flatexDEGIRO AG

XETRA:FTK

Earnings Call Transcript 2021-Q1

[Muhamad Said Chahrour, CFO & Member of the Management Board]

Good morning, ladies and gents. Welcome to our today's management comment call on our latest updates to our company, flatexDEGIRO. We are very delighted and thankful to have the chance today to present to you a bit of deep dive around our publications with respect to the FY 2020 results and that today this morning published press release with respect to the first quarter. We have promised the world quite a lot of things after the acquisition of DEGIRO; first and foremost, that we will be able to develop something very unique in the European market, to build the only pan-European online brokerage business that will be able, over time, to provide exceptional growth, to provide exceptional margins and to provide an exceptional strategy. And we were very thankful that in 2020, already, we managed to leverage the first synergies after the transaction with DEGIRO, which also have contributed to our full year 2020 figures. We have closed the year with 1.25 million clients. We settled for our clients more than 75 million transactions with almost a transaction volume of EUR 300 billion, which made us, in 2020, the largest pan-European retail brokerage business in terms of transactions. So operationally, we were very satisfied and happy about the results and also about the financial conversion that ended in record revenues and in record EBITDA margins. But apart from the operational excellence, we had a lot of changes, strategic changes in this year, not only the acquisition of DEGIRO but especially with respect to capital markets, with the uplisting into the Prime Standard and the promotion into the SDAX. We have managed to professionalize our capital market strategy and to improve our capital market strategy. But be rest assured that this wave into this professionalization will continue, whether it is points like continuously improving our ESG reporting, which we started also last year. But actually, for me and for my colleague and CEO, Frank Niehage, one of the ultimate aims, the promotion into the MDAX, hopefully, if everything goes well, by the end of this year. We developed last year -- or we set the stones last year for developing, as I said, the only pan-European online broker with a unique growth opportunity being operating our business model in 18 countries and with a high scalability and operating leverage that we will come to in a short moment. Now we promised that we will start a new era of online retail brokerage. And figures don't lie. And I think they prove our strategy right and our structure right. We have managed in 2020 to become the fastest-growing online brokerage business in Europe in absolute and in relative terms. No other broker in Europe won more clients than we did and no other broker grew its client base as fast as we did, which provides the perfect bridge for the first quarter of 2021. And I received over the last weeks and months a lot of questions whether this growth is maybe exceptional, why I or we believe that this is not exceptional, but rather structural. And I've again and again highlighted the many secular trends that are -- that have been accelerated, especially with the COVID situation. Digitization has been brought forward, especially in Continental Europe, and has allowed us as well to accelerate our growth but not to the extent that we could say everyone else had this growth as well. We didn't exceed the growth rates of our peers only in 2020, but if we look into Q1 2021, it has even become more exceptional and more phenomenal than we expected. If we look into the first quarter of 2021, flatexDEGIRO won more than 360,000 new clients, which is not only more than our 3 peers that have already published figures, it's even more than the 3 peers together have won during the first 3 months of the year. In terms of relative growth, we were as well the fastest-growing online brokerage business. And we are very keen to continue this strategy in the future. Something that I would love to highlight and that we are also stating the question to the analysts that could most probably provide a much better reason for is the valuation of our company. Most of you have had a lot of discussions with me and you always have known that I keep valuation to analysts and to the appreciation of the market. But I think it is interesting to highlight that the fastest-growing online broker in Europe is enjoying the lowest PE multiples on the '22 targets of all the benchmark companies, which equals, by the way, the half of the average of our peer groups. Again, something that markets have to appreciate. We are here to provide operational excellence and to give you as many reasons as possible to appreciate the valuation of the company. What did we do? We had a strong sustainable structural growth that is beautifully shown over the recent quarters, whether it's in terms of number of clients, we grew our client base over the last 12 months by roughly 80%, over the last quarter by almost 30%. We grew the number of transactions by almost 100% over the last 12 months and by 60% over the last quarter. And I think it's important here to highlight also the challenging questions that we usually receive or that we have received. If you look into the Q2 2020, you see despite the effect of high volatility and a very, very strong push by COVID into the market, it was a very strong quarter. But what we also see is how much structural growth is coming with respect to transactions settled, especially driven by the strong growth number in terms of clients. As you know, we are claiming that we are the largest pan-European online brokerage business with respect to transactions. With respect to number of clients, we are on our best way to also become, in this KPI, the largest pan-European online broker. And should we continue with this commercial speed to win clients all over Europe, we can stay very convinced that by most probably the end of this year, we will be Europe's largest online brokerage business, both in terms of transactions settled as well as in terms of number of clients. How does this commercial growth and this commercial success translate into financial excellence? We have recorded our record quarter ever with almost EUR 135 million of revenues in just 3 months, which grew by more than 170% quarter last year versus quarter this year. This has 2 impacts. The first one is that DEGIRO was only consolidated after the first of August of 2020. So Q1 and Q2 do not include any DEGIRO figures. But the major part or the vast majority of the revenue contribution is not coming from the consolidation only, but also from the massive growth that we achieved commercially. A very important point that I've highlighted very, very often in the past was our margins. I always said that an increase in revenues, in the top line, in the net revenues will conclude also an increase in our margin levels. And I'm more than happy and I'm very proud that the scalability of our business is kicking now in. You see here that we grew the margins from 44% for the full year 2020 to almost 55% in the first quarter of 2021. So by increasing our revenues by 40%, we managed to increase the margin levels on top by 11 percentage points. And this is the pure evidence of our operational leverage. That is driven mainly by the fact that our cost base, personnel expenses, IT expenses, overhead expenses are relatively fixed. We are talking about 70%, 80% of the cost base is fixed, and this cost base allows us to scale our business model and gives us also the confidence that over the next years, we will continue to manage this margin levels of 50% plus. What we've seen in quarter 1, 2021, is something that we expect to continue in 2021 throughout the whole year. We have seen the strong beginning again in April, as we have stated in our press release and had the discussion yesterday about adjusting our guidance, Frank Niehage and myself, and came to the conclusion that this is what we have to do. So we have updated our 2021 guidance for number of customers from 1.8 million to 2 million clients to 2 million to 2.2 million clients. And we have updated our guidance for the number of trades settled from 75 million to 90 million to 90 million to 110 million. I don't have to tell you that this is very much -- with respect to transactions, very much in line with what we have given out as Vision 2025. You might have read that we stated that it might happen that we, as a management, will have to revise the vision, especially if the year, as we hope for, will continue as it started. It will make it necessary most probably to adjust our vision. We will wait for the next months, and then we'll see how the whole operational levels continue and at what point it makes sense to restate that vision. Because, as I mentioned earlier, with respect to the current growth rates that we see, and we have highlighted here the solid track record over the last 5, 6 years, we managed every 2 years to double the number of brokerage customers. And if we continue with this speed, we didn't only manage to do it every year x2, we even managed to grow every 2 years faster than the 2 years before. So we grew our customer base between 2016 and 2018 by 1.9x, between 2018 and 2020 by 2.1x. So assuming that we keep this speed of growth, we might end up in 2022, reaching the 3 million clients. And this is what we are aiming for. Again, we would like to get a bit more feeling, a bit more diligence for the markets over the next months, but we'll keep you here updated. An important point also with respect to the costs again and the margin levels, is to highlight the internal cost per trade. Because in the end, the internal cost per trade will determine the operational leverage of the business model. In the past, those of you who know us for a longer time, you know that in the past, we always stated, the internal cost per trade is something around EUR 1.45. In 2020, we managed to get our internal cost per trade down to less than EUR 0.80. And the clear ambition here is to continue this operational leverage and to reach with the given number of transactions and revenues an internal cost per trade of maybe EUR 0.50 or EUR 0.60. And it's important to understand that this ability to grow your margin levels with a growing top line is a game that can go up to levels where the incremental margin per trade is 80% to 90%. And this is, for us, super important to highlight. With every additional client, yes, we might even have to increase our fixed cost base but at a much, much lower scale than what this additional client brings us in revenues. To give you here, for example, also a fact, we estimate per new client an IT investment of EUR 2 to EUR 3 and have an average revenue per client -- annualized, sorry, annualized revenue per client currently of roughly EUR 250 per year. So the amortization on these IT costs is just a matter of weeks. Obviously, the amortization on the marketing costs with currently client acquisition costs of significantly below EUR 50, make every client that we win a very, very profitable client with a total payback period of less than 6 months. Yes. We will, as I said, continue our focus on growing our business. We will not rest on our laurels. That's for sure. Q1 is history. It's now our duty as a management to keep the teams in line and on focus for our future goals, including becoming the largest pan-European online brokerage business in terms of clients and developing something absolutely unique in the European market. Not being dependent on domestic markets, but being pan-European allows us to tackle a market with more than 300 million people, especially Continental Europe, where the penetration of clients still sits -- sorry, where the penetration of the markets still sits at something below 10% compared to the very saturated markets like Scandinavia or the U.K. where the margin -- where the penetration levels are already 35%, 40% plus. How do we see the opportunity to drive the business short and long term? Short term, absolutely by growing the customer base with additional products, with additional features, with marketing campaigns. With the introduction of flatex-next in Germany, we have achieved a very, very great success with now just recently introducing more than 3,000 ETF and savings schemes -- sorry, mutual fund savings schemes at 0 fee with no transaction costs with no custody costs. We've become the largest European offering of 0-fee ETFs and mutual funds in savings schemes. Those are the short-term tactical steps that we will continue to do to have a good understanding of products and a good understanding of clients' demand to provide the best possible product offering at, again, one of our most important philosophies, at profitable growth. We will not give up profitability for growth, and we will not give up growth for profitability. I think at the current moment, we are very well positioned with our equilibrium between those 2 important parameters. With respect to DEGIRO, the massive structural growth as well, all over Europe. We won in Spain the 2 most important awards for best brokerage of 2020. With flatex, we won was Bursa Online, one of our key awards becoming the best ETF broker of 2020. The upcoming expansion of the DEGIRO customer offering, including the early and late trading, including an extended product offering, will also contribute to the top line, will also contribute, obviously, to the margins because here we see, first and foremost, a better way of monetization of the whole transaction flow and the transactions of our clients. Second, the immediate cost savings that we will generate with custodians in the clearing and in the settlement of the transactions of our clients. The long-term growth builds very clearly on strong secular trends, including, obviously, the new generation of investors. Our average age of new clients is still in the 30s. This is our sweet spot, win clients between 25, 26 and 45, 50, people that are generating income, people that are willed to take the responsibility, to do self-directed investing that are willed to take their savings in their own hands. And therefore, this new generation is a massive secular driver to this whole environment. Obviously, negative interest environment and simplified access and digitization also contribute to this structural and secular trends. And COVID -- the COVID situation, the COVID period was obviously an accelerator to this movement. I think most of the digitized business models have enjoyed positive tailwind. However, and let me repeat it, we truly believe that COVID was just an accelerator to the trend that most probably would have had kicked in 3, 4 years later without the situation that we've seen over the recent 1.5 years. Yes. Today, as I said, in Germany, we rolled out with flatex-next now the ETF and mutual fund savings schemes. We are very keen to finalize the process over the next weeks and months to roll out flatex-next also to Austria to one -- by the way to one of our successful growth markets. And we also don't see any limitation why we might not also have a product development with DEGIRO and to implement this beautiful product of flatex-next to DEGIRO, ending maybe up and having the DEGIRO-next that allows all over Europe more than 1.6 million clients to have the best user experience and best trading experience in the market.

[Muhamad Said Chahrour, CFO & Member of the Management Board]

During our morning session with the analysts, we have received a couple of questions that I would like to repeat here and to highlight here. The first question coming from Marius Fuhrberg from M.M. Warburg. Two questions. The first, why we haven't raised our vision now? I think I mentioned it in the beginning of my presentation. There are many different drivers that will impact the vision of the company. I think we have so far showed massive growth that gives us high confidence that we will outperform our vision. But it's also have been always our philosophy to underpromise and overdeliver. And we don't want to be unambitious. However, this was just the first quarter of 2021. So it's important for us to get a better understanding of the upcoming months and quarters to adjust something like a 4-year vision. And as soon as we feel comfortable and we find a diligent and intelligent way to have a solid picture on that, we will sooner or later then definitely, if we see the requirement, also update our vision. His second question was concerning the revenues per trade. First, whether it's right that we are having EUR 4, that we can assume also going EUR 4, something around EUR 4 per trade? Yes, absolutely. This is correct. This is also our assumption of EUR 4 per trade. However, it's also here important to highlight that due to various synergy effects also with DEGIRO, we rather expect the revenue per trade over the next years to increase than to decrease. The second part of the question with respect to the revenues per trade, the 2020, the revenue per trades were lower than in Q1 2021. Here, it's important to keep in mind that the financials that we published are actuals. The trades were pro forma. So you cannot just take the revenues and divide it by the pro forma numbers because you would dilute then the revenues per trade. If you would make use of both actual figures, you will see that the 2020 figures were already very much in line with the Q1 figures. If we compare Q1 to Q4 2020, so Q1 2021 versus Q4 2020, the reason why the trades grew much faster than the revenue is resulting mainly from 2 items. First, interest and IT revenues grow linearly, not with trades. Thus, we have here in the beginning of the year, a little dilutive effect. And second, we started a couple of months now ago the 0-fee trading offering for the first 6 months in Germany, which actually also dilutes the revenue per trade in the German country. However, this offer is only for the first 6 months of the lifetime of a client with us. And after that, it will go back to the normal levels of EUR 5.90 per trade, and we are super convinced and know from our data that we convert significant and high number of these clients so that they will start to contribute revenues to the business model after their 6 months. The second part of questions came from Ben Kohnke from KBW with respect to 3 core topics. First, international expansion. We are currently -- or we're having currently footprint of 18 countries, whether we will reduce that? His second question was with respect to product introduction, concretely spoken cryptocurrencies. And the third one was with respect to margins. And since we have achieved 50% plus in EBITDA margins, why we don't see more than 60% of margin levels as feasible?With respect to the first quarter, international expansion reduced. We always said that we are splitting our footprint into core markets, into development markets and research markets. So far, we have focused mainly on our core markets and -- so which is Continental Europe, Western Europe, which is absolutely the right way. If we consider the development markets like from our perspective, development markets, so U.K., Scandi, we see mature markets, as I mentioned, high saturation, well-positioned competitors. So is it really worth to go there and to fight, I'm not 100% convinced so far. However, there are so many other markets that we see are much more lucrative. Think about Italy, think about Switzerland, where so far, we haven't put too much effort into. And I can only tell you like that we -- after we are done with a great growth speed in Spain and France, we will also start to focus more and more on additional Continental European countries. We still see many, many countries with high inefficiencies in online retail brokerage, far too expensive, not providing a perfect product portfolio. And those are the markets made for our penetration and for winning market shares in countries that are dominated by monopolies. His second question, product introduction and crypto. Our opinion with respect to cryptos has not changed. We would want to provide it to our clients, but we have the clear philosophy. We only provide our clients best-in-class products. We discussed it already 3 years ago and came to the conclusion that it was premature. The markets for cryptos were premature. We had then -- back then still issues with things like cold wallets, hot wallets, you were not able to get insurances for any issues with the wallets, for the custody of the cryptocurrencies, which is for us super important. And we didn't want to expose our clients into products where we say that could end up in reputational risks for our business. So this was why we decided 3 years ago not to do it. Over the last 3 years, the crypto market has changed dramatically and significantly. We are doing our research during the first 6 months of this year. So also in the next quarter, we have a lot of expert discussions to get a better grip of what the market looks like, how we can offer our clients best possible offering. That means the best possible liquidity making for these cryptocurrencies by third parties. As you know, we don't provide any market making. We don't provide any liquidity making. That means 100% security on the custody of the assets. And all these things are currently evaluated. And we hope that in the second half of this year, we might come up and out with a conclusion. Best-in-class does also not mean that we have to provide thousands of currencies, it could be the top 20, top 30 currencies. Again, the focus is on best quality, stability, security of our clients' wealth. The question with respect to margins. Again, underpromise overdeliver. Yes, we could say, hey, we do 70% margins in 4 years. But I think it's important to stay humble. Q1 was a great result. 2020 was a great result. But let's also not forget about how quickly things can change. Nevertheless, we are absolutely convinced that we will keep sustainable margins above 50% with the number of transactions that we are seeing today in the markets. By the way, I mean, the markets, I mentioned it earlier, despite the fact that we are creating also highest margins with respect to our peers, we are still enjoying the lowest valuation with respect to our peers. So let's continue our underpromise, overdeliver philosophy. I think this is our task. And let's keep focus on winning new clients, on keeping the transaction activity high of our clients. And let's see then where we go to. Yes, if we meet 100 million transactions, we will do at least an EBITDA margin of roughly 50%, an adjusted EBITDA margin. And I definitely aim for more, especially with respect, as I mentioned earlier, that the synergies of DEGIRO will be more than EUR 30 million. And every single additional euro that comes on top to this synergy will obviously contribute to the margin levels. The last set of questions came from Christoph Greulich from Berenberg. The first thing was about the margin. What was the margin in Q4 2021? We answered that it was 41%. And the first synergies were obviously utilized in Q4 2020, remember, taking the customer deposits from the Morgan Stanley money market fund into our own custody and replacing the funding of the margin loan that was funded in the past by ABN AMRO with our own funds has created the first synergies. This is why also we saw a margin jump from Q4 2020 to Q1 2021. Second question, the increasing share of cross-border trades with many competitors and many peers that the analyst has seen, whether this is also applicable for flatexDEGIRO. For us, as flatexDEGIRO, we don't care where the clients trade. The client pay always very much a similar amount, whether they trade at U.S. exchanges, German exchanges, French exchanges, Italian exchanges. So the cross-border trades do not allow for us to create additional profitability. And we don't see the necessity for that. We are following an approach that rather provides the clients an open and transparent European or even global markets. And all exchanges that are linked to our system have relatively same prices. But again, most customers on our trading platforms coming from Europe trade also in Europe and in the U.S. And DEGIRO is one of the cheapest and best set online brokerage businesses in Europe for U.S. equities. So Nordics, Switzerland, Italy, et cetera, haven't been that much in the focus of clients. But again, here, I'm very happy about the fact to hear that our competitors in other countries are charging higher revenues or higher prices for certain trades where we say this is totally absurd because it doesn't make a difference, whether it's a trade in New York or whether it's a trade in Frankfurt. So they better be prepared that we will come and make sure that this type of pricing and overpricing will end sooner or later. The second question -- or the third question was with respect to marketing increase in 2020. What is the idea for 2021? The idea for 2021 is that we will keep our client acquisition costs as low as possible. 2020, we had client acquisition costs of roughly EUR 60 to EUR 70. In 2021, we expect client acquisition costs of less than EUR 50. Where is that synergy coming from? As I always stated, again and again and again, size creates free marketing. We are getting more and more brand awareness in all European countries. We are becoming very soon the largest pan-European broker in terms of clients, and not only in terms of trades. And size creates marketing. Press is starting to cover us. The analysts are starting to cover us. The investor bases are starting to talk to us and about us with friends, with family. And this is a super important fact for us to get more and more of the mouth to mouth into place and to create, yes, the most efficient marketing that you can have, which is the recommendation. The question about how long we will offer free trading for the first 6 months in Germany was asked. We answered it, let's see. So far this offering goes very well, so we will keep it for now in place. The ETF funds, savings schemes, whether they will come also for DEGIRO. We started now with flatex Germany and Austria. And there is a high probability, as I said, that we will also launch product developments with DEGIRO. We are currently in the finalization of the merger process from DEGIRO onto flatex Bank AG. So by the way, this will also reduce regulatory costs since we will only have then to deal with the German regulator to which we have a very, very good relationship. And this will also make things easier like applying and implementing product developments that we did on flatex side also with DEGIRO. Last question came from Christoph Greulich about the differences of the clients we won in Q1 2021, whether they are older, younger in age, trading and portfolio. We've said, again, our target group is 25 to 50 years, clients that are generating income, clients that are willed to take the responsibility for self-directed investing. And what we've seen in the Q1 and also in 2020 is that our client base is still on average in their high 30s, so 35, 36 years. This is exactly what we are aiming for, coming with -- or having an average a 5-digit security account and with an annualized trading activity that does not differ from older cohorts. And this is for us the key focus, win high-retail, low-affluent clients with the best possible service and product offering. This is what we're going to focus on. And we will not comment now on monthly development of clients since this is nothing that we are focusing on, especially not since we are offering here products and services that are related to investing and saving, and this is nothing that you should do only for weeks or months, but goes into the long-term. Keep in mind, our client relationship is 10 years plus. The churn rates are less than 5% annualized, which would even result in 20-year customer relationship. So I think it's -- it doesn't make sense now to look on how clients develop in their first weeks. The next set of questions came from the analyst of Hauck & Aufhäuser, Frederik Jarchow. The revenue per trade assumption going forward, whether it will go down? I stated earlier in the presentation, no, it will not go down. The probability that the revenue per trade will go up is much, much higher. And what does it mean? It means that if we settle 100 million transactions per year, and we go, for example, and increase with DEGIRO the prices by EUR 0.50, that would allow us to generate EUR 50 million of more free cash flow. And also, this will contribute to the margin levels. So 2, 3 things that we didn't highlight or that we didn't imply so far since we believe that at this current momentum, at this current growth, the equilibrium between growth and profitability is very well. But again, we are in 18 countries either #1 or #2 in pricing. And this allows, obviously, also to take the perspective, whether it makes sense at a certain point to run what I always call the Netflix model and to adjust pricing when size is given. The last set of questions came from Roberta from Goldman Sachs. The first quarter results clearly exceeded our expectations. What is the driver behind this? I think we brought it up, especially the customer growth and the transaction activity. And whether it's from a specific region or product worth? No, neither product nor region. We are growing all over Europe very, very well with high growth rates, whether it's in Germany, in Austria, in the Netherlands. We are super comfortable with the growth rates and are expecting this growth to continue. And as I said in the beginning, it's rather structural than an exceptional growth. The second question was whether I can remind them of what the drivers of lower cost per trade, because I mentioned EUR 0.50 to EUR 0.60, and what we need to achieve this? We don't need anything to achieve it, but more trades. As I said, the cost base is 80%, 90% fixed. So the more load I put into my machine, which I have to run it either way, whether we do 10 million trades per month or 5 million or 15 million, we need our IT. Yes, you might buy a bit of CPU or storage, but this doesn't make the difference. So we are very keen to bring this over the next years down to EUR 0.50, EUR 0.60 per trade, and thus optimize our margin levels. Yes, we spoke about our 2020 figures and Q1 2021, about our significant growth, however, more important, the significant growth potential. We are today the fastest-growing online brokerage business. And Frank Niehage and myself are very keen to keep that speed up. We have adjusted our guidance and are very clearly stating, we'll continue with our philosophy of underpromising and overdelivering. With respect to the synergies with DEGIRO, we are very keen to leverage 100% of the synergies, i.e., including the One Flow and the One IT as of the second half of this year. And something I think important to mention that the synergy levels of more than EUR 30 million in EBITDA with respect to this transactions were based and assumed on figures -- facts and figures that we had in 2019. This is why we always said it will be more than EUR 30 million. Having in mind that since then, our number of clients almost doubled and our number of trades more than tripled on an annualized base, you might understand that more than EUR 30 million of EBITDA synergies means more than EUR 30 million of EBITDA synergies. Yes. Thank you so much for your time, for your -- for you attending this call. And if there are any questions, please feel free to reach out to my colleague, Achim Schreck or to myself. Thanks a lot. All the best, and see you soon. Bye-bye.