G ood afternoon, everyone. We hope you're well. Thank you very much for joining us today. A warm welcome to our presentation of the preliminary results, 2025, and our update on our strategic priorities, which we first introduced last year. My name is Achim Schreck. I'm heading the IR department here at flatexDEGIRO. Before we get started, let me briefly address a few housekeeping items. First of all, it's my pleasure to welcome today's speakers, our CEO, Oliver Behrens, as well as our CFO, Dr. Benon Janos. We will start today's presentation with some few opening remarks by Oliver, after which Benon will present a more detailed overview of our preliminary full year results, and also highlight some key developments in the Q4 that will surely be helpful to better understand our underlying performance in the last quarter.
Oliver will return to provide an update on our key strategic priorities as we had them presented exactly one year ago, the same space. As some of you might know, the newly endorsed accounting standard, IFRS 18, will come into effect in January 2027, having some minor implications on how our P&L will be structured. We'll use the opportunity today to just give you a glimpse into what to expect on this side, which again, will be done by Benon. We will conclude today's presentation before we then go into our Q&A, with an outlook on 2026 and our guidance, as well as the latest capital allocation policy, which we provided last week to the market as well. After those remarks, as I said, we're looking forward to taking your questions as we speak.
As you can see, we have a rather f ull agenda today, so therefore, without any further ado, I would very much like to hand over to you, Oliver, now, with your introductory remarks. Please go ahead.
Thanks a lot, Achim. Also a very warm welcome from my side. Thank you all for joining today. Before we go into all the details of our commercial and financial performance of 2025, allow me to spend 2 minutes on the bigger picture. Global stock markets have been pretty volatile in 2025, and pretty they have been for us indeed. As our business model typically benefits from these kinds of market swings, our operational and financial performance has therefore exceeded our initial expectations significantly. It has not just been the trading activity of our customers that went up a bit, it was also strong customer growth and high net cash inflows onto our platform, particularly in the first 4 months of the year. For me, as a CEO, what is more important, though, are the things we control ourselves, and quite successfully did so in 2025.
In the context of fast markets in early April, trading volumes on some days increased by 5-fold. Many online brokerage platforms in Germany and across Europe were not able to handle this load properly. Flatex and DEGIRO, however, stayed performant for our customers the whole time. This is not something we achieved just on those days. It is a result of diligent work and platform building we have done for years, and we continue doing. I will touch on the topic later in my presentation. We are also proud that the first major product rollouts we have brought to the market over the last 12 months. After the crypto start at Flatex Germany, we have brought it to all our major markets. We have started securities lending program in the Netherlands and Spain in October 2025, and have since added Italy and Switzerland.
Our first new business process outsourcing customer is about to go live in March, i.e., providing another German bank with a full technical and banking solution to attract retail deposits. We are also already in full swing when it comes to new initiatives in 2026, with a clear focus on the German market, but not forgetting our DEGIRO business either. In a positive market environment, we have shown good performance and have done our homework, but that must not make us complacent. There's a lot more we have to and will do. The strengthened focus on the German market is one element. The completion of the already started product rollouts, as well as some new ones, is another. The use of new technologies, such as AI, requires full focus. Used in the right way, AI can become a massive enabler of our execution-only business.
For many retail clients, it has the potential to significant lower the barrier between, "I think I should do something for my financial future," and, "I know what to do, and I'm doing it now." There are, of course, plenty of other areas, such as efficiency gains and enhanced customer features, one can see clear benefits in. Lastly, we are operating in markets that have clear potential for further consolidation, growth, and bolt-on acquisitions to further strengthen our existing business. All this we have factored in when we provided our new capital allocation policy last week. We are a growth company, and this is also where we will put our focus when it comes to capital allocation. Our strong cash flows, nevertheless, allow for a substantial increase of our annual dividend payments without harming this growth.
I am absolutely certain there's a lot more growth coming our way, but for the moment, let me close my introductory remarks here and hand over to Benon to first present our preliminary 2025 results. Thank you. Over to you, Benon.
Thank you, Oliver. Good afternoon, everyone, also from my side. Thank you very much for dialing in to today's presentation. A warm welcome from me as well. I am pleased to present flatexDEGIRO's preliminary results for the full year 2025, which mark another milestone in our growth trajectory. Please note that these figures are still preliminary. The full and audited annual report 2025 will be published on March 26th. In the interest of time, to keep the focus on the key messages, we will not cover every slide that was uploaded this morning in full detail. Now, let me briefly walk you through our commercial performance in the Q4 of 2025, which closed the year on a notably resilient footing.
Starting with customer additions, we saw 104,000 customer additions in Q4, slightly above Q3. Broadly consistent with our expectations for a more normalized run rate after the strong start to the year. Turning to Assets Under Custody, we continued to see strong momentum throughout the year, reaching EUR 95.5 billion at the end of December. The progress over the course of 2025 was driven by a combination of steady net inflows and constructive market performance, both of which contributed meaningfully to the year-end step-up. This ongoing growth confirms the strength of our franchise. Trading activity picked up meaningfully towards year-end. Q4 reached 20.2 million transactions, representing a solid 14% sequential increase and a 20% improvement versus Q4 of last year, which was already a strong quarter that benefited from higher trading activity around the US presidential elections.
The uplift in trades was especially driven by an unusually strong October. Turning to slide eight, we ended the year with 3.5 million customer accounts, representing a double-digit increase of 13% year-on-year. Growth remained consistently strong throughout the year, with a seasonally strong January and a strong April, driven by Liberation Day. However, despite some peaks, 2025 showed an overall steady pattern. This reflects a structurally high level of brand awareness and a proven ability to attract new clients independent of any short-term volatility spikes. On an annual view, customer additions accelerated versus the prior year, reaching 446,000 for the full year. Overall, 2025 was another year of robust customer expansion, forming a strong foundation for future revenue generation. Our customer base continued to expand steadily throughout the year, surpassing 3.5 million accounts by December 25.
Over the past 3 years, we have added more than 1 million customers, consistently delivering double-digit annual growth. The mix between Flatex and DEGIRO remains stable, with Flatex contributing around 25% of total accounts. Let me turn to settled transactions, where we saw a clear uplift across both brands throughout 2025, supported by our growing customer base and periods of elevated market volatility. The strongest months were March, April, and October, which contributed meaningfully to the overall rise in transactions. Settled transactions increased to 75.3 million in 2025, up from 63 million the year before, which is a 19% year-on-year increase. Both Flatex and DEGIRO contributed to this growth with solid engagement across all major markets. Turning to trading activity per customer, we continue to see a healthy pattern across both brands. Quarterly activity levels show an overall upward tendency throughout 2025.
As expected, trading intensity remains higher at Flatex due to the demographic profile of those customers. The underlying trend is consistent across both platforms, Flatex and DEGIRO. On the right-hand side, you can see that annual trading activity increased slightly to 23 trades per customer in 2025, up from 22 in the prior two years. This reflects the combination of a growing customer base and the resilient level of engagement, helped by increased market volatility. Let me now turn to our active customer base on slide 12. We have now exceeded 1 million active customers, which is a key milestone for us. As you can see on the chart, activity levels have remained broadly stable over the past 3 years, with the share of active customers within a quarter holding steady at around 31%.
This stability is important, particularly given the significant expansion of our total customer base over the same period. Looking ahead, we see clear opportunities to further increase customer activity rates. We are expanding our product offering to give customers more reasons to engage with the platform on a regular basis, complemented by targeted financial education initiatives that help users build confidence in navigating capital markets. At the same time, we continue to invest in technology, enhancing analytics, improving usability, and personalizing the customer experience. Together, these measures are designed to activate a broader share of our customer base and support more consistent trading behavior over time. Let me now touch on Assets Under Custody, where we continue to see very solid momentum over recent months. Starting with securities under custody, balances increased steadily throughout 2025, reaching EUR 89.3 billion at year-end.
This represents a strong uplift compared to December 2024, supported by both ongoing net inflows and a constructive market environment. On the cash side, we also saw meaningful growth, with customer cash balances rising strongly to EUR 6.2 billion by December 2025, up 45% from EUR 4.3 billion in December 2024. This strong growth has surpassed our initial expectations and is one of the main contributors to our resilient interest income line year-over-year. Turning to monthly net cash inflows on slide 14, we saw an exceptional start to 2025. From January throughout April, inflows were significantly above normal seasonal patterns, with several months close or even above the EUR 1 billion mark.
This strong momentum began already in late 2024, following the US election in October, which led to a heightened market engagement and clearly overlaid the typical seasonal slowdown we usually see in the Q4, especially in December. The elevated inflows continued into the first months of 2025, peaking in April around Liberation Day, when customer activity was particularly strong. Importantly, January 2026 again started with well above EUR 1 billion of net cash inflows. Overall, the pattern underscores the continued trust customers place in our platform. In 2025, 79% of these inflows were invested into securities. Now, turning to slide 15, you can see that for the full year 2025, net cash inflows reached EUR 8.1 billion, representing a 22% year-on-year growth. This development was driven by three key factors.
First, we benefited from a positive market environment, which started to build in October 2024 and continued into the first months of 2025, supporting higher customer engagement and increased investing activity. Second, customer growth remained an important driver. New customers again accounted for roughly 40% of total net cash inflows, very similar to the patterns we saw in 2023 and 2024. This shows that the growth in our customer base continues to translate into fresh liquidity coming onto the platform. Third, we saw a further increase in inflows from existing customers. On average, annual net cash inflows per existing customer rose to around EUR 1,600, with around half of this, about EUR 800 per customer per year, coming from recurring investments and savings plans. This demonstrates the growing stickiness and long-term engagement of our customer base.
Let's first finalize the full revenue picture before we discuss costs and earnings. As usual, we portray our revenue split in the past quarter on slide 16. In Q4, revenues grew by 18% year-on-year. Commission income increased strongly by 31% year-on-year, which is mostly attributable to a continuously growing customer base, an increase in trading activity, and higher commissions per transactions. I'll turn to that in a minute. Commission income saw a clear quarter-on-quarter increase of 17%, driven primarily by an exceptionally strong October, which was one of the strongest months we ever had, according to number of trades. Trading activity in that month was well above normal levels, supported by elevated market volatility. Transactions in October 2025 amounted to 8.4 million trades.
Despite a lower interest rate environment compared to last year, interest income remained stable year-over-year and even increased by 7% quarter-on-quarter. Higher amounts of cash under custody, a growing average margin loan book, as well as our more active treasury strategy, compensated for lower interest rate levels from ECB. Moving on to the next slide. In fiscal year 2025, we achieved record revenues of EUR 560 million, representing 17% year-over-year growth. First, commission income grew by an impressive 31% year-over-year, reflecting both increased trading activity and improved monetization across our platforms. Second, our interest income line demonstrated greater resilience than we initially anticipated, declining only 4% year-over-year, despite the lower interest rate environment, as I mentioned earlier.
One encouraging trend in 2025 was the continued improvement in our average commission per transaction, which reached EUR 4.90, which is a 9% increase compared to 2024. This improvement was driven by two primary factors. First, our product mix benefited from the introduction of cryptocurrency trading, which carries higher average commission rates given the basis point fee model. Second, we saw increased volumes in cross-currency trades, especially U.S. trades, where we charged a 25 basis points FX fee, contributing positively to our commissions per trade. I'll provide further details on the next two slides. Over the past three years, we have grown our average commission per transaction from EUR 4.13 in 2023 to EUR 4.90 in 2025. This demonstrate our ability to enhance monetization while maintaining our competitive positioning as a low-cost broker.
Turning to geographic trading patterns, we saw substantial growth in US exchange activity during 2025. A quick reminder, this is mostly driven by our DEGIRO customers, as many of our US trades at Flatex are rather done at local exchanges in euros. The volume of stocks traded at US exchanges increased significantly throughout the year, reaching a peak of approximately EUR 6 billion in monthly volumes during October of 2025. The higher volumes and larger trade sizes at US exchanges contributed to our commission income growth, particularly given the cross-currency FX fees on these transactions that I mentioned before. As you can see on the next slide, we observed this trend despite a continuing shift from US equities to European equities that started during Q1 of 2025.
The share of US exchanges in total trading volume, which had reached peaks of approximately 25% by the end of 2024, moderated to around 15% in early 2025, and stood around the 20% line in the second half of 2025. This shift reflected clients' increased focus on European equities during that period. Total trading volumes remained robust throughout this transition, demonstrating the diversification benefits of our Pan-European platform with global markets access. We also benefit from FX conversion on all cross-currency trades. For example, when a Swiss or Polish client trades German equities in euros, we capture FX conversion fees on that flow as well. This is therefore not limited to US exchanges. Let's focus on interest income, our second most important revenue stream after commission income. Let me address the underlying fundamentals of our interest income generation, which continued to strengthen.
Our cash under custody has nearly doubled over the past three years, growing from EUR 3.5 billion to over EUR 6 billion currently. This reflects both our customer acquisition success and increasing trust from existing clients who are consolidating assets onto our platform. Our margin loan book has similarly benefited from ongoing customer growth and broader utilization of margin loans by our clients.... The margin loan book now stands at approximately EUR 1.44 billion at the end of January 2026. This is providing a stable and high margin revenue stream to us. These fundamentals are critical to understanding our interest income resilience. While rates have declined, the growing asset base has partially offset the impacts from lower rates, which is why our interest income declined only 4% year-over-year, rather than falling proportionally with ECB rate cuts. Let's turn to slide 22.
In the second half of 2025, we initiated more active treasury management activities while maintaining our risk-averse foundation. Let me walk you through our current cash deployment strategy. Of our approximately EUR 6.2 billion in cash under custody, roughly EUR 1.3 billion supported our margin loan book as of December 2025, while our treasury book has grown to around EUR 1 billion. Thereof, EUR 250 million-EUR 300 million is held in bonds as collateral for settlement and custody purposes at short-term maturities. Secondly, we have made additional investments into high-quality investment-grade bonds, primarily Triple-A-rated securities, to enhance yield while maintaining a conservative risk profile. This more active treasury approach, implemented in the second half of 2025, contributed positively to our interest income line in the second half of the year.
We expect this treasury book to grow beyond EUR 1 billion in 2026, which I'll discuss further when we cover our guidance for 2026. Of the remaining cash under custody, we keep most of the funds overnight with the Deutsche Bundesbank. After a thorough review of our top line, let's move on to costs and earnings. On this slide, we have portrayed our different cost items and their development over the past years. Let me dive a bit deeper into the different drivers for each cost item. Overall, our operating expenses demonstrate disciplined cost management while we continue to scale the business. Operating expenses remained relatively stable at EUR 213 million in 2025, with only a small increase of 2.5% versus 2024.
Personnel expenses increased from EUR 116 million in 2024 to EUR 127 million in 2025. Our current personnel expenses actually decreased from EUR 108 million to EUR 104 million in 2025, reflecting our continued efficiency focus with some headcount reductions we have performed over the last months. The overall increase was driven by expenses for long-term variable compensation, which rose from EUR 7.5 million to EUR 23 million in 2025. This EUR 15.5 million increase was primarily driven by valuation effects, particularly related to our expiring stock appreciation rights plan. This virtual plan is closed for new issuances. No new grants have been issued in this plan in fiscal year 2024 or 2025.
The long-term variable compensation impact was particularly pronounced in the Q4, where we recorded EUR 14 million in expenses compared to EUR 3 million in the Q4 of 2024. It is important to note that most of this increase is directly tied to our positive performance and future earnings per share outlook within the stock appreciation rights plan. The valuation of these instruments is linked to our share price and EPS, which appreciated significantly during the year. Looking ahead, we would very much like to mitigate the volatility in our personal costs caused by this historic LTI tool. We recognize the value of creating greater predictability in our cost structure and would like to remove this fluctuation caused by the SAR plan from our financial profit and loss statement.
To address this, we are actively exploring potential options, such as offering beneficiaries with vested stock appreciation rights an early buyback against a premium. Discussions on this matter are still ongoing. We have not yet worked through all the details. However, in order to be prepared for such a potential offer, we have already built a corresponding liability for such a premium, which is included in the Q4 2025 expense for long-term variable compensation with around EUR 1.2 million. We'll keep you updated as we progress on these efforts. Marketing expenses increased slightly to EUR 34 million in 2025, which posts an increase of 8% compared to 2024. There are some effects to take into account for Q4, which I'll explain on the next slide.
Other admin expenses decreased significantly from EUR 61 million to EUR 52 million, a strong reduction of 15%. The increase in previous years was mainly attributable to higher IT costs, as well as higher professional services, legal and consulting costs. They were partly related to projects in connection with regulatory requirements. Our key focus for 2025 was on reducing expenses for professional services, legal and consultancy fees, which we have successfully done. Here are some effects in Q4 to take into consideration on the next slide. On slide 24, let me provide additional details on the quarterly cost progression in Q4 of 2025, which showed some elevated expenses. Personnel expenses in Q4 totaled EUR 38 million, with EUR 24 million in current expenses and EUR 14 million in long-term variable compensation.
As I mentioned a couple of minutes ago, the increase in long-term variable compensation was driven by valuation effects, particularly in relation to the expiring stock appreciation rights plan, resulting from the positive future outlook, reflected in a significant increase in the share price and EPS expectations of flatexDEGIRO. Marketing expenses in Q4 amounted to EUR 9 million, which included approximately EUR 2 million in production costs for our start-of-year 2026 campaign. Administrative expenses were EUR 16 million in Q4, including approximately EUR 1.5 million in legal provisions. A final remark on the admin cost line: we actually made the promise during our Q3 2024 earnings call, that we would reduce the admin costs by up to EUR 10 million in 2025. We can now close the case with a reported reduction of EUR 9 million.
Excluding the beforementioned legal provision in Q4, we would have been spot on with a reduction of around EUR 10 million. Moving on to our profitability. The strength of our earnings profile is evident in our quarterly EBITDA and net income progression throughout 2025. EBITDA ranged between EUR 63 million and EUR 69 million across all four quarters. Compared to Q4 2024, we delivered a 32% EBITDA growth. Net income showed similar consistency, ranging between EUR 39 million and EUR 42 million in the four quarters of 2025. For Q4, specifically, net income reached EUR 40 million, representing a 54% increase compared to the Q4 of 2024. For the full year 2025, our profitability metrics reached new records that underscore our operational leverage.
EBITDA crossed the EUR 250 million threshold for the first time, reaching EUR 268 million, a substantial increase from prior years. Our EBITDA margin expanded to 48%, compared to 42% in 2024 and 36% in 2023. This margin expansion reflects both revenue growth and our disciplined cost management. Net income reached EUR 160 million, coming in at the top end of our upgraded guidance range. Our net income margin improved to 29% from 23% in 2024, and just 18% in 2023. These profitability improvements demonstrate the scalability of our platform. As we've grown revenues by 43% from 2023 to 2025, our net income has grown by 123% over the same period.
Before we close the chapter for our preliminary 2025 results, let's see how we have performed versus our 2025 guidance. Our execution throughout 2025 was strong, which led to two guidance upgrades during the year. We started in February of 2025 with an initial guidance of revenues between EUR 455 million and EUR 505 million, and net income between EUR 106 million and EUR 123 million. As trading activity remained very robust, supported by heightened market volatility, and interest income proved more resilient than expected, we upgraded guidance twice: first in July, and then again in October. Our final results of EUR 560 million in revenues and EUR 160 million in net income, represent 17% revenue growth and 44% net income growth year-over-year.
Therefore, we delivered at or above the upper end of our revised guidance range. In short, more trades and a higher idle cash position were the two main drivers for the guidance upgrades. The consistent outperformance reflects not only favorable market conditions, but also our operational execution, product innovation, and the quality of our client acquisition and engagement strategies. Now, I am very pleased to hand back to Oliver, who will walk you through our updated strategic priorities for the next years. Over to you, Oliver.
Thank you, Benon. There is clearly a lot we have achieved in the last business year already, and more to come in 2026 and beyond. When we look at our strategic priorities, we mainly think in three categories: increasing efficiency, growing the existing business, and adding to it with additional product and service offerings. We are a growth company, and while we achieve this growth by further expanding our customer base, strengthening our existing offering, and launching new products, the fundamental basis for economic success is a secure, scalable, and efficient platform. It is literally the starting block for our growth strategy. Let me start right here with my update. As a reminder, when we acquired DEGIRO back in 2020, we had started the harmonization of our IT platform and linked to it our process landscape.
However, due to a shift in focus related to the BaFin audit, it was on hold for a while and only really got restarted towards the end of 2024. That doesn't mean, however, that nothing has been done so far. Not at all. Now, not all of the important milestones might be directly visible to the outside world, but indirectly, very much so. In my opening remarks, I referred to platform stability and performance around Liberation Day as one example. Performance also plays an important role in daily operations for a platform of our size, with 3.5 million customers doing hundreds of thousands of bookings and savings plan executions and tax processings every single day. This example shows that the platform harmonization, by no means, is an IT-only thing. It is a core enabler for our operations.
This is also why we brought IT and operations together under the leadership of our COO, Jens Möritz . The harmonized platform and process landscape is also the basis for enhancing our customer service, to which I'll come in a second. New products, like savings plans for DEGIRO, which we will roll out later this year, are already built on the future target operating model. What does this target operating model look like? Our aim is clearly to have one unified, highly scalable core banking and trading platform that can equally serve multiple brands across all geographies. It will allow us to release new functionalities and new products faster and in a more streamlined process, which should result in lower internal costs as well. To get to this future state is not a straight line, as we are not standing still either.
On the one-hand side, you have business requirements that need to be incorporated along the way, for example, our recent and upcoming product launches. On the other-hand side, there are new technical capabilities, such as AI, that both help you to build a more efficient platform and, at the same time, form a new set of requirements of their own in regards to future integration. The formula for an online brokerage platform like ours to improve operational efficiency is quite simple. Once you have established a performant and scalable platform, you add new businesses while keeping your cost in check. You can clearly see this scalability in our P&L. Revenue is up 17%, and net income up 44%, i.e., our bottom line grew 2.5 times faster than our top line. Both we achieved with a workforce that was actually 5% smaller year-on-year.
Let me pause here for a second for some few general remarks on an important topic I have briefly touched now once or twice. Artificial intelligence, which clearly is a big buzzword right now, and there has been quite some noise around it in the few last few weeks. As an execution-only brokerage platform, which doesn't offer any investment advice, let alone charge for it, none of our business lines is threatened by AI. There are no material revenues or earnings it could take away from us. What AI can do, however, is bring us both revenues and earnings if we use it the right way. I already touched upon internal efficiency gains, so bringing down our relative costs of doing business when it comes to our platform and programming in general.
There are, of course, also many ideas and internal discussions how we could best enhance our product offering with new AI-based features and capabilities. I don't want to fantasize about things that might come, rather focus on the ones that will come at flatexDEGIRO. which are actually right at the junction of internal efficiency and an external user experience, which is customer service. High-quality support is a key strength of DEGIRO, differentiating us strongly against low-budget peers. We will not just keep this strength, but build on it with AI. Today, we have approximately 150 colleagues in customer service answering all types of customer questions via phone and email, and our customers highly value being able to speak to a real person if need be. With the introduction of AI-based tools, we want to achieve three things.
First, we want to free our colleagues from some standard tasks and questions, so that they can spend more time on personally supporting customers in more complex matters. Simply put, if you've lost your login credentials, you don't need a human guide to guide you through the standard procedure for resetting your password. You can simply do this online. You should do it if the transfer of your securities accounts to us isn't going through, and you're left out in the rain with a few useless chatbot messages from the outgoing broker. Second, the more we grow our customer base and the more active customers we have, the higher the workload of our customer service centers, especially during peak times.
Smart use of technology can help to mitigate some of the additional load and ensure we maintain a lean organizational structure while growing our business at the same time. Finally, this will also be our starting point for better data usage and analysis. The ability of AI to capture and analyze large amounts of data, detect patterns, and derive recommendations for future actions is undisputed. In summary, with the use of AI in our customer service, we want to improve the experience for customers contacting us, prepare customer service for future growth without having to scale up teams at the same magnitude, and enable more effective and targeted customer communication. All of this while maintaining our personal customer support, and we get all of this for relatively small expenses.
When I say that customers appreciate our service and our offering in general, this isn't just my biased view. It is backed by over 50 awards that Flatex and DEGIRO have won again in 2025. As you can see, us Germans, we love to give awards, and each relevant media outlet does some kind of a broker award, from BÖRSE ONLINE to WirtschaftsWoche, which explains a certain overhang on the Flatex side. In summary, in each and every relevant market, we have again been top of the list when it comes to awarding the best online brokerage platforms. These recognitions, obviously, are most important for us in our key markets, helping us to stand out in the market and further grow our local customer base. In the Netherlands, we meanwhile, have more than 1 million customers on a total population of some 18 million people.
A similar market share across all of the EU and the UK would mean a flatexDEGIRO customer base of about 25 million. I'm not saying that we will get there anytime soon, it illustrates well the significant potential we still have in other markets, such as Germany, for instance. To tap into this potential, we have to get closer to local markets and adjust our marketing approach accordingly. This is what we will do in 2026 in Germany. Germany is by far the most competitive market in Europe and one that we have neglected a bit over the last two years. Flatex has a strong positioning in the market, our offering and our brand haven't always received the attention they deserve. In 2026, we want to start to change this.
On the product side, we have already fully digitized our onboarding process to open accounts for minors. While we already offer accounts for minors for almost 20 years, they recently got in the spotlight again in the context of the German pension reform and the so-called Frühstart-Rente, which is planned German government subsidy program designed to help children and teenagers begin building private retirement savi ngs early in life. We have also already added more than 1,000 stocks to our savings plan offering in Germany, allowing our customers to regularly invest in fractional shares, and thereby build something like their own individual equity fund from as little as EUR 25. More new products and a facelift to our Flatex next will follow later this year. We will accompany this push on the product side with a strong targeted marketing campaign. Some examples you see here on the slide.
Across all major markets, financial literacy has significant room for improvement, to say it mildly. Maybe in the not-too-distant future, AI will take on the role as a connector between people who see the need to take their financial future in their own hands, but don't know where to start, and online brokerage platforms like ours. For the time being, we have made a priority to drive financial education ourselves, using a multitude of different formats at both brands. Before I hand back to Benon for some financial education on international financial reporting standards and the outlook for 2026, let me finish off by giving you the status update on the three major product initiatives we have kicked off last year: crypto, securities lending, and Deposit-as-a-Service, as well as one new one to come.
We have launched crypto trading 14 months ago at Flatex in Germany, and once all our partners had received their MiCA license, started the international rollout in August 2025. This step-by-step geographical expansion is also visible in the quarterly volumes traded in crypto on our platform. Q1 and Q2 was Germany only. In Q3, we added Austria. In August, the Netherlands, France, and Spain, and in September, finally, in October, we completed the rollout to all major Euro markets by adding Italy, Portugal, Ireland, and Greece. In total, about EUR 1 billion worth of crypto assets have been traded at Flatex and DEGIRO, resulting in close to EUR 4 million in revenues. Not a bad result for the year of launch.
Two percent of our customer base has made use of our crypto offering, a number we would expect to rise in 2026, despite the currently, let's say, rather muted euphoria when it comes to Bitcoin and Co. Of course, like any other platform offering crypto, we see customers being rather reluctant to trade in crypto in the current environment. A, that doesn't concern us based on the small impact crypto has on our financial performance so far. B, quite likely, the mood will change again at some point in time in the future. Securities lending. The second big product we have launched in 2025 is securities lending. We have started in the Netherlands and Spain, and meanwhile extended our offering to Switzerland and Italy as well. We are still in early days.
In the medium term, we believe that up to EUR 10 billion of the DEGIRO assets could be used for securities lending, with probably around 20 basis points of net revenue potential for us, so after deducting cost and 50/50 profit sharing with our customers. Currently, we are at around 10% of potential assets. Still, we believe that, like crypto, also, securities lending will be able to deliver EUR 3 million-EUR 4 million of net revenues in its first full year. 2026, that is. Maybe more. As you know, for regulatory reasons, our focus on securities lending is currently firmly on the DEGIRO brand, so this makes it a good segue into the new product initiative I mentioned earlier, namely savings plans at DEGIRO.
Different from Germany and Austria, where Flatex customers make active use of savings plans to invest recurring amounts on a monthly basis into ETF fund and stock. Such an offering doesn't exist yet at DEGIRO. There surely are customers who manually replicated monthly orders, mimicking their own savings plan, but the potential to attract significantly higher regular on inflows with a convenient and automated desires process is very high. From the end of 2026 on, DEGIRO customers will benefit from the same comprehensive savings plan universe already available at Flatex, including around 2,000 ETFs and over 1,000 stocks. I come to the last new product launch, one that is not related to our online brokerage business, but to our legacy as a technology and banking as a service provider. Business Process Outsourcing, or as we call it internally, Deposit-as-a-Service....
As a reminder, in this business, we are providing a full-fledged outsourcing service to third-party banks that are looking to attract retail deposits without having to build the whole infrastructure, services, and teams themselves. Deposit-as-a-Service is actually a long-standing business of ours, with a proven track record and two long-term customers who currently have some EUR 8 billion of retail deposits acquired through our services. These deposits, just to be clear, don't end up on our balance sheet, so they don't require any of our own regulatory capital, which with rising market demand, we decided last year to expand this business line in order to create a meaningful flow of recurring revenues medium term. I am happy to announce that the first new customer in Deposit-as-a-Service business is about to go live in March 2026.
As the official launch communication from our partner bank will only go out in March, I would ask for your understanding that we cannot reveal the name today either. It shows 2 things: our ability to build a tailor-made solution for our sophisticated bank partners within a few months of time, that there is a actual market demand for a solution like ours, which is unmatched in the market. I have to add to that, CRD VI regulation is also playing in our hands. Our target is to provide such a deposit solution to 1 to 2 partner banks every year, thereby continuously adding to the recurring revenues generated in form of some basis points on the deposits. The full revenue potential will thus clearly depend on the target deposit volume of our partner banks, as well as the ramp-up speed of these deposits coming in.
We would, however, expect to increase our revenues in this newly strengthened business line by up to EUR 10 million in 2027, which would result in a tripling of the currently achieved approximately EUR 5 million of annual revenues. After crypto, securities lending, and savings plans, this was the last major product launch I wanted to highlight before I now hand back to Benon, who will inform you about the next evolution of our P&L structure, as well as where you will then find the financial contributions of these new products going forward. Benon, over to you again. Thank you.
Thanks a lot, Oliver, for your explanations. Before discussing our 2026 guidance, I want to walk you through a major upcoming change in our financial reporting structure. This change is driven by the endorsement of IFRS 18 two weeks ago, which will change the presentation and disclosure in financial statements for all companies. The new standard becomes mandatory for fiscal year 2027. We are currently evaluating the possibility to adopt these reporting changes voluntarily, beginning with our H1 2026 results, to provide enhanced transparency and comparability as an early adopter. Let me already now take a minute to highlight the expected upcoming key changes to our revenue reporting structure under IFRS 18, using our 2025 results as the baseline for illustration. Those are still preliminary thoughts, and it may change, This is the best we have for now.
We will continue to report total revenues, which were EUR 560 million in 2025, for reference and comparability purposes until 2027. Our guidance for 2026 is based on total revenues. We'll provide additional granularity on the revenue composition. For commission income, which totaled EUR 369 million gross in 2025, we'll separate between transaction-related commission income and other commission income. Transaction-related commissions of EUR 350 million will form the new basis for our commission per trade metric and will include cryptocurrency commissions on a net basis. Other commission income of EUR 19 million includes items like connectivity fees and revenues from securities lending. There is an important change to highlight.
Under our new structure, securities lending revenues will be reported on a net basis and therefore reflecting only flatexDEGIRO's retained revenues, not the portion attributed to clients and partners. This actually differs from our previous thoughts. Importantly, this has, of course, no impact on our net income or profitability. It simply provides greater transparency and appropriate accounting treatment. After deducting commission expenses of EUR 60 million, we will show our net commission income that was EUR 309 million in 2025. For interest income, we will also present a separate line item for net interest income, or NII, which is a standard metric commonly used across the banking sector in accordance with IFRS 18. Our gross interest income of EUR 173 million, less interest expenses of EUR 8 million, resulted in an NII of EUR 166 million.
Other operating income, which includes our revenues from our business process outsourcing business, contributing approximately EUR 7 million. Under this new structure, our net revenues for 2025 would have been EUR 481 million. This represents the true economic value we capture after direct revenue-related costs. The expense side of our profit and loss statement will maintain similar categories with enhanced clarity. There will be no meaningful changes to the reporting of our OpEx cost lines. Importantly, we will be dropping EBITDA as a defined line item going forward under IFRS 18, and effectively replace it by the much more suited operating profit or loss as an important yardstick. As we prepare for the adoption on IFRS 18, either for July 1, 2026 or January 1, 2027, we will give you a more detailed walkthrough upon implementation.
We hope this early look at our IFRS 18 thoughts gives you helpful clarity. You appreciate the transparency we are providing ahead of the formal transition. Our current EBIT line for 2025 is very close to the operating profit or loss line under IFRS 18. Let me turn to our outlook for fiscal year 2026 and the key assumptions underpinning our guidance. As we have already disclosed with last week's ad hoc notification for fiscal year 2026, we are guiding for revenues of EUR 588 million-EUR 616 million, representing 5%-10% growth year-over-year. We expect net income to arrive in the range of EUR 168 million-EUR 184 million, representing 5%-15% growth.
While our guidance is based on revenues and net income only, you also find on this chart some key assumptions that we have taken in order to arrive at these numbers. Let me now walk through the key assumptions across our revenue and cost components. On commission income, we expect growth driven by several factors. Customer growth is expected to exceed 25 levels as we continue our market penetration, particularly in Germany. We are assuming trading activity will be somewhat below 2025, as 2025 benefited from elevated market volatility. We expect stable commissions per trade in 2026. Our commission income should benefit from higher contributions from new products, such as crypto trading and securities lending, albeit from a low base. We'll see additional BPO revenues from client onboardings in 2026. For our interest income line, we expect slight growth despite rate headwinds.
Average cash levels should grow slightly below customer growth rates. Our margin loan book is expected to remain stable. We plan to expand our treasury book to exceed EUR 1 billion during 2026. This should also help a bit in compensating the lower average expected ECB rate of 2% in 2026, versus 2.23% in 2025. We expect our cost base to increase modestly. Current personnel expenses will rise due to wage inflation and the impact of Bulgaria joining the Euro area as of January 2026, but this will be more than offset by a significant reduction in long-term variable compensation. Marketing is budgeted to increase by approximately EUR 10 million, focused primarily on the German market. Administrative expenses should remain stable year-on-year. This guidance reflects our confidence in continued growth, while acknowledging a potentially more normalized trading environment.
Looking at our assumptions, some of you may view them as conservative, especially our expectation that trading activity will remain 2025 levels, with commissions per trade holding steady. There is a reason why we take this approach. Staying prudent and conservative has served us well in the past, and we would like to keep it that way. We have seen firsthand how quickly markets can shift direction and how rapidly operating conditions can change. This is rather about maintaining the credibility and reliability that our stakeholders have come to expect from us. We are, of course, also reiterating our 2027 guidance to achieve EUR 650 million in revenues and EUR 200 million in net income by the end of 2027. This concludes my section of the presentation. Thank you.
I'll now hand over to Oliver, who will take you through our capital allocation framework.
Thank you, Benon. Let me close today's presentation with a few words on the new capital allocation policy we have published last week. As we have stated many times before, flatexDEGIRO is a growth company, and our focus will continue to lie on the growing of our operating business, to tap into the vast potential of our European markets, and to scale the profitability of our business. However, as you can see on this chart, we expect our most relevant regulatory capital ratios, the total capital ratio, as well as the leverage ratio, both to increase noticeably once the 2025 profits will be recognized as regulatory capital after our AGM in June 2026, and that is already after a potential dividend of 20%.
It is therefore clear that the operating performance and the strong cash generation of our business allow us to recalibrate the balance between growth, financial flexibility, and stability, as well as shareholder returns. In essence, our new capital allocation policy can be read as follows: It remains our top priority to organically grow our existing business and to establish flatexDEGIRO as a leading platform for building wealth. This can also include growing beyond today's product and service offering. As we are operating in highly fragmented European market, we additionally want to maintain sufficient firepower to be able to act swiftly in case of opportunities arising. Based on our financial forecasts and capital planning for the next few years, we believe that we can entertain such an ambitious growth strategy strongly, while at the same time going one step further in regards to shareholder distribution.
This is why the management board and the supervisory board of flatexDEGIRO have agreed on a future target dividend payout of 20% of annual net income of the group. Applied on our 2025 profits of approximately EUR 160 million, this will result in a dividend payment of approximately EUR 32 million or EUR 0.30 a share, up sevenfold from the low EUR 0.04 per share we paid out in the last two years. Further, share buybacks are currently not concretely planned, but our capital allocation policy would also allow us for opportunistic decisions here in case of potential market opportunities. As you know, we still have an existing AGM authorization that will allow us to buy back another 7% of the share capital until June 2029.
I want to close the presentation by reiterating that we are a growth company and that we are well on track to successfully scale our operations across Europe. We operate in growing markets in which we aim for further market share gains by strengthening our existing offering, as well as by launching new products and services. The scalability and profitability of our platform provides us with significant funds to reinvest in our operations, potentially take an active role in consolidating the European brokerage market, and to further strengthen our positioning with growth and bolt-on acquisitions. Achieving these ambitious goals will not be a walk in the park, but it will be possible if we keep our eyes on the road and continue to do our homework properly. Many thanks for your attention.
I hope Benon and I have been able to give you a good overview of flatexDEGIRO's development in the last business year and our strategic roadmap. However, we, of course, also wanted to give you the opportunity to ask any additional questions you might have on these topics. Maybe, Achim, from here, you take over again and run us through the process for the Q&A now. Thank you for your attention.
Thank you, Oliver. Thank you, Benon, as well. We are happy now to take your questions, and I would very much like to hand over to the moderator to start the Q&A process, where I see that the first questions are already lined up.
The first question comes from Marina Massuti, from Morgan Stanley. Marina, go ahead.
Hi. Good afternoon. Thank you so much for the presentation. The first question that I had is around the potential new tax regime on the capital gains in the Netherlands. I understand that there is still a fair amount of ambiguity on the potential outcome from those proposed changes, and that there has been some pushback. Yeah, if ultimately, if it gets approved, it will be long dated, but curious to hear your views on this recent proposal and how should we think about, yeah, any potential implications for your business, if any? Thank you.
Okay. Thank you, Marina, for your question. Obviously, that question is all over the press and people are thinking about it. What does it mean? At the same time, it is in the horizon of 2028, We would say in German, these things usually don't get eaten with the same heat they get cooked, which means along the journey, potentially things change.... Secondly, the retirement schemes in the Netherlands are not affected from this tax. My personal view would also be that it is very difficult to tax capital gains that have not been executed or not been realized and exclude capital losses. I think the comments from the finance ministry were exactly in that direction.
Yes, we shouldn't ignore it, but most likely things might change, across, along the journey. Does that make sense?
Yes, thank you.
Overall, I would say the tax authorities have empty pockets, and they have an appetite for more revenues.
That's for sure, given the debt-to-GDP ratios across Europe.
Okay, great. A question on the business. For 2026, you're guiding to, for customer growth, accelerating from the current level, so from the 13%. Could you give a bit more color on the drivers, especially if this acceleration is mainly coming from Germany and for the rest of the markets, like for instance, Netherlands, Spain, and Spain and Austria, so very strong growth. Are you expecting a similar growth rate for this year, or do you also expect other geographies to pick up in terms of customer growth? Thank you.
Thank you again for your second question, Marina. As you probably saw from the forecast, we are spending EUR 10 million more on marketing. We are increasing the budget, and usually the increase of the marketing budget also corresponds with client growth. There's a special focus on two countries, which is Spain and Germany. At the same time, we maintain the same effort as last year, slightly up for the remaining countries. It is important to get a significant market share, as explained in the example of the Netherlands. I think the client base in the Netherlands has, in the meantime, reached about 1.1 million customers and is continuing to grow. The bigger you are in a certain country, the easier they grow until you have reached a certain level.
You basically build a little bit of a fortress per country, if you have the right offering, and that is the aim here. We expect the customer growth to be at the same level moving forward, because the penetration rate across Europe is still at a low level compared to, let's say, a more equity-minded markets like the U.S. Across Europe, you have equity ownership, which is in the 10-ish %, across the countries. In the U.S., you have 65%, we see massive continued growth opportunity going forward.
Super clear.
Hopfully that a nswers your question.
Yeah. Thank you.
Thank you.
The next question comes from Christiane Holstein from Bank of America. Christiane, go ahead.
Oh, hi there. Thank you for taking my questions. I was hoping just to ask a little bit more about guidance. Firstly, on 2026 guidance, you've said you have expectations for stable commission per trade. I just would have thought that this would be likely to increase, given there's higher offshore trading, and you anticipate a ramp-up in crypto, which is also higher margin. Just wondering what's driving your expectations here. Also on your guidance for lower transaction activity per client, again, activity has just been quite strong year to date. You have new products which are driving engagement, and you're also taking quite a few steps to take advantage of the Germany opportunity. Just again, wondering what is driving your expectations for a decline here. My second question is just on 2027 guidance.
Given you've upgraded 2025 twice and still beat consensus, especially on the top line, and then you also seem to have stronger customer growth guidance rather than the original, just greater than 10%. You have kept 2027 unchanged. Just wondering if you could please provide some more detail on your thinking here. Thank you.
Yes. Maybe I'll start with your first question on the commission per trade. Historically, we have not guided to an upward trend on the commissions per trade in the last two years, we delivered on them. I totally understand the question. However, we continue to be prudent. We will be introducing ETF savings plans at the year that might take a hit on those numbers, we feel fine with the number for now. As you very clearly said, there are a lot of building blocks that should help in actually bringing it up, but particularly the introduction of ETF savings plan at DEGIRO might likewise also bring them down a little bit. On the activity per client, yes, we took a reduction of roughly 5%. Two months are done. The two months have been pretty okay.
However, there are still 10 months to come, and we are running against a pretty tough year-on-year comparison in April and in October. It's simply a prudent buffer that we built in into the projections in light of those super strong months that we have seen last year. Frankly, it's a similar answer to the, to your third question on the 2027 guidance. If you look at the span that we covered with our guidance, that's a 3-year span. One third of that is done.
clearly, if everything would stay as it is, if the volatility levels would stay as it is, which very likely they're not, then it would be easy to take a look at that. We don't know what the next two years will bring. We don't even know what the last 10 years of this month will bring. Therefore, we decided it's a prudent and good conservative idea to just stick to that for now.
I think when we maybe to add to that, when we took on the forecast until 2027, early last year, I think we took a heavy step in terms of doubling profits over three years. We've been on a good path to get there. Let's see how the year evolves. So far, we've been under-promising and over-delivering. That has served us well. Let's see how far we get.
Great. Thank you.
The next question comes from Andrew Lowe from Citi. Andrew, go ahead.
Hi. Thanks. Can we dig into the net interest income guidance, which seems really quite conservative? Can you just explain to me why you're only guiding for slight growth when your deposit levels are currently up 22% versus the average from 2025? In addition, you've said that the average cash levels are gonna grow from here as your customer grows, but not as much as your customer growth, but still there is growth. Can you... I appreciate that there is some negative effects from lower rates, but the assumptions that you've used seem to be sort of in line with expectations in the market. Can you maybe, just on the volume side, just really explain this to me? Because it just seems excessively conservative. Thank you.
I'm happy to start to answer the question. If you look what happened on our platform last year, our deposits grew effectively 45%. We did not see that coming. It's just one of the things that happen in market dynamics that it's really hard for us to control. We also experienced in the year 2025 a phenomenon which we have not seen in the last couple of years, in that clients left way more money sitting idle in their accounts versus prior years. We don't have a good explanation as to why that was. Maybe they were preparing for market opportunities. We knew that it's a good sign, and it's a strength of our platform that fresh money is brought in.
There certainly can be a scenario when clients, maybe after market correction, decide to reenter the market, and we may have an investment rate which is higher than what actually comes into our platform. There's certainly the theoretical possibility that our cash levels may even drop despite a success in our business. If you combine all the different scenarios that could happen, you know, the weighted average is basically what we came up with. I copy what I said before, if the trends prevail until the end of the year, then it should be okay to beat that.
We have also seen in the last two months, a pretty stable development, so the asset base has not grown, and you mentioned already the fact that we are still, in a year-on-year comparison, a little bit against the headwind of the ECB being much higher at the beginning of last year. That's our thought process that went into this line.
Yeah. Also, we don't, we don't speculate on these numbers. We take the ECB forecast on the rates. As Benon mentioned, there's two other risks. One is the SEPA payment. The instant payment has been introduced in Germany, so you can wire your money from the platforms immediately to other platforms. There are more and more players entering the market, especially on the deposit sides, especially on term deposits. JPMorgan Chase will open around Easter with potentially very aggressive rates. BBVA entered last year, the market with a 3% offering, so 100 basis points above ECB rate to gain some share. I think it's just prudent to continue to take it as this. The clients could also develop a more active approach and buy overnight money market funds, then they earn the interest rate, and we don't.
We think it's the right way to continue with our approach.
Got it. Thanks, that's really helpful. Can I just ask also on the sort of margin loan book, you said that's stable. You've previously talked about that increasing, so I'm just wondering why that's expected to only be stable.
We don't know what's gonna happen on the interest rate levels on the book. The nominal value should continue to rise, but there might be the need to potentially make an adjustment on the interest rate side, which equals out to the statement we've made. For the first two months of this year, 2026, the development has been actually quite nice on the book.
Great! Thanks.
The next question comes from Zach Wurz , from Autonomous Research. Zach, go ahead.
Hi, good afternoon, thanks for taking my questions. I have two, please. First is on securities lending. On the up to EUR 10 billion of relevant AUC, I think you called that a medium-term potential. I'm just thinking through the ramp-up and revenue potential here, particularly this year. How do you expect the stock that you see, the relevant stock that you see, to develop between now and year-end 2026? The second question is on the new treasury management system. You previously spoke of somewhere between 15 and 20 basis points of yield enhancement, I think, once it's fully rolled out. Is that still the right type of number to think about? Can you help us with how much of that is sort of baked in already, versus how much is still to come early this year? Thanks.
Thank you for your question, Zach. The securities lending side, as we said, for 2027, we are thinking that the EUR 10 billion is a realistic number, and 20 basis points would be the revenues. That is obviously building up because every client has to sign up that he or she, or the family wants to participate in securities lending, and obviously is a little bit more complicated process. Basically, you have to talk to the most relevant clients that have the relevant assets that are where the market has an appetite for borrowing them. That is basically happening as we speak. At the same time, we don't wanna be in the box of investment advice. That balance we have to strike, that's why the buildup is probably a little bit slower than anticipated.
Also, when you look at the different markets across Europe, at the moment, we can only start on the DEGIRO platform because of different tax regimes and different opt-in or opt-out regimes, otherwise, our potential would be guided higher. These different tax regimes make it a little bit more complicated, for example, in France, where we take a very, very conservative approach. I think in our guidance, we put 3 million-4 million this year, and for 2027, it gets closer to the 20 million mark. Maybe later, Benon wants to add something to that. On the treasury side, it is true that we think it's somewhere between 15 and
We want to keep a very conservative investment approach. At the moment, we only invested in Triple-A and Double-A names, which obviously have a tight spread. Given the fact that spreads in credit markets are all-time low, and at the same time, government debt is at all-time high, not in terms of spreads, but in terms of debt-to-GDP, we feel it's better to be prudent at the moment, not to make unnecessary speculations with our clients' money. That's why this 15 to 20 basis points, based on this EUR 1 billion or above, would be the contribution to additional rates. At the same time, the duration is slightly longer, so we have, let's say, an average of, let's say, close to 2 years of duration in that portfolio.
In case there's a rate drop by the ECB, maybe in May, some people are saying there will be 25 basis points cut in May, it will buffer our interest rate sensitivity on the downside, which is a positive. On the other hand, if rates drop, maybe it has a positive impact on markets going up further. Who knows? Directionally, it is deemed to balance this out, and the treasury system will help us once opportunities arise, either in the swap market or the repo market, and so on, to capture them. In the past, we could only put the money at the ECB overnight rate, which of course, is conservative, but doesn't necessarily give us the right counterbalance to our, to our business. Hopefully, that answers your question in a satisfactory way.
Yeah. Thanks very much.
Pleasure. Tack.
The next question comes from Christoph Greulich, from Berenberg. Christoph, go ahead.
Hi, thanks a lot for taking my questions. It's 3 from my side, please. Firstly, regarding the pension reform in Germany and the expected introduction of the tax-efficient investment accounts, as of January 2027. As far as I understand, single stocks are not eligible in those accounts, so it seems most likely that this will be mainly for ETF investments. It just puts a question mark on the monetization of those investments and trades, and I was wondering if you have any plan or strategy in place how you might be able to better monetize, yeah, your clients' trading in an ETF?
Secondly, I was wondering for the business process outsourcing, if you could give us some idea of the pricing model here on, a rough indication of the basis points you're planning to charge on the deposits. I was also wondering if you're switching for the existing clients to, a basis point model or if you're keep the old pricing there.
Just lastly, you select a legal provision in the other OpEx line in Q4. Just wondering, yeah, what was the reason for that? Thank you.
A lot of questions. Should I start? Is that okay?
Yeah, yeah, of course.
The others Altersvorsorge account retirement savings opportunity in Germany, we believe that's a 10 million new account opportunity. Who knows how quickly that will unfold? My expectations or our expectations also, that the government will decide upon this in July before the summer break. Rules and regulations will be clear. I think they will also cover how much add-on you can do savings in the minor accounts. If Grandpa, Grandma want to help the enkel to save something for their education, that makes it clearer to really calibrate what the savings are. The question which I still have and what we discuss here is this a online or a offline selling product?
Because for the first time, you have to think about of, can I really save for like 45 years until I retire? What do I do when I die beforehand? Who will take my will? So on. It's a little bit more complicated than just signing up for an ETF savings plan. For us to prepare for that on the Flatex platform is easier because we already have ETF and equity types of savings plans. That's why it's so essential, as we indicated, that we have the savings plan on the DEGIRO platform as well, because most of the other countries also have these comparable instruments for retirement savings plans. The way you make money is the German product so far has a cost cap of 150 basis points.
Obviously, a low-cost online brokerage company cannot charge 150 basis points. I would calculate this more, and we haven't fixed this, and we have not planned this into our planning, by the way. I would see this more as a 50 basis points opportunity. Then on a net margin, it's probably 20%-25% on our side. Who knows how much we can get through? It's also a question whether that could be teamed up with not BPO, but with a partner who wants to do the offline selling, yeah? I would assume a lot will be sold through agents, where people basically sit down and have a chat about why this is important and what the implications could be. You make money with ETFs as well, if you probably sell asset allocation.
You need two or three funds in the product to basically have a good asset allocation mix. If you team up with a partner, the partner would most likely determine the asset mix. You can potentially, for this product, also maybe charge a service fee or annual fixed custody fee. That really depends on what the overprice is. You can also consider a rebalancing fee, which could be equal to a normal transaction price. Basically, if things go out of range, the cash, or the equity side, you can have a mix between two, three, four funds, do a rebalancing every half year, every quarter, every year, whatever the client thinks is good. That should, even if it's small money when you look at it, if you add it up in the thousands and thousands of contracts, it could be an economic impact.
Again, we have not factored that in. I think your other question was on business process outsourcing. existing clients and new clients, what does it mean in terms of revenues? The historic pricing was a unit-based pricing, and usually with these clients, you have a term of the contract. Our discussions basically go when they reach the end of the term, where we have agreed on pricing. Of course, we have long-term relationships with these clients, and they matter a lot to us, but we have discussions with them around repricing of those contracts. The pricing, we have not so much appetite to fully make this completely transparent, but you have to think about it in a way that if you raise 1 billion, it obviously has, for the first billion, a different price than for the 10th billion.
It's a inverted curve, which probably starts at around close to 20 basis points and goes down to maybe 6 basis points for the tenth billion. That's a negotiation process, and every contract is slightly different because it depends on what kind of services are bought by that client. Is it including marketing? Is it excluding marketing? And so on. I would say on average, it could be a double-digit basis points number. Low double digit.
The legal provisions, yes. We built a legal provision at the end of 2025, which was around EUR 1.1 million. Sorry, not billion, million. Because of a legacy BaFin issue ad hoc notifications, which is in the making, and it is from 2022. We are in good discussions with the BaFin to settle this early this year.
It is not finalized, but we, as we did with other provisions as well for last year, we wanted to have the balance sheet as clean as possible to absorb any additional cost or burden, you can call it, which are known to us at that point in time, even if they go partially into the future, to make sure we have a clear sky in front of us, if that makes sense.
I think it's also fair to say that to the best knowledge that we have today, this is the last item that we have from the bank. This is again, from 2022.
Correct.
Stemming back almost 3 and a half years ago. It comes specifically from the share price drop communication at the beginning of December of 2022. It's the last today known item that we're cleaning up.
Correct. We double-checked that with the regulators internally, whether they have any of those fines in the making, and they told us, "No." Historic cleanup, let's call it this way. As you can see from the fines that are happening in the markets, these things have a jet lag of three years, plus, minus, sometimes four. Your question was pretty long, Christoph. Did I completely answer-?
Yeah.
Did we completely answer your questions?
Yes, it was very clear. Thank you.
Thanks a lot. It's a pleasure.
The next question comes from Ian White from Autonomous Research. Ian, go ahead.
Hi there. Thanks for taking my questions. 2 from my side, please. Firstly, when should we expect to see growth in your total headcount again, or how might that trend over the next 2 years? I'm conscious that there's still a lot of cost-saving and AI initiatives being introduced that you mentioned. Secondly, how do you see near to medium-term dynamics with respect to pricing? Are markets like Germany now becoming sufficiently competitive that we need to start thinking about a downward shift in revenue per trade over the next couple of years? Thank you.
Great questions. Thank you for that, Ian. Well, sometimes our people also ask about headcount growth. Our answer is always no. As we hopefully described in our presentation, we try to make use of technology investments to keep our headcount pretty flat. There might be a small increase in front office headcount, as I mentioned, as we are investing in PR, in affiliate marketing, in the whole area of, let's say, customer experience. There is in terms of developing messaging, trading signals, and so on. There's an area which, let's say, is in infant stage, in some parts on our side. There might be some investments, but at the same time, might not be at the same time, but maybe in, let's say, in somewhat parallel, we will try to make savings in the rest of the organization.
At least that's the plan for the moment in terms of no headcount growth on a net basis over time. You heard also our investments in the call center technology that should give us room in terms of taking on more business with the same number of headcount. Pricing-wise, I think that's a very interesting question. First of all, we have the benefit of having two brands, so we have slightly differentiated pricing per country, per region, per brand, which is very helpful because not every market is the same. Europe is a fragmented bunch of independent franchise takers, and Germany is a very specific case because you have, on the one hand, the legacy banks or the big banks. They are still charging 1% equity commission, and they still have about 10 million custody accounts.
Not for round trip, but only one way, it's two and a quarter, roughly, for equities round trip for most of the cases. I think they have a different pressure on downward side, but the cost is also much higher than ours, we are looking to see what happens. At the same time, we have the PFOF ban hitting Germany. There will be some players at the end of the spectrum, which are, everything is for free and for DEGIRO, and they are surprised that they still make some money. We'll see how this play out, whether they have to up fees or not. We are pretty reluctant to move fees on the lower side at the moment, and so far, that strategy has been proven right.
That's why, given the two spectrums, sides of the spectrum, we, planned for flat fees.
I would maybe add on.
Got it.
Make two additional comments, Ian. On the headcount situation, you know, we do modelings into the future, of course, and we see no discontinuity. Let's start maybe with that. So it's not like we're adding 150 or 200 people next year, or the year after that, or the year after that. There, there might be a small inflationary drag as we increase capabilities here or there. AI may lead to a revision, maybe down a little bit. It's a quite powerful message that we are sending to our people in that they should not, you know, fear that they're gonna lose their jobs, basically. We rather want to make an investment into the platform to continue to grow without meaningfully changing the employment base.
Also, some of the things that are not talked about a whole lot, but we have reduced the management board to, you know, we are now, effectively, we have a reduction of 2, where today we're doing the same work with 5 instead of 7, if you include the banks board. That's a message we try to send through the organization to be a bit more efficient, use more tools, and things like that. On the pricing dynamics, on Flatex, maybe 1 single point. Yes, a cash trade at Flatex is more expensive, but again, what sometimes is missed in the discussions is that not only do clients value customer service, but if you slice it into different buckets, there's a really a high, high fraction of trades at Flatex, which go for 0 or 1 EUR, 2 EUR. Yeah.
Yeah, the reality is if you want to trade on a busy day, it doesn't matter whether you pay EUR 1, EUR 2, EUR 3, or EUR 5, it matters that you can trade. If you trade for EUR 10,000 plus per transaction, the percentage of your transaction cost is so little that the quality of the platform matters much more than the transaction cost, I would guess.
Got it. Thanks a lot for that.
Thank you.
Our next question comes from Amit Jagadeesh, from UBS . Amit, go ahead.
Hi, thank you for the questions. I've got 2 questions. Appreciate the comments on the headcount. I guess how should we think about the run rate cost savings that are gonna come from the AI-driven customer service once that rollout sort of completes in Q2 2026? The second question is, you mentioned 2% of customers have traded crypto. I guess, what penetration level do you ultimately expect for crypto trading among your customers, and I guess over what time horizon? Thank you.
Thank you. As Benon described, we have not factored in any cost savings on the introduction of the new call center software because we intend to upgrade the quality of our reachability. We will split the call centers in three pieces. One is maintenance, one is outbound calls, and one is VIP clients that basically can get a different service in terms of helping them to find securities or other matters in terms of investment. There will be a higher quality of service, and we try to do this with the same number of headcount. Might not necessarily be exactly the same people.
There's usually fluctuation in the call center staffing, but we have in these areas, people that have bank education, so high quality people that can help the clients to achieve better goals for their investments without entering into investment advice. Yes?
No, I wanted to just take the second question.
Yes, please.
On the trades, on the crypto side, you know, modeling is a great thing until you're wrong. On the crypto side, yes, we have, of course, models, and I think I mentioned that on a previous call, and I'm happy to repeat that. When we started a year ago to think about our contribution from crypto, we overestimated the number of clients trading, and we underestimated the notional value that is being pushed through the crypto universe. In the end, the model is perfectly right, even though we made two mistakes. With that sort of with that comment, we initially were thinking that we were going maybe closer to 5% of our clients. Maybe we'll get there. A lot will depend on the crypto hype, on whether Bitcoin will break 100K again.
Overall, we're happy with the outcome. We printed EUR 1 billion of crypto flow last year. This year, we should double that number, given where we are at the end of February.
Great. Thank you so much.
It's also interesting, there are a lot of, in some of the market, because it's unregulated business, we feel our pricing is very transparent, very competitive, and on some of the market participants, we feel that there could be hidden costs. From the outside, it looks cheap, but in the inside, the spreads are very wide. And we think, on the other hand, it takes time until people understand that they pay more than just EUR 1 when they trade. That will, over time, help us to increase the reputation of our quality offering. We don't speculate on these numbers. That's why we project the same numbers going forward and annualize them.
Great. Thank you so much.
Great, thanks.
The next question comes from Andrew Lowe, from Citi. Andrew, go ahead.
Hi. Thanks. Sorry, I just have a couple of follow-ups. The first one is just, if you could just clarify, sort of LTIP contributions that you're assuming in your guidance, if any, that'd be great. The second follow-up is on the securities lending, you're rolling that out across the DEGIRO, to do that in Flatex, I think you need a change in law in order to do that. I was just wondering if there's been an update on that, and if that's something that we can expect in the next, I don't know, year or 2. Thanks.
Yes, I start with the securities lending question. You're absolutely right. There's different legislations, or interpretations of the same law across Europe, depending on the countries, and there's both ways. One is the opt-in or opt-out structure. At the moment, for Germany, in the past, you needed to opt in for every single transaction, which you do in writing, which makes it extremely troublesome to introduce the product in the market. We feel it is not the right thing, and that's why we're having discussions with the regulators to change. That takes time. They recently made a change in the regulation that would allow people to do this confirmation electronically, but it's still not the right approach.
In the Netherlands, you basically decide on which proportion of your custody account assets, will you want to be available for securities lending, and you transfer them into a new sub-custody account, and then they can get pooled and lent out. That is a more efficient way of doing that, and we are introducing that idea to the German regulators, but that will take time, and it's out of our control when this will be active. We have another opportunity which we are at the moment exploring, which is we have a branch of the DEGIRO in Germany, which we have not actively been marketing with. We could consider to activate that brand in Germany to make the product available.
Imagine once we have one IT platform, we could smoothly make those offers available for those clients that have the appetite and the volume and the necessary assets to participate in that. At the same time, we still have different tax legislation. In France, for example, it is a little bit complicated because the securities lending could be seen as a sell of the security and trigger capital gains tax. The reality is, in most other markets, it's not a sell because you just lent out your securities, and that makes it more complicated because we have the fiduciary obligations to do the right thing for our clients. That's why the investigation around the topic takes a little bit longer, because it's new to some of those European markets.
Nevertheless, we are confident that we will continue to roll this out and have a great offering for our clients, wherever we can safely do that, over the next couple of months.
On the LTIP question, thank you for the question, and of course, it's a little bit of mathematics behind, but the first comment is that we are still exposed to the virtual stock plan from 2020, which none of us appreciates in the P&L, but we will have to live with it as long as it's there. That is also the one that pretty much distorted our personal costs line, particularly in the Q4. We cannot control that. What we do is we take the actual share price on the day of valuation. We make no forecasts on our share price. This would be inappropriate, and we also make no forecasts on our EPS expectations, but we take your forecast.
On the EPS part of the plan, we can take whatever the sell side is coming up with. Those are the best numbers we can take in order to be conservative. For the share price, we don't do that. We have a new options or potentially share-based plan, where we have much more control, and we know pretty much what's gonna happen. If you put that all together, best guess for 2026, according to our current planning, is around EUR 11 million. That's what we are and what we have in our internal models for LTI 2026. Again, that number might be different at year-end because of the still existing virtual stock plan, which may bring this up or down, depending on share price movements.
I think it's fair to say, last year, on the historic SAR plan, in the numbers, the number was on the expense side, about twelve and a half?
Closer to 15.
Closer to EUR 15 million. We are looking into options to basically, get rid of this plan, as we speak. That's not resolved. We will communicate when this is done and dusted. We have no control of the impact-
... on. We are basically a victim of our own success. The stock went up last year massively. It ends up in HR expenses, which is not right because it's because of legacy. The plan from 2024 will have a totally different impact because it is in a linear way, amortized over time, and the stock movements have DEGIRO implications on the plans. We intend to have a plan going forward, which-
... where the expenses are more directed to the year or to the business year, instead of harvesting the future or being caught from the past in the actual fiscal year. We tried to get rid of these historic structures to have a more clean approach, but we'll comment or report once this is done.
Very helpful. Thank you very much.
Thank you.
The next question comes from Christoph Greulich from Berenberg. Christoph, go ahead.
Hi again, Christoph.
Also, 1 quick follow-up from my side, please, regarding the D&A charge. It seems like in Q4 that, yeah, stepped up quite meaningfully compared to the previous quarters. I appreciate it's rather flat year-over-year, but if I, yeah, recall correctly, in Q4 2024, you had about EUR 6 million in write downs included in there. I was just wondering, in 2025, in Q4, were there any further write downs in that line item? Also what we should expect in terms of D&A for 2026.
Well, well spotted, Christoph. You're right. At the end of each year, we do a thorough review of our holding book, so to speak, we indeed took a bit more than EUR 4 million write down on one of the legacy businesses, our factoring business, that we stopped having as an operating business line 6 or 7 years ago. We have some very residual commitments to that. Again, that business is closed, but in order to be prudent. That's basically the majority of the explanation. It's a factual review of our residual factoring business, where we took more than EUR 4 million charge in that, plus some other smaller adjustment, that's the bulk of the answer.
What should we expect for 2026 in terms of D&A?
Look, we've almost gone through all that.
The value on the balance sheet, remaining value on the balance sheet is tiny, I would call it.
It's from memory, around EUR 4 million, give or take.
Exactly.
Those things are, you know, with the insolvency proceedings, and there are quotas which are being discussed. As of today, this is pretty much the value that we expect back. As of today, we don't see any further write downs. Things may change, but as of today, that's a proper representation of the books at year-end. Thankfully, we've worked through that. I mean, if you just take a six, seven years approach, you know, that's a EUR 20 million line item that went through over the last years combined. We are pretty much done or close to being done.
To be fair, there's one item left, which is investments in property funds from legacy management or historic management, put it this way. Also they have been written down. Nevertheless, nobody can exclude that there will be a little bit of more downside risk here. It looks like the floor is found there as well. We tried, as I'm repeating myself here, we tried to create a balance sheet that is as clean as possible. What could be done was done, and we feel pretty confident about that, even though the numbers in Q4, as you rightfully said, don't look that great. We felt it is the right thing to do on prudent management.
Yeah, that's all clear. Thank you.
Thank you, Christoph, and thank you all. As we don't have any further questions currently in the call, we would thank you for your attention today and your participation. We'll be roadshowing tomorrow in Frankfurt and early next week in London, and hopefully get the opportunity to speak again with many of you. As always, Lara and myself, of course, always available for any follow-up questions you might have now after our presentation. Thank you very much. Thank you also, Oliver.
Fantastic.
Thank you, Benon.
Many thanks.
Many thanks.
Bye.