flatexDEGIRO Aktie

Thank you for standing by. My name is Kate, and I will be your conference operator today. At this time, I would like to welcome everyone to the flatexDEGIRO Analyst Call Q1 2026. [Operator Instructions]

I would now like to turn the call over to Achim Schreck. Please go ahead.

Good morning, everyone, and many thanks for dialing in. A warm welcome to our analyst call relating our Q1 2026 results, which we published yesterday evening post-market close. My name is Achim Schreck and I'm heading the IR team here at flatexDEGIRO. And with me today, as usual, we have our CEO, Oliver Behrens, as well as our CFO, Dr. Benon Janos who will lead us through today's presentation. We also have with us in the room, Dr. Thomas Lindner, our Global Head of Finance; as well as, of course, my IR colleague, Laura Hecker.

As usual, we would like to provide a short run through the presentation before we open up for your questions. And without any further ado, I'm very pleased to now hand over to Oliver, please go ahead. The floor is yours.

Thank you, Achim. Good morning, everyone, and welcome to the analyst call regarding our Q1 2026 results. Benon will run you through the details of our performance in the first quarter in a moment. I would just like to highlight a few key points. The market in the first quarter remained volatile. Venezuela, Greenland, Iran and Ukraine, the Strait of Hormuz, rocketing oil prices, ceasefires, swinging interest rate expectations and AI fear trades. Given all these events, it is almost surprising that the markets have not been -- not reacted even more strongly.

Our business benefits from customers see opportunities to trade and knowing that they can rely on our platform performing also in fast markets. This is why we saw a 17% increase in settled trades despite already meaningful comps from the previous year's quarter. Customers also continue to entrust us with significant amounts of fresh money. Over EUR 3 billion in the first quarter helping us to also grow our interest income despite the year-on-year decline of interest rates.

The new products and services we put in place last year also helped, albeit to a significantly lesser extent given that we only got started. Crypto trading is now live in all relevant markets and this geographic expansion has driven up traded volumes fivefold year-over-year despite the global crypto market currently not doing all that well.

First, revenues and earnings are also now coming in from our securities lending program, which we only started at the end of last year in the first markets. And finally, in March this year, we also welcomed Hamburg Commercial Bank as the first new and additional client for our deposit as a service business, where deposit volumes are now expected to build up and contribute to our pool of recurring revenues. In fact, we have seen a positive development in all relevant revenue-related KPIs, more customers, higher trading activity, higher commissions per trade, higher cash and margin loan levels, and new products and services delivering on top.

As a result, we have been able to grow our top line by almost 1/5. We also managed to reduce personnel expenses and keep admin expenses in check. Deliberately, we increased our marketing spend substantially in the first quarter particularly in the German and Spanish market. However, if you look at the EUR 21 million we spent and 123,000 new customers we won, the resulting ratio is clearly not satisfied. And we did expect more growth to come out of our marketing activities. In the first 3 months of the year, however, we have noticed that the general marketing spend across the industry has increased strongly, particularly in the German market in the wake of upcoming pension reforms.

The fact that we nevertheless achieved our highest-ever quarterly net income of EUR 54 million shows the strong scalability and potential of our platform. On this solid basis, we will continue to build our success by delivering for our customers and further enhancing our product and service offerings. We have started in the German and Austrian market, introducing stock savings plans at flatex in February 2026. It allows our customers to invest continuously in a selection of up to 1,000 German, European and global stocks, including fractional shares. This way, our customers can build their own diversified basket of stocks and invest in monthly installments of as little as EUR 25.

Our offering is priced attractively, but not coming completely free of commission fees like our ETF savings plans. With stock savings, we are charging a small fee of 1% on the transaction volume.

Towards the end of the year, we will also start rolling out these savings plans at DEGIRO, including ETFs, funds and stocks. These forms of auto investment products are actually not as widespread in many of our international markets, giving us an additional edge to position ourselves as a leading platform for building wealth in Europe.

Long-term wealth building is also the key driver behind the new pension and retirement accounts we will soon see in Germany. The first one will be the early start of retirement accounts or Frühstart-Rente where the German government will incentivize kids between the age of 6 and 18 with a monthly EUR 10 support to start early on the capital market investments to build a financial cushion for retirement. The second one will be the state subsidized pension accounts for everyone. The current draft provides for government subsidies of up to EUR 1,800 per year for investments. We expect the relevant legislation to be passed before the summer recess and to take effect in January 2027.

To be well prepared for both, we are not just working on the products themselves already, but have fully digitized our onboarding process for minor accounts and now put full focus on refreshing the flatex app with a modern facelift and smoother user experience. So as you can see, we are not resting on our laurels. While the start of the year has really been strong, the most challenging comps are still ahead of us. Last April, saw a trading boost driven by Liberation Day and also the month of October had been outstandingly strong last year. For the time being, we would also expect the marketing pressure to stay across the industry.

We feel very comfortable with the full year guidance we have given at the beginning of the year, but I'm mindful of these challenges and uncertainties as well. However, before I get into the outlook for 2026 and 2027, I would like to pass the word to our CFO, Dr. Benon Janos who will quickly run you through the details of our financial performance over the last quarter. Benon, the floor is yours. Thank you.

Thank you, Oliver. And good morning, everyone, from my side as well. Thank you for joining us today. You all had the opportunity to review the presentation and materials we shared yesterday evening after-market close. Therefore, I won't walk through every single slide in full detail today. Instead, I will focus on the key topics and the main drivers behind our Q1 2026 numbers.

Let's turn to our commercial performance on Slide 9. Oliver has already elaborated on customer additions in the first quarter. Settled transactions grew by 17% year-over-year to 22.7 million. This was driven by higher trading activity among our existing customer base benefiting from elevated market volatility during the first quarter.

However, let me also reiterate again what Oliver just said. Last year, we experienced exceptionally strong trading activity in April, particularly around Liberation Day, which resulted in record transaction volumes for us. We also saw an unusually strong October 2025. These were exceptional months driven by specific external events and market volatility spike that are beyond our control. As such, we have not assumed these conditions will repeat fully in 2026, which means we are facing some tougher year-over-year comps. Please note that this is fully reflected in our full year guidance, and we remain confident in delivering on those targets.

Let's move to Slide 11 and net cash inflows. Net cash inflows in Q1 reached EUR 3.1 billion, up 2% year-on-year. While this may appear as modest growth on the surface, I would like to emphasize that we are building on very strong comparables from last year. What's also noteworthy this quarter is the investment behavior of our clients. In the first quarter of this year, 98% of these net cash inflows were reinvested by our customers into securities. This is, again, more in line with our historic average of around 95%. And thus, significantly higher than what we saw in full year 2025, where only approximately 80% of net cash inflows were reinvested.

Roughly 90% of the net cash inflows in Q1 of 2026 came from existing customers. This is also consistent with what we saw in Q1 of 2025. Our existing customers continue to deepen their relationships with us by entrusting us with more of the investment assets.

Now turning to Slide 12. The growth in revenues of 19% year-over-year to EUR 174 million was driven by strong performance across both of our core revenue stream. Commission income increased by 18% to EUR 116 million. The first 3 months of 2026 were characterized by continued market volatility primarily driven by ongoing geopolitical conflicts, hence the resulting impact on global supply chains and economic conditions. Our firm benefited from this environment through a further slight increase in customer trading activity, combined with our customer base expanding by 12% year-over-year, the number of settled transactions grew by 17%. Additionally, average commission per transaction increased slightly. I'll turn to that in a bit.

Interest income rose by 14% to EUR 49 million. This is particularly noteworthy given the lower interest rate environment we are currently in. Let me break down the 3 key growth drivers here. First, customer cash under custody was substantially higher, averaging 41% above Q1 2025 levels throughout the quarter. The higher cash balances enhanced our interest earning capacity. Second, the utilization of margin loans increased by an average of 18% compared to Q1 of 2025. Third, we have intensified our treasury activities actively managing our liquidity to optimize returns. This includes the strategic deployment of excess liquidity into high-quality investment grade bonds, primarily AAA rated where appropriate.

Our treasury book now stands at EUR 1.2 billion, with an average yield of 2.3%. We leveraged higher customer cash balances as well as current rates that went up sharply across the yield curve also on the short end, allowing us to build up the portfolio a bit quicker than previously anticipated. Overall, these 3 positive effects more than compensated for the lower interest rate environment on a year-over-year basis. Remember, we are comparing against Q1 of 2025 when rates started at 3% and declined to 2.5% versus a flat 2% throughout the first quarter of this year.

Commissions per transaction came in at EUR 5.09, up slightly from EUR 5.02 in Q1 of 2025. As a reminder, Q1 typically benefits from connectivity fees, which contributes to the seasonal strength in this metric. Total connectivity fees charged amounted to EUR 6 million in the first quarter.

During Q1 of 2026, we saw a continuing shift from U.S. equities to European equities that started during Q1 of 2025. The share of U.S. exchanges and total trading volume, which has reached peaks of approximately 25% by end of 2024, moderated to around 20% by the end of Q4 and 15% by the end of this past Q1 quarter. However, the average ticket size of U.S. trades continued to rise steadily.

We also benefit from FX conversion on all cross currency trades. For example, when a Swiss or Polish client with German equities in euros like Rheinmetall stock, we capture FX conversion fees on that flow as well. This is, therefore, not limited to U.S. exchanges. So there ma now be room to the upside in U.S. shares trading. And just as a personal remark, it's probably a good sign for the equity culture in Europe when trading takes place mostly in their domestic shares.

Now let me walk you through our operating expenses in more detail. OpEx increased by 13% year-over-year to EUR 63 million. Marketing expenses were the primary driver of the increase. Oliver has already discussed that in his earlier remarks.

While operating expenses showed an absolute increase in total, it's important to note that personnel and administrative expenses stayed flat or even came down year-on-year demonstrating the strong operational leverage in our business model. Let me break down these 2 components in some more detail.

Personnel expenses declined by 10% year-over-year to EUR 29 million, compared to EUR 32 million in Q1 of 2025. This reduction was driven by 2 factors. First, current personnel expenses decreased slightly from EUR 27 million to EUR 26 million as we continue to benefit from efficiency gains and disciplined head count management. However, they are up by 9% quarter-on-quarter given seasonal effect due to short-term incentive payments usually paid out in Q1 of 2026. Moreover, Bulgaria has joined the euro as of the 1st of January 2026, which usually leads to some wage inflation. We do have around 300 colleagues based in Sofia.

Second and more significantly, expenses for long-term variable compensation dropped by 47% from about EUR 5 million to EUR 3 million year-on-year and more than 80% quarter-on-quarter. As we have shared during the fiscal year 2025 analyst call, we intend to mitigate the volatility in our long-term variable compensation expenses caused by the legacy stock appreciation rights or SARs program. We recognize the value of creating greater predictability in our cost structure and would like to remove this fluctuation caused by the start from our P&L. To address this, we are currently planning to offer beneficiaries with vested SARs an early buyback against the premium, and the program is expected to start in early May of 2026.

As mentioned in February, we have already built a corresponding liability for such a premium, which was included in the Q4 2025 expenses for long-term variable compensation with around EUR 1.2 million. We believe personnel expenses for long-term variable compensation component of around EUR 3 million to EUR 4 million per quarter are now a reasonable estimate going forward.

Other admin expenses remained relatively stable at EUR 13 million, compared to EUR 12 million in Q1 of 2025. This stability reflects our continuous focus on operational efficiency and cost discipline.

This brings us to Slide 15 and the bottom line. Net income reached EUR 54 million, up 28% year-over-year, and for the first time in our company's history, exceeding EUR 50 million in a single quarter. This demonstrates the scalability of our business model. Despite significantly higher marketing investments, we were able to expand margins, thanks to strong operational leverage.

Before I close my remarks, I would like to again emphasize the upcoming change in our financial reporting structure driven by the endorsement of IFRS 18. We will adopt these reporting changes voluntarily beginning with our H1 2026 results to provide enhanced transparency and comparability as an early adopter. We have given a sneak preview in February, and we'll give you more information with the half year results. Moreover, in July, we will also host sell-side events on IFRS 18 for our analysts in London and Frankfurt to which you should already have received invitations.

Now I would like to hand back to Oliver, who will walk us to our '26 and '27 guidance. Oliver, over to you.

Thanks so much, Benon. Looking at our guidance for 2026, I can make it quick as we haven't changed it. Our expectation was and is to see an increase in revenues of 5% to 10% this year and a 5% to 15% growth of net income. This would result in an annual revenues of around EUR 600 million and a net income of around EUR 175 million.

In my opening remarks, I already mentioned some caution we will remain on the trading side, driven by current market uncertainties and the high comps of last year. I would also like to point out that we have not changed our assumptions for interest rates at this point. From today's perspective, we believe that also 2027 will be another growth year of flatexDEGIRO, with revenues reaching around EUR 650 million, and the net income to rise to around EUR 200 million.

I would also like to remind everyone that our new product lines, crypto and securities lending will be shown in the P&L on a net basis. For crypto, this will likely be some 30 to 35 basis points on the trade volume and for securities lending, some 20 basis points on the lending volume, which we believe has the midterm potential to grow to around EUR 10 billion of assets held on the DEGIRO platform. But to achieve this, we first have to push forward the geographic expansion into all relevant markets and ensure a high adoption rate among our most significant customers.

Let me stop here and open the floor for your questions on the quarter. Maybe Achim, can you take over again and run us through the process for the Q&A now. Thank you.

Thank you, Oliver. Yes, we are now happy to take your questions. I can see the first 2 ones already in the queue. And may I ask you to please remind everyone of how to pose the question and then start opening the line. Thank you.

[Operator Instructions] Your first question comes from the line of Amit Jagadeesh with UBS.

I've got 2 questions. So firstly, could you just give us any color into the trading sentiment since the end of March? Are there any signs of trading fatigue from the retail customers? Or is it still holding up relatively well for the March levels?

And then secondly, could you help dissect the marketing expense this quarter in more detail. So how much was related to sort of normal marketing customer acquisition costs versus specific targeted marketing in Germany, Spain and then also versus the start of the year campaign, that would be helpful.

Maybe I'll start with the trading activity, and then I can hand over to Oliver on the marketing side. So trading in April is a bit slower than what we had seen last year during the Liberation Day. So not surprisingly, this is pretty much what we expected. So unless something happens in the last week of April, the numbers will be down compared to last year. And I wouldn't go as far as saying that it's trading fatigue. We will have had lower quarters, probably lower months in the past. So April is a solid month, but it's, again, another week to go. So we'll see where the final numbers will end up.

On the marketing side, I think we said already last year, we increased marketing spend by EUR 10 million. I think it's also fair to say that it looks like that the entire market has increased their marketing spend. So the attention levels you get with more spend are lower than if everybody else would have spent less, that's for sure. And that's why we have already lowered our expense basis in recent weeks. The EUR 10 million were intended to be spent in Germany and Spain or in Spain and Germany as focused markets, especially for Germany to reinitiate the recognition of the flatex brands, which we have a little bit ignored for a while during the period of the BaFin findings where it would have not been worthwhile spending the money, and that's why we're initiating especially brand spending in Germany in preparation for the retirement savings accounts.

But we always said we will make some of the expense basis more variable, which is 2 ways, variable compensation for our people and variable expenses, especially marketing expenses. Hopefully, that helps.

Your next question comes from the line of Andrew Lowe with Citi.

Also on the marketing spend. What do you think has been driving? I know you've done a lot in Q1 and the cost of customer acquisition has gone higher, and that you had a lower number of customer adds in the first quarter of this year than you did in the prior year. Do you think that spend is structural? So going forward, as we think about outer years modeling your marketing costs, should we be higher than the EUR 75 to EUR 100 per new customer that you previously guided to? So yes, so that's the main question.

And then I guess, I noticed that you haven't committed to customer numbers going up year-on-year, whereas you previously had that target in your full year results. So could you maybe comment on sort of expectation of customer growth in the remaining 3 quarters of the year and then going into next year as well?

And then the second question, can we just get a little bit more color please on what the revenue contributions in the other income line are sort of how much securities lending, how much from third-party deposits and how that's expected to grow in the coming quarters?

The marketing spend per client. I mean first of all is, as I described in I think most of the calls, the spend is the most in Q1. So the client acquisition cost is the highest in Q1. And that expense line basically slows down during the course of the year and normalizes the customer spend. To be also very clear, if we are spending EUR 46 million on marketing, Trade Republic is probably spending EUR 300 million and Revolut is spending EUR 1 billion. So you always have to put these things into perspective. And awareness level you can create with the spend. So we have to spend our money very wisely to get to these levels. And there could be a benefit if you are not listed because our number is directly visible in the bottom line and has an impact.

And as I mentioned, we are reducing -- have been reducing some of the spend already in recent weeks. We always said we expect customer growth also to be around 10%. I don't know where you took the idea that we are not committing to customer growth. We are committing to customer growth. But it's also the truth that others are spending more money in marketing and that the competition is increasing because there are more and more banks, neos and others have identified this sector for growth. But the reality is also that Europe is still at a low base with penetration rates of between 14% in equity ownerships in Germany, and in the direction of 10-ish percent across the European countries, which has significant growth opportunities overall. And in the long term, relative to more established markets like the U.S.

On other income line, I think we have not changed or maybe as an introductory remark and then Benon will takeover. We said in '27, we expect 5% to 10% in this category. And I think we kicked it off with 5%, and that is still the plan. Over to you, Benon.

Yes, on the breakdown. And the IT-related part is a bit shy of EUR 4 million. The banking-related BPO outsourcing part is EUR 1.5 million roughly. And we also had a release of provisions from last year of around EUR 2 million.

Great. That's really helpful. Can I just clarify that the point on the customer growth. So your full year presentation, you said that the customer growth, which was 13.1% last year, you're expecting that growth rates be higher in 2026, and that line no longer appears in the guidance slide. So that's where that number came from. So is that just a reflection of customer growth in Q1 was maybe lower than you were initially anticipating. Hence, the sort of drop of that commitment? Or do you still expect customer growth to be above the 13.1% that you did last year?

Andrew, Achim speaking here. As you correctly summarized here, of course, we still do expect further customer growth. We still expect it to be at least 10% on an annual basis. But given that we have now seen in the first quarter, which is typically the strongest one seasonally also for customer growth that we were slightly below what we had achieved in 2025. We just believe it would be a bit too bold to still guide for an overall increase now over last year, i.e., fully catching this up. Please also note that we are not including in that assumption, any potential pension accounts that might be opened already ahead of the start of the pension plan or pension reform in Germany in January 2027.

So of course, we are aiming for opening up these types of accounts already in the fourth quarter, allowing people to already create these accounts and become customers of ours. But I think in all fairness, these customers, at least for the beginning will be very different from the usual customers we have when it comes to trading activity and monetization. So that's not included in that number here.

Your next question comes from the line of Christoph Greulich with Berenberg.

It's 3 from my side, please, if I may. Firstly, on the interest income. I was just wondering if there has been any meaningful intra monthly moves in the cash deposits number that we couldn't see in the month and KPIs that might have affected the interest income generation for the quarter? And then also on the treasury portfolio, do you have a specific target size that you want to reach, relative to the overall amount of excess liquidity, minus the margin loans. I think you mentioned at the full year results presentation, you want to exceed EUR 1 billion. Now you mentioned you're already at EUR 1.2 billion. Just wondering if there is a clear target where that should go?

And then secondly, on the other operating income line, just a follow-up with regard to the BPO income. I think you mentioned in the press release that you have been compensated for some start-up costs with regards to your -- the launch with the new first -- your first new customer. Can you just clarify on the revenue model there? Is that purely a basis point fee? Or are there also some kind of effort or cost based income -- some income, which just means that when you launch with a new customer, there might be a temporary boost to that income?

And then lastly, I was wondering on the regulatory side. If we kind of -- there's a lot of focus on Germany at the moment with the pension reform, but there are also things happening in other European countries. I think Poland, Ireland and Spain. There are some debates now about some potential regulatory changes similar to the ones in Germany. So just wondering if you could give me some comments where you see other interesting opportunities happening in Europe that you might increasingly focus on the coming year?

Thank you, Christoph. I'll start with the first question. Interest income and intra-monthly moves on the deposits side, no, we didn't really see anything. It's a pretty normal intra-month development with normal seasonality kicking in after a strong Q1 and there's not a whole lot to say other than the reinvestment levels into securities are different to last year. I mentioned that when I made the introduction. So this year looks like more normal compared to the previous years. Last year was a bit of an outlier. On the treasury portfolio, maybe I'll hand over to Oliver.

Yes. Look, as Benon mentioned, the cash has gone up last year at 45% or so, yes. And it remains at an elevated level, which is around, what, 6%, 6.5% of total assets on the platform if you include the cash. And you have to minus the margin loans, which stands around EUR 1.4 billion or so, which makes it a net of EUR 5 billion and the -- we indicated this EUR 1 billion, but this number looks at the moment, at least pretty stable. The bonds are between 1 and 3 years duration of high-quality, AAA and around that in our -- from our major markets like Germany, the Netherlands and Austria, or the other way around and limited other high-quality names, which could then lead to what, 20% to 30% of a range, but we haven't published any range target.

Let's not forget the yield curve was pricing in at the beginning of the year a yield cut from the ECB by 25 basis points in May. People tend to have forgotten this. Now the yield curve is pricing in 2 to 3 rate hikes. We are trying to smoothen the volatility of our interest rate revenues. And this number of EUR 6 billion looks pretty stable at the moment, because it's an average a small amount, which for most clients is not worthwhile moving to other platforms also. They are buying with bigger cash positions than overnight money market funds and which we offer.

On the business process outsourcing, there is in terms of revenue model. There has been a set-up fee, which is in the -- which basically covers the cost, as Benon indicated in his speech. And we converted those revenues into basis points model. The basis point model is an inverted price curve. You put more money on the platform, you pay a lower price. You put a lot of volume for the last euro, so to speak, on the platform, you pay less. So there is an alignment of interest in terms of encouragement of those business process outsourcing partners to put more on the platform at a lower price to also move money on our platform from other platforms and so on. And we are intending to build this out. This is the third client then.

We are also changing the pricing with the existing clients from unit pricing to basis point pricing. And we are committed to this meaningful number of 5 plus percent of revenues in '27. But let's not forget, somebody starts new in February or March, the volume needs to build up over time. So on the European opportunity, there is a positive and negative. We have to participate in the local retirement schemes, which might be comparable to the German -- was already -- or which we need to deal with our shifting approach from the Netherlands DEGIRO platform. That will take us into '27.

At the same time, as indicated for the end of '26, we are planning to offer stock savings plans and mutual fund savings plans across the countries, which will not have an earnings impact in '26, but should contribute to significant rise of transaction volume in '27. But should also contribute to a lower revenue per trade because these transactions might be lower volume as a current equity transaction volumes. But nevertheless, this plays exactly into the retail investment strategy, which came from Ursula von der Leyen from the EU to encourage all European countries to offer these savings plans. And we believe that our offer will be attractive and will be priced at very low levels, which will be interesting for investors to participate with small amounts and monthly installments to save on our platform. Will that make sense. Hopefully, that has answered your 4 or 5 questions.

[Operator Instructions] I would now like to turn the call over to Achim Schreck for closing remarks.

Thank you very much. Thank you all for participating in today's call and your good questions. As always, if you have any follow-up questions, Laura and I are available to answer anything you might still want to add on it. With that, thank you very much for today's participation. Have a great day. Goodbye.

Thank you.

Ladies and gentlemen, that concludes today's call. Thank you for joining. You may now disconnect.

Good afternoon, everyone. We hope you're well. Thank you very much for joining us today, and a warm welcome to our presentation of the preliminary results 2025 and our update on our strategic priorities, which we first introduced last year.

My name is Achim Schreck. I'm heading the IR department here at flatexDEGIRO. But before we get started, let me briefly address a few housekeeping items. First of all, it's my pleasure to welcome today's speakers, our CEO, Oliver Behrens; as well as our CFO, Dr. Benon Janos.

We will start today's presentation with some few opening remarks by Oliver, after which Benon will present a more detailed overview of our preliminary full year results and also highlight some key developments in the fourth quarter that will surely be helpful to better understand our underlying performance in the last quarter. Afterwards, Oliver will return to provide an update on our key strategic priorities as we had them presented exactly one year ago, the same space.

As some of you might know, the newly endorsed accounting standard, IFRS 18 will come into effect in January 2027, having some minor implications on how our P&L will be structured, and we will use the opportunity today to just give you a glimpse into what to expect on this side, which again, will be done by Benon. We will conclude today's presentation before we then go into our Q&A with an outlook on 2026 and our guidance as well as the latest capital allocation policy, which we provided last week to the market as well. After those remarks, as I said, we're looking forward to taking your questions as we speak.

As you can see, we have a rather full agenda today. So, therefore, without any further ado, I would very much like to hand over to you, Oliver, now, with your introductory remarks. Please go ahead.

Thanks a lot, Achim. And also a very warm welcome from my side. Thank you all for joining today. Before we go into all the details of our commercial and financial performance of 2025, allow me to spend two minutes on the bigger picture.

Global stock markets have been pretty volatile in 2025 and pretty they have been for us indeed, as our business model typically benefits from these kinds of market swings. Our operational and financial performance has, therefore, exceeded our initial expectations significantly. It has not just been the trading activity of our customers that went up a bit, it was also strong customer growth and high net cash inflows onto our platform, particularly in the first four months of the year.

For me, as a CEO, what is more important, though, are the things we control ourselves and quite successfully did so in 2025. In the context of fast markets in early April, trading volumes on some days increased by fivefold. Many online brokerage platforms in Germany and across Europe were not able to hand this load properly. flatex and DEGIRO, however, stayed performant for our customers the whole time. This is not something we achieved just on those days. It is a result of diligent work and platform building we have done for years, and we continue doing. I will touch on the topic later in my presentation.

We are also proud that the first major product rollouts we have brought to the market over the last 12 months. After the crypto start at flatex Germany, we have brought it to all our major markets. We have started securities lending program in the Netherlands and Spain in October 2025 and have since added Italy and Switzerland. And our first new business process outsourcing customer is about to go live in March, i.e., providing another German bank with a full technical and banking solution to attract retail deposits.

We are also already in full swing when it comes to new initiatives in 2026 with a clear focus on the German market, but not forgetting our DEGIRO business either. So, in a positive market environment, we have shown good performance and have done our homework, but that must not make us complacent. There's a lot more we have to and will do. The strengthened focus on the German market is one element. The completion of the already started product rollouts as well as some new ones is another.

The use of new technologies such as AI requires full focus. Used in the right way, AI can become a massive enabler of our execution-only business. For many retail clients, it has the potential to significant lower the barrier between I think I should do something for my financial future, and I know what to do. And I'm doing it now. And there are, of course, plenty of other areas such as efficiency gains and enhanced customer features one can see clear benefits in. And lastly, we are operating in markets that have clear potential for further consolidation, growth and bolt-on acquisitions to further strengthen our existing business.

All this we have factored in when we provided our new capital allocation policy last week. We are a growth company, and this is also where we will put our focus when it comes to capital allocation. Our strong cash flows nevertheless allow for a substantial increase of our annual dividend payments without harming this growth. I am absolutely certain there's a lot more growth coming our way.

But for the moment, let me close my introductory remarks here and hand over to Benon to first present our preliminary 2025 results. Thank you. Over to you, Benon.

Thank you, Oliver. Good afternoon, everyone, also from my side. Thank you very much for dialing in to today's presentation, and a warm welcome from me as well. I am pleased to present flatexDEGIRO's preliminary results for the full year 2025, which mark another milestone in our growth trajectory. Please note that these figures are still preliminary. The full and audited annual report 2025 will be published on March 26. In the interest of time and to keep the focus on the key messages, we will not cover every slide that was uploaded this morning in full detail.

Now let me briefly walk you through our commercial performance in the fourth quarter of 2025, which closed the year on a notably resilient footing. Starting with customer additions, we saw 104,000 customer additions in Q4, slightly above Q3 and broadly consistent with our expectations for a more normalized run rate after the strong start to the year.

Turning to assets under custody. We continued to see strong momentum throughout the year, reaching EUR 95.5 billion at the end of December. The progress over the course of 2025 was driven by a combination of steady net inflows and constructive market performance, both of which contributed meaningfully to the year-end step-up. This ongoing growth confirms the strength of our franchise. Trading activity picked up meaningfully towards year-end. Q4 reached 20.2 million transactions, representing a solid 14% sequential increase and a 20% improvement versus Q4 of last year, which was already a strong quarter that benefited from higher trading activity around the U.S. presidential elections. The uplift in trades was especially driven by an unusually strong October.

Turning to Slide 8. We ended the year with 3.5 million customer accounts, representing a double-digit increase of 13% year-on-year. Growth remained consistently strong throughout the year with a seasonally strong January and a strong April driven by Liberation Day. However, despite some peaks, 2025 showed an overall steady pattern. This reflects a structurally high level of brand awareness and a proven ability to attract new clients independent of any short-term volatility spikes. On an annual view, customer additions accelerated versus the prior year, reaching 446,000 for the full year. Overall, 2025 was another year of robust customer expansion, forming a strong foundation for future revenue generation. Our customer base continued to expand steadily throughout the year, surpassing 3.5 million accounts by December ' 25. Over the past three years, we have added more than 1 million customers, consistently delivering double-digit annual growth. The mix between flatex and DEGIRO remains stable with flatex contributing around 25% of total accounts.

Let me turn to settled transactions where we saw a clear uplift across both brands throughout 2025, supported by our growing customer base and periods of elevated market volatility. The strongest months were March, April and October, which contributed meaningfully to the overall rise in transactions. Settled transactions increased to 75.3 million in 2025, up from 63 million the year before, which is a 19% year-on-year increase. Both flatex and DEGIRO contributed to this growth with solid engagement across all major markets.

Turning to trading activity per customer. We continue to see a healthy pattern across both brands. Quarterly activity levels show an overall upward tendency throughout 2025. As expected, trading intensity remains higher at flatex due to the demographic profile of those customers, but the underlying trend is consistent across both platforms, flatex and DEGIRO. On the right-hand side, you can see that annual trading activity increased slightly to 23 trades per customer in 2025, up from 22 in the prior two years. This reflects the combination of a growing customer base and the resilient level of engagement helped by increased market volatility.

Let me now turn to our active customer base on Slide 12. We have now exceeded 1 million active customers, which is a key milestone for us. As you can see on the chart, activity levels have remained broadly stable over the past three years with the share of active customers within a quarter holding steady at around 31%. This stability is important, particularly given the significant expansion of our total customer base over the same period. Looking ahead, we see clear opportunities to further increase customer activity rates. We are expanding our product offering to give customers more reasons to engage with the platform on a regular basis, complemented by targeted financial education initiatives that help users build confidence in navigating capital markets. At the same time, we continue to invest in technology, enhancing analytics, improving usability and personalizing the customer experience. Together, these measures are designed to activate a broader share of our customer base and support more consistent trading behavior over time.

Let me now touch on assets under custody, where we continue to see very solid momentum over recent months. Starting with securities under custody, balances increased steadily throughout 2025, reaching EUR 89.3 billion at year-end. This represents a strong uplift compared to December 2024, supported by both ongoing net inflows and a constructive market environment. On the cash side, we also saw meaningful growth with customer cash balances rising strongly to EUR 6.2 billion by December 2025, up 45% from EUR 4.3 billion in December 2024. This strong growth has surpassed our initial expectations and is one of the main contributors to our resilient interest income line year-over-year.

Turning to monthly net cash inflows on Slide 14. We saw an exceptional start to 2025. From January throughout April, inflows were significantly above normal seasonal patterns with several months close or even above the EUR 1 billion mark. This strong momentum began already in late 2024 following the U.S. election in October, which led to heightened market engagement and clearly overlaid the typical seasonal slowdown we usually see in the fourth quarter, especially in December. The elevated inflows continued into the first months of 2025, peaking in April around Liberation Day when customer activity was particularly strong. Importantly, January '26 again started with well above EUR 1 billion of net cash inflows. Overall, the pattern underscores the continued trust customers place in our platform. In 2025, 79% of these inflows were invested into securities.

Now turning to Slide 15. You can see that for the full year 2025, net cash inflows reached EUR 8.1 billion, representing a 22% year-on-year growth. This development was driven by three key factors. First, we benefited from a positive market environment, which started to build in October '24 and continued into the first month of '25, supporting higher customer engagement and increased investing activity. Second, customer growth remained an important driver. New customers again accounted for roughly 40% of total net cash inflows, very similar to the patterns we saw in 2023 and 2024. This shows that the growth in our customer base continues to translate into fresh liquidity coming onto the platform. Third, we saw a further increase in inflows from existing customers. On average, annual net cash inflows per existing customer rose to around EUR 1,600 with around half of this, about EUR 800 per customer per year coming from recurring investments and savings plans. This demonstrates the growing stickiness and long-term engagement of our customer base.

Let's first finalize the full revenue picture before we discuss costs and earnings. As usual, we portray our revenue split in the past quarter on Slide 16. In Q4, revenues grew by 18% year-on-year. Commission income increased strongly by 31% year-on-year, which is mostly attributable to a continuously growing customer base, an increase in trading activity and higher commissions per transactions. I'll turn to that in a minute. Commission income saw a clear quarter-on-quarter increase of 17%, driven primarily by an exceptionally strong October, which was one of the strongest months we ever had according to number of trades. Trading activity in that month was well above normal levels, supported by elevated market volatility. Transactions in October '25 amounted to 8.4 million trades. Despite a lower interest rate environment compared to last year, interest income remained stable year-on-year and even increased by 7% quarter-on-quarter. Higher amounts of cash under custody, a growing average margin loan book as well as our more active treasury strategy compensated for lower interest rate levels from ECB.

Moving on to the next slide. In fiscal year 2025, we achieved record revenues of EUR 560 million, representing 17% year-over-year growth. This strong performance was driven by two key dynamics in our revenue composition. First, commission income grew by an impressive 31% year-over-year, reflecting both increased trading activity and improved monetization across our platforms. Second, our interest income line demonstrated greater resilience than we initially anticipated, declining only 4% year-over-year despite the lower interest rate environment, as I mentioned earlier.

One encouraging trend in '25 was the continued improvement in our average commission per transaction, which reached EUR 4.90, which is a 9% increase compared to 2024. This improvement was driven by two primary factors. First, our product mix benefited from the introduction of cryptocurrency trading, which carries higher average commission rates given the basis point fee model. Second, we saw increased volumes in cross-currency trades, especially U.S. trades, where we charge a 25 basis points FX fee, contributing positively to our commissions per trade.

I'll provide further details on the next two slides. Over the past three years, we have grown our average commission per transaction from EUR 4.13 in 2023 to EUR 4.90 in 2025. This demonstrates our ability to enhance monetization while maintaining our competitive positioning as a low-cost broker.

Turning to geographic trading patterns. We saw substantial growth in U.S. exchange activity during 2025. A quick reminder. This is mostly driven by our DEGIRO customers as many of our U.S. trades at flatex are rather done at local exchanges in euros. The volume of stocks traded at U.S. exchanges increased significantly throughout the year, reaching a peak of approximately EUR 6 billion in monthly volumes during October of 2025. The higher volumes and larger trade sizes at U.S. exchanges contributed to our commission income growth, particularly given the cross-currency FX fees on these transactions that I mentioned before.

As you can see on the next slide, we observed this trend despite a continuing shift from U.S. equities to European equities that started during Q1 of 2025. The share of U.S. exchanges and total trading volume, which had reached peaks of approximately 25% by the end of '24, moderated to around 15% in early '25 and stood around the 20 percentage line in the second half of 2025. This shift reflected clients' increased focus on European equities during that period. Total trading volumes remained robust throughout this transition, demonstrating the diversification benefits of our pan-European platform with Global Markets access. We also benefit from FX conversion on all cross-currency trades. For example, when a Swiss or Polish client trades German equities in euros, we capture FX conversion fees on that flow as well. This is, therefore, not limited to U.S. exchanges.

Now let's focus on interest income, our second most important revenue stream after commission income. Let me address the underlying fundamentals of our interest income generation, which continued to strengthen. Our cash under custody has nearly doubled over the past three years, growing from EUR 3.5 billion to over EUR 6 billion currently. This reflects both our customer acquisition success and increasing trust from existing clients who are consolidating assets onto our platform. Our margin loan book has similarly benefited from ongoing customer growth and broader utilization of margin loans by our clients. The margin loan book now stands at approximately EUR 1.44 billion at the end of January '26. This is providing a stable and high-margin revenue stream to us. These fundamentals are critical to understanding our interest income resilience. While rates have declined, the growing asset base has partially offset the impact from lower rates, which is why our interest income declined only 4% year-over-year rather than falling proportionally with ECB rate cuts.

Now let's turn to Slide 22. In the second half of '25, we initiated more active treasury management activities while maintaining our risk-averse foundation. Let me walk you through our current cash deployment strategy. Of our approximately EUR 6.2 billion in cash under custody, roughly EUR 1.3 billion supported our margin loan book as of December '25, while our treasury book has grown to around EUR 1 billion. Thereof, EUR 250 million to EUR 300 million is held in bonds as collateral for settlement and custody purposes at short-term maturities. Secondly, we have made additional investments into high-quality investment-grade bonds, primarily AAA-rated securities to enhance yield while maintaining a conservative risk profile. This more active treasury approach implemented in the second half of '25 contributed positively to our interest income line in the second half of the year. We expect this treasury book to grow beyond EUR 1 billion in '26, which I'll discuss further when we cover our guidance for 2026. Of the remaining cash under custody, we keep most of the funds overnight with the German Bundesbank.

After a thorough review of our top line, let's move on to costs and earnings. On this slide, we have portrayed our different cost items and their development over the past years. Let me dive a bit deeper into the different drivers for each cost item. Overall, our operating expenses demonstrate disciplined cost management while we continue to scale the business. Operating expenses remained relatively stable at EUR 213 million in 2025, with only a small increase of 2.5% versus 2024. Personnel expenses increased from EUR 116 million in '24 to EUR 127 million in 2025. Our current personnel expenses actually decreased from EUR 108 million to EUR 104 million in '25, reflecting our continued efficiency focus with some headcount reductions we have performed over the last months. The overall increase was driven by expenses for long-term variable compensation, which rose from EUR 7.5 million to EUR 23 million in 2025. This EUR 15.5 million increase was primarily driven by valuation effects, particularly related to our expiring stock appreciation rights plan. This virtual plan is closed for new issuances. No new grants have been issued in this plan in fiscal year '24 or '25.

The long-term variable compensation impact was particularly pronounced in the fourth quarter, where we recorded EUR 14 million in expenses compared to EUR 3 million in the fourth quarter of 2024. It is important to note that most of this increase is directly tied to our positive performance and future earnings per share outlook within the stock appreciation rights plan. The valuation of these instruments is linked to our share price and EPS, which appreciated significantly during the year. Looking ahead, we would very much like to mitigate the volatility in our personnel costs caused by this historic LTI tool. We recognize the value of creating greater predictability in our cost structure and would like to remove this fluctuation caused by the SARs plan from our financial profit and loss statement.

To address this, we are actively exploring potential options such as offering beneficiaries with vested stock appreciation rights and early buyback against the premium. The discussions on this matter are still ongoing, and we have not yet worked through all the details. However, in order to be prepared for such a potential offer, we have already built a corresponding liability for such a premium, which is included in the Q4 2025 expense for long-term variable compensation with around EUR 1.2 million. We'll keep you updated as we progress on these efforts.

Marketing expenses increased slightly to EUR 34 million in 2025, which posts an increase of 8% compared to 2024. There are some effects to take into account for Q4, which I'll explain on the next slide. On the other hand, other admin expenses decreased significantly from EUR 61 million to EUR 52 million, a strong reduction of 15%. The increase in previous years was mainly attributable to higher IT costs as well as higher professional services, legal and consulting costs. They were partly related to projects in connection with regulatory requirements. Therefore, our key focus for '25 was on reducing expenses for professional services, legal and consultancy fees, which we have successfully done.

Also here are some effects in Q4 to take into consideration on the next slide. On Slide 24, let me provide additional details on the quarterly cost progression in Q4 of '25, which showed some elevated expenses. Personnel expenses in Q4 totaled EUR 38 million with EUR 24 million in current expenses and EUR 14 million in long-term variable compensation. As I mentioned a couple of minutes ago, the increase in long-term variable compensation was driven by valuation effects, particularly in relation to the expiring stock appreciation rights plan resulting from the positive future outlook reflected in a significant increase in the share price and EPS expectations of flatexDEGIRO. Marketing expenses in Q4 amounted to EUR 9 million, which included approximately EUR 2 million in production costs for our start of year '26 campaign. Administrative expenses were EUR 16 million in Q4, including approximately EUR 1.5 million in legal provisions.

A final remark on the admin cost line. We actually made the promise during our Q3 2024 earnings call that we would reduce the admin costs by up to EUR 10 million in 2025. We can now close the case with a reported reduction of EUR 9 million. Excluding the beforementioned legal provision in Q4, we would have been spot on with a reduction of around EUR 10 million.

Now moving on to our profitability. The strength of our earnings profile is evident in our quarterly EBITDA and net income progression throughout 2025. EBITDA ranged between EUR 63 million and EUR 69 million across all 4 quarters. Compared to Q4 2024, we delivered a 32% EBITDA growth. Net income showed similar consistency, ranging between EUR 39 million and EUR 42 million in the four quarters of 2025. For Q4 specifically, net income reached EUR 40 million, representing a 54% increase compared to the fourth quarter of 2024.

For the full year 2025, our profitability metrics reached new records that underscore our operational leverage. EBITDA crossed the EUR 250 million threshold for the first time, reaching EUR 268 million, a substantial increase from prior years. Our EBITDA margin expanded to 48% compared to 42% in 2024 and 36% in 2023. This margin expansion reflects both revenue growth and our disciplined cost management. Net income reached EUR 160 million, coming in at the top end of our upgraded guidance range. Our net income margin improved to 29% from 23% in 2024 and just 18% in 2023. These profitability improvements demonstrate the scalability of our platform. As we've grown revenues by 43% from 2023 to 2025, our net income has grown by 123% over the same period.

Before we close the chapter for our preliminary 2025 results, let's see how we have performed versus our 2025 guidance. Our execution throughout 2025 was strong, which led to two guidance upgrades during the year. We started in February of '25 with an initial guidance of revenues between EUR 455 million and EUR 505 million and net income between EUR 106 million and EUR 123 million. As trading activity remained very robust, supported by heightened market volatility and interest income proved more resilient than expected, we upgraded guidance twice, first in July and then again in October. Our final results of EUR 560 million in revenues and EUR 160 million in net income represents 17% revenue growth and 44% net income growth year-over-year. Therefore, we delivered at or above the upper end of our revised guidance range. In short, more trades and a higher idle cash position were the two main drivers for the guidance upgrades. The consistent outperformance reflects not only favorable market conditions, but also our operational execution, product innovation and the quality of our client acquisition and engagement strategies.

Now I'm very pleased to hand back to Oliver, who will walk you through our updated strategic priorities for the next years. Over to you, Oliver.

Thank you, Benon. There is clearly a lot we have achieved in the last business year already and more to come in 2026 and beyond. When we look at our strategic priorities, we mainly think in three categories: increasing efficiency, growing the existing business and adding to it with additional product and service offerings. We are a growth company. And while we achieve this growth by further expanding our customer base, strengthening our existing offering and launching new products, the fundamental basis for economic success is a secure, scalable and efficient platform. It is literally the starting block for our growth strategy.

So let me start right here with my update. As a reminder, when we acquired DEGIRO back in 2020, we had started the harmonization of our IT platform and linked to it our process landscape. However, due to a shift in focus related to the BaFin audit, it was on hold for a while and only really got restarted towards the end of 2024. That doesn't mean, however, that nothing has been done so far, not at all. Now not all of the important milestones might be directly visible to the outside world, but indirectly very much so.

In my opening remarks, I referred to platform stability and performance around Liberation Day as one example. Performance also plays an important role in daily operations for a platform of our size with 3.5 million customers doing hundreds of thousands of bookings and savings plan executions and tax processings every single day. This example shows that the platform harmonization by no means is an IT-only thing. It is a core enabler for our operations. This is also why we brought IT -- the leadership of our COO, Jens Mobitz. The harmonized platform and process landscape is also the basis for enhancing our customer service to which I'll come in a second. And new products like savings plans for DEGIRO, which we will roll out later this year are already built on the future target operating model.

So, what does this target operating model look like? Our aim is clearly to have one unified, highly scalable core banking and trading platform that can equally serve multiple brands across all geographies. It will allow us to release new functionalities and new products faster and in a more streamlined process, which should result in lower internal costs as well.

To get to this future state is not a straight line as we are not standing still either. On the one hand side, you have business requirements that need to be incorporated along the way, for example, our recent and upcoming product launches. On the other hand side, there are new technical capabilities such as AI that both help you to build a more efficient platform and at the same time, form a new set of requirements of their own in regards to future integration.

The formula for an online brokerage platform like ours to improve operational efficiency is quite simple. Once you have established a performant and scalable platform, you add new businesses while keeping your cost in check. You can clearly see this scalability in our P&L. Revenues up 17% and net income up 44%, i.e., our bottom line grew 2.5x faster than our top line. And both we achieved with a workforce that was actually 5% smaller year-on-year.

Let me pause here for a second for some few general remarks on an important topic I have briefly touched now once or twice. Artificial intelligence, which clearly is a big buzzword right now, and there has been quite some noise around it in the last few weeks. As an execution-only brokerage platform, which doesn't offer any investment advice, let alone charge for it, none of our business lines is threatened by AI. There are no material revenues or earnings it could take away from us.

What AI can do, however, is bring us both revenues and earnings if we use it the right way. I already touched upon internal efficiency gains, so bringing down our relative cost of doing business when it comes to our platform and programming in general. There are, of course, also many ideas and internal discussions how we could best enhance our product offering with new AI-based features and capabilities. But I don't want to fantasize about things that might come, rather focus on the ones that will come at flatexDEGIRO, which are actually right at the junction of internal efficiency and an external user experience, which is customer service.

High-quality support is a key strength of DEGIRO, differentiating us strongly against low budget peers. We will not just keep this strength, but build on it with AI. Today, we have approximately 150 colleagues in customer service, answering all types of customer questions via phone and e-mail. And our customers highly value being able to speak to a real person if need be.

With the introduction of AI-based tools, we want to achieve three things. First, we want to free our colleagues from some standard tasks and questions so that they can spend more time on personally supporting customers in more complex matters. Simply put, if you've lost your login credentials, you don't need a human guide to guide you through the standard procedure for resetting your password. You can simply do this online. But you should do it if the transfer of your securities accounts to us isn't going through and you're left out in the rain with a few useless chatbot messages from the outgoing broker. Second, the more we grow our customer base and the more active customers we have, the higher the workload of our customer service centers, especially during peak times. Smart use of technology can help to mitigate some of the additional load and ensure we maintain a lean organizational structure while growing our business at the same time. And finally, this will also be our starting point for better data usage and analysis. The ability of AI to capture and analyze large amounts of data, detect patterns and derive recommendations for future actions is undisputed.

So, in summary, with the use of AI in our customer service, we want to improve the experience for customers contacting us, prepare customer service for future growth without having to scale up teams at the same magnitude and enable more effective and targeted customer communication, all of this while maintaining our personal customer support. And we get all of this for relatively small expenses.

Now when I say that customers appreciate our service and our offering in general, this isn't just my biased view. It is backed by over 50 awards that flatex and DEGIRO have won again in 2025. As you can see, as Germans, we love to give awards and each relevant media outlet does some kind of a broker award from Borse Online to WirtschaftsWoche, which explains a certain overhang on the flatex side. But in summary, in each and every relevant market, we have again been top of the list when it comes to awarding the best online brokerage platforms. These recognitions obviously, are most important for us in our key markets, helping us to stand out in the market and further grow our local customer base.

In the Netherlands, we meanwhile have more than 1 million customers on a total population of some 18 million people. A similar market share across all of the EU and the U.K. would mean a flatexDEGIRO customer base of about 25 million. I'm not saying that we will get there anytime soon, but it illustrates well the significant potential we still have in other markets, such as Germany, for instance. To tap into this potential, we have to get closer to local markets and adjust our marketing approach accordingly. This is what we will do in 2026 in Germany.

Germany is by far the most competitive market in Europe and one that we have neglected a bit over the last two years. flatex has a strong positioning in the market, but our offering and our brand have always received the attention they deserve. In 2026, we want to start to change this. On the product side, we have already fully digitized our onboarding process to open accounts for miners. While we already offer accounts for miners for almost 20 years, they recently gotten the spotlight again in the context of the German pension reform and the so-called Fruhstart-Rente, which is planned German government subsidy program designed to help children and teenagers begin building private retirement savings early in life.

We have also already added more than 1,000 stocks to our savings plan offering in Germany, allowing our customers to regularly invest in fractional shares and thereby build something like their own individual equity fund from as little as EUR 25. More new products and a facelift to our flatex app will follow later this year. We will accompany this push on the product side with a strong targeted marketing campaign.

Some examples you see here on the slide. Across all major markets, financial literacy has significant room for improvement, to say it mildly. Maybe in the not-too-distant future, AI will take on the role as a connector between people who see the need to take the financial future in their own hands, but don't know where to start and online brokerage platforms like ours. But for the time being, we have made a priority to drive financial education ourselves using a multitude of different formats at both brands.

Before I hand back to Benon for some financial education, on International Financial Reporting Standards and the outlook for 2026, let me finish off by giving you the status update on the three major product initiatives we have kicked off last year, crypto, securities lending and Deposits-as-a-Service as well as one new one to come.

We have launched crypto trading 14 months ago at flatex in Germany. And once all our partners had received their MiCA license, started the international rollout in August 2025. This step-by-step geographical expansion is also visible in the quarterly volumes traded in crypto on our platform. Q1 and Q2 was Germany only. In Q3, we added Austria in August, the Netherlands, France and Spain. And in September, finally, in October, we completed the rollout to all major euro markets by adding Italy, Portugal, Ireland and Greece. In total, about EUR 1 billion worth of crypto assets have been traded at flatex and DEGIRO, resulting in close to EUR 4 million in revenues, not a bad result for the year of launch. So far, 2% of our customer base has made use of our crypto offering, a number we would expect to rise in 2026 despite the currently, let's say, rather muted euphoria when it comes to Bitcoin and co.

Of course, like any other platform offering crypto, we see customers being rather reluctant to trade in crypto in the current environment. But a, that doesn't concern us based on the small impact crypto has on our financial performance so far; and b, quite likely the mood will change again at some point in time in the future.

Securities lending. The second big product launch -- product we have launched in 2025 is securities lending. We have started in the Netherlands and Spain and meanwhile, extended our offering to Switzerland and Italy as well, but we are still in early days. In the medium term, we believe that up to EUR 10 billion of DEGIRO assets could be used for securities lending with probably around 20 basis points of net revenue potential for us. So after deducting costs and 50-50 profit sharing with our customers. Currently, we are at around 10% of potential assets. Still, we believe that like crypto, also securities lending will be able to deliver EUR 3 million to EUR 4 million of net revenues in its first full year. 2026, that is, maybe more.

As you know, for regulatory reasons, our focus on securities lending is currently firmly on the DEGIRO brand. So this makes it a good segue into the new product initiative I mentioned earlier, namely savings plans at DEGIRO. Different from Germany and Austria, where flatex customers make active use of savings plans to invest recurring amounts on a monthly basis into ETF funds and stock. Now such an offering doesn't exist yet at DEGIRO. There surely are customers who manually replicated monthly orders mimicking their own savings plan, but the potential to attract significantly higher regular own inflows with a convenient and automated process is very high. From the end of 2026 on, DEGIRO customers will benefit from the same comprehensive savings plan universe already available at flatex, including around 2,000 ETFs and over 1,000 stocks.

I then come to the last new product launch, one that is not related to our online brokerage business, but to our legacy as a technology and Banking-as-a-Service provider, business process outsourcing or as we call it internally, deposits as a service. As a reminder, in this business, we are providing a full-fledged outsourcing service to third-party banks that are looking to attract retail deposits without having to build the whole infrastructure, services and teams themselves.

Deposits-as-a-Service is actually a long-standing business of ours with a proven track record and two long-term customers who currently have some EUR 8 billion of retail deposits acquired through our services. These deposits, just to be clear, don't end up on our balance sheet, so they don't require any of our own regulatory capital, which with rising market demand, we decided last year to expand this business line in order to create a meaningful flow of recurring revenues medium term. I am happy to announce that the first new customer in Deposits-as-a-Service business is about to go live in March 2026.

As the official launch communication from our partner bank will only go out in March, I would ask for your understanding that we cannot reveal the name today either. However, it shows two things: our ability to build a tailor-made solution for sophisticated bank partners within a few months of time and that there is an actual market demand for a solution like ours, which is unmatched in the market. I have to add to that CRD VI regulation is also playing in our hands.

Our target is to provide such a deposit solution to one to two partner banks every year, thereby continuously adding to the recurring revenues generated in form of some basis points on the deposits. The full revenue potential will thus clearly depend on the target deposit volume of our partner banks as well as the ramp-up speed of these deposits coming in. We would, however, expect to increase our revenues in this newly strengthened business line by up to EUR 10 million in 2027, which would result in a tripling of the currently achieved approximately EUR 5 million of annual revenues.

After crypto securities lending and savings plans, this was the last major product launch I wanted to highlight before I now hand back to Benon, who will inform you about the next evolution of our P&L structure as well as where you will then find the financial contributions of these new products going forward.

Benon, over to you again. Thank you.

Thanks a lot, Oliver, for your explanations. Before discussing our 2026 guidance, I want to walk you through a major upcoming change in our financial reporting structure. This change is driven by the endorsement of IFRS 18 two weeks ago, which will change the presentation and disclosure in financial statements for all companies. The new standard becomes mandatory for fiscal year 2027. We are currently evaluating the possibility to adopt these reporting changes voluntarily beginning with our H1 2026 results to provide enhanced transparency and comparability as an early adopter.

But let me already now take a minute to highlight the expected upcoming key changes to our revenue reporting structure under IFRS 18 using our 2025 results as the baseline for illustration. Those are still preliminary thoughts, and it may change, but this is the best we have for now.

We will continue to report total revenues, which were EUR 560 million in 2025 for reference and comparability purposes until 2027. Also, our guidance for 2026 is based on total revenues. However, we'll provide additional granularity on the revenue composition. For commission income, which totaled EUR 369 million gross in '25, we'll separate between transaction-related commission income and other commission income. Transaction-related commissions of EUR 350 million will form the new basis for our commission per trade metric and will include cryptocurrency commissions on a net basis. Other commission income of EUR 19 million includes items like connectivity fees and revenues from securities lending.

There is an important change to highlight. Under our new structure, securities lending revenues will be reported on a net basis and therefore, reflecting only flatex, not the portion attributed to. This actually differs from our previous thoughts. Importantly, this has, of course, no impact on our net income or profitability. It simply provides greater transparency and appropriate accounting treatment. After deducting commission expenses of EUR 60 million, we will show our net commission income that was EUR 309 million in 2025.

For interest income, we will also present a separate line item for net interest income, or NII, which is a standard metric commonly used across the banking sector in accordance with IFRS 18. Our gross interest income of EUR 173 million, less interest expenses of EUR 8 million resulted in an NII of EUR 166 million. Other operating income, which includes our revenues from our business process outsourcing business, contributing approximately EUR 7 million. Under this new structure, our net revenues for 2025 would have been EUR 481 million. This represents the true economic value we capture after direct revenue-related costs. The expense side of our profit and loss statement will maintain similar categories with enhanced clarity. There will be no meaningful changes to the reporting of our OpEx cost lines. Importantly, we will be dropping EBITDA as a defined line item going forward under IFRS 18 and effectively replace it by the much more suited operating profit or loss as an important yardstick.

As we prepare for the adoption on IFRS 18, either for July 1, 2026 or January 1 of '27, we will give you a more detailed walk-through upon implementation. We hope this early look at our IFRS 18 thoughts gives you helpful clarity and that you appreciate the transparency we are providing ahead of the formal transition. Our current EBIT line for 2025 is very close to the operating profit or loss line under IFRS 18.

Now let me turn to our outlook for fiscal year '26 and the key assumptions underpinning our guidance. As we have already disclosed with last week's ad hoc notification for fiscal year '26, we are guiding for revenues of EUR 588 million to EUR 616 million, representing 5% to 10% growth year-over-year. We expect net income to arrive in a range of EUR 168 million to EUR 184 million, representing 5% to 15% growth. While our guidance is based on revenues and net income only, you also find on this chart some key assumptions that we have taken in order to arrive at these numbers.

Let me now walk through the key assumptions across our revenue and cost components. On commission income, we expect growth driven by several factors. Customer growth is expected to exceed '25 levels as we continue our market penetration, particularly in Germany. However, we are assuming trading activity will be somewhat below 2025 as 2025 benefited from elevated market volatility. We expect stable commissions per trade in '26. Our commission income should benefit from higher contributions from new products such as crypto trading and securities lending, albeit from a low base. Moreover, we'll see additional BPO revenues from client onboardings in 2026.

For our interest income line, we expect slight growth despite rate headwinds. Average cash levels should grow slightly below customer growth rates. Our margin loan book is expected to remain stable. We plan to expand our treasury book to exceed EUR 1 billion during 2026. This should also help a bit in compensating the lower average expected ECB rate of 2% in '26 versus 2.23% in 2025. We expect our cost base to increase modestly. Current personnel expenses will rise due to wage inflation and the impact of Bulgaria joining the euro area as of January '26, but this will be more than offset by a significant reduction in long-term variable compensation. Marketing is budgeted to increase by approximately EUR 10 million, focused primarily on the German market. Administrative expenses should remain stable year-on-year. This guidance reflects our confidence in continued growth while acknowledging a potentially more normalized trading environment.

Looking at our assumptions, some of you may view them as conservative, especially our expectation that trading activity will remain 2025 levels with commissions per trade holding steady. But there is a reason why we take this approach. Staying prudent and conservative has served us well in the past, and we would like to keep it that way. We have seen firsthand how quickly markets can shift direction and how rapidly operating conditions can change. This is rather about maintaining the credibility and reliability that our stakeholders have come to expect from us. And we are, of course, also reiterating our 2027 guidance to achieve EUR 650 million in revenues and EUR 200 million in net income by the end of 2027.

This concludes my section of the presentation. Thank you. I'll now hand over to Oliver, who will take you through our capital allocation framework.

Thank you, Benon. Let me close today's presentation with a few words on the new capital allocation policy we have published last week. As we have stated many times before, flatexDEGIRO is a growth company, and our focus will continue to lie on the growing of our operating business to tap into the vast potential of our European markets and to scale the profitability of our business. However, as you can see on this chart, we expect our most relevant regulatory capital ratios, the total capital ratio as well as the leverage ratio, both to increase noticeably once the 2025 profits will be recognized as regulatory capital after our AGM in June 2026, and that is already after a potential dividend of 20%. It is therefore clear that the operating performance and the strong cash generation of our business allow us to recalibrate the balance between growth, financial flexibility and stability as well as shareholder returns.

In essence, our new capital allocation policy can be read as follows: it remains our top priority to organically grow our existing business and to establish flatexDEGIRO as a leading platform for building wealth. This can also include growing beyond today's product and service offering. As we are operating in highly fragmented European market, we additionally want to maintain sufficient firepower to be able to act swiftly in case of opportunities arising.

Based on our financial forecast and capital planning for the next few years, we believe that we can entertain such an ambitious growth strategy strongly, while at the same time, going one step further in regards to shareholder distribution. This is why the Management Board and the Supervisory Board of flatexDEGIRO have agreed on a future target dividend payout of 20% of annual net income of the group, applied on our 2025 profits of approximately EUR 160 million, this will result in a dividend payment of approximately EUR 32 million or EUR 0.30 a share, up sevenfold from the low EUR 0.04 per share we paid out in the last two years. Further share buybacks are currently not concretely planned, but our capital allocation policy would also allow us for opportunistic decisions here in case of potential market opportunities. As you know, we still have an existing AGM authorization that will allow us to buy back another 7% of the share capital until June 2029.

But I want to close the presentation by reiterating that we are a growth company and that we are well on track to successfully scale our operations across Europe. We operate in growing markets in which we aim for further market share gains by strengthening our existing offering as well as by launching new products and services. The scalability and profitability of our platform provides us with significant funds to reinvest in our operations. potentially take an active role in consolidating the European brokerage market and to further strengthen our positioning with growth and bolt-on acquisitions. Achieving these ambitious goals will not be a walk in the park, but it will be possible if we keep our eyes on the road and continue to do our homework properly.

Many thanks for your attention. I hope Benon and I have been able to give you a good overview of flatexDEGIRO's development in the last business year and our strategic road map. However, we, of course, also wanted to give you the opportunity to ask any additional questions you might have on these topics.

Maybe Achim, from here, you take over again and run us through the process for the Q&A now. Thank you for your attention.

Thank you, Oliver. Thank you, Benon, as well. We are happy now to take your questions, and I would very much like to hand over to the moderator to start the Q&A process where I see that the first questions are already lined up.

The first question comes from Marina Massuti from Morgan Stanley.

The first question that I had is around the potential new tax regime on the capital gains in the Netherlands. I understand that there is still a fair amount of ambiguity on the potential outcome from those proposed changes and that there has been some pushback. But yes, and if ultimately, if it gets approved, it will be long dated, but curious to hear your views on this recent proposal? And how should we think about, yes, any potential implications for your business, if any?

Okay. Thank you, Marina, for your question. Obviously, that question is all over the press and people are thinking about it, what does it mean. But at the same time, it is on the horizon of 2028. And we would say in German, these things usually don't get eaten with the same heat they get cooked, which means along the journey, potentially things change.

And then secondly, the retirement schemes in the Netherlands are not affected from this tax. My personal view would also be that it is very difficult to tax capital gains that have not been executed or not been realized and exclude capital losses. So, and I think the comments from the Finance Ministry were exactly in that direction. So, yes, we shouldn't ignore it, but most likely, things might change along the journey. If that makes sense.

Overall, I would say the tax authorities have empty pockets and they have an appetite for more revenues. That's for sure, given the debt to GDP ratios across Europe.

Okay. Great. And then a question on the business. So for '26, you're guiding for customer growth accelerating from the current level, so from the 13%. Could you give a bit more color on the drivers, especially if this acceleration is mainly coming from Germany and for the rest of the markets like, for instance, Netherlands and Spain and Austria, so very strong growth. So are you expecting a similar growth rate for this year? Or do you also expect other geographies to pick up in terms of customer growth?

Thank you again for your second question, Marina. So as you probably saw from the forecast, we are spending EUR 10 million more on marketing. So we are increasing the budget. And usually, the increase of the marketing budget also corresponds with client growth. There's a special focus on two countries, which is Spain and Germany. At the same time, we maintain the same effort as last year, slightly up for the remaining countries. It is important to get a significant market share, as explained in the example of the Netherlands. I think the client base in the Netherlands has, in the meantime, reached about 1.1 million customers and is continuing to grow. The bigger you are in a certain country, the easier the grow until you have reached a certain level. And you basically build a little bit of a fortress per country if you have the right offering, and that is the aim here.

So we expect the customer growth to be at the same level moving forward because the penetration rate across Europe is still at a low level compared to, let's say, a more equity-minded markets like the U.S. Across Europe, you have equity ownership, which is in the 10-ish percent across the countries. In the U.S., we have 65%. So we see massive continued growth opportunity going forward. Hopefully, that's answers your question.

The next question comes from Christiane Holstein from Bank of America.

I was hoping just to ask a little bit more about guidance. So, firstly, on 2026 guidance, you said you have expectations for stable commission per trade. I just sort of thought that this would be likely to increase given there's higher offshore trading and you anticipate a ramp-up in crypto, which is also higher margin. So just wondering what's driving your expectations here?

Then also on your guidance for lower transaction activity per client. Again, activity has just been quite strong year-to-date. You have new products which are driving engagement, and you're also taking quite a few steps to take advantage of the Germany opportunity. So, just again, wondering what is driving your expectations for a decline here?

And then my second question is just on 2027 guidance. So given you've upgraded 2025 twice and still beat especially on the top line. And then you also seem to have stronger customer growth guidance rather than the original just greater than 10%, but you have kept 2027 unchanged. So just wondering if you could please provide some more detail on your thinking here.

Yes. Maybe I'll start with your first question on the commission per trade. Historically, we have not guided to an upward trend on the commissions per trade in the last three years, and then we delivered on them. So I totally understand the question. However, we continue to be prudent. We will be introducing ETF savings plans at DEGIRO that might take a hit on those numbers. So we feel fine with the number for now. But as you very clearly said, there are a lot of building blocks that should help in actually bringing it up. But particularly the introduction of ETF savings at DEGIRO might likewise also bring them down a little bit.

On the activity per client, yes, we took a reduction of roughly 5%. 2 months are done. The two months have been pretty okay. However, there are still 10 months to come, and we are running against a pretty tough year-on-year comparison in April and in October. And it's simply a prudent buffer that we built into the projections in light of those super strong months that we have seen last year.

And frankly, it's a similar answer to your third question on the '27 guidance. If you look at the span that we covered with our guidance, that's a three-year span. 1/3 of that is done. Clearly, if everything would stay as it is, if the volatility levels would stay as it is, which very likely they not, then it would be easy to take a look at that. But we don't know what the next two years will bring. We don't even know what the last 10 years of this month will bring. And therefore, we decided it's a prudent and good conservative idea to just stick to that for now.

I think when we -- maybe to add to that, when we took on the forecast until '27 early last year, I think we took a heavy step in terms of doubling profits over three years. And we've been on a good path to get there. Let's see how the year evolves. And so far, we've been underpromising and overdelivering that has served us well. Let's see how far we get.

The next question comes from Andrew Lowe from Citi.

Can we dig into the net interest income guidance, which seems really quite conservative. Can you just explain to me why you're only guiding for slight growth when your deposit levels are currently up 22% versus the average from 2025. And then in addition, you said that the average cash levels are going to grow from here as your customer grows, but not as much as your customer growth, but still there is growth. So can you -- I appreciate that there is some negative effects from lower rates, but the assumptions that you've used seem to be sort of in line with expectations in the market. So can you maybe just on the volume side, just really explain this to me because it just seems excessively conservative.

I'm happy to start to answer the question. If you look what happened on our platform last year, our deposits grew effectively 45%, and we did not see that coming. It's just one of the things that happen in market dynamics that we -- it's really hard for us to control. We also experienced in the year '25, a phenomenon which we have not seen in the last couple of years in that clients left way more money sitting idle in their accounts versus prior years. And we don't have a good explanation as to why that was. Maybe they were preparing for market opportunities. But we knew that it's a good sign and it's a strength of our platform that fresh money is brought in.

There certainly can be a scenario when clients maybe after market correction, decide to reenter the market, and we may have an investment rate, which is higher than what actually comes into our platform. So there's certainly the theoretical possibility that our cash levels may even drop despite a success in our business. And if you combine all the different scenarios that could happen, the weighted average is basically what we came up with. And I copy what I said before, if the trends prevail until the end of the year, then it should be okay to beat that.

But we have also seen in the last. two months, a pretty stable development. So the asset base has not grown. And you mentioned already the fact that we are still in a year-on-year comparison a little bit against the headwind of the ECB being much higher at the beginning of last year. So that's our thought process that went into this line.

Yes. Also, we don't speculate on these numbers. We take the ECB forecast on the rates. But as Benon mentioned, there's two other risks. One is the SPA payment, instant payment has been introduced in Germany as you can wire your money from the platforms immediately to other platforms. There are more and more players entering the market, especially on the deposit side, especially on term deposits.

JPMorgan Chase will open around Easter with potentially very aggressive rates. BBVA entered last year the market with a 3% offering, so 100 basis points above ECB rate to gain some share. I think it's just prudent to continue to take it as this. The clients could also develop a more active approach and buy overnight money market funds, then they earn the interest rate and we don't. So we think it's the right way to continue with our approach.

Got it. That's very helpful. Can I just ask also on the sort of margin loan book? You said that's stable. You previously talked about that increasing. So I'm just wondering why that's expected to only be stable.

We don't know what's going to happen on the interest rate levels on the book. The nominal value should continue to rise, but there might be the need to potentially make an adjustment on the interest rate side, which equals out to the statement we've made. But for the first two months of this year '26, the development has been actually quite nice on the book.

The next question comes from [ Zach Wurz ] from Autonomous Research.

I have two, please. First is on securities lending. So on the up to EUR 10 billion of relevant AUC, I think you called that a medium-term potential. I'm just thinking through the ramp-up and revenue potential here, particularly this year. How do you expect the stock of AUC, the relevant stock of AUC to develop between now and year-end 2026?

And then the second question is on the new treasury management system. You previously spoke of somewhere between 15 and 20 basis points of yield enhancement, I think, once it's fully rolled out. Is that still the right type of number to think about? And can you help us with how much of that is sort of baked in already versus how much is still to come earlier this year?

Thank you for your question, Zach. The sec lending side, as we said, for 2027, we are thinking that the EUR 10 billion is a realistic number and 20 basis points would be the revenues. That is obviously building up because every client has to sign up that he or she or the family wants to participate in sec lending. And obviously, it's a little bit more complicated process. Basically, you have to talk to the most relevant clients that have the relevant assets that are -- where the market has an appetite for borrowing them. And that is basically happening as we speak. At the same time, we don't want to be in the box of investment advice. So that balance we have to strike. That's why the buildup is probably a little bit slower than anticipated.

And also, when you look at the different markets across Europe, at the moment, we can only start on the DEGIRO platform because of different tax regimes and different opt-in or opt-out regimes. Otherwise, our potential would be guided higher. And these different tax regimes make a little bit more complicated, for example, in France, where we take a very, very conservative approach. I think in our guidance, we put EUR 3 million to EUR 4 million this year. And for 2027, it gets closer to the EUR 20 million mark. Maybe later, Benon wants to add something to that.

On the treasury side, it is true that we think it's somewhere between 15 and 20 basis points. When you look at the different opportunities in the market, the repo market is pretty -- offers pretty nothing in additional returns. And we want to keep a very conservative investment approach. At the moment, we only invested in AAA and AA names, which obviously have a tight spread. But given the fact that spreads in credit markets are all-time low and at the same time, government debt is at all-time high, not in terms of spreads, but in terms of debt to GDP, we feel it's better to be prudent at the moment not to make unnecessary speculations with our clients' money. And that's why this 15 to 20 basis points based on this EUR 1 billion or above would be the contribution to additional rates.

At the same time, the duration is slightly longer. So we have, let's say, an average of, let's say, close to two years of duration in that portfolio. So, in case there's a rate drop by the ECB, maybe in May, some people are saying it will be 25 basis points cut in May, it will buffer our interest rate sensitivity on the downside, which is a positive. So, on the other hand, if rates drop, maybe it has a positive impact on markets going up further, who knows. But directionally, it is deemed to balance this out. And the treasury system will help us once opportunities arise, either in the swap market and the repo market and so on to capture them. In the past, we could only put the money at the ECB overnight rate, which, of course, is conservative, but doesn't necessarily give us the right counterbalance to our business. Hopefully, that answers your question in a satisfactory way.

The next question comes from Christoph Greulich from Berenberg.

It's three from my side, please. Firstly, regarding the pension reform in Germany and the expected introduction of the tax-efficient investment accounts as of January 2027. As far as I understand, single stocks are not eligible in those accounts. So it seems most likely that this will be mainly for ETF investments. So it just puts a question mark on the monetization of those investments and trades. And I was wondering if you have any plan or strategy in place, how you might be able to better monetize your clients trading in ETF.

And then secondly, I was wondering for the business process outsourcing, if you could give us some idea of the pricing model here, a rough indication of the basis points you're planning to charge on the deposits. And I was also wondering if you are switching for the existing clients to a basis point model or if you keep the old pricing there?

And then just lastly, you flagged a legal provision in the other OpEx line in Q4. Just wondering what was the reason for that?

A lot of questions. So the others -- should I start? Is that okay?

Yes, yes. Of course.

So the others follow log account retirement, savings opportunity in Germany, we believe that's a 10 million new account opportunity. Who knows how quickly that will unfold. My expectations or our expectation is also that the government will decide upon this in July before the summer break. Then rules and regulations will be clear. I think they will also cover how much add-on you can do savings in the minor accounts. So if grandpa and grandma want to help the ankle to save something for their education. So that makes it then clearer to really calibrate what the savings are.

The question which I still have and what we discuss here is, is this an online or offline selling product because for the first time, you have to think about can I really save for like 45 years until I retire, what do I do when I die beforehand, who will take my will and so on. It's a little bit more complicated than just signing up for ETF savings plan. For us, to prepare for that on the flatex platform is easier because we already have ETF and equity types of savings plans. The -- that's why it's so essential as we indicated that we have the savings plan on the DEGIRO platform as well because most of the other countries also have these comparable instruments for retirement savings plans.

The way you make money is the German product so far has a cost cap of 150 basis points. Obviously, a low-cost online brokerage company cannot charge 150 basis points. But I would calculate this more, and we haven't fixed this and we have not planned this into our planning, by the way. I would see this more as a 50 basis points opportunity. And then on a net margin, it's probably 20, 25 on our side, who knows how much we can get through.

But it's also a question whether that could be teamed up with not BPO, but with a partner who wants to do the offline selling because I would assume a lot will be sold through agents where people basically sit down and have a chat about why this is important and what the implications could be. You make money with ETFs as well if you probably sell asset allocation. You need two or three funds in the product to basically have a good asset allocation mix. If you team up with a partner, then the partner would most likely determine the asset mix. You can potentially for this product, also maybe charge a service fee or annual fixed custody fee. That really depends on what the overall price is. You can also consider a rebalancing fee, which could be equal to a normal transaction price, which basically, if things go out of range, the cash or the equity side, you can have a mix between two, three, four funds and then do a rebalancing every half year, every quarter, every year, whatever the client thinks is good. That should -- even if it's small money when you look at it, but if you add it up in the thousands and thousands of contracts, it could be an economic impact. But again, we have not factored that in.

I think your other question was on business process outsourcing is existing clients and new clients, what does it mean in terms of revenues? The historic pricing was a unit-based pricing. And usually, with these clients, you have a term of the contract. And our discussions basically go when they reach the end of the term where we have agreed on pricing. Of course, we have long-term relationships with these clients, and they matter a lot to us, but we have discussions with them around repricing of those contracts.

The pricing, we have not so much appetite to fully make this completely transparent. But you have to think about it in a way that if you raise EUR 1 billion, it obviously has for the first EUR 1 billion, a different price than for the EUR 10 billion. So it's an inverted curve, which probably starts at around close to 20 basis points and goes down to maybe 6 basis points for the EUR 10 billion. That's a negotiation process and every contract is slightly different because it depends on what kind of services are bought by that client. Is it including marketing? Is it excluding marketing and so on. But I would say, on average, it could be a double-digit basis points number, low double digit.

The legal provisions, yes, we built a legal provision at the end of 2025, which was around EUR 1.1 million because of a legacy BaFin issue on ad hoc notifications, which is in the making and is from 2022. We are in good discussions with BaFin to settle this early this year. It is not finalized. But we -- as we did with other provisions as well for last year, we wanted to have the balance sheet as clean as possible to absorb any additional cost or burden, you can call it, which are known to us at that point in time, even if they go partially into the future to make sure we have a clear sky in front of us, if that makes sense.

I think it's also fair to say that to the best knowledge that we have today, this is the last item that we have from the back. This is again from 2022. stemming back almost 3.5 years ago, and it comes specifically from the share price drop communication at the beginning of December of 2022. So it's one of -- it's the last today known item that we are cleaning up.

Correct. We double check that with the regulators internally, whether they have any of those fines in the making, and they told us no. Historic cleanup, let's call it this way. As you can see from the fines that are happening in the markets, these things have a jet lag of three years, plus/minus sometimes four. Did I -- your question was pretty long, Christoph. Did I did we completely answer your questions?

Yes, it was very clear.

The next question comes from Ian White from Autonomous Research.

Two from my side, please. Firstly, when should we expect to see growth in your total headcount again? Or how might that trend over the next two years? I'm conscious that there's still a lot of cost saving and AI initiatives being introduced that you mentioned.

And secondly, how do you see near- to medium-term dynamics with respect to pricing? Are markets like Germany now becoming sufficiently competitive that we need to start thinking about a downward shift in revenue per trade over the next couple of years?

Great questions. Thank you for that, Ian. Well, sometimes our people also ask about headcount growth. Our answer is always no. As we hopefully described in our presentation, we try to make use of technology investments to keep our headcount pretty flat. There might be a small increase in front office headcount, as I mentioned, as we are investing in PR, in affiliate marketing in the whole area of, let's say, customer experience. There is in terms of developing messaging, trading signals and so on. This is an area which, let's say, is an infant stage in some parts on our side. There might be some investments, but at the same time, might not be at the same time, but maybe in, let's say, in somewhat parallel, we will try to make savings in the rest of the organization. At least that's the plan for the moment in terms of no headcount growth on a net basis over time. You can -- you heard also our investments in the call center technology that should give us room in terms of taking on more business with the same number of headcount.

Pricing-wise, I think that's a very interesting question. First of all, we have the benefit of having two brands. So we have slightly differentiated pricing per country, per region, per brand, which is very helpful because not every market is the same. Europe is a fragmented bunch of independent franchise takers. And Germany is a very specific case because you have, on the one hand, the legacy banks or the big banks, they are still charging 1% equity commission, and they still have about 10 million custody accounts, not for round trip, but only one way. So it's 2.25% roughly for equities round trip for most of the cases. So I think they have a different pressure on downward side, but the cost is also much higher than ours. So we are looking to see what happens.

At the same time, we have the PFOF ban hitting Germany. There will be some players at the end of the spectrum, which are everything is for free and for zero, and they are surprised that they still make some money that -- we'll see how this play out, whether they have to up fees or not. So we are pretty reluctant to move fees on the lower side at the moment. And so far, that strategy has been proven right. That's why given the two spectrum sides of the spectrum, we planned for flat fees.

I would maybe add and make two additional comments, Ian. On the headcount situation, we do modeling simple. And we see no discontinuity. Let's start maybe with that. So it's not like we're adding 150 or 200 people next year or the year after that or the year after that. There might be a small inflationary drag as we increase capabilities here or there. AI may lead to a revision maybe down a little bit. But it's a quite powerful message that we are sending to our people in that they should not fear that they're going to lose their jobs basically, but we rather want to make an investment into the platform to continue to grow without meaningfully changing the employment base.

Also, some of the things that are not talked about a whole lot, but we have reduced the management Board. Two, we are now effectively we have a reduction of two, where today, we're doing the same work with five instead of seven if you include the bank's board. And that's the message we try to send through the organization to be a bit more efficient, use more tools and things like that.

And on the pricing dynamics on flatex, maybe one single point. Yes, a cash trade at flatex is more expensive. But again, what sometimes is missed in the discussions is that not only do clients value customer service, but if you slice it into different buckets, there's a really high, high fraction of trades at flatex, which go for zero or EUR 1 or EUR 2.

The reality is if you want to trade in a busy day, it doesn't matter whether you pay EUR 1, EUR 2, EUR 3 or EUR 5, it matters that you can trade. And if you trade for EUR 10,000 plus per transaction, the percentage of your transaction cost is so little that the quality of the platform matters much more than transaction costs, I would guess.

Our next question comes from Amit Jagadeesh from UBS AG.

I've got two questions. I appreciate the comments on the headcount. So I guess how should we think about the run rate cost savings that are going to come from the AI-driven customer service once that rollout sort of completes in Q2 '26?

And then the second question is, you mentioned 2% of customers have traded crypto. I guess what penetration level do you ultimately expect for crypto trading among your customers? And I guess, over what time horizon?

Thank you. As Benon described, we have not factored in any cost savings on the introduction of the new call center software because we intend to upgrade the quality of our -- it's not advice, our reachability. So we will split the call centers in three pieces. One is maintenance, one is outbound calls and one is VIP clients that basically can get a different service in terms of helping them to find securities or other matters in terms of investment.

So, there will be a higher quality of service, and we try to do this with the same number of headcount, might not necessarily be exactly the same people. There's usually fluctuation in the call center staffing. But we have in these areas, people that have bank education, so high-quality people that can help the clients to achieve better goals for their investments without entering into investment advice.

I wanted to just take the second question.

Yes, please, please.

On the trades on the crypto side, modeling is a great thing until you're wrong. On the crypto side, yes, we have, of course, models. And I think I mentioned that on a previous call, and I'm happy to repeat that. When we started a year ago to think about our contribution from crypto, we overestimated the number of clients trading, and we underestimated the notional value that is being pushed through the crypto universe.

In the end, the model is perfectly right, even though we made two mistakes. So with that sort of -- with that comment, we initially were thinking that we were going maybe closer to 5% of our clients. Maybe we'll get there. A lot will depend on the crypto hype on whether Bitcoin will break EUR 100,000 again. But overall, we're happy with the outcome. So we printed EUR 1 billion of crypto flow last year. This year, we should double that number given where we are at the end of February.

It's also interesting. There are a lot of -- in some of the market -- because it's unregulated business, we feel our pricing is very transparent, very competitive. And on some of the market participants, we feel that there could be hidden costs. From the outside, it looks cheap, but in the inside, the spreads are very wide. And hope -- and we think -- but on the other hand, it takes time until people understand that they pay more than just EUR 1 when they trade. And that will, over time, help us to increase the reputation of our quality offering. But we don't speculate on these numbers. That's why we project the same numbers going forward and annualize them.

The next question comes from Andrew Lowe from Citi.

I just have a couple of follow-ups. The first one is just if you could just clarify sort of LTIP contributions that you're assuming in your guidance, if any, that would be great. And then the second follow-up is on the securities lending, you're rolling that out across DEGIRO. To do that in flatex, I think you need a change in law in order to do that. So I was just wondering if there's been an update on that? And if that's something that we can expect in the next, I don't know, year or two?

Yes. So I'll start with the sec lending question. You're absolutely right. There's different legislations are interpretations of the same law. across Europe depending on the countries. And there's both ways. One is the opt-in or opt-out structure. So, at the moment, for Germany, in the past, you needed to opt in for every single transaction, which you do in writing, but makes it extremely troublesome to introduce the product in the market. We feel it is not the right thing, and that's why we're having discussions with the regulators to change. That takes time. They recently made a change in the regulation that would allow people to do this confirmation electronically, but it's still not the right approach. In the Netherlands, you basically decide on which proportion of your custody account assets will you make -- want to be available for sec lending and you transfer them into a new sub-custody account and then they can get pooled and lend out. That is a more efficient way of doing that, and we are introducing that idea for the German regulators, but that will take time and it's out of our control when this will be active.

We have another opportunity, which we are at the moment, exploring, which is we have a branch of DEGIRO in Germany, which we have not actively been marketing with, but we could consider to activate that brand in Germany to make the product available. Imagine once we have one IT platform, we could smoothly make those offers available for those clients that have the appetite and the volume and the necessary assets to participate in that.

At the same time, we still have different tax legislation. In France, for example, it is a little bit complicated because the sec lending could be seen as a sale of the security and trigger capital gains tax. The reality is in most other markets, it's not a sale because you just lend out your securities. And that makes it more complicated because we have the fiduciary obligations to do the right thing for our clients. That's why the investigation around the topic takes a little bit longer because it's new to some of those European markets. But nevertheless, we are confident that we will continue to roll this out and have a great offering for our clients wherever we can safely do that over the next couple of months.

And on the LTIP question, thank you for the question. And of course, it's a little bit of mathematics behind. But -- the first comment is that we are still exposed to the virtual stock plan from 2020, which none of us appreciates in the P&L, but we will have to live with it as long as it's there. That is also the one that pretty much distorted our personnel cost line, particularly in the fourth quarter. We cannot control that. What we do is we take the actual share price on the day of valuation. We make no forecast on our share price. This would be inappropriate. And we also make no forecast on our EPS expectations, but we take your forecast. So, on the EPS part of the plan, we can take whatever the sell side is coming up with. So those are the best numbers we can take in order to be conservative. But for the share price, we don't do that.

We have a new options or potentially share-based plan where we have much more control and we know pretty much what's going to happen. If you put that all together, best guess for 2026 according to our current planning is around EUR 11 million. That's what we are -- what we have in our internal models for LTI 2026. And again, that number might be different at year-end because of the still existing virtual stock plan, which may bring this up or down depending on share price movements.

I think it's fair to say last year, on the historical SARs plan in the numbers, the number was on the expense side, about EUR 12.5 million.

Closer to EUR 15 million.

Closer to EUR 15 million. We are looking into options to basically get rid of this plan as we speak. but that's not resolved. We will communicate when this is done and dusted. But we have no control of the impact on -- so we are basically a victim of our own success. The stock went up last year massively that ends up in HR expenses, which is not right because it's because of legacy.

The plan from 2024 will have a totally different impact because it is in a linear way amortized over time and the stock movements have zero implications on the plans. And we intend to have a plan going forward, which where the expenses are more directed to the year -- to the business year instead of harvesting the future or being caught from the past in the actual fiscal year. So we try to get rid of these historic structures to have a more clean approach, but we will comment or report once this is done.

The next question comes from Christoph Greulich from Berenberg.

Yes. Also one quick follow-up from my side, please, regarding the D&A charge. So it seems like in Q4 that yes, stepped up quite meaningfully compared to the previous quarter. So I appreciate it's rather flat year-over-year. But if I recall correctly, in Q4 '24, you had about EUR 6 million in write-downs included in there. So I was just wondering in '25 in Q4, were there any further write-downs in that line item and also what we should expect in terms of D&A for '26?

Well spotted, Christoph, you're right. At the end of each year, we do a thorough review of our holding book, so to speak. And we indeed took a -- a bit more than EUR 4 million write-down on one of the legacy businesses, our factoring business that we stopped having as an operating business line six or seven years ago. And we have some very residual commitments to that.

We -- again, that business is closed. But in order to be prudent, we -- that's basically the majority of the explanation. It's a factual review of our residual factoring business where we took more than EUR 4 million charge in that, plus some other smaller adjustment, but that's the bulk of the answer.

What should we expect for '26 in terms of P&L?

Look, we've almost gone through all that. So...

The value on the balance sheet -- remaining value on the balance sheet is tiny, I would call it.

It's from memory, around EUR 4 million, give or take. But those things are with the insolvency proceedings and their quotas, which are being discussed. So as of today, this is pretty much the value that we expect back. So we -- as of today, we don't see any further write-downs. Things may change. But as of today, it's a proper representation of the books at year-end. But thankfully, we've worked through that. I mean, if you just take a six, seven years approach, that's a EUR 20 million line item that went through over the last years combined. And we are pretty much done or close to being done.

To be fair, there's one item left, which is investments in property funds from legacy management or historic management, put it this way. And -- but also they have been written down. Nevertheless, nobody can exclude that there will be a little bit of more downside risk here. But it looks like the floor is found there as well. But we tried, as I'm repeating myself here, we try to create a balance sheet that is as clean as possible, what could be done was done. And we feel pretty confident about that, even though the numbers in Q4, as you rightfully said, don't look that great. But we felt it is the right thing to do on prudent management.

Thank you, Christoph, and thank you all. As we don't have any further questions currently in the call, we would thank you for your attention today and your participation.

We'll be roadshowing tomorrow in Frankfurt and early next week in London and hopefully get the opportunity to speak again with many of you. And as always, Laura and myself are, of course, always available for any follow-up questions you might have now after our presentation. Thank you very much. Thank you, Oliver. Thank you, Benon.

Fantastic. Many thanks.

Many thanks.

Bye.

Hello, and welcome to the flatexDEGIRO Q3 2025 Analyst Conference Call. [Operator Instructions]

Now I will hand the conference over to Achim Schreck, Head of Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Thank you, and good morning, everyone. Many thanks for dialing in, and a warm welcome to our analyst call relating to our Q3 2025 results, which we published yesterday evening post market close. My name is Achim Schreck, and I'm heading the Investor Relations team here at flatexDEGIRO.

With me today are our CEO, Oliver Behrens; as well as our CFO, Dr. Benon Janos, who will lead us through today's presentation. We also have with us Dr. Thomas Lindner, our Global Head of Finance; as well as my IR colleague, Laura Hecker. As usual, we would like to provide a short run through the presentation before we open up for your questions.

And without any further ado, I'm very pleased to hand over to you now, Oliver. Please go ahead. The floor is yours.

Good morning, everyone, and welcome to the analyst call for our Q3 and 9-month results. Benon will run you through the details of our performance in the third quarter in a moment. I would just like to highlight a few key points. Last week, we already preannounced our revenue and net income for the third quarter, combined with a substantial raise in our full year guidance.

Growing commissions and a stable interest income have led to further growth of our top line. At the same time, we kept personnel expenses and marketing flat year-over-year and significantly reduced our administrative expenses. The combination of both growing our top line while staying cost focused enables us to further scale our operations and continue to increase our profitability. The clear reduction of our admin expenses over the last 12 months was important. We promised it exactly 1 year ago and when we published our numbers for Q3 2024, and we delivered.

While there are always certain elements to improve, our cost base in general is clean and sustainable now. To meaningfully increase our profits, the focus thus is on further expanding our top line, building new products, rolling out new services and driving customer growth.

Crypto trading and securities lending are the 2 new products we have already introduced over the last 12 months. Let me give you a brief overview of where we stand with each of them. With crypto trading, we went live in December 2024, limited to flatex in Germany at first. We further extended it to DEGIRO in Germany during the second quarter of 2025. However, we really only got started now in Q3 when we began with the international rollout. With product launches in Austria, the Netherlands, France and Spain, we today give approximately 2 million customers access to crypto trading. And shortly, Italy, Portugal, Greece and Ireland will follow.

As you can see on the chart, this international rollout has been a step change when it comes to traded crypto volumes on our platform. More than 30,000 customers have traded crypto with us so far. Adoption rates are rising, and we have also seen a pretty strong start into the fourth quarter. However, the crypto market is impacted by significant volatility and external impulses. In addition, we have only started our offering. So take these steps with a grain of salt. Nevertheless, the direction of travel is very clear.

When it comes to the monetization of our crypto businesses, the average ticket size in the first 9 months as well as in the third quarter has been around EUR 2,300. As you know, we are charging a low commission of 50 basis points in all countries, but the Netherlands, where it is 29 basis points. The blended rate for the first 9-month was 47 basis points at a rate that over time will most likely develop towards 40 basis points with a rising share of trades in the Netherlands. Benon will later on also detail how the crypto business has supported the growth of our average commission per trade in the third quarter. But before I hand over to Benon, let me briefly comment on 2 other strategic initiatives we have started now.

On the product side, we have started our securities lending program in October in the Netherlands and Spain, our 2 largest DEGIRO markets. We are thus enabling our Dutch and Spanish customers to now earn additional passive income on parts of the EUR 20 billion of assets they hold on our platform. Of course, not all of these assets will be in constant demand for securities lending desks. We continue to expect that some 20% to 30% thereof are really relevant for lending purposes. As we only got started this month, I hope you understand that it is too early to give any indications on adoption, pricing and actual volumes. We will now focus on rolling out the product to more DEGIRO customers and markets and increasing marketing and customer communication to drive adoption.

Last but not least, our treasury enhancements. Our customers today entrust us with cash deposits totaling over EUR 5.6 billion. We used close to EUR 1.3 billion thereof to provide margin loans to our customers at an average margin interest rate in Q3 of around 5.9%. On the remaining over EUR 4 billion, we have so far been rather passive. We are using a small part as collateral in our operating business in form of bonds, but we are keeping the vast majority of cash at the German Federal Bank with overnight availability. In order to monetize this asset better while staying very risk averse, we will implement a full treasury system in Q1 2026. We are progressing well here and we'll start with internal testing already at the final stage of Q4 this year.

The new treasury system will allow us a more active steering with our investments and a broader variety of instruments. In anticipation of this new system, we have already initiated an increased focus on investment in high-quality investment-grade bonds, predominantly with a AAA rating and a focus on Germany. First improvements are already reflected in our interest income in Q3.

To summarize, in a positive market environment, we continue to do our homework on cost reduction, product rollouts and internal process enhancements. We are well on track to achieving our financial goals and the implementation of our most important strategic milestones. All of this is at least to some extent, already visible in our Q3 numbers, for which I'll now hand over to Benon to guide you through the details.

Thank you. And over to you, Benon.

Thank you very much, Oliver, and good morning to everyone from my side as well. I trust you have already seen our pre-release and the updated guidance we published last week. I'm very excited to now walk you through our financial performance for the third quarter and the first 9 months of the year and share a bit more details over the next minutes.

Now let me quickly take a moment to remind everyone on our commercial performance in the third quarter, which we have already shared through our monthly KPIs. Gross customer additions amounted to approximately 100,000, an increase of 9% year-on-year. As we typically see, the first quarter tends to be the strongest in terms of customer additions due to seasonal patterns. This year, it stood out even more, thanks to elevated market volatility. This is also true for trading, as one can see on the right-hand side in regards to settled transactions.

In the third quarter, we settled 17.7 million transactions for our customer base. This accounts for a strong 20% increase compared to last year, but naturally less than what we did in the first quarter. However, I believe what really stands out is the fact that we have actually been able to repeat the strong Q2 numbers on both KPIs, which at the time benefited from additional tailwinds from market turbulences around the so-called Liberation Day in early April. October also got off to a strong start, continuing the positive momentum we saw over the summer. We will publish our monthly statistics for October and November -- sorry, for October on November 5 and share more details then.

Assets under custody reached a new all-time high, coming in just shy of EUR 92 billion. We crossed the EUR 90 billion mark for the first time. Year-on-year, that translates to a strong 42% increase. And even quarter-on-quarter, we experienced growth of 10%. Splitting the assets under custody into securities and cash, you can see a relative uniform development. Securities under custody grew 42% year-on-year and 10% quarter-over-quarter to now EUR 86.3 billion. At the same time, cash under custody grew strongly by 49% year-on-year and also 9% quarter-on-quarter, respectively. To some extent, cash under custody benefits from overall asset growth with a relatively stable ratio of 6% of assets being held in cash. This also means that we have seen a pretty stable trend of growing cash per customer over the last quarter, rising from around EUR 1,250 on average at the end of September 2024 to now around EUR 1,650 on average. Our customers are simply becoming more wealthy.

To put it differently, when we apply just the current ECB rate of 2% as our interest income on these cash holdings, we are talking about an interest-related average revenue per customer of EUR 33. At close to 3.5 million customers, this basically equates to approximately EUR 115 million annually of recurring revenues.

The increasing cash level is fueled by strong net cash inflows onto our platform, which, as you can see here, has continued in the third quarter, albeit at a more normal rate after the exceptionally high inflows of Q1 and Q2. In total, we recorded net cash inflows of a record EUR 7.2 billion in the first 9 months of the year. This represents an increase of 44% on a year-over-year basis. Moreover, the net cash inflows we have seen in the first 9 months of 2025 are already exceeding the full year 2024 level of EUR 6.6 billion. It is worth noting that in the first 9 months of 2025, in quotation marks, only around 85% of these net cash inflows were reinvested compared to historical average of approximately 95%.

Now as usual, we portray our revenue split in the past quarter on Slide 13. In the third quarter, revenues grew with 18% year-on-year. Commission income, especially increased strongly by 34% year-on-year, which is mostly attributable to a continuously growing customer base, an increase in trading activity and a higher commission per transaction. I'll turn to that in a second.

Despite a significantly lower interest rate environment, interest income remained broadly stable. Interest income only declined by 5% year-on-year and just 2% sequentially. This was less than what we previously anticipated. Higher amounts of cash under custody and a growing average margin loan book compensated to a large extent for lower interest rate levels from the European Central Bank. Moreover, we also benefited from a more active treasury strategy. Oliver mentioned this in his opening remarks already. Let me add some more details and briefly walk you through our updated treasury strategy and how we are managing our customer cash under custody.

We have now initiated more active treasury activities while still maintaining our risk-averse foundation. This means we are selectively deploying cash to more interest-bearing investments where appropriate. As shown on the slide, we currently manage around EUR 5.6 billion in customer cash under custody. Thereof, we use some part of funding for our margin loan business with the current margin loan book volume of EUR 1.2 billion.

A quick reminder, margin loan rates were reduced by around 50 basis points as of the 1st of July 2025 with headline rates of around 5.5% to 5.75% currently. As Oliver mentioned earlier, the average margin interest rate in the third quarter amounted to around 5.9%. This is driven by product mix, i.e., allocated versus unallocated margin loans as well as margin loans in different currencies, for example, U.S. dollars, which have higher average margin rates. Moreover, our bond investments are now close to EUR 800 million.

As explained earlier, we have slowly started to deploy a more active treasury strategy. To enhance yields while staying conservative, we have increased our exposure to high-quality investment-grade bonds. The majority of these bonds are AAA rated. This approach allows us to improve returns while preserving flexibility and security. This is a strategy we believe is well suited to the current market environment. These investments have already contributed positively to our interest income line in the third quarter of 2025.

Last but not least, over EUR 3.5 billion of our cash under custody are still placed overnight with the Bundesbank where we receive the current market interest rates. Once we have fully established the new treasury system in 2026, this should provide some more opportunities going forward.

Turning to the next slide at the monetization of our trades. You can see that we were able to generate an average commission of EUR 4.83 per transaction in the third quarter of 2025. This implies a 12% year-over-year increase from EUR 4.32 in the third quarter of 2024. For the last few quarters now, we have seen a heightened volume in U.S. trade from which we benefit additionally due to the FX conversion fee of 25 basis points. The uplift from higher U.S. volumes is around EUR 0.20 on the average commissions per trade. While U.S. volumes came back slightly in Q2, they have picked up again in the third quarter, even slightly surpassing the previous highs of Q4 of last year and Q1 of this year.

Additionally, crypto trading contributed positively to commission per trade with a positive impact of EUR 0.04. This is up from EUR 0.02 in the previous quarter as we expanded crypto trading to more markets during Q3. And as Oliver has already shown in the beginning, trading volumes have significantly increased accordingly.

Moving to Slide 16. We have portrayed our different cost items and their development over the past quarters. Let me dive a bit deeper into the different drivers for each cost item. We have demonstrated strong cost control and all cost items are coming in significantly lower compared to the previous quarter.

One, personnel expenses. Personnel expenses on a year-on-year comparison stayed broadly stable with EUR 26.3 million in Q3 of 2025 compared to EUR 26.1 million in Q3 of 2024. Sequentially, personnel expenses declined by 15%, driven by a clear reduction of current personnel expenses as well as lower expenses for long-term variable compensation.

Second, on marketing. Marketing expenses amounted to EUR 6 million in Q3, which is broadly in line to the EUR 6.2 million reported in Q3 of 2024. On a quarter-on-quarter comparison, marketing expenses declined by 14%. Marketing expenses are seasonally front-loaded with Q1 typically seeing the highest spend followed by much lower numbers in Q2 and Q3 before picking up a bit again in Q4. Our average customer acquisition costs in Q3 of 2025 amounted to EUR 60, down 10% year-on-year from EUR 67 in Q3 of 2024.

And thirdly and lastly, Other administrative expenses amounted to just EUR 10.9 million, decreasing strongly by 38% year-on-year and 15% quarter-on-quarter. This decline is primarily driven by lower legal and consulting expenses as well as a positive one-off reduction in bank-specific contributions of around EUR 2 million in Q3. As previously communicated, we remain well on track to achieve our full year target for administrative expenses, aiming at a level of around EUR 15 million for the full year. These EUR 10.9 million in Q3 also include one particular item. More than 4 years ago, back in 2021, we conducted a marketing campaign promoting 0-cost trading that the German regulator, BaFin did not appreciate and is currently evaluating. This might also lead to a potential fine at some point in time. For this event, we have already built provisions in Q3 of 2025 of approximately EUR 0.5 million.

Moving on to our profitability development on Slide 17. Given the high scalability of flatexDEGIRO's business model, we have seen a strong increase in net income, driven by higher revenues and lower costs. With revenues increasing 18% year-on-year and continued cost discipline, we have managed to achieve a strong increase in net income, which rose by 57% to EUR 39 million. Our net income margin improved by 7 percentage points, reaching 30% in Q3.

Let's now have a quick look at how the quarterly performance adds to our results for the first 9 months of the year. Our revenue line increased by 16% year-over-year, while net income grew over proportionally by 41% year-on-year, given the scalability of our business, tight cost control. Things have progressed much better this year than initially anticipated. These strong results as well as the initial potential emerging from the ongoing international rollout of crypto trading and the launch of our securities lending program also contributed to the second upgrade of our revenue and net income guidance for fiscal year 2025, which we communicated on October 15 already.

As you can see on Slide 21, revenue growth is now expected to come in between 10% and 15% versus 2024, which already was a record year for us. The revenue range we are aiming for is thus between EUR 530 million to EUR 550 million. This is a significant upgrade to the guidance we have first issued in February of 2025. On the bottom line, we have even more significantly upgraded our expectations for net income. We are now anticipating a net income between EUR 150 million and EUR 160 million, resulting in growth rates of 34% to 43% year-over-year. This compares to our previous range of plus 15% to plus 25% we gave out in July this year.

Turning to absolute numbers. If we compare the midpoint of our upgraded guidance, this translates to an increase of around EUR 60 million on the revenue side and EUR 40 million on the net income side compared to the initial guidance we gave out with our strategy update in February of 2025. To achieve EUR 40 million of additional net income based on a revenue uplift of EUR 60 million once more shows the operating leverage we can achieve in scaling up our business.

We remain confident in our ability to deliver on these targets as we move through the last month of 2025. October has obviously been off to a pretty good start. However, we are not applying a direct extrapolation of October's initial momentum across the remainder of the quarter. At the same time, when we gave the guidance last week, we have also been mindful of the fact that expenses for long-term variable compensation are likely to increase again in Q4 given the strong share price performance recently. The guidance also reflects an overall cautious valuation approach and some potential housekeeping items in the process of preparing our annual financial statements. So I would like to emphasize that these are realistic targets, and we are confident to achieve results within this new guidance range.

With that, I would like to conclude our presentation. But before I hand back to Achim for the question-and-answer session, I would like to finish with one quick remark. flatexDEGIRO is constantly evolving, not just in regards to our operational growth and the implementation of strategic measures.

At the end of September, we have successfully relaunched our corporate website with the aim of delivering an improved user experience that enables faster and more intuitive access to content for our key stakeholders and most importantly, our analysts and investors. The Investor Relations section has been comprehensively revamped and now offers much clearer and much more direct access to quarterly reports, presentations, company compiled consensus data and KPIs. We hope you like the new website. If you have any feedback or suggestions for improvement, please don't hesitate to let us know in the Investor Relations department.

Now Achim, over to you.

Thank you, Benon, and thank you, Oliver, also for your introductionary remarks. We are now very happy to take your questions on our Q3 financials.

[Operator Instructions] The first question comes from Andrew Lowe from Citi.

I've got one on crypto and the commission per trade and then the second is on your securities lending business. On the first one, you reported EUR 270 million of crypto volume in Q3, 47 basis points of fees. That implies EUR 1.3 million of revenues, which is a EUR 0.07 contribution in the quarter. Can I -- just clarify that your EUR 0.04 figure that you mentioned, Benon, is a 9-month figure? And do you agree with the EUR 0.07 in Q3 alone?

And then what are your sort of expectation for Q4 and beyond? Is it reasonable to assume that we get to, say, EUR 1 billion of crypto trading volumes for 2025, which would imply a EUR 0.13 contribution in Q4? And then how do you expect the commission per trade to evolve when you exclude the crypto contribution? Does this increases -- trade size increases and clients get more wealthy, that would be really helpful.

The second question, as I said, is on the securities lending. You're currently only able to offer this on your DEGIRO platform, which is 40% of your securities portfolio. Do you expect policy changes that may allow implementation in Germany and Austria? It seems to me that this is in clients' best interest. So I'd be interested if you've had any feedback from policymakers so far on this.

Thank you very much. I will start with the crypto question. I will then hand over to Oliver for the securities lending question. At the same time, the team is computing the EUR 0.04/EUR 0.07 question. But on your other comments on the crypto side. So I made a comment a while back that it's very realistic to achieve EUR 1 billion in crypto trading this year. Given what we have seen in the third quarter and the backloaded third quarter, in addition to the launch of the upcoming crypto activities in other European countries, we certainly would think that the EUR 1 billion total volume traded stands and is a realistic option for this year. I will comment on this, of course, explicitly when we portray our full year numbers. And maybe now quickly to the sec lending question.

Yes. Thank you, Andrew. It's a very interesting question. Obviously, Europe is not like the United States of America. It's -- sometimes I say a set of independent franchise takers under one currency. And that's why regulatory interpretation of what is allowed and what is beneficial for customers might differ from country to country. On this happy note, we are discussing with the regulators the different interpretation of MiFID regulation and the impact on securities lending and so on to get to a more common view. But unfortunately, we are not yet there.

Nevertheless, there are enhancements in Germany. There was also a change in recent legislation, which makes it a little bit easier, but not at the same level of what is available in the Dutch market. So it is not a half empty glass or it's rather a half full glass. We think we can do more, but not overnight. We might go live with DEGIRO in Germany for sec lending next year. But that is a constant dialogue we're having. So we will keep you posted latest in the update coming for 2026 outlook, which will happen somewhere in February of '26. I think we will be clearer by then on the rollout of further markets, especially on the flatex side.

We totally agree with you that this would be very beneficial for clients as this is a setup of a very institutionalized product with an auction process for the assets, for the securities lending. And it is, from our perspective, very attractive to participate in this program, and it should be as easy as the clients approach it, but we are not yet there. So we keep you posted. Thanks for your question.

And to finish off, our first initial check indicates that we arrive at the EUR 0.04 commission increase per quarter. And I would suggest that the Investor Relations team, a.k.a. Achim Schreck will reach out to you after today's call to clarify that.

The next question comes from Amit Jagadeesh from UBS AG.

I just have a couple. So on marketing, could you share some color on how we should think about this next year, whether there will be or you're currently assuming some growth in marketing expenses, say, for example, to help with pushing the new product initiatives? And then I guess just a question on capital allocation. Could you share your latest thoughts here? Are you looking at any forms of capital return? Any plans for new buyback programs, things like that? And then lastly, could you expand on the special effects that led to the increased tax rate this quarter? Is this a one-off or -- yes.

Okay. Do you want to start with the tax rate or the other way around?

We can start with the 2 financial questions, and then we can hand over to Oliver for the marketing question. So I'll start from the back. It is a one-off effect. It's related to business activities we have terminated almost 10 years ago. And it's a long-standing dispute on a tax situation we have with the local tax authorities in Germany, which amounts to approximately EUR 1.4 million. We have agreed to take a charge for that just in case we continue to find arguments in order not to have this tax levied on us, but to be prudent, we put it into this past quarter, and it's indeed a one-off effect.

With respect to capital allocation, I will repeat what I have been saying constantly over the past couple of quarters. We plan to issue a statement on that when we publish our full year numbers. So today, we will not make a comment on that other than saying that we grew really strongly this year, and we have seen how positive a cash position is to simply fuel and finance the requirements for regulatory capital from existing funds. We mentioned before, we did not expect that much of balance sheet growth this year, and it's always good to have cash at hand for that. But more details on capital allocation most likely in February next year.

Yes, I can only echo what Benon said. Maybe to add to that, as some of you probably know, payment for order flow will be banned in Germany from next year. That could have impact on some of our competitors' business models. And it's always good, as Benon said, to have some cash at hand if others might run into trouble that we can look out for opportunities.

You also asked on marketing. I think what we can see in this year 2025 is that we are definitely back to business with new products, new launches and growth. Nevertheless, we put marketing expenses this year at a similar level of last year. But at the same time, we need to see on which areas we want to grow next year faster. We're preparing for some new marketing approach on our core markets. I would say, so far, so good. More to come towards the year-end, but I think we will definitely not reduce all marketing expenses, we will be slightly up for the next year. But we are going through our planning as we speak. We will discuss this with our committees, our Supervisory Board, our stakeholders.

And once we are in sync, we will return to the market and give you guidance that would hopefully be helpful in a growing business like ours, it would not be prudent to reduce marketing expenses because we believe the opportunities are there to make those investments in a successful way for our shareholders. Hopefully, that satisfies your question.

The next question comes from the line of Mengxian Sun from Deutsche Bank.

So 3 questions from my side. The first one is on the net interest income. Just a try to understand the NII dynamic here better. You said Q3 was helped by the higher yields from the bond investment in the treasury book, what are actually the incremental NII from the treasury enhancements in Q3 in euro million amount? And I assume the rest is coming from the margin loan growth and the customer deposit growth.

And the second question is on the other operating expense. Thank you very much for explaining us the details for Q3. But if I add the EUR 2 million banking levies on top, we are probably -- and if I keep the EUR 50 million guidance for the full year basis, we're probably still going to see another EUR 3 million increase in Q4. Any specific reason for that? And the last question is on the white label banking. I remember you were commenting on the 2 new potential partnership on the deposit as a service side in last quarter. Could you please provide any update on these partnerships?

Would you like to start the white label banking?

Yes. So on the white label banking, deposit as a service is one part. I think there will be good news. We will go live around Christmas with one new partner. And so the -- there's one other bank that will basically raise deposits and they will go live in December for family and friends and then live to the market in January. And we have built a good pipeline of those names. Thank you for really going into all these details. We expect hopefully another 2 new partners for 2026, but it's too early to tell. And with the other 2 questions, I would suggest I hand over to Benon on the interest side and so on. Thank you.

So on the other operating expenses, the EUR 50 million is the number I had first mentioned pretty much a year ago on the call. So we simply stick to a clean headline number. Yes, there might be some room, but we still have 2 months to go, and there is no point in adjusting an expectation for our cost base. So let's see what the fourth quarter will bring. I think what's almost more important is that we have shown that we have successfully turned around the cost discipline. We are now on track for a clean number, which depending on how the fourth quarter develops, we may even undershoot a little bit. So I'm glad that we are on the lower side of the EUR 50 million and not on the upper side.

And on the net interest income line, we just started the activities of expanding our treasury activities. The vast majority of our investments are in AAA investment grade -- sorry, AAA rating category with also a strong skew to Germany. So the uplift you get on these is not gigantic. It's a modest benign uptick compared to what you would get if you simply park your money with the Bundesbank. And we will probably do a more proper review of that when we present the full year numbers. But as a very rough estimate, a couple of hundred thousands, give or take, something like that. It's not in the millions.

I think what is important to add to what Benon rightfully said is the interest curve was not an ordinary upward sloped curve for many, many years now. We had an inverted curve with the highest point almost at the short end of the curve. And given the fact that we have now a flattish curve or slightly upward sloping curve, it is more beneficial to use additional instruments, swaps, repos and other money market instruments, and that is mixed basically with short-term bonds. For that, we are introducing the treasury systems and it will enable us to better manage both sides of the balance sheet in terms of ALM matching. That would reduce the volatility of our earnings because when you look at it, the cash and interest from cash relative to the overall earnings momentum created some volatility on the quarterly earnings, higher volatility than the trading activity of our clients. And that is not something which is perfect. And that's why we are introducing the treasury system out of various reasons. One of them is this what I just explained. Hopefully, that helps you.

And of course, you can get an enhancement. I think we said it already in the 3-year planning at the beginning of this year that we expect somewhere between 15 and 20 basis points enhancements on the cash once the treasury system is fully rolled out, and we cannot invest every money because we need to stay liquid and flexible. And you also know that SEPA Instant Payment was introduced, and we need to still see what the patterns of the clients will have an impact on daily liquidity, but directionally, I think that is still intact what we mentioned in the guidance at the first quarter in February of '25 for the future once the system is fully up and running.

The next question comes from Zach Wurz from Autonomous Research.

I've got 3 of them. Firstly, the release said that the updated guidance does not assume that operational growth in the first weeks of October continue with the same intensity through the year-end. Can you just give a little more color around what your assumptions are here or help us frame the guidance a little better? The second is on crypto. How does uptake of the offering thus far compared to your expectations in terms of number of trades and average ticket size? Has uptake in any of these markets been particularly better or worse than you were expecting? And then the last one is on the transition to a European SE legal structure. Is that still expected to take place during the fourth quarter? And my understanding is that you should see some minor operational cost savings as a result of this move. What do you expect the nature and magnitude of those savings to be, please?

Maybe we'll start with the last question. So indeed, the transition from a German AG to an SE is still on track. We have received regulatory approval for the capital and the new legal entity. So we are in the final stages of sorting the time frame to execute that. And as of today, we expect that process to be done by year-end. In terms of cost savings, they are minor. We don't expect anything gigantic from this one. Any cost savings are probably more linked to what we have issued earlier in combining our stock-listed entity and our bank unit into one, which is something we are slowly but steadily preparing for as communicated already to the market.

On the first question, on the guidance. Look, we are -- this is a quarterly call, and we took the freedom to take the knowledge of a pretty good start into October. And we thought it's okay to take what we have seen, but not to extrapolate on until the rest of the year. So the rest of this year is basically our normal planning that we had, which implies a modest growth compared to last year, but less than what we have seen in the first days of October until today. I think that's the most fair statement, I can say mathematically. And on the crypto trading side, Oliver, would you like to take over?

Well, I think it's like, like in most of the other trades as well. Germany has the slightly higher average trade size than the other countries. But it's also fair to say we have not fully rolled out to every country. So the numbers, especially for the 4 countries we rolled out in October or September, have another full year, so it's too early to tell whether these numbers are stable or not. We still see the uptake rates going up, which means we have not -- it's not in a BAU steady-state situation with crypto trading that I think we will have better statistics somewhere in the summer or so of next year when we have a more relevant time frame to look at.

The next questions come from Ian White from Autonomous Research.

Just a few follow-ups from my side, please. First on the treasury investments. Can you just clarify, are you adding interest rate risk with the increased flexibility there? And could there be any impact on Pillar 2 capital requirements from that. And maybe just can you also just clarify how the -- sort of how you're thinking about the increased flexibility for product rollout on the liability side. Should we expect to see term deposit products, for example, in the near future now that you have this flexibility on the asset side? That's question one.

Secondly, can you just clarify for us how much of your revenue margin is linked to the size of the actual trade. I have in mind, it's basically just FX and crypto. But are there other pricing structures where you basically earn higher RPC when the actual value traded tends to be larger? That's question 2.

And just finally, can you say a little bit more about the scope of the BaFin investigation that you mentioned, I'm assuming this refers to the DEGIRO goes zero campaign back in 4Q '21. What's the kind of worst case, I suppose outcome there is what I'm thinking of. Can you just say a bit more about that, please?

Yes. Maybe I start with the interest rate risk. So let's put this way, of course, we will add a little bit of interest rate risk, but it's so minor that is not really material. To give you an example, if we have every money on the overnight deposit with the Bundesbank, then of course, if we add for a small proportion, short-term bonds, it is an extended duration beyond the overnight risk. But at the same time, we are buying only bonds that we can put into repo. We are buying short-dated bonds, 3 months, 6 months. That gives us an enhancement at and over and above of the overnight rate with the Bundesbank.

At the moment, still, the Bundesbank rate, the ECB overnight rate is 2%. And you find some bonds in a high-quality AAA-related area with, I think we have 90 whatever percent of the, what, EUR 700 million or so we have in bonds in Germany. And the maximum duration we bought for maybe EUR 100 million of that is 3 years. So you can see from that calculation, of course, the duration is longer than overnight, but it's probably on average, I don't know what, maybe 4 or 5 months. We haven't done the arithmetic to give you an example. So we expect, again, the pickup to be 15 to 25 basis points.

And with the new system, we can engage better in additional money market instruments to diversify the risk with repos, reverse repos, securities lending and so on. That would give us a little bit more flexibility. But you can be assured we have a risk-averse approach for our clients' money not to have any hiccups here. In terms of -- hopefully, that answers first part of your question one.

The question towards additional products is clearly, yes, we are looking at, and we said this already at the beginning of this year at further product enhancements. And we are currently, again, going through the planning. We believe for generations of European savers, deposits is an area which we might consider. But obviously, as we are going through the planning and we are discussing these topics with our Supervisory Board and stakeholders and have to prioritize what we can do on the platform and how we -- and how quickly this would be available, we will say more to these changes at the capital markets outlook in February and come back on the situation.

And maybe if I may, I also say something on this BaFin situation. We are in -- first of all, it's a topic from the past. It's not an actual issue. It's a topic exactly, as you said, from 2021 when previous management was a little bit, let's say, maybe an ignorance in the discussions with the regulators. We have a very good relationship with the regulators. We have open dialogue, but we still have to deal with some issues from the past, and that is 2021 is almost 5 years ago. The impact, as Benon mentioned, has already been mostly provisioned. And if there is an additional payment once we are in agreement, it will probably be not able for you to see that. So the impact will be is already in the numbers, let's put it this way, okay?

Ian, I would like to finish off with your second question. This was the question relating to products where we actually benefit from the size of the trade. You mentioned in your calculation 2 examples. I think I would add a third one, which is exchange traded products without specifying the details because they are very individual, but those are also as a trade category where size matters.

The next questions comes from the line of Christoph Greulich from Berenberg.

Three from my side, please. The first one would be another brief follow-up on the new treasury system. So if I look at your slide where you break down how the cash deposits are being used, it looks like about 20% of the cash, which is not used for the lending book is currently invested in bonds. But what is kind of the final target here in terms of the liquidity portfolio? How much of that would sit in bonds and how much would, yes, remain parked at the Bundesbank. That would be the first one.

Then secondly, on the cost side, you mentioned that you've reached now a clean sustainable level. So I'm just wondering what type of normal cost inflation we should expect from here on in the OpEx line?

And then lastly, a follow-up on your comments regarding the average commission per trade. So if I look at the year-over-year comparison in Q3, it looks like that the average number has gone up by EUR 0.50 in total. You mentioned about EUR 0.20, yes, was coming from the higher share of U.S. trades, EUR 0.04 on crypto. So it means that there is still half of that kind of uptick contributed by other factors. Is that mainly the mix shift between the flatex and the DEGIRO brands? Or what other factors should we take into consideration here?

Okay. Thanks, Christoph. Shall I start with the treasury system, maybe. I would say we have not fixed a clear mix of product. But one thing is clear, we need to stay very liquid for our clients' money movements and so on. At the same time, credit spreads are at all-time low. So we will remain flexible when it comes to instruments. But obviously, because the money is very sticky, we can add a little bit of duration, but it is important for us that the bonds are available for repo that we can always fulfill and stay liquid for any money movement that happens.

We will tap slowly into new areas like, as I mentioned, swaps, repos and sec lending. And the expectation is to create this 15 to 25 basis points enhancement. I would -- a ballpark number is at the moment, we think about whatever, 20%, 25% in bonds at the moment. And when we look at additional instruments once the system is running, I would say it's a little bit too early to tell what we will exactly do in terms of asset allocation because we don't know what the spreads look like once the system is running. And if the spreads are not attractive or the yield curve will go inverted again, we will stay at the short end of the curve because it will be most beneficial.

Maybe on the 2 other questions, your last question on the commission rate. Really, it's simply the product mix that benefited quite a bit to the numbers. So we simply had more revenue-generating trades and high revenue-generating trades compared to other trades, and we mentioned a few minutes ago, sort of which trades those are in general. So it's been a positive trend for us.

And on the cost side, we haven't finished the modeling for 2026. Oliver alluded already to the fact that we are preparing currently all the documents to get approvals from the committees and Supervisory Board and so on. But clearly, it's not going to be 60. We don't expect any big changes next year. We expect normal inflation patterns and whether it's going to be a number of slightly above or slightly below 50, we simply don't know yet.

But it's very clear, we will stay disciplined on cost.

The next question comes from Andrew Lowe from Citi.

I've got a quick follow-up. Could you possibly disclose the share of customers that placed at least one trade during Q3? I think the last time it was disclosed was Q1 when it was 33%. So if you're able to share what that figure is for Q2 and Q3, that would be really helpful.

So yes, we are happy to disclose that. For Q3, it's 30%. And if we look at the second quarter, it's also 30%. So we qualitatively always tend to say that about 1/3 of our client base is active in a given quarter, but the Q2 and the Q3 numbers were 30%.

Can I just ask a quick follow-up? So that seems to be slightly below the figures from Q4 last year and Q1. Is there sort of any particular reason for that? And is 30% the right number going forward?

Look, it's hard to comment. Increased market volatility tends to benefit trade from existing clients, particularly from clients who trade with us frequently. So you don't have an even distribution of client behavior when you look at cohorts. People who trade or clients who trade tend to trade more on average than the average client when market volatility picks up, and that might lead to some of those effects. But the effects are not in a range that where we start looking at them with any special care or caution.

There are no further questions at this time, so I hand the conference back to the speakers for any closing comments.

Thank you very much all for your participation today in our Q3 call. As already mentioned, obviously, if you have any further questions, any follow-ups, Laura and myself are more than happy to take your calls and e-mails individually now after the call. And again, thanks for the good questions today during the call. Thank you very much, and have a great day. Goodbye.

Hello, and welcome to the flatexDEGIRO Analyst Call for H1 2025 results. [Operator Instructions] Now I will hand over the conference over to the speakers, Oliver Behrens, CEO; Dr. Benon Janos, CFO; and Achim Schreck, Head of IR. Achim, please go ahead.

Thank you, and good morning, everyone. Many thanks for dialing in, and welcome to our analyst call relating to our Q2 results, which we published yesterday evening post-market close. My name is Achim Schreck, and I'm heading the Investor Relations team here at flatexDEGIRO.

And with me, I have today our CEO, Oliver Behrens; as well as our CFO, Dr. Benon Janos, who will lead us through the presentation today. We also have in the room with us today, Christiane Strubel, our Chief HR Officer; Dr. Thomas Lindner, our Global Head of Finance; as well as my IR colleague, Laura Hecker. As usual, we would like to provide a short run through the presentation before we open up for your questions.

And without any further ado, I'm very pleased to hand over now to Oliver. Please go ahead. The floor is yours.

Thank you, Achim. Good morning, everyone, and welcome to our analyst call for our preliminary Q2 and H1 results. Benon will run you through the details of our performance in the second quarter in a moment. I would just like to highlight a few key points.

We are obviously well on track. We have achieved a record half year, both in regard to our top line as well as our bottom line. And while external factors have helped this development, namely the higher market volatility, you also have to be able as a platform and as a team to capture these opportunities, which I believe we have done very well, particularly during the turbulent days of April. I would, therefore, also like to take the opportunity to thank all colleagues within flatexDEGIRO who have contributed greatly to the strong performance.

The strong first half also allowed us to raise our full year guidance significantly. Aiming for more than EUR 0.5 billion of revenues and a 15% to 25% increase in net income. Despite some headwinds from the overall interest rate environment and despite the fact that the strategic growth initiatives are currently implemented, we have not yet had a measurable impact over the past 6 months yet. We have also seen a number of important changes to the management team and the Supervisory Board of flatexDEGIRO. I will elaborate on this shortly. Also on our current status when it comes to crypto and securities lending.

But let me start with 2 high-level observations when it comes to our operating performance. On the trading side, volatility has been a substantial driver of growth. It spiked at the beginning of the second quarter, reaching levels that were only surpassed at the beginning of COVID. That volatility didn't only lift the number of trades, but also the average commission per trade due to a higher share of U.S. trading. It probably even created some tailwind for our interest income due to high cash inflows at the time with a more moderate investment rate of retail investors.

As much as we enjoyed the additional boost in the first half year, it is prudent to not project such effects into the future, which we have not done for the second half of our full year guidance. It is also part of prudent management to not get carried away in good times, but to stay focused on the things you can control and we can control. flatexDEGIRO has always been a story about growth and operating leverage. And while we have been able to strongly demonstrate our ability to grow for years, the operational leverage has never been as evident as one could have expected.

There have always been reasons why costs went up in 1 year. Our special expenses had to be accounted for in another. When Benon took office as Group CFO in early 2023, one of his first official acts was to abolish all forms of adjustments in our financial reporting. Yes, unexpected things can happen. And yes, sometimes it is absolutely the right thing to increase costs to achieve a long-term gain. But the mindset is and has to be that this is just cost of doing business.

In the first half of 2025, the provisions for long-term variable compensation were higher than we originally expected. And we did recognize some additional EUR 2 million for some personnel measures. But at the end, we have still been able to deliver, again, the operating leverage one would expect from a platform business like ours. The personnel measures I just mentioned are also related to changes at the top of flatexDEGIRO. Over the last 3 months, we had 3 changes at the Management Board or management boards, I should say.

As for the moment, we still have slightly separate management teams in place for flatexDEGIRO AG and flatexDEGIRO Bank AG. In June, Evgeni became our new Chief Risk Officer in the bank, taking over from Matthias Heinrich. It has been a generational shift. On the same token, Steffen Jentsch left the Management Board of the bank effective end of this month. He has been responsible for leading the project of addressing all BaFin findings. And given that all major findings have been solved, his position will not be filled again. Lastly, Stephan Simmang stepped down as CTO, and we use this as an opportunity to bring IT and operations closer together, uniting it under our COO, Jens Möbitz.

As we laid out in February already, harmonizing our IT infrastructure is an essential cornerstone for our 2027 growth plans and beyond. And this harmonization is not an IT thing only. It is a business requirement implemented by IT. This is why it is so important to have both parts of the organization working hand in glove. I want to use the opportunity to thank Steffen, Stephan and Matthias for his important -- for their important contributions they have made to drive the success of flatexDEGIRO over the past years.

At the Supervisory Board, 3 new Board members got voted in at the last AGM in June. Hans-Hermann Lotter, Martina Pfeifer and Sarna Röser; while Stefan Müller and Bernd Förtsch got reelected. As indicated, Hans-Hermann Lotter has been elected Chairman of the Supervisory Board. He is also chairing the Nomination and Remuneration Control Committees. The joint Group Risk and Audit Committee is chaired by Martina Pfeifer. I speak for all my colleagues in the management team when I say that we are very much looking forward to working together with this newly assembled Board and all of its members.

One final remark on governance. As you know, we are in the process of making the legal switch from a German AG to a European SE. Following the approval of the last AGM, things are progressing well, and we expect the change to take effect during the fourth quarter of this year.

I want to close my high-level overview by providing a quick update on some of our key strategic initiatives highlighted in February, starting with crypto trading. We had the initial launch of crypto trading at flatex in Germany in December 2024. In the second quarter, we now also added crypto to the products our DEGIRO customers in Germany can trade. So we made progress, but not as much as we wanted.

Let me explain. To start with a positive, we have done our homework, both on the technical side as well as on the regulatory side. We have done the technical implementation on the DEGIRO system and successfully launched in Germany. We have also received our MiCAR license for the international rollout. However, one of our partners is still waiting for the formal approval of their MiCAR license. The international rollout, which had been planned for Q2 is, therefore, delayed, and we have the launch as well as the start of our marketing campaign only after the summer holidays.

Economically speaking, the delay is, of course, already reflected in the updated guidance. As planned in this wave, we will go live in the Netherlands, France, Spain and Austria to then have crypto trading available for around 2/3 of our total customer base. What we have seen so far is promising and generally in line with our original expectations. By the end of the first half year, the crypto trading volume in Germany alone was already -- has already reached some EUR 175 million.

When it comes to our second important new product launch, securities lending, we are on track for a go-live in key markets such as the Netherlands and Spain early Q4. Securities lending is a valuable enhancement to our product offering, enabling us to generate a higher share of recurring revenues in the future. As mentioned previously, we will start at DEGIRO due to legal restraints in Germany, holding us back on the flatex side. We believe that some 20% to 30% of DEGIRO's assets under custody will be relevant for securities lending once fully rolled out. We will provide more information on the financial impact of securities lending once we have it up and running and have a better visibility on how many customers are opting in and using this opportunity for additional returns.

Now I am pleased to hand over to Benon, who will walk you through our financial performance in the second quarter and the first half of 2025. Thank you for your attention. And now over to you, Benon.

Good morning, everyone, from my side as well, and thank you, Oliver, for your opening remarks. I trust you have already seen our pre-release and the updated guidance we published last week. I'm now pleased to walk you through our financial performance in the quarter in some more detail over the next couple of minutes. Let me quickly remind everyone on the commercial performance in the second quarter as published already with our monthly KPIs.

Gross customer additions amounted to approximately 103,000, an increase of 22% year-on-year. Following normal seasonal patterns, the first quarter is normally the strongest. This year, it was exceptionally strong due to heightened market volatility. This additional volatility peaked at the beginning of April when the U.S. presented their plans to introduce and significantly increase global tariffs.

After a busy April, we observed a normalization in activity in May and June, alongside the typical seasonal slowdown heading into the summer months. This is driven, as usual, by a lot of public holidays and extended weekends. The same is obviously true for trading and thus, the number of settled transactions, which reached 17.9 million in the second quarter, an 18% increase of last year, but a bit lower compared to the first quarter of 2025. We expect this normalization to also continue over the coming months.

Assets under custody again reached a new record with more than EUR 83 billion, strongly growing 37% year-on-year and 10% quarter-on-quarter. Splitting the assets under custody into securities and cash, you see a relative uniform development. Securities under custody grew 36% year-over-year and 10% quarter-over-quarter to now EUR 78.4 billion. At the same time, cash under custody grew by 43% and also 10%, respectively. For the first time in our corporate history, we have now surpassed the EUR 5 billion mark as of June 2025.

To some extent, the growth in cash under custody reflects the heightened market activity. And frankly, we did not anticipate such a strong increase in cash levels when we did our financial planning towards the end of 2024. However, it is important to note that we do not expect these levels of volatility and increases to remain throughout the rest of the year. But let me also point out that from our perspective, these increases over the last few months also reflect the high level of trust customers put in us.

As demonstrated during the busy first weeks of April, when some peers had difficulties handling the steep increase in trading volumes, our platforms performed reliably. We instantly saw a very positive customer reaction to this, and we believe it will also be good to our reputation in the market, both medium and long term. The increase of both securities under cash under custody has been supported by strong inflows onto our platform. Let us have a closer look at the development of our net cash inflows on the next slide.

As you can see here, our customers continue to strongly deploy cash onto our platform, resulting in positive net cash inflows of EUR 2.5 billion in the second quarter. This represents a significant increase of over 70% on a year-over-year basis. For the first half year, we recorded net cash inflows of EUR 5.6 billion compared to EUR 3.2 billion in H1 of 2024. In April, we saw the second highest monthly net cash inflows in our history, surpassed only by the exceptional levels seen in March 2020 when COVID hit the market. With around 80%, a significant portion of these inflows came from our existing customer base, underlining the continued trust and engagement of our customers. It is worth noting that in the first half of 2025, "only" around 85% of these net cash inflows were reinvested compared to historical average of approximately 95%.

Now as usual, we portray our revenue split in the past quarter on Slide 15. In the second quarter, revenues grew 11% year-on-year. Commission income increased strongly by 28% year-on-year, which is mostly attributable to a continuously growing customer base and higher commissions per transaction. I'll turn to that in a second.

Despite a significantly lower interest rate environment, interest income remained relatively stable. Interest income only declined by 10% year-on-year and just 2% sequentially. This was less than what we previously anticipated. Higher amount of cash under custody and a slightly growing average margin loan book compensated to a large extent for lower interest rate levels from the European Central Bank. That said, as the overall market environment continues to normalize, we anticipate that cash levels will not continue on this exceptionally strong growth path that we have observed in the first 6 months.

We are also mindful of a potential further cut of interest rates by the ECB. Moreover, please note that effective July 1, 2025, we have lowered our margin loan rates at flatex and DEGIRO by approximately 50 basis points on average. Since July 1, the average rates are thus in the range of around 5.5% to 5.75%.

Turning to the monetization of trades. You can see that we were able to generate an average commission of EUR 4.72 per transaction in the second quarter of 2025, a 9% year-over-year increase from EUR 4.33 in Q2 of 2024. We have benefited here from higher U.S. trading volumes, an effect that basically started around the U.S. elections in early Q4 of last year. We have also seen a stronger pickup in trading at the flatex side, which is quite positive for us from a mix perspective. Sequentially, the commission per transaction fell by only 6%. As you well know, but please let me reiterate again, Q1 commissions per trade are generally higher than in the following quarters due to seasonal effects. For example, the so-called connectivity fees are typically charged in January or February each year.

Moving to Slide 17. We have portrayed our different cost items and the development over the past quarters. Let me dive a bit deeper into the different drivers for each cost item. Personnel expenses rose from EUR 26 million in Q2 of 2024 to EUR 31 million in Q2 of 2025. The increase in current personnel expenses was due to general wage inflation, but also due to provisions for personnel measures. Without these provisions, current personnel expenses would have been pretty flat year-over-year. Expenses for long-term variable compensation came down versus Q1 in which the strong share price increase had driven up the valuation.

Marketing and advertising expenses amounted to EUR 7 million in Q2, down from EUR 12 million in Q1 2025. Marketing expenses are seasonally front-loaded with Q1 typically seeing the highest spend. On a year-over-year comparison, marketing expenses were on a comparable level despite our accelerated customer growth and the recent crypto launch in Germany. Our average customer acquisition cost in Q2 of 2025 amounted to EUR 68, down 11% year-over-year from EUR 77 in the second quarter of last year.

Other administrative expenses amounted to EUR 12.9 million, decreasing 20% year-on-year. This is a welcome trend and the reduction reflects our ongoing commitment to cost management and operational efficiency. We, therefore, saw a meaningful reduction in costs related to professional services, legal and consultancy fees, amongst others. Let me reiterate what our full year ambition is regarding these admin expenses.

Last year, admin expenses amounted to EUR 61 million. While this number has been driven by the work last year to comply with regulatory requirements, it is not sustainable going forward. Our aim is to reduce it by up to EUR 10 million, i.e., bringing it back to slightly above EUR 50 million. If we now add up simply the first and second quarter of this year, you will see that we are slightly below EUR 25 million after 6 months. So we are fully on track to achieve our communicated goal on the admin expense line.

Moving on to our profitability development on Slide 18. As Oliver mentioned in the beginning, we are seeing operating leverage in our business coming through. With revenues up 11% year-over-year and some cost discipline, we have managed to achieve a 28% increase in net income. Or to put it in simple absolute terms, of EUR 13 million of additional revenues, we generated EUR 9 million of additional net income. That would be an incremental net income margin of about 70%. Including the strong first quarter and thus looking at the full half-year figures, the operating leverage looks very similar. Revenues up 15% or EUR 37 million, net income up 34% or EUR 21 million. And this is on a fully reported basis, no adjustments for long-term variable compensation, provisions for personnel measures or anything else.

These strong results also led to the upgrade of our revenue and net income guidance for fiscal year 2025, which we communicated Monday last week. Revenue growth is now expected to come in between 4% and 8% versus 2024, which already was a record year for us. The revenue range we are aiming for now is thus between EUR 499 million to EUR 518 million. So it's very likely that this year, we will report more than EUR 0.5 billion of revenues for the first time.

On the bottom line, we have also quite significantly upgraded our expectations for net income. We now anticipate growth rates of 15% to 25% year-over-year, ending this full year somewhere between EUR 128 million and EUR 139 million. This compares to our previous range of minus 5% to plus 10%. At the midpoint of our new guidance, we would increase revenues year-over-year by close to EUR 29 million and net income by over EUR 22 million. Again, a leverage on incremental growth of more than 75%.

These upward revisions reflect our strong performance in the first half of the year, continued client growth as well as disciplined cost management. We remain confident in our ability to deliver on those targets as we move to the second half of 2025. However, as mentioned earlier, it is likely that we see a certain normalization of trends again. So our aim for the next 6 months is to beat the second half of 2024, not H1 of 2025. And keep in mind that the fourth quarter last year already benefited noticeably from a higher trading in connection with the U.S. election towards the end of last year.

With that, I would like to conclude our presentation. But just before handing back to Achim for the Q&A, a final remark. We are constantly evolving as an organization also when it comes to our financial reporting. With our monthly and quarterly releases, including preliminary results for the first half year, we believe that we are already providing a full deck of high-quality information to analysts and investors in a timely manner.

Historically, we have published the half year report for flatexDEGIRO about 8 weeks after the end of the first half period, i.e., towards the end of August. While this is perfectly in line with capital markets regulations, the German Corporate Governance Code is recommending a slightly faster publication, which is something we will also now adhere to. This means that we will release the full half year results in full on August 14, roughly 2 weeks earlier than originally scheduled.

Now Achim, back over to you.

Thank you, Benon, for running through the latest numbers. And also thank you, Oliver, for your introductory remarks. We are now happy to take your questions, and I hand back to the moderator to guide us through the Q&A process.

[Operator Instructions] And we have our first question coming from Andrew Lowe from Citi.

I had a couple on -- and the first one was on the commission per trade. So this was EUR 4.72 in Q2, which is flat quarter-on-quarter once you strip out the connection fees and your Nordic peers suffered a 5% to 10% decline quarter-on-quarter. So I'd love to hear a little bit more about the drivers here. Specifically, how did the margin evolve throughout the quarter? Was this significantly higher than the EUR 4.70 in April, driven by the U.S. share dealing and volatility and then normalizing to something like EUR 4.50 in May and June?

Am I correct in thinking that there was a limited mix effect from the crypto trading? So you flagged EUR 175 million of volumes, which suggests that it's probably only about EUR 1 million of commission in H1. And then how meaningful is the mix effect from higher activity in the flatex brand? And then sort of final one, just if you could comment on your expectations from H2 and beyond, that would be great.

Thank you, Andrew. Let's start with your commissions per trade question and the drivers. Let me first reiterate that we typically do not do a full set of analysis based on the monthly figures. So it certainly was higher in April than in May and June, but we are not computing the numbers and compare them in a structured way. The effect as to the commission per trade was mainly driven by the U.S. trading situation. We still enjoy an elevated number of U.S. trades compared to last year.

Sequentially, it actually went down slightly, but what's really driving the commission per trade is the meaningfully higher notional value of trades. As the flatex and particularly the DEGIRO platforms mature and clients grow older and more wealthy, the average size of a transaction tends to go up. The FX conversion fee that we charge on the platforms, particularly on the DEGIRO platform is directly linked to the size of a transaction. And this is really where the kicker comes in, and this is where we benefited from being able to execute a higher notional volume of foreign transactions, mainly U.S. flow.

With respect to the crypto offering, the uplift by the flatex crypto offering was in the quarter, approximately EUR 0.02. So you see that we were able to generate meaningfully higher commissions per trade for the crypto trade. Resulting in a EUR 0.02 pickup. So differently -- saying it differently, without the crypto offering, our commissions per trade would have been around EUR 4.70 for the quarter.

And yes, your final question, and I hope I got it all right with respect to the topics you raised. flatex was indeed seeing a more direct response to the trading activity compared to DEGIRO. Really, this is driven mainly by the fact that while Europe in general has experienced a larger focus from global investors and retail investors over the last 6 months.

Within Europe, Germany is standing out a little bit given the changes we have seen in Germany on the government side and the commitments that the German government has done with respect to spending on investments, spending on defense and other things. So the flatex pickup was particularly noticeable, which is also shown in the different trade growth rates we have published. Yes, that would basically sum it up.

That's really helpful. If I could ask a quick follow-up on the flatex point, if that's okay. You've posted what looks like quite low commission expense as a share of interest expense, but we have to wait until the 14th of August before we get all those details. But I think you flagged in the release that there's some effect from more participation in the flatex trading. So maybe if you could just also follow up with some commentary there of why that seems to be lower than expected?

This is a question which has a couple of elements. Probably one of the key elements is our increased operational efficiency where we are able to meaningfully streamline parts of the operations that have an impact on the line. So volume effects trigger that. What's also clear, it's also a similar answer I gave you a few seconds ago.

The notion of the trade gets bigger, that has a positive influence on that, given that exchanges, clearing houses and such, more often than not charge you on the actual trades, not necessarily on the volume that goes along with that. Plus, we still have the general interest line, which has a very high fraction. So that all leads to a reduced COGS line, whereas the first 2 factors I mentioned, particularly lead to a reduced commission expenses line.

The next questions come from the line of Ian White from Autonomous Research.

Two from my side, please. Just first of all, on the current personnel expenses, you're saying it would have been about flat in 2Q without the specific provisions, so about EUR 25 million. Is that a sensible quarterly run rate for us for 2H '25? Or is there some seasonality there we should expect to see perhaps towards year-end? And when should we expect employee headcount to start growing again? I know the FTE count is down by 40 since year-end. Just trying to understand that progression basically of personnel expenses over the next sort of 6 to 12 months, please?

Secondly, just on the securities lending product. Can you just talk us through essentially kind of what clients earn and the sort of flow of revenues there? I'm trying to understand basically client incentives to sign up for that service and whether the revenue that you receive is linked to, say, cash collateral received in exchange for the loan stock. So can you just help me understand exactly how that -- how you earn revenue on that product and how clients benefit to? And just lastly, on margin lending, basically, does the price cut that you put on 1st of July signal really a steady state for this part of the rate cutting cycle? Will margin lending rates go any lower, all else being equal, basically?

Maybe I'll start with the first question, and then I will hand over to Oliver for the question on securities lending, and we will then answer your third question. So on the personnel expenses, you were right in highlighting the EUR 2 million. But what we were trying to say that the EUR 2 million, if you compare them to the consensus for the quarter, you would be right in there. So the consensus on the personnel side was around EUR 26.5 million or EUR 26.6 million.

So that's the delta to the number we have produced. If you now extrapolate that for the full year, we -- that's probably the better number. We have committed to the fact that our personnel line is not to grow this year, and that's still something we stand by. Our headcount has been reduced, and we currently have no plans for the headcount to rise. So there is no answer to your question, really. There is no plan that headcount would grow again.

Maybe I'll hand over to Oliver for the second lending part.

Yes. Thank you, Benon. I can only echo what Benon said. We have no intention to grow headcount at the moment. We believe that operational leverage will help to keep us -- to keep the headcount flattish. Sec lending, basically, we have a fee share with our clients, and that is essential because it is the entry point for us to get to recurring income. Recurring income regardless of market conditions and volatility.

Obviously, sec lending revenues are also based on volatility, but it's a different form of income, and that is important for us going into the future to balance our revenues that move from only trading revenues and dependence on 0 rates on residual cash on clients' accounts. That we split the fees we receive from sec lending between the clients and us in a fair way based on market practice and regulatory framework. And we said we will be clear in the next couple of weeks how that evolves and how many clients have taken that up, not to preempt anything that has -- is not translated in reality yet.

And maybe the last question was on the margin lending price cuts. So we have done 2 notches down so far. The ECB went down by 2% from the peaks. We went down by 75% approximately. Should the ECB stay at the current interest rate level, we do not expect today any changes to our headline interest income line. Should the ECB continue to cut meaningfully, and it's likely that we would, at some point, follow suit with a similar elasticity compared to what you have seen. I would finish that off, however, with the comment that there is a floor for margin rates.

In the dark days of negative interest rates by the European Central Bank, we had a floor of somewhere around 4-point-something percent on a mix level on the margin loans, which we didn't go below even in a negative 50 basis point ECB scenario. So that is rock bottom for us. And today, the ECB levels at 2% suggest that with today's knowledge, this is roughly a rate cut, plus or minus where we are. So we are okay for now and don't model any meaningful changes in there.

[Operator Instructions] The next question comes from the line of Christoph Greulich from Berenberg.

Three from my side, please, and I will take them one by one, if that is okay. The first one is a follow-up on the commission income and the impact from the U.S. trade. So in Germany, we have the special situation that investors can buy U.S. stocks in euro on a German stock exchange. So I'm wondering like what is the rough percentage of trades in U.S. stocks on the flatex brand that actually is done in U.S. dollars and earn a commission -- I'm sorry, an FX conversion fee compared to the share of U.S. trades done in euros. And then also, I was wondering if you could provide us with the rough magnitude of how much of your total commission income in Q2 came from the FX conversion fee?

You will have to give us a second for the question.

Maybe, Christoph, you go ahead, nevertheless with your second question, then we got the most [indiscernible].

Absolutely. Yes. The second question was regarding the time line for the product initiatives. So you talked about the crypto rollout and the securities lending. I was wondering if you have any update on the B2B business where you -- when you presented the strategic plan, you talked about a deposit-as-a-service initiative. I was just wondering if there's anything you can tell us about the time line here and how the preparations are progressing?

Okay. Maybe I'll start with the B2B business. We are, at the moment, negotiating with 2 parties on contracts for this service. We expect to -- at this moment, from what we know today to finalize these negotiations in the next couple of weeks. But it's, of course, too early to factor anything. It would be not appropriate to factor in any revenues as the contracts have not been fully signed yet.

But I think what the discussions are and where we are talking, the impression is that the appetite from the market for this business, especially to create NSFR revenues from retail funding is very interesting. We also see this from the foreign banks that basically grant loans into Europe. There's also a rising pressure from the ECB to engage in local funding. And again, we still have EUR 3,200 billion of deposits in the local market in Germany that only earn an average coupon of 0.6%. This will be also accompanied by our own deposit offering somewhere in Q1 or Q2 of next year to add to the existing product line.

Once those contracts are signed and we have better visibility on the ability of our clients to raise deposits with their own Internet presence engineered by us, we will be more precise in the next couple of weeks and months. But we are pretty confident that we can close at least 1 deal before Christmas.

Let me cover your first question. Let's start with your point that in Germany, a lot of the U.S. stocks executed not in U.S. dollars, but in euro. And that's, of course, exactly the same for us. If we look at the ratio of the directly executed trades in U.S. dollars on the different platforms, you can make a point that at DEGIRO, more than 90% of investment into American companies is done directly on American soil in U.S. dollars.

Difference on the flatex side. On the flatex side, the ratio is very roughly speaking, maybe 1:3. So for every 3 shares in U.S. companies executed in Germany on regional exchanges in Europe, 1 native order is placed in the U.S. This basically means that the conversion revenues on the foreign exchange side are meaningfully more relevant on the DEGIRO platform than the flatex platform, where DEGIRO accounts for more than 90% of those revenues. And to finish off your question with some real numbers, I'm rounding a little bit. But on the DEGIRO side, it's EUR 15 million, whereas on the flatex side, it's EUR 1 million to EUR 1.1 million for the second quarter.

Yes, that's very helpful. And then just a last one from my side regarding -- sorry...

Sorry, just to add to that, this is not certain that these transactions are always converted back into euros because clients can have a U.S. dollar account that basically keep their dollars. They can also convert a bulk amount of dollars from euros and then use that and so on. So you cannot just do the arithmetic on just looking at the U.S. trades and take the U.S. conversion as a given revenue.

The next question comes from the line of Mengxian Sun from Deutsche Bank.

So 2 questions from my side. So the first one is on the crypto trading products. As you mentioned, there is some delay of one of the partner getting the MiCAR license. So do we have any visibility on when and whether they will get it? Will they get it before this summer? Or are there any risks that the international rollout of the crypto trading will be delayed further?

And the second question is more broader on the general -- on the recent discussion on the German state pension plan restructuring. Can you share with us some of your thoughts, what do you think the potential changes would be? And how do you think it will shape the flatex business or the general industries in the midterm?

Thank you for the question. So question -- I think it was 2 questions, 1 on crypto, 1 on pension reform. Crypto with our partner, we, I think, stated in our presentation here that we expect to go live after the summer. So which means summer holidays end in different regions in Germany in a different date, but the reality is not too far off. So we're speaking about whatever, 4 to 6 weeks from here, something like that. But of course, you never know who and which authority is also going on vacation and whether that extends the process.

But we're talking about a maximum of 40 days from today, business days from today. That will be the absolute maximum from what we know today. And I think we are starting the preregistration as we speak, which means clients are already starting the onboarding process in their crypto addition to their product range they can trade. They have to go through these tests and so on. So I would say there's a lot of light at the end of the tunnel, and we are watching it to come.

On the pension reform, I think there has been a lot of preempting in minor accounts and so on in the marketplace. The reality is most likely, these products will only hit the market in '27 when the regulatory framework is fully revealed. The reality is also that the current project of the government is put under financial education, which means the government is giving every child between EUR 6 and EUR 18, EUR 10 per month to basically try out investment product.

On a EUR 10 basis, it's great to have an investment account to play around, but you could also do a [Foreign Language], the effect would more or less be the same. Because if you add it up, you have 12x EUR 10 is EUR 120, multiplied by 12 years, that's at least from the top of my head, EUR 2,440. You add a little bit of performance, then the great news is somebody who becomes an adult with the age of 18 has probably EUR 2,500 to EUR 3,000 if nobody ever makes any money along the journey.

So we are hoping that the government is open to adjustments of their initial thoughts, which would mean that at least the parents and grandparents can add on to the savings. And then there needs to be a crossover from the Riester-Rente in a way to the [Foreign Language] system. And that would require a change in the [Foreign Language] legislation, which means there needs to be an additional [ lag ] of retirement savings. And this is what we are still hoping for this initiative from basically last year from Mr. Lindner, the Aktiv-Rente is really with maybe some adjustments that it looks like it's coming from the acting government is coming into play. And there is from the discussions, what at least I heard is that they are considering something around 15% of the social security barrier, which would mean something around EUR 10,000 annual savings.

But this is all rumors, and we are not basing our business planning on rumors. We are looking at the facts. But generally speaking, any reform and pension, any change in the governments accepting that the pension, the [ IOU ] pension in Germany is safe, but the level is not safe. And that individuals have to do something on their own would also make a meaningful change in the tone the governments would have towards private investments in equity markets and ETFs, mutual funds and so on. And that alone could give the business a big boost, and the entire industry a big boost.

When you look at Germany, when you look at the equity participation rate, we're always so happy about this, whatever, 10% to 14% participation rate of the public in equity markets and investment markets. The reality is we are a financial illiterate region. We are underinvested in assets, broadly speaking, and there is massive upside. But it would require a change in the retirement pension system that would result in a massive change of tone from the top, and that would help to grow investment and custody accounts and investment accounts from my perspective by at least 50% over the next couple of years, maybe more.

And there are studies from Oliver Wyman and others -- what the potential is -- we believe is enormous, but we cannot harvest this alone. We need the support of the government. It should be accompanied by some tax bracket of those investments. And that would also make European investment markets less dependent from foreign capital. And I think the good news is the wave is really intact. And also the European government under the leadership of Ursula von der Leyen is also supporting this retail investment initiative.

Things maybe from our perspective, are a bit slow. We're hoping for a little bit of faster change. But yes, we have to play by ear and see how things evolve. And then if it really comes and at which level, we are definitely very interested in participating and making our clients and their families and their children the right offer when the framework gets clearer. I hope that answers your question reasonably well. Thank you.

We have a new question from the line of Christoph Greulich from Berenberg.

Just 1 last one from my side, please. It's regarding the capital planning. And just wondering how far you've come there and when we can expect an update from your side on the capital allocation strategy?

Yes, we are on track to deliver on what we mentioned previously. So that's something that we are currently developing. It's to remind everyone, it's bring our strategy update and our top line update that we gave in February and align that with the required regulatory capital to grow and operate our business. Don't forget that our balance sheet in the bank or our customer deposits grew by like 40% in 9 months. We are on track to deliver on what we promised to give you a detailed update by the end of this year, beginning of next year, respectively.

There are no more questions at this time. So I hand the conference back for the speakers for any closing remarks.

Thank you very much, everyone, for participating in today's call as well as for your questions. As always, if there are any follow-ups, Laura and myself will be happily available to any clarifications. Please just reach out to us.

Otherwise, we wish you a great summer. You'll hear again from us on 5th of August with our July figures. And then as mentioned by Benon, with our preliminary -- sorry, with our full H1 results being released on 14th of August. Thank you very much. Have a great day.