Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the 2019 Investor Day of Deutsche Borse Group. I would also like to welcome all the participants that have joined today's event via our live video stream. With me is the entire Executive Board of Deutsche Bose, chaired by Theodor Weimer. Theodor will kick off today's presentation. And afterwards, the Executive Board members, Stefan Leitner, Thomas Bruck, Christoph Bohm, Hauke Stas and Gregor Pottmeyer, will present their areas of responsibility.
At around 11:30 or 11:45, we will commence the Q and A session. And afterwards, we're happy to continue some of the discussions during lunch. With this, let me now hand over to you, Theodou.
Thank you, Jan. Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to this year's Capital Markets Day of Deutsche Borse. I'm really glad you're here and a special welcome to our colleagues here in the first row. Let me Jan already mentioned how we would go through, and I will kick off.
And later on, the Exco members, some of them are new to you, will present their respective areas. And finally, Gregor will conclude with the numbers. And I do really hope that this will cover your areas of interest. Last year, we presented our growth strategy, which we called, as you know, Roadmap 2020. Today, my colleagues and I from the Executive Board, we will give you an update, a, on the progress, what we have made so far and b, an outlook of the opportunities ahead of us.
As you are fully aware, our strategy comprises 3 major pillars. 1st, the organic growth. Here, we are exploiting secular growth opportunities with the objective of generating at least 5% net revenue growth and around 10% to 15% earnings growth on average per year. 2nd, M and A. We operate in a, as I call it, a size matters business.
Therefore, we made M and A activities an integral part of our Roadmap 2020. It is our explicit strategy to increase the scale of selected and well defined asset classes in our group by going for external growth opportunities. 3rd, technology. We do have 2 major strategic assets. 1 is HR, our people and second, the IT.
And on the IT side, we've had a great reputation, which we need to and we want to defend. We are perceived being a strong technological player in our industry with a great track record over many decades. Therefore, our plan is to maintain our leading position in IT by introducing new technologies such as the public cloud and the ledger technology. For us, technology is a main driver of our future success. And finally, I'm personally very much convinced that we need strengthened execution discipline on all levels of our company.
For us, execution discipline is the 4th element of our strategy. Here, the aim is to further improve cost control, financial steering and, quite frankly, general management skills. We do believe we can shape our industry and foster secular growth, home made growth by applying a hardworking attitude. From an investor perspective, the goal of our Roadmap 2020 was to reduce the historical valuation multiple discount compared to our peer group. Slide 4 covers an overview of what we have achieved so far over the last year.
Looking at roughly the first half of our midterm planning period from 2018 to 2020, at roughly, I think it is fair to say that we made good progress in implementing our strategy. And to mention it explicitly, we are fully in line with our financial targets of last year's stated roadmap. We exceeded our midterm organic growth targets in 2018 through a combination of strong secular growth and cyclical tailwinds. In 2019, so far, we have been well on track to deliver upon our guidance despite some cyclical headwinds at the start of the year 2019, and we are confident for the rest of the year. After we completed 4 attractive smaller bolt on acquisitions in 2018, our M and A focus in 2019 is on larger transactions to gain further scale.
The Axioma acquisition announced in April 2019 is one example, but others will hopefully follow. Our main focus in technology is currently on distributed ledger technology and adoption of the public cloud services for our regulated businesses. In both areas, we have made good progress since last year. Christoph Perm will present later on that we are at the forefront of regulatory cloud adoption in the European context. To strengthen our execution discipline, we have implemented a wide range of organizational enhancements last year, including the newly composed executive board sitting in front of you today.
The structural performance improvement program, which we call SPIP, the Structural Performance Improvement Program, was initiated last year with the aim to increasing our cost flexibility, and it has largely and very successfully been implemented. The ramp up, the speed of the savings is faster than expected, and the total savings are somewhat above our original estimate of around €100,000,000 With this, we are convinced we have the right setup for delivering our growth strategic roadmap. I think the results so far, including the increase of our valuation, speaks for themselves. Let me now take you through the different parts of the road map, starting with the organic growth on Slide 5. Under the Roadmap 2020, midterm targets, we expect average annual secular growth of net revenue to reach at least 5% per year, no change.
Given the market and political environment, some cyclical growth should come on top. This should result in adjusted net profit growth of around 10% to 15% each year until 2020. Because of the exceptionally strong secular and cyclical net revenue growth in 2018, the increase in net profit significantly exceeded the 10% to 15% range in 2018. For the remaining years, 2019 2020, average annual growth of adjusted net profit of around 10% would be sufficient to meet the midpoint of our 2020 targets since we are ahead of the curve. This is something we firmly believe is achievable, and my colleagues on the Executive Board will later on present the most important opportunities available to achieve these targets.
And you can be assured, if you are ahead of the curve, we won't stop, right, if we have reached our targets. M and A, where do we stand and what is our strategy? Last year, we presented the 5 areas of our business in which we are targeting inorganic growth. Each of these areas requires an individual approach. In the pre trading area, we are lagging behind in most dimensions from a product, from a buy side client and from a geographic point of view.
The Axioma transaction will help us improve our position significantly, but we are also considering further inorganic growth as we are moving along. In the trading, the trading and clearing area, we already own and operate well established platforms. But size and scale of the less mature businesses can and need to be improved. Our FX business and Karl Johls is sitting in the front in the first row. Our FX business, for instance, is still one of the smallest of our 9 business segments, but it has excellent midterm growth prospects.
Therefore, it is only consequent, ladies and gentlemen, to continue to pursue available options in the FX space. We have good coverage of fixed income securities in post trading, but practically none in trading and clearing. We are closely monitoring the market for opportunities, but at the moment, assets availability as such is very limited. In Investment Fund Services, the 5th area, we are considering all products, services and geographies that add value to our already leading fund offering based on our strong and very capable Vistema IT platform. On Page 7, we will demonstrate what we have achieved so far.
You can see we have a more focused and disciplined approach in our M and A activities applied since last year. The very systemic and systematic approach of monitoring the market opportunities or even creating opportunities by ourselves has yielded first results already. The Axioma transaction strengthens our pre trading offering significantly and improves access to the buy side for the entire group. In commodities, we are benefiting from the acquisition and integration of Nodal Exchange in the U. S, which has started to develop very, very favorably.
On top of that, AEX has acquired 2 small businesses since 2018. Kraxel Systems is a leading European provider of energy certificate registry services and the Spark joint venture in Singapore is targeting the growing LNG liquefied natural gas market. And Peter is doing a great job, right? The growth rates on the commodity sites are simply phenomenal. The acquisition of the GTX ECN has helped us grow further in the U.
S. And build a presence in the dealer to dealer FX market. With Swisscanto Fund Centre, which we announced shortly before last Capital Markets Day, we expanded our service with the management of distribution contracts and data processing. In addition, last week, we announced a small acquisition of Ausmak, which is the management fund administrator in the growing Australian asset management industry. And Australia is, as you might be aware, the most important market in the Asian and Pacific region.
Let me briefly summarize the AXIOMA transaction on Slide 8. Why? Because I dare to say that the AXIOMA deal has a corporate strategy element in dimension, which goes well beyond the pre trade area. The key objectives looking for a partner in our index business were: 1st, a complementary product offering and service offering and second, improved access to the buy side, which is becoming a new key customer group for us. With Axioma, we believe we have found the right partner.
The combination of Axioma and our index business brought in, by the way, at a very attractive valuation for our stocks business, forms a nucleus of a buy side intelligent intelligence leader that is uniquely positioned to benefit from trends that are reshaping the investment management industry. What we want to create is de facto a kind of a European borrower. The combination is highly complementary and will create meaningful synergy opportunities. We believe the partnership with General Atlantic is very promising. It will make a strong contribution to further accelerating growth in the combined businesses and achieve strong value creation.
2nd, GAA has an excellent track record of successfully investing into minority stakes with corporates like us 3, and last but not least, with this structure, we are preserving our firepower for additional potential M and A opportunities. We also very much appreciate the continued commitment of Axioma's senior leadership as well as the equity investment in the new company. Sebastian Cherrier, our CEO, has been the driving force behind Axioma since he founded it some 20 years ago. As we look to accelerate growth in the coming years, we are confident that he is the right person to lead the combined joint company going forward. Stefan Leitner will present the benefits of the transaction in more detail in a moment.
Slide 9 summarizes the 3rd pillar of our strategy, technology. Our capabilities are growing steadily, and first products will be ready this year. As I mentioned, our focus is on using the public cloud to improve our operating efficiency and agility as well as creating new market structures based on a distributed ledger technology. In addition, we are also implementing and improving the efficiency of operations heavy tasks through automation and by addressing client demand for analytics, for instance, for the Exuma transaction. We have recently achieved a breakthrough in the adoption of the public cloud in the financial service industry in Europe.
The contract we signed in Microsoft, precisely with Microsoft Azure, meets all regulatory requirements to move some very important regulated services into the public cloud over time. This positions us Deutsche Borse at the forefront in Europe. In March, we announced a strategic partnership with Swisscom, the Swiss Telecom and sophisticated and capable fintech company located in Singapore, to build a trusted digital asset ecosystem for the tokenization of asset. This ecosystem will provide a bundle of solutions for digital assets, including issuance, custody, liquidity provision and banking services, all, all using digital ledger technology, blockchain. I firmly believe that the digital asset space has great growth potential over time.
Therefore, we put Jens Achmeister on top of this initiative, one of our top guys with quite a sizable team. The HQLAX high quality liquid assets. The HQLAX joint venture is a very good example of concrete applications of the ledger technology in financial services. The firm plans to introduce an innovative blockchain solution for collateral swaps in the securities lending market this year. It aims to facilitate more efficient collateral management of high quality liquid assets, which are in heightened demand due to increasing clearing and margin requirements.
HQLAQ's high quality liquid asset is a perfect example of how regulatory constraints are at the end of the day grading business opportunities for us. Christoph will touch upon the technology part in his presentation later on. On Page 10, I again stress would like to stress the importance of execution and discipline as a general management paradigm. Since I addressed this a couple of minutes before, I can be very short here again. But again, we strongly believe that we can determine at least 5% growth by ourselves via sales and innovation, via pricing, via product innovation, via simply working hard and applying a hardworking attitude.
We are convinced we can make growth happen of at least 5% by applying management skills. We are not sitting there like a duck and waiting for simply right tailwind and increased NII. And quite frankly, we will also write implement continuous improvement programs. And therefore, we need to be in a position that we can increase our productivity year over year. Slide 11 provides an overview of our business and our business system.
This is very familiar to you, I assume. But nevertheless, I want to stress it again what is on the chart here. Our growth targets build on the advantages of our business model. We operate a very well diversified portfolio of businesses. The diversification along the value chain is unique.
In our industry, we've got the broadest value chain. We have continuously increased our exposure to less mature and faster growing assets, and we will continue on this path. With our M and A, we will almost automatically further diversify our geographical reach, which is, by the way, shown here on the chart. As you're all aware, the highly scalable IT infrastructure that we operate allows for high incremental margins. This makes M and A activities in areas where there are no regulatory concerns particularly effective.
And by the way, we are working with such high margins that we are prepared to give in some margins to the benefit of growth. Finally, our business model also stands out in terms of its high resilience due to our strong recurring revenue base. 46% of our revenue base is a recurring revenue base, which is basically the same what we are having as a margin. That shows you a lot in how great businesses we are in. So my read out of this Slide 11 is we do operate a very robust business model.
Last slide. Despite a very dynamic macro environment over the last couple of months, We firmly believe that the underlying secular growth drivers for our business are fully intact. We see 4 main drivers, and we try to show to you where the main drivers really affect the value chain. 1st, as you can see, there's a strong secular growth driver, which is the shift to central clearing. There is clearly a strong demand for a liquid EU based OTC clearing option, demonstrated by strong growth of market share we have seen since last year.
2nd, over the counter to on exchange, OTC to on exchange is the 2nd key secular driver. We already see a shift from OTC to regulated markets and we believe there's a lot more to come. For instance, from MiFID in 2020, MiFID is not only a challenge, it's also a business opportunity. Also, there are still a lot of asset classes for which we expect to see a significant increase in electronic trading and clearing. Our trading and clearing businesses will continue to benefit strongly from those drivers and Thomas Bok will later on provide deeper insights.
3rd, the ongoing shift from the active to passive investments where Europe still offers significant growth potential compared to the U. S. And 4th and lastly, increasingly self directed buy side firms and corporates as well as continued pressure from various angles on the banking industry to reduce exposures. My colleagues will now present how they are planning to continue translating our drivers of secular growth into concrete, actionable and tangible initiatives ready for implementation. With this, I'd like to hand over to Stephan for his part.
Many thanks. Stefan?
Good morning. It's a great pleasure to be here today. 12 months ago, I was sitting as a guest down in one of those rows after the announcement, but still ahead of joining Deutsche Borse. So after 20 years as an outsider continuously working with and around Deutsche Borse in the capital market. I must say I'm very proud of what we have been able to achieve in terms of implementing towards the road map that Fero has laid out to you.
On the pretrade business, as I started to look in detail at it, it's consisting of stocks and the data businesses, the market data businesses. There certainly are 3 in going conclusions that are very clear and obvious in this context. The first one is we have outstanding and excellent businesses. The businesses sorry, the businesses we have in terms of stocks with €145,000,000 revenues in 2018, 13% growth the Data business, €170,000,000 revenues, 10% growth with great margins. They're definitely platforms.
However, as Fjerde already alluded to, the key opportunity in our businesses is to grow on the buy side. This obviously applies to the businesses themselves with stocks, for example, today only 14% of revenue is coming from the buy side, but it equally has larger benefits for the group as Fyodor alluded to. Now the 3rd conclusion besides strong assets, a gap on the buy side was definitely that the organic build out alone would not be enough. We need M and A to drive and we need to do M and A under smart structures because clearly, it is a space where valuations are not easy. Now in reviewing the targets, there's a broad universe available.
That's why we believe there's continued growth opportunities. However, Axioma really stood out from the outset. It's a situation that is very complementary. I'll come back to that. It's a situation that Deutsche Borse has worked with for many years.
We have joint products in the market. And lastly, it was an opportunity where the time was perfect because after basically 20 years of growth, AXIOMA had reached also in its own perception the limits of where it could grow alone and without the support of a strong and broad brand. So if you just recap in one sentence, our own business on the stock side, it is a number 4 globally. It is, however, a very strong number 1, and in particular, in all the tradable index spaces in Europe. It is a business that is particularly prone around licensing fees as well as customization, which we are a real leader in.
The complementarity from the domain business of the index and the analytics and solution is pretty obvious and Axioma, the natural partner because Axioma brings, in a way, a multi asset class perspective that is unique. It brings a factor model that is the standard of the industry. It brings an open architecture that is, I think, setting a tone in the industry. And lastly, it is not just a software business, but it is a solution business. That's why as I look across the room here and the invitee list, I came up with 60% of your firms using Axioma in some form on the list of the 400 customers that we have found with Axioma on the buy side already.
Now that complementarity of the spaces index and on the other side, the analytics goes beyond the areas. It's very much a complementarity, as you can see on the top right hand side in a geographic sense, While stocks is very much EMEA business, AXIOMA is very much a U. S. Business. The two businesses together will be very balanced, but we believe in both areas have significant upside, selling Axsome products in Europe as well as on the other side, penetrating much deeper the U.
S. Environment with stocks products. The same is true and that's the main driver, as I alluded to earlier, in terms of the client segment complementarity, so no need to dwell into that. Again, simply stating, look at the resulting balance across the ETF issuers, the sell side and the buy side, it's a very balanced portfolio that emerges in the combination. The benefits, however, of the complementarity are not only linked to the domains we're in, to the geographies as well as to the client segmentations.
But I believe truly that it's a complementarity in terms of the data sets, as you can see on the next page, which is again the page that we have in this form used in the announcement call we did a few weeks ago, the data sets that for stocks are very much transaction and market and reference database. However, for Axioma, they are risk factor data that they provide to their clients that they update and have subscriptions around as well as the portfolio holdings. So the 2 things together very much complement each other and make a very strong combined entity. Here we go. So this was the complementarity in the data sets.
As a last complementarity, I would like to highlight is the revenue models of the 2. Now the stocks business, you know, is asset based fees, but at the same time, it has a strong subscription and licensing component to itself. On the other side, the Actioma business is not only a software sales and licensing business, which is very stable in itself, but it also has a strong multiyear and therefore a very high portion of recurring revenues, which again, the 2 of them will increase the stability for the growth path that we envision. Our vision for the combined business is the one that Fyodor alluded to. It's a buy side intelligence leader.
What do we mean by this? The factor expertise, the index expertise, the customization capability, I think it makes that combination very unique. The second element is the open architecture. We truly believe that the future is open architecture. Axioma is cloud native in its products.
It has a unique approach to partnerships. Take the examples of State Street and FactSet that were recently announced on their platforms. I think both of those show that the open architecture is not just a verb, but it's a true deep felt expertise and commitment. Now we see a lot of further opportunities. We have had, after the announcement, very strong and positive feedback from clients as well as from partners, and we believe that this is a true platform for further M and A driven growth.
That's why the structure that we have implemented is certainly a good starting point. It not only has crystallized the value of our own stocks and tax businesses with €2,600,000,000 valuation that General Atlantic implied. That's a 23 times EBITDA of 2018. But we truly believe that the partnership with General Atlantic preserves the financial degrees of freedom for the group. So Gregor will talk about that certainly later, but it also has the benefits that it brings somebody who has an expertise in this space, in partnerships, in many situations as an attractive go to early call when companies and founders consider themselves to exit their businesses.
We believe that this will increase our sourcing capability. And then the second element of this structure certainly the Axioma Management, as you can see, who will retain a 3% ownership stake. That means the entrepreneurial spirit will persist, but also the financial commitment. It's over US100 million dollars that they will personally reinvest, so that clearly gives them a strong incentive to continue to develop the venture with us. Now what progress have we made on this transaction since the announcement?
We have made good progress in terms of our own carve out activity, especially around the DAX businesses. And secondly, we have received the antitrust clearances in the U. S. Already last week. So that allows us in a much better way to now work on the entire preparation of the integration, and we are very confident to be on track for the closing in Q3 as we had announced.
So if you allow me to turn as a last point on the situation of STOXX and AXIOMA, what does it mean for our financial outlook? We have announced €30,000,000 of synergies by the end of 2021. I can tell you the flow of ideas, as it now has been announced, continues to increase. The second element is in terms of the net revenue guidance for our stocks and then the combined business after the 13% of growth we had last year on stock stand alone, the above 10% that has a very high portion of secular growth, I feel, is something that is certainly a minimum of what you expect, and I hope we can and we need to exceed that and we will do for sure. So let me briefly, at the end of my presentation, turn to the second, the data business, the market data business, which as you know is mostly our real time distribution network that we operate on our own venues, Xeta and Eurex, but also for a number of partners.
It's a very high recurring revenue business. More than 90% is recurring revenues. And we have built last year the regulatory reporting hub activity, which has contributed to a very good growth in the last year as well as their new services coming on stream going forward. If I look at the secular growth opportunities, then from our side, the proprietary analytics and services are certainly a major driver. We need to continue product innovation here.
A good example is the high precision time stamps that we have introduced just at the end of last year on our trading information. 17 customers lined up, a situation where the revenues within a short period have grown to above €1,000,000 So I think it shows that the analytic innovation we can drive can be very material in continuing to contribute. There is a lot of untapped assets on the data side across the group. For example, a few weeks ago, we have introduced the Eurex Flow Insights product, very attractive, and we are just seeing the 1st pickup in the market on that. And then lastly, again, similar to the index space, this is an environment where there for sure is going to be a number of inorganic growth opportunities that we are reviewing as we speak.
So let me conclude, therefore, I'm very proud about the quality of the businesses on the data side that Deutsche Borse Group has. It is with the transaction of stocks and Axioma we've shown that we are not only a partner, but that we can execute these type of transactions in a very capital efficient way and partner and keep ourselves attractive for entrepreneurs. And lastly, on the market data SSA, I think we have a good flow of innovation there that will continue to drive beyond what is purely the cyclical growth component of the data businesses. Let me hand it over to my partner, to Thomas, who clearly in the Data business, him and Hauke are very important partners. So I'm pleased, Thomas, over
to you.
Good morning. Also from my end, a warm welcome to all of you. It's great to be with you here this morning. I will now take the next step of the value chain and go into our trading and clearing business. Last summer, I took over responsibility for the 3 asset classes shown here.
So financial derivatives, commodities and also foreign exchange, cash equities later were within, be covered by my colleague, Hauke. All these 3 segments continue to develop at a very rapid pace, very dynamically. You've heard some of the trends earlier from Teodor, electronification, but also the drive for efficiency are key in these markets and are also fueling the secular growth drivers that have been explained. They are supporting the growth in our key markets. Here, and I will talk to you in my short presentation about how we want to exploit the opportunities coming from these trends.
Let me give you a few examples, starting with the trend from OTC to ETD. We continue to roll out new products that are mimicking the currently bilateral traded OTC instruments, be it at Eurex, EEX or 360T. The shift to central clearing materialized in our OTC IS Clearing offering. We really made a quantum leap here, now achieving 14% market share, but the same shift is also very visible in the commodities and also the foreign exchange businesses. In foreign exchange, we have now combined the assets of Eurex and 360T to create a very strong proposition, for instance, in OTC clearing.
All in all, we have a substantial and very strong footprint in all the 4 major asset classes in financial markets, allowing us to get to strong global reach, achieve globalization, also allowing us to reap the benefits of cost efficiencies by moving these markets to be running on the same trading and clearing platforms. And let me say, all these are very exciting businesses, and I'm very proud to have a world class team running these. As mentioned, heads of the businesses that you've met last year are also here with us today. Let me start going into our financial derivatives offering. With Eurex, we are operating the largest exchange globally by open interest.
Open interest is, for me, a very important metric. It provides an indication of the activity of the real position holders of the take aside and in particular, the institutional investors and also the hedges. They tend to hold positions for a longer period, also reducing the cyclicality, but also a good indication of the future activity and evidence of the diversification here. If we look at the development, we see an outstanding 18% year over year growth in open interest, which is a proof of attractiveness of our product portfolio and also taking us a part of our peer group and consequently also reducing the cyclical dependency of our business. On the right side of this slide, another important indicator for our growth dynamics showing the success of our product diversification shows the product concentration.
New products have contributed over proportionally to our growth. For example, open interest in dividend products grew by more than 60% year over year. New index products grew by more than 40% year over year. And as a result, as you can see, the concentration in the top 5 products went down by 10% while growing our volumes since 2015, again taking us ahead of our global peers. The 4 key success factors for Eurex are liquidity, efficiency, innovation and technology.
These are the core elements, and they are very closely interlinked, and they provide also the basis for our expansion and growth and allow me to walk you through this chain briefly. We are the place to go to for best execution in some of the most actively traded global benchmarks. These are the well known stocks, stacks, but also bundt bubble shuts and other products. We offer deep liquidity pools in these products, tightest spreads and also lowest transaction costs and also margin efficiencies. The liquidity in these benchmarks draws the global trading community towards Eurex and also puts the flows into our value chain.
In terms of efficiency, it is our unique portfolio margining model that we have rolled out as a clear competitive advantage. And with Eurex Clearing, we offer fully integrated clearing across OTC and ETD products under a single CCP framework, allowing us to maximize capital and also margin efficiencies. And these efficiencies are the basis for product innovations because the new product launches that we can roll off are benefiting from being put into the same pool as the existing highly liquid products. They reduce the adoption barriers, and they benefit from the same infrastructure and connectivity that we have rolled out for Eurex. And we have a strong innovation track record, and you'll see some of these later on.
We are systematically decomposing and expanding the product groups around some of the key benchmark indices. So we launched dividend, but also volatility and sector indices around the stocks complex. We have just recently launched the total return futures as a highly innovative product. All these innovations benefit from the liquidity and efficiency in our core portfolio. And then lastly, as said, all markets go electronic, that's a given and that we see with rapid pace, both creating challenges, but also opportunities for us.
So technology for us is key. It's not only about speed and resilience, but also about flexibility and adaptability. We have launched a market structure roadmap, implementing new market models and focusing to attract further buy side flows to our markets. Our performance also shows we are on a good track. 2018 was exceptionally strong for Eurex with 18% net revenue growth.
This was driven by higher equity market volatility and also more dynamics on the fixed income side, but not only, much more importantly, we have achieved 7% secular growth and this is our focus. On the next slide, you see some of the examples where we can benefit from the shifts of the buy side to the more index focused passive investments. So these strategies have driven volume in some of our core product groups, most notably the MSCI index family, which is complementing our stocks index family. This is a global index family that provide a truly global product framework. And one of the key enablers to also fuel further growth here was our expansion of trading hours that we've implemented in December, starting now with the Asian opening and covering 21 hours.
We have seen more than 200 participants active during those extended hours and which is very positive. We have seen 42% agent flows during those hours, so there real client demand. Then secondly, futurization is the word for the shift from OTC to ETD, where previously OTC traded products are now drawn into our trading and clearing infrastructure. We saw phenomenal growth and gains, in particular, in the dividend complex, which is now almost entirely moved from the OTC dividend swaps to now being traded on Eurex. The same, we are striving for to achieve for the total return swaps segment with the total return futures.
With that, you can see we have a pretty modular concept for our product innovations. It's like a assembly line. We can expand the segments like we did for volatility and dividend, just adding further components. So MSCI dividend derivatives will now follow. For total return futures, we will add single equity and customized baskets to further expand that segment.
Let me now focus on the clearing value proposition. With Eurex Clearing, we operate 1 of the largest CCPs globally. Led by Eric and team, we have here made huge progress over the past years in further penetrating our OTC interest rate clearing offering, which is in focus and which responds to over the past years over the past years and average daily volumes, but also notional outstanding jumped at unexpected levels. The core element behind this success is our partnership program that we have launched in January 2018. This program has helped to create market quality and also pricing in a way that large dealers now provide similar quotes or even better bid ask spreads for Eurex clearing traded swaps compared to LCH.
As a result, the market share for clearing euro denominated interest rate derivatives went up from 1.7% beginning of last year to now 14.3%. For the short end, we saw a real market shift now arriving at a 40% market share, but also on the long dated interest rate swaps, the gains are significant now taking us to 7.3%. We had set ourselves the target of onboarding 50 to 100 new clients. And now in May, we already stand at adding 90 clients to the program, and this gives us the confidence to achieving the target of 25% next year. Let me briefly also speak about the repo segment.
We have added in February the expansion to the repo markets. We have 39 participants for the overall program and 29 participants already for the repo program, helping us to grow the volumes here. And again, here, the proposition is an integrated clearing offering across future swaps and repo. And in addition, tapping into the full straight through processing of collateral management and efficiency that Clearstream can offer, and that will be covered by Stephan Leitner later. Let me, with that, continue to talk about our commodities business, and it was mentioned already by, Teodor.
EX strives to become the preeminent global platform. And while the nucleus is in European power, EEX is already one of the leading venues globally. So if we look at power, EEX is the number one power trading venue globally. If we look at the segment of gas, we are number 2 and for emissions, number 3 globally. It was a highly, highly successful year in 2018 with a growth of 21% that we achieved, and this growth was achieved in all these segments, also leading to much more diversification of our product offering, as you can see here.
Very important to mention on the way to globalizing our offering here was the addition of nodal. Nodal has been growing to be now the number 2 platform in the U. S. In terms of power trading, coming from around 17% market share in 2017, getting to 21%, as you can see here. We are very pleased to now record currently a market share in the U.
S. Of almost 33% in the first quarter. What are the secular growth drivers that we see for our Energy Business and Commodities Businesses. First of all, it is what was mentioned, the shift from OTC to ETD products. We do see a significant market share gains in all of our core product groups.
So for instance, we were able to significantly increase our market share in German power derivatives, yet still only onethree of the universe is traded ETD, twothree are still OTC traded. With that, you can see there is still a lot of potential to further grow in these markets. EEX also as a commodities market is very close to the real economy. So one of the further growth drivers that is very important the proliferation of renewable energy. This will further increase the volatility of the supply side and in turn creating the need for further trading and hedging of products.
So again, additional secular growth drivers that we will have a focus to exploit. The second angle is entry into new markets and into new products. This is both expanding our current product universe by launching products for Southeastern Europe and strengthening our position also in gas derivatives. But it is also, as mentioned, getting into new regions. EEX is already active with 17 locations globally.
And I mentioned the growth that Nodal was able to achieve. With Nodal, we have achieved almost the complete integration, moving it to our T7 trading infrastructure. And some of their growth drivers are the ability to offer straight through processing, but also strong capital efficiencies that are very important for the user base in that segment. As you can see, our intention and our objective is on these growth factors to build a global commodities exchange of choice and continue the growth in all the key segments that we are seeing. With that, let me go to the last segment, which is our commodities business.
And in many ways, I may say, it is also the most interesting part of the division. The FX segment is the most actively traded financial asset class with more than €5,000,000,000,000 traded daily. And it is also an asset class that is in a very profound transformation. And in particular, electronification is very important in these markets, which are still quite fragmented. We ended this segment with the acquisition of 360T in 2015.
And since then, a lot of work has been put into the combination of the product and client expertise that 360T takes apart from many of its peers and also the innovation and the assets that Eurex has in terms of trading and clearing. And with that, we support the electronification and exploit the potential that comes from there. In 2018, we have seen 18% growth if we include the effects from the consolidation of GTX. And in the core business, revenues have grown 10%, which is a very respectable result and bringing us back to a strong growth path here, which is, in particular, driven by the continuous attraction of new clients, as you can see, 9% secular growth by new clients in 2018. With the addition of GTX, we have also expanded our offering into a ECN that is on the dealer to dealer side active and that complements our product offering very nicely.
And if I go to the next page, briefly talking about some of our secular growth drivers here in this segment. This is, as mentioned, the ongoing electronification that we believe to continue where we can add some of our core expertise and benefits. It is innovation around services. We are making a lot of progress in the rollout of our ETD and clearing offerings, creating now very good liquidity in the ETD segment and also introducing further new innovative products such as the workflow products around the EMS, but also data products that allow us to further innovate in this highly competitive segment. Then lastly, this is almost entirely OTC traded asset class, largely yet still uncleared.
So there is a potential in further growing our proposition for the OTC clearing segment. We have now over the years created the most innovative and most comprehensive FX product offering with the combination of 360T and Eurex Clearing. And we, of course, now look forward to exploiting the growth potential in a asset class that, from my perspective, is in a long and midterm, very attractive position for transformation. With that, let me hand over and conclude. You can see, there was a lot of great opportunities and projects we have.
And let me hand over to Hauke to conclude with the cash equity segment.
Yes. Thank you, Thomas, and also a warm welcome from my side. I would like to give you now an overview of our cash business, the status in this business and the further development. The cash equities trading is the core of our traditional exchange business. And in this business segment, we operate regulated markets for trading of equities, ETFs, bonds, certificates and many other products via 3 trading venues: Xetra, very well known, Berse Frankfurt and Tradegate Exchange.
Xetra is the most liquid place to trade German equities with a DAX market share of more than 68%. And with this, Xetra is the reference market for German equities globally. We have a good track record in this very competitive equities trading environment with MiFID 1, this area of our business was put into strong competition, and we have a good track record in this business. Over the past 3 years, we were able to regain 10% market share from the Pan European Trading Venues like Cboe. And in comparison to our peers like LSE, Euronext, we have been leading in terms of year over year growth in turnover volumes for the past 2 years now.
In addition, one area of strength in our business is our ETF segment. Here, we have a clear European play. And there, we are the European leader. We are leading based on assets under management and based on listed ETFs. Over the past years, we have also successfully developed our pre IPO ecosystem and built a strong IPO pipeline.
And we saw this as a result of this, a large number of IPOs, also large IPOs last year. And we have built over the past years an attractive integrated equity clearing. This is now subject due to regulation to open access, but we believe that we can limit the business impact of this change in the market. I would like to mention also one other important characteristic of our cash business of Deutsche Borse Group. And that is that the cash market is the starting point of the value chain of Deutsche Borse.
With this business, we generate follow on revenues along the value chain that correspond to the turnover of the cash market itself. For example, our data business is directly linked to our reference market position in German Equities. The CSD is a directly direct follow on transaction to our trading and clearing in equities. And we are working very closely together with my colleagues who are presenting here today to make sure that we provide our customers a seamless service across the whole value chain of Deutsche Borse Group. And then there's one other important point about the cash market.
The cash market has also a role other than the revenue contribution. It plays an important role for the reputation of our company. Our market integrity shapes the public perception and the company reputation. The media uses pictures of our trading floor, including our Deutsche Borse Group logo every day and represents with this the German Capital Market and the German Economy. When we look at the cash business, we have secular and cyclical drivers.
And Theodor already talked about this that we are very much focusing on understanding the secular drivers and working on improving our activities around these drivers. When we look at the cash market, the main secular volume driver is Xetra's trading market share in German Equities and the order book liquidity in German blue chips. Other business levers are pricing and incentive schemes, the high quality of our service, the number of listed ETFs as well as a broad customer community as the origin of a highly diverse flow. Further secular factors are the number and the volumes of IPOs driven by attractive segments and driven by a well functioning IPO community. And then another important secular driver is our technology.
This was already mentioned from my colleagues before. Technology makes the difference in our business, the functionality in our technology that we provide to our customers and members. Cyclical drivers in this business, and we are impacted quite heavily from them from time to time. Cyclical drivers are the overall market capitalization and of course, the market volatility. To drive and to develop our business in the most successful way and to capture structural growth opportunities, we have a twofold answer.
Number 1, as we call it, win in the core, focus on our core competencies. And the other is expand into new services. Just to give some examples of activities and initiatives in our core, just to mention first our technology initiatives, expanding the functionality and work on having a leading edge technology and providing attractive functionality to our customers and our members. At the end of Q1, we will launch the Xetra in light functionality, a functionality that facilitates the execution of large blocks of ETFs, large blocks of shares through a request for quote functionality. Another initiative is around our liquidity provider program, attracting more flow from OTC, from SIs by demanding and extending our liquidity provider program that has worked already in the past, and we will focus on extending our program here.
We also continue to develop our pre IPO ecosystem, The Deutsche Brosse Venture Network, our platform that brings together investors and growth companies, is flourishing. We had already a number of IPOs from this network. And it is important for us to nurture this environment and build a long term IPO pipeline to make and keep our market attractive also on the long term. Another area that we are focusing is on is the ETF segment. We expect growth from this business driven by the long term investment trends towards passive investments, but also by our initiatives to attract more ETF listings and gain flow from MTFs.
Beyond developing our core services, we see growth opportunities by expanding into new services. And one is to build out our business with issuers. We are in the unique position to reach out to them with tailored solutions in the corporate services space. In the past, we consistently developed our digital interface to our issuers with services like our e listing, e Listing, digital listing opportunity. And now we are expanding with digital formats into servicing issuers and IPO candidates and their interaction with their investors.
And another area are the specific thematic trends around ESG and impact possibilities. We have already launched a green bond segment, and we will enlarge our initiatives around sustainability and activities in this area. As we all know, the cash business is impacted by cyclical effects, but we believe with all our initiatives, we are well positioned to benefit from the structural future. And we will also manage and capture cyclical effects whenever possible, and this by maintaining our high profitability. Thank you very much.
And with this, I would like to hand over back to Stephane.
Thank you. Okay. So you see me coming back on the post trading business. And as I said at the beginning of the data businesses, when joining the initial review equally showed a very strong asset. However, the challenges on Clearstream are clearly more balanced than in the growth environment of the data business.
It's a very strong industry position we have. We have critical size €950,000,000 We have industry leading margins. And we last year had 8% growth, so clearly on track with our road map. At the same time, I know that many of you are preoccupied around the balance between NII momentum versus secular growth. So let me make clear that this is something that we are very focused on as a team.
You have many of you have met Phil Brown and Philip Sale last year. Phil is here today. The first initiative and the first set of activities after looking at the division was clearly around creating a framework for more focus and a focus on sustainable growth. Now at the same time, while I will mostly talk about this today, at the same time, there are longer term momentum questions in the industry, and they require answers similar to the other businesses around M and A and in particular, technology. And that's with Christoph Bohm having joined.
There clearly is a platform to take this forward to the next level, but that's beyond today in many aspects. So let me come back to my point around the changes to the business that we have made over the course of the last year. And the main effort really is that in looking at the industry driver and the business drivers, it's become very clear that it's critical that we establish a much sharper focus around the core set of product clusters that make up the Clearstream franchise. So therefore, you now see on top here, in addition to the 2 sort of segments that you have seen outside of Clearstream Core in the past, the Investment Fund Services and the Global Securities Financing, we internally have made clear the clusters which make up the rest of the business. And those really are our issuer CSD, the German franchise in a broad sense, but with T2S that has become a pan European franchise, the Eurobond franchise, the investor CSD and I'll come back to that in more detail in a minute, and then very importantly, but often neglected, a global markets franchise in custody that we have that is powered by a broad set of links, but that is a very powerful and attractive source of revenue and continued growth.
So I'll come back to the strategy in those four areas in a minute, but the outgoing point obviously is that these four clusters as well as the fund and the financing businesses, in our belief, still are very well placed against the secular industry changes that we're experiencing. It still is the post T2S change in the European landscape and the pressure points on cost and efficiency. It is very much a step up in critical size for CSDs after CSDR. It is the collateral and the funding management together with settlement efficiency, which after CSDR will see a rapid change to the requirements around settlement efficiency. And lastly, it is the technology change, blockchain and other buzzwords.
So if you look against these main themes, how we are positioned, let me just recap the net revenue composition, which is 60% settlement and custody fees, euros 480,000,000 in Clearstream core. That in itself, we have transitioned very well through the introduction of T2S By moving more from settlement fees to custody fees, that's been now well established in the market. And 2019 is not an environment in which so far we have seen significant pressure on the fee side as has been the case in the last 2 or 3 years. At the same time, I think the approach that Clearstream has taken in making the T2S fees a pass through has been very successful because as you may have also noted, T2S, the ECB had to increase its fees very significantly already earlier this year. So it's not something that has had an effect on the margins for Clearstream contrary to a number of other players.
22% of our revenues are NII, EUR 160,000,000. Now clearly, that is a cyclically driven component, and we keep monitoring closely the developments. However, let me highlight that in addition to what has proven a very stable cash balance basis of €13,000,000,000 for a long time. We have seen some pickup, whether that is cyclical or structural, ahead of the CSDI implementation where many of the market players will certainly be much more conscious to make sure that they also on the cash balance side are more proactive rather than remedying sort of settlement failures exposed. The last element that you see on the chart here from the revenues is a number of other sort of contributions.
The reason why I highlight that is that in one of our takeaways from the early review of the business with a number of smaller businesses, which didn't really fit into Clearstream. In particular, for example, we had a hosting business, which is labeled here 3rd party services. So we are running down these businesses, which again, you will see as a pressure point on our secular growth. But in reality, I think it's back to creating a very focused business. That's why what you see on the left hand side are the 4 areas that we are now focusing on.
In each of them, as I said on the earlier chart, we have pretty unique positions in the industry. The issuer CSD, our German per se CSD opening point for issuers is much more than Germany in itself the biggest European issuance market standalone on the continent. But we have now started to introduce a high degree of automation, which allows pan European issuers, high frequency issuers of certificates to consolidate their issuance activity into Clearstream Banking Frankfurt. As I mentioned earlier, CSDI is upping the requirements from the CSD cost perspective. So we're starting to see issues from other European geographies issue through the Frankfurt CBF platform.
And therefore, I do believe, while certainly not a growth business, there is quite a lot we can do around our issuer activity in terms of the German and the Luxembourg markets. The Eurobond market is very intact. It's been growing nicely, and I do believe that it has a number of secular drivers, in particular around the Chinese and Asian starting to be very active in the Eurobond market. So we have put on our flag to make sure that this franchise that is basically one of the hallmarks of Clearstream is really actively promoted much more than has been the case more recently. The third theme is the investor CSD, on which I'll do a short deep dive.
It has been a key topic of our recent communications. It's driven off the belief and the experience now that after T2S, investors really only need one gateway into the European market. We believe we can build on that. We can believe we believe and have started to implement a very effective network across Europe through which we can basically move beyond just a settlement activity into a European custody style product for the right type of clients. But let me come back to that in a minute because clearly, the momentum is not yet as pronounced as we had expected.
The last theme I alluded to earlier is our global markets franchise. It's a EUR 1,200,000,000,000 assets under custody franchise. It's 36 emerging markets where through the links that we have, we in a very good way are able to create a balance between introducing international investors to local markets and in return, getting local investors into our custody network. So it's all four of those, and that's part of the focus effort that I described earlier that we will sharpen the proposition around, that we've stopped certain areas where we have really had extensive additional ideas and therefore, really will focus to market those, a bit like I described on the next page around our investor CSD rollout, which I know you have heard about for a number of years, at least I heard about it when I was sitting here last year. And we believe that the underlying long term play is very much intact.
The drivers for that are very much still the shift of the liquidity and trading flows from the iCSDs into the CSD, therefore, Central Bank money. We believe that there clearly is a very strong logic for Pan European equity market that is driving this. And we lastly believe that the collateral pooling proposition that we have between Clearstream Banking Luxembourg and Frankfurt is very much intact, and we can deliver superior efficiency here. We have made good progress. By now, 80% of the European T2S markets are on line.
We, Clearstream Frankfurt, operate 40% of all the settlement volumes in T2S. So this gives you a sense what type and quality of proposition we are having here. At the same time, we have made progress with the client uploading or the client acquisition around it, we see a shift from the initial considerations of major broker dealers to 2nd tier custodians that want to offer a Pan European product and which can do this most efficiently through the investor CST proposition that we have. At the same time, momentum has not been as fast as expected. The reason behind that is pretty obvious.
Our clients are very busy around Brexit and a number of other internal regulatory changes. So they have put the benefits of T2S single handed across Europe custody offering a bit on the back burner in a number of cases in light of their IT investment budgets. But we have also seen that it's taken more time than expected to get all the T2S markets connected. That's not just internal, that's external. But also some of the securities that we had to configure have been more complex than initially expected.
Nevertheless, as I say, the medium term proposition, I think, is intact, and it's changing actually towards more of a European custody proposition. So if I, therefore, turn back to the numbers, we had last year an 8% growth. In fairness, it's been driven mostly by NII. We do believe that the 5% to 10% growth that we have talked about for 2017 to 2020 is intact, but I would also be very open to admit that the secular growth, especially as we had expected to be driven by the investor CST, is delayed, and we need to sharpen, as I said earlier, our focus. To sharpen the focus is not only a top line product focus, but it is in particular also around a number of other initiatives in order to protect also the industry leading margins that mark the Clearstream franchise for such a long time.
The regulatory compliance topic, we believe, can set us apart. We are on track in terms of our CSDR application processes across the different franchises. We have had a very strong focus in line with SPIP on the internal efficiency, fantastic opportunities around digitization we are seeing there. We have seen a good momentum in terms of new technology initiatives. I'll come back to that in a minute.
And lastly, we're still here in the room. I think there is a clear need and desire that we have around establishing excellence in client service, a hallmark of Clearstream, but also in terms of the client focus and the clarity on our leading clients to really make sure we deliver 1,000 percent quality and service to them. So that's the core business. Let me move on to GSF and keep it fairly short. I mean, it's a business facing headwinds.
Last year, 2% growth. We still believe that there is up to 5% growth opportunity. It's a change that we have made in terms of our outlook. I do believe that the cyclical handwings are taking their toll. However, we have the 2 components of the securities lending in which we are very aggressively diversifying the lender and the borrower base, making the business much more resilient.
And secondly, we have seen more recently, in particular in Q1 and Q2 now, a pickup in the collateral management revenues, which is very positive and a bit against the expectation one would have. This business will clearly benefit medium term from our Blockchain HQLAx initiative. Fyodor already alluded to that, and I'm sure that Christophe is going to come back to that. But we are well on track. We have the 2nd global custodian on board now.
We have the core banks who are set up, and we look very much forward to the Sybus events later this year when we hope to be able to announce the transaction sequences being up and running. The 3rd business is IFS, the Investment Fund Services. And there, let me be very clear that I remain positive on the long term structural outlook and the growth potential that we have in this business, in particular in light of the product offering strengthening and the global progress that we continue to make. The model needs adopting, and medium- to long term, this will be certainly an area where the blockchain technology will have quite dramatic impact. But the underlying starting point and you see it on the left hand side is pretty unique.
To put it into context, we're the lead provider of international fund order routing. Our position in terms of the transaction process of €25,000,000 is roughly double the size of the next player. So I think we really have a very strong franchise here. We cover all types of funds. We go all the way to ETFs, hedge funds, and we have 40 domiciles we have on stream.
So it's a really unique platform and starting point that we have. It's a quite balanced revenue business, as you can see on the right hand side. However, you will also note that it's more exposed to settlement revenues than the core business. And that means why in Q1, we have seen a bit more cyclicality since clearly we have seen much less transaction activity on the front side than we had seen in last year. So if you look at the plan and our outlook, we had last year had a 12% growth.
We this year and medium term talk about above 10% growth. In Q1, we had only had 6% for the reason that I explained. However, I think that the new client and fund onboarding continues to progress well. And as we had outlined last year around the Swisscanto transaction, we clearly expect from the new service and the extension of our service offering significant benefits here. The growth in IFS is not only a top line growth.
That's very important for me to highlight. What you see is exactly the benefits that we always talk about under the road map of the scaling effects. The adjusted EBITDA margins in 2017 was 41%, 2018 was 44% and we'll continue to progress towards the 50% because it's truly a scaled business that is playing out itself as we grow. That growth is not only an organic growth. You have last year seen the Swisscanto transaction.
Philippe Sale was here, who was instrumental in bringing that about. We see that transaction progressing well. We have closed it at the end of the year. The rationale of getting into a highly synergistic data related and service revenues is very much confirmed. The confirmation the implementation of these benefits is on track, and we actually 10 days ago had the launch of our fund desk in a big sort of client event in Zurich, and we have seen very positive recognition.
Let's not forget, at the end, Swisscanto has also added €42,000,000,000 in terms of assets under custody. Last week, you have seen us announce Osmak, an acquisition in Australia that Fyodor referred to earlier. Again, this is mainly a platform step. So we don't start greenfield in Australia, which we would have considered too far away, too risky. So having an up and running business in place will help us because we have very strong client interest from the global banks that all of them are very focused on the enormous opportunity in the Australian Asset Management market.
It's again a business that came with €32,000,000,000 assets under custody. So again, we're up and running. We have a functioning franchise. We have a revenue base at the back of which we will now and have already confirmed clients to onboard into the Australian markets. So if I summarize it, IFS is very much on track, and these bolt on acquisitions, as I would call it, will be a continued element since this is an industry that is both organically growing, but it is also consolidating in a number of niche segments.
If I summarize for Clearstream, Clearstream is a high quality asset. I mean, at the end of the day, this unique position in the industry, together with a margin and industry leading capability to invest will be important as Christoph and myself will look at the technology base and how we can use the new technologies in order to reform and set the standard in the industry. We have put in place a sharper focus around products, and I truly believe that this is the engine to drive the organic secular growth as it is available. However, short term, being realistic, the NII and the IFS growth will be the main drivers. And in line with the Roadmap 2020, Christopher and myself will spend more time around how can we shape a longer- to medium term outlook that is based on a technology leadership.
So thank you very much. I will hand it over to Christoph after I've given him such a strong ask already from Clearstream for the technology, but I can tell you it's great to have him on board, and he will help on that.
Thank you very much, Stefan. Also from my side, a very warm welcome to all of you. I will be talking today about operational excellence and also how to best exploit technical innovation in the space of information technology. And I'm excited to having the opportunity to present to you multiple strategically important topics and initiatives. As you have heard multiple times already, technology is at the core of what we do.
In many cases, IT is actually the core of the product. And for that, I will show to you our IT strategy and also how we invest into innovation from a position of strength, either to grow existing businesses or to move into new markets or to create new markets. To frame the picture, innovation has always been a part of our DNA. We are using on one side the leading edge of IT to grow. And on the other side, we deliver operational excellence.
When you look at the time line, you see that we have started 1st digitizing the business, launching Sextra and Eurex Trading. Then we introduced high end computing systems like our risk management Prisma or the renewed matching and clearing environments C7 and T7. And now we are taking a prime position, establishing distributed ledger capabilities and deploying material workloads into the public cloud. We have a strong track customers. And we are a very credible partner for other market leaders in technology.
That gives us a position of strength in ambitious times. Our customers demand highly reliable systems and environments in combination with richer features like, you have heard that already, enhanced transparency coming from timestamps, what we have delivered in the past and what we are going to deliver. Around us, disruption and transformation is coming from the multiple centers of IT, cloud, distributed ledger, optical fiber transmission, all of this is happening at large scale. You might have heard quantum computing is knocking on the door, and these are enablers for growth and new business models. Our regulators are constantly demanding higher levels of transparency and control.
Technology will actually help us to deliver this. In addition, we are developing our internal IT staff towards new technology, and we also provide new ways to work. This makes us highly attractive to recruit new talent on top of it. And finally, partnering with market leading technology companies allows us to leverage R and D investments that have been done elsewhere. Our vision and mission is clear and straightforward.
We evolve the core, delivering secure and stable operations at high quality. This is the foundation of what we do, and it creates a great user and customer experience. From there, we foster innovation, building up new technologies. This is following the roadmap 2020 and will deliver and delivers cloud automation, big data and distributed ledger capabilities. And we established strategic partnerships with selected top companies.
We have started an evolution, and we see a clear benefits coming up. On the IT architectural side, we have established a strong setup driving applications to leave silos and to use cloud service architectures. That gives us flexibility and speed implementing IT applications. And once we are moving forward, it also gives us scale. We have started implementing a target operating model, which is an industry standard governance framework, and this ensures compliance with existing and upcoming regulations, and it creates transparency, which is always required.
We have evolved our organizational structure towards the target operating model, and we have implemented central functions, giving us both improved business orientation and the capability to steer horizontally, delivering efficiency and based on KPIs, more transparency.
We have
initiated we have kicked off initiatives to retain the existing IT top talent and also to attract new talent for our initiatives. That is overall extending our IT talent pool in all locations, including our nearshore facilities. And finally, we have started rolling out a new digital workplace concept, which is giving our employees a better user experience and the company higher levels of security. This also includes flexoffice capabilities and a seamless mobile integration. When you look at our innovation agenda, it's very straightforward.
We focus on quick and large scale cloud adoption as an underlying innovational foundation. On top of that, we have initiatives benefiting from this approach. We will develop partnerships in the space of distributed ledger and big data, and we will extend existing capabilities in the place of automation. For distributed ledger, we create a partnership setup in the Swiss ecosystem, and I will talk about that in detail in a second. And we intend to launch launch first products in the second half of twenty nineteen.
To show the effectiveness of that approach, we have done a legally binding repo transaction on a distributed ledger environment already in the first half of twenty nineteen. For automation, we are intending to extend the existing setup of automation procedures, introducing a multipurpose platform, reaching from task management via use case management to machine learning. All of that sitting on one platform gives us the capability to properly integrate and to feed our pipeline of use cases for automation purposes into the technology. We believe that parts of that can be reused for big data and advanced analytics, where we are currently designing our technology approach and where we believe that this is giving us a head start. What exactly is now our cloud strategy?
In simple words, we want to move fast now to benefit fast. We want to work with market leading companies, and we will execute in waves over the next years. We expect, as benefits coming out of this, speed in implementing new services, higher levels of automation and also higher levels of resiliency. For that, we will invest a high double digit €1,000,000 number, and we expect to take a leading position adopting cloud in our industry. On an average, the expected payback period of the cloud initiatives is around 3 years.
When you look at 2019, what we have achieved so far is the partnership with Microsoft Azure, ensuring that we have compliance from the regulatory side in place. We are covering the requirements. While we have signed this agreement, we have been working with other market leading companies to extend our partnership footprint. And we are positive that we will do another announcement in the second half of twenty nineteen. The first wave of activities that will go live in 2019 will comprise of test and dev environments we are migrating to the public cloud and material enterprise workloads.
What we are also doing in 2019 is preparing the wave to be kicked off in 2020. In 2020, we will continue to migrate workloads from on premise to the cloud, this time moving into application and production workloads. And we also believe that we can start shutting down first components in our backup data centers. Cloud business cases typically deliver step by step rather than like a hockey stick. Thus, we expect in 2020, 1st agility to kick in and 1st efficiency to help our performance.
In 2020, also, the wave for 'twenty one will be prepared. Out of the list of expected benefits, I like to highlight 1, which is the availability of native machine learning services in public cloud environments. This is something which is prepackaged. You can use that more or less out of the box, but it's only available in public cloud environments. You need to go there to really consume that service.
This is a benefit that we absolutely want to add to our capabilities, helping us in the space of automation and big data. We believe in a tokenized economy running on distributed ledgers, we will have a redefinition of financial markets. A broad spectrum of existing assets can be tokenized. To pick an easy example, real estate. It's a traditional asset.
Once it gets a digital representation, including smart features like contract features, real value is created. And such a digital asset needs a trusted, comprehensive and regulatory compliant infrastructure. This is the foundation and the basis for safekeeping and for the transfer of assets like that. We believe Deutsche Borse is in a perfect position to lead the establishing of an infrastructure for digital assets and that this has the possibility to broaden our business scope and to untap new revenue pools. Talking to analysts, this is also a huge business potential that will be available over the next decade.
How to do that best? We see that the regulatory framework and also the product perspective in the Swiss market it's a very good foundation to move forward. This is why we have established a strategical partnership with Swisscom and Signum to jointly build and grow an ecosystem for digital assets in Switzerland. The core service library will include issuance, custody, access to liquidity and also banking service, which is a strong package. The partnership is strong and is strengthened by cross shareholdings, and it will deliver in a first step the tokenization of assets as the next level of asset digitization.
That is providing a clear value, especially to our institutional buy side clients, to move into new asset classes. How do we continue to develop our partner ecosystem? We are looking for partners where we have aligned roadmaps and where we co invest into joint innovation to increase efficiency and especially to gain scale. That will broaden our product and service offering, and it will also allow us to shape ecosystems and will bring us in touch with the new IT talent we are looking for. Coming back to my opening statement on operational excellence and how to best deliver innovation.
Based on our IT strategy and the road map, we have started delivering 1st life houses in 2019, and we will continue in the second half of the year to do so. And we have a clear agenda rolling into 2020 and ongoing. Technology will enable us here and will be a very warm tailwind under our wings. With that, I'd like to thank you for your attention and hand over to Gregor
So I want to sum up from a financial perspective and want to highlight the financials and also give you some outlook for 2019 2020. Here on that slide, you can see how did we go over the last full years, so from 2015 to 2018. And the average CAGR was 8%. If you look where does it come from, roughly 5% came from secular growth, roughly 2% from cyclical growth. But in some years, there's cyclical tailwind and some years, it's cyclical headwind, obviously.
On average, it's 2%. And we had some 1% out of M and A growth. So now looking with regard to our roadmap target 2020, and we said what do we want to achieve for 2017 to 2020. So we said we want to at least grow on a secular basis by 5%, and we expect some cyclical tailwind. And in 2018, obviously, was quite a good year.
We delivered 6% secular growth. On top of that, there was 6% cyclical growth and 1% M and A. So overall, it was 13%, and we over delivered compared to what we guided for the 3 years time horizon. 2019, we are on track. You have seen in the Q1, we delivered some 5% secular growth as promised, as guided.
We had some cyclical headwind in the Q1, especially in the trading space. So April May was better. April was quite good from a cyclical perspective. May is okay. So overall, we are rightly on track.
And overall, if you take all the cyclicality into account, then it's basically neutral for the 1st 5 months. So we are on track to deliver our secular growth, and we will see how cyclicality will end over the next 7 months as for this year. And for 2020, unchanged, we confirm our road map 2020 targets. So we are sometimes criticized what do you calculate as secular growth. So want to be very clear and precise here.
So secular growth is, on the one hand side, it's increased market share, obviously. So that's not too difficult. It's also, specifically on the Eurex part, the move from OTC to on exchange. So our OTC clearing opportunity where we basically started from 0 to now more than 14% market shares, and we said we want to achieve some €50,000,000 to €70,000,000 net revenues in 2020. So we are right on track to deliver that.
But this year, we expect some €50,000,000 So that's definitely also secular growth. In the EX area, so it's really good to see we increase our market shares here. And Thomas Brook already mentioned that. In the U. S.
Market model, more than 30%. So we started at around 20%. We have seen in the cash equity area positive elements increasing our market shares. In the European commodities areas, we increased also our market shares. 5 years ago, it was 10%.
Now it's more than 35% on a European level. So that's obviously good to see. On Clearstream, we are behind our expectation. So it's good to see growth rates of 7% to 8%. That's obviously good.
But it's basically cyclical growth, specifically out of the NII business. But our view is unchanged with the good chance to achieve secular growth in Clearstream. As Stefan Leitner mentioned, we want to grow in the investment fund service business where we see secular growth. We expect secular growth with regard to target 2 securities. Yes, you don't see it today, but it's our clear belief that over the next 2, 3 years, we will benefit from that, and that's why we are unchanged committed to deliver also secular growth on Clearstream side.
Here, you see the summary, and you see also what we guided last year, what do we expect as growth rates over the 9 business segments. So 5 out of 9 business segments will deliver more than 10% growth. I think that's really good to see. And even more important, the majority of that is secular growth. So that's unchanged our view with regard to stocks, data and Eurex.
Even on EEX, we see upside potential as really 2018 was a strong year, and so far, 2019 is also a strong year with roughly 20% revenue growth. So that's obviously good to see. And the far majority is secular growth. 360T, we invested a lot to benefit from the trend OTC to on exchange. So we introduced central limit order book functionality.
We introduced clearing functionality. And so far, the far majority, 90% is OTC, 10% is on exchange. So getting some of this 90% OTC market on our platforms is obviously a big opportunity. Cash equity is more we have seen into specifically in 2018 also some secular growth, but the majority is clearly depending on the cyclicality. Clearstream, secular growth delayed.
I already mentioned that, but unchanged our view. We are confident to deliver at least a 5% to 10% growth rate and also some secular growth. And the index business, still unchanged, growing with more than 10%. Even in the Q1, it was definitely below the 10%. But overall, we are quite confident.
Even in 2019, we have a good chance to achieve some 10% growth and also for the next year. And with the combination of AXIOMA, obviously, should be exciting opportunities here. I'll skip that. Scalability of the business model. There's no difference from a cost perspective whether we trade 10,000,000 contracts a day or 15,000,000 contracts a day.
There are no additional costs for that. So far, as long we grow, we should be able to show some scalability of our business model. And over the last 3 years, from 2015 to 2018, our revenue, as I mentioned, grew by 8%. Our cost grew by 2%. So that's quite good, I would say, shows a good cost discipline and also the capability to show that kind of scalability of our business model.
With regard to our cost saving program, so we are right on track Or I could say differently, we are above our expectations. So here you see, we expect some €60,000,000 savings already this year. So we guided last year roughly so onethree. So out of the €100,000,000 or €33,000,000 So we are ahead of the curve. We accelerated that kind of savings.
All the measures are decided. They are purely in the implementation phase. And so far, that's good. €90,000,000 cost saving next year and even slightly above €100,000,000 in 2021. Clear message, this cost reduction, you will not see in our cost development as and that we guided last year, we will reinvest that kind of savings.
And we will reinvest and it's roughly €250,000,000 over the 3 years, 20 19, 2020 2021, so €60,000,000 as cost savings in 'nineteen, €90,000,000 in 2020 and the €100,000,000 So overall adding up is €250,000,000 And we reinvest this €250,000,000 in organic growth, specifically, cloud, like distributed ledger, technology, or cloud, like distributed ledger, technology, robotics, artificial intelligence and last but not least, also in some regulatory changes or investments in cyber and IT security. Net income, you see over the last 3 years, 12% CAGR. That's quite good from 2015 to 2018. Last year, it was 17%, and our clear guidance is for this year around 10%. I think we are right on track here.
If we would achieve another 10% in 2020, then we would have achieved, including the 2018 number, the midpoint of our guidance from 10% to 15% or 12.5%. Summary with regard to our financial targets out of the Roadmap 2020. Again, growth target, at least 5% secular growth with cyclical tailwind. Overall, 10% to 15% net profit growth. With regard to external growth, we confirm still there's €1,500,000,000 cash and debt firepower capacity for doing M and A.
On top of that, the opportunity to raise some equity if it's needed. Capital Management policy, unchanged 40% to 60 percent dividend distribution ratio, AA rated for Deutsche Borse and specifically for the Clearstream business. Excess cash, the plan is to reinvest in M and A. If not, we would also consider to do a further M and A program. And cost management, making sure that we achieve also from a cost management perspective, the 10% to 15% net profit growth.
With this, I would give back to Theodor.
Thank you, Gregor. Ladies and gentlemen, we are 2 minutes over time. Therefore, I keep my final remarks very short. But allow me to summarize how I see the situation. Firstly, we did and I would like to avoid any kind of coming over as an arrogant guy.
I'd rather be humble. But one thing is for sure, I think we did fairly well over the last 12 months. And quite frankly, we are pretty confident for the future. This includes 2019 and of course, 20 20. The growth drivers we are relying on are intact.
Our business system, which is a very broad one, is resilient, it's robust and it is a kind of an 8 cylinder machine, right, which is scalable. 2nd, our road map. Our strategic road map is quite frankly pretty spot on And we love to see that us obviously try to copy paste this, right? So it's spot on. And we don't see any need right now after 12 months to change the strategy.
I want to clarify we have a clear strategy, we will execute the strategy, and we need to deliver. And we want to deliver, we want to deliver shareholder value, right? We want to deliver according to your needs and expectations. And allow me a personal statement here. When I started some 15, 6 months ago or so, it feels like much more, right?
Some people, some of you challenged me whether I'm a bit too Germanic, right? Too much orientated to Germany because of the fact how I was nominated. I think I've demonstrated together with my team, which I like a lot and a lot of fun of working together, we are not Germanic at all. We have a clear focus. Our focus is being an international player.
Our business requires global aspirations. That's the reason why we've done this bolt on acquisitions, the string of a purse approach, and we will continue in doing so. But we will not do it at all cost. We always apply a pretty hopefully pretty smart commercial attitude. I see no need to change the strategy right now.
Next year, in the 3rd year, we'll probably come up with some further developments. But this year and the 1st 6 months of next year, we will continue to execute what we have promised you last year. We want to deliver growth. We want to deliver results. That is what we are getting paid for.
And it is our objective to reduce the still existing gap on the valuation side, which I don't like particularly guys, right? I want to reduce this gap further. Quite frankly, I don't see that such a still significant gap is justified. With this, I open the floor for Q and A. Thank you.
Yes. If you would like to ask a question, then please raise your hand. There are microphones in the room. Please kindly limit your questions to 1 to allow for broader participation. And if you would state your name and company, then this would be helpful for the audience.
Benjamin Goy?
Yes. Hi, good morning. Benjamin Goy from Deutsche Bank. Maybe one question coming back to your opening remarks where you said trading margin for revenue growth. I was just wondering any payback period you have in mind for these kind of actions you're taking?
And I think you did it in Xetra in the past or maybe some other businesses where this could be part of the strategy.
I have to push the button now. It works very good. So far, our strategy is to increase the liquidity on our platforms. And if we are able to follow that path, we have the opportunity even to increase the margin. As I said, the costs are basically flattish as depending on what is our trading volumes.
So no difference from a cost perspective, Valerie, trade 10,000,000 or 15,000,000 contracts a day. From a technology perspective, I think we invested a lot over the last year, specifically in the trading, clearing and risk management and are now on for that level, quite state of the art. So the big investments are done for that. And now we are going into the new S curve. That's now investments in cloud and in blockchain technology.
And here, we make primary sure that we are ahead of the curve and that we make sure that we have also good opportunities in the future.
In addition to what Gregor said, when I alluded to this statement in the beginning, I think what is pretty clear, we have increased over the last years, year by year the margin. And we were lacking, yes, sometimes a little bit the growth, right? And what I want to attract is growth investors. And growth investors should be prepared that we give up at least marginally on the margin, right? That you understand that since we are in a scale business, it makes sense to invest in growth because we will get a benefit over scale, right?
And therefore, I said I'm prepared to give him some margin points, not massive ones, right, if I can get more growth. That is the strategy.
Johannes Thormann?
Johannes Thormann, HSBC. Good morning, everybody. One follow-up question regarding the blockchain, first of all. How far are you depending on the German government to provide a better legal framework for the blockchain in Germany? And do you have plans to move to other jurisdictions if this is not happening?
And secondly, just on the cash market, you're always talking about gaining back market share, but we're still far back from the old historic levels of 100%, I've met. Any chances to go deeper into the OTC share of the market, which is still relatively unchanged?
So I will take the first part of your question. As you have seen from our cloud initiatives, we are very closely working together with the local regulation in Germany, and we have open discussions around how to move material workloads into public cloud environments and how to best establish distributed ledger capabilities. For that, we need clear guidance and decisions from the regulators to move forward. This is why we have decided, as of now, to start our activities in Switzerland where exactly those decisions have been taken and the clear guidance is in place. And we want to do after a successful start in Switzerland, another step.
And we are very hopeful looking at the existing collaboration and cooperation with the regulators around the cloud topics and that we are making meaningful progress in the meantime.
Then I continue. Thank you for your question. And I have also my numbers here. When we look at 2016, beginning 2016, we had on the overall market a share of OTC of 46%. With all our initiatives around technology, around the liquidity provider programs or pricing initiatives, functionality initiatives, we managed to bring this down to 40%.
So we gained already over the past years a share of OTC, and we continue to work on that. That's what I presented. We have a number of initiatives. We are further learning and understanding on how we can tweak and continue to work on that. So I can promise that we will work on that and work on further winning OTC share.
Joanna, first
one. Joanna Nader from RBC. Sorry, I don't even really exactly know how to ask my question because my knowledge level is a bit low on the blockchain. But I guess it's kind of combined for Christophe and Stephane. But just wondering if you could talk a bit more specifically about your near term plans, which I think may be around sort of improving your cost efficiency, particularly in Clearstream and protecting your position as a large incumbent?
And then longer term, sort of how you're thinking about creating these markets and what kind of cooperation you need from I guess third parties in terms of whatever protocols you go with or consortiums? I'm just sort of interested how you make this happen because it seems like it could be a big opportunity.
Happy to kick it off. I think, 1st of all, the blockchain initiative that we have that really touches the market and the main X. So I think the approach we take there is really to make sure that the ability that we have to convene the market and other players into a new format is leveraged, that we don't go too broad, that we are very focused around individual segments. I do believe that this in working with Jens Hachmeister and the colleagues that are the center of competence is the way we're going to continue. I truly believe it's an approach that we need to take segment by segment.
Now certainly, among those different market environments, funds is an environment that is prone to blockchain. There are a number of players there. It has a very complicated environment in terms of asset servicing and handling that's very fit for the purpose of smart contract environments. That's how to take it forward. That's why as a last point, it's very complementary in addition to the Swiss ecosystem and custody, custardigit investment we made that we're also very close to some of the main providers of blockchain technologies.
That's why our venture investment around digital asset holding and a number of other partnerships are very best player. Not every player is excellent on both of those components. So that's basically how we want to take it forward. It's a combination of targeted segments blended with a strong in house center of competence and a broad set of in of technology partnerships.
Please allow me to add from a technology perspective to decloak the words scale and speed I was using before. Going one level deeper, what exactly can we expect to happen if we move, for example, from traditional processing to distributed ledger technology? When you look at the HQLAX business, traditionally, we are talking about 2 days. And if you tokenize and if you use token technology to do the same process, we are talking about intraday. And that is the speed aspect, which is coming immediately up, you will see first.
The second aspect is even more important, and that is the scaling factor. Once you have built it in a highly standardized environment, which is either a localized cloud or a public cloud environment being globally available, you can recreate your service capabilities and offerings in other markets quite fast because no brick and mortar needs to be touched. This is creating new instances from a technical perspective, and that makes you really fast and allows you to scale. So this is what is going to happen on the technology side, and this is why I said it's a warm wind. Technology is really helping the business in that case to deliver better services and once the services are available in one market to move into new markets.
And from Mahesh, I'll turn to CEO perspective is following. Firstly, we predominantly believe that the post rating area is the area where we should do everything to be ahead of the curve on the block chain distributed ledger technology rather than on the trading side, point number 1. Point number 2, we believe that the distributed ledger will create and that's a new paradigm, will create a new ecosystem. You don't you will not win, right, if you simply apply the blockchain and the digital ledger technology in a part of the value system. You need to apply and you need to create an ecosystem.
That's the new paradigm. What I see way beyond, way beyond the blockchain. And there, the ecosystem creation requires a partnering approach, right? And therefore, we clearly made up our mind, we invest, but we actively seek for partners. And 3rd, it goes back to what Johannes has asked.
It's pretty clear. We don't care if we don't have the right environment, regulatory environment in Germany, we go outside.
Good morning. It's Arnaud Jeune from Exane. Just a question on EEX. You clearly explained that you benefited from increased electricity price volatility because of their share of renewable energy increasing. I'm wondering if we should expect further volatility in electricity prices with carbon credits becoming more valuable.
Is there upside in trading carbon credits? And also, I mean, since EEX has been so successful, do you see opportunities to accelerate growth through bolt on acquisitions out there? Thank you.
Yes, if I may. Thank you very much, Anup, for the question that I also touched on. Since we have the CEO of EX in the room, Peter here, if I may invite him to respond to your questions.
Happy to do so. First part of the question on increased volatility. We see that through what Thomas Buch explained earlier, the change of the production mix onto renewables with wind and solar obviously being not constantly available, that's affecting the very short end of the power market. So there is increased intraday volatility and that is a driver for intra day volume on the very short end of the curve. What we already see, especially over the last 18 months, is that when we look at the short end of the derivatives, so next days, next 2 weeks, that weather is becoming a clear factor for prices in that part of the curve and that emissions prices are a major driver of the direction of power prices.
And with the huge increase in price levels for emission certificates and corresponding to that the increase in volatility of emissions prices. We've also seen increase in volatility of power prices. That has already happened in the last 18 months. Whether you can expect that to continue, I'll leave that up to everybody in the room to predict. But it's already a factor that is driving volume and has contributed to the significant growth in power derivatives volume we've seen in 2018 and although in the 1st 5 months of this year.
Further growth opportunities? External.
External growth opportunities, sorry, I forgot that part. In obviously, there will be opportunities in some of the areas that we're active in. It's quite a broad portfolio that we have in only the commodities part. As you have seen, the recent acquisition we did was quite a niche market with Grexel in the registry business. We have acquired the leading provider in Europe for that niche segment, but it puts us in a position because there's some huge overlap with registry users and power market users.
So it's a quite adjacent space to us. If we look at our position in our main business power derivatives, we are by far the market leader in Europe. We have around 70% market share in exchange traded power derivatives in Europe. So there's no obvious acquisition target in that field. There may be other opportunities that will come up over time, but not in our core business in power derivatives in Europe.
Got it.
Hi, good afternoon now. It's Gurjit from JPMorgan. Just in terms of the investments you're making, particularly in technology, how should we think about the payback from that? Is that in the form of lower sort of cost improved efficiency? Or will it come through in the top line revenue growth?
I think the biggest investment we see into cloud, And therefore, we said it's a high double digit €1,000,000 a month, and we also explicitly said that we expect a payback within 3 years. So and that is roughly also guidance when we invest in technology that we expect that kind of payback.
Question here in the first row.
David Walton from Canaccord. I'm confident that the pricing model in terms of charging per transaction will hold over the next 5 years or should be a shift to subscription pricing for those transactions now? Thank you. Yes.
If that is directed to the transaction businesses, let me start by saying that the value proposition that we are running, and that is true for other businesses, has been significantly expanded. What was 10 or 20 years ago focused on price discovery is now equally focused on capital efficiency and margin efficiency. So we are both providing trading and clearing services. This, of course, goes hand in hand with that some of the fee models that we are running are not only charging for the execution point of a transaction, but then similarly for holding positions in the CCP in the risk framework. We do that, of course, already for the swaps business, but also for other products that are much more focused on a component where risk is held with us.
We will go to pricing models where we have maintenance and other fees that reflect the value proposition that we are having.
Fermino Moragato from Mangeology. ESTETEN as an Deutsche Borse shareholder, I mean, the biggest concern is large scale expensive and dilutive M and A. And my question is, I mean, the large scale versus the small scale and innovative M and A. And one of the things I was expecting, more about product innovation, I mean, comes to mind, like certain asset classes like real estate, housing. It's so big.
And we lack products to allow hedging. To what extent Deutsche Borse can innovate on that area. And even like on the energy, I mean, one of when I speak with the utilities in Europe, they say, look, in the U. S, we can hedge power prices for 20 years or 25 years, and so we can go and develop, say, wind parks. In Europe, we like that.
I mean, to what extent can also replicate what we have in U. S. In terms of Europe, in terms of energy. And so my question is that what kind of innovations, products that we don't have today that we can have in the future? To what extent, I mean, that is not related with large scale M and A, but actually small scale or even initiatives that you can invest organically in the company.
You want to kick off?
Yes, yes. I will kick that off. Also, I would invite Peter later to add specifically for the emissions part. Obviously, we believe that product innovation continues to be a major secular growth opportunity for all of the businesses that I covered earlier in my speech. One of the key drivers, as mentioned, for that is replicating products that are currently traded to OTC and trading them on exchange, what I take futurization.
And just repeating the example of total return futures, here we are able to attract an already quite significant segment of total return swaps into the exchange and into the clearinghouse. There is, of course, as you alluded to, there will also be completely new segments that we believe will be an opportunity for us. And let me mention, 1, we launched ESG products just recently, which will form a new asset class together with the colleagues from stocks as an index portfolio. So any changes of investment behavior, we will, of course, exploit and also then see growth opportunities there. You alluded to alternative asset classes.
Of course, we already had a contract around property. I think there, we probably get much more into the space. And Theodor mentioned previously in some of his speeches of tokenizing of assets that in the mid- and in the long term will make assets tradable that are not tradable right now. And that, of course, is a mid- and long term potential to create new markets for us. In the now near term, we are focusing on also much more innovative solutions.
Just recently, we launched Trucking Futures with your colleagues of Nodal in the U. S. So there will be continuous innovations. And many of these are really seeding plants to grow over years and then at some point, sort of harvesting them. So we, of course, look at this also in the mid and in the long run.
And I'd invite Peter, if you want to add a bit on the specific energy segment.
Yes. On the question of availability of longer term hedges, what we've seen in the U. S, there is a growing trend in Europe as well, also driven by financing of big renewable projects that is using a special structure called Power Purchase Agreements, PPAs. Those usually have a duration of 10 to 15 years. We currently offer standardized futures product up to 6 years out.
And we are actually working right now with the utilities to extend that range to 10 years out, so that we can offer long term hedges also to help finance these renewable power projects. But that's an initiative we have already started.
In building on your observation around small enabling M and A and then really driving sort of the product acceleration from there, I think that Swisscanto is really among a critical example there for the entire fund business, which exactly in the spirit that you described, the acquisition gave us a base capability, a base client set around the data analytics and the trailer fee, in particular, management as well as distribution management. So now we have a very broad client platform at which we can implement it. But more important, we can enhance the product because we have such an enormous volume on Vestima. So we can support distribution platforms with insights around which flows are underway, what's happening in the fund market as we speak. That was not possible as long as Swisscanto was basically a very narrow setup that didn't have the breadth but only had 15 clients historically, the Swiss Cantonal Banks.
So therefore, these examples, I think, really illustrate what we're trying to do with enabling small bolt on acquisitions. And the fund space is 1, I believe, across the platform, we see a lot of them.
And in addition, Stefan, we talked about it. You were talking asking specifically about the products, but don't forget the regional component. Don't forget a component that we have existing IT systems, which we can use and further utilize. Take the example of Osmark. This very small investment we've done in Australia.
Australia is a market of €2,000,000,000,000 right, addressable assets, assets under management custody there, right? And we believe up to 50% of the market there is addressable for our Vistima IT platform, up to 50%. So it is a spirit investment what we are doing here. On the FX side, Carlo, right, and interfere quite frankly. But what we have done, we used to be in a business in a dealer taker business, a dealer to customer business.
We did this acquisition dealer to dealer on the GDC side, right? And therefore, we expanded our business further, right, even via small acquisitions to get into new asset and product clauses, right? And there we there's a huge market. The market for asset managers is opening up more and more on FX side as well and we want to approach this market. Carlo, did I say it correctly?
Okay, thumb up.
Maybe also from a financial perspective. So we do not expect large scale M and A within the framework of the core exchanges. So that's politically not supported. There are regulatory concerns. So and that's not our focus.
So that's why we defined and said outside of the core exchange business, we defined these 5 areas where we said, therefore, we consider M and A and this is FX, this is commodities, this is investment fund services, this is index and data and this is fixed income business. So constantly in these five areas, we screen the markets, we look for opportunity. You have seen we have done some M and A on that side, and we have a clear financial framework for also doing M and A. And we want to create additional value for our shareholders. We want to make sure that any transaction is already in the 1st year cash earnings accretive.
So that's a framework we are working on. And so that should give you some comfort that we have good discipline on M and A side.
Further questions already for lunch? No. Christophe, in
the last row. Christophe Biefer, Commerzbank. How should we think about the contribution from the client side? And how important is repo clearing to achieve your revenue targets?
Yes. Many thanks for that question. I'm glad that there is a question on the OTC side because I think there is a there was tremendous progress that the team on Eric Leads have delivered over the past year in that segment. And to your question, I would invite Eric if you want to, in the room, respond to that.
Yes. Thank you for the question. And Thomas, in his presentation, outlined the development of the notional outstanding. And there you are right, it's roughly 2 thirds is the FRAA, so the short dated area and 1 third of the notional is relating to the longer dated business. But in revenue terms, that can look a bit different because the long dated business, and it goes back to one of the earlier questions, is there just a transaction fee or is there also maintenance involved?
So for the long dated business, you have the recurring maintenance fee as well. So in terms of the revenue mix, we are better than suggested by the notional outstanding piece. Where do we focus on? So onboarding has been a huge success so far this year. So year to date, Thomas said close to 100 new clients, and that is non banks, so buy side firms, pension funds, insurance firms, asset managers and all across the globe because we now have our CFTC approval license extension in place since Christmas last year.
So we're starting to onboard also U. S. Clients. And we are also looking into Asia, and we're having constructive discussions with some of the regulators there. So do expect that future revenue contribution and achieving those goals that Gregor underlined again for OTC clearing will depend on also further progress on the long dated business, which is largely buy side.
But again, we are on track also from that angle.
Any further question?
We invite you for lunch. Thanks for coming. It was great having you around and see you later next year and some of you hopefully before. Many thanks.