Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the 2019 Investor Day of Deutsche Börse 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 Börse, chaired by Theodor Weimer. Theodor will kick off today's presentation. Afterwards, the Executive Board members, Stephan Leithner, Thomas Book, Christoph Böhm, Hauke Stars, and Gregor Pottmeyer, will present their areas of responsibility. At around 11:30 A.M. or 11:45 A.M., we will commence the Q&A session. Afterwards, we are happy to continue some of the discussions during lunch. With this, let me now hand over to you, Theodor.
Thank you, Jan. Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to this year's Capital Markets Day of Deutsche Börse. I am really glad you are here, and a special welcome to our colleagues here in the first row. Jan already mentioned how we would go through and I will kick off. Later on, the ExCo members, some of them are new to you, will present their respective areas. Finally, Gregor will conclude with the numbers. I do sincerely 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 three major pillars.
First, the organic growth. Here we are exploiting secular growth opportunities with the objective of generating at least 5% net revenue growth and around 10%-15% earnings growth on average per year. Second, M&A. We operate in a, as I call it, size-matters business. Therefore, we made M&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 internal growth opportunities. Third, technology. We do have two major strategic assets. One is HR, our people, and second, the IT. On the IT side, we have had a great reputation, which we need to, and which 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. Finally, I am personally very much convinced that we need strengthened execution discipline on all levels of our company. For us, execution discipline is the fourth 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, homemade 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 four 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, I think it is fair to say that we made good progress in implementing our strategy. To mention it explicitly, we are fully in line with our financial targets of last year's stated Roadmap 2020. 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 four attractive smaller bolt-on acquisitions in 2018, our M&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 Böhm 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, was initiated last year with the aim to increasing our cost flexibility, and it has largely and very successfully been implemented. To ramp up the speed of the savings is faster than expected. The total savings are somewhat above our original estimate of around EUR 100 million.
With this, we are convinced we have the right setup for delivering our growth strategic Roadmap 2020. 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 Roadmap 2020, starting with the organic growth on slide five. 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%-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%-15% range in 2018.
For the remaining years, 2019 and 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. My colleagues on the Executive Board will later on present the most important opportunities available to achieve these targets. You can be assured, if we are ahead of the curve, we won't stop if we have reached our targets. M&A. Where do we stand and what is our strategy? Last year, we presented the five 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, we are also considering further inorganic growth as we are moving along. In the trading and clearing area, we already own and operate well-established platforms. Size and scale of the less mature businesses can and need to be improved. Our FX business, Carlo Kölzer is sitting in the front, in the first row. Our FX business, for instance, is still one of the smallest of our nine business segments, it has excellent midterm growth prospects. 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, practically none in trading and clearing. We are closely monitoring the market for opportunities, at the moment, assets availability as such is very limited.
In investment fund services, the fifth area, we are considering all product services and geographies that add value to our already leading fund offering based on our strong and very capable Vestima IT platform. On Page seven, we will demonstrate what we have achieved so far. You can see we have a more focused and disciplined approach in our M&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 favorably. On top of that, EEX has acquired two small businesses since 2018.
Grexel Systems is a leading European provider of energy certificate registry services, the Spark joint venture in Singapore is targeting the growing LNG, liquefied natural gas market. Peter is doing a great job. The growth rates on the commodity sides 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 Ausmaq, which is the managed fund administrator in the growing Australian asset management industry. 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 eight. Why?
I dare to say that the Axioma deal has a corporate strategy element and dimension, which goes well beyond the pre-trade area. The key objectives: looking for a partner in our index business where, first, a complementary product offering and service offering, 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 STOXX business, forms a nucleus of a buy-side 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 bureau. 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. Second, GA has an excellent track record of successfully investing into minority stakes with corporates like us. Three, and last but not least, with this structure, we are preserving our firepower for additional potential M&A opportunities. We also very much appreciate the continued commitment of Axioma's senior leadership, as well as their equity investment in the new company. Sebastian Ceria, 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's the right person to lead the combined joint company going forward. Stephan Leithner will present the benefits of the transaction in more detail in a moment.
Slide nine summarizes the third 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 Axioma 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 with 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 Börse, at the forefront in Europe.
In March, we announced a strategic partnership with Swisscom, the Swiss Telecom, and Sygnum, a very sophisticated and capable fintech company located in Singapore, to build a trusted digital asset ecosystem for the tokenization of assets. This ecosystem will provide a bundle of solutions for digital assets, including issuance, custody, liquidity provision, and banking services, all using digital ledger technology, blockchain. I firmly believe that the digital asset space has great growth potential over time. Therefore, we put Jens Hachmeister 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. HQLAX, High Quality Liquid Assets, is a perfect example of how regulatory constraints are, at the end of the day, creating business opportunities for us. Christoph will touch upon the technology part in his presentation later on. On page 10, I would like to stress the importance of execution discipline as a general management paradigm. Since I addressed this a couple of minutes before, I can be very short here again. Again, we strongly believe that we can determine at least five percent 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 five percent by applying management skills.
We are not sitting there like a duck and waiting for simply right tailwind and increased NII. Quite frankly, we will also 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&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&A activities in areas where there are no regulatory concerns particularly effective. 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. 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 four main drivers, and we try to show to you where the main drivers really affect the value chain. First, 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. Second, over-the-counter to on-exchange, OTC to on-exchange, is the second 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.
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 Book will later on provide deeper insights. Third, the ongoing shift from the active to passive investment, where Europe still offers significant growth potential compared to the U.S. Fourth 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. Stephan.
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 Börse. After 20 years as an outsider, continuously working with and around Deutsche Börse 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 roadmap that Theodor has laid out to you. On the pre-trade business, as I started to look in detail at it's consisting of STOXX and the data businesses, the market data businesses. There certainly are three ingoing conclusions that are very clear and obvious in this context. The first one is we have outstanding and excellent businesses. The businesses we have in terms of STOXX with EUR 145 million revenues in 2018, 13% growth.
The data business, EUR 170 million revenues, 10% growth with great margins. They definitely are platforms. As Theodor already alluded to, the key opportunity in our businesses is to grow on the buy side. This obviously applies to the businesses themselves, with STOXX, for example, today, only 14% of revenue is coming from the buy side, but it equally has larger benefits for the group, as Theodor alluded to. The third 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&A to drive, and we need to do M&A under smart structures, because clearly this is space where valuations are not easy. In reviewing the targets, there is a broad universe available. That's why we believe there is continued growth opportunities. Axioma really stood out from the outset.
It's a situation that is very complementary. I will come back to that. It's a situation that Deutsche Börse has worked with for many years. We have joint products in the market. 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. If you just recap in one sentence, our own business on the STOXX 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. 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 invite 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. 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 STOXX is very much an 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 Axioma products in Europe as well as on the other side, penetrating much deeper the U.S. environment with STOXX products. The same is true, and that's the main driver as I alluded to earlier, in terms of the client segment complementarity, 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. I believe truly that it's a complementarity in terms of the datasets, as you can see on the next page, which is again, a page that we have, in this form, used in the announcement call we did a few weeks ago. The datasets that for STOXX are very much transaction and market and reference data based. 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. The two things together very much complement each other and make a very strong combined entity. Here we go. This was the complementarity in the datasets.
As a last complementarity I would like to highlight is the revenue models of the two. Now, the STOXX 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 Axioma business is not only a software sales and licensing business, which is very stable in itself, but it also has a strong multi-year and therefore a very high portion of recurring revenues, which again, the two of them will increase the stability for the growth path that we envision. Our vision for the combined business is the one that Theodor 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 is a true, deep felt expertise and commitment. 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&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 STOXX and DAX businesses with EUR 2.6 billion valuation that General Atlantic implied. That's a 23x EBITDA of 2018.
We truly believe that the partnership with General Atlantic preserves the financial degrees of freedom for the group. Gregor will talk about that certainly later. 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. The second element of this structure is 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 $100 million that they will personally reinvest, so that clearly gives them a strong incentive to continue to develop the venture with us. 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. Secondly, we have received the antitrust clearances in the U.S. already last week. 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. 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 EUR 30 million 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 STOXX and then the combined business after the 13% of growth we had last year on STOXX standalone. 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. 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, et cetera, and Eurex, but also for a number of partners. It's a very high recurring revenue business. More than 90% is recurring revenues.
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, 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 timestamps 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 EUR 1 million. 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 first pickup in the market on that. 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. Let me conclude therefore. I'm very proud about the quality of the businesses on the data side that Deutsche Börse Group has. It is with the transaction of STOXX 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.
Lastly, on the market data, as I say, 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. 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 three asset classes shown here, so financial derivatives, commodities, and also foreign exchange. Cash equities later will then be covered by my colleague, Hauke. All these three segments continue to develop at a very rapid pace, very dynamically. You've heard some of the trends earlier from Theodor. Electronification, 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. 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 IRS clearing offering. We really made a quantum leap here, now achieving a 14% market share. 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 four 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. Let me say, all these are very exciting businesses, and I'm very proud to have a world-class team running these. As mentioned, the 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 taker site, and in particular, the institutional investors and also the hedgers. 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 their development, we see an outstanding 18% year-over-year growth in open interest, which is a proof of the 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. As a result, as you can see, the concentration in the top five products went down by 10% while growing our volumes since 2015, again, taking us ahead of our global peers. The four 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. 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, DAX, but also Bund, Bobl, Schatz, 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. 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. 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. 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. We launched dividend, but also volatility and sector indices around the STOXX 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. 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. 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, 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. 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. These strategies have driven volume in some of our core product groups, most notably the MSCI index family, which is complementing our STOXX index family. This is a global index family that provide a truly global product framework. 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, which is very positive.
We have seen 42% Asian flows during those hours, there is real client demand. 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 in 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 an assembly line. We can expand the segments like we did for volatility and dividend, just adding further components. 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 one 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 the market demand for an EU-based liquid alternative. We've made a lot of progress in onboarding new clients 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 a target of onboarding 50 to 100 new clients. Now in May, we already stand at adding 90 clients to the program. 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.
Again, here the proposition is an integrated clearing offering across futures swaps and repo. 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 Leithner later. Let me, with that, continue to talk about our commodities business, and it was mentioned already by Theodor. EEX strives to become the preeminent global platform. While the nucleus is in European power, EEX is already one of the leading venues globally. 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 two, and for emissions, number three globally.
It was a 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 two 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 significant market share gains in all of our core product groups. For instance, we were able to significantly increase our market share in German power derivatives. Yet still, only one third of the universe is traded ETD, two-thirds 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. One of the further growth drivers that is very important is 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. 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. 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.
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 EUR 5 trillion traded daily. It is also an asset class that is in a very profound transformation. In particular, electronification is very important in these markets, which are still quite fragmented. We entered 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. Lastly, this is almost entirely OTC-traded asset class, largely yet still uncleared. 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. 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.
As you can see, there was a lot of great opportunities and projects we have, let me hand over to Hauke to conclude with the cash equities segment.
Yes. Thank you, Thomas, 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, in this business segment, we operate regulated markets for trading of equities, ETFs, bonds, certificates, and many other products via three trading venues. Xetra, very well known, Börse Frankfurt and Tradegate Exchange. Xetra is the most liquid place to trade German equities with a DAX market share of more than 68%. 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 I, this area of our business was put into strong competition, we have a good track record in this business.
Over the past three years, we were able to regain 10% market share from the pan-European trading venues like Cboe. In comparison to our peers like LSE, Euronext, we have been leading in terms of year-over-year growth and turnover volumes for the past two years now. In addition, one area of strength in our business is our ETF segment. Here we have a clear European play, 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. We saw this as a result of this, a large number of IPOs, also large IPOs last year. We have built over the past years an attractive integrated equity clearing.
This is now subject, due to regulation, to open access, 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 Börse Group, that is that the cash market is the starting point of the value chain of Deutsche Börse. 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 direct follow-on transaction to our trading and clearing in equities. 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 Börse Group.
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 Börse 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. 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. 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, 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 EnLight 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 Börse Venture Network, our platform that brings together investors and growth companies, is flourishing. We had already a number of IPOs from this network, it is important for us to nurture this environment and build a long-term IPO pipeline to make and keep our market attractive also in the long term. Another area that we are focusing on is the ETF segment. We expect growth from this business, driven by the long-term investment trend 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, 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 eListing, digital listing opportunity. Now we are expanding with digital formats into servicing issuers and IPO candidates in their interaction with their investors. Another area are the specific thematic trends around ESG and impact investing. They will continue to create opportunities and demand for purpose-built investment 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. We believe with all our initiatives, we are well-positioned to benefit from the structural effects. We have shown that we are able to do that, and we will continue so in the future. We will also manage and capture cyclical effects whenever possible. This, by maintaining our high profitability.
Thank you very much. With this, I would like to hand over back to Stephan.
Thank you. Okay, so you see me coming back on the post-trading business. 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 of EUR 950 million. We have industry-leading margins. We last year had 8% growth, so clearly on track with our Roadmap. At the same time, I know that many of you are preoccupied around the balance between NII momentum versus secular growth. Let me make clear that this is something that we are very focused on as a team. Many of you have met Phil Brown and Philippe Seyll 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. 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&A and in particular, technology. That's with Christoph Böhm having joined. There clearly is a platform to take this forward to the next level, but that's beyond today in many aspects. Let me come back to my point around the changes to the business that we have made over the course of the last year.
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. Therefore, you now see on top here, in addition to the two 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. 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.
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. 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.
Lastly, it is the technology change, blockchain, and other buzzwords. 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, EUR 480 million 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 two or three 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.
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 million. 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 EUR 13 billion for a long time, we have seen some pickup, whether that is cyclical or structural, ahead of the CSDR 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 settlement failures exposed. The last element that you see on the chart here from the revenues is a number of other contributions.
The reason why I highlight that is that in one of our takeaways from the early review of the business, we had 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 third-party services. We are running down these businesses, which again, you will see as a pressure point on our secular growth. 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 four 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.
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, CSDR is upping the requirements from the CSD cost perspective. We're starting to see issuers from other European geographies issue through the Frankfurt CBF platform. 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.
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 believe and have started to implement a very effective network across Europe through which we can basically move beyond just the settlement activity into a European custody-style product for the right type of clients. 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 1.2 trillion 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. 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.
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 a pan-European equity market that is driving this. 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 online. We, Clearstream Frankfurt, operate 40% of all the settlement volumes in T2S. 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 second-tier custodians that want to offer a pan-European product, and which can do this most efficiently through the Investor CSD 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. 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. 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. If I therefore turn back to the numbers, we had, last year, an 8% growth. In fairness, it's been driven mostly via NII. We do believe that the 5%-10% growth that we had talked about for 2017 to 2020 is intact, I would also be very open to admit that the secular growth, especially as we had expected to be driven by the Investor CSD, 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, 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've had a very strong focus in line with SPIP on the internal efficiency, fantastic opportunities around digitization we're seeing there. We have seen a good momentum in terms of new technology initiatives. I'll come back to that in a minute. Lastly, with Phil 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% quality and service to them. That's the core of business. Let me move on to GSF and keep it fairly short. 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 headwinds are taking their toll. We have the two components of the securities lending, in which we are very aggressively diversifying the lender and the borrower base, making the business much more resilient. 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. Theodor already alluded to that. I'm sure that Christoph is going to come back to that. We are well on track. We have the second global custodian on board now.
We have the core banks who are set up. We look very much forward to the Sibos events later this year when we hope to be able to announce the transaction sequences being up and running. The third business is IFS, the investment fund services. 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 adapting. Medium to long term, this will be certainly an area where the blockchain technology will have quite dramatic impact. The underlying starting point, 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 processed of 25 million is roughly double the size of the next player. 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. We have 40 domiciles that we have on stream. 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. You will also note that it's more exposed to settlement revenues than the core business. That means why in Q1, we have seen a bit more cyclicality, since clearly we have seen much less transaction activity on the fund side than we had seen in last year. If you look at the plan and our outlook, we 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. I think that the new client and fund onboarding continues to progress well. 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 roadmap of the scaling effects. The adjusted EBITDA margins in 2017 was 41%, 2018 was 44%. Will continue to progress towards the 50% because it's truly a scale 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 Seyll 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 implementation of these benefits is on track, and we actually, 10 days ago, had the launch of our front desk in a big client event in Zurich, and we have seen very positive recognition. Let's not forget, at the end, Swisscanto has also added EUR 42 billion in terms of assets under custody. Last week you have seen us announce Ausmaq, an acquisition in Australia that Theodor referred to earlier. Again, this is mainly a platform step. We don't start greenfield in Australia, which we would have considered too far away, too risky.
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 EUR 32 billion assets under custody. 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. 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 is a high-quality asset.
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. In line with the Roadmap 2020, Christoph and myself will spend more time around how can we shape a longer to medium term outlook that is based on a technology leadership. 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, I can tell you it's great to have him on board, and he will help on that.
Thank you very much, Stephan. 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. 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. 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. On the other side, we deliver operational excellence. When you look at the timeline, you see that we have started first digitizing the business, launching SEFA and Eurex Trading. We introduced high-end computing systems like our risk management Prisma or the renewed matching and clearing environments, C7 and T7. Now we are taking a prime position, establishing distributed ledger capabilities and deploying material workloads into the public cloud. We have a strong track record in place running high volume and large scale IT. Our operating excellence is outstanding, and here I'm quoting our customers. 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.
Finally, partnering with market leading technology companies allows us to leverage R&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 cloud automation, big data, and distributed ledger capabilities. We establish strategic partnerships with selected top companies. We have started an evolution, and we see 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. This ensures compliance with existing and upcoming regulations. It creates transparency, which is always required. We have evolved our organizational structure towards the target operating model. 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 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. 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 flex office capabilities and a seamless mobile integration.
When you look at our innovational 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. We will extend existing capabilities in the place of automation. For distributed ledger, we create a partnership set up in the Swiss ecosystem. I will talk about that in detail in a second. We intend to launch first products in the second half of 2019. 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 2019. 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. 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. 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, higher levels of resiliency. For that, we will invest a high double-digit million euro number. 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 three 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. We are positive that we will do another announcement in the second half of 2019. 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 business 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, first agility to kick in and first efficiency to help our performance. In 2020 also, the wave for 2021 will be prepared. Out of the list of expected benefits, I like to highlight one, 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, especially 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. 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 Börse 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 is a very good foundation to move forward. This is why we have established a strategical partnership with Swisscom and Sygnum 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 Roadmap, we have started delivering first lighthouses in 2019, and we will continue in the second half of the year to do so. 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 now.
I want to sum up from a financial perspective and want to highlight the financials and also give you some outlook for 2019 and 2020. Here on that slide, you can see how did we grow over the last 4 years, from 2015 to 2018. The average CAGR was 8%. If you look, where does it come from? Roughly 5% came from secular growth, roughly 2% from cyclical growth. In some years, there's cyclical tailwind, and some years it's cyclical headwind, obviously. In average, it's 2%. We had some 1% out of M&A growth. Now looking with regard to our Roadmap 2020 target, we said, what do we want to achieve for 2017 to 2020? We said we want to at least grow on a secular basis by 5%, and we expect some cyclical tailwind.
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&A. 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 first quarter, we delivered some 5% secular growth, as promised, as guided. We had some cyclical headwind in the first quarter, especially in the trading space. April and May was better. April was quite good from a cyclical perspective. May is okay. Overall, we are rightly on track. Overall, if you take all the cyclicality into account, then it's basically neutral for the first five months.
We are on track to deliver our secular growth, and we will see how cyclicality will end over the next seven months for this year. For 2020, unchanged, we confirm our Roadmap 2020 targets. We are sometimes criticized, what do you calculate as secular growth? Want to be very clear and precise here. Secular growth is, on the one hand side, it's increased market share, obviously. That's not too difficult. It's also, specifically on the Eurex part, the move from OTC to on exchange. Our OTC clearing opportunity where we basically started from zero to now more than 14% market shares, and we said we want to achieve some EUR 50 million to EUR 70 million net revenues in 2020. We are right on track to deliver that. For this year, we expect some EUR 50 million, that's definitely also secular growth.
In the EEX area, it's really good to see we increase our market shares here. Thomas Book already mentioned that. In the U.S. market model, more than 30%, 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 increase also our market shares. Five years ago, it was 10%. Now it's more than 35% on a European level. That's obviously good to see. On Clearstream, we are behind our expectation. It's good to see growth rates of 7%-8%. That's obviously good. It's basically cyclical growth, specifically out of the NII business. Our view is unchanged with the good chance to achieve secular growth in Clearstream, as Stephan Leithner mentioned. We want to grow in the investment fund service business where we see secular growth.
We expect secular growth with regard to TARGET2-Securities. You don't see it today, but it's our clear belief that over the next two, three 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 nine business segments. Five out of nine business segments will deliver more than 10% growth. I think that's really good to see. Even more important, the majority of that is secular growth. That's unchanged our view with regard to STOXX, data, and Eurex. Even on EEX, we see upside potential. It's really 2018 was a strong year, and so far 2019 is also a strong year with roughly 20% revenue growth. That's obviously good to see.
The far majority is secular growth. [Swiss LX], we invested a lot to benefit from the trend OTC to on exchange. We introduced central limit order book functionality, we introduced clearing functionality, and so far the far majority, 90% is OTC, 10% is on exchange. 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%-10% growth rate and also some secular growth.
The index business still unchanged, growing with more than 10%, even in the first quarter 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. With a combination of Axioma, obviously, should be exciting opportunities here. I skip that. Scalability of the business model. There's no difference from a cost perspective whether we trade 10 million contracts a day or 15 million contracts a day. There are no additional costs for that. As long as we grow, we should be able to show some scalability of our business model. Over the last three years, from 2015 to 2018, our revenue, as I mentioned, grew by 8%, our cost grew by 2%. 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, we are right on track, or I could say differently, we are above our expectations. Here you see, we expect some EUR 60 million savings already this year. We guided last year, roughly, one third, out of the EUR 100 million, EUR 33 million. 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. EUR 90 million cost saving next year, even slightly above EUR 100 million in 2021. Clear message, this cost reduction you will not see in our cost development as, that we guided last year, we will reinvest that kind of savings.
We will reinvest, it's roughly EUR 250 million over the three years, 2019, 2020, and 2021. EUR 60 million as cost savings in 2019, EUR 90 million in 2020, and EUR 100 million. Overall adding up, it's EUR 250 million. We reinvest this EUR 250 million in organic growth, specifically the majority in Eurex and Clearstream, but also in the new technology like 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 three 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%-15%, so 12.5%. Summary with regard to our financial targets out of the Roadmap 2020. Growth target, at least 5% secular growth with cyclical tailwind. Overall 10%-15% net profit growth. With regard to external growth, we confirm still there's EUR 1.5 billion cash and debt firepower capacity for doing M&A. On top of that, the opportunity to raise some equity if it's needed. Capital management policy, unchanged 40%-60% dividend distribution ratio. Double A rating for Deutsche Börse and specifically for the Clearstream business. Excess cash, the plan is to reinvest in M&A. If not, we would also consider to do a further M&A program.
Cost management, making sure that we achieve also from a cost management perspective, the 10%-15% net profit growth. With this, I would give back to Theodor.
Thank you, Gregor. Ladies and gentlemen, we are two minutes over time. Therefore, I keep my final remarks very short, allow me to summarize how I see the situation. Firstly, we did, I would like to avoid any kind of coming over as an arrogant guy. I'd rather be humble. 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 2020. 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 eight-cylinder machine, right, which is scalable.
Second, our roadmap, our strategic roadmap is, quite frankly, pretty spot on. We love to see that others obviously try to copy-paste this, right? 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. We want to deliver shareholder value, right? We want to deliver according to your needs and expectations. Allow me a personal statement here. When I started some 15, 16 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 these bold acquisitions, this string of a pearls approach, and we will continue in doing so. We will not do it at all cost. We always apply, hopefully, a pretty smart commercial attitude. I see no need to change the strategy right now. Next year, in the third year, we'll probably come up with some further developments. This year and the first six 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&A. Thank you.
If you would like to ask a question, please raise your hand. There are microphones in the room. Please kindly limit your questions to one to allow for broader participation, and if you would state your name and company, 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? I think you did it in Xetra in the past or maybe some other businesses where this could be part of the strategy. Thank you.
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, depending on what is our trading volume. No difference from a cost perspective, whether we trade 10 million or 15 million 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. The big investments are done for that. Now we are going into the new S-curve, that's now investments in cloud and in blockchain technology.
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. We were lacking, yeah, sometimes a little bit the growth. Right? What I want to attract is growth investors. 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? Therefore, I said I'm prepared to give in some margin points, not massive ones, 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? Do you have plans to move to other jurisdictions if this is not happening? Secondly, just on the cash market, you are always talking about gaining back market share, but we are still far back from the old historic levels of 100%, I have to admit. Any chances to go deeper into the OTC share of the market, which is still relatively unchanged? Thank you.
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. We want to do, after a successful start in Switzerland, another step. 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.
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, our pricing initiatives, functionality initiatives, we managed to bring this down to 40%. We gained already, over the past years, a share of OTC, and we continue to work on that. That is 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. I can promise that we will work on that, and work on further winning OTC share.
Joanna, first row.
Thank you. Joanna Nader from RBC. Sorry, I do not even really exactly know how to ask my question because my knowledge level is a bit low on the blockchain. I guess it is kind of combined for Christoph and Stephan. 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. Longer term, sort of how you are thinking about creating these new markets, and what kind of cooperation you need from, I guess, third parties in terms of whatever protocols you go with or consortiums. I am just sort of interested how you make this happen, because it seems like it could be a big opportunity.
You want to kick it off?
Happy to kick it off. I think, first of all, the blockchain initiative that we have that really touches the market and the main participant is HQLAX. 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 do not 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 are going to continue. I truly believe it is 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 Custo digit investment we made, that we're also very close to some of the main providers of the blockchain technologies. That's why our venture investment around Digital Asset Holdings and a number of other partnerships are very important. We stay close to what is the best technology, both for the smart contract side and for the underlying blockchain. The two don't necessarily have always the best player, or not every player is excellent on both of those components. 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 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 two days, and if you tokenize and if you use token technology to do the same process, we are talking about intraday. 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. This is what is going to happen on the technology side, and this is why I said it's 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.
From my side, Joanna, to see EO perspective is falling. Firstly, we predominantly believe that the post-trading area is the area where we should do everything to be ahead of the curve on the blockchain distributed ledger technology rather than on the trading side. Point number one. Point number two, we believe that the distributed ledger will create, and that's a new paradigm, will create a new ecosystem. You will not win, right, if you simply apply the blockchain and the distributed ledger technology in a part of the value system. You need to apply, you need to create an ecosystem. That's the new paradigm. What I see way beyond the blockchain, and there, the ecosystem creation requires a partnering approach. Right? Therefore, we clearly made up our mind. We invest, but we actively seek for partners. Third, it goes back to what Johannes has asked.
It's pretty clear, we don't care if we don't have the right regulatory environment in Germany, we go outside.
Arnaud?
Good morning. It's Arnaud Giblat from Exane. Just a question on EEX. You clearly explained that you benefited from increased electricity price volatility because of the 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? Also, since EEX has been so successful, do you see opportunities to accelerate growth through built-on acquisitions out there? Thank you.
If I may, thank you very much, Arnaud, for the question that also touched on, since we have the CEO of EEX in the room, Peter here, if I may invite him to respond to your question.
Sure.
Happy to do so. First part of the question on increased volatility. We see that through what Thomas Book 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. There is increased intraday volatility, and that is a driver for intraday 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, next days, next two 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.
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 also in the first five months of this year.
One add on? Arnaud? Both? Both ones. Further growth opportunities.
External.
External growth opportunities. Sorry, forgot that part. 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, it was quite a niche market, with Grexel in the registry business. We have acquired a leading provider in Europe for that niche segment. It puts us in a position because there's some huge overlap with registry users and power market users. It's 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. 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.
Gurjit.
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 cost improved efficiency, or will it come through in the top line revenue growth?
I think the biggest investment we see into cloud, therefore we said it's a high double-digit million EUR amount, and we also explicitly said that we expect a payback within three years. That is roughly also a guidance when we invest in technology that we expect that kind of payback.
Question here in the first row.
Thank you.
Hello. David Walton from Canaccord. Are you confident that the pricing model in terms of charging per transaction will hold over the next five years, or could there be a shift to subscription pricing for those transactions now? Thank you.
Thomas?
Thomas, yeah.
Thomas.
Yeah. 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. We are both providing trading and clearing services. This, of course, goes hand in hand with some of the fee models that we are running are not only charging for the execution point of a transaction, but 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.
Here in the first row, please.
Firmin Morgado from M&G. As the Deutsche Börse hold, the biggest concern is large scale, expensive, and dilutive M&A. My question is, the large scale versus the small scale and innovative M&A. One of the things I was expecting more about product innovation, comes to mind, certain asset classes like real estate, housing, it is so big. We lack products to allow hedging. To what extent Deutsche Börse can innovate on that area? Even on the energy, when I speak with utilities in Europe, they say, "Look, in the U.S. we can hedge power prices for 20 years or 25 years, we can go and develop, say, wind parks." In Europe, we lack that. To what extent can also replicate what we have in the U.S. in terms of Europe, in terms of energy.
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? That is not related with large scale M&A, but actually small scale or even initiatives that you can invest organically in the company.
You want to kick off?
Yeah. I also 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 OTC and trading them on exchange, what I tag futurization. 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 one.
We launched ESG products just recently, which will form a new asset class together with the colleagues from STOXX as an index portfolio. Any changes of investment behavior, we will of course, exploit and also then seek 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. 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 the colleagues of Nodal in the U.S.
There will be continuous innovations, and many of these are really seeding plans to grow over years and then at some point, sort of harvesting them. We, of course, look at this also in the mid and in the long run. I'd invite Peter, if you want to add a bit on the specific energy segment.
Yeah, 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 products up to six 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. That's an initiative we have already started.
[Holger]?
In building on your observation around small enabling M&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 describe. 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. 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. We can support distribution platforms with insights around which flows are on the way
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. Therefore, these examples, I think, really illustrate what we're trying to do with enabling small bolt-on acquisitions. The fund space is one, I believe across the platform, we see a lot of them.
In addition, Stephan, we talked about it. You were talking, asking specifically about the products, 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 Ausmaq, this very small investment we've done in Australia. Australia is a market of EUR 2 trillion addressable assets under management custody there. We believe up to 50% of the market there is addressable for our Vestima IT platform, up to 50%. That's a spirit investment, what we are doing there. On the FX side, Carlo, 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 GTX side. Therefore, we expanded our business further.
Even via small acquisitions to get into new asset and product classes. There's a huge market. The market for asset managers is opening up more and more on the FX side as well, and we want to approach this market. Carlo, did I say it correctly? Okay. Thumb up. Good.
Maybe also from a financial perspective. We do not expect large-scale M&A within the framework of the core exchanges. That's politically not supported. There are regulatory concerns, that's not our focus. That's why we defined and said outside of the core exchange business, we defined these five areas where we said, therefore, we consider M&A, this is FX, this is commodities, this is investment fund services, this is index and data, this is fixed-income business. Constantly in these five areas, we screen the markets, we look for opportunity. You have seen we have done some M&A on that side, we have a clear financial framework for also doing M&A, and we want to create additional value for our shareholders. We want to make sure that any transaction is already in the first-year cash earnings accretive.
That's a framework we are working on, that should give you some comfort that we have good discipline on M&A side.
Further questions or ready for lunch? No.
Christoph.
No, not yet.
In the last row over there.
No lunch.
Christoph Liefner, Commerzbank. One question on Eurex OTC, please. Revenue generation has been pretty much driven by the dealer-to-dealer side so far. How should we think about the contribution from the client side? How important is repo clearing to achieve your revenue targets? Thanks.
Many thanks for that question. I'm glad that there is a question on the OTC side because I think there was tremendous progress that the team under Erik Leupold have delivered over the past year in that segment. To your question, I would invite Erik Leupold if you want to, since you're in the room, respond to that.
Thank you for the question. Thomas, in his presentation, outlined the development of the notional outstanding. There you are right, is roughly two-thirds is the FRA, so the short-dated area and one-third of the notional is relating to the longer-dated business. In revenue terms, that can look a bit different because the long-dated business, it goes back to one of the earlier questions, is there just a transaction fee or is there also maintenance involved? For the long-dated business, you have the recurring maintenance fee as well. In terms of the revenue mix, we are better than suggested by the notional outstanding piece. Where do we focus on? Onboarding has been a huge success so far this year. Year-to-date, Thomas said, close to 100 new clients, and that is non-bank.
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. We're starting to onboard also U.S. clients, and we are also looking into Asia, and we are having constructive discussions with some of the regulators there. 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. 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 latest next year, and some of you, hopefully before. Many thanks.