Ladies and gentlemen, good morning to the press conference of Swissquote Group Holding for the first half results. I would like to welcome you. The press conference itself will last about 30 minutes. We'll go through the presentation. If you can't see the presentation on your screen, then certainly you have a chance to download it from our website. For the sake of a good organization, I would ask you to mute your microphone during the presentation. At the end of the slide presentation, we'll have a Q&A session. For the Q&A session, before you ask your questions, I would just ask you to raise your hand so that we can have an orderly Q&A process. With me on the table this morning is Yvan Cardenas, who is our CFO, and he also will be available for questions at the end of the presentation.
Let's start and let's dig into the agenda of our first half results. We will obviously give you some information about our figures for the first half. We will dig into the business update, as we call it, so we have a little bit more information on our different reporting segments. We will discuss about the guidance 2021. We will have a look at the balance sheet. Then at the end, we also have a slide about our joint venture partnership with PostFinance, with our neobank application, Yuh, that has been very successful in its launch and is growing according to plan. Let's go to the first half figures 2021, and with some very good news for us, because that's the one factor that we can control the most, which is the account openings and the account opening requests.
You see here in the first half of 2021, we had a massive increase in account opening requests, up to 117,795 requests. That created some issues at certain moment in our organizations because we were not ready actually to handle so many requests, and specifically the questions all those people had, legitimate questions about our systems. Our call center in Zurich was a little bit overwhelmed, but this is now solved. We have hired enough people so that we can again give the service our clients deserve when they open an account at Swissquote. This has pushed the number of clients to 459,800, which is obviously a record number from Swissquote. You can see the distribution here on the slides between trading accounts, which is by far the largest type of accounts we have.
Then we have eForex accounts and also a little bit of saving accounts, something out of the past. As you know, saving with cash at the moment is kind of difficult since there is no interest rates, interest paid on almost any currency. In the first half, we had almost 50,000 new accounts. Here what we want to show you is two things. First, the average deposits per account is now increasing. Again, we've passed the threshold of CHF 100,000. On average, clients hold about CHF 109,000. It's a little bit compliant with our business model. We are targeting the mass affluent clients and offer them a very good service with a very broad service. At Swissquote, you can trade all type of securities, all type of currencies, and these at a good price.
This very important to note where our business model is. We're not a deep discount broker. We have a nice segment that we cherish with a higher deposit than what you would expect at other online brokers in Europe. Another very good news is that the clients we are acquiring are very active here in the first half of 2021. We did 9% of total revenue with clients we acquired in 2021. You can see that this is good news for us because now these clients are with us. They have been acquired, and obviously they will also contribute to the revenue in the second half of 2021. If we go back a little bit, the clients we acquired over the last five years from 2016- 2020 represent 61% of our revenues in the first half.
Still, also the older clients, the one that we acquired back in 2000- 2005 are still with us and still contributing a decent amount of revenue to the company. You see here the number 7%, then 12%, then 11%. What we wanted to show you with this slide here is that once you have an account with Swissquote, normally you stay there. You develop the business with us. As you get older, you bring in new assets, we have a very loyal client base that are very active, interacting with us and asking us improvements or to add new features to the system. This is a little bit the success story of Swissquote, keeping the clients, listening to them, developing our business, offering new type of services. The charts that is probably the most amazing is the client assets.
Here for the first time ever, we have crossed the CHF 50 billion mark, and with a quite amazing net new money for six months. We have CHF 4.9 billion of net new money that came to our bank, and that together with the good market performance, pushed the assets over the mark of CHF 50 billion. You can see here, going back in time, the growth story of Swissquote. I could go back to the inception of the company back in 2000, and you would see that these assets has grown over time, but never with an organic growth of CHF 4.9 billion in six months. I can well remember when we were a much smaller company. We had targets of net new money of CHF 1 billion for the entire year, and here we are almost doing these figures in one month.
This shows you how strong the brand has become and how attractive we are to many clients with the service we are offering. Obviously, the margin on assets has been really good. We have ended 17 as a margin, 1.17%. That's revenues divided by the assets under deposit, and which is much higher than the bandwidth we have set in the past around 80%-90%. This obviously is linked to the very good markets we had in the first half, very volatile markets on crypto specifically, and this obviously pushed the revenues in the first half. Here, again, the net new money of CHF 4.9 billion in the first half. I would like to mention that this is purely organic. We had similar growth in the past, notably in H1 2019 at CHF 3.4 billion, but there part of that money was non-organic.
It was linked to an acquisition we did. Here in the first half, the almost CHF 5 billion is really made simply by the new clients coming to Swissquote and also the other ones that improved their relation with us and deposited more assets. That's for us, the most important figures we are looking at. This together with the number of clients is the growth story of Swissquote, and is also the best guarantee for us to further improve our results in the future. Okay. Here, sorry. There's been delays on my slide. Here, a chart about the origin of the net new money. It's still a strong Swiss business. We have 57% of this CHF 4.9 billion that has been booked in Switzerland. That's the biggest part of it. We have the usual suspects.
We have the Europe that accounts for almost CHF 0.5 billion, Middle East, Africa with CHF 280 million, and the Asian market with CHF 1.4 billion. This is a similar pattern that you could see also in our previous reporting. Just one mention maybe for Switzerland, this is the headquarters. Also when we have institutional clients that would book and open an account, then obviously this would be booked in Switzerland even though the clients are not domiciled, or the companies or the B2B clients are not domiciled in Switzerland. This is the place where it's booked. Net revenues of CHF 264.4 million. That's the record number. You can see also here that going back in time, the growth pattern we had, usually the second half is a little bit slower than the first half.
This is due to some seasonality with summer where clients traditionally are a little bit less active. Here, what is spectacular on this chart is the business with crypto. You can see the very strong growth here from the second half 2020 to the first half 2021. Also if you deduct the crypto business, all the rest had a very nice growth. Fee and commission income did growth, all the segments in the first half, also without the crypto impact, had a very nice growth pattern. Net revenues of CHF 264.4 million. Again, a little bit delays with the slides. Here. Sorry. Okay. Also, one slide we wanted to mention, if the slide is coming here. Sorry. We have tried to compute the net revenues by what we call Swissquote locations. The Swissquote has many subsidiaries and many rep offices in all over the world.
We have offices in Europe, London, Luxembourg, where we have a bank. We are also present in Malta, then in Dubai, Hong Kong, Singapore. In some places we are a booking center, in some places it's a simple rep office, and the clients are booked in Switzerland. Here what we wanted to show you is that the Swiss domestic part of our business represents 65%, and the rest represents 35%. If you now concentrate on this 35%, you see that here over time we had a nice growth. We did grow from about CHF 30 million revenues in the first half 2017, to now more than CHF 80 million. This is very good news for us. This is also the results of a strong investment we did in the past, this international expansion that we pushed.
Because we know that Switzerland is a smaller country, given our strengths and our service offering, we think that we can be successful also outside of Switzerland. This here is a little bit the results of that investments we did over the last year, and very nice growth with our operations outside of Switzerland. Again here, where are we located? In Switzerland, we have office in Gland, Zurich, then in the U.K., in London, Luxembourg with our bank, Malta, Dubai, Hong Kong and Singapore. Also another interesting chart that we would like to comment a little bit is that Swissquote is not only a retail business, it is to 78% a retail business, but we have also many asset managers, money managers. We're doing business with other banks. We have white label solution. We're a custody bank for investment funds.
We're dealing with funds managers, bank brokers, and all this represents 22%. Here again, if you look back a little bit where we started in 2017, roughly the B2B business represents us CHF 20 million, and here also over the last year, we had a very nice development of our business. It's important for us because the B2B part is a little bit less exposed to volatility, and so this stabilizes our top line and ultimately our bottom line. We have invested a lot of efforts and money to develop our white label offering. Here again, this is the results of our past investments. We think that the B2B segment is very attractive.
We're one of the few banks and service provider that can offer the full range of services, really from simple custody to execution brokerage and also if requested by our partners, we also have white label solutions where we are putting our famous and well-known eTrading platform for our business partners. A good example is PostFinance in Switzerland. There we do everything from custody to brokerage to the technology where PostFinance clients can trade securities using our services. All this together here has a nice, strong increase in profitability. In the first half, we did CHF 134.6 million. This is an incredible number when you think that this was our forecast for the entire year. We realized this in only six months. We're paying taxes, obviously, we have now a net profit for the first time above CHF 100 million in only six months.
If you have read our press release, you see that we aim to double these numbers compared to 2020 for the entire year, as we are targeting now to have CHF 210 million of operating profit for the entire year. That would be double as much as the number we had in 2020, which itself was double as much as the number we had in 2019. Why are we so confident that we can achieve this?
Simply because we have had this amazing growth in number of clients. They are with us now. They are trading actively, and even though the market would be a little bit less volatile in the second half, we are very confident to reach our targets. This company has a track record of always reaching the targets they are announcing. Usually, we are overachieving our targets. At least it was the case for the last years.
Certainly, when we announce the targets, we are able to hold it. Little bit delays for the slides. Hopefully, it's coming here again. We have a slide about the staff, the number of people, here finally. We aim to say that we are a technology powerhouse. Out of the 904 full-time equivalent, we have 33% that are in the technology sector. That's probably much more than any bank in Switzerland. We're really a tech company. Of course, we also have some salespeople. We also have infrastructure support, compliance risk, which is very important for a bank. We have 15% of our staff that is in our remote location. It's a very young company, so the average age of our staff is 34. We have 58 nationalities, that's probably whenever you do business in Switzerland, you would have this type of mix.
Not because we want to be so international, but simply that's fact. In Switzerland, you have many nationalities, and also because it is so difficult to hire IT specialists and software engineers that obviously we are also obliged to grow outside of Switzerland to hire the specialists we need. We improved very much our gender diversity. These figures was very different. Now we have 1/3 of our staff, which is female. That's really good news. Also we managed to reduce the turnover to 10%. That's, as you know, for tech companies now with the international competition on talents, this is something we have a close look at. It's good to have a little bit of turnover because this keeps your average age young and dynamic. Obviously more than 10% would also represent a challenge for the company.
I can very well remember in the past when we had turnover in the magnitude of 20%-25%. That means that you have to rehire the company every five years. This has improved a lot and also stabilizes a little bit our operations. 904 people, that's a lot. Also here to mention that now part of our staff is working part-time. This gives a little bit of flexibility in our organization and helps us growing the business immediately because the part-time staff we're hiring are usually high-skilled specialists, and they help us pushing the developments when we need it. We are investing money into our brand, into our marketing. That's the game when you are an online company active in the entire world.
We're very famous in Switzerland. If you look here, we've just conducted a brand awareness using Ipsos as a company to see a little bit where the Swissquote brand and how strong the Swissquote brand is. Here you see that top of mind when it comes to online trading, we are almost 25% of the people do know Swissquote. If you push a little bit, do you know Swissquote? You see that the brand awareness now is almost 40%, 45%. That's as good as the bigger guys in Switzerland. This shows a little bit the results of our constant investments in our brand, with the various initiatives we took. Swissquote now is part of Switzerland. We have been the very first online bank. We have been the very first financial website in Switzerland.
It's a story actually that goes back to 1996 when we launched everything. This also is the reasons why we are celebrating on 25th anniversary. 25th anniversary since the launch of, not the bank, but the platform, Swissquote.ch , already 25 years ago. One of the important numbers we're looking at is the equity. The equity did now pass the threshold of CHF 0.5 billion. It is an amazing growth and is mandatory to develop our equity. We have a lot of business with B2B partners. We have high number of assets under custody. We need to have a strong equity and a strong Tier 1 ratio to be able to fuel our growth in the future. We have strong capital ratio here, 24.3%. It did grow over time.
Sometimes we pay an acquisition and then it has a small impact because we're paying our acquisition out of our excess cash. The growth is so strong that it always goes back to levels above 20%. CHF 544 million of equity, that gives us good opportunities to grow the business in the future to finance our organic growth. There is probably also a little bit of space for M&A activities in the future. More to that a little bit later. The first half-year in a nutshell, CHF 264 million of revenues, CHF 134.6 million of pre-tax, CHF 116.4 million of net profit after the taxes. We have this amazing net new monies of CHF 4.9 billion. Total client assets above CHF 50 billion. Core capital ratio 24.3%. The gross figures of the company.
These are these account opening requests we experience in the first half, and then the number of accounts, 50,000 we opened. You could not say what happens to the others. Some of them are in the process of being opened now. Sometimes we have a little bit of delay. Sometimes the account is a little bit more complicated. We are also picky with the clients we onboard. We are a Swiss Bank. We have lots of obligation when it comes to be compliant. We are very careful with the type of clients we are onboarding as a Swiss Bank. We have a few slides about our various revenue segments. Here there is a lot to say and a lot to read about these slides. Sorry about that. It is a little bit charged with information. I will try to guide you through it.
First of all, you see the revenue. If we divide our clients in two segments, the trading business on one side and the FX business on the other side, you see here that the trading business is the biggest part of our revenue. This represents CHF 200 million of revenues in the first half, and also the number of trading accounts of more than 400,000. What are these guys trading? They're trading all type of financial instruments, and this is the bottom right chart. You see that they do trade shares to 25%. They do cash and FX also to 26%. A big part of that is also crypto revenue up to 30%. Your other usual type of financial instruments. We have structured products, derivatives. We do fixed income. We have ETFs and investment funds.
This here represents not the number of trades, but the revenue generated in each of these segments. Again, as we already mentioned, we also have a lot of B2B clients. If we now look at the distribution of assets, this is about half. 51% are assets from retail clients, B2C, and then 49%, these are assets deposited from institutional clients. This does not reflect the 50% on the revenue side, because obviously on the assets from our institutional clients, we have a lower margin. What we wanted to show you here is that there is a nice balance between our B2B and B2C business. Another number that I would like to comment is the revenues by nature. Sometimes we have the feeling that Swissquote is just about volatility. When the market is good, the revenue is good.
This is obviously true, it's not the full story. We now also have a bigger part of our business, or a big part of our business that is asset-based, up to 20%. Asset-based means custody fees, means swap revenues, interest revenues, even though it's becoming tiny small, that all in represents 20% of our revenue in this segment. Speaking about crypto, this is something we strongly developed in the past, we are continuing developing it. We believe in cryptos. We think that it has now become a natural part of the business. We don't think at all that crypto trading or the crypto business will disappear. Here are a few numbers. When you're at Swissquote, you can trade 24 different cryptos. There's even one that we have launched, together with our partner, PostFinance. It's called Swissqoin.
This is our own token, but you can only trade it when you have a Yuh account. The other 23 are the classic cryptocurrencies that you would expect at the bank, like Swissquote. Obviously, the biggest one are Bitcoin and Ethereum. There is where we have most of the trades, but there are newcomers, like the Dogecoin that has been pushed by famous personalities and also the latest add to our family is called Polkadot. In order to be successful and to offer and to please our clients, you have to develop this business. It's very rewarding since we now have already CHF 1.9 billion of crypto assets under custody. You can expect these numbers to be quite volatile, together with the volatility on the underlying cryptocurrencies. That's a little bit the rule of the games. You need to offer excellent execution.
You need to offer custody services so that the clients that would trade with you as a bank has a safe haven to deposit their cryptocurrency. A little bit about the number of clients. We had more than 60,000 customers that traded cryptos in the first half, but only a part of those clients, namely 10%, do exclusively trade cryptos. I've heard in the past that the growth is just about crypto. That's not the case. We also have traditional clients in bracket that would also trade crypto. This is even the bigger part, 90% of these 60,000 clients do trade other securities at Swissquote, and then they diversify part of their holdings with crypto assets, which is probably a good strategy. Don't bet 100% on crypto, but spice up your holdings with crypto assets. Then also, we have a little bit of information about customer clients profile.
Surprisingly, you will see that 65% of our clients trading crypto are in the age of 40-60. It's not just something for millennials. It's everyone is trading crypto. We even have a number of 9% that are older than 60 years. I think our oldest crypto trader is above 90. You see, this is really becoming an asset class fancy for everyone. The last information here on the slide, we're not only offering B2C services, but we also 68% of the revenue. Now it starts to diversify. We are becoming an execution partner for other banks, other institutional clients, and they are using our brokerage services and our custody services. This already represents or did represent in the first half, 32% of our revenue. Of course there, this also stabilizes a little bit the top line.
I think it's important as a service provider that you have a good diversification of our client typology. Again, here, our bank status and the fact that we have been an early adopter of crypto technology. We have a very credible offer in Switzerland and abroad, with our serious approach to crypto trading. We have a lot of additional services that will come in the future. We are investing a lot in this sector, because we believe in cryptos, and we think that it will stay there for the longer term, despite the bad news you get here and there. It has become an asset class that is now accepted and acceptable by the entire world. Okay, about Swissquote. We have a very competitive offering in Switzerland. Usually people don't realize, but we have zero account maintenance fee.
If you have an account and you have a few thousand CHF on it would cost you zero. The custody fees are capped. It is capped to CHF 50 per quarter, so that is a max of CHF 200 per year. For these CHF 200, you can deposit millions and millions and millions. We will not charge you more. This is also a token of our success. If you look also one of the reasons why we could onboard so much assets, CHF 4.9 billion in the first half. This is also because we are absolutely not greedy on custody. Basically, with custody, we would like to cover our costs because we know that ultimately, we will make our money with transaction. We are very aggressive on options and futures. There you can trade as of CHF 1.50.
We have our lowest fee for FX and structured products is at CHF 9 flat. You can buy package of trade, and then you would pay flat fees of CHF 19 per trade. This number is obviously a little bit higher than our competitors that are offering deep discount brokerage. When you consider the full service we offering, the broadness of our financial instruments that you can trade, the fact that the custody is capped at CHF 200, then all in, it's a very competitive offer, and this explains our growth and our successful business model. We have thematic offering. These are so-called AMCs, and you see here also that we have had a nice growth of it in the past. Now this all represents, or the manager represents already CHF 440.6 million.
We have still an objective to reach about CHF 1 billion. This will probably reach over the next 1.5 years, and now it's growing strongly. We have realized that this is a very nice way of mixing our technology together with our financial skills. We have 10's of different certificates, very successful, and it's a good product for starters that would open an account but don't know exactly what type of products they should buy. However, they may have an idea. They may say Switzerland is a good place to invest, so I buy a Swiss tracker, and then obviously they can go into the tracker, see what type of companies we're investing, and this gives him investment ideas, how to trade and where to trade. Very successful business model and will push this hard in the future. Here again.
We have the same type of charts for our other segments, the eForex business. Here also, you see that we have a nice growth here in the first half of 2021. We did more than CHF 60 million of revenues. We had volumes of CHF 746 billion in the first half. Here also, there's a good mix between the retail business, B2C represent 64%, but we also are a liquidity provider to many partners, and that represents 36%. What can you trade when you do forex? You can trade forex, obviously, FX, that's the biggest part, 49%. We now are improving our CFD offering. That represents 32%, and then we have a bunch of precious metal. Here also, part of the business is volume-driven. That's really linked with trade, but then we have also parts that is simple asset-based.
I mentioned swap revenues in the past, and that represents 18%. Traditionally, Swissquote has been a little bit weak when it comes to CFDs, and if the slides would like to pop up. Here it comes. We are improving our offering on single stock CFDs. It was not a request in the past because we had such a broad range of direct equity investments, so why would you buy a CFD if you can buy the stock? We realized that CFDs has a lot of advantages. You can invest smaller amounts and have the same effect, and slowly but surely, we're starting to increase our offering. We just added 100 new single stock CFDs, and there will be many more that we will add to our system in the very near future.
We have an aggressive account fee structure where you could trade. If you have a prime account, you would only pay 0.09% of commission, and also the standard trading account is very aggressive on prices. There's no surprise here. It's an international, very strongly competitive market, and there you just have to be in the market to be able to gain clients. You would see this type of fee structure almost the same all over the world. Again, there our big advantage is that we are a bank. When you open an account and trade forex with us, you have the security of a Swiss bank and not trading with a dodgy forex broker. We have a serious service offering, and this is appreciated by our clients. Let's go to the guidance 2021. Here, it has been announced in our press release.
We aim to do CHF 465 million of net revenues. That's a 47%+ compared to 2020, where we had CHF 317.3. The operating, the pre-tax profit will almost double, +29%, to CHF 210 million from CHF 105.6 in the past. Look what happens over the last two years. This is a strong growth story. We almost double. Now the second time in a row, we doubled the pre-tax profit. What will happen in 2022? The growth story will continue. Now we have all the clients we have acquired in the last two years, and also because of the developments of our services, because of the developments of our companies abroad, we will also grow the top and bottom line in 2022.
It's a little bit early to make a forecast, I think as long as I can remember, this company has always experienced growth, and 2022 will not be different than the years in the past. Still, for the moment, we do appreciate our incredible growth numbers. A 100% growth for the second year in a row is quite a performance. Because we are already in August, we can give a little bit, a first taste of July. July, you see here that the pre-tax profit is at CHF 14.1 million. July is traditionally the weakest month in the year because it's summertime. This year, we had the impact of the euro that so usually people are trading a little bit less, but still CHF 14.1 million in the weakest months of the year is a very good number.
You can see also here that the growth is continuing. We had more than 5,500 new accounts in the same period. There also one thing that is quite amazing. We had CHF 700 million of net new money for the month of July. At the end of the month, we increased the assets under custody again, from over CHF 50 billion now to CHF 51.5 billion. Obviously the market helped a bit, but certainly the CHF 700 million of net new money was the biggest part of that asset growth. Okay. Now a look to our balance sheet, and then we'll almost come to the end of this short presentation. Here we have total assets of CHF 8.6 billion. There also, that's the highest number ever. I already mentioned the total equity of CHF 544 million. Amazing growth compared to 2020. Now, where does the money come from?
That's in big part due to customer. Here you see that CHF 3.2 billion. We have $2.1 billion and EUR 1.3 billion. What are we doing with the cash? Well, unfortunately, not a lot. A big part of this is deposited with central banks. Because we have a trend or a tendency actually to be careful with our clients' deposits, we don't want to take any type of interest rates risk. We still believe that interest rates will go up now that inflation is coming back a little bit. We would not want to be capped in long-term investments at a very low investment rate. We know that this has a cost currently, but it's the philosophy of the company.
We, for now, are a little bit careful with our balance sheet, and we hope to capture then a better interest rate in the future when interest rates will go up. A very sound and solid balance sheet without any risks. We have loans. Obviously here you see that the Lombard and the leasing increase from CHF 551- CHF 744. That's low risk business, Lombard, because it's covered by securities deposited with us. Leasing is related to the deal we having with Tesla, which is growing nicely and also generates a nice return. Okay, now last but not least, I have one slide I would like to mention. First of all, the number of accounts since the launch, that's now more than 20,000. It's growing on a daily rate.
We already was that the second-largest provider in Switzerland, and I think we'll soon become the largest provider of neobank services in Switzerland together with our partnership with PostFinance. Also to mention that the 20,000 clients or 20,000 accounts you have here are not counted with our other accounts that we mentioned earlier in the press release. That's 20,000 on top. We do not account them, even though we are offering banking and custody services to our joint venture partner, Yuh, but it's a different type of accounts. Here, the average deposit is high. For a neobank, it's CHF 2,170 precisely. It had a very good start. It's a super attractive business. We have a very good offering and maybe you are already a Yuh client, and then you can experience the attractiveness of our offering.
Also if you are trading, you get Swissqoins. Swissqoins, this is the token we have created together with PostFinance. It is a very interesting system. It creates loyalty, and ultimately, because we are paying back into the treasury account of Swissquote, ultimately, people will make money with the coins they get when they open an account and when they trade. Okay. I think this, coming slowly to the end of our presentation. We have a very active investor relation program for the next months. We are at Investora in September in Zurich. We also are in Munich at the Baader Small Cap Day. In November, we have a roadshow with ZKB at the Swiss Equity Conference. You can meet us at the Credit Suisse Equity Forum on November 16.
Next time we have our yearly figures, that will be in March 2022, when we will present our yearly figures and then also give forecasts for then 2022 and an outlook, what will happen two years later in 2025. This concludes my presentation. Thank you to your participation today. We have 77 participants that joined us for the press conference this morning. Again, we'll go into some Q&A. To keep it working, I would like to ask to raise your hand through the Zoom system. You go into settings or into the more, and then you have a function where it says, "Raise your hand," and then we will see you, and then we will be able to pass you the word so you can ask your questions. Please don't forget to unmute when you ask the question so that we can hear you.
Okay, let's try this. Who has a question?
Hello. Can you hear me? Andreas Brun from Credit Suisse.
Hello. Yes. Hi, Andreas.
Yes. Okay. Hi. Thanks for the presentation. I would like to start with three questions. First, in eForex, I saw that the number of clients decreased by 24%, but traded volumes actually are on an all-time high. Could you give us some color there? That's the first one. On growth abroad, some investors are worried sometimes about especially flatex with their strategy, trying to grab some market share in Switzerland. You guys, as the market leaders in Switzerland, how do you react? Do you think your pricing is competitive enough? The last question on growth abroad. On slide 10, you showed us that strong increase from growth of international revenues. I saw that the share of Swiss domestic decreased versus 2020, which shows that growth of non-Swiss customers.
At the same time, the share of Middle East and Europe decreased as well, from 5% last year to 4%. How do you see that growth outside of Switzerland in that context? Thank you.
Okay, thank you. Thank you very much. Three very interesting questions. First of all, the easiest one, this is eForex. Yes, we do a little bit of cleanup sometimes. The eForex business is really different from the equity business. We do not count small accounts or inactive accounts. What is happening with eForex is that you are active over a certain period of time, and then you are less active, and then you may become active again. That's the nature of that business, and this is why I wouldn't concentrate too much on those accounts. We are also charging inactivity fees on those accounts because keeping these accounts open has a cost, contrary to a trading account where we keep the clients for life. When it comes to eForex, we expect the clients to trade because otherwise it has a strong cost impact on the organization.
There, from time to time, we are suspending or closing the accounts when there is only a few Swiss francs on it. This is the reason why you would see this fluctuation in number of clients. As you mention it, the most important number there is the generated volume with the active clients. To answer precisely to your question, we only do account for active clients. Yes, of course, it's a highly competitive market in Europe, as you know, with many different type of service offering. We do not want to compete in the lower segment. You mentioned flatex, and there are others in the same range, let's say with very low transaction fees. It's a choice. We have made the choice of offering a very broad service. This is probably also a little bit our Swiss heritage in a way.
When we started the company many years ago, in the beginning, we only offered the Swiss Exchange, the SWX Swiss Exchange in the beginning, and a few hundred securities. It didn't last two days before the clients say, "Well, that's great, but I would like to trade U.S. stocks. I would like to deposit my funds with you. I have a fixed income product somewhere that I would like to consolidate with your bank." That's a little bit the nature of our Swiss origin, and we decided that this is our business model, to have a broad range of service, a quality customer support, and also a custody bank that is able to deal with all those different securities. Now, this is not the case for our competitors in the low segment, in the deep discount. By nature, you have to concentrate on a smaller number of security.
Also probably if you divide the number of assets by the number of clients, you would see that it has much smaller accounts, not the one we have, where we have deposits on average over CHF 100,000. It's a choice of business model. We also have an offering for the more aggressive pricing model, but we think the market is going towards 100% mobile. This is the neobank offering. There for now, we have a limited range of securities, but the idea there is to increase that a lot to offer very cheap costs on execution, so to be able to compete against the neobanks and the flatex and the like. You had questions on slide 10. Yes, it is only percentage, and especially when there was such a high number, it's difficult to compare percentage with percentage .
The business in the Middle East did not grow in the same magnitude than our business in Switzerland did. This is why percentage-wise, it's a little bit slower, in absolute numbers, we had growth all over the place. It's just this amazing business we had in Switzerland that is pushing percentage-wise the other locations a little bit down.
Okay, perfect. We'll come back with more, but we'll let others speak as well. Thank you.
Yes. It's good that you mentioned it. Yvan and myself, we are available for any questions you may have. You can also call us later directly. We are here for you. Okay. Next question, please. Yvan? Hello. That's Mr. Nicolas Bürki from Mirabaud.
Good morning.
Good morning.
Thank you for the meeting. Congratulations for your success. That's really beautiful. You're in the very enviable position of having exponential clients, exponential revenues. My broad question is, how do you strategically do to, at the same time, have quality support to your clients, continue to be the same or improve, while at the same time containing costs to avoid having exponential costs? Because as you said it, some costs are highly correlated to the number of accounts or clients. Some are more variables. I guess you want to have, in the years to come, some margin in order not to have a too negative operating leverage in case clients are less active or even withdraw assets. How do you solve this equation strategically? Thank you very much.
Yeah. Well, that is a tough question, and it is difficult. I have to admit, and also we don't always succeed. In the first half, we've made headlines because people were complaining that they have to wait sometimes weeks before the account opening is actually processed. Then when you have to wait weeks, then what you do, you take your phone and you give us a call, and then you realize that you're in the waiting of the telephone, and then you have to wait for 30 minutes before getting an answer. It was a very tough moment for us. We worked really hard to clean and clear the backlog, and it's exactly what you said. The type of business in which we are is about having the cost under control. At the same time, we want to offer a super good service.
This is the fine-tuning of the management of the company. We have hired a lot of people. We are now 904. The growth was even stronger than that. We have to do it carefully, manage the cost at the same time when growth is there, but not overdoing it because volatility may come down a little bit, and we don't want to be stuck in fixed costs and then have a negative impact on our profitability. It's a fine-tune management of the company. That's what we are doing, and then also technology is helping a lot. Now we realize that more and more people are not calling any longer. They are consuming the service on mobile phones, so they are dealing with us with different tools. They are going into chat modes. They are sending requests online.
It's easier to handle this type of flow than just having a call center agent on the telephone. There's also a shift in the way, actually, you are using our customer care services, and we can serve these at a cheaper price. We also have installed robots. Now, when you ask questions on the chat system, you may well be served by a robot, and then only pass over to a human being once the questions becomes a little bit more complicated. We're trying to deal with that. As you said, it's not an easy task.
Thank you very much.
Thank you. Next question is from Rene.
Yes.
Good morning.
Good morning, all, and thank you very much. I would like to start with on slide eight. Marc, you mentioned in the presentation that this is a little bit the same picture as you see it every year. I do not fully agree because the growth we have seen in net new money in Asia is quite outstanding. I have just checked with full year 2020. Full year 2020 was CHF 747 million, and now we are up at CHF 1.4 billion in H1. I do believe it's very good news to see a shift out of Switzerland into new regions like Asia-Pacific. Also, Europe is up. Middle East seems to be quite tough. Nevertheless, do I do the right reading here on slide eight? On slide 26. Well, it's not fair. You have increased your guidance from CHF 130- CHF 210.
Now if I do a rough calculation, you have CHF 134 H1 plus CHF 14 in July, you want to achieve CHF 210. If I divide the remaining CHF 61 million by five month, that's roughly CHF 12 million per month. Looks not very ambitious. I know it's not fair, but nevertheless fair enough. In this context, perhaps, any word on the 2024 guidance, or will you then next year give a 2025 guidance? The next one, just a confirmation on slide 18. Because I used to be with the number of trades per client per year. Now I did a rough calculation. Is it right that we've seen like 16 trades per client per year in H1 2021 versus 14 in H2 2020, which would go hand in hand, that your new clients are active traders. Just here, 16 versus 14. Now the last question on slide four.
I don't know if there's an English word, but I call it conversion rate from opening request to opening accounts, right? Interestingly, in H1, this conversion rate was like 42%. If I'm looking at July on slide 26, here the conversion rate was 67%. I'm wondering, is there kind of a time lag in the year between opening requests and opening accounts? Thank you.
Thank you, Rene. That's all good. All good questions. I knew that you would multiply the pre-tax by I'm not surprised. Once, I was a very young entrepreneur, and I had a meeting in London with a portfolio manager, and he told me, "Marc, you should only give numbers that you are sure you can match and overachieve." I learned that lesson very strongly. True, we are a little bit conservative in our numbers, and especially when we say it was the weakest months in the year, then obviously there was a problem. We like to be conservative in our figures. We think that doubling the pre-tax profit is already a nice guidance. Markets are unpredictable, so we may have a slowdown, but it's difficult to forecast. That's truly we have been a little bit conservative for the second half in our forecast. Well spotted.
About the number. Yes, we have been overwhelmed with account openings. We had difficulties in handling all those numbers because suddenly, it is like you open the gate and it is coming like crazy. I think the crypto hype also helped a lot. At the same time, we had to refuse a certain number of clients, simply because they did not match our requirements for a Swiss banking account. We have a backlog, and the reason why suddenly you see 5,500 accounts openings with 8,200 opening requests is because we opened also accounts where the request was made in May and June. We still have a backlog. We still are struggling with opening the accounts because we have to document the accounts. Now we are not in a position where we can open an account in two hours. That is not possible.
We have to deal with the fact that we are a Swiss bank, and there is a little bit of cost to that, and sometimes we're losing the clients because we can't open the account fast enough. That's okay. We can live with that. Let's go back to the various slides you mentioned. Conversion rates, I think we've touched that, right?
Yeah.
Then-
Slide eight.
Yeah. Slide eight. Yes, there is. It's true. Maybe Yvan Cardenas is just sitting next to me, so he has some good explanation as always.
Hi, Rene.
Hi.
Hi, folks. Perhaps, there's more comment on the question that Marc just answered. I think you know that there is a backlog, but it's not necessarily on Swissquote side. We have an application process, but sometimes the profiles of customers is a bit more complex. You see they're more wealthy. Sometimes there is a back-and-forth process. If the customer is the CFO of a listed company somewhere, we may have two or more questions, and it may take, on his side, a few weeks to come back to us. Some accounts are in progress, not because there is an administrative backlog at Swissquote, but we getting more sophisticated customers than have in other banks. It may take a bit longer. We always know that high profiles are a bit more complex too often. This is why I think the conversion rate is in line with historical metrics.
The files could be sometimes a bit more sophisticated. This is good news. There is some time to wait. On slide eight. I think we had this target to have 50% of net new money coming from Switzerland, 50% coming from customers domiciled outside Switzerland. We're moving in that direction. Last year, I have to say as well, COVID-19 impacted a little bit the development of our international activities, and Switzerland overperformed in a certain way. This is why now we're returning back to what was the objective of management. I think in the future, the growth should come of net new money with a good mix, 50% Switzerland, 50% international operations.
Nice. Thank you. Yes.
Was there another slide? A last one, that one we forgot?
Oh, just this number of trades, which you used to report in good old days. Now you just give the total number. Is it 16 versus 14?
Yes. That's true.
Okay.
It was an amazing time. This is all mixed. It's also including crypto. You trade crypto in a very different way than you trade securities. You go in and out in the same day. That pushed the number, obviously.
Yes. I will not bother you with 2024 outlook, and wish you all luck. Thank you very much.
Thank you very much, Rene, and you can always bother us a little bit later on the phone. Okay, Mr. Thomas Paul.
Yes. Hello. I was just wondering if you could explain me a little bit, the trading income, why this is boosted so much? What is in there? Is this your own holdings? Do you hold maybe even crypto yourself? The second question would be a bit about Yuh, and you mentioned Yuh were already the second largest neobank. Who is the largest, and what number of clients will you make a profit with Yuh? Do you have some business plan there?
I take the last one, then Yvan will take the first question. Well, it's maybe I exaggerated a little bit and we're the third largest because we have Credit Suisse in between. I think the market leader today in Switzerland is neon, and then you have Credit Suisse, CSX, according to their own numbers. We can't control that, but we have to trust them, and then comes Yuh. However, if you see the dynamic of the dynamics, CSX started months ago, and they claim to have 40,000 clients. We, in a few weeks, we are at 20,000 clients, and it continues. I think we will soon become the market leader, and we only count active accounts. That's also maybe something that we don't know with our competitors, but we do only account for active clients.
We have high ambitions for the end of the year. We want to more than double this number. We would like to be around 50,000 clients as a target, then profitability will not be far away when we have reached this type of clients. The thing is that this is an investment case. The application is quite nice today, but there are many more things that we want to develop together with our partner. It is the beginning of a longer story. For now, we did the obvious, which is credit cards, which is saving, investments, but there's many more things we can do, and we have a lot of good ideas. What is important to say here is that we are in the lucky positions where we are investing in the company, but at the same time we are offering services to the company.
From a P&L perspective in 2021, this will have no impact on. The costs of the investment is compensated by the revenue of the service we're rendering to the joint venture.
For the first question. Yvan Cardenas speaking. It's true that trading income increased compared to, for example, second half year last year by 7%. This is as you did spot, this is because as there was an increased trading activity across all asset classes. When the Swiss customer with Swiss francs does a transaction, it could be that the asset acquired is designated in another currency. It does generate, on top of the brokerage commission, an FX margin for the bank. Same on the crypto asset class, fixed income. It's really when customers, they acquire, they trade, they buy or sell the security that is not designated in the same currency that they deposit. We have here an interesting margin that comes on top of the brokerage commission.
Okay. Thank you.
Okay. next question is (uncertain) ?
Swissinfo.
Swissinfo. Okay. Yes. Swissinfo. Yes.
Yes. Matthew Allen from Swissinfo. Thanks very much. I've got a quick question relating to your crypto business. In one of the slides, you say you're going to get into the lending, staking, and exchange side of that business. I wonder if you could put any more meat on the bone there as to when and how you're planning to do that, and particularly with the exchange, does this mean you are going to be applying for the new DLT trading license that's just been introduced by FINMA at the beginning of this month?
Okay. Well, to your last points, no, we don't need because we are a bank, so we have all the licenses we already have. For now we are basically a broker when dealing with crypto, meaning that we have exchanges on the other side, and we are interlinking the trade of our clients, and then with the execution on the exchange. That was the initial phase of our development. First of all, we have many clients, so we can hedge them internally as a start. Also we can cumulate the liquidity from various places to offer a better execution service to our clients. In that sense, we will then become an exchange, and this is big developments we are doing. We are almost ready for that. The other will come in 2021. We have an entire team dedicated to this now.
Okay. Thanks very much.
Thank you. Mr. Manuel Peter at Helvetische Bank.
Yes. Hi. Hello. Can you hear me?
Very good.
Perfect. Thank you very much for taking my question, and also congratulations to the very good result. I have only one question regarding risk. What is the average leverage your customers have with you, and probably also what is the maximum leverage you offer to clients in FX and crypto trading? Thank you very much.
Okay. No leverage with crypto trading, because we don't think we should do it. When it comes to FX, it depends a little bit where the client is booked. If the client is booked in Europe, obviously we follow the ESMA rules, which is where the leverage is capped at 30:1. In Switzerland, there is no regulatory cap on the leverage, but however, we have an internal limit at 100:1.
Thank you very much.
You're welcome. Thank you. We have a question from Kepler Cheuvreux.
Hello, can you hear me?
Yes.
Yes.
Morning.
Hello. Thank you. Good morning. Thank you for your presentation. I have a question. Well, you say that you were aiming for growth in 2022, top line and bottom line. There's something I don't get. When I see your guidance, I understand that you're conservative for H2, but that means that your guidance suggests that you will make something like CHF 75 million, if I'm not mistaken. CHF 75 million pre-tax profit in H2. I don't know, just if I extrapolate this CHF 75 million the next to half of 2022, I get to CHF 150 million. It would be below 2021. I don't know if I'm wrong thinking like this, but do you have any?
Okay. Well, there's two answers to your questions. The first one is the second half has always been historically lower in our history. I don't know why. This is probably there is the summer, and then there's the holiday season at your end that is lowering a little bit the revenue in the second half. You shouldn't take the second half as a forecast for the entire year 2022. As we mentioned earlier, we are a little bit conservative in our approach anyway. We also invested a lot. We have our operations in Luxembourg that is now getting some more steam. As you know, we have acquired this bank, and we have transformed the business model, and now we are pushing on the growth side. You have a little bit same story in Singapore, in our different locations.
We know that year after year, we are increasing our business, and this will also happen in 2022. Simply out of growth from all the clients we will acquire in 2021, and they will be sitting on our revenue line in 2022.
Okay. Thank you very much.
Thank you. Who's so?
Stephanie Deans.
Stephanie Deans. Yes.
Hey.
Good morning.
Congratulations on your results, and good morning. Well, I had a few questions. Relating to the new partnership with PostFinance. You were saying that the cost investment in this is mainly sort of compensated by the revenue you'll get from the partnership. I was just wondering, do you have any estimates, I know it's still probably early days, of the effect that this could have on the business and any other partnerships that you sort of have in mind going forward? Following from that, I think globally we've seen quite a dramatic increase in first quarter of 2020 in trading for retail investors generally. What kind of gives you the impression that this market acceleration on trading platforms will continue organically, same sort of growth rate?
Lastly, as you said in your presentation, you kind of pride yourself in being a tech powerhouse. This is purely out of curiosity. Do you think that there's any relationship between users using your platform, say in a trial account, and then conversion into trading, or is it mainly users who come with already some trading background and would like to just use the services that they're familiar with? Thank you.
Okay. For the last question, we see a little bit the shift in financial knowledge between the clients we had a few years ago and the one we have now. There's also one of the reason why we struggled a little bit with our customer care, because on average, they were spending more time with them because they have different questions about financial products. There is truly a new generation of clients coming to us and learning financial products. I'm not sure whether it is because they are using demo accounts and then transforming it simply because it has become popular, and you can hardly open newspapers without speaking about cryptos, about financial products, and it has become part of your early adult life to deal with financial products.
There really is a shift, and also the one reason why we developed this partnership with PostFinance is that to have a good introductory product for neo customers using neo banks. Now, obviously, when the clients get a little bit more sophisticated, they want to have a broader service range, and then they can use the classic eTrading service from both partners. I can't remember the two other questions. The first one I think was about you. Was it about some forecasts about the impact on our business, right?
Yeah. Particularly for sort of neobank interested users, sort of relating to the crypto trends, and also do you have any sort of future partnerships around this space in mind?
Hi. Yvan Cardenas speaking. I think for you, we have a mobile app that has been launched to the market. You know the vast majority of the costs are behind us. They were basically included in our 2020 figures. We made this partnership with PostFinance to launch it in the Swiss market. We think that we need to be successful in Switzerland, in our domestic market, before contemplating to export this mobile app somewhere else.
Yeah.
I think, yes, first we need to observe how the hub develops in the market here. Mr. Marc Bürki has mentioned an objective for the end of this year. I think if we are successful and we are convinced we can be successful, then we may contemplate other services. For this year, we don't expect the partnership to cost something despite now we're really launching the product in a new market, so a new product, new market. There is some cost in terms of marketing and so on. Later on, this should contribute nicely to the profitability of Swissquote Group.
Okay, perfect. Thank you very much for your answers.
Thank you. Thanks a lot. Okay, we have three more questions. Andreas Brun from Credit-- Sorry, no. What was that? (uncertain) ? Is that so?
[Non-English content].
Excuse me.
Oui.
I'll ask my question in English. Do you intend to review and upgrade your long- term guidance for 2024, considering that the pre-tax profit you were aiming initially is expected to be reached as of this year? Is it something that you plan to do, to review the guidance, to upgrade the guidance in the next six months, let's say?
Yes, absolutely. We announced at the beginning of the year that we will have half a million CHF revenues in 2024, and then a profit margin to lead us to a pre-tax of CHF 200 million. We did it earlier with the help of good markets, and it also explains why the margin is a little bit higher, because by 2024, we will have a higher cost base, so we probably will not be able to sustain the same profit margin. Yes, sure, in 2021, we have reached our forecast for 2024. By the end of the year, when we have the presentation of the yearly results, we will give a two years outlook for, in this case, 2025.
Thank you.
Thank you. Then we have Andreas Brun from Credit Suisse. Hello.
Yeah. Thank you. Just a quick follow-up. Talking about the profit margin, looking at your H2 guidance, one can calculate the pre-tax profit margin of 37%. Do you think that's a sustainable level for the short, medium term? Secondly, also looking at H2 2021 guidance of CHF 200 million of revenues, where do you actually expect the difference to come from versus H1? Is it coming mainly from crypto revenues or mainly seasonality? Around that topic, I would like to understand how sustainable your crypto revenues are. How much is kind of the average revenue contribution, for example, in July from crypto trading, or put differently, what do you expect in a normalized half year from cryptos?
Well, that's a tough question. This is the reason why we have been a little bit careful for the second half, because it's difficult to predict actually what the crypto markets will give us, in a way. If you take the July figures, out of the CHF 14 million, out of the posted revenues, CHF 3 million is coming from crypto in July. That's a very low number. It happens in a market where crypto was going sideways. If there is a little hiccup in crypto, you would see this number explode and this going straight to bottom line. That's probably a little bit the reason of our, let's say, more careful forecast for the second half, is because we don't exactly know how much cryptos will be traded and when it will be happening.
It could well be possible that we do the exact same numbers in crypto revenue than we did in the first half. We would simply need to have more volatility coming back to this business segment, which you can absolutely not exclude. We may see the Bitcoin going back to CHF 50,000, CHF 60,000 within a few days, then we are back there. Our forecast has been made taking into account that crypto trading will be very, let's say, boring for the second half. That's the explanation of our, let's say, more careful forecast and the more careful outlook for the second half. What makes us also more positive, however, is that the number of clients trading crypto is increasing. The number of clients depositing cryptos from wallets to the bank is increasing as well. The fundamentals of the business are increasing.
We do believe in that market. It's in the medium term, and we're speaking about 2022, it will again be a substantial part of our revenue. In the medium term, let's say next two, three, four months, it's difficult to say exactly at what level we will be. Then there was a question about the margin of 37%.
Yes, Andreas, Yvan speaking. In the first half, we had quite a very positive pre-tax margin of 50%. Our objective in the initial guidance was 35%, with an objective for 2024 to be at 40%. It's true that we had, three months ago, an objective of 35%, so the second half year looks more in line. We probably have made some accelerated progress here in the pre-tax margin, but it's certainly not the case that we could sustain 50% medium term. We had, back in March, an objective of 40% medium term, and this is probably a more appropriate target medium term. We could be sooner at this pre-tax margin of 40%. Second half year is an example, 35.5%, it's again above initial target. Yes, this is what I can say. Probably it's somewhere between 35% and 40%.
Perfect. Thank you very much.
Okay. With this, I think we've reached the time limit of our presentation this morning. Again, thank you very much for joining us. Thank you very much for your interesting questions, and this is highly appreciated. Yes, Yvan and myself, we're here in case you have questions. Don't hesitate to call us. With that, I wish you a wonderful day and a great weekend. See you next time. Bye.