 2025. And after payout, the Tier 1 ratio still stays at 25%. The high above the minimum of 11.2% that we still need to have as a -- still a Category 4 bank, it will increase slightly above 20%.

How much? It will increase to 12% once we are becoming a Category 3 bank. And you also see here our distribution -- dividend distribution policy now stable at 30%. We set the 30% as a target in 2023. And since then, we are following our target of 30%.

More to that in the slide here. The questions we sometimes have is why do you keep so much cash in the company? Well, first, we aim to be a bank that is solidly capitalized and with a Tier 1 ratio of 25% is certainly the case. We're among the banks in Switzerland with the highest Tier 1 ratio. And we also have set some kind of targets. We want to grow our excess cash of currently CHF 300 million. This is the cash above our comfort Tier 1 minimum comfort ratio of 18%. Everything above represents about CHF 300 million. And we want to grow that part to 500 million. And once we reach the CHF 500 million, then we will think about higher distribution to our shareholders.

Why do we need to have this pocket of CHF 500 million? First, this is our buffer for additional growth in the future, and we may also do some -- we may also see some inorganic opportunities in the coming year, and we need to have this comfort zone to target opportunities in the future if they may appear. But there are probably also some questions that will come for our CFO.

Now, let's spend some time on to discuss AI. So AI for Swissquote is very important. We started our AI journey a long time ago. So 2 years ago, we started to invest in AI because we could feel that this is a further evolution in a further tech revolution in banking. We at Swissquote are very good at that. We do anticipate revolutions coming. We are born with a revolution. We created our bank when the Internet came to life. That's almost 26 years ago now. And we have been the first Internet bank in Switzerland.

We also have been the first mobile bank in Switzerland. We were among the very first one or the first one in Switzerland to create an app, the Swissquote app, I think it was the first app, financial app in Switzerland. And of course, we want to be the first AI bank, the first intelligent bank in Switzerland. And I would like to spend a little bit of time on that. So what will AI bring to banking? It may not necessarily change the banking products as such. Clients will always buy the same type of financial products. And this, by the way, hasn't changed even with Internet or mobile banking, we still -- our clients are still consuming the same financial products, maybe with the exception of crypto currencies or blockchain that is a little bit special financial products. But otherwise, we're selling the same financial services than the banks did 50 years ago.

However, the way you consume these products have massively changed with technology, and we anticipate a further change in the future. And you see how AI is already influencing the way you're interacting with your service provider, with your bank. The example I mentioned before with Yuhlia, our AI chatbot is a good example. Our clients, we think that in the future, our clients will not only open an app, but they will talk to their bank service, and so you need to get ready for that.

Now -- why do you need to invest to be able to do that? Because first, you need to create the infrastructure. And when you -- when speaking about infrastructure and especially if you're a bank, you need to have a solid governance in place. And so this is what we built since the last 2 years. We created the right governance, the right structure, the right organization. We also invested in staff and resources. We now have in Switzerland, one of the strongest AI stuff that is in place. We invested in hardware solutions. We bought NVIDIA chips. We have 20 H200 NVIDIA chips, for example. We invest in processing powers in data lakes, in big data. So we're getting our infrastructure ready.

And we can do this because we own our technology. That's very important. If you're just a consumer of external developments, then you're dependent -- you're very much dependent on other providers, but this is not the case. At Swissquote, we have our own tech stack, and we have built this multilayer architecture that is enabling us today to build on it and to create our AI environment. And once you have the governance, the AI infrastructure, you also need to make -- to be sure that the workforce you have internally are then using this infrastructure. And we have been very pushy in our teams and across the board at Swissquote that everyone adopts AI at a very fast rate.

But since you're a bank, you can just open up to everyone. You have to be sure that there are guardrails in place and that banking secrecy and confidentiality is guaranteed. And this is also part of our strong infrastructure that we have built. So again, why are we doing all this? Because we think that this is a strategic investment. We think that in the future, if you're not AI ready, then you will not be able to benefit from the increased productivity that now everyone is expecting with -- coming with the AI.

The good news is that we are ready, and we have already first results on the -- I have later on in the slides, I have a few ratios that I can show -- but for example, on the client interaction, so we already discussed about Yuhlia, but also on the customer care, we have AI-driven chatbots. We call it Swissquote GPT. It's a 24/7 available chatbot that is completely independent without human intervention. And later on, I can show some very first results on the success ratio we have there.

On the product side, we have developed a set of tools. You may -- if you are a user of Swissquote, you may have used our daily digest, new sentiments, diverse score. We have snapshots portfolio analysis. So these are the first glimpse of what AI is capable in doing to bring additional tools to our clients. So that's on the client interaction side, but that's just the beginning. We have many developments in place that will be deployed over the next 3 years. We at Swissquote, but the entire industry, I guess, and it's really important that you be at the forefront.

Now since you're a bank, you also need to do transaction monitoring. And there also AI helps a lot into forensic analysis of transactions, especially when you have a Neobank with millions of transactions. Of course, you cannot put a compliance officer behind every transaction and then to have AI forensic capabilities is super important. There, we are working with our internal tool. We have a quantitative research team at Swissquote since years. They also have taken the AI change. And -- but we're also working a lot with external partners. We signed this agreement with IC, a department of DTH in Zurich and where, of course, we use or they use AI applied research to transactions monitoring, and there is a lot of good developments we expect from that partnership.

On the -- and this is the third pillar on the engineering side, I was speaking about being more efficient. The -- our engineers have taken the AI change. Now everyone is using GitHub Copilot on their development tools. We now have 400 GitHub Copilot license. We have [indiscernible] License as well to -- for code generations and code support, and they have later on a very good examples. And you see here the other developments we've made. So Swissquote is absolutely AI ready, and we think that the future will be fascinating from that standpoint.

Here, maybe I promised to give you a short -- small examples of what we did. So we created a new page is called the global sector movers, and this has been completely built with AI. Almost 90% of the code has been generated through AI, mainly with Claude as our AI code generator, and it's just fascinating how fast this goes. And we really expect to have a speedy an increase in time to market and also an increase in the quality of the code generation in the future. So 90%, this is the rate that we are aiming at here.

If you see the -- what we what we have set our priorities in here on the second line in the code generation with AI. So we're expecting a 30% productivity increase in software development already in 2026, in the second year of 2026. So currently, we have probably a productivity increase in the first half of 15%, but the adoption of those new tools goes really fast. We have a very young generation of engineers. They're young in age. They're fresh from school. So they are very eager to use these advanced tools. But we think in the next 2 years, the productivity gain we will have will be higher than 100%.

And on the client interaction side, currently, about 30% of all the clients interactions we have are handled through AI. This will increase to 50%. And we think that over next year, '27, '28, 90% of our interactions with clients will be fully handled by chats and bots and AI agents. Why not 100%? Because some clients have complex structures and there will also be -- always be the need for human agents in the future, but at least the growth in our customer care will not go at the same rate than the growth in our clients. And this is the entire -- this is the idea behind this increased efficiency with AI.

Of course, we also use AI, as I said before, in -- we call it payment intelligence. So the idea here is to monitor payment transactions. So we have 100% -- we aim to have 100% of AI coverage in every transaction. So it means that every transaction will be covered by AI. That's in the second half of 2026. And we also think that in '27 and '28, we'll have AI agent-driven investigation in the payments. So less human interactions means better capabilities, and this is where the play we have with DTH in Zurich and the deal with May comes in place, and it will be a great help to monitor our transactions.

Now that every single instance, you need to have very solid terms in place to analyze and handle those transactions. And of course, we will use the second half to bring new AI-enabled client-facing features, and we have a full set of features for 2027 and 2028, where we will begin to unlock the new products and new services. So guided investments, investment advice, almost automated robot investments in certain securities. So it's the full range of questions there. Of course, this has to be embedded into the regulatory duties. But there, we are very well advanced, and we're discussing with our various regulators about that.

Now guidance of the years to come. So we are in 2026. In 2026, we'll continue to grow the business. It will grow from CHF 723 million to CHF 760 million in revenue here in 2026 is a little bit more challenging year on interest rates, for example, but the market is volatile. So we think that CHF 760 million is a fair potentially a little bit of conservative approach to our revenue and applying our pretax profit margin higher than 50%. We think that we will end the year with a pretax profit of CHF 385 million. So this looks lower than the CHF 420 million we have, but don't forget, we had this one-off of CHF 50 million. But otherwise, it would have been at CHF 370 million.

So from CHF 370 million to CHF 385 million, it will be a further growth in 2026 in a year that is not so easy for, I think, every bank on the planet. Now the -- if you -- how do we compute those revenues here, the CHF 760 million we aim to have. But first of all, we have a fairly good idea of how much new money -- net new monies we will have in 2026. We haven't changed our target of CHF 7 billion net new monies. That's a number we know is solid and the one we can achieve.

We don't know, of course, what the markets will do in 2026, but we assume in our forecast that the markets are stable. This is the way we forecast. And if we add the CHF 7 billion to the CHF 89 billion we already have, we will end up the year 2026 with something which is close to CHF 100 billion. So in fact, CHF 96 billion of total client assets.

And on this, we do apply our margins, and we have 3 segments. We have the crypto assets, interest and securities trading. So there, we do take some assumptions. We think that crypto assets will generate 10 bps on our CHF 96 billion. So -- and will not change with 2025. 2025 was a good year, but not as exceptional as 2024. So this is a reasonable assumption.

On the interest rates, we think that the rates will go down. This is why we do forecast only 20, 21 bps, but of course, based on a higher cash deposits with growing assets. And all the rest will stay stable. We had a good start in 2026, but the geopolitical uncertainty we have. But still, we think that we can achieve something around [indiscernible]. So all this combined will bring us CHF 760 million of revenue in 2026.

Now, we do usually a 3-years plan. The last one was we did in 2022 for 2025. We announced in 2022 that we aim to have CHF 350 million of pretax. Now we have CHF 420 million, CHF 370 million without the one-off. So we exceeded our very ambitious goal we set in 2022. And we have goals that looks a little bit less ambitious, but still ambitious for 2028. We want to achieve CHF 0.5 billion of profit in 2028. we think that the revenue will grow to CHF 950 million. We also think that the pretax margin will grow to 53%. There is leverage in our business, and this means that we'll generate a pretax profit of CHF 500 million.

Now compared with what will happen compared with 2025, this means that more or less we will have CHF 100 million additional costs to our cost base to CHF 450 million, but the revenue will grow by CHF 227 million. So the revenue should grow more than the cost. This is simply because of the leverage in our operations, but also, as we mentioned before, by the use of AI and the efficiency gains we will have in the future. So we haven't changed our forecast CHF 500 million by 2028.

And you know that at Swissquote, we are very good in respecting the guidance and the forecast we set. This has been proven over the last years. We are almost at the end of our presentation. Customer loyalty is always a slide that is interesting to look at. So we had 18% of new clients in 2025. And this 18% growth are representing 8% of new clients assets here. Why only 8% versus the 18% is because it takes time to build up your portfolio, especially if you open your account on the 31st of December, then obviously, you can't contribute yet. And -- but also for the other clients, it's -- you don't bring all the assets upfront. It takes some time to build up.

So there, we know that we have further potential because our clients are happy with our services. And then the distribution of net revenues from the clients we earned in 2025 should also contribute to the business in 2026. The product road map in 2025, I don't think we have time to comment that further, but we are constantly developing our various services. I've mentioned a few already. We do develop our crypto offer. We have developed further developed our SQ Pro. This is our interface for our professional B2B clients, and we are developing our software solutions for many type of clients we have.

And last but not least, here for the specialists and if you want to ask me more questions about our sovereign AI platform, it is also a very nice look at it. Please give me a -- give us a call if you need further information there. Otherwise, you can always meet us in the various meetings we're organizing. We have our General Annual Meeting that will be on May 7. And then we have the various roadshow we have organized with the analysts that are covering our stocks.

At the very end, the key figures as usual, and this would end my presentation. Thank you already for participating this morning. It's a pleasure of having you. And we now will enter the Q&A session. [Operator Instructions] But after the presentation, feel free to call us, we're here for you and to answer your questions.

Now operator, we are ready, please. Let's start the Q&A session.

[Operator Instructions]

Our first question comes from Christiane Holstein from Bank of America.

My first one is on costs. So it did step up a bit in 2025, which was largely on the higher personnel hiring for technology. I know you flagged that it will increase in 2026 by about 6%, I think, and then again in 2028. I was just getting a bit confused on what's driving this additional step-up again. So I was just wondering if you could explain a bit more how you're thinking about this and the moving parts like staff, marketing, AI? And does it also include additional costs for setting up AI and technology?

Then my second question is on the AI road map. So I also understand that the revenue and cost benefits you've spoken about are not included within the midterm guidance, so potentially provides upside. Are you able to provide a bit more detail on how meaningful you're expecting this to be for revenue and operating leverage? And then you also noted AI is an opportunity but also a threat. So just wondering if you could expand a bit more on the threat piece and how you see your AI and tech initiatives versus peers.

Thank you very much. I will give the first 2 questions to Yvan, which is next to me here. And about the threat, yes, it's a threat if you don't embrace AI. That's a little bit the thing. You -- because AI will have a very strong effect on time to market. AI-ready companies will be able to bring faster features on the market and we also have a better cost-income ratio. So in that sense, it's a threat. It's not a threat for us. It's a threat if we don't do AI. I think that was the meaning of that sentence.

For the rest, Yvan?

Yes. So yes, I think the big part of the investment in terms of hirings has been made in 2025. However, as you may have seen, we increased the headcount quite significantly in 2025. So the increase we had, for example, in H2 has not yet impacted the year in full. So we have, I would say, a mathematical increase of expenses linked to the fact that the headcount 1st of January 2026 is 19% higher than the headcount at the beginning of 2025. Adding on that, the fact that now we will as well consolidate the revenues of you for a 12-month period when in 2025, it was as well. It was the case only for 6 months.

So I think there is a bit of like mathematical impact of basically starting the year with a higher base cost compared to 2025. And as well, we have factored a few hirings in the 2026 headcount, not necessarily related to additional investments, but just that as a matter of caution, we have included a few -- still a bit of headcount increase in the 2026 headcount.

On the integration of AI initiatives in the outlook 2025, I mean, I think that as we have not changed the pretax profit target, I think we have certainly in a relatively moderate way, included the benefits of the AI initiatives. I have to say it's still today, if we are very convinced this is the right move to do, and I think we have a track record on being early movers in technology, and this is the case today for AI, it's still very difficult for us to quantify. So we have provided these KPIs in terms of AI adoption in the slides presented by Marc, but we have not changed the pretax profit target. So I would say that there is probably an upside if these initiatives they are delivered on time and they basically are material initiatives.

At the same time, I would say, for us, 2028 is not the end of the journey. So we really focus as well beyond 2028 and our plans or strategic plan, they go beyond 2028. 2028 is sort of an intermediary checkpoint with the market. But obviously, we really focusing as well later than 2028.

The next question comes from Christoph Blieffert from BNP Paribas.

The PFOF ban in Germany is likely to bring some platforms to the market, which might be available for M&A in the months to come. I'm just wondering whether this is the type of assets you're looking at? And more strategically, would you be willing to expand your Neobank approach to other European countries such as Germany organically or via M&A?

The second question is on your 2028 guidance. You're expecting some 10% of '28 revenues to be generated with you, i.e., CHF 95 million. However, we have only increased the guidance by some CHF 50 million. Just curious to understand which other assumptions might have changed.

Okay. So I'll take the first question, and Yvan will take the second one. So yes, we are looking at M&A opportunities, of course, and we have this cash reserve that we could use. Now there's 2 things. The first one is those Neobanks are super expensive out in the market. They have valuations that are very high in the sector, which means us probably if you would be a stand-alone bank, it would be valuated at a much higher price than it's now accounted at Swissquote. However, many of those neobanks are loss-making. And I think we are one of the few in the market that now the second year in a row is able to work profitably. And so it's quite a challenge to integrate a large client base with a new app that you will then need to integrate in your own neobank.

So we're a little bit on the cautious side there. We do have plans actually to go abroad with you. We think it's a superior product compared to other neobanks, you can bring to the market, but you really have to focus on your home market first. You need to consolidate your #1 position. Switzerland has very high growth opportunities.

You have also the the wealth of the clients even for neobank is much higher. This CHF 9,000 you have is probably also something unique in the European market, much higher than everything else you find in Europe. So it would be wrong actually to go immediately outside of Switzerland whenever you still have these growth opportunities here. So to be short, yes, we're looking at things. We haven't seen anything interesting so far because of everything I said and always a little bit cautious in our M&A approach.

Yes. On the other one, Christoph, I think it's a good one. So if you still see the slides in this table, we have provided the incremental revenues that were captured through the acquisition. So Yuh see that in 2025, so basically starting July 2025, we have added revenues of CHF 10 million, thanks to you. I round it to CHF 10 million. Then if you look at the segment reporting disclosure that you find in the annual report, so here, it's what Yuh has added in terms of revenues, keeping in mind that before the acquisition, we had revenues related to Yuh as somehow related related party revenues because Swissquote was invoicing Yuh for the services provided.

Now the related party revenues, they disappear, but we consolidate the entire revenue pool of Yuh. And if you look in the segment reporting disclosure, you see that since the acquisition of Yuh, the end revenues of Yuh, they represented more or less CHF 20 million. So it means that out of CHF 20 million of revenues generated by Yuh, only 10 million were incremental to Swissquote because we will have anyway invoice Yuh for half of the revenues generated because of the services we render. So we added CHF 50 million in the outlook 2028 because part of the revenues of Yuh were already factored in the initial outlook in the way of related party revenues. And Yuh see here that in 2025, that's more or less half of it -- so it means that when we say, well, basically 10% of CHF 950 million, it's CHF 95 million, half of it is roughly CHF 50 million. So this is a bit the rationale.

The next question comes from Oliver Carruthers from Goldman Sachs.

Oliver Carruthers from Goldman Sachs. Two modeling questions for me, please. So firstly, can you outline the cost implications of becoming a category bank, assuming that happens this year? And is this embedded in the CHF 385 million pretax profit guidance you've given for '26? And the second modeling question, you called out higher trading in foreign currency designated products as a notable revenue driver for FY '25 from your clients. This is obviously a phenomenon we're seeing in a lot of markets. Are you able to quantify the positive impact that this had on the 51 basis point margin on assets that you show on Slide 30? And then perhaps what's embedded in the 52 basis points that you guide to for 2026?

So perhaps -- I can take both of them, but I can start with the second one. So yes, what we have mentioned is we had more activity in foreign currency designated products. So what we mean by that is, for example, a Swiss customer with Swiss francs trading U.S. stock. So we had more. I'm afraid we don't disclose that much information, but you can observe that there is a growing trading income. So I think this is a way to confirm this statement. Difficult to comment more, but what I can say is, in general, when I compare to the industry, we have more foreign currency designated trading activity than any peers. But this is something that has a bit increased in 2025.

But to give you an idea, U.S. market is certainly one of the most, if not the most traded stock exchange at Swissquote when we have mainly non-U.S. customers. Cryptos are exclusively traded in USD, again, so I think we have, in general, an important flow of foreign currency designated activity, but it's difficult for me to give you more with the information we have publicly available.

On the Category 3 bank, what I can say is what we expect to be the main change is the change in the minimum capital ratio that will increase from 11.2% to 12%. This is the main change that we expect. From a supervision point of view, what we know and what we have been informed by FINMA is that we have somehow already been considered as a Category 3 from many regulatory aspects. So I will say that in 2025, any additional costs linked to the change of category, they're already in the books. I cannot exclude a few additional costs. But I will say when you see the step-up in terms of headcount, for example, in compliance teams and in general, in the organization, I think we have here an indication that the cost they're already here in 2025.

The next question comes from Daniel Regli from ZKB.

The first question is a bit on the net new money trajectory. And maybe if you could talk a little bit more about the developments in the different markets, particularly in Switzerland, obviously, clearly, H1 was exceptional, but still H2 was kind of only just a bit more than half of H1. So can you maybe explain a bit more what happened and what kind of trends you're seeing also kind of throughout the second half year?

And then my second question is a bit about, if you could give us a little bit a wrap about the competitive situation in both Switzerland and Europe. Do you see or feel any kind of increased competition from your peers? And what does this do to your kind of margin or pricing in these markets?

Yes. Thank you, Daniel, for your questions. I take the second one and then Yvan will take the first one. So yes, competition is very strong in Europe, obviously, in our sector, also in Switzerland, we -- there are many banks that we're competing with. I think we have quite a unique position because we're not a discount broker. That's now our strategy, but we are -- we have a very good ratio between the quality of the service we're rendering and the price the pricing of our services. So even though there are competitors that are cheaper than us, to be fair, we haven't seen a loss in clients to any of our competitors.

I think the clients in Switzerland do value the quality of the service, the fact that you can -- at the very end, if you're not satisfied with the response from the chatbot, you can still call someone and have ask a question in Swiss, German, and that would still work. So competitive environment, yes, we be careful that our pricing and our proposal is competitive to the market. So we are adjusting our prices whenever we think we should.

But so far, so good. The fact also that we have now a neobank in our offering with a price strategy that is more aggressive than the one we have on Swissquote, custody fees, for example, there are no custody fees on the assets you have at Yuh, is also a way to please our clients when they say, well, you're too expensive, they say, well, you could also have an account at Yuh. And so it's quite a balanced offer we have.

Now in Europe, the market is even more competitive than in Switzerland. You know all these 0 brokers and the deep discount brokers that are very active on the Germans, sometimes U.S. providers that are -- have set foot in Europe, Robinhood being a good example for that. But that's absolutely not the segment in which we are. We think we are targeting in Europe a more mass affluent type of clients.

If you look at our client base we have in Luxembourg, it's a client base with higher assets than the one we have in Switzerland. We have on average CHF 250,000 as deposits. But this is a strategic decision we have taken. We think that this segment is underserved in the European market. So high technology good service at a better price than traditional banks, but not trying to compete with Flatex, Robinhood, Trade Republic or other 0 brokers out there. And the strong growth we had in assets in Europe is also attribute to our strategy there.

About the net new money strategy for -- or the explanation between a little bit the drop in H2. I think this is there's some seasonality there. I guess, H1 is usually also a moment when you reorganize your assets, and we always had very good net new monies in the first quarter of the year. So this is a pattern that is not completely unknown to us. And also this CHF 8.5 billion is really very strong. This is not our forecast, by the way, our main forecast is CHF 7 billion for 2026, even though it has been systematically higher over last year.

Yvan?

No, yes, that was what I wanted to emphasize. So I think H2 in comparison to H1 looks weak, but we did CHF 3.3 billion of net new money in H2. Our yearly target is CHF 7 billion. So now it's CHF 3.3 billion compared to CHF 3.5 billion. So we're slightly below. This I agree. But it looks less weak when you compare to the target of management than when you compare to a strong H1. So I think the issue with H2 is we had a strong H1. And what you have as well to take into consideration is FX rates because Swiss franc was quite strong in H2.

So any inflow of USD and euro, when you basically countervalue it in Swiss franc, you lose easily 10% at least. And I think this is what explains the difference between management targets, so the 3.5%, 7% divided by 2 and the actual 3.3%.

I think we have no more questions on the chat -- over the phone, but on the chat, we have a couple of ones. Marc, perhaps I can ask it to you. The one is, can you benefit from clients moving their funds from the Middle East in the context of the war?

Okay. Well, that's an easy one. So we have operations in the Middle East. We have about a team of 40 employees there. They are all well and sound, by the way. So it's -- we're taking care of our people, nothing to report there. And the booking center for most of the assets we have in the Middle East is Switzerland anyway. So we haven't seen any suddenly strong increase because the assets we are gathering in Dubai, for example, are already booked in Switzerland.

Then another one is a bit more technical one. So thank you for the disclosure of the 16% net revenues from ethics and precious metals in 2025 -- can you share the momentum in this from H1 to H2 2025 and also comment on any activity 2026 to date?

I think this one I can take it. So the question is from Eli from UBS. Eli, I think you should look at the segment reporting disclosure where you have quite detailed revenues distribution by asset classes. If you will compare the -- in the eForEx segment, for example, if you compare the revenues we have generated in precious metals in H2 compared to H1, you see a significant increase, I think above 80% increase. So you can see that at the end of 2025, we could already see a pickup in the precious metals activity, as an example, in eForEx. And this is as well something that we indicate in the press release in the text where we say by the end of the year, we could see activity rotating to precious metals.

In the slide, margin on assets, I think we indicate as well that we had a good start, and that's certainly explained by precious metals. The second question is expected -- net revenue margin is expected to fall from 88 basis points in 2025 to 83 basis points in 2026 before then recovery to 90 basis points in 2028.

Can you help us to understand the moving parts driving this shift? So yes, I can provide a bit of color. So there is a drop in revenue margin on assets in 2026 compared to 2025. I think it's mainly explained by the strong growth we had in client assets in 2025. We increased client assets, I think, by 16% in 2025. That's quite significant. And I'm afraid revenues, they may take a bit of time before to adapt to the new volume of client assets. So could it be that the situation ultimately is better, but we always count with a certain delay before additional assets they translate into revenues.

I'm afraid they're not like fully linear and fully correlated. There is always a sort of a period for the revenue margin to adjust, in particular, when you have a significant increase in client assets. For 2028, 90 basis point revenue margin, why do you think it will recover? Basically, this is a margin between 80 to 90 that we have been able to sustain in almost any scenarios or any environment. But as well, what you have to take in mind is we think that the revenue margin will increase from one point of view, with view because before the revenue margin was lower, you see we consolidate more revenues for the same level of assets.

And as well, we have more products and services that are not necessarily related to the client assets. For example, when customers they do payments, when they travel, when they do other products and services, they're not necessarily related to the assets. So this somehow non-assets related revenues will still generate revenues, but therefore, increase the revenue margin on assets. So I think there is as well a transformation effect from our revenues. We see more and more revenues that are not necessarily related to market volatility and therefore, not necessarily related to the level of client assets.

There are a few more, Marc. This one for you. How do you assess the current situation on the crypto market? I know you are very good in predicting the Bitcoin price. Are you already noticing that customers are acting more actively again?

Yes. So well, you've all seen the drop in the value of cryptos in the beginning of the year. It's not 100% clear whether crypto is acting as gold or is moving at the same rate than the dollar is moving or is it moving with the market. What we could see actually is that the Bitcoin found a bottom around around 65%, I guess. Now we are now higher than 70% again. So I think there's a good level for additional regional performance in 2026. So me at the personal level, but that engages only me, Marc burki, I think that the cryptocurrency will see growth in 2026, and we may be even surprised how fast it can go.

Then a few more. I think we have as well people over the phone. I propose we finish the written ones. Can you please provide your rate assumption for CHF in your net interest guidance? So for 2026. So yes, I think on the net interest income, there are various scenarios in front of us that are possible. What we have factored in the net interest income guidance is, I would say, the assumptions of the market before the war in Iran because assumptions are moving now relatively fast. So for example, in USD, we had factored 3 rate cuts. So the news of yesterday is somehow a good news because we had factored a cut yesterday. on euros, we have factored a flat interest rate.

Now market is rather betting for 2 hikes or 1 or 2 hikes, but we think these are assumptions that could move quite quickly. And on the Swiss franc, we assumed flat interest rates, so 0 with potentially Swiss National Bank moving negative at the end of the year. So this is a bit the assumptions we have on the interest rate side of things.

More questions, Marc. I'm trying to find one. ones have been already dealt with. There is one about can you comment on today's price action, minus 4% at the start of the trading. I think things have recovered.

Yes, I think well, first a little bit as a surprise to me as well. I think we are providing very solid results and a very strong forecast in which we believe. It's a difficult day-to-day on the markets in general. We are -- the situation in the Middle East has a strong impact on our market. It also explains the drop of our share price over the last weeks, I guess. So I'm not surprised.

I think it's -- I was a little bit surprised, but I see it recovered since then. I think it's a super good entry point, by the way, with everything we've put in place with the CHF 0.5 billion profit forecast in 2028. It's probably a good entry point. So now we are below most of the price targets of our analysts. So I think it should recover.

And I think we have 2 persons queuing on the phone and then we are done.

We have a question from Rene Locher from ODDO BHF.

Yes. So just on Slide 30, just a confirmation, these crypto revenues, for me, this looks very, very challenging. I mean, when I take average assets in '26, they end up at roughly CHF 92 billion and then 10 bps, this would lead to crypto revenues of CHF 92 million. And when I compare that with 85 million, CHF 81 million, looking at the monthly crypto trading, which is slightly above CHF 1 trillion. Yes, I'm really just wondering how you will end up with the CHF 92 million crypto revenues. So that's the first question.

The second one, quickly again, on costs, I mean, I see a lot of questions. But again, when I'm looking at the cost on an absolute basis, so '24 was CHF 360 million, then up to CHF 350 million, CHF 375 million in 2028, CHF 450 million. And yes, pushbacks I got from clients this morning is that Swissquote is more like a platform. So they wonder a little bit why the cost increase how you outlined in your guidance. And I guess another pushback in this context is earlier guidance 2028 was a pretax margin of 55.6%. Now we are down at 52.6%. So that's minus 300 bps. I guess mainly explained by the new integration. Perhaps you can comment a little bit on this cost issue again.

So Rene, I propose I take the 2 of them. And if you're not satisfied, then I invite Marc to join the discussion. On the Slide 30, and it's really for number conscious. So what we say is in the text, we say we help to deliver results comparable to those of 2025. But then when you compute, you end up with a slightly higher number. So when you read the text, you say, well, Swissquote is going for like CHF 85 million of crypto assets income in 2026. And this is the case.

The thing is when you want to have rounded numbers, will end up with -- 9 basis points will end with a number far too low and then you slightly above what management intends to do. And then we're not willing to start putting 9.5 or 9.75 basis points. So I think you should read the text. So we expect in Swiss francs, the crypto asset income to be exactly the same in 2026 than in 2025. Could be still seen as challenging, but you have to keep in mind that Yuh is providing additional crypto revenues.

And if you go to the Slide 39, you see that Yuh added in 6 months, CHF 4 million of crypto assets income. So if we say that, well, Yuh will add 4 million more in 2026, so in fact, the forecast is CHF 85 million, so the same number than last year, including an additional CHF 4 million of Yuh. So it means that if you more or less compare things being equal, it will be CHF 85 million down to CHF 81 million and not CHF 85 million.

I hope I'm clear, but we can take it separately if needed. On the cost is. On the cost side, so yes, the cost, I think this is why we have emphasized the headcount growth, et cetera, there is this willingness of management to invest. And we discussed about AI. That's one thing. We discussed about Yuh, which is, in my view, another investment, deciding to go for full ownership is an investment. And you see that we have as well hired more people in our foreign subsidiaries. So headcount increased by 90%. But if we exclude these 3 investment drivers, the headcount increase would have been closer to 6%, so much lower.

And I think when -- if you want to quantify the volume of investment that we have made, I think this is what explains the difference between our numbers in 2026 and the consensus. You have more or less the money that Swissquote has decided to invest to capture these opportunities, AI, Yuh building this ecosystem, Swissquote Yuh that is powered by AI. And so this is a bet from Swissquote, but it's not related at all to operating the existing platform is to really look for a brighter future beyond 2028 and not just stopping the story in 2028. I hope this is what I can give you.

And Marc, if he wants to add something.

Yes. What is a little bit difficult in the forecast is to factor in the efficiency gains that we will have through the AI. You could actually see it from 2 angles. The first angle is that, with everything will be so more efficient, the development will be more efficient, so we'll need to have less engineers you will have to -- the growth in customer care agent will almost be nil because now you have this 90% of questions taken from -- through the chatbot. So you don't need to hire anyone there. So this is not easy to forecast.

And to be honest, we didn't do it currently in our cost forecast for 2028. We took it a little bit out of the past to crunch 2028, but there could be a game changer. On the other hand also is that everything could go just faster, like the world may run faster, then the efficiency gains will be there. But at the same time, everything will be just much faster.

I'll give you a small example. I had a friendly told me, "Oh, now I'm using Copilot and Copilot answers about half of my e-mails automatically. So my life will become half better because I don't need to spend so much time on responding to e-mails. But what he forgets is that on the other side, they are also using Copilot. So he will just potentially get double the amount of e-mails than we had previously. So that's a little bit the trade-off. For sure, it will help. Efficiency gains are huge, but the world will run faster. And this goes a little bit back to one of the questions I had before is why do you think AI is also a threat. It is a threat because for those companies who are not able to embrace AI, they will not be able to compete in the coming world. A little bit more.

That's helpful. Perhaps just a quick remark, if I may. So I think share price reaction is perhaps not only about the results. I think it's much more about market sentiment, right? I mean the multiples in your sector, so like the Avanza, Flatex and Robinhood of this world are trading now at much lower multiples. And I guess this is also a little bit of a negative impact you see on your share price. So I guess earnings are okay, but multiples are down quite a lot over the last few weeks. Just a remark.

Yes. Yes, that's No, you're right, you're right. It's a mixed bag of -- it needs more than just a profit to create a price. That's true.

We have a follow-up question from Daniel Regli from ZKB.

I have one last question on your net interest income guidance for '26. And obviously, towards the end of last year, I heard you once say, you expect something more like a flattish net interest income '26 versus '25. Now the new guidance implies kind of a 10% decline. So what has changed in your view on the interest compared to end of last year?

So yes, a comment from my side, Daniel, on interest income. So -- and I here -- I think I will definitely acknowledge there is room for higher net interest income. Again, what we have -- I think I've mentioned before, what were our interest rate assumptions that I think today will be priced differently by the market. And the days we have nowadays are an opportunity for us. So we're trying to capture higher yield, for example, in euro because the market are pricing rather interest rates to increase when our scenario is interest rates will remain stable in euros.

The question is, we don't know how much time it may last. So if this situation may last more than, let's say, a couple of weeks, then I think we're very likely to overdeliver on the interest income. But we decided to stick on these assumptions, and I think I have a rather push personally to stick on these assumptions because now I prefer to overdeliver if the situation lasts a bit longer than underdeliver because the war end up too early compared to my initial forecast. So I think, yes, there are views of the CEO and the CFO. The guidance is a compromise and -- but we definitely acknowledge there could be a bit of upside, but I don't think I have to bet on the end of a war to deliver my forecast.

And there is a last question. I mean, you can take it, Marc, I can take it. Are there any plans to enter prediction markets?

Like poly markets. You've been well known. No, no, this is not -- we're not in the betting industry yet. We don't have plans there. And I think this betting markets, tolling markets are also a little bit controversial to a certain extent because when you see what happened before the war started in the Middle East, your question where the information are coming from. So it's not the plan we have.

Okay. I think we are at the end.

I think we are at the end. Again, thank you very much for joining us this morning. It has been a pleasure hosting this presentation. And of course, we hear the entire day, me and Yvan, if you have additional questions, please don't hesitate to call us. So let's close here. Thank you very much, and see you soon.