Plus500 (LSE:PLUS) — Investor Presentation

0:01 Good afternoon, and welcome to the PLUS500 LTD investor presentation. Throughout this recorded meeting, investors will be in listen only mode. Questions can be submitted anytime by the q and a tab situated in the right hand corner of your screen. Just simply type in your question and press send. Company may not be in a position to answer every question received during the meeting itself. However, we review all questions submitted today and publish responses where appropriate to do so. Before we begin, we'd like to submit the following poll. I'd now like to hand you over to Owen Jones, head of investor relations. Good afternoon, sir. Thanks, Paul. Good morning, everyone. I'm sorry. Good afternoon, everyone. My name is Owen Jones. I'm the, group head of investor relations at PLUS500. The purpose of today's call is to introduce our business to you all and highlight the excellent strategic progress that PLUS500 has made this year, across a number of important growth drivers, and also how we are positioned in our end markets. Also, a big thank you to IMC for hosting, and thank you for all, joining today's presentation.

0:58 Slide two shows the agenda for today. I will provide an overview of the strategic progress that we have made so far this year before providing more information, in the operating review section. I will then look at our technology stack in more detail, our balance sheet and shareholder returns, before concluding with a summary and outlook. So before I do all of that, I just want to provide you all with a brief overview of of where we are as a business, today. We are a a global multi asset fintech group operating proprietary technology based trading platforms. Over the last four years, PLUS500 has evolved from being a single OTC product provider to becoming a global established and diversified fintech group offering multiple products across OTC, futures, and shared dealing markets.

1:53 The group has launched a significant number of innovative new products and expanded our services, that we provide to customers, enabled by our proprietary technology and unique system architecture. Today, the group has over 32,000,000 registered customers across more than 60 countries, and its customer cohorts continue to improve driven by our focus on higher value customers and retention initiatives. The vast majority, more than 90% of the group's revenue, is generated by high quality customer income. PLUS500 is the best performing stock on a TSR total shareholder return basis over the last twelve years, having generated almost 8000% over that time frame, and we continue to go from strength to strength.

2:45 There are five key takeaways from today's presentation, slowed here shown here on slide four. We are making significant progress in further diversifying our business and strengthening our operating model in a way that enables the group to continue driving compounding shareholder returns. The positive momentum behind our business is accelerating as we build on the growth achieved across our key markets in 2025. We have added to our industry leading portfolio of global licenses and clearing memberships and continue to build out our product suite with new offerings in Japan as well as announcing the conditional acquisition of MetaEquities in India earlier this year, which further expands our geographic reach.

3:33 We drove growth across key markets and regions, including The UAE and The US. This, in turn, has led to excellent financial results so far this year. We announced shareholder returns of $200,000,000 in February 2025, and we added another $165,000,000 with our results in August, comprising dividends and share buybacks, taking the total announced this year to $365,000,000, equivalent to almost 18% of our closing mark market capitalization, last week. And even with such attractive shareholder returns, the group has maintained its extremely strong financial position.

4:23 We have established an excellent track record of shareholder returns since our IPO in 2013. Since then, PLUS500 has generated 3,700,000,000 in cash from operations, $3,000,000,000 of accumulated net profits. And of that, the company has returned approximately $2,700,000,000 to shareholders through $1,600,000,000 in dividends and $1,100,000,000 in share buybacks. These shareholder returns have positioned PLUS500 as the best performing share in the FTSE all share index over the last twelve years on a total return basis, as I mentioned, with a cumulative total shareholder return of nearly 8000% to the end of June twenty twenty five.

5:10 This is an achievement we are extremely proud of, as you can imagine. And, also, earlier this year, we joined the prestigious stocks Europe 600 index, which was an important recognition of the compounding value creation and share price performance we had delivered in recent years. Moving to slide six. This focuses on some of our operational drivers and key operational outputs. Our ongoing focus on customer engagement, product development, and our people continue to drive meaningful results for PLUS500. The drivers and outputs that you can see on the slide are all underpinned by our industry leading proprietary technology, a key competitive advantage for us, and this allows us to drive deeper engagement with our customers.

6:03 As a result, as of the end of June twenty twenty five, nearly 70% of our OTC revenue was derived from customers who have been trading with PLUS500 for more than three years, and this gives us excellent visibility on forward revenue. Customer deposits more than doubled to $3,100,000,000 as of the end of June, which is a record level for a six month period. The strength of our mobile offering was once again evident with 89% of OTC revenue being generated from mobile or tablet devices, demonstrating the value of our continued investment in our technology. Moving to slide seven. Three years ago, we introduced our strategic road map at a Capital Markets Day.

6:54 Since then, PLUS500 has successfully evolved from being a single product provider into a scaled market leading multi asset fintech group with increasingly diversified operations both geographically and across product lines. This transformation has had a significant impact on the growth of the business and underpins our focus on innovation, growth, and continued diversification through the development of new products and expansion into new markets. Furthermore, a crucial part of the group strategy is to deepen customer engagement and enhance customer retention by investing in and developing our customer retention technologies and initiatives.

7:42 Together, we expect the objectives within our strategic road map to position PLUS500 to continue delivering compound returns for shareholders for many years to come. Slide eight shows the group's superior technology, and its ability to quickly develop new offerings such as additional product lines and services and how this has enabled PLUS500 to transform in recent years into a global provider of market infrastructure and proprietary trading platforms with a broad customer base. The PLUS500 of today provides a wide range of products, services, and instruments across OTC futures, options on futures, share dealing verticals, and we operate in strategically attractive growing markets with powerful structural growth drivers.

8:36 Our OTC business, shown here on the left hand side, covers seven asset classes, and our futures business can be split further into a b to b or institutional and a b to c or retail offering, which provides clearing and execution services across a growing range of global exchanges. We also include PLUS500 COSMOS here on the slide, which is an industry leading client portal for our b to b futures customers, which was launched last year. On the right hand side of the chart, we can see our share dealing platform PLUS500 Invest, which enables customers to buy and sell shares directly. Our overall offering provides customers with a wide choice of products, enabling them to tailor their approach and trading strategies.

9:28 The diversification of our business is a key part of our success and has increased the quality of our earnings in recent years. We will continue to drive this agenda over the coming years as we seize the attractive growth opportunities in front of us. Moving to slide nine. Here, we show the important role that PLUS500 plays as a provider of market infrastructure. Our role has evolved significantly as the group has diversified its operations, and we now sit at the heart of the financial ecosystem, connecting institutional customers and retail customers to more than 30 different exchanges and clearinghouses. And we provide critical market infrastructure to a global customer base, which includes individual customers, institutions, and other businesses.

10:20 We remain extremely excited about the potential for this key part of our business, and there is much more to come. The next section, the operating review section, will include an overview of our operating performance in the first half of this year as well as a closer look at our growing futures business. The positive momentum in our business is accelerating, and we have delivered excellent operational progress in 2025 as as shown here on slide 11. The operational highlights include significant positive momentum across a number of important initiatives and strategic drivers, excellent progress with our growing futures business in The US with record customer segregated funds during the period, optimization of our already market leading online customer acquisition strategies, and the exciting, but conditional acquisition of MetaEquities in India, which we announced announced in March of this year.

11:24 As can be seen here on slide 12, the group currently holds 15 different regulatory licenses, which will become 16 with the expected addition of MetaEquities, this year. These licenses represent an extremely valuable asset and meaningful source of competitive advantage for PLUS500 as they all serve as a trusted regulatory stamp on our status as a global multi asset fintech group on the international stage. Most recently, as we announced in June, we obtained a new license from the Canadian Investment Regulatory Organization. This achievement marked an important milestone in PLUS500's ongoing strategic effort to further expand into North America with the extension of our offering into the well established and highly regulated Canadian market.

12:17 With this new license, PLUS500 will be able to offer its services within the OTC market and aims to further expand its local proposition by offering an omnichannel suite of products over time. Our portfolio of international licenses represents a unique asset for the group. Taken together, these licenses serve as an economic moat around our business, raising the barriers to entry, to the industry, and reinforcing PLUS500's value proposition. Additionally, our expertise in obtaining regulatory licenses leaves us well positioned to secure additional licenses in the future. For instance, we are actively working to expand our operations in Asia and elsewhere in Latin America.

13:11 As can be seen on slide 13, we offer our services to approximately 32,000,000 registered customers in more than 60 countries. This global scale and local offering are an important source of both current and future value as we focus on driving activation, retention, and monetization of our global customer base by leveraging our highly innovative and agile proprietary technology. Our global offering is further enhanced by our localized solutions, which include support in a customer's native language and products and services localized and tailored to the end markets in which we operate. Moving to slide 14, which shows current, customer tenure and longevity.

14:04 Over recent years, we have made investments in our customer retention technologies and premium account programs to improve overall customer longevity. The aim was to foster long term relationships with our customers by providing technology enabled retention initiatives and by consistently providing our customers with a wide range of products and services supported by our robust, secure, intuitive, and reliable trading platforms. These improvements are working well as shown here by the blue shaded areas on the pie charts. For example, in the first half of twenty twenty five, eighty four percent of OTC revenue was generated by customers who have been with us for more than a year, while 47% of the OTC revenue was generated by customers who have been with us for more than five years.

14:59 This is an excellent achievement, as the equivalent number for 2020 was just 14%. Over the next few slides, I will highlight the impact that the non OTC business, as a whole, and particularly the futures business, has had on the group's revenue, customer mix, and other KPIs. Slide 15 sets out how our revenue and new customer mix have evolved in recent years. When we acquired our futures business in 2021, our non OTC revenue accounted for just 1% of the group's total revenue. Since then, our futures business has established itself and grown quickly, reflecting the strength of our offering both to retail and institutional customers.

15:51 In the first half of twenty twenty five, non OTC revenue accounted for approximately 13% of the group's group's total revenue, which highlights the importance of this vertical to the group. In 2025, we anticipate that the non OTC business will generate revenues of more than $100,000,000. From a customer perspective, 17% of new customers came from the non OTC business in the first half of twenty twenty five, and this is the foundation which we will look to build on in the coming years. Slide 16 shows the progress we have made in attracting and retaining high value customers and how this has impacted our average deposits per customer since 2021.

16:40 For the first half of this year, aggregate customer deposits more than doubled to $3,100,000,000, which is a record level for the group over a six month period, reflecting our increased breadth and scale of operations. And over the last four years, we have more than tripled the average deposit per active customer from approximately $5,000 in 2021 to approximately $1,700 as of the end of of June twenty twenty five. We have done this by strategically focusing on high value customers, leveraging our superior marketing technologies, and providing a localized offering to customers, includes local payment solutions and an exceptional customer service.

17:31 Over the last three years, PLUS500 has established its position in The US futures market with a b to b and b to c offering, both of which performed extremely well so far this year. Across our b to b and b to c businesses, we grew customer segregated funds to approximately 1,200,000,000 as of the end of September twenty twenty five versus approximately $350,000,000 at the end of twenty twenty four, representing significant growth in a short period of time, which is a fantastic achievement. This reflects both the onboarding of new customers and increased trading activity from existing ones, and our futures business is going from strength to strength. In 2025, we secured a clearing membership with IceClear US, which will allow us to further enhance our institutional product offering as a global customer base.

18:28 And subsequent to that, we also secured a clearing membership with ICECLEAR Europe, further bolstering our position. In the b to c business, our trading platform PLUS500 Futures offers a unique Omniset solution and continues to set us apart from our competitors, and it is clear that our customers value the seamless trading experience we offer. Over the next few slides, I will look at our technology stack in more detail, which is the key competitive advantage for PLUS500. It enables our global operations and trading platforms and also our approach to customer acquisition. Slide 19 shows how our technology supports all of our domains from operations, product, and marketing capabilities through to customer service.

19:26 This means our technology delivers a broad range of services within each of these areas, such as search and data analytics and marketing, payment processing, and customer onboarding solutions. Our domains are built using our own technology, and they are integrated and optimized with one another, giving a holistic view of our systems. Our system architecture, therefore, enables us to operate with both resilience and agility in highly regulated markets and underpins our global best in class multi asset offering. Moving to slide 20. Our proprietary technology allows us to support customers at every stage of their journey, end to end, from customer acquisition through our established CRM system to payments, through to proprietary cashiers, all the way through to our unique trading solutions and product offering.

20:23 PLUS500 is focused on developing and delivering the most innovative and established technology, which provides our global per customer base with a localized, intuitive, and secure trading experience. Our industry leading proprietary technology also provides our customers with a reliable, robust, and same seamless trading experience across mobile devices, tablets, and the web. We offer over two and a half thousand different underlying global financial instruments across more than 60 countries and in 30 languages via our product portfolios of OTC, share dealing, and futures. And as you can see on the slide, the graphic user interface and general user experience across our product offering is seamless, which enables high levels of customer satisfaction and overall retention.

21:18 Slide 22. PLUS500's new technology stack for The US futures market available across various platforms serves both retail, professional, and institutional clients. This includes PLUS500 Futures, t four Pro, and PLUS500 Cosmos, along with advanced clearing, risk management, middle office, and execution technologies. For our retail clients, our mobile technological solutions offer an intuitive trading experience, making futures trading accessible to all applicable customers. We also provide access to our trading academy for an informed trading experience. For institutional clients, we offer enhanced control over the end to end process.

22:06 PLUS500 COSMOS leads industry innovation with a customer portal featuring advanced risk management tools and trade monitoring services. With these advancements, PLUS500 is has established itself as a key market infrastructure provider in the futures industry. On to slide 23. Shown here is our full suite of OTC products in the Japanese retail market. At the beginning of this year, we launched our new proprietary multi asset trading platform for the Japanese market, including OTC products across FX, indices, equities, and ETFs, as well as knockout options. More recently, in June 2025, we secured an additional commodities license, meaning we now offer a full range of OTC products to the important Japanese retail trading market.

23:01 It is a large and well established market offering significant potential to PLUS500 over the medium to long term. Turning to slide '24. The mobile trading space has become more and more important for retail customers, and we work extremely hard to maintain our leading position in this space. Many of our customers have a mobile first approach to trading, which is why PLUS500's customer experience is seamless between mobile, tablets, and web, and each interaction is designed to have the same look and feel. This provides a more consistent trading experience for our customers, which is extremely important to us. As a result, 89% of OTC revenue was generated from customers trading with us on mobile or tablet devices, and 84% of trades in the OTC space took place on mobile or tablet devices in the first six months of this year.

24:03 Slide 25 represents some of the educational tools we provide as part of our responsible and customer centric approach. We go beyond giving our customers access to the best trading platforms. For example, we also provide them with access to PLUS insights and to our PLUS500 trading academy. PLUS insights is our proprietary big data analytical tool that is designed to provide customers on our OTC trading platform with access to real time and historical trends and content using data from the group's extensive customer base. We also show here on the slide our trading academy, which includes educational materials and webinars on different aspects of trading.

24:54 I will now move on to look at our balance sheet and shareholder returns slide, starting on slide 27. Here, we show our disciplined approach to capital allocation across the group. We always seek the right balance between maximizing shareholder returns, making strategic investments to drive future growth, carrying out highly selective bolt on acquisitions, and developing a sustainable business over the long term. We illustrate on this slide the two broad categories within our capital position. The first one, which is approximately $550,000,000, includes regulatory capital, working capital, clearing, and risk management funds, and the other is surplus capital of approximately $385,000,000 at the end of the first half of twenty twenty five.

25:49 Both categories, both sides of our balance sheet are there to support the ongoing day to day activities of the group, including our growing clearing businesses in The US, future growth, and enhanced returns to shareholders, which I'll cover on the next slide. Our shareholder returns policy states that at least 50 of net profits are to be distributed to shareholders via dividends and share buybacks, and at least 50% of those distributions will be made by way of share buybacks. This policy will continue to apply net profits on a half yearly basis and will continue to be based on a 23% corporate tax rate for both interim and final distributions.

26:34 The board will also consider executing special share buybacks or dividends on a half yearly basis dependent on fiscal results as well as on investment and growth opportunities that we see. Accordingly, in August 2025, alongside our interim results, we announced additional shareholder returns of $165,000,000 comprising $90,000,000 in new buyback programs and $75,000,000 of total dividends, which was equal to a dividend distribution of more than $1.05 per share. Turning now to slide 29, I'll finish with the summary and outlook section starting on slide 30.

27:21 As we have shown, 2025 has been another excellent year for PLUS500 with accelerating positive momentum and further strategic, operational, and financial progress as we extended our track record of delivering significant returns for shareholders, which goes back to our IPO in 2013. This has propelled us to be the best performing share on a total return basis since our IPO to the end of June twenty twenty five. Shown here on slide 31 is our investment case, which puts everything, together that I've discussed so far today. PLUS500 has an established and, enviable track record of growth, innovation, and sizable shareholder returns.

28:12 Leveraging our proprietary technology, we are focused on attracting and retaining high value customers whilst ensuring that our customer offering remains cutting edge, innovative, relevant, diversified. Our robust balance sheet underpins our growth objectives and enables us to deliver attractive and sustainable returns to our shareholders. The board and the executive management team established a strategic road map that clearly outlines PLUS500's growth plans, and we are laser focused on executing against it successfully. And to conclude, slide 32. We wanted to take this opportunity to present to you all today given how much strategic and operational progress we have delivered in 2025 and how excited we are for the future of PLUS500.

29:06 The opportunity to drive growth, scale, and compounding value creation is significant, and we have strong fundamentals underpinning our business. These fundamentals, coupled with our disciplined approach to capital allocation and our differentiated proprietary technology mean that we are well positioned to seize the exciting growth opportunities ahead of us. We remain confident in the business' future prospects and strategic direction driven by our status as a trusted, diversified multi asset fintech group with a strong track record of delivery. Moreover, in the medium to long term, we will continue to invest in our strategic road map initiatives and our class leading technology to deepen customer relationships and invest in our people.

29:56 We will also focus on our efforts to continue to drive further diversification towards the non OTC parts of the group. This is all supported by our robust financial position, highly cash generative business model, and the enduring strength of our diversified business model. Thank you for listening. That marks the end of the presentation. I will now move to take your questions that have been submitted via the facility. Fantastic, Owen. Thank you very much indeed for the presentation. Ladies and gentlemen, do please continue to submit your question just using the q and a tab situated in the right hand corner of the screen. Just so it only takes a few moments to review those questions submitted today. I'd like to remind you the recording of the presentation, along with the copy of the slides and the published Q and A, can be accessed via your investor dashboard.

30:42 Owen, as you can see, we had a number of questions throughout today's presentation. Thank you, everyone, for submitting those. If I may just ask you to read out those questions where appropriate to do so, give you a response, and I'll pick up from you at the end. Great. Yep. Thank you. So taking a minute to, to to pull these together. So the first question I have is, how important is m and a to PLUS500's growth strategy, and will you do I'm sorry. Will you look to do more deals given the company's strong cash position? So, yeah, I think future bolt on acquisitions will certainly continue to feature for PLUS500, but they won't be the single driver of our future performance. Yes. We have the financial position to support ongoing m and a, but our focus remains on bolt on acquisitions that typically deliver access to new markets and or regulatory licenses rather than necessarily being focused on, product, given us our strong internal ability to develop new new products for ourselves.

31:46 We we're also in the enviable position of being able to provide shareholders, I think, with excellent levels of shareholder returns in the form of dividend and share buybacks, as I mentioned, whilst also being able to pursue organic and inorganic growth opportunities at the same time. That is to say, we don't have to choose between the two options, thanks to the the strength of our high quality earnings model and and sort of cash generative, business model as well. The next question, can you go into more detail on what makes your technology platform different to the competition? I guess the key point of differentiation for us is that our technology is proprietary, and our system architecture is is therefore unique, having been built sort of fully from the ground up within PLUS500.

32:43 Very few, if any, of our peers can claim to have the same level of proprietary technology within the business within their business, and this provides us with a number of a number of important benefits. It makes us incredibly agile and responsive to local market changes, either something like customer feedback or perhaps a change in regulation. It also enables us to operate with high levels of automation within our within our business, which has the the knock on benefit of keeping our costs low and, therefore, our operating margins high. And, I think because of our differentiated system architecture and technology stack, our trading platforms are incredibly robust and reliable, which is a a critical component of why customers choose the PLUS500 platform in the first place.

33:38 Next question I have is what is the scale of opportunity for PLUS500 in The US futures market, and how confident are you in in executing against this? Well, I think the first thing to say is we've barely scratched the surface in The US, and we're we're certainly really excited about the the potential our operations have there. The business has been fully up and running, with the full support of the group really for the last two years. We bought the business four years ago, but then spent a period of time to update its systems and capabilities so that it was operating on our own our own platform. And so over the last two years, we have grown customer segregated funds to over $11,000,000,000.

34:25 The end of September number was actually $1,200,000,000. And to put that into some perspective, the market estimates for The US futures market from a customer segregated funds perspective, is estimated at over $300,000,000,000. And, indeed, when we acquired the business in 2021, customer segregated funds were just $70,000,000. So $70,000,000 to $1,200,000,000, in in sort of really only two years, which highlights a significant growth that that we've achieved since then. So, in an industry context, we've still got lots to lot lots to achieve, but we are, we're very confident that we can execute our strategy in The US successfully. The next question I have is, what are the reasons behind such a large proportion of OTC revenue being generated by customers who have been with PLUS for more than five years?

35:24 And why do you think this is happening? I think, you know, this is a great question because it's a fundamental part of our recent success, and and I think a key driver of our outlook is our customer retention, and and what we've been able to achieve there. In as I'd say, in recent years, we have invested significantly in our group wide retention initiatives, with the objective of of really improving customer retention and longevity. We we constantly evaluate our offerings to customers, to make sure that they are relevant as possible. And this applies not just to our product, but also to payment mechanisms and platform features as well. I guess we we've really sought to create a relationship with our customers as much as possible through things like personalized communications, dedicated account managers, and sort of similar initiatives.

36:18 And these are working really well, and I I think it's it's really driving that customer retention piece and and keeping, customers with PLUS500 for longer than ever before, which is why almost 50% of OTC revenue in the first half of twenty twenty five, was generated by customers who have been with us for for five years or more. And over a three year period, that rises to about 70%, which, as one, institutional, shareholder put to us recently, that's almost recurring revenue for a business of our nature. And I I don't think we would class that other other as anything other than best in class from from that revenue generation perspective. Just taking a look at what else has come in.

37:05 I've got one. What what's next for PLUS500? Well, I think the short answer is really the same, but bigger and better. You know? We will continue to pursue our strategic road map objectives, which are to expand into new markets, develop new products, enhance our existing offering, and and deeper engagement with our customers. You know, these these are the foundations of of structural growth for us over the next few years and in in indeed, into the medium to long term. We will continue to look at adjacent market opportunities, and we'll keep looking for bolt on acquisitions as applicable, all whilst maintaining that disciplined approach to capital allocation that I think I mentioned during during the presentation.

37:51 I I can say that we are all very excited for what the future holds for PLUS500. And, look, I'll be I'll be delighted to come back and update you all again after our full year results in in February next year, but that's the last question I had had in the queue. So just to say before I hand back to Paul to close the call, thank you very much for for joining, and enjoy the rest of your afternoon. Thank you very much. Alright. Thanks indeed for answering those questions from investors and updating investors today. Of course, company can review all questions submitted, and we'll publish those responses on the Investor Meet company platform. Can I please ask investors not to close the session? You're automatically redirected to provide your feedback in order the team can better understand your views and expectations. Moment is complete, and it's greatly valued by the company. PLUS500 LTD, we'd like to thank you very much for attending today's presentation. That concludes today's session, and good afternoon to you.