Welcome everybody to our 2026 Investor Day. It's great to see so many familiar faces, and we appreciate the effort you've made to join us here today. It's almost two years since our IPO in April 2024, and it's instructive to cast one's mind back to that time and how we describe Marex to gain a sense of how much we have accomplished during that two-year period. For me, more important than the outperformance itself is understanding what it is that explains why we've been able to grow so much more successfully than we expected, because that provides the basis for our assessment of how we will deliver the next phase of our growth. Our goal has always been to build a resilient business, capable of sustained double-digit growth through a range of market environments.
Since our IPO, we have delivered that consistent growth with every quarter ahead of the same quarter in the prior year. It is that consistency, which is one of the clearest indications of how much the firm has strengthened and underpins our confidence in our future. It's instructive to look back at how we conceptualized our opportunity and described the investment case at our IPO. The foundation was the same then as it is today. We were looking to build an increasingly diversified and resilient firm, capable of growing through a range of different market environments by diversifying by product and geography within a frame of four interconnected and reinforcing services. We had a huge TAM, estimated at $70 billion and a low circa 2% market share. Our business was about servicing the flow of our clients, facilitating activity in exchange traded products.
We described ourselves as a clearing-led business, connecting clients to exchanges and clearing houses through our four interconnected services. As a large global clearer, we had built a set of very hard to replicate sources of competitive advantage. The strong barriers to entry included our extensive global connectivity, deep client relationships, expertise in exchange rules and contract settlement, and nimble technology. The exchange traded derivatives that were the basis of our business had enjoyed an 8% growth rate over multiple decades, and we saw secular trends supporting that growth. Unusually for a fast-growing business with high moats, our marketplace was characterized by declining competitive intensity. As smaller players were unable to provide the capabilities clients increasingly looked for and exchanges demanded, and banks focused relentlessly on larger clients and de-emphasized the services we provided.
We had a track record of successful growth, having increased profit in each of the prior eight years with a CAGR of 35%. We had enjoyed success augmenting our organic growth with acquisitions and presented this as a way to increase the 10% target organic trend growth, potentially increasing our growth rate to 15%. Our forecast was 12% growth, a level we had high confidence we could meet. That was the basis of our successful IPO. Since our IPO, our performance has materially exceeded those expectations. Even at the 15% annual growth, which at the time would have been the high end of what was expected of Marex, our 2025 earnings would have been a little above $300 million, and we delivered $418 million. What is interesting to me is analyzing what underpinned this outperformance.
What was it that we didn't anticipate or emphasize at the IPO? Importantly, the outperformance is not a function of markets being better than we forecast. Exchange volumes over the past two years have grown at around 10%, broadly in line with what we expected at IPO. Similarly, interest rates have performed much as we anticipated based on the forward curve back in 2024. There are a number of factors that explain our growth, which were, however, not anticipated. Although we had closed the Cowen transaction in December 2023, the business was still settling in during the first half of 2024, and was, during that period, performing below the level prior to the acquisition.
While we still believed it would be an important strategic transaction for us and described it as such, we did not anticipate how Prime would become so important to the firm and the extent to which it would increase both growth and earnings resilience. As I will discuss later, the share of the firm that is infrastructure-led is considerably higher than we had expected. At IPO, we never anticipated that a combination of our own capabilities, our improved brand following becoming a public company, and clients' openness to growing their business with Marex would create an avenue of growth, including the largest clients choosing to clear and grow their business with Marex. At the time of the IPO, we never anticipated competing for and winning the largest mandates in the face of fierce competition.
Today, it feels we are competitive in almost any bid, and while we continue to grow with highly valued smaller and medium-sized clients, it is success with larger clients that are powering our growth. M&A has proven to be more powerful lever than we had anticipated. At IPO, I would have expected $15 million-$25 million of inorganic PBT growth. In 2025, on a run rate basis, it's more like $50 million. All of which is within our existing capital envelope. At an acquisition like Cowen, which now accounts for 25% of profit, shows how if you get it right, you can acquire a very valuable franchise at a very reasonable price. While our strategy hasn't changed, how it manifests itself in our business today is somewhat different. There are six things to highlight, and this will structure the rest of my remarks.
First, we are scaling with larger institutional clients, which is now a key driver of growth. Second, the mix has shifted towards infrastructure-led high margin activities such as clearing, prime, and financing. Third, M&A is contributing more meaningfully, not just adding capabilities, but driving earnings. Fourth, our geographic footprint has expanded and our brand and positioning have strengthened, helping us win larger mandates and attract talent. Fifth, technology, particularly electronic execution and AI, is operating as an accelerant to growth. Finally, new opportunities, particularly in digital assets, are expanding our addressable market. The evolution of our client base is one of the clearest indicators of how the franchise has strengthened. Overall, active clients grew 19% in 2025, and revenue grew 32%. The most significant acceleration is with our largest clients.
Our $5 million+ client cohort increased from 36-49 clients, and revenue from that client segment grew from $368 million to $674 million, so over $300 million of incremental revenue. It's important to understand how that growth occurs. This is not the result of us prospecting and finding new $5 million+ clients each year. All of the 49 clients now generating more than $5 million a year of revenue were existing relationships in 2024. Seventeen grew into that category from lower tiers, while four moved out of the bucket during the year but remained important clients for the firm. This reflects a consistent pattern in the business, growth driven by clients increasing their activity over time.
Today, we have around 250 clients in the $1 million-$5 million revenue tier, which represents a meaningful internal pipeline for future growth. Notwithstanding this growth, we remain highly diversified with more than 3,400 active clients and no single counterparty representing undue exposure. The top-tier clients generate around one-third of our revenue. It is also instructive to look at the business through a somewhat different lens based on how infrastructure-intensive the underlying activities are. A growing proportion of our profit is now generated from what we think of as high infrastructure-intensive businesses, which include clearing, prime services, and our financing activities. These are high margin, stable, and highly recurring revenue businesses requiring connectivity, capital, technology, regulatory standing, and balance sheet capacity where we have a clear specialization and a durable right to win.
Of the $188 million increase in PBT between 2023 and 2025, around $150 million of that growth comes from these high infrastructure, high margin recurring revenue businesses, which now represent 70% of our profitability. Our medium infrastructure businesses, comprising solutions and market making, contributed approximately $22 million of that growth. These remain important parts of the franchise, and we expect their contribution to increase in 2026. Our lower infrastructure matched principal and brokerage activities in securities and energy contributed around $16 million of the incremental profit over the same period. Matched principal and brokerage remains an essential part of the platform. It is often the entry point for client relationships, generates significant trading flow across the franchise, and remains a very high ROE business.
However, the incremental growth of the firm is increasingly coming from infrastructure-intensive activities, which tend to be recurring, deeply embedded, and more scalable in addition to being high margin. This shift in the mix of earnings is one of the key reasons our earnings profile today is more resilient than it was at IPO, notwithstanding the expected headwinds from lower interest rates on our clearing business. One of the consequences of the shift towards higher infrastructure activities is the increased quality and reliability of our earnings. You have seen this slide before, but it remains one of the clearest ways we have to demonstrate that particular point. On the left of the chart, you see the consistent growth in average monthly profitability over the past five years, alongside the relatively narrow band for our monthly profit as measured by standard deviation.
That combination drives a Sharpe ratio of 6.2 for 2025, which is remarkably high. The key takeaway is that profitability is not concentrated in a handful of exceptional months. It is delivered consistently each month and within a relatively narrow band. On the right of the chart, you can see the distribution of daily profitability. The distribution in 2025 has shifted to the right by approximately $400,000 a day from roughly $1.3 million- $1.7 million , reflective of our growth. Importantly, the left tail remains small with only six negative days in the year. At the same time, the right tail has expanded, which reflects the increasing scale of the franchise and our ability to execute larger transactions with more sophisticated clients as our relevance increases.
M&A has been highly impactful for Marex, and this represents a distinctive source of competitive advantage. What has changed over the past two years is the position we now have in the market. We have become a buyer of choice. We are seeing a significant increase in inbound opportunities with multiple unsolicited approaches each week from companies looking to join the Marex platform. At IPO, we had assumed acquisitions might contribute around $10 million-$15 million of earnings annually. The scale of contribution we are now generating materially exceeds that expectation. A good example of this is the Cowen transaction in 2023, which strengthened our prime and institutional franchises, and importantly, created the foundations for the on-balance sheet prime business we have today.
In 2025, we deployed approximately $80 million of premium, including the sale of Winterflood's custody business across bolt-ons, which are expected to contribute approximately $35 million of run rate profit after tax in the first year. What we've shown over time is that you don't necessarily need to spend very large amounts of capital to create meaningful value. The Cowen transaction is a good example of that. We paid roughly $25 million of premium, and today that business contributes around a quarter of the group's profitability. Our pipeline today remains attractive. Over the past year, we have screened more than 100 opportunities, more than double the number we would have reviewed around the time of the IPO. More importantly, we now have real choice. At IPO, opportunities felt more limited and somewhat opportunistic. Today, we're able to be much more selective.
We remain disciplined in how we approach acquisitions. We look for scalable businesses with good cultural fit, targeting over 20% PBT margins, over 20% ROE, and payback of premium in under three years. We are acquiring high-quality businesses at fair prices, which once integrated onto our platform, deliver very attractive returns. This disciplined approach to M&A has been an important driver of how the firm has evolved. Another development we did not anticipate at IPO was the rapid evolution of AI. The more I learn about AI and see the impact at Marex, the more I'm convinced of its potential. I know as investors, you grapple with AI as a potential threat to business models, how it could impact existing barriers to entry, and who will be the winners and losers as this plays out over the next series of years.
We are similarly focused on those questions and want to share our experience and explain why we see AI as a growth accelerant and why we believe the winners in our ecosystem are likely to be incumbents with nimble organizations just like Marex. The impact of AI on productivity in particular areas and scope to improve margins is the most obvious impact of AI and where we are currently seeing the largest impact. For example, on a major system build for a new product, AI tools have transformed productivity. What even two years ago would have likely taken 50 people two years to build will now, with the AI tools available, take 20 people six months. What this experience demonstrates for me is where the source of competitive advantage now resides. In this case, we will have coded 1.5 million lines in just six months.
We could only do that because we had deep internal domain knowledge, understanding all the use cases, the complexity, and how the system needs to be connected across the firm. That knowledge and expertise is not in the public domain. What AI does, both in this situation and I suspect more broadly, is to create opportunity for nimble incumbents with fully functioning business systems to accelerate their growth. We have built a platform at Marex, which is difficult to replicate, with industrial scale capabilities, proprietary systems, and deep connectivity across exchanges, geographies, and clients. That moat is underpinned by long-standing exchange relationships which require credibility, expertise, and regulatory approvals that can take years to establish, alongside deep client trust and a broad service offering.
What is valuable is deep domain knowledge that is not widely available elsewhere and institutional capabilities, both of which we have firm-wide, and they don't exist in the hands of just a few people. I believe AI compresses advantages built on generic information but amplifies advantages built on infrastructure, connectivity, and expertise. The winners in businesses like ours will be nimble, ambitious incumbents. It is also intriguing to imagine how AI might, over time, transform how business is done. We are actively experimenting. Nilesh will be talking more about how we are developing AI agents and tools to enhance how clients interact with our platform. This is just one actually of very many examples of things that we are doing with AI within the firm. You will hear more on digital assets after the break.
It's an interesting ecosystem as it operates on an uncorrelated basis with traditional asset classes, so it acts as a diversifier for our business. I believe digital assets will coexist alongside traditional markets as an additional asset class, one where clients will require execution, clearing, and financing capabilities, just as they do today in other products. If the market evolves and broadens beyond its current scale, we'd be well-positioned. Equally, if it remains within its current ecosystem, we see an opportunity to build an attractive business. The move to a 24/7 market structure is also important, enabling developments such as prediction markets, as well as broader trends like tokenization and digital collateral.
What is notable is that two years ago at IPO, we would not have expected Marex to have the level of engagement we do with many of the most innovative participants present in this space. Our goal has been to build a resilient business capable of sustained growth through a range of market environments. Since IPO, every quarter has been ahead of the same quarter in the prior year, with quarterly growth ranging from 16%-55% and averaging at a very impressive 38%. I'm particularly proud of how we performed in the third quarter of 2025, a quarter characterized by materially lower exchange volumes and the publication of the short report, yet we still grew 27% and increased client balances. That was an important indication of how much we had diversified the firm. The first quarter of 2026 is another test of our resilience.
It is a quarter characterized by extremely high volatility at a level which creates significant pressure on some clients. While we still have four days to go in March, we are now forecasting a very strong quarter with record adjusted PBT of between $140 million and $150 million, up 45%-55% on last year's first quarter and comfortably above our record fourth quarter of 2025. As I described on the fourth quarter earnings call, what we're experiencing now is not Goldilocks volatility. We have seen, for example, the sizable losses reported by some of the most sophisticated hedge funds in March. While these firms remain very strong with sizable equity and liquidity positions, market moves in the quarter have affected smaller, less diversified clients adversely. It is worth noting that this is not new.
We have experienced periods of heightened volatility before, during COVID, the Ukraine invasion, the nickel price shock, and various extreme moves in natural gas and rates. These are challenging environments which create both opportunity and stress. They tend to be correlated with very high exchange volumes, which is good for our business and enhance market making opportunities, but also liquidity pressures for select clients. Client defaults, when a client cannot meet a margin call, given the impact of extreme price moves on their position, is an inherent part of the clearing business. Defaults are rare, but they do happen.
Over the past five years, we've had three or so cases where a client couldn't make a call, was clearly insolvent, and consistent with the conditions of our client agreement, and with the support of the exchange, we took the position into the firm and had to manage down the risk. Typically, we're able to manage the risk with limited P&L impact. In Q1, a client default by a natural gas market maker coincided with what was described as a one 1 in 35-year event in price moves, and we incurred a loss. Notwithstanding this loss, we are forecasting another record quarter. Importantly, while March is particularly strong, each month has been a solid contributor, even with the January impacted by the loss. We made around $38 million in January post the impact of the credit default.
$37 million in February, which was a slower month due to Chinese New Year, and are forecasting between $65 million and $75 million for March. This would make March our record month by some margin ahead of last October. Customer balances continued to grow through the quarter, increasing from the $14 billion on average in Q4 2025 to around $16 billion in the first quarter of 2026. As we approach the end of the quarter, the spot balance is materially higher than the average. This includes the impact of higher exchange margins as well as important new client wins. Cleared volumes in March were around 25% above the record levels in April 2025, which we were able to process successfully, again confirming the operational resilience of the firm and the scalability of our platform.
Liquidity surpluses through the quarter also remain strong and consistent with prior quarters. While periods like Q1 are demanding, there are opportunities to re-demonstrate to the market the strength of our model. As we did last year, I want to illustrate how we think about the potential scale of Marex over the next few years. We have maintained our growth framework. We continue to target over 10% organic growth annually, augmented by disciplined M&A, creating a 10%-20% target corridor for growth. As we have demonstrated over the past few years, we have delivered materially above that range. To illustrate what that means in practice over the next three years, at 10%-20% growth, we would expect adjusted PBT to continue compounding meaningfully from 2025 levels driven by the structural themes we have discussed today.
At 20% growth, those numbers would be approximately $500 million of PBT in 2026, $600 million in 2027, and $722 million in 2028, with EPS of roughly $4.94, $5.84, and around $7.01 in 2028. There is a more optimistic case where we are able to replicate 2025's 30% growth, which would clearly transform our scale with PBT of over $900 million and around $9 of EPS in 2028. Investors often ask me about my outlook for margins. Our objective has been consistent, to deliver steadily growing earnings supported by a scalable and increasingly efficient platform. As you would expect, a growing business benefits from returns to scale with higher margins on incremental activity.
To date, that effect has been offset in part by investments which include the following. As we have grown, we have deliberately invested in control infrastructure and systems required to operate a larger and more complex public company. This, for example, includes our sizable investment in SOX compliance. Given our efforts to diversify by product and geography, we do not get the returns to scale which might be anticipated and may even experience diseconomies while businesses and regions are growing. This, to my mind, is a sensible trade-off as we grow earnings resilience via diversification. We're also carrying a lot of investments in new capabilities and businesses to ensure we can deliver structural growth. As we have grown, we're doing more of this as our ambitions increase.
The outcome has been slowly improving margins over the past five years from 15% to 21%, and we expect that progression to continue with a path towards the mid-20s% over the next three to five years. The drivers of further margin improvement are increasingly clear. The combination of AI improving productivity, together with a greater proportion of growth coming from infrastructure-led businesses such as clearing and prime, means that as the platform scales, the underlying economics become more margin accretive over time. Taken together, these factors give us confidence that margins will continue to improve as the business scales. I want to introduce a new element in our evolution as a firm to you, a proposed re-domiciling to Bermuda. As we have grown, both organically and through acquisitions, the group has become more complex, both operationally and from a regulatory perspective.
As we have grown geographically, there is increasingly a need for stronger regional structures and decision-making, which is consistent with how regulators increasingly expect firms like ours to operate. We are now a global business with increasingly substantial regional franchises, and the structure needs to evolve with that. Our proposal is to re-domicile to Bermuda, creating a new holdco and four regional subgroups reporting into the new holdco. We believe this is the right structure for the next phase of growth, aligning the group more closely with how the business is managed and enabling us to scale more effectively across regions. This also helps simplify the unintended complexity that comes from being a UK-incorporated firm which is U.S. listed.
Bermuda provides a legal and governance framework that aligns naturally with our Nasdaq listing and is operationally more efficient to manage within, including reducing some of the structural and administrative costs associated with our current setup. Critically, this is not a change to the underlying business. There's no impact on our listing, our board, our management team, reporting lines, risk management, our clients, our people, our financials, or our tax position. We're also very mindful of preserving shareholder rights and protections in the new structure. The proposal is subject to shareholder approval at our AGM in May and subject also to regulatory approvals, and we expect implementation in the second half of 2026. Overall, we see this as a sensible and necessary step that supports the next phase of our development, reducing complexity and enabling us to operate more effectively as a global firm.
Materials describing this proposal in greater detail will be distributed to shareholders in April. Over the past two years, we have executed the strategy we set out at IPO and have built a much stronger platform. We're operating at greater scale with broader capabilities, deeper geographic reach, and more embedded client relationships than we anticipated at the time of the IPO. Our opportunity set is larger, our competitive advantages are clearer, and the organization we have built is materially stronger than it was two years ago. We've become better at all elements of acquisitions, better at winning client mandates, better at managing risk, and better at attracting and developing high-quality talent. We've also been able to address, in part, the question of how the firm will perform in more challenging environments. In the third quarter of 2025, we grew strongly despite lower exchange volumes and the short report.
In the first quarter of 2026, we're performing very strongly in a quarter of extreme volatility, even after a client default. We have exceeded our own expectations, not because of tailwinds, but because the firm has more scale, more capabilities, greater geographic reach, and critically, a stronger organization and culture than we anticipated. We're extremely excited about the opportunity ahead of us. With that, we're very happy to take, you know, some questions from you.
Hi, good morning. Bill Katz from TD Cowen. Thank you very much for this. Ian, maybe you could just sort of talk a little bit about the default a little bit and maybe expand beyond that one client, how we should think about any kind of risk profile among maybe the smaller clients, even as you continue to migrate your business to the larger platforms.
Sure. Look, I think that, you know, defaults of the kind that we had in the first quarter are sort of, you know, extremely rare. You know, we do, in the clearing business, recognize that there will be, you know, on occasions, clients having, you know, some challenges. Our experience, as you've seen from, you know, our track record of credit losses, you know, shows that this impact is extremely occasional and, you know, this was very unusual. You know, the scale of it in our sort of clearing business is, you know, on a revenue basis, somewhere in the sort of mid-$20 million to $30 million.
Obviously, you know, that gets comp affected, you know, both in the front and in the back. You know, the margin of the loss is somewhere like 70%, so it's sort of something like $20 million in aggregate. You know, just to make the point obvious, you know, we're managed out of the risk completely. It's a January effect, and within January, we still did $38 million, which I think would've been sort of our fifth highest month as sort of a public company or as a company. You know, it is gonna be these sorts of challenges are gonna be correlated to high volatility environments. Certainly when we look at March, for example, you know, the clients have actually performed extremely well in March.
Sorry. Does that cover your question, Bill?
I'm sorry, I don't have a mic. Can you just sort of broaden it out a little bit in terms of maybe the profile of some of the smaller clients in terms of how we should think about incremental risk relative to migrations to larger clients that may be more diversified subject to migration?
Yeah. I think that, I mean, even, you know, as I sort of think about March, which was a very, you know, a period of very high volatility, all the clients, including small clients, have, you know, performed pretty well. I don't think, to the thrust of your question, that there's in what we're seeing, sort of a concern of anything that feels systematic or sort of problematic. I've actually been really pleasantly surprised by how well clients have managed through this and have been able to make margin calls, and the number of sort of missed calls is less than I would've expected based on, for example, what we saw, you know, in the Ukraine crisis.
I think that, you know, the default feels like a rare event. A default that sort of leads to us having to take a position onto our books and manage it out is very rare, and we don't see anything like that, you know, in the portfolio based on what we're seeing in March, which was quite a difficult environment for some set of clients.
Hi, Alex. Yeah. Alex Kramm, UBS. Probably a little bit of a follow-up. Maybe just in terms of the first quarter, can you just help us as we think about, I guess, our numbers, what's been good? What's been helping? Maybe by business, where are you seeing the most strength and maybe any areas that are outside of what we can observe looking at public volumes, et cetera? I think this is a follow-up to Bill's thing, but, like, as you think going forward, are you seeing any sort of, not signs of stress, but do you see a little bit of wound licking right now? Are people stepping back a little bit? Is this another example of, "Oh my god, in April, May, we're gonna be looking at softer volumes"? Not anything structural, but just-
Right.
Do you see some of that already happening right now?
That's sort of a compound question. Well, the first part of it was?
Just a little bit more color on
Oh, the color-
What you saw on Q1, yeah.
...on what we saw in the quarter.
On the positive side.
Yeah, that's fine. Look, I think that when we look at the quarter, exactly as you would expect, if you know, given how strong the quarter is, you know, it's up, you know, circa 50% on where we were a year ago, every business and segment is actually performing strongly. What you're seeing in Agency and Execution is just sort of increased flows as a result of, you know, the volatility, you know, leading to more and more clients, you know, wanting to sort of transact. Agency and Execution is looking, you know, extremely strong. Within clearing, you will see that in the balances. You'll see how. You've seen how our CFTC balances have grown.
You know, we've had sort of similar growth, maybe even heightened growth in our, in our non-U.S., businesses. The clearing franchise is extremely strong. We saw, you know, 25%+ increases on certain days in March relative to the levels that were set in April of last year, which was the previous high watermark for us. Operationally, we were able to sort of deal with those, you know, very successfully. The clearing business, you know, away from the impact of the default has been, you know, sort of terrifically strong in the, you know, in the quarter.
You know, our solutions business has done extremely well and is, you know, I think reaping the benefits of the investments we made last year in the underlying infrastructure, which did consume a lot of bandwidth, but we are now sort of more able or better able to sort of deal with the increased volumes that are coming through, and, you know, that business is thriving. Exactly as you would expect in an environment which is characterized by heightened volatility, you know, our market-making businesses have done extremely well. What you have is, you know, all elements of the firm performing really well, and actually all regions are performing really well.
You know, in terms of, you know, what sort of the impact of this heightened volatility, the sort of uncertainty around, you know, sort of setting price, what's that sort of doing to volumes, and are we anticipating anything different for April and May? I think what we have observed, in the oil markets in particular, is a lot of activity from producers and consumers of oil, and that has sort of continued all the way through this period. There's definitely been some amount of pullback from the sort of more speculative money. Again, that's not really a big driver for us. You know, when I look at March, I'm not seeing sort of a big turndown in daily performance.
It's not a case of, oh, you know, the first two weeks were fantastic, and then it's all sort of turned down. We're seeing continued higher levels of performance through the whole month. I don't know how this sort of plays through in April and May, but we certainly have not seen evidence of slowdowns over the course of March.
Thanks.
Bill?
Yes, second one. All right. Okay, thank you. Just big picture. You have now more inbound coming to you in terms of,
Yep.
opportunities for inorganic growth.
Yep.
You can be more selective. Could you maybe talk about priorities geographically?
Yep.
... product distribution, client channel? Then the second part of the question is, given where the stock is trading, how are you balancing de novo versus inorganic growth, maybe perhaps, repurchase, given the shares seem to be so attractive at this price?
Well, hopefully, that's not gonna last, and the stock price actually moves up very quickly. Look, I think that the benefit of having a lot of inbound is sort of worth teasing out. I mean, part of it is, you know, those tend to then become bilateral conversations. You're not part of a competitive process. You could, you know, rapidly determine whether there's sort of a meeting of minds around price. You could sort of engage in ways that are just sort of very efficient. You know, in many cases, the acquisitions are people that we know and are sort of clients of the firm.
That's always an additional benefit because you've had experience working with them in a you know capacity, and you see how they operate, and you have a sense of you know what their culture is and how well they you know run their particular businesses. I think that you know that's hugely beneficial in so many different ways. You know with regard to what we're looking to do I would say that you know we recognize the benefit of acquisitions, particularly in the sense of certain jurisdictions like Brazil, Middle East, even you know in Asia, growing these things organically is just super difficult. Some of our interest in acquisitions is sort of driven by a recognition that to try to grow certain things organically is hard.
If we can grow it organically, I think that's our preference, but we're also very honest with ourselves about what we're likely to be successful with and what's likely to be sort of hard for us. If it's easier to do this through an acquisition, then we're very open to that. I mean, the other benefit of acquisitions is you get to do real diligence on what it is that you're acquiring, you know, which in contrast to sort of team lifts, where you don't. You're not able to ask about the clients and you just don't know in quite the same way. You do get sort of a genuine benefit. You know, in terms of what we're looking to do, I think that there's probably sort of two themes here.
You know, we do see opportunities for all of our segments, and I think Paolo is probably gonna talk a little bit to that. As you gathered from my remarks, I mean, our recognition is that the path to growth, if you are sort of choosing one, goes through infrastructure-intensive activity that sort of fits well within what we do. As you would probably expect, the priorities we have are sort of clearing businesses in geographies that are hard to build those out. In Latin America, in Asia, in certain niches, product niches where we don't actually have those.
We're open to opportunities in market making and actually you know some of the acquisitions or obviously Webb Traders that we announced and another acquisition that we're working on is in the market making space. We're looking at some things in the solution space, and then there's you know a raft of things in Agency and Execution that we're looking at. You know we see these as paths to continue to diversify the firm, add resilience, add geographic diversification, and sort of just accelerate our growth. That's how we have approached it in the past, and that's how we'll continue to approach it.
Ben?
Hey, Ben Budish, Barclays. Can you give a little color on the tail of smaller clients? I guess for the clients that are currently paying you under $5 million, I mean, how do you think of. Can you talk about maybe the average size of that client group? I mean, how many is there a potential to see things scale up meaningfully? How many are large clients allocating-
Yeah
sort of a smaller portion of activity versus smaller clients allocating a lot of their activity.
Yeah. I mean, look, I mean, hopefully, what I was communicating is a sense that, you know, medium and small-sized clients are actually really attractive and valuable clients, you know, in the firm. It's not a case that we are, you know, just sort of shifting the firm to a small number of large clients. We're keen to, you know, add clients in at all of these different sort of revenue points. I mean, I think if it's sort of less than $25,000, you know, we're increasingly thinking, you know, we'd want them to be above that level. We are actively looking to add small and medium-sized clients.
You know, when I look at the sort of 250 clients that I referenced in the $1 million-$5 million bucket, I would say that the preponderance of those are clients that there is quite a lot of scope to grow, as opposed to those sort of small clients, and they're sort of at the maximum level that you could imagine them operating, given their scale, what they do, and being on the Marex platform. I mean, I'm sure that sort of within the 250 there are a few that sort of fall into that category. Certainly, you know, we have a plan around 100 of those, that we're looking actively to cross-sell, and all of those feel like they could be materially larger clients.
It is not a case of, you know, we've shifted our strategy to just focus on large clients. It just turns out that given the range of capabilities we have, there is a path to growth which involves doing a lot more with those larger clients, and we are taking advantage of that. It is not as though we've changed our prospecting efforts and we are, you know, sort of cutting off smaller clients, 'cause we're keen to service people, you know, at a whole range of different points. All right. Why don't we move on to Rob. Thanks, everybody.
Best slide of the day. Thanks, Ian, and good morning, everyone. Over the next couple of slides, I want to cover how we've continued to diversify and grow our business, but spend the majority of the presentation unpacking our balance sheet and how we think about our cash flows and capital allocation. Following the short seller report last summer and discussions with many of you, it became clear to us that our cash flow presentation included within our accounts is not intuitive. While it is obviously fully compliant with the accounting rules, today is about providing you with a clearer and more intuitive way to think about it. Investors have also wanted to understand how much of our capital generation is required to support organic growth and how much is available for acquisitions. We have reworked our capital allocation for you to address this question.
Over the past five years, we have grown our profits sevenfold, and as you've heard from Ian, we've exceeded the growth expectations we set for ourselves at the time of the IPO. As we have grown, we have diversified our business and added complementary high quality revenues, making our earnings even more resilient to different market environments. Our resilience also extends to our balance sheet as we have maintained a strong capital ratio supporting our investment grade credit ratings, as well as maintaining a prudent approach to managing our liquidity. As you will hear, we continue to be disciplined in our capital allocation, balancing our capital position with the growth opportunities in our business, both organic and inorganic, as well as returning capital to shareholders. All of that underpins the strong profit growth that we have delivered over a long period and the impressive performance in 2025.
2025, simply put, was another record year for Marex. We delivered strong revenue growth, up 27% year-over-year to just over $2 billion, with growth across all of our business segments. We grew adjusted profit before tax by 30% to $418 million, demonstrating the strength of our client activity. Basic EPS increased to $4.12, and our return on equity was 28%. Importantly, this performance was delivered across a diversified set of businesses and regions, reinforcing the strength of our franchise. The Americas now represents nearly half of our profitability, demonstrating the growth we have experienced within this large market. This slide brings together the two core components of our P&L, strong, diversified revenue growth, and a cost base that remains flexible as we continue to scale.
All of our segments have delivered meaningful growth since 2023 through growth from existing and new clients, as well as continued expansion of both products and geographies. At the same time, 55% of our cost base is variable, which continues to give us flexibility as we grow. Where we have invested, these have been deliberate choices, including in our control and support functions as we mature as a public company, as well as building out new capabilities across the platform. Turning now to our balance sheet, which hopefully you will recognize, but I want to spend a little bit more time on it today.
This slide presents a summary of the audited balance sheet, but more importantly, breaks it down to show how the business is funded. As you've heard before, one of the distinguishing features of our firm is that around 80% of our balance sheet is directly driven by client activity, which is highly liquid and essentially self-funded. Let me take you through the key components. First, client balances. These represent amounts posted at exchanges to meet margin requirements for our clearing clients' activities. On our balance sheet, treasuries posted at exchanges sit in cash and liquid assets, and cash posted at exchanges sit in trade and other receivables. Importantly, these assets are fully funded by our clients, so they offset on both sides of the balance sheet. Second, repurchase agreements. This is a matchbook activity within our capital markets business, which is self-financing.
We act as a facilitator for clients, typically hedge funds, to access collateral or finance collateral while taking a small spread. This business is often linked to their futures activity, which supports clearing. Third, securities activities, which again primarily sit within our capital markets business. These are equity hedges for client activity in our equities and prime businesses and the associated financing of these high-quality assets, predominantly through stock lending. These also include our prime services and associated financing activities, which are recorded within trade and other receivables and trade payables. While much of this is self-financing, given our high level of liquidity, we have chosen to deploy some of our house liquidity in order to capture enhanced spreads. Importantly, though, we have the flexibility to fund this via stock loan if needed and improve our house liquidity position. Fourth, derivatives, which are primarily from our solutions business.
In financial products, we offered structured notes to clients, and in hedging solutions, we offer clients access to markets to manage their risk. These derivatives arise as a result of our hedging of this client activity, not from taking proprietary risk. Fifth, settlement gross up. This reflects fixed income trades in our capital markets business that have been executed but have not yet settled at year-end. We act as a principal on a matched basis but take no direct market exposure. Settlement risk is also assumed by the underlying clients. Outside of the client activity, the main corporate item is our debt funding, which supports the business, for example, being able to front intraday margin requirements on exchanges and our liquidity buffer. Overall, the key takeaway is that our balance sheet is client-driven, highly liquid, and conservatively funded with limited net leverage.
Turning to cash flow, this is where I really want to simplify things for you. There are four key components to consider. Firstly, the cash generated from our day-to-day operations. Secondly, working capital movements. Thirdly, financing activities. Fourthly, investing activities. Starting with operating cash flow. The first takeaway is that Marex is highly cash generative. In 2025, we delivered profit after tax of $308 million, which translates to $365 million of cash earnings once you adjust for non-cash items such as depreciation, amortization, as well as the equity deferrals for senior staff compensation. We converted more than 100% of our profits into cash with very little unrealized P&L. The next piece is working capital. As a financial institution, we raise debt to fund our client activities.
Debt funding increased by $2.2 billion during the year, driven primarily by $1.5 billion raised through our structured note program and a further $500 million from senior debt issued in May last year. The proceeds were added to our central liquidity resources. We used the majority of this funding to support client activity, most notably to fund the high-quality securities we hold to hedge client positions in our Agency and Execution business. As I mentioned on the previous slide, while much of this activity can be self-financing, we sometimes choose to use our own liquidity to enhance returns. In total, we generated cash inflows of $713 million from our operating activities, representing the combination of cash generated from our operations and net positive movements in working capital.
This cash was first used for our financing activities, covering $81 million and ordinary dividend payments of $56 million, as well as for our share-based payment schemes. While there was no cash outflow at the point of deferral, when they vest, we use cash to settle the associated tax obligations. After these financing activities, we retain significant capacity for discretionary investing. In terms of these investing activities, the main use of cash was our acquisition activity. We spent $115 million on the premiums and $127 million acquiring the net assets of the businesses we purchased. We finished the year with $2.8 billion of cash, an increase of $325 million year-over-year.
This uplift flowed directly into our total available liquidity resources, allowing us to continue to operate with significant headroom of over $1 billion relative to our regulatory liquidity requirements. A key question we're often asked is how do we balance organic growth, M&A, and capital returns. Our North Star is maintaining sufficient capital to support our investment-grade credit rating with both S&P and Fitch, while supporting organic and inorganic growth and returning capital to shareholders. To frame this, I will focus on our S&P RAC ratio, although I would highlight that under the FCA's investment firm regime, our capital ratio is 230% of our minimum regulatory requirement, providing us with significant headroom. I'll first discuss our sources of capital. In 2025, we generated $253 million of capital from our operations after dividends and AT-1 coupons.
After taking into account other reserve movement, capital increased from just over $1 billion at the end of 2024 to $1.3 billion at the end of 2025. This growth in capital provided capacity to support our strong organic growth. It also generated meaningful excess capital available to deploy into M&A. Importantly, this is not a one-off. Our model consistently generates excess capital after funding dividends, organic growth, and maintaining our investment-grade credit rating. This provides us with the ability to deploy capital into M&A on a recurring basis, driving additional profit growth over time. There are two components to our uses of capital: our risk-weighted asset requirements and premiums paid on acquisitions. Our RWA requirements consist of three parts. Firstly, credit risk. This is calculated by applying credit risk weights to our balance sheet assets.
This requirement increases with both balance sheet size and the risk profile of the relative asset. Second, market risk, which reflects capital held against trading positions. Thirdly, operational risk, which is driven by the scale and mix of our revenues, with more stable income streams, such as commissions, attracting lower capital requirements. The increase in our capital requirements from $894 million at the end of 2024 to just over $1.2 billion at the end of 2025 reflects our strong organic growth and the impact of our strategic acquisitions. Around 50% of this growth related to organic growth reflecting the strong performance of our businesses last year.
After funding organic growth, we used $170 million relating to M&A activity, comprising $115 million of acquisition premium, most notably from Aarna, Winterflood, and Hamilton Court, together with $55 million of additional capital required to support the RWAs of those businesses. At the year-end, sources of capital, less our uses of capital, left a capital surplus of $58 million, equating to an S&P RAC ratio of 10.7%. This is comfortably above the 10% threshold that S&P defines as strongly capitalized, which is supportive our investment-grade credit rating. On a pro forma basis, including the expected sale of the Winterflood custody business in the second quarter of this year, our surplus increases to $98 million and our RAC ratio to 11.1%. What does this mean? Our capital allocation approach is simple.
Firstly, we maintain a strong capital position to support our investment-grade credit rating. Second, we invest organically to support our growth. Thirdly, we return capital to shareholders through dividends, reflecting the board's confidence in the earnings trajectory of the firm. Fourthly, we deploy excess capital into very disciplined M&A. In addition, to give ourselves more flexibility going forward, we are looking to put in place a share buyback authority subject to AGM approval in May. Finally, as you've already heard from Ian, we expect the first quarter to be a very strong quarter for Marex, another record.
While we still have a few days to go before we close the quarter, we would expect revenue to be between $667 million and $697 million and our adjusted PBT to be between $140 million and $150 million. At the midpoint, this would represent growth of nearly 51% in profits and 56% in revenues, which reflects, as you heard from Ian, the strong, broad-based performance across the group. We are really pleased with the continuing momentum in our business and remain confident in our growth outlook for the remainder of the year. With that, I'll now open up to Q&A with myself, Ian, and Paolo before we break for coffee.
Yeah. Patrick Moley, Piper Sandler. In your prepared remarks, Ian, you mentioned that you expect the margin to kinda move from around 20% to the mid-20% over the next three-five years. I think you cited AI efficiencies and the benefits of scale. Could you maybe just break that down for us a little bit more? Where are you expecting to see benefits from AI in the business? Maybe if you could just talk about how you would see that ramping in terms of the margin. Could some of that flow through earlier? Is that gonna be a later thing? Any color there? Thanks.
Yeah. I mean, it's a great question, and one that, as you can tell, you know, we spend a lot of time, you know, sort of thinking about. I think, you know, as I sort of think about it, we clearly have some accelerants that were not present as we were addressing this question a couple of years ago. I would say that, you know, it's more likely that we get to the sort of higher margin, so sort of think of it north of 25% sooner, if these things play out in the way that I would expect them to.
Now, we obviously don't know exactly how it plays out, but whereas, you know, two years ago, I think, you know, the central tendency was we would get to sort of the mid-20s, and I had high confidence we would. You know, now I think there is sort of meaningful probability that we get higher. You know, we're seeing the impact of AI. It feels very early days, right? We see it in the impact of productivity in a whole range of places. We see it in interesting, like audit. We see it in surveillance. We see it in onboarding.
You know, we see it in IT, although that productivity increase is just being reinvested in more capability because we see so much benefit of, you know, having more output in the technical space, particularly as we're growing, you know, infrastructure-intensive businesses. Clearly it seems to me that, you know, we may just get to some kind of tipping point as more and more of the growth is coming in higher margin activity. The amount of investment we have to make in the ways that sort of I laid out for you just don't keep pace with how much the rest of the firm is growing. I do see sort of a meaningful probability that in that three-five-year timeframe, we're sort of in the higher 20% rather than in the mid-20%.
Not that I have a specific glide path to it, but as I see the sort of the forces at work, that's what I see as the more likely outcome now.
How you doing? Chris Allen, KBW. Maybe just following up on that. AI is one part of the margin improvement story, but scaling up the recent deals that you've done over the last year and a half is probably another in building them out and also realizing efficiencies there. Maybe if you could talk to where you are in terms of the more recent acquisitions in terms of fully building out those businesses to where you think they can get to and how much of an impact that could have on margins.
Yeah, thanks. Thanks very much, Chris. I think, you know, if I sort of focus on the sort of three larger acquisitions, I think you know, it's a good sort of illustration. The acquisition of Cowen, I think, has still got significant potential. I think, you know, we're adding to our capabilities. You know, we have more credibility with the clients, and we're adding products. You know, there are a few areas where we are, I would say we're either sort of underweight in terms of our capabilities. Some of the sort of fixed income prime brokerage would be sort of an example.
I think that probably allows us to be in the 20%-30% growth for some period of time. Not in the medium term. Hamilton Court, which is an FX business, we're gonna rebrand all of that under Marex. I think that we bought a business which was operating at around, let's sort of say $80 million of revenue. I think that the combination of all FXs is gonna grow at, again, 30%+ a year. I think that's. If it wasn't a $200 million business in a couple of years, I'd be surprised and disappointed.
Winterflood, which is, you know, in a very established business in the U.K., I think has the capability to extend internationally. That brand has got, I think, sort of resonance, particularly in the U.K., but it's actually got good technical capability. Again, I mean, that's. We've seen growth. I think that is, you know, another where you'd hope to be growing sort of 20%-30% a year. There's still some way to go with all of them. Behind the growth in revenues lies investment in the technology and in the capabilities. We haven't really sort of called that out or drawn that out, but there's, you know, significant investment in being able to support these new asset classes and doing so on an efficient basis.
You know, when we first entered this business, our sort of capabilities were pretty rudimentary, and some of the costs were quite high. I think that will not just add the ability to scale, to do more business for clients, but it'll make it much more efficient. I'm sort of very optimistic about about those. You know, as Ian said, we've got a very strong pipeline. There's five transactions which are in advanced stages. We've got another 15 or so in slightly early stages of discussion, so you know, very optimistic about being able to close those and those being efficiently integrated, perhaps more efficiently integrated than we've had with the past few just because you know.
I mean, as an example, you know, when we bought ED&F Man, we didn't have a broker-dealer, and all of the infrastructure of broker-dealer has had to be built. We didn't have a prime brokerage business. That infrastructure has had to be integrated and extended. Once you have that, it's much easier to add clients onto the platform.
I think the only thing I'd sort of add to that is I've been sort of amazed and surprised at what the sort of opportunity in FX is. I mean, somehow you, from the outside in, you just assume that it's an extremely efficient market with sort of tons of providers and that it would just be a space that's sort of very difficult to make money. And actually, what we found with Hamilton Court is, you know, they're it's a good business, but there's also, you know, really substantial opportunity to grow and be competitive, and that's actually just sort of really heartening. Many of these acquisitions, you go into them thinking, you know, they can be good businesses unto themselves, and there's opportunity to generate sort of good returns just in an M&A sense.
With many of these things, as you get into them more and you realize if you combine it with other things at Marex and then just, you know, work it in with sort of the culture of Marex, the market opportunities are often way better than you would've anticipated going into it. Alex.
Hey, Alex Kramm again. This is a two-parter again, sorry. One, just a follow-up on the M&A, you did mention prime at the end there. Is prime an area that you can scale inorganically, or is it just more organic? Then a second question I'll ask at once. It's just the new Bermuda-based structure, just as a little bit of a clarification. I think, Ian, you made a point that the four regions, you know, U.S., U.K., EMEA, and rest of world, it's. You said something like this is already how the business is organized or operating. So I just wanted to clarify that. To what degree are you actually operating international, and how much of these business are really siloed?
'Cause I assume some of your clients are looking increasingly international, so just wondering if you're behind on that or if that's just maybe something I didn't understand right. Maybe just talk about the global ability to kind of basically be a global firm for clients.
Sure. I'll cover the prime question quickly, which is, yes, we're looking at inorganic opportunities as well as organic opportunities. We don't have much of a presence, for example, in Asia, and so that would be a sort of natural place for us to try and acquire, you know, a business and a client base, in prime.
Actually, thanks for that question around, sort of how we're structured and how we think we're gonna, you know, move forward, you know, with the the sort of new structure. Look, I think that one of the things that is the case in terms of our evolution as a firm is that we've now moved to a point where, for example, the Americas now generate more profit for us than Europe did. We always, for example, anticipated that there would be, you know, substantial opportunity to grow our U.S. franchise, and we're now at a point where, you know, our U.S. franchise is not quite 50% of what we make, but it's actually bigger than what we make in the U.K. and in Europe. You know, we've had success growing in Asia.
We're having success, although it's off a small base, growing in the Middle East, growing in Brazil. There's definitely a sense inside the firm that what we're looking to do is to grow geographically. Now, at the moment, what we do is we run, as I think you're aware, sort of global businesses, you know, with sort of a regional overlay. It's all a matrix, but they are definitely global businesses. What we recognize that the regulators are looking for, you know, is strong regional management that can sort of face off against a local set of regulators, and can sort of legitimately talk to and express what's going on within each of those regions. You know, the structure that we're gonna put in place is we still have, you know, a top co.
In this particular case, it's gonna be in Bermuda. You have, you know, sort of regional hold cos. There'll be one in the U.K., one in Europe, one in the U.S., and one in sort of Asia. I think Europe will, you know, cover the Middle East as well. What you will have there is, you know, management and, you know, risk folks who can deal with sort of the local regulators and be responsible for that, you know, as a unit. You know, what we do find, which is interesting, is, you know, we do service clients across multiple regions, and we do have sort of global clients.
What we also have, you know, are a set of clients that are sort of keen to just have, just being a little careful in what I say. Just, we want to sort of have nexuses that are, you know, either just Asian nexuses or Middle East nexuses and not have, for example, a U.S. nexus. I think that this also, you know, supports, you know, the fact that, you know, some of the clients wanna be clients of an Asian business that sort of feels like an Asian business, and some people wanna be clients of a Middle East business that feels like a Middle East business.
It's like, you know, it's part of the motivation that, you know, you wanna be in Dubai, you wanna be in Abu Dhabi because the large clients in those locations are not gonna deal with you out of Europe, just by way of example. You know, part of this is, you know, driven by just sort of the administrative and complex nature of being both U.S. listed on Nasdaq and running, you know, a firm that's, you know, subject to the Companies Act 2006. That just creates a certain amount of administrative burden and sort of complexity. Most of what's motivating this is sort of a view of this is the right next strategic step for the firm.
There's a lot of organizational and, in particular, sort of regulatory complexity that comes from, you know, our current structure, and this new structure will allow us, I think, to sort of manage that more effectively. Did that cover your point?
Perfect.
Good.
Bill.
Thank you. Now it's a broader panel, maybe a two-part question for me as well. Ian, in your commentary, you mentioned that digital assets could accelerate the opportunity set for you. One of the debates, I think, in the market is pre-post trade impact of tokenization and digitization. Wondering if you could talk, maybe break down your comments a little bit further there, number one. Then number two, philosophically, to the extent you get approved for a buyback program at the general meeting in the spring, how should we be thinking about sort of capital management priorities? Is there a targeted payout ratio? Would buyback take precedence over the dividend? What's your mindset? What's the board's mindset around sort of the path to deployment on that? Thank you.
Why don't you deal with the digital asset one?
Yeah. You know what, the way we think about digital assets is in sort of three components. There is the sort of cryptocurrencies, which is sort of in of itself a large asset class, and Nilesh will talk to this, you know, in more detail. There are tokenization, which, you know, feels as though it's going to enhance volumes and activity, but is more a matter of, you know, extending the sort of trading day and, you know, improving settlement rather than in of itself generating a, you know, a very significant change in the sort of underlying nature of assets. There's stablecoins, which I think, you know, again, sort of fit into some combination of settlements and payments.
We're operating on the basis that all of those are going to evolve and be meaningful to clients. We are working with the clients, so this isn't us just building the capability sort of in a vacuum, in isolation. You know, this is really very much client-driven. You know, we're seeing high levels of interest. We also see that others are behind us. I think, you know, in each of those categories, you know, we think that there's an opportunity to win business. I think probably on the tokenization and the stablecoin side, it's more an important lever to win business than a generator of profit in and of itself.
Whereas in sort of crypto, I think as an asset class, you know, $3 trillion of crypto assets, you know, represent a sizable asset class, you know, in and of themselves. We're seeing, you know, adoption and more sort of trading activity, which is, you know, obviously being reinforced by the platforms becoming more established.
Yeah, I think that you know, just sort of adding to that. I mean, my general sense of this is this is a very sensible place for us to invest. You know, I don't think of us as you know, sort of crypto or tokenization evangelists. I think of us as sort of recognizing that there's a lot of interest from a set of important clients to provide them with some set of capabilities. That in and of itself is going to be a profitable and sensible investment to make. If it does turn out that you know, some of the more optimistic cases around tokenization in particular are realized, then we'll be sort of in the forefront of that.
It's, you know, to my mind, it's sort of optionality if the world does in fact evolve in that way. If the world doesn't evolve in that way, it doesn't matter because the things that we're doing are gonna generate, you know, attractive returns unto themselves, and it also represents a diversified earning stream. The path that we're on is strengthening our relationships with key clients, leading the market in a series of things that even if they don't grow beyond sort of what we see today, will still be, you know, very profitable for the firm, and then it creates optionality if in fact it does turn out that the world evolves in a way where these things become massively more important.
You know, my expectation is it will just be, you know, an ecosystem that works unto itself and is, you know, an attractive business where we can actually be a leader. If that's wrong and it turns out that it really does, that there is sort of some major shift to more stuff happening through stablecoins, more stuff happening through, you know, tokenization, we'll be extremely well positioned with regard to that. You know, with regard to your question around buybacks, I think that, you know, we certainly felt at the time that the short report came out, the fact that we did not have an authorization to do buybacks felt, like an important, you know, a real gap.
I think it's in part in the spirit of addressing, you know, that concern that we're gonna come to investors and ask for permission to be able to buy back stock. I mean, as a sort of general matter around capital management, and again, this obviously is a decision that the board will have to take, and it has not been taken, but my general view of it is that we see so much opportunity to create value for shareholders through acquisitions that I would imagine that we would remain on that path where to the extent that we have, you know, excess capital relative to maintaining our investment grade rating and supporting the organic growth, as Rob sort of described, that we will find that, you know, the M&A opportunities, you know, represent better value for shareholders than buying back stock.
If we were in a world where, for whatever reason, there was a big dislocation, you'd wanna be in a position where you could buy back your stock. I think that's how I would certainly think about it.
Should we break now?
Yeah. Well, thank you all, and coffee is at your disposal. You know, if there are any questions you didn't wanna ask in the broader forum, you know, obviously, please just come and speak with, you know, Rob or Paolo or myself. Thanks.
Mary, sorry, I click the green?
If you want me to do it, if the board can figure it, I will.
Oh, you have one?
I was doing three.
That's what I was wondering.
Yeah. No.
She had these two hands and they're the size of plates. Okay. I'm gonna try to do it.
It's not at all.
All right. Good morning. I realize I'm wearing exactly the same outfit that we did when we had the IPO. Yeah, clearing business, two years on, same shirt, probably longer hair. Hi, I'm Thomas Texier. I'm the group Head of Clearing, and I'm here to talk to you about how our business has grown since the IPO, along with my hair.
I will talk a bit about the evolution of market structure as well, in the next few minutes. First of all, a little reminder about our business and our priorities. As you know, clearing is very much at the core of Marex, and that it's the heart of what we do. We're a highly profitable and scalable business with high barrier to entry. We're diversified across asset classes, geographies, and client types. In 2025, we generated $528 million of revenue with a 50% profit margin. We have $14 billion client balances at year-end. Now, in this quarter, we're closer to $16 billion, as you've heard from Ian, given sort of market volatility and also recent client wins.
We're positioned for mid-market, but we're seeing, as you also heard from Ian, much increased traction among sort of larger clients. We're an infrastructure-led business with long-term sticky client relationships, and those relationships are held at very senior levels within our clients. We have a clear and consistent strategy. We add clients. We grow our balances. We grow volumes. We expand our product set and our regional footprint, and we invest in our growing scalable platform organically and also via acquisitions. We are the largest non-bank FCM globally, and we have greater breadth and expertise than most of our peers, both large and small. We cover 60 exchanges across 20 countries, and we have global reach and asset coverage. If we look at our competitive position echoing what you've heard previously.
I don't know why I'm pointing that way when Ian is over there. Our competitive position is stronger today compared to two years ago. What we said at IPO remains true. The industry is consolidating, the barriers to entry are high, and we have a strong competitive moat. The banks are retrenching to focus on their largest clients, and they are underinvested in our core competency. Our mid-tier competition is constrained by scale. They either have only regional reach or lack of capital and liquidity to effectively compete against Marex. Marex's competitive position and right to win strengthens post-IPO. The brand and the public company status really contributed meaningfully to this. We are now seen as a credible non-bank alternative as clients look to diversify their exposure and their counterparty risk on banks.
We're winning RFPs that were previously out of reach, resulting in big client wins and big client mandates and our right to win is real, and we'll talk a little bit later about why that is. We cover the retail segment and its growth, but we focus essentially on servicing retail aggregators. We do not deal directly with retail. Digital assets are also proving to be a foot in the door against major incumbent players. The business has transformed in the last two years since the IPO. Pre-IPO, as you can see from this chart, we were quite narrowly focused with, you know, focus on energy and ags and relatively small in financials. Our client balance is around $10 billion in 2023. The acquisition of ED&F was quite pivotal in 2022 as it's accelerated our access to financial futures and overall institutional clearing.
Today, as you can see, our initial margin mix has grown materially in financial products and digital assets, and we continue to grow in the other asset classes. This results in a scaled and diversified business across all asset classes. This breadth of product coverage also allows us to have larger institutional mandates. Digital assets are now 20% of our initial margin, and we're a very established player in the digital asset space, and we'll talk about this further. We still see opportunity to grow in our core business, and we also see opportunities to develop capabilities in FX and credit. Our geographic diversification accelerated since the IPO. America is now our largest region, and it still represents a significant growth opportunity.
The Middle East has strengthened through the acquisition of Arna, and it's very important for the customers in the Middle East to face us directly in the region. APAC is a very strategic growth area as well. It's benefiting from our new memberships in SGX and ASX, and we see very meaningful momentum now starting to come through in these exchanges. We continue to expand our footprint selectively. We are exploring opportunities in Brazil, Hong Kong, Japan, and Canada. Alongside this, we have a very strong pipeline of M&A opportunities across Brazil, Asia, and Europe, and we feel we have a high probability of execution, which will allow us to fill our targeted gaps. In terms of market coverage, we're also seeing, you know, we're doing a lot of first.
We were the first one on FMX, the first doing Coinbase derivatives, and we're the first non-bank clearer of LCH swaps, and that highlights our ability to win new business and deepen client relationships with these new initiatives. Overall, our global footprint supports the growth of the business. Now turning to our client balances. We've consistently grown balances. We have 20% CAGR in client balances since the IPO, and importantly, we also have very consistent quarter-on-quarter growth. The underlying growth remains strong. The growth trend remains strong despite short-term variability from margin and market conditions. We are the largest non-bank clearer provider globally. The CFTC ranking reflects only U.S. balances. A lot of our growth is also coming outside of the U.S., and it's not necessarily reflected in the CFTC balances.
We target between $500 million and $1 billion of net new client balances annually. We have a very strong 2026 pipeline with good visibility, and we're confident we're gonna achieve this target. At this point in the year, we're already very well progressed. As you can see from the ranking of our competitors, we are gaining share in a very highly concentrated market. The top 10 players in the clearing hold 75% of the balances in the U.S. They are predominantly large banks, and this is our opportunity to take further market share. We are taking market share from with larger, more sophisticated clients from these banks. We're very well positioned for future industry consolidation as well. I'd like to spend a little bit of time to talk to you about our technology. We're a very highly scalable platform underpinned by modern technology.
Our volumes have scaled significantly faster than our headcount. You can see here we are now clearing 4.6 million contracts per FTE against a 3.3 million at IPO. We operate a single global operating infrastructure, which is extremely scalable. That infrastructure allows us to have a very low marginal cost of trading and clearing, and it allows us to add clients and exchanges at very low cost. This is also one of the reasons why we are very often one of the first clearing to new venues, because our technology is flexible and scalable. We also have a state-of-the-art client portal in Neon, which is a key part of the client experience. Clients will have access to a lot of data through Neon, as well as real-time indicators around their P&L and their margins, all of this in real time.
Neon is deepening client connectivity and is also enabling greater self-service functionality from the clients, and this is a customer requirement. The platform is able to handle significant volume, including the current volatility we see in the markets, without necessarily adding any incremental headcount. We have the capacity to continue growing without fundamentally changing the operating model, and we're extremely scalable. Let's talk about risk management. Clearing is fundamentally a credit intermediation business due to the leverage involved in the products. Managing credit risk runs through the core of the business. All the heads of clearing in the regions within Marex are former risk managers. The risk discipline starts at onboarding. We're highly selective on the clients we take on, and we try to understand how they trade and why.
The fact that we understand these customers and really with deep understanding of their strategy allows us to manage high periods of volatility like we have experienced recently and to best risk manage them. Obviously, we have access to real-time monitoring and intraday margining, and we apply very strict collateral management, and we apply margin multipliers when it is appropriate, depending on the market volatility. We also monitor very closely concentration and position limits, and we have at all times full visibility of our clients' exposures. Credit losses, as you heard from Ian, are an inherent part of the clearing model, but they're expected to be infrequent and well managed within our disciplined risk framework.
Let's talk about our right to win in clearing, and as you know, this is the bit that excites us the most, is when we are growing the business and winning client mandates. We really believe that our market coverage and level of understanding of these markets is second to none. We have extreme expertise in many areas of the clearing space, and our clients are reacting very well to it. We tend to lead with areas of real strengths of the firm, where we can differentiate ourselves as a non-bank or as a specialist. You know, I will give you some example. You know, clearing metals, energy, digital assets, or interest rates clearing are real areas of strengths of the firm. We also provide leverage and financing for the clients, which is a requirement for dealing with large institutional customers.
These are typically pain points for the clients with their existing providers, and they're very receptive to the Marex offering in this respect. These areas of expertise allow us to get our foot in the door with these clients, and we open large relationships, and we then expand them further. We also have proven to be agile and innovative to support our client needs, so we will respond quickly to the customers asking for new markets. Overall, we also pride ourselves in providing an excellent client experience and to be very responsive. Finally, we look to expand our relationships across the firm and cross-sell other Marex divisions. An example of this interaction is our relationship with Trafigura, which is one of the largest commodity trading firms globally. I'll let you read the quote.
This was unedited and straight from that person's email. Trafigura is a long execution client of our energy desk. They have been a customer for a long time. Historically, they've only cleared and dealt with bank FCMs. In 2022, during the Ukraine crisis, Trafigura required additional clearing capacity, which we were able to provide them at very short notice. At that time, they made a decision to add a non-bank clearer as they were experiencing constraints with banks and looking to diversify away. This relationship has since developed into a large clearing relationship across multiple commodities in clearing, as well as bespoke hedging services through Solutions. It demonstrate both the stickiness and scalability of our clients' relationship.
More broadly, this is a good example of how we grow and how we deepen our relationships across the platform. Turning to digital assets. We have established a meaningful institutional presence here with unique and very differentiating capabilities. As I said earlier, digital assets represent about 20% of our initial margin. The margin does move around with the valuation, and the cash margin we hold for client is quite sensitive to movement in crypto prices. Our approach is institutional collateralized, exchange cleared, as you would expect in a clearing business. We operate in regulated markets, and we are a meaningful volume player on these key exchanges. For example, we hold a top three position across the crypto products on CME and also on SGX. We are number one in terms of volume cleared on Bitcoin futures on CME.
As you know, this is the main product used by institutional players approaching crypto. This is a real advantage with institutional client, as they are not being serviced currently by the banks, and they're also very reluctant to go to digital natives or some of our peers with a lower credit profile. We have a very strong right to win in digital assets, and it's proving to be a very meaningful door opener for institutional clients and hedge funds in particular to come and trade with and clear with Marex. Let's talk a little bit now how we're positioned for the evolution of market structure. We've seen meaningful innovation in the world recently due to the rise of digital assets and prediction markets. 24/7 trading, digital collateral, tokenization are reshaping client activity and how derivatives are processed.
Marex is very well positioned for these new market developments. We are enthusiastic about the changes as they bring meaningful benefit to Marex. For example, digital assets allows you to receive collateral and margin in real time or over the weekend, which we see as meaningfully reducing risk. We are already live on 24/7 coverage, and we're also the first FCM, part of the CFTC pilot program, on accepting digital assets as collateral. This positions extremely well as well for prediction markets, which are also 24/7. We're well-positioned across all the outcomes, whether adoption is gradual or accelerates. We're often asked whether tokenization presents a threat to the clearing model, and we don't believe this is the case for several reasons. Clearing is already 24/7, and it's already real time, and we manage client margins on a continuous basis.
Unlike settlement cycle for cash equities, for example, the clearing market is already real time. It would not necessarily meaningfully benefit from tokenization. Clearing is a credit intermediation business, and as you know, the exchanges don't want to face our clients, and the value of the FCM is in intermediating the credit. In the digital space, we're seeing more and more demand for clearing houses rather than less. Also, in the prediction market, we've seen Kalshi being very keen to have Marex on board, and they've approached us to become an FCM in order to manage the credit intermediation as they themselves move into the margining and leverage world.
We see the opportunity of 24/7 to be, you know, an opportunity for greater volumes rather than less and an improvement in credit risk management if margins and payments are available 24/7. In conclusion, Marex is a scale player in global clearing. We are one of the leading non-banks FCM. We have a greater breadth and expertise than our peers, large and small. We've grown our balances materially since the IPO, particularly with large clients. Clearing is a key driver of the firm's growth in infrastructure-led business. We have a scalable and efficient technology platform, and we keep managing our risk very tightly, particularly in challenging environment. We still see an opportunity to continue growing using our strengths. Thank you. Take questions.
Thanks, Thomas. Ben Budish from Barclays again. Just curious on the digital asset contribution to clearing. It seems like you're looking at this like a pretty interesting growing opportunity. How do, like, collateral requirements in that business compare to other asset classes you service? I'm just curious, like, you know, prices are down quite a bit from the top. If they're a pretty significant portion of balances, like how much do they impact your overall? I think it's like small but growing. How, you know, over time, how should we think about how volatility impacts what we're going to see?
Well, I think what you can see, what you've seen in the recent, you know, sort of recent history is that the prices of crypto have gone down. As you know, the margins on crypto are a function, essentially, of prices, right? 'Cause the margin requirements are a percentage of the notional value of the contracts. Even the prices of crypto have gone down. We've managed to continue increasing our balances overall. While crypto is a, you know, sort of meaningful portion of our balance, it is not everything, and so it's been compensated by other increases in other activities and also new client wins.
Actually, just one other thing to say with that. I mean, I think that, you know, the margin multipliers we apply on sort of crypto are higher and more consistently applied than other products. You know, even though the exchange margins are about 25%, you know, we would often be applying, you know, 10% or 15% on top of that just because of the volatility in the underlying asset. That actually plays through a little bit in terms of the balances as well.
Thanks. Thomas, you mentioned that your capabilities in digital asset have maybe helped you get a foot in the door with a lot of hedge fund customers, you said.
Yep.
Could you talk about how much of a differentiator that's been? Is that something that your competitors could close the gap on you pretty quickly? How much runway I think you think you maybe have there?
I think we still have quite a bit of a head start, you know. We still think we have a bit of a head start, and I think the larger the institutions you face, the more they are sensitive to the creditworthiness of the counterparty and the agility. So we still think we have a lot of runway. We're engaged in multiple conversations with sort of essentially larger hedge funds who are looking to Marex because we have a very unique set of sort of products and offering, which I think it will take a little while for our competitors to catch up on. So I feel quite confident about this scope. Then once the relationship is initiated, we've seen it multiple times, right?
You initiate the relationship on crypto, and then, you know, they sort of get a taste of the Marex service and all the other things we can do, and then we have conversation around other asset classes, you know. We've had some large, very large, you know, hedge funds who want to give us sort of equity PB balances and, you know, we're also a lot of these hedge funds are very interested these days in the sort of repo clearing, you know, changes in mandate and, you know, we have, again, a very meaningful advantage there. What we've seen is just this is an entry point, and then we're adding all the services further on.
Sorry, this is a quick one, and I'm sorry if I missed this, but did you also give how much revenue comes from digital assets and how that has changed? 'Cause I mean, the balances-
I think Nilesh is gonna cover that a little later.
Okay. Should've looked ahead, sorry.
It's a teaser.
Actually, if I just sort of make an additional comment in response to that last question. You know, I don't. We just don't see others investing in sort of building out these set of services for hedge funds in the way we are. I mean, while it's possible conceptually that others would close that gap, we're just not feeling it. I mean, there are clearly, you know, some of the big banks have big investment programs in very particular niches, but it just doesn't have the feel that there's sort of a broad-based effort to invest in these products. The advantage that I think we bring here is we're not developing the stuff like a field of dreams. We're building it and hope that it sort of works out.
I mean, we're working with, you know, some of the leading innovators in the space and solving a problem for them, and if you're solving a problem for them, you're probably solving a problem for others. While, you know, to the thrust of your question, not only are we not feeling sort of like a bunch of people on our heels looking to catch up, it just doesn't feel like people are seeing it as an opportunity in the same way we are.
All right. Thank you.
I'm gonna talk about capital markets, which is essentially an amalgam of the businesses that we service around financial asset classes. It's not the way that we report the business in our public filings, but it is the way that we manage these sort of combination of services across these asset classes. What you'll see is that the capital markets business shows up in both Agency and Execution on the securities side, and it shows up in Market Making. Both of these are very much fundamentally client flow driven activities. It's not risk-taking. We're not looking to benefit from proprietary positions.
Where we're involved in market making, it's very much, you know, in niche markets where there's sort of, you know, not sufficient liquidity just to provide a sort of agency or execution service. The sort of predominance of what we have is low risk flow driven. It spans execution, financing, prime services, and it covers all of the main financial asset classes. That's equities, equity derivatives, rates, credit, FX, and importantly, we are moving into digital assets as well. The way that we manage this and why we manage it on a holistic basis is important, and it's about the connection that you have with clients.
Certainly for the most sophisticated clients. For the largest hedge funds, for the largest asset managers, they want to have a service which is multiple asset class. They want to have a service which is not just sort of singular. It's not a monoline service in terms of execution. It's a service that can provide prime brokerage, can provide clearing, can provide direct pricing, can provide financing where that's needed. It's very much moved from being a voice-led business, and you'll sort of see how we've sort of evolved financially. This is not a voice-led broker business.
I think the sort of the sense of this business being, you know, relatively low margin and sort of more comparable to, you know, the traditional interdealer brokers is, you know, a bit, or it's a bit misunderstood. That is not really our business. We are an all-to-all business. We are servicing end clients, and we're increasingly doing so by providing infrastructure. The strategy is simple. We look to acquire or to service high-value clients. You can see in terms of the numbers, you know, we've made very significant progress. I made this point partly because I mean, it's become a very meaningful part of the business. We're now, you know, the largest revenue contributing area, and we're close to the largest profit contributing area.
The point here is less about, you know, how relevant that is, you know, in and of itself. It's about how large the market opportunity is because, you know, we really only initiated this activity a few years ago, and we've been able to sort of grow it to the sort of largest revenue stream within our the sort of Marex business. You know, within that, prime has been, you know, extremely important, and you can see the stats around prime are that we've grown the assets under management to $28 billion. When we talk about assets under management, we're talking about client assets. It's not the amount that's on our balance sheet. Our balance sheet usage for this business is actually relatively limited. It's really where we're providing financing.
Beyond that, we are taking ground in terms of a number of our services. We are the No. 1 broker on Cboe. We are extremely active in a wide range of option products, U.S. option products. We are the fifth largest non-bank prime broker. Now, I think that sort of probably understates, at least the prime team tell me, understates how relevant we are, just the way that they collate this data. There's clearly room for us to move. I mean, the next you know sort of competitor that we would hope to overtake or the next competitors are the likes of Jefferies and BTIG. We are taking ground as we add clients.
The majority of the business is, as I say, reported within Agency and Execution. That includes our prime business. There is some within Market Making. As I say, the sort of overlap between those or the distinction between those two services is actually quite small. You know, where we're providing direct pricing, it's because, you know, there isn't sufficient liquidity in the market, certainly on the capital market side. A good example is Winterflood, which, you know, has a very large number of client relationships and provides direct pricing. That is the way the market works. There isn't really a brokered version of that service. We manage as a single integrated platform, and the investments that we make are in building greater levels of connectivity to our clients.
I'll talk a little bit later about the way that we try and embed ourselves in the workflow and in the trade life cycle, which means that we're moving away from being a transactional business and more towards being a repeat revenue business. I think, you know, that has been, you know, an important component in improving the levels of profit recurring profit stability. Prime very much sits at the center of that. The prime service is very comparable to clearing, but it's providing the full range of support for clients that transact in securities. There's obviously an enormous number of securities and an enormous number of markets. The focus has been on the U.S. market in particular, where we've been able to develop an internalized offering.
We're gonna extend that into other markets. It includes execution, so we'll provide outsourced trading for those counterparties that require that financing. Then obviously, there's you know, very strong interaction with clearing. You know, as this platform grows, it's a very meaningful contributor to this infrastructure heavy, high margin, and recurring revenue stream. Just to give you a sense of how much has changed since IPO. At IPO, we were much more focused on this sort of narrower voice-led execution type business. We had made a couple of acquisitions that were predominantly offering that type of service, and they had you know, very good sort of levels of market penetration.
Since the IPO, we've really focused on growing our capabilities and our product set, adding clients both within the sort of existing geographies and in and in new geographies. The transformational point, I think, for the business was when we made the acquisition of Cowen, so at the end of 2023. 2024 and 2025 have been, you know, the sort of the launch points for a much broader offering. It really has sort of transformed, I think, the nature of our interactions with with clients. You know, the sort of transactional nature of of sort of agency execution is, you know, it's very much hand-to-hand combat.
Whereas, you know, once you have a prime relationship, you're much more embedded into, you know, the full workflow, the full sort of service of clients. It's not just about the sort of direct prime offering, but it's also the link that you have to the other activities of this client. It's been very supportive for a lot of our option execution, just as an example. We're still very selective with, you know, where we choose to compete. We, you know, we've traditionally focused on sort of mid-size hedge funds, and the economics are, you know, attractive for those hedge funds.
We are moving up, as in clearing, we're moving up the size spectrum in terms of the clients that we're able to service and our own sort of level of sophistication supports that. As we look forward, there are sort of a few areas where I think we're still, you know, somewhat underrepresented, so credit, fixed income prime, FX, and I'll talk a little bit later about our investment in a payments platform. Just to sort of step back and look at the range of offerings that we have within capital markets, and you'll also then get a sense of, you know, how much more opportunity there is. We have capabilities in cash equities, in listed derivatives, and in equity financing.
In cash equities, it's in a relatively narrow set of geographies and products. In credit, we have capabilities in corporate bonds in structured products and trade facilitation. Again, very large market, lots of opportunity to expand our offering. In rates, we're very well established, and we probably have the largest sort of rates platform. You know, in FX, we made some acquisitions, but that's an, again, another area where we expect there to be real opportunities for growth. Prime services, I've talked about digital assets within the capital market spaces about providing liquidity.
We are launching a series of offerings which will allow clients to access pools of liquidity, and that's sort of typically how we operate, as a sort of an aggregator of sources of liquidity. What we're not is an interdealer broker, and we're not either a full service investment bank. Capabilities will probably lean to more towards being investment bank-like than being an interdealer broker. Where we're focused is not the full range of those services. It's very much on execution, access to liquidity, and supporting clients with their execution needs and with financing, where that's an important component. That breadth has been really important to attracting clients. You know, the most sophisticated clients, they want that consolidated relationship. They want that offering.
They're not going to onboard providers that are too small, don't have the creditworthiness, or don't have that sort of range of offering. While sort of each of the products has its own sort of particular characteristics, it's really important that we are able to sort of offer something which you know, access to products which is very broad. The expertise that we provide is the differentiator. We are able to offer some amount of balance sheet, but we're not leading with balance sheet, and we're not really competing in terms of balance sheet. We are providing price transparency, liquidity aggregation, and expertise in execution. As I say, prime brokerage sort of is the combination of all of those skills and all of those capabilities.
In terms of sort of the trade life cycle, it's important to sort of know that these are not capabilities which everyone can offer. We've sort of divided this between the sort of three phases of a trade being completed. This is really important, particularly to the sort of largest, most active transactors. Pre-trade is providing access to pricing and to liquidity. Execution is an ability to find that liquidity, to put people onto the right platforms, and to fill the orders. Post-trade is really important because a lot of these sophisticated players, they want real-time risk positions. They want real-time connection, and establishing that level of connectivity is not, again, straightforward, is not open to others.
It creates a sort of a protective moat for, you know, for a lot of this business. If I turn just back to prime services, which, you know, you've heard a lot about over the sort of past few quarters, but just to put some numbers around it. We're now at $28 billion of client assets, and that's sort of been growing as we've added clients. Within that, there's about $6 billion of borrowing. The $6 billion of borrowing is sort of probably the most relevant driver in terms of the financing revenues. The client asset figure is the total amount of assets that the clients leave with us.
They may need security, so it has a slightly different reporting dynamic to the clearing side, where it's typically cash that's left with us. The business has been growing through a combination of adding new clients and expanding what we do with those clients. It's probably a fairly even mix in terms of where the growth has come from both new and from existing clients. It's very well diversified. We don't have high concentration on any one client. We have a very large number of relationships that we're supporting. It's very conservative in terms of the level of leverage and the sort of risk exposure. You know, and as I said, we're sort of ranked as the fifth largest non-bank prime broker.
We, you know, as we have with clearing, we can see the opportunity move, you know, very quickly through the ranks. Offering that type of service moves you much more into the higher margin infrastructure-heavy side of the business. We've made very significant investments, and as I sort of mentioned earlier, you know, there's still more to do because, you know, the infrastructure that we acquired was relatively undeveloped. I think, you know, whether it's in sort of fixed income products or whether it's in digital assets, there's investment to be made, and we expect that will result in high levels of recurring activity, stronger retention, and an ability, obviously, to then cross-sell.
Let's say, I mean, in total, as you know, and as you've seen in the numbers, prime's really an important contributor to our success. Yeah, and in numerical terms, you know, we bought a business that was generating about $80 million annually in revenues, that is now contributing a little over $250 million, and it's growing every month. I said earlier, I think the sort of sustainable rate of growth for this business is somewhere in the 20%-30% annually for some period. We have broadened the platform very materially since we bought it. We've been able to. It was primarily a sort of prime of prime model.
Essentially, the business that we bought was introducing clients into a prime offering from, that was being provided by one or other of the larger investment banks. What we've been increasingly moving towards is where we provide the prime service, and that obviously increases your opportunity to sort of generate revenues and generate margins. You know, we now think that we have, you know, a very competitive range of products and markets. We can offer access in almost any form, so cash, synthetics, through futures, in almost any geography. There's investments to be made to ensure that we do so on the most efficient basis, and that will sort of improve our margins and will improve our, you know, overall scalability.
You know, we are making meaningful investments in the infrastructure to support that level of growth. That business is now about a quarter of the overall group's profit. You can sort of see that, you know, we're getting a very good return on those investments. While, you know, the 20% or 30% is a lower rate than we've, you know, achieved in the past, it's off a much higher base. You know, it is a very important sort of component in achieving the Ian 20% target growth that we talked about earlier.
What began as a relatively sort of focused or relatively narrow capability has developed into something which is, you know, broad, and covers, you know, a very wide range of products, and it's become a really important driver of growth and profitability. In terms of risk management, it's very similar, it's a very similar position to the one described by Thomas Texier. You know, we start with the client. We're very selective with the clients that we onboard. We're not, you know, I see this sort of every day. We're not willing to interact with, you know, some range of clients, either because of creditworthiness or the nature of their activities. There's a very selective onboarding process.
We only will onboard if we're getting the right risk characteristics as well as the right economics. You know, once they're onboarded, this is a collateral led business, a collateral first business. You're typically well protected in terms of the level of collateral that you hold. We have a very limited, very rigid and limited set of limits in terms of the amount of leverage that we'll provide. The sort of averages are very low in terms of the sort of client leverage. The maximum leverage we provide is actually low relative to what you will see for some of the banks. Somewhere around 6x is the maximum leverage, and there's very few counterparties where, you know, that would be available to them.
It would be very dependent on broad portfolio and the right quality of assets. It's consistent with risk. I think you know, one's always exposed to some amount of credit risk. But I think you know, in this case, with the clients that we have, you know, that risk is really minimal. And it has been tested. We've seen periods of you know, extreme volatility, and we haven't seen any issues with you know, clients' performance, whether that's margin calls or cash withdrawals or sort of movements of collateral. The example we have here is sort of similar to the one that Thomas Texier had for Trafigura. You know, Kettle Hill is a client that we have...
It's almost the poster child of our target, you know, hedge fund. It's a mid-size hedge fund. It's one that's sort of grown very steadily. It sort of almost was incubated as part of the sort of initial offering. We do see quite a lot of opportunity in that type of client set. These are the most underserved hedge funds, those that are relatively small balances. Now it's, you know, it's doing a wide range of business with us. It has about $1 billion of assets under management. You can see the sort of description is one of, you know, having been supported through their growth. Yeah, we are able to service the full range of requirements from these clients.
You know, now it's moved from being just traditional prime broker to, we're supporting in terms of their trading activity. Where are the growth opportunities? I'm gonna sort of focus on two areas where I think there's really very meaningful opportunity to grow sort of beyond what we talked about in prime. The first is FX. We started with an FX business, which was essentially, I mean, this is on the left-hand side, the EFX. It's essentially a price aggregation business. You can execute on a very efficient basis, and you can go through our pipes. We added corporate FX, which, you know, is slightly different in terms of the sort of nature of not just the nature of the clients, but the sort of nature of their needs.
It's more like a treasury service. Again, I mean, these are repeat flows. These aren't transactions which are one-off. We're adding an institutional FX business, which is, you know, again, really to support the most sophisticated transactors. Again, it has a very specific need, and we've built a payments capability, and this payments capability will come online in the next few weeks. It's a very important component to embedding clients into that FX activity. It's not, you know, it's not a remittance business. It's not a retail remittance business. It's not Western Union. You know, it's about supporting large banks and institutional clients predominantly.
An extension of that is that, you know, we'll also be important in supporting the FX activity we have with corporates. You know, many of you will know, and then the sort of names at the bottom of the page, and the fact that these are, you know, very, very large, profitable, high margin activities. It was Ian's example of where we were able to build something in six months that had taken a competitor of ours at least two years and four times the amount of resource.
I mean, it's a sort of very clear example of you know the ability to build these types of services and deploy them rapidly, and we're waiting for the regulatory licenses to come through, and then we'll be able to roll that out. You know, it's a really important sort of part of the FX process. Again, it's an example of you know we are building infrastructure which supports repeat business. Then the sort of last area that I wanted to cover was electronic trading. As I sort of have hopefully indicated to you, we are embedded into the flows, the transaction flows of a lot of our clients already in a way which I think is probably a bit under or underplayed.
We will be building. We've sort of branded it Marex One and maybe MX One when Nilesh talks about it. You know, we are building a platform which will sort of unify all of these offerings. Again, supporting the very sophisticated needs of these clients, it's a sort of move more into electronic venues than perhaps you've seen before. We've recently hired Christophe Roupie, he was the CEO of MarketAxess in Europe. You know, we believe that we can sort of compete very effectively in this electronic access venue. That's something that we are also investing in.
This sort of summary of the points, I'm not gonna sort of run through them. I'll just leave it to Q&A.
Thanks. Alex Kramm, UBS again. Not sure if I fully understand the scope of prime, so hopefully this question makes sense. Can you talk about the prime of prime versus prime? I mean, again, I think when you bought Cowen, it was mostly prime of prime. I think that's what you said. So how has that evolved? Can you talk about the revenue contribution-
Yeah.
the profitability? Again, I'm not sure if this is correct, but, like, is the prime of prime eventually like a funnel to get full prime? Like, is it, is it a different sales process where you're saying like, "Hey, look, we've been doing this for you in prime of prime," but now it's like, "Actually, we can do this ourselves for you," and that's actually becomes a really nice sales funnel over time.
Yeah. It-
Maybe just talk about this a little bit.
Yeah, you are absolutely right, Alex. I mean, the prime of prime model is that you act as a sort of underwriter or introducer to other providers of prime services. There's a couple of versions of this, sort of the U.S. version is a little different to the sort of European version, which is more like an omnibus arrangement. Essentially, you are underwriting those clients that would typically not be banked by those organizations, and these are your employer, as an example, so UBS is one of the providers of that service. When you're providing that service, you're essentially limited to with the capabilities of that group.
You're limited to the sort of the capacity, the willingness to support that activity, and you're also not in control of pricing. You wanna move to something which it's got more self-determination, and that's what we are now able to offer. When we talk to clients, we aren't just saying, "Well, we're just gonna introduce you to UBS or Goldman." We are actually able to service you directly. Most of the revenue opportunity is having the ability to service those directly.
That really means providing the financing and the execution, which is not to say that we don't value and plan on continuing to use the services of the third-party providers because there's some markets where we won't be able to provide that service. We're just rolling that out. It has been a very useful. It's been an important. It obviously gives you a client base that you can immediately go and try and move onto your own platform. I don't wanna say that it's sort of competitive with these because what we really wanna have is clients that grow to a point where they're gonna need multiple prime brokers.
You know, this feels more like a partnership than it feels like we're sort of in competition.
Sorry, is there a percentage where you are today and the profitability of those two models?
Yeah. I mean, the profitability is very much weighted towards where we are managing this. I would say it's, you know, probably like 60% is on the sort of self prime business and 40% on the outsourced.
Thanks. Wanted to circle a little bit on the growth opportunities. You talked about FX, building out payments. You have other capabilities. Love to hear kinda what the next steps are as a blocking and tackling, cross-selling opportunities within FX. The credit side, you've added a new hire there. What are the capabilities you need to build out there to monetize the opportunity?
Yeah, I mean, in terms of FX, I mean, we're waiting for the payments license to come through. You need to have sort of regulatory payments license. We actually have one, but in the sort of wrong entity, so this will allow us to unify our offering. It will mean that all of the clients that we have, corporate clients, clearing clients, solutions clients, are actually able to interact through the same entity on a sort of consistent basis. That's the big next, the sort of big step in terms of capabilities. The payment platform will be technically ready in a few weeks. And in terms of, you know, where it's more. It's
At that point, it's sort of less about blocking and tackling and more about, you know, pushing out, you know, a new product and to a slightly different customer base. It will be very comparable to what some of you will have seen as the StoneX capability. In terms of credit, this, I mean, this.
Better. Yeah, obviously it goes without saying it's gonna be much better. In terms of credit, I mean, it's a, you know, it's a $14 trillion-$15 trillion market. We're not looking to sort of compete in every asset class. It is a. It's an area. It's an asset class which we're certainly sort of subscale. So yeah, we have made some hires. There's quite a lot that will be happening in the credit space. It overlaps with our existing client base. It's basically, you know, it's the same asset managers that we interact with in a lot of the execution areas.
Then?
Just speak loudly.
Just speak loudly. Yeah.
There you go.
Thank you. Just curious if you could comment on competitive intensity in this segment. I mean, earlier in the presentation, you talked about declining competitive intensity across clearing. You know, there's definitely a couple of firms in the list of competitors that are growing rapidly. Interactive Brokers is public. We all kind of know them and hear what they're talking about. There's another, it was on track to go public that has also been, you know, growing rapidly and maybe some of the other ones in the middle, not quite the same. But it seems like we kind of hear more about, you know, from not just you guys about an opportunity to serve underserved hedge funds. I guess, yeah, how would you describe that?
Is it getting more competitive, or do you see it as, you know, enough white space, or is that, you know, I'm thinking about it incorrectly?
Yeah. I mean, I think it's, you know, it's certainly competitive. There's, you know. We're the fifth, you know, in the U.S., we're the fifth largest non-bank, and, you know, there's a lot of banks that are, you know, larger than us. So, you know, for the largest clients, it's, you know, it's competitive. It's the same with clearing. You know, the ability to win that business requires you to be, you know, to have a superior service. And that's, you know, that's not a surprise. I think that, you know, we've taken a slightly different path to Clear Street, who are presumably the company that you were sort of referring to.
I mean, you know, they. We've got a broader range of capabilities, a broader set of markets. You know, they very much focus on a sort of singular platform and technology. There's a lot of overlap there. I think, you know, we've got a credit rating. We've got more resources. You know, I think we're gonna compete very effectively. We do need to invest in that, continue to invest in that capability and the sort of technology, having a unified offering. Yes, it's competitive. I think that, you know, we've got a couple of competitors that are probably slightly distracted and, you know, that's in one case because of an acquisition, in the other because of sort of business challenges.
I think we're, you know, quite optimistic about being able to win business.
Yeah, I mean, the only thing I'd sort of add to that is it actually feels to me a little like where we were two years ago with clearing, where it felt like, you know, we didn't really feel like for the largest mandates we were really gonna be competitive if we were bidding for those. Two years on, I think we now are. I think that when I think about, you know, where we're having success with funds that are in that $500 million- $2 billion range, which are sort of underserved, and I don't think that the others who are trying to serve them in the way we are have a product that is sort of superior to ours.
We still, you know, for the really large, you know, prime mandates, I mean, the banks have, you know, a really strong product and a series of advantages that at least at this point it seems very hard that we're going to sort of compete for those mandates on equal terms. You know, two years forward when we're sort of sitting here again on whatever it is, the fourth Investor Day, I mean, hopefully we'll be able to say in that circumstance we are competitive for those mandates. Don't know. Like right now, yeah, I mean, the really big mandates, the banks dominate, and it's hard to see right now that we would win those not trying. You know, to Paolo's point, there's just.
For the client set that we're competing with, the product that we have is as good or better than what's available to others.
Thank you very much.
Unlike Thomas, my hair didn't grow in the last two years. I'm Nilesh Jethwa, I'm the CEO of Marex Solutions, but today I'll be presenting a firm-wide view of digital assets. Ian mentioned digital assets in his opening remarks, and you heard both Thomas and Paolo talk about how important digital assets have become to their businesses. I want to explain how digital assets really fit into Marex more holistically across the firm, and in particular, how it is we're making money today, how we see the product set evolve through time, and perhaps most interestingly, what is our right to win? What is our source of advantage? It's what I call Marex helps clients get access to markets, and digital assets are a market. It's already pretty big, but it's growing quickly, and it's gaining increasing institutional adoption.
I just wanna be clear that we're not evangelical about digital assets. We're not Bitcoin maximalists. You know, our approach has been to ensure that the infrastructure, the risk management capabilities, the client services that we apply to traditional assets can be extended here too. Not as a sort of separate isolated business unit, but really as a natural extension of everything that we already do. Just another asset class. Now, institutional clients are increasingly coming to Marex in this space, partly because of our innovative, adaptable approach culturally, but also because of our institutional status. Now, being an investment grade, globally regulated, listed firm, known for our competence in traditional asset classes, sort of assures institutions that they can trust us here too, and that's really the foundation of everything I'm about to walk you through.
Let me give you a sense of the scale of this market. The market cap of digital assets is now around $3.2 trillion. Every day there's about $180 billion that gets traded. $80 billion of those are in derivatives. There's no longer sort of a niche market. There's a few reasons for that growth, and I'll highlight four of them. From a regulatory perspective, the clarity provided is growing. You've seen MiCA in the EU, the GENIUS Act in the U.S. The stance from policymakers is getting sort of firmly constructive. The ETF boom has also really contributed. You can now buy access or get access to digital assets without the need of a wallet and a private key.
BlackRock's IBIT ETF, which tracks Bitcoin, is the fastest growing ETF in history. The market cap's just growing from $800 billion in 2023, two years later it's $3.2 trillion. It's quadrupled. That just gives it just more relevance. If you add those three things together, you get to the fourth, which is increasing institutional adoption. Institutions owned 1% of Bitcoin in 2023. It's now 8% at the end of last year, and that trajectory is clear. Our strategy is to position Marex as the natural home for institutional clients looking to access this market, partly because of our institutional status, our deep sort of expertise in digital assets, but also our culture of innovation being adaptable and nimble around the product sets.
At the IPO, digital assets was not really a big feature. It didn't really feature in our presentation. We didn't have a lot of revenue coming from it. What we had done in the years before that are planted several seeds and invested a lot in the infrastructure of digital assets, sort of anticipating that eventually institutions would actually come on board. That work we are now seeing the benefit of today. We trade around $400 billion of digital assets across 20 underlyings, and last year we made about $150 million of revenue. It's also forced us to reassess how we operate as an organization. Digital assets themselves are 24/7 products. We have to upgrade our risk management systems to also be 24/7. That's a sort of direction of travel for many other asset classes as well.
An example of this is prediction markets. Prediction markets are becoming increasingly popular because they allow people to. It's easier to take a view on the market than it would be otherwise. If you wanna take a view on the midterm elections, the traditional approach is you come up with a basket of maybe oil stocks or bank stocks, and you try and see how they may play in your favor. With prediction markets, there's a much cleaner route from your view to the outcome of that view. We see prediction markets gaining in popularity. To be able to deliver those, you need to be 24/7 ready, and because of digital assets, Marex now is. Tokenization is another sort of hot topic at the moment in the digital asset space.
Our view is that, yes, we'll have an increasing population of securities transacted in tokenized form, but we don't think everything moves across all at once. Actually, you know, sort of traditional assets will live alongside digital assets, which makes our role as the bridge between the TradFi world, if you like, and the digital native world, sort of makes that relevant. If we're wrong, and if actually many more securities move onto the blockchain faster than we anticipate, we're actually pretty well positioned given the investments we've made in previous years. Now, this slide really illustrates how Marex has come together across all the divisions to offer this, you know, to offer these services to clients.
Every single business within Marex, every sort of division, has extended this offering to enable digital assets to be more easily transactable with our client base. It's been also done in a very joined-up way. We're now clearing listed derivatives on traditional exchanges and on digital venues, bespoke and standardized structured investment products, prime brokerage, total return swaps. The combination of all of these services together is what enabled us to make that $150 million last year. Looking ahead, we are still investing. We're applying for licenses, for example, the 5MLD license in the U.K., which allows us to sort of move assets from one to another. These licenses take sometimes 18 months to get.
You heard from Thomas talking about the importance of sort of tokenized collateral to move value around. If you can receive collateral instantaneously, that obviously reduces cost, but also risk, it reduces risk. Clients love that we can increasingly sort of net down digital asset collateral with traditional assets. That creates capital efficiency for both sides. Paolo talked about the payments business that we're spinning up, and over time, that will increasingly benefit from blockchain rails. We can now actually use stablecoins to move value between countries. Quantitative investment strategies or custom indices, this is a $1 trillion industry today. Marex is still young in this journey, but we like it because it's very high quality of revenue. It's recurring revenue.
It's sort of almost asset management-like in the sense that you sell an index, it stays with you for many years, and you're charging basis point fees on that volume. Now right now it's dominated by equities and fixed income. Our idea is to take strategies which we know work in equities and just apply them to digital assets where we have an edge. Using digital assets as a door opener for other products is a theme we'll come back to. Now the digital assets world is really split between digital asset natives and traditional finance operatives or TradFi. The digital asset natives tend to be sort of very fast and creative and disruptive, and they've done a great job in frankly building out this industry. Marex will not be as fast as many of those participants.
What Marex does have is institutional acceptance. Now if you're an institution coming into this space, you want to work with someone who you feel understands regulation, understands operational robustness, credits, liquidity, capital. Now our Nasdaq listing, our investment grade rating, our global regulatory oversights, now these credentialize us with an increasing institutional population which, you know, just feels reassured by that package. The speed to innovate is important, but once a product exists, clients just want it to work. Now amongst our traditional finance peers, we also perform well versus that audience because of I think it's our culture of agility and adaptability. This is a fast growing area, and you need to be able to evolve very quickly. We have a very flat hierarchy with a short decision chain, which allows us to sort of play well here.
That's why a lot of the larger institutions are coming increasingly to Marex, and you heard it from Ian earlier, to kind of solve their problems and partner with us. Beyond purely culture and technology as well, we're increasingly using AI to cheapen the cost of experimentation and delivering these capabilities to clients. Our approach internally is incredibly collaborative. We have a group-wide steering committee which evaluates the opportunities in front of us, allocates resources, and ensures alignment. Clients really respond to that joined-up approach that we're presenting. Here's a sort of short video, hopefully, that sort of brings together some of the topics we've discussed.
Since 2018, we have built a fully integrated platform operating across the entire digital assets value chain, bridging the gap between traditional finance and the digital assets ecosystem. We provide market access, clearing, execution, spanning structured products, OTC derivatives, market making across spot and derivatives, institutional crypto collateralized lending, and prime. Our clearing infrastructure provides clients with access to leading global derivatives and crypto exchanges, supporting liquidity, block trade execution, and seamless clearing. We consistently rank among the top three clearers on the CME and SGX in digital asset volumes and have traded over $25 billion in total notional in structured products and have transacted more than $400 billion in digital assets in 2025, covering over 20 crypto assets, building one of the most comprehensive institutional digital asset platforms in the market.
As institutional adoption of digital assets accelerates, we have built strategic partnerships with some of the biggest players in the space. It's the combination of our established presence in the space, our ability to innovate at pace in a dynamic landscape, and our institutional, globally regulated investment-grade platform that makes Marex the obvious choice for clients.
Marex has done a great job of anticipating client needs and then constructing packages and payoffs to meet exactly what investors need. Thanks for the partnership.
As a market maker in this space, Marex have supported us in testing elements of trading infrastructure, connectivity, and settlement processes. The collaboration has provided a useful environment to test workflows as our digital asset platform evolves.
Marex, bridging the gap between traditional finance and the digital assets ecosystem.
It's getting increasingly clear that digital assets are starting to influence how traditional markets operate. I'll give you a couple of examples of that. You've heard a little bit already about how sort of 24/7 digital assets is. You know, in the traditional sort of credit or clearing model, you know, you calculate client risk overnight through a batch process. The next morning you send them a margin call, and they typically have a day to pay you. If the market moves late on a Friday, Monday morning you tell the client what happened. On Tuesday, hopefully you get the money. From Friday night to Tuesday, you're running a bit of risk, and given how the speed at which things move today, that's quite a lot of credit risk.
A real example in digital assets, we had a client who was margin called at 1:20 A.M. on a Saturday, and within 20 minutes, the collateral was in our accounts. Of course, you can see the efficiency gain, but also the risk-reducing nature of that. The second is sort of cross-business synergy. There's a clearing account who's, you know, a good client of clearing and seeking to do more business with us, but didn't have enough fiat currency to support doing more transactions. What they did have is a lot of digital assets which they had no intention of selling. We just said, "Well, give us your digital assets, and we'll net that collateral down with your clearing activity." Now what that means is the client takes sort of essentially a dormant asset and makes it useful.
They can now do more activity with our clearing business. From a Marex perspective, we've reduced the risk, the credit risk towards that counterparty. It's that kind of joined-up thinking across the firm that clients really respond to. This next slide is something I feel strongly about, and you've heard it from both Thomas and Paolo already. Digital assets is increasingly a door opener for other business lines. There's a G-SIB bank with a large wealth management arm in Asia, and you can imagine they're sort of well-served by everybody. We turn up and say, "We'd love to add our product to your shelf too." They're like, "Well, yeah, but we'll see you in a few years' time." We'll never be the top priority for them.
Their clients came to them and said, "We would like a digital asset product." Marex is one of the few places in the world where you can get that. Suddenly now we're in a situation where we are now being onboarded, shaving years off the process. The digital assets was our foot in the door, but now you're in the room, you can now compete on all products. Now, for existing clients who are already clients of our equities business or fixed income or commodities, when they move horizontally into digital assets, we're now seen as a partner who can help them on that journey. By helping them there, you sort of strengthen the relationship.
We feel at Marex that the more multi-threaded you are with a counterparty, the more reasons you have to speak to them, the more multidimensional that interaction is, you move away from being in a transactional relationship to one of much more of a partnership. Now, the opportunity for digital assets is moving really quickly, and we don't actually know with 100% confidence what that product set looks like in a few years from now. Which is why being innovative and adaptable and moving with the times is important. We talked about the importance of culture, the culture of Marex, which really lends itself to that. But there's also another aspect here, which is technology. Ian talked about the increasing use of AI across the firm for both productivity gains but also products.
I wanted to give you a bit of context about how we're creating client capabilities using AI now. There are three agents we're spinning up. Agent one scans the entire market and looks for opportunities. Does Ethereum look cheap versus Bitcoin, for example? We'll hand that thesis over to agent two, who will say, "How can I turn that thesis into a very simple investable product?" Agent two hands that product over to agent three, who will scan all of our clients and say, "Which of these clients are most suitable for that product? Who would be interested?" All of that process can take a few seconds, and then run on a 24/7 basis. In fact, better than me talking about it, let me show you a quick video of what this might look like.
Markets move continuously, but how opportunities are identified, structured, and distributed is still manual and tied to desk hours. At Marex, we want to reimagine that process by creating a set of independent agents driven by AI, from market intelligence to structuring to client identification. Agent one watches the market 24 hours a day, seven days a week across equities, rates, credit, commodities, FX, and digital assets. It automatically detects structural dislocations and generates a ranked trade thesis in real time. That thesis moves instantly to agent two, which builds a complete ready-to-trade structured investment product to monetize the idea. Then the product flows to agent three. It screens the entire client book for suitability and fit. It finds the most appropriate clients for that trade. Hundreds of profiles screened in seconds. Only the most relevant opportunities surface and are routed directly to account managers for a final assessment.
Three agents in one continuous pipeline. From market signal to client-ready investable product in under 60 seconds. Running 24/7. Markets don't sleep. Neither should intelligence. Marex.
Look, just, I'm so grateful the videos worked, by the way. Look, just to bring this together and summarize. Digital assets are a large and growing market with increasing institutional adoption. They're a catalyst for how markets operate 24/7, collateral moving quickly within minutes on the blockchain. Now, we're not ideologues. You know, we are here to provide clients with access to markets, which includes digital assets, because that's what clients want us to help them with. We do this holistically across the firm in a very joined-up, collaborative way, and clients really love this. Marex is well positioned, and we combine our sort of, you know, institutional governance and credit quality with an understanding of how digital assets work, plus our sort of genuine ability and agility to adapt quickly to market evolution. Lastly, it's a client acquisition tool.
You know, we're gaining relationships and deepening existing ones because of digital assets. That approach collectively enables us to make this $150 million we mentioned in 2025. The foundations are in place, the momentum is building, and we feel confident we can continue to execute whichever way the market evolves. Thank you very much. Happy to take any questions.
Maybe this comes back to the question that I asked earlier and wasn't answered, but can you break down the digital asset revenues? 'Cause you've basically said it's across the whole firm. The $150 million, which is, I think, 7% of revenues last year, right? So is it mostly on the clearing side and on balances, or is it? Yep, just basically where does it sit? And then has that changed, that number, last year? I mean, are we actually now at 10%, 15% of the business, or how has that changed over time?
Yeah, the number's growing a lot, comparing it over time isn't that relevant. I think the revenue pre-IPO is almost negligible, so it's growing fast. I think that breakdown is sort of roughly about half is in the primary, I would say more or less, maybe a quarter each in between sort of the clearing and the solutions business. Is it a very rough idea?
Is it higher now, like, due to excess hiring for 4 Qs? Are we like-
Yeah. It's great. I say it's great 'cause one of the questions earlier was, you know, what the fact that sort of Bitcoin, for example, is off its highs, does that impact our volumes or anticipated revenue? I think the phase of growth we're in right now, that isn't the case. We are seeing more demand from institutions to find ways to this way I guess use our interoperability between these two asset classes, between TradFi and digital assets. We're seeing more use cases for people trying to take dormant assets and use them in the traditional finance world. We're in the phase now we're just doing more business with more people, and that growth is beating the sort of total growth in sort of Bitcoin value, for example. Bitcoin is a crypto asset, and that's not digitalize.
That's just one small segment of the digital asset ecosystem that we hope to participate in.
I mean, Alex, I think we'd be surprised if sort of quarter to quarter it's probably growing at the same rate of the firm rather than it's gaining share relative to the growth in all the other assets, is my sense over, you know, a three to six-month period. I mean, over long term, I suspect it may grow faster, but at the moment it feels like it's proportionate.
Thank you. Maybe just in terms of like native digital assets versus, you know, tokenized TradFi, can you talk about the split between the two? When you think about the growth opportunity, you know, how much comes from tokenized equities, clearing tokenized collateral versus trading of native crypto assets, which I think, you know, it seems like the narrative from that industry or all the TradFi players has sort of switched from interest in digital assets to interest in tokenized traditional assets. Which do you see as more important? Which has been, you know, a bigger contributor for you and, you know, how do you think about, you know, what the next couple of years look like?
I feel there's about seven questions in that, but I'll try to remember.
Just answer the way you want.
Yeah.
Whichever one sounds best for you.
I think the digital natives, like I said before, they've been very quick to spin up opportunities. As the opportunities emerge, the institutions who are now entering the space probably just feel more comfortable dealing with Marex than someone who's maybe has better technology potentially or quicker to innovate, but doesn't have the security, the stability. You know, we may not be as quick, but when you come here, it's gonna work, and they sort of feel assured by that. You're taking an investment grade credit risk. Often this involves people giving you value and giving them value back. If you're giving value to Marex, that's one thing, is if you give it to someone who's got a crazy idea, but it's new.
I think we have a quite an interesting position where we are established as an institution. Amongst the other TradFi players, we're just gonna be a bit more adaptable and nimble. We can sort of be more helpful in that regard. That I think that applies to all of the sort of questions you mentioned in terms of the tokenized one in particular. I'll pick on question six. You know, there is a big push towards tokenizing securities. There's a lot of, at least a lot of hype around it, and we are positioning ourselves well to the extent that that actually does take off and suddenly everyone's trading tokenized equities on a Sunday. I think we're better positioned than most to be relevant in that.
That's again another example of, you know, having a bridge between, you know, having a serious equity offering first positions you well to then have to enable people on the tokenized equity side. Just having one piece of that isn't that interesting. Being, again, that bridge between the tokenized equity world and be able to say repo out the equity on the other side, that's where we can always play a part. I feel like we're just. I think we don't know the direction this goes, but I think we're well-positioned sort of whichever direction it does go into.
Yeah. I think our basic view on that is that we see those as like tokenized equities will be, you know, a small niche market appealing to a particular set of investors that will live alongside the more traditional markets. We'll be in a position to offer that service, and it could be, you know, to the earlier points, you know, profitable in its own right. If it turns out that, you know, that does take off in some way, you know, then we'll be well-positioned. We're not of a view that that's gonna sort of take over the world at this point. We do think, you know, there's gonna be. There's a fair amount of work going on to sort of establish that as an alternative.
Again, it allows some group of people to trade, you know, over weekends, late at night. You know, they'll probably trade with, you know, much wider spreads. It'll be an attractive enough business. We don't start out thinking that's going to replace the existing way of operating. It almost doesn't need to because there's not a huge amount of competition, to Nilesh's point, for the kinds of people that are gonna wanna face off for that service to an institution. We'll do well out of whatever that turns out to be, and then we'll have the optionality if it turns out to be bigger than we currently anticipate.
Real example of that right now is you have trade houses who are clients of ours already today anticipating that retail people, to Ian's point, and there'll be some subset of people who wanna trade equities in a tokenized format on a weekend, and they're looking forward to offering those wider spreads and benefiting from that on the weekend. But someone has to finance that. If they have to do that in a fully funded format, they don't have the liquidity or the return on equity looks worse comparatively for them. So if they can come to Marex where we can actually help finance those, that activity, that's actually really attractive.
There are very few people who have all the aspects of that ability and that knowledge and know-how and willingness to try that. We are sort of just well-positioned for that growth if it does materialize. Thank you very much. Cheers.
Thank you. So thanks, everybody. Thanks for joining us. Thanks for all the questions. You know, I think when, you know, sort of I reflected on, you know, what were the themes of our presentations. You know, a lot of what, you know, I wrote about in my remarks, and I think, you know, was replicated in, you know, as a structure within the other presentations, was this notion that two years on, we've made enormous progress relative to where we were at the IPO. That, you know, our opportunity set and the set of advantages we bring to bear today are just so much greater than you know, we had at that point.
The outperformance of the firm has also, you know, had this sort of multiplier effect, and, you know, it's a virtuous circle, and we're now better able to, you know, to compete going forward. You know, listening to the presentations though, I think there's another element of this that hopefully comes through to, you know, all of you. You know, which is just almost like the reason behind that performance. What is it about our culture? What is it about, you know, how we approach these opportunities, and how to make that sort of come alive for you? Because what I was hearing is just sort of this huge sense of opportunity, people being extremely well organized to go after it, you know, very ambitious.
Nobody's trying to figure out, "How do we grow at 5% a year?" Everybody's trying to figure out, you know, how you're gonna grow at 20%, how you're gonna grow at 30% a year. You know, how do you not be slower than the rest of the firm? You know, the kinds of questions you ask yourself when that's what you're trying to accomplish are just so very different. hopefully, you know, in addition to taking away a sense of how far the firm has come, and also having a feel for how much better positioned we are to grow from here on in, you also have a feel for how the firm operates when it looks for opportunity and then sets itself up to capture those.
You know, whether those are the opportunities that you know, Paolo was describing in Prime or, you know, in payments or in FX, or the opportunities that Thomas Texier was identifying, you know, by expanding in product sets or by making more progress with clients, or it's in digital assets, you know, as Nilesh Jethwa was describing. I mean, what you're almost getting a feel for is how it is that the firm thinks about and sets itself up, and how ambitious it is to take advantage of these opportunities, and how the improved position that we've created for ourselves two years on puts us in a position where we really you know, can grow and thrive. There's, you know, an enormous amount of entrepreneurial energy inside the firm. There's an organization that's actually very skilled at taking advantage of those opportunities.
The sort of growth rates that you've seen, I mean, it's not sort of an accident. I mean, it happens as a result of a lot of work and a lot of advantages that we sort of bring to bear and the way in which our culture positions us to take advantage of those opportunities. You know, thank you for joining us. Thank you for making the time to learn a little more about Marex. I mean, we have lunch, and we're happy to, you know, sort of handle questions that you might have. Thank you to, you know, our investors for your support, for the sort of feedback you give us.
Thank you to the analysts for their sort of insight and sort of the engagement they have with us and obviously to our board and our management team who have been here today. Obviously, Adam and Mary, who have sort of pulled this all together with Nicola and others in the sort of support team who have, you know, made this such a successful day. Thank you all.