Plus500 Ltd. (PLUS) Earnings Call Transcript

Good day, ladies and gentlemen and welcome to the Plus500 H1 2025 Interim Results. The presentation will commence shortly. [Operator Instructions] Please note, this call is being live streamed to a webcast for a wider audience and will be recorded. I would now like to hand over to David Zruia, Group Chief Executive Officer, to open the presentation. Please go ahead.

Good morning, everyone and thank you for joining our 2025 interim results presentation. I'm David Zruia, CEO of Plus5 500 and I am joined today by Elad Even-Chen, our Group CFO; and Owen Jones, our Group Head of Investor Relations. During the first 6 months of 2025, Plu's500 globally diversified multi-asset offering drove an acceleration of positive momentum across a number of important strategic initiatives, which we will highlight to you today. Our differentiated offerings which are powered by our proprietary technology provides us with strong competitive advantages and we remain committed to delivering seamless and innovative access to financial markets worldwide. The structural growth opportunities ahead of us are compelling and we look to the year ahead and beyond with confidence. As always, I would like to thank all of the people of Plus500, who once again made these results possible, for the hard work and continued dedication towards successfully achieving our collective goals and strategic ambitions. Slide 2 shows the agenda for today. We will take you through the highlights for the first half and the operating review followed by a run-through of our unique technology and product set and then continue with the financial highlights. We will then conclude with a summary and outlook section before taking your questions at the end. There are 5 key takeaways from today's presentation shown on Slide 4. In summary, we made significant progress in further diversifying our business and strengthening our operational model in a way that enables the group to continue driving compounded shareholder returns. The positive momentum behind our business is accelerating as we build on the growth achieved across our key markets in the first half. We have added to our industry-leading portfolio of global licenses and clearing memberships, continue to build out our product suite with new offerings in Japan and announced the conditional acquisition of Mehta Equities in India further expanding our geographic reach. We drove growth across key markets and regions, including the UAE and the U.S. This, in turn, led to an excellent set of financial results with revenue and EBITDA growth year-on-year. We announced shareholder returns of $200 million in February 2025 and we have added another $165 million today, comprising dividends and share buybacks, taking the total announced year-to-date to $365 million, equivalent to 11% of our closing market capitalization on 30 of June 2025. And even with such attractive shareholder returns, the group ended the first half with an extremely strong financial position with cash balances of approximately $938 million and no debt. This accelerated momentum and excellent results for the first 6 months of 2025 build on the significant track record that we have established since our IPO in 2013. Over that period, Plus500 has generated $3.7 billion in cash from operations, $3 billion in accumulated net profits and of that, the company has returned approximately $2.7 billion to shareholders, which includes the $165 million announced today, to $1.6 billion in dividends and $1.1 billion in share buybacks. These shareholder returns have positioned Plus500 as the best performing share in the FTSE All-Share Index over the last 12 years on a total return basis with a cumulative total shareholder returns of over 7,900%, an achievement that we are extremely proud of. Earlier this year, the company joined the prestigious STOXX Europe 600 Index, an important recognition of the compounding value creation and share price performance we have delivered in recent years. Moving now to Slide 6, which focuses on some of our operational drivers and output for the first half of 2025. Our ongoing focus on customer engagement, product development and our people continue to drive meaningful results during the period. The drivers and outputs that you can see on this slide are all underpinned by our industry-leading proprietary technology, a key competitive advantage for Plus500, which allows us to drive deeper engagement with our customers. As a result, 66% of OTC revenue was derived from customers who have been trading with Plus500 for over 3 years, which demonstrates the benefits of our strategic focus on driving higher customer lifetime values. Customer deposits more than doubled to $3.1 billion, which is a record level for a 6 months period and this equated to a record of approximately $17,250 per active customer. The strength of our mobile offering was once again highlighted with 89% of OTC revenue being generated for mobile or tablet devices. Moving now to Slide 7. Three years ago, we introduced our strategic road map at our Capital Markets Day. Since then, Plus500 has successfully evolved from being a single product provider into a scaled market-leading multi-asset fintech group with increasingly diversified operations, both geographically and across product lines. This transformation has had a significant impact on the growth of the business and underpins our focus on innovation, growth and continued diversification through the development of new products and expansion into new markets. Furthermore, a crucial part of the group's strategy is to deepen customer engagement and enhance customer retention by investing in and developing our customer retention technologies and initiatives. Together, we expect the objectives within our strategic road map to position Plus500 to continue delivering compound returns for shareholders for many years to come. The group's superior proprietary technology and its ability to quickly develop new offerings, such as additional product lines and services has enabled Plus500 to transform in recent years into a global provider of market infrastructure and proprietary trading platforms with a broad customer base. The Plus500 of today provides a wide range of products, services and instruments across its OTC, futures, options on futures and share dealing verticals. And we operate in strategically attractive growing markets with powerful structural growth drivers. Our OTC business covers 7 asset classes and our futures business can be split further into a B2B institutional and a B2C retail offering, which provides clearing and execution services across a growing range of global exchanges. We also include Plus500 Cosmos, an industry-leading client portal for our B2B futures customers, which was launched last year. On the right side of the chart, we can see our share dealing platform, Plus500 Invest, which enables customers to buy and sell shares directly. Our overall offering provides customers with a wide choice of products, enabling them to tailor their approach and trading strategies. The diversification of our business is a key part of our success and we will continue to drive this agenda over the coming years as we seize the attractive growth opportunities in front of us. Moving to the next slide. Here, we show the important role that Plus500 plays as a provider of market infrastructure. Our role has evolved significantly as the group has diversified its operations and we now sit it at the heart of the financial ecosystem, connecting institutional customers and retail customers to more than 30 different exchanges and clearing houses. We provide the critical market infrastructure to a global customer base, which includes individual customers, institutions and other businesses. We remain extremely excited about the potential for this key part of our business and there is much more to come. Slide 10 shows our current clearing and industry memberships in the futures space. With the acquisition of Cunningham Commodities and Cunningham Trading Systems in 2021, Plus500 became the owner of a fully regulated futures commission merchant, or FCM, in the U.S., enabling the business to become an execution value for its customers while also offering a full suite of holistic clearing services. The group has secured memberships with some of the largest clearing houses globally, including the CME exchanges, Eurex, the Minneapolis Grain Exchange, and most recently, ICE Clear U.S. in January this year. These clearing memberships, which are difficult to obtain allow us to enhance our holistic offering and accommodate the need of our customers on a global basis, which is a key part of the growth strategy of our futures business. We will continue to pursue additional clearing memberships with global exchanges during 2025 and beyond. As shown here on the right-hand side of this slide, we are in the process of adding a further 6 exchange and clearinghouse memberships in India through our acquisition of Mehta Equities, which we anticipate completing during the second half of the year. The Indian market is globally significant for both B2B and B2C customers and we'll return to this opportunity in more detail later. Slide 11 highlights some of our ESG credentials and priority areas. Customer care and education is extremely important to us and we always strive to provide the highest level of care and services to our customers. Employee welfare and well-being remain a key focus area and we also continue to support the local communities in which we operate. We have an extremely talented and diverse Board of Directors who have relevant experience across a number of important business areas for Plus500. We remain committed to being carbon negative by 2030. And we are looking at ways to reduce energy usage, particularly in our data centers. Consistent with this commitment, last year, we moved our headquarters to a newer and more energy-efficient building. I will now hand over to Elad to present the operating review section.

Thank you, David and good morning, everyone. It is a privilege to be speaking with you all again, and I'm proud to be presenting such a strong set of results. The operating review section will include an overview of our operating performance in the first half of the year as well as a closer look at our growing futures business. As David mentioned, the positive momentum in our business is accelerating, and we delivered an excellent operational progress in the first half of 2025 as shown here on Slide 13. The operational highlights include significant positive momentum across a number of important initiatives and strategic drivers, excellent progress with our growing features businesses with record customer segregated fund during the period, optimization of our already market-leading online customer acquisition strategies and the exciting conditional acquisition of Mehta Equities in India, which we announced in March of this year. Turning to the next slide. The acquisition of Mehta Equities, which we anticipate closing later this year represents an exciting step in our strategic ambition of becoming a global futures provider. Leveraging our existing futures platform, we can now establish attractive and meaningful synergies for B2B customers between our operations in the U.S. and India. This will be achieved by providing these customers with more streamlined access to trading products and clearing services across jurisdictions, while also providing them with best-in-class customer service and access to our proprietary customer portal, the Plus500 Cosmos. And we are really excited about the growth potential of this part of our business. Plus500 operates in a highly regulated industry and our products across OTC, share dealing and futures are regulated globally by [indiscernible] with major regulators in each territory overseeing the local markets and ensuring compliance with applicable regulatory requirements. As can be seen on this slide, the group currently holds 15 different regulatory licenses, which will become 16 with the expected addition of Mehta Equities this year. These licenses represent an extremely valuable asset and a meaningful source of competitive advantage for Plus500 as they all serve as a trusted regulatory stamp on our status as a global multi-asset fintech group on our international stage. Most recently, as announced in June, we obtained a new license from the Canadian Investment Regulatory Organization. This achievement marked another important milestone in Plu's500 ongoing strategic efforts to further expand into North America with the extension of its offering into the well-established and highly regulated Canadian market. With this new license, Plus500 will offer its services within the OTC market and aims to further expand its local proposition by offering an omnichannel suite of products over time. Our portfolio of international licenses represents a unique asset for the group. Taken together, these licenses serve as an economic moat around our business, raising the barriers of entry to the industry and reinforcing Plus500's value proposition. Additionally, our expertise in obtaining regulatory licenses leaves us well positioned to secure additional ones in new territories in 2025 and beyond. For instance, we're actively working to expand our operations in Asia and LatAm. As can be seen in Slide 16, we offer our services to approximately 32 million registered customers in more than 60 countries. This global scale and local offering is an important source of both current and future value as we focus on driving activation, retention and monetization of our global customer base by leveraging our highly innovative and agile proprietary technology. Our global offering is further enhanced by our localized solutions which includes support in a customer's native language and products and services fully localized and tailored to the end markets in which we operate. On Slide 17, we show some of our operating KPIs, overlaid with some regional performance data. As the group has consistently demonstrated historically, new customer acquisition and deeper engagement with existing customers lays the foundation for future growth, making it an investment today to drive value creation over the medium to long term. In the first half of 2025, we onboarded more than 56,000 new customers and active customers increased to approximately 180,000. Moving ahead to Slide 18, which shows customer tenure and longevity. Over recent years, we have made investments in our customer retention technologies and premium account programs to improve customer longevity. The aim was to foster long-term relationships with our customers by providing technology-enabled retention initiatives and by consistently providing our customers with a wide range of products and services, supported by a robust, secure, intuitive and reliable trading platforms. These improvements are working well, as shown by the blue shaded areas on the pie charts. For example, in the first half of 2025, 84% of the OTC revenue was generated by customers who have been with us for more than a year, while 47% of the OTC revenue was generated by customers who have been with us for more than 5 years. This is an excellent achievement as the equivalent number from 2020 was just 14%. Over the next few slides, I will highlight the impact that non-OTC business as a whole and particularly the futures business has had on the group's revenues, customer mix and other KPIs. Slide 19 sets out how our revenue and new customer mix have evolved in recent years. When we acquired our future business in 2021, our non-OTC revenues accounted for just 1% of the group's revenue. Since then, our futures business has established itself and grown quickly, reflecting the strength of our offering, both to the retail and institutional customers. In the first half of 2025, non-OTC revenues accounted for approximately 13% of the group's total revenue, which highlights the importance of this vertical to the group. In 2025, we anticipate that the non-OTC business will generate revenues of more than $100 million. From a customer perspective, 17% of the new customers came from the non-OTC businesses in the first half of 2025. This is the foundation which we look to build on over the coming years. Slide 20 shows the progress we have made in attracting higher-value customers and how that has impacted our average deposit per active customer since 2021. For the first half of 2025, aggregate customer deposits more than doubled to $3.1 billion, which is a record level for the group over a 6-month period, reflecting our increased breadth and scale of operations. And over the last 4 years, we have more than tripled the average deposit per active customer from approximately $5,000 in 2021 to approximately $17,000 in the first half of 2025. We have done this by strategically focusing on higher-value customers, leveraging our superior marketing technologies and providing a localized offering to customers, which includes local payment solutions and an exceptional customer service. In the next 2 slides, I will cover the highly attractive opportunities ahead of us in the U.S. futures market, starting on Slide 21. Over the last few years, Plus500 has established its position in the U.S. futures market with a B2B institutional and a B2C retail offering, both of which performed extremely well during the first 6 months of the year. Across our B2B and B2C businesses, we grew our customer segregated funds to approximately $850 million at the end of June 2025 versus approximately $350 million at the end of 2024, representing growth of over 140%, which is a fantastic achievement. This reflects both the onboarding of new customers and increased trading activity from existing ones. Our U.S. futures business is going from strength to strength. In 2025, we secured a clearing membership with ICE Clear U.S. which will allow us to further enhance our institutional products offering to a global customer base. In the B2C business, our trading platform, Plus500 Futures, which offers a unique omni-set solution, continue to set us apart from our competitors and it is clear that our customers value the seamless trading experience, which we offer. Moving ahead to Slide 22. Plus500's U.S. operation is regulated by the CFTC and is a member of the National Futures Association and the Futures Industry Association. Plus500's U.S. operation also holds clearing memberships with the CME Group exchanges, the Minneapolis Grain Exchange, Eurex and ICE Clear U.S. We will continue to target additional clearing memberships going forward. This objective will be supported by our robust financial position and expertise in applying for and securing new clearing memberships. Thanks to our proprietary technology, financial strength, customer service and strategic collaborations, we have grown rapidly in a short space of time to become an established player in the futures market. Additionally, as part of our B2C offering, we are proud to have the Plus500 Futures platform, which has gained good traction with our customers, driven by its omni-set solution and the T4-Pro, our trading platform for more professional customers. Our licenses, clearing memberships, strong balance sheet, partnerships and innovative training platforms leave us well positioned to generate continued value for all stakeholders. Overall, our expansion into non-OTC products was a key pillar of our strategic road map in one against which we are delivering real and accelerated progress. I will now hand back to David, who will take us through the technology section.

Thank you, Elad. Turning to Slide 24. Since Plus500 was founded in 2008, our proprietary technology development has been a key enabler for the group and it has provided an invaluable foundation for everything that we have delivered since. Developing and maintaining our own proprietary technology enables our system architecture to be extremely robust while keeping a high degree of flexibility. More importantly, our global customer base benefits on the framework. We maintain a global presence with localized and tailored offerings. And this wouldn't be possible without our superior technology-enabled foundation and the inherent resilience of our operations. Over the next few slides, I will cover the various aspects of our technology stack in more detail. On the next slide, Slide 25, I will cover the various proprietary technology components, which we have produced and which continue to deliver new innovative solutions for our customers. Our technology supports all our domains from operations, product, marketing capabilities to the customer service. This means our technology delivers a broad range of services within each of these areas such as search and data analytics and marketing, payment processing and customer onboarding solutions. Our domains are built using our own technology and they are integrated and optimized with one another, giving a holistic view of our systems. Our system architecture, therefore, enables us to operate with both resilience and agility in highly regulated markets and underpins our global best-in-class multi-asset offering. Moving ahead to Slide 26. Our proprietary technology allows us to support our customers at every stage of their journey end-to-end from customer acquisition to our established CRM system, to payments, to our proprietary cashier, all the way through to our unique trading solutions and product offering. Plus500 is focused on developing and delivering the most innovative and established technology which provides our global customer base with a localized intuitive and secure trading experience. Our industry-leading proprietary technology provides our customers with a reliable, robust and seamless trading experience across mobile devices, tablets and the web. We offer over 2,500 different underlying global financial instruments across more than 60 countries and in 30 languages via our product portfolios of OTC, share dealing and futures. As you can see on the slide, the graphic user interface and general user experience across our product offering is seamless, which enables higher level of customer satisfaction. Plus500's new technology stack for the U.S. futures market available across various platforms serves both retail, professional and institutional clients. This includes Plus500 Futures, T4-Pro and Plus500 customers, along with advanced clearing, risk management, middle office and execution technologies. For retail clients, our mobile technological solutions offers an intuitive trading experience, making futures trading accessible to all applicable customers. We also provide access to our Trading Academy for an informed trading experience. For institutional clients, we offer enhanced control over the end-to-end process, Plus500 Cosmos leads industry innovation with a customer portal, featuring advanced risk management tools and trade monitoring services. With these advancements, Plus500 has established itself as a key market infrastructure provider in the futures industry. On to Slide 29. Shown here is our full suite of OTC products in the Japanese retail market. In the beginning of the year, we launched our new proprietary multi-asset trading platform for the Japanese market including OTC products across ForEx, indices, equities and ETFs as well as knock-out options. More recently, in June 2025, we secured an additional commodities license, meaning we now offer a full range of OTC products to the important Japanese retail trading market. It is a large and well-established market offering significant potential to Plus500 over the medium to long term. Turning to Slide 30. The mobile trading space has become more and more important for retail customers and we work extremely hard to maintain our leading position in this field. Many of our customers have a mobile-first approach to trading which is why Plus500's customer experience is seamless between mobile, tablets or web and each interaction is designed to have the same look and feel. This provides a more consistent trading experience for our customers, which is extremely important to us. As a result, 89% of OTC revenue was generated from customers trading with us on mobile or tablet devices and 84% of OTC trades took place on mobile or tablet devices in the first 6 months of 2025. Slide 31 presents some of the educational tools we provide as part of our responsible and customer-centric approach. We go beyond giving our customers access to the best saving platforms. For example, we also provide them with access to +Insights and to our Plus500 Trading Academy. +Insights is our proprietary big data analytical tool that is designed to provide customers on our OTC trading platform with access to real-time and historical trends and content using data from the group's extensive customer base. We also show here our Trading Academy, which includes educational materials and webinars on different trading strategies. I will now hand over to Elad, who will take you through the financials before I return with the summary and outlook section.

Thank you, David. Shown here on Slide 33, are some of the financial and operational highlights for the period. The group delivered revenue and EBITDA growth of 4% and 1% year-on-year for the first half of 2025 and of 15% and 12%, respectively, for the second quarter of 2025, which is an excellent result and one I'm extremely pleased with. Our focus on attracting and retaining higher-value customers, enabled by our sophisticated marketing technology investments led to a significant increase in the average deposit per active customer to approximately $17,000, which reflects a group record of $3.1 billion total customer deposits for a 6-month period. This kind of progress would not have been possible without the strong foundations we have in place of best-in-class customer service and robust and reliable trading platforms, all enabled by our proprietary technology. On Slide 34, we can see the financial performance that Plus500 has delivered in recent years. The group generated revenue of $415 million in the first half of 2025, representing growth of 4% year-on-year. EBITDA was also extremely healthy at the level of $185 million. This robust delivery, combined with the ongoing share buyback program during the period, led to a basic earnings per share of $2.05, representing growth of 8% year-on-year. I will now take you through our financials in more detail, starting on Slide 35. Slide 35 shows the breakdown of our income statement in a bit more detail. Both selling and marketing costs and general expenses increased in line with revenues in the first half of 2025 due to the increased scale of our global footprint and the investments we made to drive future growth. In the first half of 2025, the growth in our marketing spend slowed, reflecting the increased efficiency of our marketing programs during the period. Slide 36 shows our cost base in more detail. The group's cost base is heavily weighted towards variable costs, which accounted for 70% of the total operating costs. The flexibility within the group's cost base is a key part of its overall financial strength and is a significant source of resilience through the different market cycles. In the first half of 2025, the marketing cost decreased as we improved and continue to optimize spend per customer via our multichannel approach to customer acquisition. On Slide 37, we can see the group's balance sheet. Our strong financial position underpins all of our activities, giving us the optionalities to invest both organically and inorganically and to enhance our shareholder returns where appropriate. The group ended the period with cash balances of approximately $938 million with no debt or loans, representing an extremely robust and flexible financial position. Slide 38 presents the cash flow statement, Plus500 remains a highly cash-generative business, supported by a lean cost base and proprietary technology. Since our IPO in 2013, our average operating cash conversion has been approximately at the level of 98%. In the first half of 2025, cash generated from operations was approximately at the level of $130 million and cash and cash equivalents at the end of June 2025 stood at approximately $938 million. This extremely strong cash position has enabled us to announce on shareholder returns of $365 million during the year of 2025, including the $165 million announced today. On Slide 39, we show our disciplined approach to capital allocation across the group. We always seek the right balance between maximizing shareholder returns, making strategic investments to drive future growth, carrying out highly selective bolt-on acquisitions and developing a sustainable business over the long term. We illustrate on the slide, the 2 broad categories within our capital position, one, which is approximately at the level of $550 million, which includes the regulatory capital, working capital, clearing and risk management funds and the other is the surplus capital, which was approximately at the level of $385 million at the end of the first half of 2025. Both categories are there to support the ongoing day-to-day activities of the group, including our growing clearing businesses, future growth and enhanced returns to our shareholders which I will cover now on Slide 40. Our shareholder returns policy stated at least 50% of net profits are to be distributed to shareholders via dividends and share buybacks and at least 50% of those distributions will be made by way of share buybacks. This policy will continue to apply to net profits on a half yearly basis and will continue to be based on a 23% corporate tax rate for both interim and final distributions. The Board will also consider executing special share buybacks or dividends on a half yearly basis, dependent on the fiscal year results as well as on investment and growth opportunities. Accordingly, we are highly pleased to announce today on an additional shareholder returns of $165 million, comprising $90 million in new share buyback programs and $75 million of total dividends, which equals to a dividend distribution of more than $1.05 per share. Thank you all and I will now hand back to David for his final remarks.

Thank you, Elad. Let's now move to the summary and outlook section, starting on Slide 42. As we have shown, the first half of 2025 was another excellent period for Plus500 with accelerating positive momentum and further strategic, operational and financial progress, and we extended our track record of delivering significant returns for our shareholders, which goes back to our IPO in 2013. This has propelled us to be the best performing share on a total return basis since our IPO in 2013 to the end of June 2025, during which time, we generated over 7,900% total return for our shareholders. And partly reflecting this track record Plus500, joined the STOXX Europe 600 Index in January of this year, which is another testament to the growth and success of the group. Putting everything together, shown here on Slide 43 is our compelling investment case. Plus500 has established an enviable track record of growth, innovation and sizable shareholder returns, leveraging our proprietary technology, we are focused on attracting and retaining higher-value customers while ensuring that our customer offering remains cutting-edge, innovative, relevant and diversified. Our robust balance sheet underpins our growth objectives and enables us to deliver attractive and sustainable returns to our shareholders. The Board and executive management team established a strategic road map that clearly outlines Plus500's growth plans and we are laser-focused on executing against it successfully. And to conclude, Slide 44. The opportunity to drive growth, scale and compounding value creation is significant and we have strong fundamentals underpinning our business. These fundamentals coupled with our disciplined approach to capital allocation and our differentiated proprietary technology mean that we are well positioned to seize the exciting growth opportunities ahead of us. We remain confident in the business future prospects and strategic direction driven by our status as a trusted diversified multi-asset fintech group with a strong track record of delivery. Moreover, in the medium to long term, we will continue to invest in our strategic road map initiatives and our class-leading technology to deepen customer relationships and invest in our people. We will also focus our efforts on continuing to drive further diversification towards the non-OTC part of the group. This is all supported by our robust financial position, highly cash-generative business model and the enduring strength of our diversified business model. Thank you for listening and that marks the end of our presentation. We will now move on to take your questions. We have a facility via the webcast.

[Operator Instructions] I would like to remind that this call is being recorded. The first question is from James Allen at Panmure Liberum.

Congrats on another good set of results. Two questions, if I can. First one, we saw the news that the regulators in India are calling for structural reform in the Indian derivatives market. Presumably stricter regulations is a good thing longer term in that market and helps to reduce things like the number of finfluencers, for example. So I guess that could be seen as a good thing for Mehta. Second question is the percent of client deposits in the first half generated by the non-OTC part of the business, that's already running ahead of the 3- to 5-year target. Is there a chance that, that gets upgraded? And if not, what will swing that back the other way over the next few years?

So as for Mehta, very much, we identified new regulatory changes and also the one that took place over the last year and even a couple of years is very positive, reasoning is because of SEBI new guidelines, we see more infrastructure, more regulated markets. And accordingly, you see also an established ecosystem and are currently more than a few players that came across as new entrants. And very much you see that those new guidelines are actually supportive of the people and the new kind of customers to come, trade and feel comfortable. So we feel very comfortable with them. We modeled them already and we see the opportunity, including them. As for the client funds and the non-OTC segment. So as for that, it's true that we already kind of crossed the milestone that we put in front of us. But yet again, we see that the end goal also as increasing the volume, increasing the total amount, not just the percentage. And very much we believe it's a good balance to be with reasoning, let's not forget that the OTC segment is one that also generates the increased level of EBITDA margins. We do believe that from an ROE standpoint of view, we need to put also focus on that segment. As you've seen, we are expanding ourself into the operations in the UAE this year, in the first half into Canada, into the license in Japan, into additional monetization, retention technologies and lots of focus is also being attributed to the OTC space, not just for the non-OTC, while the non-OTC brings us, of course, stability, strength, expansion into the U.S. and other territories.

[Operator Instructions] There are no further questions on the webinar. I will now hand over to Owen Jones, Group Head of Investor Relations, to read out the written questions submitted via the webcast page.

Thank you. We've had a few questions come through to me directly. The first picks up on James' question about growth in non-OTC customer deposits. And the question is, can you explain some of the dynamics behind this growth, i.e., what do we see driving the growth in customer deposits and in particular, customer segregated funds? That's the first question. Second question relates to customer retention. And the question notes that customer retention has improved significantly in recent years. And in the flip side of that is that churn rates have obviously come down quite a lot. So the question is, can we provide any additional information as to what we have done to get those results?

Yes, sure. So over the last few years, we keep growing our customer base, both in institutional and in the retail in the U.S. And basically, this drives the increase in the deposits ratio in the U.S., in the non-OTC business. The majority comes from IBs, introducing brokers and their customers. So basically, we recruited many introducing brokers. This is how the futures business works in the U.S. So each such introducing broker has between hundreds to thousands of customers. So when you recruit a introducing broker, basically, it follows with his customers onboarding to the platform. And then this is the way to increase the deposits. So we recruited new IBs, new institutional customers and also some high net worth customers in the U.S. So this is for the first question.