Good morning and welcome to our results presentation for the first half of the 2025 financial year. I'm Breon Corcoran, Chief Executive. Thank you for taking the time to join us this morning. I'm joined by Clifford Abrahams , our Chief Financial Officer. Clifford joined us last month, and I'm delighted to welcome him to IG. We'll be running through the presentation together this morning. Starting with today's agenda, I'll kick off with some highlights on the first half and hand over to Clifford to take you through the details of our financial performance. I'll return to look at the progress we've made across the various priorities I presented in July before opening the line for questions. Beginning with highlights on slide four. Looking back over the last six months, we've made progress. Personally, I'd say it was a six out of 10.
Total revenue was up 11%, reflecting stronger market conditions, which resulted in higher revenue per customer, but active client numbers were flat. Performance in the period shows that the business remains well placed to capture cyclical upside, but demonstrates we have a lot of work to do to grow the active client base, which will be necessary to deliver sustainable, stronger growth. As I outlined in July, our focus is on three initial priorities: improving our product, enhancing our culture, and increasing efficiency, and we've made some progress. Product velocity has some green shoots, supported by the implementation of our new organizational model. We're embedding a high-performance culture across the business, and we've initiated digital servicing workstreams to enhance efficiency.
Back in July, I said that we'd take decisive action to close initiatives not delivering acceptable returns, and we've done that with the exit from DailyFX, Spectrum, and a legacy stock trading initiative. We're continuing to review sandbox projects and are prepared to fail fast and cheaply where I see a lack of acceptable progress. In the first half, we demonstrated a commitment to deploy our strong capital generation to enhance shareholder returns and increase long-term growth potential. Last week, we announced the proposed acquisition of Freetrade, the fast-growing U.K. self-directed investment platform, and I'm pleased to announce today that we're extending our existing share buyback program. Performance in the first half and current trading keeps us on track to meet consensus revenue and profit before tax expectations for the current financial year. You can find these on our investor relations website.
In summary, we've made progress, changes underway, and we have a lot of work ahead of us. Turning now to the financial highlights on slide five. Total revenue increased 11% year-on-year, driven by higher revenue per client, reflecting stronger market conditions. tastytrade delivered another consecutive half of record trading revenue of 24% in U.S. dollars. Costs were well controlled, down 1% on the prior year, supported by efficiency measures initiated in October 2023 before I joined IG. Adjusted profit before tax increased 30%, and EPS was up 42%, reflecting the undemanding comparator and lower share count resulting from buybacks. We expect to complete the remainder of the 150 million share buyback we announced in July by the end of this month.
Today, we've extended our share buyback program by an extra GBP 50 million to GBP 200 million, and we expect to complete this in the second half of the current financial year. Since the end of the 2022 financial year, we've returned over GBP 1 billion to shareholders via dividends and share buybacks, including GBP 281 million in the first half of the current financial year. Turning now to the operational performance on slide six. As I said in July, we operate in large target addressable markets. We're the global over-the-counter market leader, but our penetration of the revenue pool is small at under 10%, and we must add scale. The B2C exchange-traded futures and options revenue opportunity in the United States, Europe, Australia, and Singapore alone is similar to the OTC opportunity. Our penetration of this revenue pool is less than 3%, and there's a huge opportunity in emerging markets.
In stock trading and investments and crypto, our existing proposition only scratches the surface of the opportunity, but Freetrade will give us a stronger platform on which to grow. There are clear benefits from being in multiple categories compared to a single vertical industry, but we must move faster to capitalize on the opportunities in front of us. In the first half of the year, active clients and first trades were flat on the prior year. Within this, tastytrade grew customers by 9%, and first trades were up 32%. By contrast, over-the-counter active clients were down 3%, and first trades dropped 15%. I'm confident we can return the OTC business to growth, but we must invest in product and brand to realize our potential. We must bring high-performing talent to IG to help us deliver, and strategic hiring is one of my top priorities.
We've made some progress in recent months. With that, I'll hand over to Clifford to go through our first half financial performance in more detail.
Thanks, Breon, and good morning, everyone. I joined IG after the current reporting period in mid-December, so I'm just over a month into the role. I've met some of you already and look forward to meeting others in coming months. First, I'll give a brief personal introduction and explain why I'm delighted to have joined IG, and after that, I'll run through financial performance in the period in detail. I'm an experienced CFO of large-scale international financial institutions. I've spent my career in regulated digital consumer businesses and have considerable M&A experience. Like Breon, I'm ambitious and here for the opportunity. IG has solid positions in large and growing addressable markets, and we're competing against many new and highly capable players. As Breon said in July, there's been some complacency here at IG in recent years, and we're changing this.
We detailed our initial priorities in July, and we're moving at pace to deliver. As we do this, I'm confident that we'll compete more effectively, increase our active customer numbers, and build scale. That commercial growth will translate into growth in our earnings and ongoing capital returns for shareholders. Now, kicking off with the P&L on slide eight. You can see here trading revenue of GBP 452 million increased 12% on the prior year, reflecting stronger market conditions and a soft comparative. Interest income of GBP 71 million was up fractionally as customer cash balances increased 7% to GBP 3.8 billion, which offset the impact of low interest rates. Adjusted operating cost of GBP 277 million declined 1%, reflecting normalization of bad debt charges and efficiency measures.
Net finance income in the period was GBP19.8 million, up 29%, and within this, finance income increased 29% to GBP33.6 million, partly offset by finance costs, up 29% to GBP 13.8 million. These higher finance costs reflected increased interest payments to customers on their cash deposits. Altogether, adjusted profit before tax increased 30% to GBP 267 million, and we delivered a pleasing PBT margin of 51%. Group tax expense includes a non-recurring tax write-off of GBP 2.5 million, resulting from our exiting Spectrum. As a result of this, we now expect the group effective tax rate for the year to be around 25%. Adjusted profit after tax was up 30% to GBP 201 million, and adjusted earnings per share increased 42% to GBP55.3 as the share count dropped 8% with our share buybacks.
As Breon mentioned, we're comfortable with consensus revenue for the full year and expect net trading revenue to be broadly stable, H2 versus H1, and alongside this, some pressure on net interest income as rates come down. We'll now look at top-line performance in more detail on slide nine. First half volatility normalized closer to long-term averages against the weak prior year comparative, and this increased revenue per client in all our product lines. In our OTC business, trading revenue was up 10% to GBP 360 million as high volatility increased client trading volumes. Revenue per client was up 13%, partly offset by a 3% decline in active clients. OTC client income retention for the half year was in line with typical levels in a mid-70% range, but performance was at the top end in Q1 and the low end in Q2.
Despite a stronger market backdrop, total active clients were flat, with growth at tastytrade offset by weakness in our OTC and stock trading businesses. Turning now to performance by division on slide 10. In the first half, we implemented a decentralized organizational model, enhancing client centricity and accountability across the business. It's still early days, but we're encouraged by the positive impact already. We now have five divisions arranged geographically, with group revenue well diversified around the world. This gives us a solid platform for growth. A reconciliation from our prior disclosure is in the appendix of this presentation. Now, looking at the figures, trading revenue increased against the prior year in all divisions. High revenue per client offset lower active client numbers in all divisions except the U.S., where stronger performance was equally driven by revenue per client and growth in active clients.
Moving down the P&L, we'll now turn to costs on slide 11. Overall, costs were well controlled, declining one% on the prior year to GBP 277 million. Within this, fixed remuneration was down five% to GBP 95 million, reflecting our implementation of efficiency measures initiated in 2023 and which reduced average headcount by 10%. Marketing costs declined four% to GBP 42 million, and revenue-related costs dropped 25% to GBP 23 million, reflecting normalization in our bad debt charge from an unusually high level in the prior year. IT costs increased 20%, reflecting investment in digitization of business processes and relocation of our data centers. Looking forward, we expect costs to be modestly higher in the second half, reflecting the timing of the provision we take for the U.K. compensation scheme levy, higher marketing costs, further investment in digitization, and some costs associated with the acquisition of Freetrade.
Turning now to our capital position on slide 12. Today, we announced that we're extending our share buyback by GBP50 million to GBP200 million. It's pleasing to show how we can both invest in accretive growth and return capital at attractive rates of return through our buyback, all while safeguarding our robust balance sheet. At the end of November 2024, we had GBP658 million of headroom over the minimum regulatory capital requirement of GBP286 million. And the group capital position remains strong following the acquisition of Freetrade and following the execution of the GBP50 million extension to our share buyback, with indicative pro forma headroom of GBP424 million. And this is stated prudently prior to capital generation from the end of November. Turning now to capital allocation on slide 13.
You can see here we have a well-embedded capital allocation framework, which has served us well, and I'll consider if it can be further refined and will update you here in coming months. With that, back to Breon.
Let me start by recapping what we said at our full year results presentation in July. Back then, we detailed three initial priorities: deliver better product, embed performance culture across the business, and increase efficiency. All of this is necessary to drive faster growth, and our priorities are unchanged. Moving on to our current product assessment and geographical coverage on slide 16. We have broad over-the-counter product range and global reach, but must add scale in this category, and our B2B2C offering requires investment. tastytrade provides us with a footprint in one of the world's largest retail futures and options markets, the United States. Our market share there has flatlined, and we must address this by simplifying our offering and differentiating our brand and performance marketing.
We've made progress to enhance our U.K. stock trading and investments offering with the launch of IG Invest, and the acquisition of Freetrade will take our proposition to the next level. Our crypto offering around the world remains very limited. Turning now to our progress on slide 17. I remain convinced that I joined a business with huge potential. We have a strong sense of purpose, and I will invest in colleagues that are driven to better serve our customers' needs to accelerate growth. Our focus on improving our products has some early momentum, and we've delivered content and features which our customers have asked us for. In our OTC business, we've rolled out IG Top Trader, which provides our customers with information on the positioning of our most successful traders, and we've deepened integration with TipRanks, a popular trading and investment research platform.
We've recently completed integration of our OTC and exchange-traded derivatives business with TradingView, a leading charting platform and social network. At the end of the first half, we rolled out measures that will enhance revenue retention in our OTC business by capturing more spread income and lowering our hedging costs without taking more market risk, whilst enhancing client experience. In our exchange-traded derivatives business, we launched tastytrade in the U.K. Revenue generated in the first half was minimal, but active clients and first trades are growing from month on month, and I'm encouraged about the long-term potential of this offering. In stock trading and investments, we rolled out IG Invest, which we intend to operate as a separately branded proposition alongside Freetrade. This will give us flexibility to deliver relevant products to different customer segments and experiment with UX and different fee and commission structures.
We're configuring new stock trading and investment propositions in other countries tailored to local market demand. In summary, we're making progress and have more to do to enhance our offering and broaden customer appeal to drive sustainable growth. Now, turning to the acquisition of Freetrade on slide 18. This is a great transaction for IG and Freetrade. Victor has built a disruptive high-growth business in a large and fast-growing market, and I'm delighted to welcome him and his colleagues at Freetrade to IG. The U.K. self-directed investment platform market is compounding at 10% per annum and forecasts to grow strongly, reflecting structural drivers. These include the democratization of financial markets, greater individual responsibility for retirement planning, increased pension freedoms, growing financial literacy, digitalization of services, and demand for better value proposition.
Freetrade brings us capabilities I've talked a lot about us needing, including a great brand and UX, product velocity, performance marketing capability, highly scalable technology, and a proven ability to acquire and serve customers at a low cost. This deal broadens our addressable market. Most of Freetrade's customers are in their 20s and 30s, and this gives us optionality around new product and market entry. Our initial focus will be on scaling Freetrade in the U.K. and completing the product roadmap to ensure that it offers everything a self-directed investor wants. Turning now to Freetrade's growth profile on slide 19. Since it launched in 2018, Freetrade has become one of the most successful challengers in the U.K..,. with 720,000 customers and assets under administration more than doubling over the past couple of years to GBP 2.5 billion.
Freetrade has well-diversified revenue split broadly equally across subscriptions, foreign exchange transaction fees, and interest income. In 2024, revenue increased 32% year-on-year to GBP 27.5 million sterling, including a record Q4 of GBP 8.3 million. Top-line growth has been delivered on a lower cost base, which has driven strong operating leverage. Freetrade achieved positive EBITDA for the first time last year as it scales through the important growth phase. I'm confident that we are buying the business at the right time, at the right price, and that we can help take it to the next level. Turning now to culture on slide 20. One of my initial priorities has been to implement an organizational structure which enhances client centricity and increases P&L ownership and accountability throughout the business.
Each of our divisions has been and will continue to be provided with dedicated marketing, technology, and product engineering resources to deliver product aligned with local market needs. I've put in place new leadership for two divisions in the period, the United Kingdom and Ireland, and institutional and emerging markets. Michael Healy joins us as the head of the U.K. and Ireland from Ryanair, where he was a commercial director. Laura Jane O'Shea joins as Chief Business Officer. She was most recently Chief Trading and Marketing Officer at Flutter in the U.K. and Ireland. Since November, we've hired over 100 new joiners from organizations with best-in-class digital offerings, including TikTok, N26, Deliveroo, Just Eat, Alphabet, and Flutter, and we're continuing to seek high-performing talent to drive growth. Hiring great people is one of my top priorities.
In the first half, we communicated new performance expectations with all colleagues, enhanced performance evaluation, and changed incentive schemes effective from FY25, with further enhancements planned for next year. In summary, change is underway. Our engagement survey shows that colleagues have an appetite to move faster to drive growth, and we're prepared to pay for high performance. Turning now to efficiency on slide 21. We've taken decisive action to close initiatives not delivering acceptable returns over the past 12 months, including DailyFX, Spectrum, and a legacy multi-year stock trading initiative. Spectrum was established in 2019 to diversify our product offering in Europe. The group has invested significant resources over the past five years attempting to scale it. It's clear to me that the original momentum, which had been hoped for, has not materialized.
Spectrum was broadly break-even in the first half of the year, generating some GBP eight million of revenue with modestly lower costs. I'm allocating the capital and resources it consumed to more promising initiatives. Headcount declined in the period, and we expect to have fewer but higher-performing people in the business in the future. To achieve this objective, we've initiated digital servicing work streams, which will enhance our automation and scalability, initially focused on client onboarding and servicing processes. Reducing costs to serve will create capacity for investment in product and marketing to drive growth. To conclude on slide 23, I'm confident that we have a solid platform for growth. Our first half performance demonstrated that the business is well placed to capture cyclical upside, but also showed that we have work to do to grow the active client base and drive sustainable growth.
I'm delighted to have announced the acquisition of Freetrade and extend our share buyback program supported by strong capital generation, replicating capital in a disciplined manner, balancing distributions, and the high equivalent rates of return from buying back our own stock with investments in growth that will create long-term value for all stakeholders. We will continue to monitor M&A opportunities that will close product and capability gaps, and we're on track to meet consensus revenue and profit before tax expectations for the current financial year. Our focus is on executing against the three priorities I outlined in July: product velocity, improved culture, and efficiency. We made progress in the first half of the year, perhaps, as I said earlier, a 6 out of 10, evidencing stronger growth will take time, but I remain very excited about our prospects. I'll leave it there and move on to Q&A.
Thank you very much. Ladies and gentlemen, if you wish to ask a question, please press star followed by one on your telephone keypad. If you change your mind and wish to remove yourself from the question queue, please press star followed by two. When preparing to ask your question, please ensure that your phone is unmuted locally. To confirm, that's star followed by one to ask a question. One moment for the first question. And our first question comes from Ian Wright, Autonomous Research. Sorry.
My question is now.
Sorry.
Maybe I can start with. Hi there. Thanks for taking my questions. Maybe I can just start with them, with three, please. Firstly, in terms of the hiring and organizational change, is there a sort of summary measure you can provide to us that basically tells us how much you think has already been achieved and how much is still to do? Are you broadly halfway through, sort of made the most difficult steps already? How do you see it, please? As I said, just at a summary level, that's question one. Question two, on hedging and risk management, should we interpret that the group's approach to hedging and revenue capture is settled now with the changes that you've introduced towards the period end, or is that still an area where there is a decision to be made about how that looks over the medium term? That's question two.
And maybe just the third one, in terms of the decision to run IG Invest alongside Freetrade, can you just help me in a little bit more detail to understand why that's the optimal proposition? I'm sorry, are you not running two businesses in direct competition with one another in that regard? Just interested to understand a bit more the thinking behind that, please. Thank you.
Okay. Are we off mute? Yeah.
Ian, hi. Good morning. It's Breon. I'll let Clifford take the second question. If he's happy to, he's here. He tells me all about six days. Hiring, I'm happy enough with the progress we're making. I'm very happy with the people who have joined. I think the reality of long notice periods in the U.K., in particular, and in some cases, Draconian non-competes has slowed us down. That's not helpful. I was asked a question six months ago about where the brand was and whether that was the employee brand, whether that was an inhibitor to getting some people on board. It's proven to be some people look at this and they go, "It's a turnaround in a public company. There's a bit of cultural change, and you're competing against the likes of Revolut and some other big American firms." So this is not for everyone.
But the ones that have joined so far, I'm very happy to have them here, and I'm excited about the impact they're making. I don't have a heuristic for how far along the journey we are. I think I'm pretty sure that someone asked me six months ago what the kind of typical level of change is at a time like this, and I would have said a third of people go, and then a third of people decide it's not for them. I think the work-from-home thing and I think the soft job market in London has probably slowed voluntary attrition versus what it might have done at different stages in the cycle. So in summary, the energy that the new people are bringing is palpable. Their enthusiasm about the opportunity and the kind of journey ahead of us is really exciting and helping enormously.
But we're definitely not. We're sort of at the end of the beginning rather than whatever the other side of that cliché is. Clifford.
Yeah, Ian, thanks for the question. I'm happy with our overall approach to internalizing market risk, and it's pleasing to see the recent initiatives making sort of incremental progress here in terms of revenue retention. I'd expect us to continually be looking for such optimization initiatives, particularly as markets continually change and we have new ideas, but I'm not expecting any fundamental changes in our approach.
Cool. And then the question about IG Invest and Freetrade. I think it feels like we're late to the game, and I mean generally across multiple product lines, across multiple geographies. And although we met Freetrade first, or the company had met them previously, but I met them first in March last year, maybe April last year. As you know, the deal only got closed last week. And I don't like kind of when we can avoid taking binary bets that may not pay off. I'd rather have multiple irons in the fire. So we're progressing onboarding for IG products generally across the markets. IG Invest was quicker and easier to launch a new UX because that's really what it is for a slightly different customer base, and that has some effect.
Freetrade was never certain, and indeed, we still have a way to go in terms of change of control from the FCA. So I feel that given the urgency to be competitive and have our brands have better products in front of customers, we have to have several bets at the same time. And that's partly the reason why we're not being more aggressive on guidance in terms of efficiency. We are running slightly inefficiently in the pursuit of growth to build a business that's more relevant to more customers sooner rather than later. I'm sure we'll come back to Freetrade later.
That's super. Thank you.
Our next question comes from Richard Taylor from Barclays. Please go ahead.
Yeah. Morning. A few questions from me, please. Keen to hear an update on incentives and how you're embedding the performance culture amid all the new hires. Secondly, it sounds like they're being run separately. Is there anything you can benefit from Freetrade to the benefit of the wider IG business, UX marketing, and so on? And finally, active's flat overall, but a big variance, say, with tastytrade up and Asia Pacific, especially lower. Can you signal when you would aspire to turn first trades and active in the OTC business into positive territory? Thank you.
I'll take some of those or maybe have a shot at all of those. Jump in if I miss something. Good morning, Richard. Incentives, the company had some performance management stuff in place, but it's been run a little more rigorously now. We are paying kind of non-linearly for really great performance and talking much more about the benefits of meritocracy and how that's not for everyone and how the best people that have the most to contribute should find great fulfillment here. So I think we're on that journey. The culture is changing. I think there's always a risk that people measure the change from where they were rather than think about the gap between where they need to be. So we're somewhere on that journey, but we're further to go.
Freetrade, so the way it works, and I'm sure you know this, but for others on the call, we've announced the deal. It's subject to change of control approval by the regulator. I'm sure that will come in time. The team there is very. I like the team a lot. I mean, Victor, the CEO, who I've spent a fair amount of time with, is smart and hardworking and focused, but also humble and low ego. Paul, the CFO there, briefly was at Revolut after he had previously worked at IG for seven or eight years. The tech team there were kind of known to us peripherally as well. So there is overlap between what they do and what we do, and I would expect that we will start sharing. I've received some kind of nice warm emails from some of their people this morning after the results.
So there's an enthusiasm there to work with us. There's a humility on our side, I think, that we can learn from them. But I also have to respect the kind of the process, the regulatory process, and that's not yet done. But I would hope that we will start working closer with them in the coming months, and we would hope to have the full deal completed late summer, but I can't give explicit guidance on that. It's outside of our control. And the last question, actives. Yeah, I mean, that's the worry. That's the number that I look at too. I can't give you a forecast. I know we're trying more things. We're being more honest about how hard it is and how we have to try more things more quickly. We've ramped up some of the thinking in terms of creative.
We've learned that this is all about IG in the U.K. We've learned that we've worked to do there. We're investing hard, and I don't just mean financially. We're investing hard in terms of talent as well. The Tasty guys have had a good run for the last number of months. They're also working hard. The difference in growth there in terms of first trades and actives is clear to us. So it's very much under focus. I can't give you guidance as to when. Do you want to jump in?
Yeah. I think in terms of sort of sequencing, I think clearly we're sort of flattish sequentially now, flat to down. I think the thing that I'm looking to see the business deliver are that sustained uptick in first trades and some of that seasonal. You've got ISA season and the start of the year in certain markets, combined with improved retention, clearly driving actives, and then look to see a sustained quarterly rise in all those metrics quarter on quarter, rather than blips through quarters. So that's what sort of early success would look like.
Very good. Thanks for your answers.
Thank you. And the next question comes from Ben Bathurst from RBC Capital Markets. Your line is open.
Morning. I have questions in three areas, if I may, starting on costs, where I see marketing and advertising expense was 4% lower year-on-year in the first half in what you sort of characterized as supportive market conditions. I seem to recall the fear in the summer was that you may have been underspending on marketing historically. So I just wondered if there's any update on thinking there. And secondly, on Freetrade in the detail question, but you showed revenue growth on slide 19 of 32% in 2024. I wondered if you could split out that growth and give indications to how much of that comes from higher interest income?
And then thirdly, really on longer-term targets, with the senior leadership team somewhat refreshed and new CFO on board, I wondered, do you have any plans to do a broader strategic update to the market in the next 12 months or so, or is that still likely further down the line? Thank you.
I'll let Clifford take the Freetrade question. I don't know. Look, we see merit. There's a new team here. We see merit in transparent, open, whatever the word is, inclusive conversations with shareholders and whatever else. That may get us to a strategy there, but I don't think today is the day to commit to that. On the marketing thing, I'd love to spend more money on marketing. Absolutely would love to spend more money on marketing, but I'm forcing people to operate in a resource-constrained way. And periodically, I task the CMOs to justify incremental budget. And to date, in the first half of the year, we haven't really had enough conviction that we could spend money efficiently. So we are trying to focus our efforts. We are measuring the return on those efforts more carefully. And I've got appetite to spend more money.
I think we're underspending, but I don't have such clear conviction that the full proposition from creative marketing for marketing creative all the way through to onboarding journeys, all the way through to monetization is sufficiently slick that we can step change marketing up, and that may be, as people are focused on proving things, that gets them to trimming some of the fat first to take some pressure off themselves, I suppose, as much as anything else, so marketing is very much a work in progress. It goes back to Richard's question. Clifford's answer is right, but this is going to take us some time. Do you want to talk about the revenue mix of Freetrade?
Yeah. I think Freetrade has a broad revenue mix. I think you can see from the proposition that it offers good value across the sort of various revenue drivers, so I don't want to comment particularly on net interest income, but their revenue streams around subscriptions, around FX, and so we're content that that franchise has legs, which will drive the accretion that we expect to see over time.
And the next question comes from Vivek Raja from Shore Capital. Your line is open.
Morning, chaps. Thanks for taking my questions. Three areas to question you on, please, if I may. The first one is on your initial comments about six out of 10 progress so far. I just wondered if you could say a little bit more about that, particularly what has gone well in your sort of first year and what would you like to have gone better. Next question's on the risk management changes. And if you could quantify for us the output of that, are you used to communicate that in terms of client income retention? So I just wondered if you could tell us what you achieved in the first half in terms of client income retention and what you expect risk management changes could deliver in future.
Then the last thing, I appreciate you sort of talked at a high level in terms of efficiency improvement, but I wonder if you could communicate that in terms of pretax margin. I mean, it's not a shabby pretax margin that you generated. Where would you like that to get to over time? Thanks.
Interesting to answer the last question, so I might have to jump in before him. These are volatile. We've committed to running the business more efficiently. I think we're evidencing that. But I think it's way too premature to be giving long-term guidance. Too many moving parts and too many unknowns. To the six out of 10, I think that would be my score on what we've achieved rather than the effort put in. A lot of people, a lot of people have kind of raised their game and put a lot of energy and thought into how we can make this company more relevant to more customers. So I think the six out of 10 is an output measure rather than a reflection on how much effort went in. But if we look back, I wish we had brought in more new people earlier.
I can't tell you how excited the team is to have Clifford here. He's helping enormously. It's good for the finance team, but it's good more generally as well, and sparing his blushes, although he's not blushing for the record, the other people who've come in, bringing energy and bringing new ideas from other often great companies, that's refreshing and helps people that were formerly here or previously here to raise their game as well, so I wish I'd kind of accelerated the rate of change, but it does take some time to kind of diagnose kind of what the right blend is, but if I had the time again, I would have brought in more new people earlier. You will recall there were some departures. I think there were four departures in March of last year.
And you're trying to steer a company through change and have shareholders and the board and regulators keep them comfortable as well. But the one regret is not bringing in more people more quickly. I'm happy with the progress we're making in technology. I'm happy with the divisional structure. I'm happy with some of the cultural moves. I'm very excited about Freetrade. So maybe it's a 6.5 out of 10, but there still is a reflection. There's a lot of work to do. On the guidance, sorry, on the pricing thing, do you want to take that?
Yeah. I think clearly we've got some large, strong, high-margin businesses that we're proud of, and we're looking to grow and are growing in some low-margin areas, some bluntly low-margin areas. We're not going to guide or yet target against PBT margins. What I can say is we're committed to accelerating growth in sustainable revenue. We do think there is strong operating leverage in the business, and that will safeguard margins. And ultimately, we want to drive consistent profit after-tax growth, EPS growth, and ultimately distributions to investors. So that's how we're thinking about the growth of the business.
Vivek, your second question, I'm not sure if that was an operating margin question or a kind of a gross margin, like an RTV question. So on that, because I guess it'll be interesting to other people as well. We continue to invest there. We have real capability in terms of risk management. It goes back to, I think Clifford answered the question earlier. I don't think there's a bit there is some volatility there. I think there's more. We have made an investment in something called price and size, which recognizes the fact that some of our customers trade in very small size and some trade very large, and that pricing that business accordingly makes sense for us and indeed the customer. So there's an opportunity to make ongoing investments to improve the quality of the business and indeed improve the customer experience.
But I think it's too early to give guidance on what that looks like from a financial point of view.
Not really a guidance question. It was actually about, I suppose, gross margin. It's about revenue retention. So gross client income and then net trading revenue that you recoup from that after hedging costs and client P&L. I just wondered, after risk management changes, what you achieved in the first half? And I'm not necessarily asking you to say what you think is achievable over time, but can you say what you did in the first half?
The primary change was a product change that in most of our OTC businesses, not all, but in most of our OTC businesses has differential pricing based on order size. So you can imagine that absent that, which is where we were, somebody trading in one lot versus 100 lots was getting the same price. Sometimes that led to one of those trades being mispriced. So we fixed that. There's a roadmap of other things to do. Some very talented people in the risk and trading team here, very talented, and they have literally years of work in terms of what they'd like to do to improve the proposition for customers and for the business. But, and this is very important, I can't just focus on monetizing the existing customer base better. I have to grow the customer base as well.
And that's the tension that we're living with.
Thank you very much, chaps.
There's a follow-up question from Ian Wright. Please go ahead.
Hi, there. Thanks again. Just a few follow-ups from my side, please. Firstly, on cryptocurrency, just sort of first part, am I right to think you've captured sort of more or less no upside from the heightened interest in crypto assets that really began in late October? And secondly, can you just set out your latest thinking regarding the introduction of crypto asset trading at IG? Sorry if I missed that in the prepared remarks, but is that something that's currently under development internally, maybe more likely to be addressed through M&A, potentially rolled out in some geographies before others? There's some help with that would be appreciated, please. Secondly, on the decision to exit Spectrum Markets, we can see that the financial performance hasn't been there in the last few years.
But what made you conclude that that business couldn't be improved or indeed sold as opposed to the sort of wind-down option that you've chosen ultimately? And just lastly, on tastytrade, what's the latest regarding the international expansion plans there, either execution on the existing plans that you discussed last year and also any new markets that might be being considered? Thanks.
A couple of spicy ones there. Yeah, at a very high level, our crypto offer is very subpar, and at a very high level, you can presume that we missed the uplift in the market over the last six months, whatever it's been, three months. That's not to underestimate the effort that we've made internally to improve some products and offer more coins or whatever else, but effectively, our product's not right. That's one of the big misses, actually, for the first half. I'd like to have made more progress there. We have some organic work. We're doing some work internally. We've looked at things like AccuCors. We've looked at some M&A, but it's a hard one to crack. Otherwise, we would have progressed it faster, so that remains a work in progress.
Recent events in the United States. We can't pretend that companies like ours have a future that are kind of where we're crypto agnostic. We have to embrace this. That's what our customers want to do. On Spectrum, I can't remember. Spectrum, I think, is five years old, something like that. It was very well resourced. Nicky, the CEO, did a solid job, and the team worked hard. In the context of the group, it wasn't relevant, and it wasn't growing fast enough. I guess the reason we made some efforts to see could we sell it, or was there another way out of this? Focus is a very valuable thing right now, and we have an awful lot of work to do. We wound it down. We appreciated the efforts of the team.
We wanted a safe transition for our partners and our customers, and we couldn't find a way to sell the business that would get us sufficient value in terms of solving for all of those things, so a decision was made whenever it was September, October, November, and that's progressed reasonably well since that. tastytrade, what was the question? Oh, international. Yeah. The experience in the U.K. has been educational, educational for people in the for all of us, really, including for the guys in Chicago. They have an enormously strong appeal to a somewhat niche audience. That's evidenced by the events they run, as they did recently in the U.K. and Ireland. Tom and his colleagues, JJ's the CEO there, but Tom Sosnoff is the founder. Tom has extraordinary charisma and appeal with some customers.
But in terms of materiality for the group and relevance to the broader customer base in the U.K., there's still some work to do. So I don't think we should be drawn now on where we go next. It's also subject to regulatory approval, which is outside of our control. So we're thoughtful about it, but nothing to announce this morning.
Thanks very much.
Thank you. Our next question comes from Richard Stuber from Deutsche Numis. Please go ahead.
Sorry, actually, all my questions have been answered. So thank you.
Thanks. So the next question comes from Richard Taylor from Barclays. Please go ahead.
Yeah, hi. A couple of quick follow-ups, please. On your answer on crypto, and it's sort of it cuts out, so I didn't actually hear all of it, but a different point, really. You're not hiding behind the regulatory issues, but can you just give us updates in terms of if there is anything you're waiting for from a regulatory perspective to accelerate your product there? I realize you're saying you need to do better yourselves, but what are the regs look like in your major markets? And secondly, tastytrade market share, I know it's growing, but how has its share gone in the last six months or so? Thanks.
tastytrade is growing, but I don't think it's growing share in any demonstrable or sustainable way. So I think we should be very honest with ourselves about that. And indeed, the guys are. And that's the reason why focusing on their core market is a prerequisite to build a platform for future international success as well. So there's work to do at tastytrade as well. I don't mean to hide behind the regulators, but the regulatory thing is complicated, and different geographies have different appetite for crypto. Our existing licenses, in some case, crypto might be an incremental kind of variation of I can't remember what the term is, but variation of license application. In other places, it's a completely new standalone thing, and that could be a year away.
So I can't go all in on crypto at the cost of focus on the core business, but we're pursuing organic licensing. We're pursuing, as I said earlier, a bunch of other strategies to try and accelerate this. I believe we must have a crypto offer. It's the miss of last year that we didn't progress it further.
Okay. So you could offer it in the U.K. and U.S. today, given the regs, or that would be?
U.K. to retail today. I can offer CFDs to professional customers. So that's a gap. In the U.S., I could offer more in the U.S. I'm going to get the numbers wrong, but order of magnitude, there was a stage when we offered 30 or 40 altcoins. We cut that back to six. I think we're back to 10 now. There's obviously been a change in the SEC the day before the inauguration. The former leadership of the SEC was very crypto skeptical. That now appears to have changed dramatically. We're a small business in the U.S., and perhaps we've been a little conservative there. So I understand the importance of the question. I don't really have anything very satisfactory to tell you, Richard. I would expect we will talk more about crypto in six months' time.
All right. Thank you.
Thanks. There are no further questions on the line. I would like to turn the conference back over to Martin, Head of Investor Relations, who will read the web questions.
Thanks, Mello. We have a couple of questions that have come in over the web. First is from Hayley Tam at UBS, and it's on the group surplus capital position. So Hayley notes that pro forma regulatory capital headroom of GBP 424 million provides significant headroom versus our requirements. So do we see scope to run with a smaller buffer?
So Hayley, look, thanks for the question. We clearly do have a strong capital position, notwithstanding the recent acquisition announcement. So that's pleasing. And alongside this, we're generating capital quarter on quarter. That's really pleasing. Having said that, as I mentioned in my prepared remarks, I do like our capital allocation framework, which sets out a clear sort of cascade and set of priorities. And I said I'd review it over this next little period and happy to take feedback. I think I'm getting feedback through this question. We do want to remain well capitalized because that gives us flexibility to grow, but we're not going to hold on to surplus capital if we don't need it. And I'm keenly attuned coming from other sectors where there's more clarity around specific buffers.
Thanks, Clifford. And two follow-up questions from Hayley. The first on our B2B2C offering. She notes that our institutional offering we've talked about that's requiring investment. Could we provide some more detail on how we're thinking about that opportunity?
Thank you, Hayley. I can't really provide. There's a small team of people focused on that. They're very capable. They're largely a sales team. We need to put some product behind that, product and tech resource. That's starting, but it hasn't started yet.
Thanks, Breon. Hayley's second question has actually been answered, so we'll move on to the final question that's come in via the web from Justin Bates at Canaccord. He's asking us to elaborate a little more on the rationale for Freetrade, what gives us confidence in the growth potential, and how important are synergies in helping us scale the business?
So we haven't talked in the Freetrade announcement about synergies for a whole host of reasons. It's not really the driver of the deal. But to the earlier question, I think there's stuff they can teach us, and hopefully some stuff we can teach them. The U.K. cash equities market is a tough market, but we need a better product to address our customer needs at IG in the cash equities, the cash equity demand. And Freetrade are focused and have been for many years on providing a very clear, user-friendly proposition. Their growth has been impressive. They have been capital constrained for many years, and I'm excited to work with the team. As I said earlier, these are the kind of people that we want to work with.
So, we don't underestimate how much work it is to build further scale here, but any day that I can get a clean technology stack with a focused customer proposition and a management team that's kind of targeting growth, that's a good day, and we're very happy with the deal.
Perfect. Thanks, Breon. Don't think there are any further questions on the web, so back to you, Breon, for any closing remarks.
Thanks, Martin. So thank you all for joining us today, either online, well, mostly online. We're quite excited, or I'm very excited by the opportunity ahead. There continues to be work to do. There's investment required, but the macro backdrop is encouraging. We're happy to follow up. We've got investor meetings over the next few days, so please come through to the IR team, to Martin, or contact me or Clifford. We look forward to chatting with some of you one-on-one over the next week or so. Thank you for your support today.