Good morning, and welcome to OTC Markets Group's Inaugural Investor Day. My name is Kristie Harkins, and I'm the Chief Marketing Officer here at OTC Markets Group. As a starting point, I'd like to share that today's presentation may contain forward-looking statements. For more information, please refer to the cautionary statement regarding forward-looking statements included in our presentation materials. We have an exciting agenda for you today, which we're going to kick off by sharing our corporate video, followed by a welcome and company overview from our President and CEO, Cromwell Coulson. With that, we'd like to kick off today's events.
OTC Markets Group sits at the crossroads between financial services and technology.
We want to provide a public market for companies to have public equity in a way that's easy and efficient.
We're really given the chance every day to help those Main Street companies that are building the jobs that help the U.S. economy thrive.
We're not your father's stock market. We're the future.
OTC Markets plays a very critical role in the financial markets ecosystem. We provide a trading platform that's an SEC-registered trading platform that allows for the 10,000 or so public companies that are not listed on an exchange to trade.
We operate domestically as well as globally. Our global market presence deals with some of the largest companies in the world and gives U.S. investors easy access to those types of investments.
We spend a lot of time looking at what are the biggest problems that small-cap companies face, that large international companies face. We're helping both small public companies, community banks, as well as large international companies have that trading platform and that opportunity to reach and interact with U.S. investors.
The core of the business is trading services. We operate a trading platform for FINRA member broker-dealers to, quote, "communicate with one another and ultimately trade securities." Regulators, investors, companies, institutions all want to see that data. That becomes our market data business.
Corporate services is the way we interact with the companies who have securities trading on our market.
The best companies are on our OTCQX market. We've got an OTCQB venture market, which works for entrepreneurs and early-stage companies. We've got an open market for brokers to still provide best execution in any security an investor comes to them with. We're more nimble. We react faster to market changes, to regulatory changes. Our applications from time to market are much smaller.
I mean, the future is about being more transparent, not only with your investors, but with your employees, with your customers, with your community.
We have worked extensively with issuers and creating best practices for them to follow, to identify to investors when promotion is happening.
We work very closely with our subscribers to provide them with functionality that they need to trade efficiently and to the best of their abilities in the over-the-counter market.
Quality data is what broker-dealers base their quotations and orders on. It's paramount for our marketplace.
We give these companies a public market that allows them to focus on building their company, building their brand, and building their business. Less time on the cost and complexity of being on a national exchange.
We serve the needs of traders, investors, and public company executives in an efficient and responsive manner.
Welcome to the OTC Markets Group Virtual Investor Day. It is a pleasure to share our perspective on our business operations. We have grown significantly over the years from what was a turnaround situation into a technology-driven, highly regulated, mission-critical financial market infrastructure provider and a publicly traded company on our OTCQX market. As CEO, I am a significant shareholder in the company. With widespread employee, officer, and director share ownership, we are all focused on building long-term shareholder value by offering our broker-dealer and corporate clients a compelling service proposition. I am proud to say many of our original shareholders, who are highly sophisticated investors, are still owners today. We have all benefited as we've grown the value that we provide for public markets.
Today, we will put more sunlight on the technology and data platform we have built and the opportunity to use our mission-critical infrastructure to continue improving public markets and growing our company. Our mission is straightforward: to create better-informed and more efficient financial markets. Our strategy, or how we uniquely execute our mission, is to operate world-leading securities markets. We share information widely through open networks that foster transparency. We connect broker-dealers, organize markets, and inform investors. We deliver elegant, reliable, and cost-effective subscription-based technology solutions for a future that is online, data-driven, and social. The core OTC values are aligned with our role as a highly regulated operator and as an innovative public company. We live them every day. We offer a platform to be public with three complementary business lines: regulated trading, market data, and corporate services. We deliver mission-critical trading infrastructure for broker-dealers.
We bring the benefits of public trading to a wide spectrum of securities, and we can efficiently fulfill the capital formation needs of a broad range of U.S. and global companies. The core of OTC Markets Group is the mission-critical infrastructure and cost-effective services we provide U.S. markets as an operator of broker-neutral, SEC-registered, and FINRA-regulated alternative trading systems. By connecting broker-dealers, organizing markets, and incentivizing disclosure and information availability, we provide broker-dealers with a range of tools and services and data so they can trade more efficiently with better information. Our market data business distributes useful and unique information that connects our markets and integrates our data into the screens and machines of brokers, investors, and regulators. What was an opaque market is now more transparent, electronic, and better regulated.
Our corporate services business line, a platform of services that empowers companies to be public and serves as a global gateway to access U.S. investors. As a public company ourselves, we want to make it easier for companies to be public. Our OTCQX Best Market and OTCQB Venture Market offer an alternative path for companies to go and be public. By using our data-driven market standards and technology platform, companies can ensure their investors have access to high-quality disclosure materials that are useful to investment decision-making. We provide the organization that is now recognized by state and federal securities regulators to monitor ongoing financial reporting. We offer data distribution infrastructure to connect public companies with brokers, regulators, and investors. Our platform empowers public companies to ensure their business operations, financial condition, and corporate governance are clearly understood by investors and key stakeholders.
Being public and transparent allows companies to demonstrate compliance with federal and state securities laws. Today, you will hear the senior executives of OTC Markets Group walk through how they manage our business lines. As a network-based platform, we all work together to help facilitate the success of our overall operations and the value of our customer offerings. I'm excited to hear your questions and provide clarity at the end of our presentation. Thank you.
Good morning. I'm pleased to be joined with Jason Paltrowitz, who's our EVP of Corporate Services. Jason, welcome.
Thank you. Great to be here.
Excellent. Just to kick things off, I'd love to just talk a little bit about the role our corporate services plays within OTC Markets and really how that's evolved over time.
Sure. Corporate services is really the companies that trade on our market, and it's the offering and the platform through which they're allowed to kind of meet their investors. If you think of it in terms of a traditional exchange, it's the listings business. It's the companies that want to engage their investors, that want to provide best practice investor relations, that want to be open and transparent and provide a public market so their investors can see the value of their investment and be able to trade, buy, and sell that investment and have access to kind of the best information available from an investment perspective.
How would you say that's changed kind of over time?
I mean, it's changed dramatically since I've been here. If you think about the evolution of OTC Markets generally, the OTCQX business was launched in 2007, the OTCQB business sometime in 2013, 2014. If you look at the market's evolution over time, you'll see a significant change to providing transparency and information to investors so that investors can make informed investment decisions. That really is a change that we've seen both on the structure of our markets going from paper-based, phone-based to electronic, but really the engagement that we now have with issuers and the way issuers see our markets as their gateway to meeting those investors.
While we have that Pink Open Market on the bottom tier, which is really that broker-dealer-driven market, right, that comes from demand of investors, when you start looking at our premium markets, our OTCQB and OTCQX markets, those are the markets where investors or issuers, I'm sorry, are really owning the investor experience. Our QB market, as the slide points out, our venture market is companies, early-stage companies that really want to put best foot forward, be proper corporate citizens, learn how to be public companies, and engage their investors in the best possible way with the lightest touch kind of corporate governance and disclosure requirements necessary to be a public company, really meeting the needs of what does an early-stage company need to do to be kind of best practice public company.
As you upgrade to our QX market, what we call our best market, that's really our highest tier and the highest level of disclosure, transparency, corporate governance, and rules around the types of companies that trade there. Both of those markets are really about transparency, disclosure, rules, and regulations to really show that they're investable from an investment perspective.
Tell me a little bit more about sort of how the companies break down when you think about the QX market. What are the main types of industries or the types of sectors that we tend to see?
Yeah. So it's interesting. Our QX market kind of services a wide breadth of company types. First, we split it out between kind of U.S. domestic companies and international companies. On the domestic side, you're really talking about kind of smaller companies, public companies, maybe companies that aren't yet ready to be on a national exchange, but where our market kind of meets the needs of where they are for being able to, whether it's raise funds or service their investors. We have a large group of community banks as a good example, companies that don't necessarily need all of the things that are required to be on an exchange. From a domestic perspective, it really is a market that fits the needs of those types of companies. From an international side, it's a little different.
We have some of the world's leading global brands that are already listed on their home market exchanges, whether it's Adidas or Heineken or Roche or Marks and Spencer, that are already meeting their local market disclosure and transparency requirements, but that still want to access the U.S. and the largest pool of investment capital possible. They use our markets as a secondary trading venue where they can leverage their home market disclosure but still provide U.S. investors the opportunity to trade in U.S. dollars during U.S. market hours and make their information available on all of the kind of sites and places where U.S. investors do their investment research.
What did we see last year just in terms of the overall numbers of companies kind of joining, whether it was the QX market or the QB market?
Yeah. Last year was an interesting year, not least of which it was the COVID year. Generally speaking, we started the first half of the year, it was slow, right? I think corporates generally around the world, U.S. as well as internationally, kind of were taking pause to see how we were going to shake out. From a corporate services perspective, we had a really slower start to last year than we had had traditionally. As we saw kind of markets equalize the second half of the year, we saw tremendous growth. Overall, last year, we saw 345 companies come to our market, and then again, domestic, international, from small caps to mega caps. Really, the bulk of that was in the second half of the year. 242 of those companies were kind of in the second half of the year.
What was interesting is as you looked at it, again, the first half of the year, companies were taking pause. By the second half of the year, there were a couple of things at play. First, the markets generally held steady and actually grew. Corporates really wanted to be able to leverage that investment, the markets, in order to grow as they saw that the markets were equalizing. It was also interesting in that retail investors became kind of the flavor of the day, right? Traditionally, in our markets, people did not want or issuers were not that keen to reach out directly to retail investors. We saw a trade-off or a trade-in trends last year where retail investors became more important. We saw significantly more issuers come into play to use our markets to try to access U.S. retail investors from around the world.
Jason, one of the other things I think it's important to touch on, I think you did a great job kind of highlighting really where's the value in the QX market and what do companies choose the QB market for and then the broker-driven market in Pink. I think it's also important to just talk about some of the other products and services that your corporate services team offers, the client relations role that we have as well, just to kind of broaden out that picture.
Yeah. For us, it's really about helping companies meet the needs of servicing their investors. Whether it's companies that meet the requirements of QX or QB, or maybe it's companies that don't meet those requirements or don't necessarily need or want the services that we offer on those markets, it really is about helping companies be better public companies. We offer a number of other services, including just the QX and the QB. For our Pink companies, we offer what we call our Disclosure and News Service. That allows them to be current in their disclosure. At least they're making their information current and available, and they're adding a base layer of transparency that allows them to service investors. We also offer companies the ability to see what their Blue Sky status is.
That's important pieces of information as they're going out and trying to build their shareholder base or raise money around the United States to see the states in which they are blue sky eligible. We give companies the ability to put level two quotes, to open up level two quotes to the public, and to have those on their website. Again, level two quotes is important for investors to be able to see what a security is worth and how deep the market is. Of course, for our QX and QB and even Pink companies, we have a number of visibility services, including our Virtual Investor Conferences platform that gives companies the ability to tell their story virtually to a very broad and diverse shareholder base, investor base.
That actually, that business proved very significant last year as companies were not able to travel as much and things like Zoom, like we are doing now, became the way in which people engage their investors. The Virtual Investor Conferences platform saw significant growth last year as companies leveraged that to be able to talk to their current shareholders, but also work to expand their shareholder base.
I think to that point, I mean, one of the things that we should just focus on a little bit is just aside from giving those markets that obviously are allowing companies to provide that disclosure, there's also really that access for investors and the visibility solutions that we help to provide in order to really frame out an investor's understanding of one of these companies that chooses to trade with us. Can you talk a little bit about visibility and how we think about that?
Sure. There's an old saying that stocks are sold, they're not bought, right? From an investor relations perspective, if you're a corporate, you have to work really hard sometimes to get the eyeballs of investors, right, if you're looking to grow your shareholder base, if you're looking to bring more capital into your company. What we try to do for our QX and our QB companies is to give them kind of a base level of visibility so they can incorporate that into their investor relations program. We do things like a video series for our QX companies. We do the virtual investor conference platform, as I said. We're doing press release and social media outreach.
We're doing a number of things that help companies tell their story, but that also transport whatever they're doing, if you're an international company in their local markets, and transport that across into the U.S. to make sure that if you are doing a video or a promotion in Germany, I see we have BASF up here, that we're allowing that to be distributed into the U.S. as well, whether that's a press release or a video. We work very closely with our companies, usually with their investor relations officers, their investor relations team, or their CFO, CEO, to try to understand what they're hoping to accomplish by being traded on our platforms and then see where we can fill that in to leverage the visibility tools that we have to help them.
I think we've certainly seen within this past year, all of those kind of virtual solutions, be it the video series, be it the podcast, be it the virtual market opens, certainly something that companies are much more willing to leverage and engage with, just given we're all kind of living in this virtual world at this point.
Yeah. Companies are being forced to make real changes in how they do things, whether it's travel, whether it's rethinking their budgets, their investor relations budget, whether, like I said, thinking about the types of investors they're looking to attract. As I said, retail investors are becoming more and more important for companies as an investor they want to have on their books. The things that we can do to help them with that, again, whether it's an international company that doesn't necessarily understand the U.S. landscape or whether it's a community bank that's looking to expand its investor base beyond its community, these are the tools that we can bring to bear to help. It's also years of experience. One of the things that we help companies with is simply because we have so many companies that trade on our platforms.
We have kind of seen what works and what does not work, and we can bring our companies together, and we can bring the common experience of being a public company to help our clients, our prospects use the tools to be successful in their own right.
Yeah. I mean, I think education plays such a critical role in the types of things that we're doing and sharing on an ongoing basis. It's not just about visibility, but to your point, how do we really help these companies grow within the public market space?
Yeah. We do a significant number of educational webinars. I think, Kristie, you and I, obviously, as our CMO, are working very closely. Things are not on here. The educational webinar series that we do, the events and the conferences that we participate in really are about educating, A, issuers on the public markets that are available to them, but also investors on the types of securities, investable securities that are available to them, whether it is how the market works, how to provide best practice investor relations, the importance of ESG research, investor relations. All of those things play an important role within the corporate services business and the services that we provide.
Thanks, Jason. I think that's given everyone that's watching us live some good food for thought. We'll be back together a little bit later for our Q&A session.
Looking forward to it. Thanks, Kristie.
Hi, I'm Dan Zinn, the General Counsel of OTC Markets Group. I'm joined here by my colleague, Liz Hess, who is our EVP of Issuer and Information Services and runs our Washington, D.C. office. Thank you all for joining us today. Liz, given your role and the work that your team does, maybe you could start by reviewing a little bit about our market standards and what your team does to ensure that investors have access to good company information.
Sure. Hi there. OTC Markets has developed its corporate services business with two overarching goals: to provide a platform for all OTC-traded companies to tell their stories to the market and to improve the information available to investors so they can make better-informed decisions. We are creating better-informed and more efficient financial markets by segmenting the market and by ensuring that investors know when a company has current disclosure publicly available and when they do not. The way that we have organized our marketplace, the companies in our marketplace, is into three different tiers. The best market, the OTCQX market, is for established and investor-focused companies. Today, there are about 530 securities trading on our OTCQX market. These are all companies that have met high financial standards. They have best practice corporate governance standards in place. They all have current disclosure available for investors.
They have to be operating companies. There are no penny stocks or shells or bankrupt companies qualified for OTCQX. Our second tier is our OTCQB market. This is geared towards early-stage and developing companies. There are about 1,006 securities on OTCQB today. These companies don't have to meet high financial standards, but the market is really organized around making sure that there's current disclosure for these companies and that investors have a good idea of who is operating the company, who the officers and directors and insiders are for OTCQB companies. We do have to have audited financials. There's a penny minimum bid price, and companies on QB have to do an annual verification and a management certification. Our third marketplace is our Pink Market. There's just a wide range of companies with various levels and timeliness of disclosure in this market.
What we do for the companies in this market is we identify them strictly based on the disclosure that they make available. There are no financial requirements at all. Companies are either put into current information, limited information, or no information, just strictly based on the disclosure that they have available for investors. Our issuer services team monitors the disclosure of about 11,000 OTCQX, OTCQB, and Pink companies today to appropriately classify them into these markets. We understand there's a very wide diversity of companies in our markets, and therefore, we recognize that there's a diverse variety of disclosure schemes that companies use to make their information publicly available. We recognize four different categories of disclosure. The first is SEC reporting. These are companies that make their disclosure available on the EDGAR system for everyone to see.
We monitor the filings there, and we can determine whether a company is current or not in their required filings. The second category is our international reporting standard. Companies that are listed on a qualified exchange and they make their disclosure publicly available in English. The same information in the U.S. that they make to their investors in their home country can qualify for our markets using their international reporting disclosure. Our third category is bank reporting. Banks already have a sort of intense regulatory regime here in the United States. Banks that are making their current reports available to their U.S. banking regulator will satisfy the disclosure requirements that OTC Markets has in place for current information as well. The final reporting standard that we recognize is what we call the alternative reporting standard.
This is meant for companies that sort of do not naturally fall into one of those other buckets. They are not SEC reporting. They are not on an international, they are not an international company on a foreign exchange, and they are not banks. These are companies that choose to make disclosure available pursuant to guidelines that OTC Markets has developed. They put together disclosure statements and financial reports, and they publish them through our platform to make them publicly available to investors. These are the four types of reporting that we recognize. OTC Markets uses those standards to organize the companies and make sure that investors have access to their disclosure.
Liz, thanks. That's a lot of good information about the specific disclosure that companies are making publicly available. I know your team focuses on more than just that kind of transparency, but also providing additional information to investors related to maybe other compliance areas or other things where we can survey the market and maybe have access to a certain amount of information that we can provide to investors. Maybe you can talk a little bit about kind of that other side of what your team does.
Sure. In addition to reviewing companies' disclosure sort of on an ongoing basis, we also are evaluating their compliance with our marketplace rules. We are monitoring for stock promotion and other public interest concerns. When there's sort of problematic behavior in the marketplace, we try to understand it and work with the issuers to make additional disclosure that might be helpful for the markets to understand the situation. Ultimately, where needed, we work with regulators as well. In particular, we also, in addition to monitoring ongoing disclosure that companies make, work to qualify companies for our QX and QB marketplaces. We review their qualifications. We conduct background checks. We make sure that they are meeting the standards that we've developed for the QX and the QB markets before we allow them to start trading there.
Once they are trading there, in addition to looking just for the ongoing disclosure, we are also looking to make sure that they continue to meet the requirements and that we identify any deficiencies that they may have. When they fail to cure them, we remove them from those markets. One of the other sort of important jobs that I think our group does is we work to establish best practices and our disclosure guidelines and the minimum qualifications for each of our market tiers. This is an area that we are constantly working on, especially with regard to marketplace trends and opportunities to improve information availability for investors. Over the years, for example, we have locked up the financial criteria for OTCQX companies. We have required better disclosure of insiders from OTCQB companies.
Another example is when we started seeing more companies relying on fundraising with convertible debt at a significant discount to the market price, we began requiring additional disclosure of those debt issuances for Pink companies. These are the kinds of things that our group is working on, looking at trends and looking at the data that is available to us to see how we can make sure that companies that are traded on our markets are providing the best information that they can to investors. Investors sort of have an idea where to go to look for information and what the expectations are and the baseline expectations are for each of those companies in our markets. Another type of information that we work on collecting in the issuer services department is just sort of key profile data for each company.
We manage a process where twice a year, we have companies go in and verify all of the profile data that we have for them, including just their business description and their officers and directors and their share data and their service providers that they use. Just basic sort of information that investors should have access to to better understand what it is that a company, what kind of business they're conducting, and who they work with. We also work with a number of third-party providers to help provide additional types of information for companies, a number of news vendors. We incorporate their data so an investor can see news along with financial disclosure and other types of information about issuers.
We work with transfer agents to provide current share data for the companies so that an investor could see when the outstanding shares change for a company and more easily identify dilution. The other thing that we focus on doing in our group is really more around surveillance activities. We are looking at not only to make sure that companies are putting disclosure out there, but we're looking at the types of other information companies are putting into the market. Stock promotion is a big one. We monitor stock promotion for all of the companies in our marketplace. We will put a flag on a company's profile if we see an ongoing promotion campaign that is either sort of a very heavily promoted stock, or sometimes it's just a promotion that just has outrageous claims in it. Really, it's just something that we need to alert investors to.
We do occasionally have companies put out additional disclosure about their stock promotion campaigns. Their surveillance team will also respond to regulatory requests when we have requests for information from regulators or occasionally to make referrals to regulators when we see activity in the marketplace that we think that bears the SEC or FINRA looking into. We also have one other tool sort of available to us that we use occasionally. We will identify a company with a skull and crossbones, and we call it Caveat Emptor. And this is used for companies that are.
The way I always think about it is companies that kind of represent maybe a public interest concern, right, where investors should just be aware that there may be something going on. At least from a legal perspective, that's how I've always looked at it.
Yes. Thank you for filling in for me there, Dan. The public interest concern is sometimes it's information that we think is very important that is not being provided by a company or answers that we're not able to obtain or just activity that we think is just concerning enough that we think it requires another level of warning to investors. That is a pretty good overview of the issuer services department.
I would agree. Thank you for that, Liz. That was great. Thank you from a legal perspective as well for all the compliance work that you and your team do. It's very much appreciated, and I think the market appreciates it as well. Thank you, Liz. That was a great update and good insight into what you're doing in issuing information services. I, as the lawyer, am going to focus on the exciting world of OTC regulation. Specifically, I'm going to talk about some upcoming changes to what's called SEC Rule 15c2-11, which has a major impact on the way our market operates. Before I do that and to kind of set the stage, I'm going to spend just a minute talking about the regulatory posture of our trading systems so I think it adds to the discussion as we go.
We operate two SEC-regulated alternative trading systems or ATSs. One is called OTC Link ATS, and the other is OTC Link ECN. For the most part, the changes to Rule 15c2-11 and a lot of the regulation that I will focus on is really related to OTC Link ATS. That is because of the way that system operates. OTC Link ATS is, under the federal securities laws, what is known as an inter-dealer quotation system. What that means is that brokers can use the system to publish, really publicize their interest in buying or selling a certain security. They can post the price and a number of shares that they would like to buy or sell. That information is available to their counterparts, other broker-dealers on the system, as well as to investors.
Brokers use the system to communicate with one another and ultimately determine whether or not to execute a trade. That works in contrast to, say, how an exchange typically works or how some other trading systems work, which is an anonymous matching engine. That is what OTC Link ECN is, where brokers send in an anonymous order, and the system itself has an engine that matches those orders against each other. If they do match off, that becomes a trade, and each party is notified that they have executed a trade. The reason that OTC Link ATS is our primary system and the reason that it is so impacted by these rules is because of the way OTC securities typically trade. If you think about Apple or Google or Microsoft, there is no reason to source liquidity if you are a broker.
There's such an immense trading interest from retail and other sectors that you don't have to go finding somebody to buy your shares or to sell shares to. That's a naturally occurring event. With, let's say, a community bank, which is a good solid company, something like the hundred or so community banks on our OTCQX market, there may not be that same natural pool of liquidity. If you're a broker-dealer representing either your own interest or that of your customer, you may want to access, let's say, a bank specialist broker-dealer who may be able to find additional liquidity through their pool of customers and their contacts and in that way help support the trading of that bank. That's true for a lot of securities on our market, a lot of OTC securities generally. That's why we're focusing here on OTC Link ATS.
I promised 15c2-11, and I will now deliver. Rule 15c2-11 has a huge impact on our market, and it's been around for about 50 years at this point, so not a new rule by any stretch. For the entirety of its existence, 15c2-11 has really governed whether and how a broker can publish a quote in the way I explained for OTC Link ATS in an OTC equity security. It's not about who can trade or whether something can trade. It's really about that public information, that public quote that a broker is making. The rule has also required since inception that before a broker can initially quote a security—in other words, before a broker can publish a quote in a security that's never been quoted before—it needs to ensure that certain publicly available information about that security exists.
It needs to affirm to FINRA, which is the broker-dealer regulator, that it has that information and allow FINRA to engage in a little back and forth and ask some questions. That is done by what is called filing Form 211 with FINRA. Once FINRA signs off that the company or the security is appropriate to be quoted, the broker-dealer can then publish a quote in a system like ours. This impacts every security. More than 11,000 securities have gone through some degree of 15c2-11 review or compliance before being quoted with us. Once a security starts being quoted, the broker that filed that 211, or if there are multiple brokers, all of those brokers that actually filed that form, have 30 days from approval where they are the only ones or that broker is the only one who can quote the security.
As long as the quote, as long as the broker is making that continuous quote without a break of four days or more, then at the end of that 30-day period, all the other brokers can jump in and start quoting and really create a deeper pool of liquidity and price discovery. That is what's called piggyback eligibility. It stems from those other brokers piggybacking off of the work of the initial filer. The theory has been that as long as investors have access to that pricing information, that continuous quote, that can stand in the place of continued issuer disclosure. Over time, those quotes can exist in perpetuity.
As long as there is a continuous quote, even well after the 30 days, this can go out for years and years, a security can continue to be the subject of public broker-dealer quotes even if the company ceases making information available. You heard Liz talk about the different tiers we have, our OTCQX and OTCQB markets, and then the designations within Pink, current information, limited information, and no information. The reason that Pink no information companies exist is because 15c2-11 allows for that, because they can continue to be quoted whether or not they make information available. After a lot of discussion and a lot of thought recently—and this was last September, but that is very recent in regulatory circles—the SEC published final amendments to this rule. Those amendments will go into effect on September 28th of this year when we have a compliance date.
Really, what the changes do is have two major impacts on the way our market operates. The first is that those companies, those no information companies and certain others that will not qualify under the rule will no longer be publicly quoted on our markets. They will cease to comply with 15c2-11, and they cannot be the subject of public broker-dealer quotes. The other major change is that instead of having this intervening intermediary, having FINRA opine as to whether a broker can start quoting a security, we, OTC Markets, will stand in that place. Once we do a review and we make a publicly available determination that the company has the appropriate information to comply with 15c2-11, all brokers can rely on our determination. That means significant efficiency in the market.
That means companies can start—excuse me—brokers can start quoting without waiting that 30 days, as long as they're relying on our determination. It means that over time, we have the ability to continue qualifying a company and doing an ongoing review so that we're always informing the market whether there's current information available. That ability stems from a lot of the work that Liz described that she and her team do, where the SEC came in and really spent some time understanding our processes, understanding that we have systems in place for reviewing issuer disclosure. Therefore, under this new rule, we qualify as what's known as a qualified IDQS. That gives us this kind of unique position for the moment where we can provide these kinds of publicly available determinations and really allow the rest of the industry to rely on us.
All of that, however, begs one final question, which is what happens to those companies that are no longer going to be the subject of a public broker-dealer quote? This is where we have proposed and, again, worked on very closely with the SEC, the concept of an expert market. The expert market would give effect to investor protection on a couple of different levels. You look at why the SEC proposed these changes to Rule 15c2-11 in the first place. Their stated reason was that when retail investors, the general public, has access to continuous quotes in the securities of companies that are not making current information available, they may be more susceptible to fraud. Without company-based information out there, they may be more susceptible to other fraudulent information.
When they see real-time quote updates and when they see an active market in that way, they may believe that this is a security they should be involved in. What the expert market does is provide an electronic marketplace for brokers to continue to communicate with one another and publish quotes so that they can ensure their customers get best execution.
If you don't have an electronic marketplace, if these, let's say, no information companies were just to be removed from our system, full stop, they would go to what we call the gray market, where brokers would call one another or have one-on-one communication to try to affect trades, but without the ability to really know whether they're getting the best price at any given time, and without the ability to really show their customers that they have gotten best execution, they have gotten the best possible trade for their customer. It also prevents regulators from seeing whether brokers have fulfilled that obligation. The expert market would allow that electronic market to exist, but would restrict the distribution of quotes so that retail investors wouldn't see them, and they would only be available to what's called under the proposal qualified experts, which are institutions, brokers, and accredited investors.
That's a group that's a little bit more risk tolerant, understands that they may be investing in securities that don't otherwise make current information available, and may be able to operate in that market without the same kind of susceptibility to fraud that a typical retail investor might. It protects the retail investors on one end, and it protects all other investors because it allows for that kind of price discovery and best execution determination. The expert market itself was a proposal that we made. The SEC published it on their own towards the end of 2020. There was a comment period. All the comments so far have been strongly in favor. We are hoping that the commission acts soon.
We look forward to implementing not only the expert market, but all of the changes needed to fully bake in the new amended Rule 15c2-11 and allow for the entire industry to adjust. We will provide more information about what we hear from the SEC and our industry partners as soon as that becomes available. Thank you all for bearing with me and listening to the regulatory update. I am looking forward to answering questions at the end.
Hi. My name is Matt Dukes. I'm the EVP for Market Data at OTC Markets Group. I'm going to give you a quick overview of the market data business, talk about some of the trends we're seeing, as well as some of the opportunities going forward. Let's get started. Here is a kind of a quick snapshot of the market data business from a revenue perspective over the past 10 years.
As you can see, the business has been growing pretty consistently. A lot of this is really due to the unique data set that we have, as well as some new products that we've launched over the past few years, as well as the growth in the market overall. In the right-hand corner here, I kind of break down the revenue by business line. One of the interesting things—you may hear some of my colleagues talk about this as well—is kind of the virtuous cycle that exists between our business lines. The pie is pretty evenly split. The way it kind of works is success at the corporate services level helps market data. Same thing with the trading services, as well as progress that we make on the market data side will help influence and drive the businesses of corporate services and OTC Link.
It's a virtuous cycle, and it's kind of a good trend that we've had going pretty much for the past 10 years. I'm going to move on now and kind of talk about market data's main product lines and how they kind of fit into our revenue makeup. We have three main product lines: real-time data, reference data products, and our compliance data. The real-time data products are the core product line for market data. This is the data feeds that are consumed by participants on our marketplace, as well as the main market data distributors like Bloomberg, Refinitiv, and now ICE. Real-time data products make up kind of the core of the market data offering because it really powers the continued quoting and trading on our marketplace and also helps us grow the reach: more investors, more retail investors, more institutional investors.
You can see here some of the key stats around this. For 2020, we had a pretty fantastic growth in 2020. Our pro users up 17% and non-pro users up 35%. That is a lot that is attributable to the growth in the retail trading in 2020, a lot of it from the pandemic and differing change in behavior of a lot of retail investors. As well, we have had significant growth in our BD enterprise licensing. What that is, is really that goes out to—that is mainly consumed by online brokerages, which is, again, feeds into the retail story. We have seen a lot more interest from the online brokerages. Again, that is a trend that has been happening over the past five years as well. You can see some of the statistics here. Number of distributors, our data gets out on all the main financial portals.
We've had continued growth internationally: Europe, Canada, Asia. That's really helping our business here on the real-time side pretty significantly. Next, I'll talk about the reference data products. When we say reference data products, this is really around providing end-of-day pricing information as well as security and company reference data. This is non-real-time. A lot of this is used by large custodian banks as well as wealth management firms to track valuation as well as feed their internal systems around security masters, company masters, stuff like that. This business line has been a lot more stable and kind of grows linearly with the marketplace. As we see more activity on the marketplace, we see more issuers and securities on the marketplace, this business line will grow in step with that. That's kind of what we've seen.
It kind of goes back to my point around the three different business lines feeding into each other. All right. I am going to move on here. Our next product line is our compliance and analytics product line. This line is basically kind of the new product area for us. We launched some of these original compliance products about five years ago, and we have been adding to them over the past five years. What we have built here are analytics suites that help compliance departments automate their processes around OTC equities and now small-cap listed equities. What this really does is has two effects. One, it helps them cut costs as well as better monitor the OTC marketplace. As well, it also helps these firms basically be able to quickly differentiate between the wide breadth of securities we have in our marketplace, right?
They can quickly discern the super large-cap multinationals versus some of the nano-cap securities, right? This helps compliance groups get more comfortable with the OTC marketplace. That, in turn, helps us get our data in front of more institutional and retail investors. We've seen, again, very consistent and strong growth in this area. Our compliance data customers are now at 45. This has been a growing area for us over the past five years. We believe that it's going to continue over the next couple of years as well as we kind of branch out. What we've started to branch out into is around tangential areas. We started around OTC equities, and now we're building around small-cap equities as well. We built a whole new browser-based application called Canary, which helps, again, these compliance groups track OTC and small-cap listed securities.
This has been a big growth area for us and also where we're adding new products. Two of the new products that we have in 2020, we launched our Blue Sky Data product. Blue Sky Data, what the product does is basically provide information to, again, these compliance groups around Blue Sky exemptions, which are state securities law exemptions for OTC securities. OTC securities do not get a blanket exemption like listed securities do for the state Blue Sky laws. This data helps them monitor that information and will help them with their FAs and RIAs to be able to allow them to talk about, write research on OTC equities. It is very important both from a larger corporate level to get this data out as well as from a market data-specific level.
Caravan is a bank data analytics platform, which we've been continuing to build on and offering that data out on our public website as well as in Canary. That's around the US community bank sector, which is important for us. We have about 550 community banks on the marketplace. This is another new product that we've been that we're continuing to add to and something that we're going to try to drive sales over the next year or so. Those are the three main product lines for market data. Again, as I mentioned with the business lines, our product lines, again, they kind of work with each other. If you're a real-time data customer, it really helps you to have as well the compliance data. If you want to be in the OTC equity marketplace as a participant or as an investor, it helps.
You need this information to help make the best decision. It is something that we see. Again, it is kind of a virtuous cycle that has been created. The last couple of points I am going to make are around trends we are seeing, our strategy, and the opportunity over the next year or so. The trends, this is not a surprise to anybody. We have seen significant volume increases in 2020 versus 2019. You can see here on the right. For the market in general, it is more of a long-term story. We have seen continued activity on the marketplace. This has been going back about 10 years now. That continued growth really talks to, again, what corporate services has been doing, bringing on more quality and transparency to the market, new investable assets, alternative assets around the crypto market or, like I said, the foreign multinationals.
This is what's really driving the activity and driving the dollar volume. Again, in 2020, it was significant, and we're seeing that again in the first quarter of 2021. That's definitely something that is for sure we think going to sustain for the rest of the year. Global visibility. Again, I mentioned previously around the multinationals and what we've been doing to get more foreign securities onto the marketplace. That's really helped as well in the market data business. We're seeing interest from Canada, Asia, Europe. The amount of international securities as a percentage of our overall activity is significant, usually about north of 70%. That type of activity is really driving visibility of our marketplace and is helping drive market data as well.
From a strategy perspective, what we really try to do is, first and foremost, develop our products around our core market, which is OTC equities, and build out data that really surrounds that core market as best as we can. That really kind of goes to what we've done around Blue Sky Data, what we've done around compliance analytics, Canary, Caravan. These are all core parts of the OTC marketplace. That is kind of the first component of it. As we do that, we want to expand that product set to these tangential areas where we have expertise and we can bring value. The small-cap US equity marketplace is one good example of that because the securities that trade on that marketplace are very similar to many of the securities that trade in the OTC equity space.
We're bringing what we're doing in the OTC equity space to that space. We understand that, we understand the players, the issuers, all of the data that surrounds that marketplace. That's where we believe we bring some value. Third, we want to broaden our sales reach outside of the core US broker-dealers to more of the wealth management space in the US as well as to distributors and financial portals outside of the US. What we've been able to do in the US is we have a core of market participants, many of the large bulge bracket banks. They're all our customers. They're all very aware of what we do. We want to expand that out to the wealth management groups, regional wealth management groups, RIA groups to help them understand our marketplace as well as internationally do the same type of concepts, right?
We've expanded significantly into Canada. We're seeing a lot of interest from Europe as well as Asia. That is kind of from a sales perspective where we see growth is going to happen and where we're going to target our efforts. Opportunities in the short term is really around, one, we're going to leverage what's going on in terms of market activity and the investor interest that we're seeing. That's just there's been a mass amount of retail involvement. We're seeing a lot more interest, again, from online brokerages, from the wealth management groups. We're going to leverage that and push as much as we can on that. Another interesting component in the short term is there's significant changes to Rule 15c2-11, which I'm sure Dan is going to go into in his presentation pretty significantly.
What it does for market data is we believe be able to provide the opportunity to bring on more foreign securities onto the marketplace. That will, again, kind of spin the wheel in terms of reaching additional institutional investors, reaching additional retail investors, which will, again, drive interest in our market data. That is coming later in the year. That is something that we think is going to be pretty significant. The third is really to drive sales around our existing customer base, which we built up over the past five years and push kind of the new products into that customer base because we think that, like I said, there is a lot of value. We really understand this space, and we can really help our customers increase automation, cut costs, as well as introduce them to the OTC market.
That is what I see at a high level for the market data business. I think there is a lot of opportunity. 2020 was a good year. I think 2021 is going to be a better year. Thank you. I look forward to answering your questions after the presentation.
Hi. I'm Mike Modesky, President of OTC Link here at OTC Markets. OTC Link is responsible for operating two ATSs in the over-the-counter market space. Our primary ATS, OTC Link ATS, trades 11,000-plus securities on the over-the-counter market. OTC Link ATS is a network model that offers the ability for our subscribers to post quotes and send trade messages between one another to affect transactions in over-the-counter securities. In the last few years, we introduced OTC Link ECN, a fully automated matching engine ECN in the over-the-counter market.
OTC Link ECN offers anonymity and direct order entry into the over-the-counter market. In the next few months, we'll also be adding a third ATS to our suite of products, OTC Link NQB IDQS. The need for OTC Link NQB IDQS will allow our ECN, OTC Link ECN, quoting with market participant ID OTCX, to be able to distribute its depth of book out to our subscriber base. Over the last six months, OTC Link ECN and OTC Link ATS have seen tremendous growth in transactions while the entire market overall has grown in transactional count. Here at OTC Link, we focus on the needs of our subscribers and want to give them the tools they need to trade in the over-the-counter market.
Whether a wholesaler wants to trade with their own MPID in our fully attributable ATS model or a subscriber wants the anonymity offered by OTC Link ECN, we have a tool for them to use. As we continue to grow our tools and solutions for our subscriber base to use on a daily basis, we focus also on reliability and maintaining 100% uptime in the over-the-counter market. Over the OTC markets, Link ATS still remains the primary marketplace for trading OTC securities.
Hi. My name is Bruce Ostrover, Chief Technology Officer at OTC Markets. Today, I would like to talk about both the technology team and our technology priorities. Our technology organization. The first team to talk about is our trading team, which is comprised of core development and core QA. The word core translates to our ATS and our ECN offerings.
Both of these teams collectively ensure that the development, QA, and production releases of these products are successful 100% of the time. Our next team to review is our web-facing client team. That team is comprised of, again, a number of development partners and our QA team. Together, they ensure that our OTCMarkets.com website and our OTCIQ product are completely deployed successfully and without problems 100% of the time. In addition, they are responsible for internal applications that we use to both monitor and provide performance enhancements to our ATS and our ECN products.
It's important to note that at OTC Markets, we have a very low ratio of developers to QA staff, and we keep it very close to provide an agile working environment, which means if we need to roll out a patch within the hour or two, we have the ability to do that or to create a longer development cycle of two to three weeks to add additional functionality into any of our products, which include both our core trading platform and our web initiatives. Our top technology initiatives are resiliency and high availability. Both of these are at the top of the list and are paramount to our success here at OTC Markets. Resiliency ensures that our systems are up and running 100% of the time. I'm happy to report that it's been like that for a while.
High availability is another important product that we offer or parts of the product that we offer that allow us to use redundant components to continue to provide a high level of operational excellence. How do we operate? We are a fintech company. By that, the underpinnings of all our offerings are based on technology, which is obviously an incredible driving force throughout our product line. We are very cost-conscious. We do not spend shareholder money where it is not necessary. Lastly, as you've heard the last number of years in the technology world, our cloud offering is very much based on how we can evaluate our cloud behavior and our offerings and what we gain by moving our products to the cloud. Some are moved into the cloud, and some reside in our data centers. Hope you have a great day. This was Bruce Ostrover, Chief Technology Officer.
Hello. My name is Antonia Georgieva, and I'm the Chief Financial Officer of OTC Markets. Thank you all for joining us today for this exciting review and discussion of our business. My colleagues provided a great overview of our markets as well as our products and services. I would like to focus now on how we monetize our client relationships and the value we create for issuers, our broker-dealer subscribers, and the investors who participate in our markets into revenue and ultimately shareholder returns. We generate a majority of our revenues through a subscription model. In fact, over 80% of our revenues are recurring in nature. For example, once a broker-dealer decides to trade using OTC Link ATS, that broker-dealer typically continues to subscribe to our services until it stops being active in trading securities on our market.
We also generate transactional revenue, which provides us with some gearing to the volume of trading activity. As volumes fluctuate, our revenue mix will also vary, though we expect to maintain a significant majority of our revenue from subscription sources. As Mike outlined, OTC Link represents our trading services business and operates our trading venues, OTC Link ATS and OTC Link ECN. Our broker-dealer subscribers pay monthly subscription and connectivity fees to use OTC Link ATS. They connect to OTC Link ATS through our OTC dealer application and pay fees based on the number of authorized users per subscriber. As Matt discussed, we provide our subscribers with access to the extensive market data, compliance data, company data, and security information that we collect through our OTC Link and corporate services business lines, for which our subscribers pay us monthly license fees to access the information.
Our market data licenses are priced at either per enterprise or per subscriber rates and are delivered through direct connectivity, extranet connectivity, third-party market data distributors, and OMS providers. We generate a majority of our market data licensing revenue from sales through market data redistributors, and we share with those redistributors a portion of our market data licensing revenues. Jason and Kristie discussed our OTCQX Best Market, the OTCQB Venture Market, and the suite of services we provide to the companies trading on all of our markets. Companies that choose to have their securities designated as OTCQX securities do so annually on a calendar year basis and pay a one-time application fee and an annual fee.
Companies on the OTCQB market renew their services annually or semi-annually on the anniversary of the date on which they joined our market and also pay a one-time application fee as well as an annual or semi-annual fee. These fees are fixed. They do not vary based on outstanding shares, market cap, market segment, or otherwise. Companies on both markets also receive access to a suite of other services. Companies on our Pink Market may subscribe separately to these services and pay fees on an annual or semi-annual basis. Our transactional revenues are mostly related to OTC Link ECN. It generates transactional revenue based on share volume that is executed on the ECN matching platform. Our broker-dealer subscribers pay a fixed fee per share to remove posted liquidity on the ECN and receive a rebate for posting their own liquidity.
Certain of our OTC Link ATS revenue is also transactional in the form of usage fees, which broker-dealers pay to publish quotes and communicate and negotiate with other counterparties on OTC Link ATS. These fees include per security position fees and message fees determined daily and payable monthly. Separately, and to a much lesser extent, we generate certain transactional revenues in our market data licensing and in our corporate services businesses. Ultimately, the value we create for our clients translates into shareholder returns. Thanks to our subscription-based revenue and the upside we generate by our transactional businesses, we've been able to achieve profitable top-line growth, generate strong free cash flows, and distribute consistent shareholder returns through our growing regular dividends, special dividend, and our share buyback program.
I would like to conclude by thanking you once again for joining us today and inviting you to join us now for our questions and answers session.
Hi, everyone. Thanks so much for watching our presentations. We'd love to just kick it off by responding to a few of the questions that you guys have asked us throughout today. I'm going to direct the question for each of our team members here. Jason, I'm going to start with you. You gave a great overview on the QX and QB businesses and the value it provides. I'd like to talk a little bit more just about the trends that we saw in 2020 and into 2021 and what types of companies and sectors we were seeing really reflect that growth.
Thanks, Kristie. Sure. As we reported in our financials, 2020 started off a little slow, right?
The pandemic saw kind of corporate issuers kind of take a pause to see what was going on in the world. While we started slow, the sales team, the corporate services team continued to build pipeline and reach out to issuers and have those discussions about our markets. What we saw on the latter half of the year was a significant rebound in terms of number of companies joining both our OTCQX and QB markets. The fourth quarter actually saw record revenue and number of companies joining. As we look into 2021, that trend is continuing. The number of companies that are joining our markets, the number of applications we're receiving from companies continues to grow and probably close to all-time highs in both of those. Those are really coming from all over, right? We're seeing significant growth again in the US community bank space, right?
There was a pause last year as banks were dealing with the PPP programs and some of the other issues from the pandemic. We are also seeing tremendous growth from outside the United States, Europe primarily, as well as Australia and our core non-US market of Canada. Those are coming from multiple types of industries. Certainly, resources, mining mineral, oil and gas have been on the upswing, so we've seen a lot of that. Also from esports and gaming, another significant industry that we're starting to get traction, technology, biotech, blockchain, and crypto. All of these industries, as Matt pointed out in his presentation, are really driving our growth kind of into this year.
That's great. Switching gears for a second, Dan, I know you gave a really great overview of all the changes that are happening in our market based on 15c2-11.
We did get a question around what are some of the other regulatory recognitions and some of the other regulatory initiatives that we're pursuing specifically to OTC Markets Group?
Sure. Depends on how much time we have. I could do this all day. We have a number of other things that we have traditionally been pursuing. I think Jason and Matt both referenced our work with Blue Sky and working with the individual states and the fact that we're now up to 37 states that recognize OTCQX. That's a nice accomplishment, but it's not all the way there. It's an ongoing effort. This year, I think, presented its own set of challenges in terms of engaging states on that issue. That is something we plan to continue pushing for.
The other two higher profile issues that we've been working on for some time, we were heavily involved in the passage or the introduction last year of the ESOP Fairness Act, which is legislation that would allow more or less OTCQX companies, or those that would qualify for OTCQX, to offer an ESOP, an ownership plan, that would operate in step with how a New York Stock Exchange or NASDAQ ESOP program would operate. That's really just a correction of the updated rules in the tax code that need to be modernized given really everything we've talked about today about how our market operates and what kind of electronic market we've developed. The other legislative and regulatory push that we've been making over the past maybe year or two is around margin eligibility.
Again, that's for companies largely on OTCQX, maybe some OTCQB that would qualify under those standards as well. That's a push we're making both with legislators and with the Fed. It's a modernization of a pretty outdated set of rules in what's called Regulation T that the Fed monitors that really have not grown up and looked at the OTC market as it exists today. They're sort of publishing a list of companies that would qualify for margin that were OTC based on certain criteria back in 2007 when NASDAQ became an exchange. Since we have filled that role and really modernized what that market was even from there, we're getting a lot of interest in folks both on Capitol Hill and inside the Fed in working on that and seeing that modernized.
I'll cut it there, but certainly, that's the tip of the iceberg in terms of the things that we're focused on.
I think great to see and be able to talk about the progress that we continue to make on a regulatory front towards some of these initiatives. Thanks for sharing that, Dan. Cromwell, I'm going to turn it over to you next. We've gotten a question just around some of the longer-term trends that you see as impacting the business over the next 12 to 24 months. I think does IPOs and SPACs and things like that also affect that future pipeline? It's a secondary part of that question.
I mean, as I look at the two years is not a long-term trend in the building out of platform business.
I mean, we look at most of our business lines take five years to go from first launch to building out a sustainable revenue model that in the middle has connected with a customer need. As I think about the trends, the short-term trend is, of course, 211, which is very important because that's allowing us to onboard new clients and to be recognized as the organizer and monitor of ongoing disclosure. That fits into a bigger framework, which is our platform has developed. We really provide a full suite of tools for a company to be public in a much more modern manner than used to be available. If you look at the traditional stock exchanges, they're fantastic institutions with great histories. From a technology perspective, your experience is a lot like buying software from IBM 20 years ago.
It's expensive, it's complex, and it comes with a lot of different consultants. Our approach to being public is the same approach you've been seeing in the technology space with the development of open-source cloud services, software as a service, and allows companies to assemble the tools they need to be public in the most efficient manner for them. What's your reporting standard? Where are you located? What are your needs? How established is your business? We've been building out both the platform but also the operational recognitions and regulations. I think that trend is really going to open up being public. On SPACs, I see SPACs as a tool, which is a development to take companies public more quickly. It has a management, it has management is assisted by a SPAC sponsor who knows the process of going public.
Their skill to bringing companies across to the public market is, but it's one tool. Direct listings, another tool. Our market, we've seen direct listings forever with community banks. We've seen direct listings with innovators such as GBTC. I see our platform opening up being public over the longer-term trend. On the second side is we've got a platform for broker-dealers. The OTC market was very dealer-centric. Our network model was the key one. We're much more open to different types of tools for broker-dealers. Our goal is to build whatever services and data broker-dealers need to achieve best execution and regulatory compliance. Those pieces, as we add them in, will be more useful to broker-dealers because we're much more collaborative with the broker-dealer community. We view ourselves as a vendor.
We're very cost-conscious of creating a competitive platform to help them do more business on their own platforms or do their existing business at lower cost. Those are the big trends which I see us helping facilitate and grow, but none of them are easy to execute. The execution, the hard work, the building the business over the long term using our data and technology-driven viewpoint.
Cromwell, I know you just brought up and talked a little bit about the services that we continue to build out for the broker-dealer community. Mike, maybe that's a nice transition for you just to expand a little bit on the launch of the OTC Link NQB and sort of what that means from a broader business perspective for us.
Sure. OTC Markets traditionally had a fully attributable IDQS that's driven by quotes and messages across the platform.
Once we released OTCX, our ECN product into the marketplace, a number of broker-dealers' subscribers moved towards the desire to have trading take place on a venue that was just sending orders for execution, and they enjoyed the anonymity of the platform. One of the things we tried to overcome was an ability for OTCX to have a depth-of-book feed to be able to send that out to our broker-dealer community. Based on 15c2-11 from years ago, one of the things we need to do is put OTCX's quotes into an inter-dealer quotation system. NQB IDQS will give us the best of both worlds. It'll have an IDQS that's coupled with a matching engine and attribution.
We'll be able to put all of the orders that exist in OTCX into NQB IDQS so that we will be able to accomplish what we set out to do and have a depth-of-book feed for our OTCX ECN and also a home for other subscribers that would like to trade on a fully attributable matching engine platform to be able to put their layered orders into that system as well.
That's really helpful. Thanks, Mike. Matt, maybe over to you because I know that part of what Mike just talked about will affect the market data business. Maybe if you can just kind of elaborate on that and some of the other opportunities that you're seeing.
Right. Mike spoke about the NQB data feed, which is going to be super helpful for us in the short term.
That's an opportunity that we're going to have right away to use from a revenue perspective. Also, going forward, other opportunities are kind of things that I highlighted in my presentation, which is really around the small-cap listed space as well as internationally. We see a lot of opportunity there. Again, it's a domain we understand. Looking out forward, additional data sets that'll be tangential to the OTC space. Again, small-cap listed, there's private securities, there's data around banks. There are a lot of interesting opportunities that are available.
That's great. Maybe, Antonia, just to kind of expand and sort of round out a lot of the way that we've talked about some of the opportunities, can you just share a little bit from your perspective on kind of how you see our overall revenue mix evolving over time?
Certainly, Kristie.
We have been and will continue to be predominantly a subscription-based model. As we discussed, we have seen a significant uptick in our transactional-based revenue coming out of our ECN. That component is largely unpredictable for us as it is driven by general market activity. It will introduce some fluctuations in our mix as well as in our overall transaction-based revenue. We do not expect the mix to change dramatically. Even as we introduce the new ECN NQB component of our business, which Mike outlined and Matt added to, we expect that line of business to also bring a mix of subscription and transactional revenue and largely sustain what we have experienced in the past. Again, in terms of expectations and for investors looking at our financials, they should expect some fluctuations around our mix over time as the balance of transactional and subscription-based revenue varies.
At the same time, I would say the majority of revenue will continue to be subscription-based.
Just as a follow-up question to that, Antonia, we did have one of our viewers just ask kind of how we think about our overall cash balance and how we see that sort of changing over time. Maybe, Antonia, you want to start, and then if Cromwell, you want to chime in as well, that would be great.
Certainly. We evaluate our capital needs as part of our budgeting process as well as on an ongoing basis as we evaluate the changing circumstances in our marketplace as well as our opportunity set. Historically, we have deployed our capital first and foremost to support organic business initiatives. Occasionally, we have also engaged in select M&A activities as a use of our capital generation.
Most importantly, we have focused on supporting our strong shareholder returns through our regular dividend, our special dividend, and our buyback program. We do not expect substantial changes in our deployment of capital, and we will continue to evaluate the use of the cash that our business is generating along the same lines going forward.
The one point I would throw in is the reason we have an ongoing dividend, which we want to have to provide recurring revenue income to our shareholders, and a special dividend is it gives us flexibility. If we were to find an attractive acquisition, we would have some cash. Now, we have not found an attractive major acquisition, and over time, we have been mainly an organic growth story. That said, we are open to acquisition-driven or organic internal investment. Financial discipline is very important.
We run our balance sheet carefully and conservatively, and that's our goal to keep having enough financing to be able to invest in the business while provide returns to our investors who are our ultimate owners.
Thanks, both of you, for that. Jason, we did get a follow-up question to the session that we did earlier just around the cross-listing process, talking a little bit about QFEs and how that kind of translates onto our market and really helping companies to access that global retail investor. Maybe if we can just expand upon the discussion from earlier a little bit.
Sure. We primarily and part of the growth we're seeing is actually international companies kind of looking to access the US retail investor. There's lots been made that retail investing is back.
Certainly, through the pandemic, we've seen the increased importance in retail investors and issuers looking to access those investors. Part of the growth in the fourth quarter last year and into this year that I've mentioned is international companies now recognizing the importance of that investor base and trying to attract them. Part of that clearly is to have a security that trades in the US, in US market hours, in dollars that's easily accessible through the broad retail trading platforms, E*TRADE, Schwab, etc., where retail investors can buy those securities on their phone or wherever they do their investment, have access to that, and be able to have the information to do their investment research, right? That's the basic premise of what we're providing international issuers is transporting all of that into the US to access the US investor.
When it comes to accessing global retail investors, non-US, a little bit different there. The US still represents the most sizable portion of kind of investment in the world, and the US retail investor is really kind of that 800-pound gorilla that everybody's looking to attract. When you start looking outside the US for retail, it really is country-specific, fits and starts. There are some countries that have a bigger kind of history of retail investing than others that are more open to retail investing. If US corporate issuers are looking to access that in other countries around the world, not really what we provide, but certainly the mechanism to attempt to do that would be a cross-listing the other way. Although I would say that there are a significant number of countries around the world that give their investors access into US markets.
It's something I think as a corporate issuer you would have to think about and kind of really look at the markets or the pockets of non-U.S. retail investment that you'd be trying to go after and see what the best outcome would be. I'd add into that a really important point about when the word retail investors is used sometimes positively, sometimes negatively, but for a big part of being public ties into ESG, governance, social connections with your key stakeholders. The best public companies use being public to connect with their key stakeholders, their community. Whether it's ownership by consumers, transparency into their community, or good governance and the transparency of that good governance, these are some really key points of being public. We're an organizer of markets, but companies need to take ownership of their public market. Our platform provides that.
I don't see with the trends in ESG and the trends in regulatory compliance and the trends in governance and good corporate housekeeping that being public is something that companies will want to shy away from if they want to be successful in a future that's much more transparent and connected.
I think that's a really good segue to one of our other questions, which, Liz, I'm going to actually throw your way. Cromwell just spoke about, as did a number of you guys, just about providing disclosure and the way that that works and becomes available to whether it's our subscribers or investors that are logging into our website.
I think maybe we can just spend a couple of minutes just talking a little bit about the disclosure that we do make available and kind of how that shows up so companies and investors know where to look for that information.
Sure. The most important aspect is that the disclosure that companies make is publicly available. It needs to be out there and easily accessible for investors. Any investor can go on our website, otcmarkets.com, and type in a symbol or a company name and have access to all of the same disclosure that my team has access to when we're making the determination of whether the company is providing current information or not. Any financial reports that they disclose, any of their key profile data, who their officers and directors are, what their share structure is, all of that information is available on our website.
We link to companies' SEC filings and bank filings as well. The international companies that are traded on our QX and QB markets also have all of their financial disclosure available in English for investors on our website. Yeah, the goal is to make the information as concise and as easily available for investors as possible.
That goes forward with our platform analogy. When we want to store data in a cloud web service provider, they give us multiple choices of databases and data stores. We give companies multiple choices of disclosure that works for their current operational practices and their management knowledge. An international company listed on a leading foreign stock exchange, they need to make their disclosure available in English to be compliant with SEC Rule 12G3-2(b). The underlying accounting financial reporting is using the standards that their management team knows best.
They are able to provide the clearest disclosure under that model. We fit that into our market. We do it for banks. We do it for SEC reporting companies. We do it for companies that are not required to be SEC reporting but have audited financials. Our goal is to give companies choices on how to provide the best and clearest information to investors and to give brokers choices on what is the best way to efficiently execute a trade and to fit that into our highly regulated industry in a manner that is transparent and open to see. I think that is the platform piece that we have been assembling and today is coming together and will be a real game changer in the decades to come.
Cromwell, that was very well said.
I think that's a great place for us to wrap and to thank all of you for being on this Q&A session with us today, but also to thank all of the investors and companies that joined in to hear our presentations. With that, I'd like to thank you all and conclude the event. Thanks so much.