Good afternoon, everyone. A warm welcome here from Frankfurt, from our head office. I'm here together with my colleagues, Achim Schreck and Muhamad Chahrour. I'm very proud to invite you today to the First Strategy Day of this year. We have recently published a few figures on our 2026 plan, and we received a lot of positive comments and feedback. However, a few questions and the request to drill down a bit more and give more comfort and more color to those KPIs, that's the idea of ours today, Strategy Day. My colleague, Muhamad Chahrour, and I, we will split a bit. I will start with the first part. We are doing four parts today. Mo will take over the second. I'm going to continue with the third, and then Mo is going to finish with the fourth one.
I will rather speak a bit about the past than more about the present. Mo will obviously elaborate on the future of our strategy and how to do. Let me give you a brief overview what's on our agenda today. There is six items we'd like to talk about and share with you. Obviously, in the next couple of minutes and hours, we're going to drill down on each of every one. Let me start first and share with you what's our philosophy. We want to utilize the capital market access, which some call the democratization of capital market access. Further, we adhere to the highest standards in technology and security. We care a lot about our clients' assets. Further, due to our technology, we can scale. We operate end-to-end. This distinguishes us from the rest of the pack.
Obviously, more to come, and we will drill down and show you more details how we're going to do it. We will talk a lot about hypergrowth. What does it mean? We are not only growing with clients and trades, but also with products. We win market share from existing markets, but the whole market is going to grow, and we're going to take market share of the growing market in the future. How it is, we're going to elaborate later. When people talk about growth doesn't really impress me. What matters to us is profitable growth. That's to me, the challenge, and that's what really matters to us. Last but not least, we care a lot about the stakeholders.
We care about our employees, we care about the clients, and we care about you as shareholders, and we're going to show you later how we're going to do it. When we talk about our success story and the red line, please allow me to look back for a moment. If I look today at the business model of the so-called neo brokers, it reminds me personally a bit about my time eight years ago when I started. Because when we started, some of you might recall, we were using the XCOM AG and the biw Bank as a service provider. They did the IT, they did the banking and settlement for us. At that time, those guys were responsible for 70% of our cost. I always used to say, no one can really control capital markets and client behavior, but what you must control is your cost.
We were very fortunate seven years ago to take over the XCOM biw group, and we are very proud that today we own the whole value chain and we are no longer dependent. I think that makes a huge difference these days, and that distinguishes us from the rest of the pack again. However, this is not enough. When we then looked into our future strategy, we realized that to be dependent of two markets, and we were strong in Germany and Austria, is not good enough. We were discussing how to mitigate those risks. Some of you might recall that we started a strategic review back in 2019, and we reviewed how we're going to expand our international business, be it organically or be it by acquisition, and what our options are.
Fortunately, we decided to not sell the business at that point in time, but rather to continue to run it independently and to take over the XCOM group. Not the XCOM group, but the DEGIRO group. Literally overnight, we mutated from a German hidden champion to the leading European online brokerage business. I think it is very impressive that overnight, we moved from three countries to today, 18. From 300,000 customers, we moved up to 1.25 million customers, our asset base almost tripled, the transaction grew from 12 million to 75 million. Last but not least, we doubled the amount of employees. However, if I today look at our market cap of over EUR 3 billion, I think the second-largest bank in Germany only is double the market cap, but there is more than 35,000 employees.
These days, the business is no longer about how many employees are working for you, but rather how efficient you are and how profitable. More to come on that. This we only did in one year, needless to say. When we talk about growth is not the same everywhere. As I said, pure growth is not impressive to me. The growth is not similar at our competitors. We are proud to say we grow with the right clients, and we grow not only with the right clients, but our clients are active. They are in the age of 30 - 40 internationally per average, and they are affluent, rich, and above average well-educated. That client makes a huge difference with respect to future growth. That, again, matters to us.
If we look about our European footprint, we can see that the growth in the DACH region is only 24%, whereas the growth in Southern Europe, which is mainly Spain, Italy, and Portugal, amounts to 80%. If we look into Western Europe, which is Benelux and France, and in France, as you might know, we are number 1 now, amounts to over 60%. Last but not least, in Northern Europe, which is Nordics and U.K., we are growing almost up to 50%. I think it's outstanding, and we don't know anyone else who has that footprint. As a German, I regret to say my home country, Germany, is no longer that relevant to us. We are growing faster and stronger in the rest of Europe, and that is what matters.
Today, we are no longer a German company, but an international company, and more to come later. I'm sure Mo will talk about that in more detail. Moving on to our DEGIRO acquisition. I recall back in 2019, we promised you after closing and after the merger, which has been completed only a few weeks ago, we promised you EUR 30 million EBITDA per annum at least. As you know, we always keep our promise, and we always follow underpromise and overdeliver. In the first half of this year, we've worked hard on the first part. We allowed each and every client at DEGIRO to open up an account with our flatexDEGIRO Bank, and today this has been accomplished.
At the same time, we took over the credit book from ABN AMRO, and the credit risk sits today with our bank, and obviously, we enjoy the margin on that credit book. We've also started in the first half of the year to harmonize IT infrastructure, which is ongoing and pending. The most relevant synergies will kick in in the second half. Therefore, I'm very proud today to announce two major deals which will make sure that we're going to deliver at least EUR 30 million EBITDA, probably even more. The first one goes to the ETP, and the second one goes to the late trading. Let me start with our ETP business.
We are very proud to announce that we agreed to set up two partnerships for the pan-European business. It's Goldman Sachs, our trusted partner in Germany, who is now a trusted partner for all the European activities. We are proud that we won one of the most impressive European banks, which is BNP Paribas. Those two banks will support our business in Europe from now on. We worked hard over the last six months to come to that agreement. Thank you very much to the partners. We are looking forward to a very successful set up on the ETP side with respect to the European flow. There was only one deal we worked on. The second deal, and I'm very proud to announce that as well today, is our deal with Tradegate. Our friend Holger Timm, the founder of Tradegate, always had a dream.
Let's make Tradegate a European business," we are happy to align with Holger Timm on that one. We will announce now that in the future, all our DEGIRO clients, more than one million, will have access to early and late trading, which until today is not possible. In the old setup of DEGIRO, they were only restricted, I think, from 8:00 A.M. or 9:00 A.M. to 3:00 P.M., and this will now change, and we are very proud of that. This will all kick in in the second half of this year, and this will contribute to our revenues and to our profits. Obviously, it's long-lasting partnerships, so we are proud to announce that today.
Again, as we always say, we keep our promise and we deliver. All the above and what I have mentioned just now led to the delivery on our income metrics. I think we are proud to say that our revenues grow by 3.5 x, our EPS even grows 7 x, and our operating cash flow grew by 4.5 x. Last but not least, our margin increased by over 22%. Again, we are talking about 2019 until the end of this year, and this takes into account the consensus of our analysts. As you can see again, we deliver on our KPIs, but that is not enough. Maybe you might think this is rather normal. I would like to take a look for a short moment at our market cap growth in relation to our peers.
If you look at that, you can see our peers increase their business and obviously grow the market cap. Obviously, you will all say, "Yeah, the markets were quite volatile, and we all enjoyed a great business," but I think there's a huge gap in growth of market cap between our peers and the best within the peers versus what we've achieved now. Again, I'm talking about the present. The future will show more, and I'm sure Mo we're going to talk about this in more detail. 9.5x market cap growth over the last two years I would call quite impressive. That's so far for the first part. Happy to hand over to Mo.
Thank you, Frank. Also a very warm welcome from my side to all of you. Great to have you with us today at our First Strategy Day. Unfortunately, I always say we haven't had much time to really realize and to celebrate the success with our people that we have had over the recent months and years, especially given the situation over the last 18 months. I think I can speak for both of us. We are absolutely proud of what everyone here in this company has contributed. Nevertheless, for everyone who's listening, rest assured, we are starting now the next era of brokerage, the next era of our strategy, and are hoping and are very confident that we will have many other things that we will celebrate together with all of you.
As a quick recap, and Frank highlighted it, we've been defining ourselves for the last seven, eight years as pioneers in what we do. Over the recent years, we have kept operating our business with a very diligent and consequent recipe. We focused on our strengths but kept the necessary sense of opportunism that you absolutely need to pioneer an industry like ours in the financial services. We laid the foundation of processual excellence by focusing on brokerage, by optimizing ongoingly our banking setup, by de-risking our setup, and investing heavily in our IT. Over the last four years, we spent more than EUR 40 million into our IT hardware and software. We have spent massive amounts of intellectual property and human capital into topics like cybersecurity and improving our data systems.
We invested into two brand new data centers with which we will achieve over the nearer future the perfect redundancy that will allow us to even increase our uptime from currently 99.9% to maybe a status where we can have four niners in the uptime. We also changed the commercial setup. We were the pioneer of zero-fee brokerage. When we started four or five years ago, zero-fee brokerage in the European landscape, no one was actually thinking about such a setup. The zero-fee trading that we introduced with offering ETPs of our partners via OTC systems saved costs for both for our product partners as well as for our customers. We developed various ancillary services that others until today don't have in place or cannot provide or do only provide in an inconvenient way like we used to do it 20 years ago.
Finally, we acquired DEGIRO, not just the broker. We acquired our biggest competitor and surprised the world with that acquisition when everyone was expecting something else. After having engineered with great people with us, the leading pan-European brokerage platform, we will start to attack with growth, speed, and high profitability. The introduction, as Frank just mentioned, of early and late trading for more than one million DEGIRO clients that will be able in the future to trade between 8:00 P.M. and 10:30 P.M., is a massive step up in regionalizing the capital market access. I think you all share the view that usually between 9:00 A.M. and 5:30 P.M., when capital markets are open, most of us are having a job for which they have to go to make their living.
Very often we find time to think about our wealth, think about our future, about our pension, only in the afternoons and the evenings, maybe even in the weekends. With offering such an offer that is unique in the European environment, except for Germany, we have again proven our pioneer philosophy and the additional support and the additional regionalization that we will bring forward to the European market. We will continue with many other things, including flatex next 3.0. We will continue to analyze diligently how we can offer cryptocurrency to our clients. Last but not least, we touched on that a couple of weeks ago when we published our 2026 guidance, how we will continuously verticalize our platform in the future. All this has only been possible due to great people, both employees and customers.
The clear aim is to continue our strategy in turning our customers into a fan base, to intensify the relationship with these customers, and to fulfill the expectations that are set in us as a market leader. That includes, obviously, to lead in technology, to lead in the offering, and to lead in innovation. If we manage to lead in all these things, we will be able to lead by example, which is for us the self-understanding for a market leader. If we look into the lead in technology, we see what we have done over the recent years. We have built the most robust platform, as I said, with investing a double-digit million amount into infrastructure, into software code. We have reached an outstanding availability of 99.9% during the last 18 months, and I'm highlighting explicitly the last 18 months.
While others failed during high peaks of volatility due to the COVID structure or high peaks of volatility due to trading events such as with GameStop, when even market makers had to shut down their systems, we were up and running and provided our clients a trading experience on which they rely, especially in these environments. We are continuously working on a high level of security, a top-notch custody of wealth. I'm just mentioning in a sentence the reference account system that we have with our own EU banking license that allows us to make use of these models and to take care of our customers' wealth, and the continuous investments into high cybersecurity standards that we will obviously continue in the future to allow our clients to have the best possible feeling, because technology is what our customers feel. We understand our role as a leader in offering.
Next 3.0, and this what you see is currently a sneak preview, will change the brokerage experience for clients and customers from what we know today and what everyone else has in the markets today. This is how we believe, or this is why we believe that we have to change what customers see. We are working now for 12 months on the next platform to develop it and actually to transform the business model from a pull to a push business, to provide clients with educational aspects and not gamified aspects, to provide them with content information and not with hypes. This is, again, what our understanding of a market leader is that wants to, in the end, allow its clients to shape their financial future. Last but not least, we will have to continue to lead in innovation.
We are today Europe's leading online brokerage business. We are developing Europe's leading financial supermarket platform. This is what customers want. They want independency, they want transparency, they want an open architecture. They want, in the end, a one-stop shop. With flatexDEGIRO as a platform, we have allowed over the last decade to trade stocks, ETFs, bonds, ETPs, and mutual funds. While other are developing online brokers, we were developing for our clients Europe's leading financial supermarket. We have proven partnerships, big partnerships with big names. We were, as I mentioned earlier, the pioneer in introducing zero fee brokerage on the ETP side. We have transformed the flatexDEGIRO platform from a pure broker to more and more decentralized platform that allows both sides to save costs, our clients and our partners, and have the ability of being absolutely independent with our infrastructure that allows us to efficiently integrate further products.
Products like cryptocurrencies, products like insurances and mortgages that we will start strategically more and more to take into our focus and to develop our platform. As I said, if we manage to lead these things in a perfect manner, we will lead by example. Leading by example is not only just the result of what we do, it is also the philosophy that we are absolutely following as a European market leader of online brokerage and also being the fastest growing market leader with respect to online brokerage. We are carrying a responsibility towards our employees and our clients, our customers, and are absolutely keen to fulfill this responsibility well. With respect to our customers, it means that we want to allow our clients to shape their financial future by utilizing the capital markets access.
We don't want them to understand online brokerage as a gamification that in the end, very often, and statistically evident, ends in losing money. This is also the reason why we have, over the recent years, focused more and more on content marketing, on educational marketing. We increased comfort with respect to capital markets with our clients, will not trade all this belief and all this trust for a quick profit. Others spend millions and tons of millions of euros to search engine advertisement to go for the quick buck. We will continue to spend it for the best possible experience of our clients. That's, by the way, also the reason why we can operate this business model with client acquisition costs of less than EUR 50 . The source of all this creativity and diligence is absolutely our colleagues.
We have now, after the acquisition of DEGIRO, we grew to more or to almost 1,000 rock stars, half of them tech rock stars, the other half of them non-tech rock stars. We are employing more than 45 nationalities. One third of our employee base is below 30 years, which shows the great mixture between the digital spirit that we need today and the millennials, and the inevitable maturity and experience we need in a fully regulated industry. Increasing our working flexibility has allowed us, especially during the COVID period, or I have to say despite the COVID period, to outperform markets in stability of our systems, stability of our customer service because of great people. More than 90% of our employee base was in home office, in flexible office, and nevertheless, they excelled in what they do.
Continuing to operate this flexible working in the future, also post-COVID, I hope we will all at a certain point have this time, allows us also to attract part-time talents and rock stars, and has also allowed us to win more and more female colleagues. Today, with more than one third of our employee base being female, I think we are relatively good on track in an industry that is tech and banking driven to provide the highest possible diversity for the future. Now, Frank, I think we have the greatest possible setup we could have wished for. Now, let us know what massive potential lies in front of us.
Yeah, thanks, Mo. Happy to talk about our unique opportunity. Very often we got the question, "Why do you believe that there's a huge potential to grow more and to grow the extent we've stipulated in our plan for 2026?" Allow me now to share with you our view of the macroeconomic situation here in Europe. You might all know, I looked up the numbers only yesterday, there's over 440 million Europeans, and the addressable market to us is somehow 285 million. We like, for a moment, to divide Europe into the developed markets and the undeveloped markets. This goes not in line with the so-called political view of those markets, but rather with respect to our industry.
If you look into the Nordics as well as into U.K. and the Netherlands, you see very saturated and very developed markets, and the level of digitalization is very impressive, close to 100%. I think it's 97. Online banking is key in those markets. 86% do enjoy an online banking account these days. Our very specific industry of online brokerage enjoys already 35% penetration, and I think that's quite impressive, but that is not so important to us. Much more important is the so-called undeveloped G7, and I was surprised when we did that study to find out that Germany, Austria, and Switzerland, as well as France, Spain, Italy, and Portugal, are rather underdeveloped. What does that mean? Only every second European in those countries does yet have a banking online account, and only 8% of those do have online brokerage.
There's a huge potential to grow from 8% to up to 35 within the next five years in those markets. Why do we believe that this is realistic? Maybe there's a reason why it is so low and will stay so low. I think the level of digitalization is key and relevant, and only yesterday, the European Union announced a subsidy program of EUR 450 billion going into Europe in order to help to recover from the crisis. The good news is, I think almost half of it will go to digitalization. Only Germany is going to receive out of that, as an example, EUR 25 billion, and the German chancellor, Mrs. Merkel, only yesterday announced that half of this money goes into digitalization.
We will see a good reason why there is a development in the undeveloped, so-called G7 towards the developed markets within the next couple of years. I'm quite sure that we're going to enjoy that. That only goes to potential with respect to population. Let me talk about secular trends for a moment now. Those trends have a huge impact on our growth as well. When I'm asked, what about those experience, especially again in Germany with the dot-com bubble, I can only say the new young generation doesn't even know about it. They are not negative biased on it, and it's good. The situation that, at least here in Europe, there's negative interest and low interest environment, lead to the fact that each and every European realizes that the deposits are no longer generating interest.
It's not only not getting interest, but if you take into account cost and inflation, then there is a real capital loss going on. Therefore, more and more people try to help and change this by investing themselves. This is an interesting trend. With respect to negative interest and low interest environment, I'm not good in predicting interest rates, and I'm far away from doing it. I would say at least the next five years, we will not see any change in interest rates. Why is it so obvious to me? I cannot imagine that any politician in Europe would be in favor of increasing interest rates in order to make the huge debt which was taken in order to fight the pandemic will be even getting more expensive with respect to payback.
Probably quite likely, we're going to enjoy low interest rates in the future. Obviously, the people, the households, they tend to buy products which they use for daily life, be it clothes, be it smartphones. If they are convinced about those products and the quality, these days now, they can buy those stocks as well. This trend together will have a strong impact on our future growth. Last but not least, the growth is kind of twofold, because we are not only taking away market share from existing incumbents, there's also a growth in market, and we will take more market share of this growing market. With respect to our calculations, there is a potential of over 77 million new clients coming in within the next couple of years, and we will win market share there.
There are still 80% of the existing clients with the old incumbents, and they don't yet enjoy end-to-end technology. They don't offer state-of-the-art products like we do. They don't have a mobile app where you can open up an account in five minutes and do a trade in 10 seconds, versus flatex Classic, where you have access to 90% of the markets in the world and so forth. I think our business model and our leading technology, and the fact that we own the whole value chain and that we enjoy up to 100% uptime together is very convincing. Therefore, we believe that this is supporting our strategy. Not enough. Let me show you some evidence why we believe there is a shift between undeveloped and developed markets.
If it's not our view you share, you might share the fact that there are saturated markets like the Nordics, where we recently see Nordic Capital to exit, whereas the underdeveloped markets we just mentioned before, more international investors, be it Sequoia, be it the Founders Fund, be it Tencent, be it the Crypto Asset Group, be it hedge fund manager like Alan Howard and other very professional institutional investors do invest EUR billions in this underdeveloped market. The reason why, we just explained. Let me now move on to our footprint, let me comment a moment on the so-called threat by the neo brokers. Some neo brokers offer EUR 1 kind of business models, very often we get asked, "How does that impact your footprint and your business model?" You always see us taking competition very serious.
We like competition, but I think the impact is rather low. Why is that? Let me talk about two examples. Let's take France for a moment. If we compare the fee and pricing scheme we enjoy in France, a trade at DEGIRO costs EUR 0.4, which is EUR 0.40, and the next one, which is Boursorama, is charging EUR 6. How can a EUR 1 neo broker business model have an impact on France? I can hardly see that. If it's not good enough, let's take a look at Portugal. We charge EUR 1, which would be the same, and then Banco Invest does charge over EUR 6. In most of the countries, I would say we are the leading discount brokerage business already.
Why would clients satisfied with our business model, and having said so many things about our client base, have a reason to move to someone else? It cannot be the pricing. I don't even know whether our competitors do enjoy as much as we do with respect to owning the whole value chain and mitigating those risks. That reminds me again about the past, when we were not running the whole value chain on ourselves and operating end to end. Why we are able to offer for EUR 0.40 in France or EUR 1 in Portugal, because we own the whole value chain, we operate end to end, and we are able to scale. Again, that distinguish us from the rest of the pack. If this is not good enough, let's take a look at client growth.
If we look at the figures and our client growth until Q1 of this year, I think fair to say that we grow faster than the second and third biggest competitor, and we will continue to do so. Again, we always keep our word and our promise and deliver our targets. If client growth is not enough, because we always say growth is not impressive, but profitable growth, client growth is okay, but growth with the right clients do matter, let's take a look at the trades per client with respect to our peers. Again, we outperform everyone with respect to the average amount of trades, and that proves our strategy and proves us right. That's so far from my side. Happy to hand over to Muhamad.
Yeah. Thank you, Frank. Now, we took the first 45 minutes to speak a bit about our legacy, our history, and the time where we have managed to build an outstanding platform. We spoke about our people, both our employees as well as our customers, about how we define to lead as a market leader. Frank just elaborated on the massive market potential that we are facing and that we are evaluating in and out and having a very great understanding of. This has brought us already four weeks ago to the point to update our vision or to be precise, to give out the new vision 2026 that most of you are aware of. We expect to quadruple the number of clients over the next five years and to triple the number of transactions.
Well, most of the investor base and most of our friends and shareholders kept asking us about, "What do you expect is going to happen in the market over the next years when volatility comes down?" I always answer in the same way. We are too diligent, and I think too prudent to estimate our growth in the future based on extraordinary environments. When we look into the number of clients, we were growing in the first quarter by 4,000-5,000 clients per day. We kept growing quite well also during the second quarter. We estimated the number of 3,000 clients per day for the future growth. I will come in a second why we believe that we will manage that growth.
On the other hand side, with respect to trading volume, we have assumed not the trading activity of our clients of 70, 80, 90 trades on an annualized base. Otherwise, we would have ended up with an expectation of 500 million transactions plus. We based all our estimates on the experiences we did in 2017, 2018, 2019, in an environment that was defined as most probably a record low volatility environment, in which even in these years, our clients did an average between 40 and 50 transactions. Irregardless of that number, when we discussed our own estimates, we depreciated that number. Why? Because of two key parameters. First, we absolutely believe that volatility will come back to normal levels sooner or later, which would bring us then back to a level of 40 - 50 transactions per client.
On the other hand side, we are well aware of the fact that with going more and more into a mass market, you will also win more and more clients that are not trading 50, 60, 70 x on average, but rather 20 and 30 times on average. Putting all these things together, we came out with our expectation that our clients will trade most probably in environments of low market volatility on average with 35 transactions. Why do we believe that we will continue to grow with an average 3,000 clients per day over the next five years, which sums up to roughly one million clients per year? We are winning, as I said today, on average, 2,500- 3,000 clients in normal days.
We are experiencing this growth, although many of the measures that we will now start to roll out have not been put in place yet. On the global environment, we just discussed the introduction of our new ETP partners that should attract more clients and more transactions. We discussed as well the introduction of Tradegate to more than one million clients all over Europe that should increase the activity. We know this again here out of our data analysis, that even today with the German and Austrian business, the activity outside of exchange hours is somewhere around 20%. It will also allow us to win additional clients because we will be the only one all over Europe that allows clients to trade not only outside of opening hours, but to trade with Europe's largest retail exchange.
The support of the secular trends will obviously as well support our growth on a global level. Now, given all these facts, there are as well local facts. Local facts that say and that depend on our market penetration country by country. In France, we became market leader. We overtook Boursorama and Bourse Direct despite the fact that we don't have the most important French brokerage product in place yet, which are the PEA accounts. We've been growing faster than anyone else in Portugal, despite the fact that the tech services have not been put in place yet fully in scope. The same applies for Spain. In Italy and Switzerland, we are starting now with our marketing penetration.
We've been on the ground with the brand now for years, but we never spent any significant marketing to grow the market until we have had a good feeling about the markets and a good feeling about the setup that we need in these markets. To give you also a better understanding of how we approach markets and how we develop markets, we want to give you a short case study. Our case study is France. France is the recent country where we took over market leadership in terms of transactions, in terms of new customers won. We started our operations five years ago in France on a low scale. We went there with a French toolkit, with a French [doc kit], and tried to get a good feeling of the market. The following strategy is the strategy that I call the Triple C strategy.
You maybe remember our Triple P strategy, platform, product, price. When it comes to markets, there is a new strategy that is called the Triple C strategy. The first step is to challenge the market. To understand the market, to understand competition, to understand clients and customers, to understand wealth proposition of these countries. To analyze, to put a toe into the water and get a great feeling for what it is about. To create a brand awareness, as we did after starting France a couple of years ago. That's the first C, challenge. The second C, compete. We start to convert clients. We start bigger campaigns. We start to give incumbents a hard time.
This is the momentum that we try to generate to get a good feeling of how markets are reacting to our brands, to our market, to our products, to our offerings, to our services. The second C competes. The last C is a very simple one. It's conquer. Beat the incumbents up. That's absolutely the strategy. We are carrying a very clear philosophy that says we don't believe that people should be restricted from capital market access by absurd fees, by limited product offerings, in transparent platforms. This is where we are currently in France. We are now adding ancillary services and products such as the PEA accounts, now Tradegate, now the ETP partnerships. We'll make sure that we will very soon also become market leader in terms of number of clients.
If we go from our case study into the European landscape, you will see that there are a couple of countries where incumbents should prepare. France is the next one, as I said, where we are currently in the stage three, stage conquer. In Spain, we are currently in the stage two to three, from compete to conquer. In Italy, we are now starting by the end of the year, beginning of next year, stage two, from challenge to compete. We truly believe that especially Italy and Switzerland are one of the most interesting markets that are currently for us in stage one. Why is this? Because of the high population, because of a given trading activity in these markets, because of existing monopolies that still charge you double-digit amounts in euros and Swiss francs for a simple trade.
Having said all this, I just want to remind you again that these things have not been incorporated into our idea and into our belief to continue to grow with the 3,000 clients in average over the next years. Closing this up and explain more and more how all this commercial success could translate into financial success. I think the last two sentences that I would love to close with on the commercial side is, there was this beautiful Freddy Krueger song that said, "One, two, flatexDEGIRO is coming for you. Three, four, five, prepare yourself for a hard life." I think, again, we are set and we are given with the best possible platform to go into this European landscape.
As I said, we have elaborated on our technological power and on our commercial power, more and more people are questioning and wondering how this transforms into financial success. If we do the simple math that says we want to go to 250 million-350 million transactions, knowing that we generate EUR 4 gross revenues on an existing product and price mix. I just want to remember you what Frank mentioned with respect to trading fees in many countries. I just want to remind you of the fact that we will now implement ETP partnerships and the Tradegate partnership. We believe that we can grow up to EUR 1.5 billion in revenues, which equals roughly an incremental revenue growth of EUR 1.25 billion. Again, here, more important than the top-line growth is the bottom-line growth. I kept saying that for months, profitable growth results in profitability growth.
Yes, there are companies out there that love to take their shareholders' money to spend it for top-line growth, not being able at all on the bottom line to create any profitability. Rest assured, most of them will never see profitability, and now I'm speaking out of my experience with my former employer. Adjusted EBITDA margins have been almost doubled or will be doubled over the next six to seven years. Back in 2019, with roughly 12 million transactions, we had an adjusted EBITDA margin of 29%. In 2020, we had actual trades of roughly 50 million. Pro forma it was 75, if we base now our data on the actual figures, it was roughly 50 million trades. We had an EBITDA margin of 44%. In Q1, with 35+ million transactions, we achieved 64%.
The clear aim by 2026 is to achieve an EBITDA margin of more than 60%. Where is this profitability coming from and this increasing incremental profitability? From something that Frank and myself are stressing now for the last one hour. It's the importance of being independent, the importance of operating an end-to-end value chain. Why? Because we operate our whole business model on fixed costs. We don't have any variable costs below our net revenue line. Our personal expenses are relatively fixed. Our admin expenses are relatively fixed. The only variable expense is marketing, but marketing has zero to do with transactions. It's not a variable that is driven by the number of transactions. It's actually the other way around, the exogenous variable that determines how many transactions we will do the year after.
If you operate your business model, like many others do, on a full variable base by outsourcing your IT, by outsourcing your settlement, your clearing, your execution, you will never, ever be able to generate economies of scale. This has been from day one our philosophy and strategy, I think we have proven, or we were proven right, that insourcing your intellectual property is the most important thing to avoid at a certain point to have a provider that tells you, "Do you see how long the queue is for the next release? Do you know how much revenues you contribute to us? I think you should go and wait in the queue." Profitability ends also, sorry if I'm smiling about that, in operating cash flow. Unfortunately, more and more investors are not interested anymore in operating cash flow. It's rather burning cash than earning cash.
Given the top-line growth, given the extension of our profitability, we are truly confident to generate in the next five years more than EUR 1.5 billion in operating cash flow. Now, many of you keep asking us, how do you want to make use of these proceeds? We are focused on three strategic pillars. First and foremost, organic growth investments. We'll continue to invest in markets, into our platform, and into our products. We'll continue to provide our clients the best possible experience with respect to what they feel, what they see, and what they want. Last but not least, we will continue to develop a stable and sustainable capitalization of our group. If we are then left over with some money, which we will be, we're continuously looking for sensible acquisitions.
That could be high-quality sector targets or vertical business models with which we could improve the setup of our platform. It could also be opportunities that accelerate our customer growth or expand our product range or improve our technological setup. We have been always very agnostic, and this is what I said, you need a sense of opportunism to succeed in our industry, and this is how we will continue to do it. We will also make sure that our acquisitions will not happen for the sake of any ego or for the sake of any top-line growth if it does not contribute to our profitability and if it does not contribute, as we always have said, in less than two years to EPS accretion. Last but not least, yes, it might happen that we will be left over with still some money.
At the point where we believe, where Frank and I have the belief that we will not be able to generate any more return on our equity that is above average, we will for sure walk out to our supervisory board, and we will walk out to our shareholders to discuss balanced capital return measures. Mainly, it could be share buybacks, especially during inviting market environments. We all remember what happened last year in March, April, when markets collapsed by 50%. I think our stock price dropped back to EUR 20. If this happens again and our stock price is at EUR 20 with no change to our operating model, rest assured, we will fight very hard for these things. Last but not least, which is however, something that is inferior to share buybacks or potential dividend payouts.
If we recap and just give a quick summary of the financial targets, how commercial targets will translate into financial targets. 7 million - 8 million clients, 250 million- 350 million transactions, revenues of up to EUR 1.5 billion with a profitability calculated as an adjusted EBITDA margin of more than 60%, and an accumulated operating cash flow of more than EUR 1.5 billion. If we succeed on our commercial strategy, we are super convinced that our financials will do as well. Let me end our presentation with one last slide. I think that is also important and getting more and more important since, fortunately, we are not anymore a little entry-scale standard company, but have grown up now to an SDAX company and might end up, hopefully by the end of this year, in the MDAX.
It's important also to highlight how our capital market story has evolved, and the clear aim is to elevate to next stage. That includes mainly, obviously for us, to go into the MDAX, to try to make everything possible to be lifted up into the MDAX. We've been, I think, if I'm not mistaken, over the last three months in a row, the stock in the SDAX with the highest liquidity, and are facing a period also of great strategy with respect to our capital market story. With many further steps in the pipeline, including the improvement and the active dialogue with ESG rating agencies. Just today, we've been informed that ISS will upgrade us to C-, which makes us to become amongst the top half of the companies in the ESG rating, which makes us very proud.
Again, here, rest assured, we will continue to work on these things. It's our first year of being prime listed, and I think if I consider this first year, I would also consider it as a very successful year. A big thank you so far from my side. Also, a big thank you to our colleague, Achim Schreck, who has supported us during the last 12 months very well, me and Frank on the investor relations side. We're looking forward to continuing this great dialogue with you guys over the next years.
Yeah, thank you very much, Mo. Before we open up to Q&A, allow me one more personal comment, both as a shareholder and the CEO. Very happy about the development so far. As I always said, we are here to make money and not to burn money. Both our contracts for Mo and myself will run at least four more years. We will promise you that we're going to continue exactly the same, underpromise and overdeliver, and we are here to make money for the shareholders. As key shareholders, we keep an eye on that. Now I hand over to Achim to orchestrate the Q&A session. Thanks.
Thank you very much, Frank. At the very end, a warm welcome from my side as well. As announced at the beginning, we're now opening the lines for sell-side analysts to ask questions. We'd like to ask the moderator to please explain the process before we open the lines. Please go ahead.
Thank you. We will now begin a question and answer session. If you have a question for our speakers, please dial zero one on your telephone keypad now to enter the queue. Once your name has been announced, you can ask a question. If you find your question is answered before it is your turn to speak, you can dial zero two to cancel your question. If you're using speaker equipment today, please test the handset before making a selection. One moment, please, for the first question. Zero one. Zero one if you want to ask a question. The first question is by Martin Comtesse of Jefferies. The line's open now, sir.
Hey, good afternoon, all three of you. First of all, congratulations to a insightful presentation. Let me just start with two questions, then I go back to the queue. First one would be on your just announced ETP partnership. Can we assume that with Goldman and BNP that you'll have similar financial terms as you currently have in the German market, so on the flatex side? Which would then obviously be quite a steep acceleration of revenue per trade when you compare to the DEGIRO profile. Just to be clear on that, just to give a bit more insight for our modeling. Secondly, also on the adjacent products that you talked about, becoming a financial supermarket. I think you have a lot of moving parts on your platform at this point.
Can you be a bit more specific already on the timeline, or is there anything you already have in mind?
I think those are questions that many investors are asking and how you can monetize from these products. Thanks.
Hi, Martin. Thanks a lot for your questions and for your words. With respect to the ETP partnership, I'm going to answer. With respect to the second question, Frank is going to answer. Indeed, as you know, we don't disclose any contractual content between ourselves and our partners. With respect to the revenue per trade as a company, and especially providing the transactional platform in the future for product partners, you can assume that the fees for the European environment will not significantly differ from what we have in Germany as well.
Yeah, thanks Mo. Hi, Martin, Frank here. Good to talk to you again. It's been a long time and no see. With respect to our plans, let me first repeat again, we always like to focus, and we always like to deliver our targets. Obviously, I've aligned management to make sure that we deliver the 2021 targets. As we said, now we kick in the second phase, and we'll boost the EBITDA synergies with respect to DEGIRO. I always say that the DEGIRO deal has not 100% digested yet. There's more to do and more to get out of it, and we are very positive about that. I would say from next year onwards, we're going to look more into details. Obviously, the plans are already within our drawing board. I would say it's too early to go into any details.
If you imagine if we in the future enjoy a couple of million clients and only 10% like to do insurance product, this is a huge potential for any potential insurance companies to partner up with us. If you imagine with the amount of assets and the sum of inactive clients we have, if we were going to do and introduce products where assets under advice are important, this again has a huge potential. Last but not least, if we would introduce mortgage brokerage to our client base, this could also have a huge impact. This all is left for next year and the years to come. As Mo already highlighted, our given numbers do not incorporate those products and potential income sources yet. As we said, we always like to surprise positively, and we rather underpromise and overdeliver. I hope that helps.
Yes, that was very clear. Thanks a lot, Frank.
Hello.
The next question is by Marius Fuhrberg of Warburg Research. The line is open, sir.
Yeah. Hi, and thanks for taking my questions. Actually, I have two of them before I go back to the line. First one would be also on the ETP for Europe. What is your experience how the demand for ETP products is, and what are your expectations on the proportion of ETP products on your total executed trade in two or three years? The second one would be on your target market. You made very clear that you see huge potential from the so-called underdeveloped market. From the time being or from the current perspective, would it make more sense to go into the developed market with a more attractive price offering and gain market shares there instead of doing groundbreaking work in underdeveloped markets, which should be more pricey in terms of customer acquisition costs?
Hi, Marius. Thanks again for your questions. With respect to the first question, yes, obviously, we have a good feeling for what the ETP trades will look like. I think we have disclosed it in the former years as well. Sorry, back in 2019, we said that we knew that DEGIRO was doing per year something around 2 million- 3 million transactions and ETPs. However, via direct exchanges and not via OTC platforms, which were very cost-intensive and not revenue-driving. This is what we are going to change. Based on 2019, it was 2 million- 3 million transactions. Now it's obviously up to you to make your assumptions, what you believe, what transaction numbers we have today in the ETP market. Again, we also truly believe that great products create also great markets.
It's not only about what our estimate is to believe how many transactions we are going to do. Again, the EUR 30 million synergies were based on 2 million-3 million transactions. I'm truly convinced that over the next 12 months, as soon as we have the product in place and as soon as we have started also around this product to provide the services for our clients, that we will be able to generate significant double-digit million revenue figures out of these product offerings as well.
With respect to your second question, why not investing more in developed markets and maybe even reduce pricing over there? If you look at the cost per client acquisition in the undeveloped markets, and if you look at the competitive landscape, let's take Switzerland, there's one incumbent, only Swissquote. Let's take Italy, there's Fineco only, and so forth, versus Germany, where we have Comdirect, ING, Cortal Consors, and ourselves, or in the Nordics, where there's Avanza doing so well, Nordnet is doing well, Nordea is doing well. I always think it's much easier to go for the low-hanging fruits first, where we rather focus on the undeveloped markets and do have to spend less marketing money versus spend much more marketing money and rather go for uphill battle if we focus more on developed markets.
The fact that Nordic Capital has exited Nordnet gives you a bit of evidence why this might not be the focus anymore. We will obviously continue to grow in the developed markets as well, but rather focus on the potential in the undeveloped. It's much easier, and I rather consider it as low-hanging fruit. Maybe you want to add some on that one.
That's actually the answer, especially if you consider the developed markets, Marius, and this is why I was a bit wondering about the question. If you consider the developed markets, which are the Scandinavian markets and which is the U.K., for example, you already have super low fee brokers. Going to Sweden to compete with a Swedish 30-year-old company like Avanza, which we absolutely admire, these guys are doing a brilliant job. To go there and to compete with their EUR 3 or EUR 4 per trade offering to go lower is absolutely nonsense. We rather want to go for the incumbents that are still charging the clients EUR 10 and EUR 15 and EUR 20. Plus, on top of that, continental Europe with the underdeveloped market is a market of 280+ million people in the target age, in the addressable market.
We have in the developed markets, ex U.K., something around 30 million. It does not make any sense from population perspective, it does not make any sense from saturation perspective, nor does it make sense from competitive landscape, because in the developed countries, we have also the best peers in Europe.
Yeah. Okay, I understand that. Just to clarify, I want to point to the direction of the cost of bringing people to capital markets, which were no participant of the capital markets before, which is basically the work of the next few years in the underdeveloped markets, as you pointed out. I see the point that the competition is lower and that the current existing market participants in the undeveloped markets are lower hanging fruits.
Absolutely.
Yes, we always take into account allocation of resources, so why not allocate the resources to the low-hanging fruit markets and the undeveloped markets? Yeah, that's our strategy.
The next question is by Frederik Jarchow of Hauck & Aufhäuser.
Yeah, hi. Just one quick question from my side regarding the one slide sorry, with the market share. Have you gained market share in the German online brokerage market in 2020?
You're wondering whether we grew in market share in Germany?
Yeah.
Okay.
In relative terms is also right.
I know that it is right. You see, and you have seen that we grew in the DACH region much faster than the market grew. This indicates that we grew also market share in Germany, and we'll continue to win market share in Germany. Again, the German market is an absolutely interesting market that we will continue to focus on, irrespective of any potential, whatever, players that might be in the market and that might offer a different competitive landscape. The growth in 2020, for example, was bigger than what Comdirect and Commerzbank showed and what ING showed. If we are growing than our largest peers, I assume very well that we are growing also in market shares.
Okay. I wasn't sure about if you outgrew also Comdirect and Consors in Germany. Yeah, very clear. Thank you.
Yes. Absolutely, we did. Yeah.
Okay. Thank you.
The next question is by Charlie Mayne of Goldman Sachs.
Hi, Mo Hi, Frank. Thanks very much for taking my question. You mentioned the competitive environment in Sweden just now. I was just wondering if you were thinking of any potential exiting any of the markets you're currently in, given that you're in 18 as it is.
Yeah. Hi, Charlie. Thanks for your question. Absolutely, Charlie. Again, I think the key job of the management is capital allocation. Yeah, absolutely, we are thinking of these potential scenarios as well. If we see there are markets that even don't cost us money. Don't get us wrong. We are not burning millions of euros in any of the markets. All our markets are even break-even, it is always spending mental capital on various markets. We are going through deep-dive analysis of different markets, try to get a better understanding whether it makes sense to continue in these markets because of maybe a special offering or a special edge of offering. If we come to the end that it doesn't make sense, we absolutely see the potential to reduce the number of countries from 18 maybe down to 15, 14, 13, or 12.
I rather have 12 great countries than 18 average countries.
Understood. Thank you.
You're welcome.
Next question is by Benjamin Kohnke of KBW.
Good afternoon, gentlemen. Thank you very much for taking my question. It's essentially around your pricing strategy. I think you kind of demonstrated very impressively that you actually offer your services at very attractive prices in the new markets. Now, the question around that was, Mo, in our previous discussions and many of our previous discussions, you actually hinted towards potentially evaluating a price raise, a price increase for the DEGIRO offering. Seems like that's not really the case anymore, at least not in your sort of designated growth market and the underdeveloped markets, if you like. Maybe related to that, obviously, if you decided to do something around pricing and raise it, don't you think that's a very difficult exercise to do, being perceived as a sort of aggressive market entrant and then at some point raising prices more towards the incumbent?
Is that a viable strategy at all to start with? Another question, completely unrelated, I was a little surprised that you did not talk about your flatex next strategy in your presentation. Any reason for that? Maybe some remarks you want to have around that flatex next product. Thank you.
Ben, thanks a lot for your questions. Happy to answer them. With respect to pricing in general, our key aim was always, and it is always, to maximize the monetization of our business model, always with the clear strategy to avoid increases of pricing with clients. With the introduction of additional services and products, we will make sure that we will increase our average revenue per client on average without increasing the prices, the trade fees with the clients on the short term. I always have said, if you remember right, one of my most beloved quotes, it's our duty to find the perfect equilibrium between growth and profitability. If markets are inviting us for abnormal growth, the worst and most absurd thing we could do is to go and increase prices, which are absolutely nonsense.
At this point in time, I don't see any short-term price increases. Again, it depends on so many variables, on competitive landscape, on set ups, on success, on growth speed. You also know how often I quote the Netflix model. When Netflix started, it was for $4.99 per month. I think now it's for $12.99 per month, and people are still watching their series. Let's now go for growth and focus on the many things that we have, how to grow our market without increasing the fees with our clients. It will always be a potential for future adjustments. Your second question with respect to flatex Next is surprising me a little bit because I mentioned it, I hope that the line was not broken at that point, where I said the lead in offering, what customers see.
The idea is very clearly to transform the business model from a today, what we call a pull business model, into more and more a push business model that should allow clients in the future to get a better understanding of trading, a better understanding of saving. We have introduced the 3,000 zero fee ETF and mutual fund saving schemes, which was one step. We have introduced flatex Next six months ago, the first version of it. The second version will come very soon. We are super happy with the success that we have had with flatex Next, both with new clients as well as with existing clients that are shifting over to flatex next.
flatex next 3.0 will be again a paradigm shift in brokerage and in brokerage industry, and we are very much looking forward that after we release it in Germany with flatex, we will also make sure that the beginning of next year, we will also release it with the DEGIRO clients.
To actually provide more than 200 million people with a very straightforward educational-driven, not gamification-driven platform to take care of their own wealth.
Great. Thank you very much, Mo. Very clear.
My pleasure.
The next question is by Christoph Blieffert of Commerzbank.
Good afternoon, thanks for taking my question. There was a ruling from the German Federal Supreme Court that price increases of the past might be invalid, if not explicitly agreed by the customer. Any color on the impact on your German business would be helpful. Thank you.
Yeah. Good afternoon. Frank Niehage here. The good news is we've done our math and this has almost no impact on our business model and on our situation. We might have to do a provision between EUR 1 million-2 million at all as a maximum figure. Luckily, this had no huge impact on us because when we go back to 2018, we had less clients than today. Keep in mind, we are doing business in 18 countries. We have mitigated the risk through this business model, and this ruling only applies to my understanding in Germany. It's a German ruling, so it's only having impact on Germany. We did the math and might do a provision between EUR 1 million- EUR 2 million in total. However, if I look at the really few amount of clients who have already contacted us, then this might be even too much.
Out of experience over the last 20 years when federal rulings came in and had changes and impacts, less than 20% of the relevant client base really took advantage of that and made the effort to do the math and calculate and file a claim. We are quite relaxed on that one.
Very clear. Thank you.
The next question is by Marius Fuhrberg of Warburg Research again.
Yeah. Hi, thanks a lot. Maybe one on your planned crypto offering and just wanted to get a quick update on how your plans developed there and whether you are sure yet which products to offer and how the technical setup would look like?
This is Frank Niehage . Happy to answer that one. First of all, we like to introduce, obviously, cryptocurrency trading at the European market leader. We've also liaised with the European Parliament, and we have a close look on the draft of MiCA, Markets in Crypto-Assets. Only yesterday, I spoke to the relevant Member of Parliament in the European Parliament who is leading that initiative. Until today, it's not yet resolved how potential offers lead to unlimited liability. As we always said, we care a lot about our clients. We care a lot about the stakeholders.
Be rest assured, if this liability issue is not professionally resolved and will not be shared by not only the banks and the institution who will offer it, but also by the parties who do the custody and run the show and if insurance companies are not able to provide the relevant insurance level, I see a serious problem for the European market to really enjoy that business. We care a lot about liability, and we will make sure that we don't risk the capital of the firm if they continue with the idea of unlimited liability for custody assets, if they get hacked away by the hacker. At the moment, this draft provides for unlimited liability, which to my understanding and to the majority of the industry is unacceptable.
There's still discussion going on, and we try to support all the efforts to find an amicable solution for the liability. If you compare it today to custody of securities, there is no unlimited liability. If you outsource it to third parties, if you do well in outsourcing and if you do outsourcing controlling, then you are not liable unless you do it deliberately wrong. If you look at custody of cash, of deposits, there is not unlimited liability. Needless to say, every bank is insured if someone robs the bank and takes away the cash of the clients. I hope that on European level, this all will be taken into account properly and lead to a final better result than the draft version of the MiCA is yet given.
Maybe to add up one sentence, Marius, also with respect to what Frank said just today, yesterday, the announcement that one of the global leading crypto custodian firms is facing a lawsuit for a permanent loss of 70 million, of I think it was Ethereum. It is exactly the issue that we were highlighting, Frank and I, for months and quarters since we are talking about crypto, that we have to find the perfect solution for our clients with respect to the custody of cryptocurrencies. Yes, there are again, many others out there that are happy to offer these type of products to their clients. Obviously not mitigating 100% the asset segregation risk of the assets of the clients. We are not willing to carry that risk, neither for ourselves and our stakeholders, but also not for our clients.
Be rest assured, if that liability issue will be resolved amicably, we are happy to offer that service and we're going to support that initiative.
That's very clear. Thank you.
Currently there are no further questions, so I hand back for the closing remarks.
Yeah. Once again, thank you all for taking the time and allowing us to do a bit more drill down on how we're going to achieve our Plan 2026. I hope that we provided you with enough information and that we gave enough color on how to do it and made sure there's no more open questions or any loose ends which we could not tie up. However, reach out to Achim and Mo at any time or myself if that is still the case. We all look forward to hopefully see you again soon, and we wish you all the best, and please stay healthy. Thanks for your support and the understanding and taking the time today with us on those aspects. Thank you very much.
Thank you very much, and hope to see you next week in our AGM. Bye-bye.