Eric.
About?
Yeah, of course. Oh, we're live. We're back. Hello everyone, thanks for, thanks for coming. I'm Alex Kramm, Senior Research Analyst at UBS, covering the exchanges and, and business services companies. Delighted to have for the first time on stage with me, I think, although actually last year you were on stage as well.
I was very new, though.
You were very new at the time. Now that you've been there for a year, we're excited to have Ilene Fiszel Bieler here, CFO of MarketAxess. I guess we can just jump right in. I like to start fairly high-level, to frame the discussion. A lot of initiatives for 2026. You just said earnings on Friday, and you certainly talked about some of them. But a lot of those continue to be focused on gaining or regaining share in U.S. credit. I know you're doing a few other things too. We'll get to that later. But can you give us a sense how your new growth initiatives are progressing, what, where you see the biggest promise, and, yeah, where you think we can go, from a revenue and earnings perspective when it, if you're successful?
Sure. First, thanks for having me. Yeah, it's a great question because it has been where, as you know, we have spent such a significant amount of our time on the new initiatives, particularly over the course of the last year. And I know that you and everyone know that we put out recently, at the end of last year, three-year targets, with revenue growth rates of 8%-9% on average over the three-year time period annually. And then also, we put out margin targets. And as you can imagine, all of our new initiatives are geared towards making those a reality, right? And there's been quite a lot that we've done in the planning process there. But in terms of the initiatives themselves and what's important to your question and how we think about it, in 2025, we obviously put out quite a number of new initiatives.
I'm gonna talk to you about them, really in the channels, 'cause that's probably the best way to think about it. Because our goal is to have our new initiatives roll out so that they can scale globally across high-grade, high-yield EM, E.U., etc. But we're looking at them also through the horizontals and through the channels. Now, before I even kind of get into that, I would mention that, obviously, X-Pro, our new front end, is a key contributor to the success of what we're trying to do. And we're continuing to enhance X-Pro, continuing to roll it out across the different markets. So with that as a baseline, you know, you've heard Chris talk about this for a long time, but within the client-initiated, probably our most exciting protocol in what we've been working towards is blocks.
We just last year rolled out Targeted RFQ for blocks. It started in the E.U., in Eurobonds, in EM. Then later on, we piloted it in the U.S. And there's still more to go there. But if there's one thing that I would say we've spent quite a bit of time, energy, investment in, it is definitely our blocks protocol and continuing to really take advantage of the opportunity there. If you think about the credit markets and the electronification of the markets, we know that a significant, particularly in the U.S., which, to your point, and what you asked in the credit in your question, of what is not yet electronified really is blocks. So as you can imagine, there's an enormous amount of TAM there that we're looking at. So that's one of the new initiatives. More to come there.
Portfolio trading, maybe not so new anymore, but still for us, last year, I think, was the year where you really saw us, kind of get our PT protocol to a place where we and our clients and everyone is quite, you know, pleased with it. Again, there will always be more enhancements and things that we're doing, but that was a big push in 2025 as well. And then finally, in the dealer space, this is probably one of the things that we are, very, very excited about, which is what we've been doing in the dealer-initiated space. And you saw that at the end of the year last year. We rolled out our Mid-X solution.
And so, you know, there's a lot that I just said, but if you think about it, it's we're really looking to do there's a number of smaller things, but those are some of the bigger ones that I would focus on.
Well, good thing that I have all those three at my next question. Let's, no, let's unpack some of these a little bit, starting with blocks. So and you said it yourself, very large untapped market for you. So, you know, can you talk about what you've seen so far? I mean, you mentioned yourself EM and Eurobonds, some early success there, but the U.S. still seems to be a little bit behind. So we'd be really interested to see what exactly you're seeing out there in terms of, like, client behavior, what are people really doing, and then what is the trajectory to really get the U.S. going?
So getting the U.S. going in general, just across the board is obviously a key focus for us. We know that, you know, our U.S. credit business was relatively flat last year. We need to reignite growth there. And this is definitely one of the ways that we intend to do that. If you think about blocks, let's just sort of look at it from a where—where are we going, and where have we been most recently in 2025 when we've started to roll out our additional protocols there? And if you look at our ADV in blocks last year, it was up 24%. That's pretty significant. And then let's take it in turn across the markets, right?
We saw even in the U.S., where we don't have Targeted RFQ really rolled out, we still are working on getting the content there, and I'll talk about that in a moment, we still saw an 18% increase in ADV in blocks in the U.S. We saw a 27% increase in EM and 66% in Eurobonds. So clearly, this is making a difference, right? There's a there there. And I think what we have found is that traders do wanna trade blocks electronically. They do wanna make sure, however, that there is no information leakage, right? That's always been one of the things that we've needed to help get our hands around, help them get their heads around, and have the right protocols in place to achieve that.
We think with Targeted RFQ as well as just, you know, what we're doing otherwise in blocks, that we're getting people to see that. I think the numbers tell you that. That's a key component of what we're doing for our Block strategy. Now, in why has it worked so well in E.U. and EM? I think a big part of that is because we have the axe content. We have the really good, longstanding relationship with the dealers there, where we were able to get the content ahead of time. That's been an ongoing journey for us. We're getting there in the U.S. There is more to do, which is why we still think of that as in the more piloted stage. I look at that as an opportunity, knowing what we know about the TAM there.
Also, having the proof points of how well it's been working in the other markets also is really you know, it's a good way to think about it and what the opportunities are.
Okay. Very good. Moving on to portfolio trading. I'm going one by one here.
I'm gonna get comfortable.
So it seems like that business is, I think, last year kind of moved into equilibrium. And also, the percentage of trades has been kind of range-bound, so has your share. So anything to note, what you're doing there, anything to get that share higher? But then also, do you still think PT will be a bigger part of the market over time?
So I think that what you've seen from us with PT actually has been growth in terms of share and has been growth in terms of what we're doing. We needed to get the protocol to the place where it is competitive, right? And last year, we saw PT share in the US of about 19%. Now, that was a 270 basis point increase for us year-over-year. And then the back half of the year I don't know. You might have seen this in our earnings materials. But in high-yield, for instance, the back half of the year in PT, we saw really significant share growth there of about 800 basis points. You're right, though, for sure, in terms of it being range-bound. And I know we heard others who said it was going to be quite a bit higher.
There was all sorts of, you know, before my time, lots of prognosis and forecasting and things like that. But what we've really seen, particularly in high-grade in PT, is this range-bound between, call it, 10%-12%, sometimes 9%, you know, in there. So definitely meaningful. Absolutely meaningful. But I don't know that it's at the levels where you may have, you know, heard people talking about in the past. What has been interesting to us, though, is high-yield. We have seen increases in PT usage in high-yield. And I don't know that folks would have thought about that in the beginning. We've seen that as high as 15% last October in terms of share and 13%. So—so we are seeing, you know, meaningful opportunity for us in PT there. Now, of course, I'm sure you've heard me say this before.
We're happy to be there. We wanna be where our clients are. We wanna make sure that our protocol is as good, if not better, than any in the market. It's not a big revenue opportunity for us, right? So it's important share. It's important to our clients. For all those reasons, we're obviously gonna make sure we continue to enhance it and invest in it. And we have the most amazing salesperson who sort of leads the charge on it. And I, you know, she's done an incredible job as we've continued to really upgrade and enhance the protocol itself. But I would just keep that in mind as you think about it.
Fair enough. And then again, I think the third thing you mentioned is dealer-initiated trades. You mentioned Mid-X already and some of the success there. So maybe elaborate on that a little bit, but then also, what other things on the dealer side are you working on? And, yeah, what's next?
Yeah. So our dealer RFQ business in general has been growing and building. And we're very pleased to see that, you know, obviously. Mid-X is very exciting. So Mid-X, for us, we only launched it at the end of last year in the U.S. And we weren't even doing it daily, right? We were doing a couple times a week, let's say. It's only really within the last month that we've even been doing daily sessions. And it's still only one session a day. And so in January, we saw about $3.2 billion come through in volume. And if you consider that we were sort of nowhere, that's a pretty good ramp-up. And we're very pleased. We've heard a lot of positive feedback from the dealers themselves. They like the protocol. They like that they think that it's streamlined. They like that it's a one-step process for them.
They feel that it actually does help to contain information leakage within it. They're able to anonymously exit their exposure, right? If you think about it all day long, we've got the dealers coming in, whether it be through PTs or through RFQs, where we have them coming into trades. We never had something to help them get out of trades. And so now, we're helping them offload their risk at the end of the, you know, at the time of the mid-matching session. And so it's really something that has allowed us to also improve our relationship with the dealers, which has been very important to us. And again, we're very pleased with what we're seeing. You know, we expect that we'll go to more than one session per day, you know, is part of the plan. And so it's, it's really a good, good early launch.
Okay. Good. One thing you didn't mention at the beginning 'cause I have to have something here is, the new auction protocol you just launched. I mean, it's, I think it's supposed to be Open-Close. I think right now it's.
It's closing.
Close only.
Yeah.
I actually, from the buy-side perspective, I heard some positive feedback. Seems and I'm sure you have some thoughts there. On the dealer side, maybe not so much support, but we'll see how that builds. So yeah, how do we think about this opportunity? And how quickly do you think this can run?
I think what's very exciting about the closing auction is, first of all, it is the heart of what, how MarketAxess was built. It's innovation. It's changing market structure. And it is a protocol that we put in place within collaboration with the buy-side and the sell-side. So it was years in the making. It wasn't something that happened overnight. And I think it will be multiple years in the future as it continues to get understood and adopted, right? This is not something that happens overnight. I wouldn't think of it as a big revenue driver, for instance, in 2026. However, when we do new protocols, whether they be big, whether they be small, we do client forums. We had a client forum for this one that we had over 400 traders join. It was the largest amount of any forum attended that we've seen.
That tells you how much interest there is in the protocol. I think it's early days. I think it's exciting that MarketAxess has gone back to that kind of innovation and that kind of leadership. You know, we're just gonna continue to work with our clients on both the buy-side and the sell-side as it develops.
Okay. Maybe I don't know if it's called finishing up, but, you know, the one thing we haven't talked about is actually what historically you've been best at, which is the, you know, traditional RFQ, Open Trading, maybe even mostly focus on smaller trade sizes.
Right.
So you've had a very dominant position there for a long time. But it does seem like the competitors are looking at that as well. So just I feel like people don't ask about this enough. Like, what is happening in that part of the business? And how do you really defend your territory there?
I think we have to take a step back and think about how the market structure in fixed income has changed, right? So way before I arrived here, being new to the space, let's call it, seven years or so ago, we've done the research. You had about 80% of the market was client-initiated, which is our RFQ bread and butter, so to speak. And about 20% was dealer, let's say. That looks more like 58% now client-initiated, 10%-12% let's use the midpoint and say 11 for PT, and 30%-31% for dealer. That's a very different composition on how trading is being done.
And for MarketAxess, we've only recently we just talked about in the beginning of this conversation all of the initiatives and protocols that we rolled out within client-initiated, blocks, obviously, PT itself, and then within dealer, all very new and incremental for us, for sure. So we are really looking to make sure that we are expanding our playing field. We needed to do that. It's not where we're at, but we have now. And we're getting very, very good feedback on all of that. Having said that, we are still the, you know, have the deepest and most differentiated liquidity in RFQ and all- to- all. That is still an enormous area of strength for us. And you can just see that by the volumes that you're seeing come through.
You know, I've been hearing sort of, "Oh, electronification, you know, what's happening with electronification has the pace slowed," right? You hear about that. But what I think people sometimes are also missing is the amount of volume that we're seeing in the system and what has happened to the credit market since we've electronified, at least parts of it. You're talking about 65% increases in the market itself. So there is a lot more TAM to go for. And we still particularly now, if we really start to get into, you know, what we are able to provide in terms of our unique data and how that helps our clients and what we see on our platform for RFQ and for all- to- all, we are still, you know, obviously very, very pleased with that part of our business as well.
Okay. All right. So moving on since most of these questions have been focused on the U.S. market and kind of recapturing share there. But I think one of the things that often has gotten lost is the strength in the non-U.S. businesses, which I think over the last few years have grown 15%. I think you talked about your new targets at the beginning of this conversation. And I think a considerable amount of growth is supposed to come from the non-U.S. business. And actually, when I look at our model, and this is not by design. This is just continuing some of these recent trends. Most of the growth that we're expecting is also coming from non-U.S. businesses.
So maybe, starting with the biggest area and I actually asked about this on the earnings call already, which is Emerging Markets, very dominant position, long runway, big TAM, but clearly, others are also looking at that space, and are talking about it. So just give us a little bit of a lay of the land of, an increasingly bigger part of your business, which is EM.
You're 100% right in terms of the growth. So when we think about our three-year plans and I have said this that about we expect 20% of the incremental growth in year one to come from U.S. And by year three, we expect that to be 35%. So by definition, that means much of the growth is coming outside of it. And EM is clearly an enormous opportunity, all the things that you've laid out and what you've said. And it is a franchise that we are just super proud of, for a whole host of reasons. The protocols in EM that we just talked about and others are all working really well, right? So we saw, for instance, blocks in EM last year, we saw ADV up 27%, in EM.
EM also saw now on a smaller base, but 172% increase in portfolio trading, 33% increases in dealer. I mean, the amount of continuous volumes that we are seeing through the EM platform is very significant. Now, if there's not a great denominator on EM, right? We have no TRACE tape there. You'd have to scrape every central bank website. And then you'd have to try to figure out, you know, the ins and outs of what all the trades meant. And believe me, we've tried to do all of this. We have lots of models and algorithms that help us get to our assumptions. But if what we call 10% electronified, there's clearly, and it may be a little more, maybe a little less. But there's clearly an enormous amount of opportunity in emerging markets.
We have a protocol within the client-initiated channel in EM that, my EM team will tell you is a bit of a jewel. And it's called Request for Market. And it's really well-regarded because our clients can go in, and they can request, but they're not telling you which side of the trade they're on. So they're not giving anything away. This goes and plays very, very well in the EM market, right? It's now we still have a very strong, you know, all-to-all and RFQ and everything else. But this is also a really great protocol that has taken off in EM. And if you think about where we are and what makes us different in EM, you know, there's hard currency, right? So that's where you've got corporates and sovereigns that are trading basically in USD or other, you know, reserve-type currencies.
But then you also have local. And the local market currencies are really like sovereigns, local sovereigns, right? And for folks who have worked in the Emerging Markets before, you know that you really have to be there, right? There's different regulatory schemes. You have to partner with the local schemes, with the local regulatory, bodies. You have to make sure that you have the right relationships on the ground. It is, to a certain extent, a boots-on-the-ground, endeavor. And we have been you know, our liquidity in Argentina, in Mexico, in Brazil, that doesn't just happen overnight, right? We've been in these countries, some of them, for quite some time. And in Asia-Pacific as well, right? We've also, you know, been in a number of those countries, as well.
And so that kind of network effect, whether it be the network effect of the Singapore trader who is doing hard currency, EM trading throughout Asia, or the local person in Mexico, right, doing local that, for, for us, is where we have our advantage, quite frankly. That is very difficult to replicate. We also, you know, have incredible client relationships. I mean, I can go on and on. But I would, I just, I love this business. So I would just say, we think that the opportunity continues to be enormous. The teams are super excited in EM about all the opportunity ahead. And our protocols are really resonating there. So it's a, it's a great business for us.
Okay. Staying on the global side, going quickly into Eurobonds, I feel like not another business that doesn't get a lot of attention. It is already much more mature and competitive, I would say. So again, any important initiatives there, anything we should be expecting or anything from a macro perspective that you're watching, again, seems to be a more mature business, but you've done fairly well in it recently.
Yeah. It's really interesting because it is sort of at the other end of the spectrum from EM. And yet, you're right. We've done very well there. If you think about the liquidity, it's a fractured liquidity market in some ways in that there are, you know, 26 different jurisdictions, so to speak. And it's not like a monolith US type of an environment for fixed income. And our protocols really help there. And really, across the board, we have been successful in Eurobonds. And whether that be, you know, again, whether it be an RFQ in all- to- all, portfolio trading has done well there. Mid-X has done extremely well there. And it has been for quite some time in terms of they were, you know, earlier out the gate.
So we have how the way that the market is structured, our protocols and what we offer it just fits the market very, very well. They have best execution needs. We're able to help solve for those. So it's really, you know, we put things out into the market in the E.U. In fact, in Europe, we will often pilot and test things because I would just remind you that we are looking to scale. So when we build our technology now, when we enhance our technology, we are trying to do it so that it is efficient across all of the different products. And the E.U. market is often a place where we test things out first.
Okay. Interesting. Moving on, and this is really across the whole business. I know automation and AI is a big topic for you. AI in particular is a big topic at this conference.
I bet.
I think every fireside I've hosted so far, AI was definitely a question or two. So any particular AI project you would highlight, any benefits you may be already seeing from some of the things you've been doing and anything we should be expecting or getting excited about?
Sure. Let's start with automation. Then we'll move to AI. So automation is, for us, we have kind of classic automation. That is our Auto-X protocol, which you're able to use across, you know, RFQ, across all- to- all. And it has been successful for us. And it continues to grow. And we put KPIs out all the time on it. Every quarter, you can see what's happening with Auto-X. And what we really like to see with automation is that it is a very sticky protocol. Now, it's obviously very good for small tickets. We've been pleasantly seeing also some big tickets that are going through. We highlighted a client not that long ago who has been using automation for their trades, call it above $2 million. And they have increased significantly to where now they're doing something like 54% through automation protocols, right?
So that's just classic automation. Now, remember, we bought Pragma. And they are known for their algos. And that technology is really top-notch. And so the next generation for us of automation is really going to be through the algos. And we have a suite there that we're doing. We are also looking to integrate it into X-Pro. And so for those who are ready for next-generation algos for automation, we're going to be ready too. And that's a place we've been investing. We're very much looking forward to seeing that. But again, we already have, you know, Auto-X out there doing quite nicely. And it's just really sticky business because it allows our clients to do things more efficiently. It's a cost savings for them. So it just really embeds us in the trading fabric of what they're doing.
So automation is a great opportunity area for us. AI, how much time do we have? Okay.
We have a few minutes.
Okay. So.
Good.
So on AI, so I think before we get into, like, the real heart of what you're asking for me for at MarketAxess specifically, you know, we've all seen what's been happening lately with AI in terms of the enormous needs for data centers, for the hardware, for just it's just such a boom right now. And obviously, a lot of that is being financed through the debt capital markets. So that's also going to be something I know it's not the question you asked. But I think we have to frame it appropriately in what that means for the debt markets, right, which is obviously more issuance, which will.
I do cover the rating agencies.
There you go.
Pointed out. I'm watching it closely.
There you go. Okay. So you know exactly what I'm talking about. And so that's just one thing that is obviously going to be helpful for us from a credit trading perspective down the road. But we look at AI. We put it into two buckets, really. There's what we call corporate AI and commercial AI. So corporate AI is what we can do internally to be more efficient, and other things. Commercial AI is what we can monetize. Now, interestingly, MarketAxess actually spent time first on commercial AI. I think most firms spent time first on corporate AI or whatever they call it. You know, we like to try to keep things as simple as we can with how we categorize things. So let's just look at CP+, for instance, right? It is an AI-driven pricing algorithmic, you know, protocol.
I guess protocol is probably not the right answer there. But product is probably a better way to say it. And that is something that, honestly, no one else can get. You can't get our raw data. We are not monetizing, quote-unquote, "raw data." We're monetizing the outputs of that data that can only be found on our platform. So just to give you a sense, we in 2025 saw 5.3 trillion inquiries on our platform. And in 2024, that was 4.7 trillion. That is the type of information that just you can't get it unless you're us, right? And so we can then turn that into useful information for our clients. And that's how we're monetizing the AI there. And CP+ is just one example of that. We're also looking at doing you know, there's a variety of different things we think we can do with AI.
Right now, one of the exciting things we're working on is called AI Select, where we're using AI to be able to help our clients, particularly in the block space, understand who has what what access, where are they where is the trading, at what price, at what levels, what's going on in terms of where they really can find the best dealer. It's part of something we have called Smart Dealer Select, or it will be. That's another example of where AI is just becoming part of what we do for our clients. So we've actually been using AI for a while. And we're going to continue to accelerate it. That's from a commercial standpoint very exciting for us. Now, on the corporate side, there are things that we're doing in terms of, you know, coding AI, you know, we've only just begun there.
Testing, we've only just begun there. Continuous streamlining of our workflows with AI. We're actually calling it AI everywhere, and so from an internal perspective. So there's quite a bit more to be done both on the commercial side as well as for us on the internal corporate side. And I mean, if you talk to me about this in another couple of months, I'll probably be even more excited with even more to tell you. But there's really a lot that we have underway.
Excellent. Moving on to another company-wide topic that always gets a lot of attention, which is pricing. There are a lot of moving pieces here. So, you know, maybe maybe remind us where those different businesses are sitting. And then as you're successful in some of these new initiatives, they're coming with different pricing trends. So certainly, there's a lot of a lot of mix there. And you talk about this basically every month when you release your your every updates. But, but, but look, I think people are also very focused and concerned about like-for-like pricing pressure. There are some aggressive competitors out there. And it's not just anecdotes, right? So maybe maybe talk about what you're seeing on that end and and where you feel like you actually need to respond once in a while.
So, first thing I think is we need to come up with a way to simplify this for everybody because I understand why it comes up all the time. I'm going to. It's not going to be a one-minute soundbite. But I'm going to talk you through it and how we think about it and how we look at it just because I do think it's important. To answer part of your question, one of the things I would just say in terms of how pricing works is we've got pricing that goes against the verticals, so high-grade, high-yield, EM, E.U., et cetera, and then the horizontals. So whether it be client-initiated RFQ in all-to-all, automation, whether it be PT or dealer, right?
So you have to think about this as like a checkerboard, in terms of how it all works together in a matrix. Now, only high-grade is the one that uses the duration component of the pricing. The rest are all price-based. They're not converting spread, right? It's just price-based protocols for the other asset classes. So I would just put that out there. And if we kind of, I'll start with PT because what has really happened is in our regular way of traditional RFQ, we have seen steady pricing. And we've looked at it. I looked back over the last few years, maybe a little bit here and there, like a, you know, $0.50 there, $1 here, that you've seen some move in different quarters and different things happening largely, probably because of what's happening with the duration trade or other things.
But for the most part, the fee cards have not changed. The traditional RFQ pricing has been quite steady. What has changed is when you hear us talk about mix and protocol mix, which you just brought up. Again, I think this goes back to what I was saying before, which is that if the market has changed significantly and we want to be protocol-agnostic and we need to be there for where our clients are trading, certain things in that protocol mix are going to come in at different pricing points, right? So we know PT is, I'm going to start with this. I'm going to go, you know, a backwards waterfall, so to speak. So we know that PT comes in at the, you know, lowest revenue opportunity for us and the tightest pricing and everything else. And that's fine. That's not new news.
Everybody knows that. And that's PT. I think next, you think of dealer. And it is obviously very competitive, in terms of the pricing in dealer. But it's also a place that we just haven't been. So for us, that's what's the opportunity for us incrementally from a revenue perspective. And that's how we look at that. Remember, we put out revenue targets, right? And so there's a lot of different ways to get to those revenue targets. And if dealer comes in at a, you know, a price that's better than PT but, like, perhaps not as, you know, high as blocks, that's okay. Like, we it's incremental for us. That's the goal. The next piece then as I go up the waterfall is blocks. Now, blocks, it's not like there's this separate special blocks pricing.
It's just within the way blocks price because of the volume themselves of the trades, you're going to get a trade price that's going to be on a fee that's a bit lower than our RFQ, let's say, but not maybe where the dealer is and obviously not where PT is. And so I'm working my way up now. And so we also have automation. And automation is, you know, something that is premium priced. It is sticky. Now, it's premium in that it is sticky. And that is often smaller tickets. And therefore, you're going to get something more akin to the RFQ pricing through automation. And so you kind of have to think about waterfall, right? There's fee per million pricing for, you know, all of the verticals.
The high in high grade is the only one where there's a duration component, which can give you upside when the weighted average years of maturity is, you know, greater out on the platform or when the yields come in. And then there's just the different protocols. And it's the mix of that that drives the overall fee per million.
Fair enough. All right. Couple questions here too that I think I'm really getting into the CFO part now. You just had earnings on Friday. And of course, with that came your section on the expense guidance.
Yeah.
So maybe just remind us about the outlook for 2026 but then also really give us a little bit more flavor where all this money is actually going. What are the biggest investment areas, and so forth? And then really on the other side because, you know, you still need to look at the top line, obviously, when it comes to margin expansion, which, I believe is partially also in your multi-year targets, how do you think about delivering margin expansion when the environment doesn't give you what you had hoped for?
Yeah. So to start, you know, we put out expense guidance of, you know, sort of call it midpoint, 8% over the $499 million that we had on an ex-notables basis at the end of last year. So it was $530-$545 basically is the expense guide. And then we also gave out some services guide in mid-single digits, right? So you saw all of that. In terms of your question on, yes, we do have margin targets as part of the three-year. And as I said numerous times when we announced them and we said it again on the call, and it's very consistent, these are averages over time, not linear, right? And that margin expansion averages over time 75-125 basis points. And some, you know, years will be a little bit lower, maybe some higher, et cetera. And that's very consistent with what we've said.
Having said that, I think what you saw us do last year, which we haven't spent that much time on but which I think is noting, is we've probably for the first time in a while for MarketAxess really self-funded our investments, right? We went and did an efficiency exercise where we were able to save $17 million, and self-fund $16 million of investments. So we did that through vendor management. We did that through some of the repositioning that we've done as a firm and really some role eliminations now that things are we're changing the way we're doing things to a certain extent. We really have just become much more efficient as an organization. And that kind of discipline is now in the DNA, I'm happy to say.
Having said that, we were also very clear in the plans that we're going to be investing through 2027 to hit our revenue growth toll goals over the medium term. So to your question on where are we investing, we're investing, obviously, in many of the protocols that I just talked to you about. There's still so much to be done in terms of rollouts. We're continuing to invest in our algo suite. We're continuing to invest in emerging markets. We're continuing to invest really in our enhancement of our X-Pro front end. So everything we're doing really from an investment perspective is to fund the what we see and that our clients are asking for in terms of really making sure that our protocols are where they need to be.
It's a pretty exciting time for us because we feel like we have a vision and a roadmap for the next three years of where we see that investment. It's all really based on driving revenue growth.
Okay. Very good. Final question that I had prepared. Capital allocation, got to finish there. What are your latest thoughts here? Buybacks, which you've stepped up and did a big ASR here recently. And then outside of that, you know, M&A, you've done a couple of things, probably a little bit more niche. But seems like they've like have been helpful, like Pragma, for example. But so yeah, where do you feel like there may be other opportunities to strengthen the business inorganically?
So, you know, I think you've said it right. And I think you've seen, in the last year and a half or so, that we have significantly stepped up the capital return profile of the firm, right? The ASR, obviously, $300 million ASR. We also did last year $120 million just sort of regular way buybacks. And then, you know, another call it $114 million in dividends. And so you probably saw we just announced also a little bit of an increase to the dividend as well at $0.78 per share. So capital return is very important to us. But the first thing is the investments that we're making in the business, right? So we think of the use of our capital as what are we doing to drive growth, right? blocks, we've been talking a lot about. There's obviously been a lot of investment there.
And so inorganic sort of is kind of at the end of that capital allocation trajectory, I would say. So we start with organic investment. You've seen us do that. We talked a little bit just now about how we expect to continue to do that. But capital return to shareholders has been also, you know, extremely important. And that's what you saw. We did the ASR. We are such a cash-generative model. And with the three-year plan that we have, it just gave us that much more confidence in doing the ASR and really to be able to to return capital understanding what the road ahead is, the expectations are.
And then finally, on M&A, to your point, you know, if you've been watching this space for a long time, which I know you have, there's not a ton out there in terms of sort of credit market or adjacent type acquisitions. But we're always looking. We're going to do anything we would do on that front is going to have a very high bar in terms of accretion, really making sure that what we're doing is in the best interest of the business and our shareholders going forward and obviously our clients. And so, you know, we always have our eyes open to see if there are things that make sense that are going to help us to propel and execute on our model.
But again, I would put it in the waterfall of organic investment, returning capital to shareholders, and then M&A if it really fits the model and really furthers the strategy.
Excellent. I'm looking at the clock. I think we did perfect.
Oh my goodness.
I know. And if there are any super quick questions in the room, we'll take it. Otherwise, I'll probably have to wrap given that there's only, less than a minute left. All right. Why don't we just wrap it here? Thank you very much, Ilene.