FNNTF (FNNTF) Q3 2026 Earnings Report, Transcript and Summary

Thank you for standing by. My name is Prilla, and I will be your conference operator today. At this time, I would like to welcome everyone to the flatexDEGIRO Analyst Call Q3 2026. [Operator Instructions] I would now like to turn the conference over to Achim Schreck, Head of Investor Relations at flatexDEGIRO. You may begin.

Good morning, everyone, and many thanks for dialing in. Warm welcome to our analyst call relating to our Q3 2026 results, which we published yesterday evening post market close. My name is Achim Schreck, heading the IR department here at flatexDEGIRO. With me today are both our CEOs, Oliver Behrens and Dr. Benon Janos. We also have with us Dr. Thomas Lindner, our newly appointed CFO. All three will lead us through today's presentation, but don't worry, we'll keep it brief nevertheless. We have deliberately decided to have all three members of the Management Board attending today, following the recent changes in the Management Board. However, going forward, i.e., with the Q1 results in April, we will reduce the number of presenters again, especially given the character of a financial update of these calls. For today, as usual, we would like to provide a short run through the presentation before we open up for your questions. And without any further ado, I'm very pleased to hand over now to Oliver. Please go ahead. The floor is yours.

Thank you, Achim. Good morning, everyone, and welcome to the Q3 analyst call. After record revenues and earnings in the first half year of 2026, we have continued the year with another very solid quarter. For the first nine months, this means we are looking at a 19% year-on-year growth in revenues and with plus 37% and even higher profit growth of net profit. However, we are not here to solely look into the rear mirror to see what's behind us. We also want to look into the future. In the past months, we have also taken measures to strengthen our organization for our next phase of growth to take the next steps of implementing our capital allocation policy. I will talk about both aspects in some more detail in a second. For this year, due to strong operating and financial performance and the first three quarters, we feel very comfortable in reiterating our full year guidance today. We expect to achieve or even exceed the 2027 financial targets already in 2026, one year ahead of schedule. I mentioned the strengthening of our customer and market-facing focus at the Management Board level. As you can see on this chart, the team has grown already by one due to the appointment of Thomas as our new CFO, and it will grow one more once Dominik joins us as Chief Growth Officer as a divisional Board member. Together, we will have more capacity to capture the growth opportunities ahead of us and deliver for our customers while maintaining our very solid back-office structures and processes. When it comes to our capital allocation strategy, this is basically the structure we have presented to you for the first time in February of this year. If you look at the right-hand side, the shareholder distribution, you see that we have now ticked both boxes. First, in June, we increased our regular dividend from EUR 0.04 per share to EUR 0.30 per share based on target dividend payout ratio of 20%. Last week, we communicated our intention for an additional opportunistic share buyback. Subject to BaFin approval, we are aiming for a buyback of up to EUR 100 million, which at current share price levels corresponds to approximately 3.5% of the outstanding shares. If we combine both elements, we are talking about a total of EUR 132 million we are distributing to shareholders, which is equal to over 80% of our last year's profits. Importantly, this relatively high distribution to shareholders does not limit our growth ambitions. As you can see here, based on our disclosure report for the first half year of 2026, we have ample headroom in both relevant regulatory capital ratios, the total capital ratio as well as the leverage ratio. But of course, we don't just want to return capital to shareholders, we also invest into our operating growth. So Benon, maybe you can add some words around recent and upcoming extensions of our product offering. Over to you, Benon.

Thank you very much. Good morning, everyone, also from my side, and thank you for joining us today. I would like to briefly highlight two areas that are particularly important for our long-term growth strategy. Wealth accumulation through savings plans and our upcoming retirement savings offering in Germany. Let me start with our savings plan offering. Over the last several quarters, we have significantly expanded our savings plan universe. Following the introduction of stocks at a savings plan asset class in Germany and Austria earlier this year, we further broadened the offering during the third quarter by adding commodities with ETCs and crypto products with ETNs. As a result, flatex now offers one of the most comprehensive savings plan ranges in the market. We see a very clear structural trend across Europe. Investors are increasingly using capital markets not only for active trading, but also for long-term wealth accumulation. Savings plans are, therefore, an important way for us to deepen customer relationships and increase long-term client engagement. In addition, we are preparing the introduction of our savings plan offering at DEGIRO Netherlands by the end of this year with further DEGIRO market expected to follow in 2027. This will allow us to leverage our existing capabilities across a broader customer base and further strengthen our position as Europe's leading investment platform. Moreover, we continue to enhance our product offering and customer experience across the platform. In crypto, we added five new points during the third quarter, bringing the total number of tradable cryptocurrencies to 25. We also successfully rolled out in-app approvals for flatex customers in Germany and Austria, made onboarding simpler and reduce friction throughout the customer journey. Another important milestone is adding securities lending at flatexDEGIRO Germany. We expect the product to go live within the next few weeks, making Germany the fifth market where securities lending is available. Building on this theme of long-term investing, let me now turn to the German Altersvorsorgedepot on Page 9. As we have discussed before, we believe the planned retirement savings reform represents one of the most attractive structural growth opportunities in the German financial services market in many years. Our goal is simple: to make retirement investing accessible, transparent and highly cost efficient. To address different customer needs, we have developed three account models ranging from highly standardized solutions for customer simplicity to flexible solutions that allow customers to build and manage their own portfolios. Importantly, our Core offering is positioned amongst the price leaders in the market. Product costs in form of TERs start at only 7 basis points per year and will be waived entirely for at least the first five years. The reform has the potential to introduce millions of additional savers to capital markets over time. And given our scale, brand recognition and broad investment offerings, we believe flatexDEGIRO is well positioned to benefit from this opportunity. With that, let me now hand over to Thomas, who will walk you through our financial performance in more detail.

Thank you very much, Benon, and also good morning from my side. Before I start with the financials, let me briefly introduce myself. As many of you know, this is my first analyst call as CFO of flatexDEGIRO. Some of you will already know me from our recent IFRS 18 presentation and the discussions that followed. I've been with flatexDEGIRO for 40 years, holding various leadership roles across finance, and I'm very much looking forward to now working closely with our analysts and investors in my new role and to continuing flatexDEGIRO 's long-standing and established dialogue with the capital markets. I also look forward to meeting many of you in person over the coming months. With that, let's turn to our financial performance in the third quarter of 2026. Let's start with net cash inflows on Slide 11. In the third quarter, net cash inflows reached EUR 1.7 billion. For the first nine months of 2026, net cash inflows amounted to close to EUR 7 billion, broadly in line with the strong prior year level. In Q3, 128% of net cash inflows were reinvested into securities compared with a historical average of 95% and around 83% in Q3 2025. In other words, customers invested more than the entire amount of new cash they brought on to our platform during the quarter and also deployed out of the existing cash balance. This strong investment activity also explains the moderation in cash balances during the quarter, while securities under custody reached new record levels. So overall, what we saw in the third quarter was a continuous inflow of new assets combined with a particularly high level of investment activity. The development, therefore, reflects a particularly strong level of investment activity and underlines customers' continued confidence in putting their assets to work through our platform. Turning now to Slide 13 and our revenue development. Overall, revenues reached EUR 150 million in Q3 2026, an increase of 40% year-over-year. Commission income amounted to EUR 89 million, up 6% year-over-year. Compared with the strong second quarter, commission income normalized, reflecting the seasonally quieter summer period and a lower share of U.S. trading. Interest income continued its strong development, increasing by 33% year-over-year to EUR 56 million. This growth was driven by the continued expansion of our treasury book, higher utilization of margin loans and the positive impact of the recent ECB rate increase. Before moving further down the income statement, let me briefly return to our refined commission income disclosure under IFRS 18. As already introduced with our H1 results, commission income is now split into transaction-related commission income and other commission income. We believe this provides greater transparency under the underlying development of our commission income, in particular, when looking at commissions per transaction. Based on transaction-related commission income, commissions per trade as shown on Slide 15 amounted to EUR 4.42 in Q3 2026. The year-over-year and quarter-over-quarter development mainly reflects the lower share of U.S. trading and a less favorable product mix. Let me skip the gross profit slide on Page 16 and move directly to our operating expenses. Current personnel expenses remained broadly stable at EUR 26 million. Expenses for long-term variable compensation amounted EUR 1.6 million in the quarter and are thus within the expected general bracket of EUR 1 million to EUR 2 million per quarter. Marketing and advertising expenses came down to EUR 7 million, reflecting the seasonally lower level of marketing activity in the third quarter. Other administrative expenses amounted to EUR 16 million. As mentioned in the financial report already, the increase versus the second quarter is mainly attributable to some one-off items. Overall, the quarter once again demonstrates our ability to combine continued investment in growth with disciplined cost management. And this brings us to the bottom line on Slide 18. Operating profit amounted to EUR 71 million in Q3 2026, an increase of 23% year-over-year. The operating profit margin remained strong at 54%. Net income reached EUR 50 million, up 29% year-over-year. After three strong quarters, this translated into record results for the first nine months of 2026. Revenues increased by 90% to EUR 490 million. Operating profit grew by 36% to EUR 232 million, while net income increased by 37% to EUR 165 million. The operating profit margin further expanded to 54% compared with 49% in the first nine months of 2025. Overall, the first nine months demonstrates the strength and stability of our business model with earnings continuing to grow significantly faster than revenues. And that brings me directly to our outlook. Based on the strong performance year-to-date, we reiterate our full year guidance. For 2026, we continue to expect revenues of around EUR 650 million, representing growth of approximately 60% year-over-year. We expect net income in a range of EUR 200 million to EUR 230 million, corresponding to year-over-year growth of approximately 25% to 43%. We, therefore, continue to expect to achieve or even exceed the financial targets originally set for 2027 already in 2026, one year ahead of schedule. We will provide an update on our new midterm ambition on the 24th February of 2027. With that, let me hand back to Achim before we open the line for questions.

Thank you, Thomas. Thank you, Benon and Oliver, for your presentation. We are now very happy to answer questions from our analysts, for which I would like to hand back to the moderator, please run us through the process and open the line for the first question.

[Operator Instructions] And your first question comes from the line of Hannah Leivdal with Citi.

I just have one question. So what were the bigger drivers of commission per trade in the quarter? What was the average ticket size and mix of FX? And the share of cash products, as you mentioned, dropped significantly in September with more customers trading ETFs. So I'm just wondering how big of a contributor was that to the declining revenue per trade? And how has that ETN cash mix been so far in October? And to follow up on that, how should we think about the long-term evolution of commission per trade going forward and your pricing versus peers?

Let's start maybe in reverse order. In general, given that we grow our platform and given that we expand our savings plan offerings, those trades tend to be less volatile given the typical frequency of 12 or 24 transactions in a typical savings plan. So in general, as an overarching trend, there will be potentially a trend of commissions going slightly down. However, at the same time, we will expand the number of trades leading to an overall increase in the total commission income generated from those transactions. It's just a general trend of our franchise growing and the continued buildup of our investment platform to levels beyond the EUR 100 billion assets under custody that we hold currently. With respect to the actual detailed mathematics to a Q3 number, I think that is too detailed for an earnings call to go through it line by line. We invite you happy to speak to our Investor Relations department. But in general, we have laid it out in the explanation U.S. shelf trading was lower. The rest of the trends were relatively normal, and there were no unusual exceptions beyond the stuff that we communicated.

Maybe just to add on the question in regards to October now. I think one should expect trading so far to be relatively similar to what we've seen in September.

I'll add maybe one final comment, maybe that's fair. The average, I can make a comment on the average order size. What we have seen in the third quarter is on average with respect to order size higher than what we have seen in the first nine months on average.

And your next question comes from the line of Grace Dargan with Barclays.

Maybe the first one, I'm thinking about growth by geography. So thinking about customer growth within the quarter, how has that been across your various geographies? But importantly, how do you expect the kind of trends in those geographies to evolve as your thinking around that changed? And then secondly, on admin expenses, I understand we've got a number of one-off impacts in the quarter. But do you think consensus generally is thinking correctly about the trajectory of admin expenses from '26 into '27, so thinking about that growth rate.

Maybe I'll start with the customer growth number and then I'll hand over to Thomas for the admin question. So let me start maybe with a higher-level topic we continue to aim for at least 10% customer growth in 2020. We ended 2025 with 3.47 million customers. So 10% growth would be around 350,000 customers. After nine months, we are sorry, 250,000. Q4 would thus need to be around 100,000, which is basically what we achieved last year with approximately 104,000. With our planned marketing activities and the German pension accounts coming live in January, we believe that this is achievable, but we'll need a proper November and December. With respect to the individual breakdown into countries, we have typically not provided that in quarterly calls and, we will make a more formal update when we present our full year numbers in February. And there, we will focus on both the historic, but even more importantly, on the future plans that we have with respect to our geography.

Yes, many thanks. I'll pick it up for the other admin expenses and for the one-off items especially in Q3 this year. So, in general, we are seeing especially in Q3 that, as mentioned, the one-off items are based on two components I want to highlight within that comment. First, we are having a bit higher IT expenses than usually in the quarter-over-quarter comparison level, which is based on some extensions of our Software as a Service portfolio within the company. For example, the usage of AI, which is basically a bit increasing. More important is that especially the one-off of having an employee get together within our company, which is highly demanded to our collaboration throughout the different locations. It's really important to mention over here, we do not expect for sure that this one-off item is followed by some other costs in Q4. And based or coming to your question, what does that mean for the consensus, in general, we see this other admin expenses line item slightly over the actual forecast we made, but not that much to highlight the figures as much as needed. I hope that answers your question.

And your next question comes from the line of Alex Bowers with KBW.

Just a couple of questions from me, if I may. Just firstly, on the commission per trade topic, is there any way you can kind of help quantify how much of this is kind of seasonally related, i.e., just like U.S. trading, wherever it might be versus, I guess, the types of customer that you've been targeting and winning this year relative to, I guess stock? So that's my first question. And secondly, just on marketing efficiency, we've seen CAC come down quarter-on-quarter, admittedly off a lower marketing budget number in Q3. You've got $10 million left of your kind of $46 million to spend in Q4. What sort of expectation do you think we should have kind of CAC in Q4? And then I guess, more broadly for '27, I appreciate it's still early days, but what sort of ambition are you aiming for given the latest you have on sort of competitive environment, et cetera?

So I'll try to take the question one after the other. Commissions per trade seasonal pattern, there is nothing unusual we see in there. We have a trend going on that started a couple of quarters back in that U.S. stocks are not the top traded stocks on our platform, the European stocks. But that's nothing new. That's the trend that we have experienced and seen over the past quarters. Two years ago, it used to be Tesla, Amazon and the likes, Google. Now it's ASML, Rheinmetall and the like. So that continues to be the case, but it's not a deviation from anything we have not seen and observed over the last two or three quarters. On the type of customers, we are quite happy with the quality of the customers we're taking in. I wouldn't even go as far as showing that the recent data highlights good momentum and good client behavior. So 2027, while we would have liked the total number to be higher, we are happy with the quality of clients we're taking in. And if we compare it to our historical patterns, they seem to be maybe even on the upper end and certainly above average compared to the previous years. Marketing efficiency, yes. Well, I mentioned a few seconds before that our aim is to grow at 10%, right? So with that, I have put a number on the table as to what our ambition is for the total number of clients in the fourth quarter. From that, you can derive rough estimates for CAC numbers. We certainly will have some positive effect from the German pension reform scheme, which while technically starting on the 1st of January, people are likely to deal with that in, let's say, December or so or maybe even November. With respect to the Customer Acquisition Cost in Q4, I mean, that's literally a bit early to comment on. That's something we will discuss in February.

And your next question comes from the line of Christoph Blieffert with BNP Paribas.

I have a question on '27, please. Looking at Bloomberg consensus for '27, analysts expect some 91 million trades for the year, which implies a mid-single-digit growth. I'm just wondering if this is a valid base case scenario from your perspective.

Thank you, Christoph. Look, a crystal ball would help, right? Every year in November, December, we have the same question, what's our estimate for the number of trades? Let's maybe look at this a bit more holistically. When it comes to customer growth, we are doing our homework, particularly in regards to marketing. Those things take a bit of time to show effect, but they'll come. We're very confident. When it comes to trade, market environment, of course, plays a role. Take the region's Q3 numbers. When trading normalizes and at the same time, the share of U.S. trade declines, that has an impact not only on the number of trades, but also on the commission per trade. And these things are outside of our control. Product mix is the same to some extent. Looking at '26, the market did help us, particularly in the first half with additional trading activity due to market uncertainties around U.S. policies, Venezuela, Greenland, Iran and so on. To make this more specific, at the same day last year, the analyst consensus on Visible Alpha for net income in '26 was EUR 173 million. The midpoint of our guidance today is EUR 215 million. We all don't have the crystal ball to predict 2027. That's part of our business. Sometimes the market works in your favor and you beat consensus by 10%. Sometimes it runs against you and you end up 10% lower. And that's totally fine with us as the underlying business case, our platform, our customer quality are strong and so is the expected long-term growth and scalability of our business. When we do our modeling, do we have an issue with EUR 90 million trades? No. But it depends on the market conditions, and we will only know a year from today. I hope that answers the question. Back to the moderator, any other questions in the line.

And your next question comes from the line of Amit Jagadeesh with UBS.

I just have one question. On the EUR 100 million share buyback, could you just provide some color on why, I guess, that was the appropriate size for the buyback program? Should we view that as a first step within the broader capital return framework? Or is it more of like a one-off deployment of excess capital?

Well, I would really refer to our formal capital allocation strategy. So this is the second time we are planning this. I think it's neither a one-off nor is it a regular mechanism. We stated that it's an additional instrument to deploy cash in a sensible way once organic growth of the company is supported, which is the case. And we several times mentioned that last year, we needed all of '24 profits to run our operating business. This year, there is room left, which helped us to both pay our 20% payout ratio dividend plus the EUR 100 million share buyback. I mean, frankly, if we would not do that, our capital ratios once '26 profits would have been registered as capital would have gone to levels which we feel are not adequate in order to run a business on a good capital efficiency. So it's in between. It's neither regular nor is it a one-off.

And your next question comes from the line of Christiane Holstein with Bank of America.

My first question was just a follow-up on the marketing and customer growth discussion earlier. I was just wondering if you could give us any indication of how you're thinking about the marketing campaign next year and also the structure of marketing guidance? Or if it's too early to say, I guess, what could you have done differently this year if you had a little bit more flexibility within the guidance to kind of maintain that more elevated customer growth level? My next question was on the German pension reform. So you mentioned the significant opportunity from this. But I know for the near term, the core product charging fees for five years and then it's only 7 bps. So I assume the greatest opportunity is through cross-sell. So how long until you expect this benefit to be realized? And then will the other Plus and Flex accounts earn a higher fee and contribute to top line growth?

Okay. Let's maybe start with the pension reform. There are a couple of advantages that we have in the market. One of our strongest advantages and one that's potentially also a bit underappreciated is our high level of vertical integration. We truly believe that the production costs we have for this product overall are amongst the lowest that you can find. We own the entire IT value chain. We own our data centers. We have a banking license. So the production of the product is really, really low. This allows us to position the main product at such a low price offering, and we are certain that spillover effects into other products will be perfectly fine for us to justify that small investment on our side. So it's early in the game. A year from today, we can maybe make the first assessment as to where we realistically stand. But do we expect our client growth numbers in Germany to be meaningfully higher next year? Well, of course, right? Of course. And with marketing and customer growth, so your first question, I think we made the point in several calls that we were not happy with the structure of our marketing machine. We made the point that we had a delay in switching from the regulatory mode into a commercial mode. We are now in the middle of doing that. And we will devote more time into performance-based metrics, which contribution from performance-based marketing initiatives has fallen to a level that we were not happy with. This will go up next year. So we hired the new Chief Growth Officer. He is starting preparations for those things. And we are actually pretty happy with what we have in mind for 2027 and the details of that will be shown in February.

And if I may maybe just add one point as you asked about the pension account, the Flex one, i.e., where customers can freely choose their ETN. We haven't yet announced the pricing, et cetera, and of course, we will do before the product goes live. But just as a kind of cross reference, if a customer of ours would do in Germany with flatex, a regular ETN saving plan today that would come commission-free for the customer. Of course, we're not bearing the product cost in that, but we're also not charging a top-up on those regular ETN saving plans.

And your next question comes from the line of Ian White with Autonomous Research.

I just wanted to maybe touch on two areas, please. In terms of the performance in the third quarter, we see the customer growth has been decelerating through the monthly stats, net inflows kind of flat year-over-year and some of your peers are putting up good double-digit year-over-year growth numbers when it comes to the net inflows. I wonder if you could just maybe give us some thoughts there about a roadmap of specific actions that you think might be needed to improve these figures. Is it about direct investments into marketing? Is it about pricing? What do you think there, please, in terms of how those numbers improve? That's question one. And just on question two, I think on, maybe on securities lending, I think it's fair to say that maybe it's going to be slower traction on sec lending than some of us had anticipated. Just wondered if you could give us some thoughts there in terms of the trajectory for revenue build-out and what needs to happen for us to see a more meaningful contribution from the sec lending business, please?

On your first question, Ian, you're basically asking to lay out the breakdown that we're preparing for February, right? So yes, we have these initiatives. The number of initiatives is higher than what we have had in the previous year. We are currently in the final stages of preparing our new multiyear outlook. And it includes, of course, a more specific rollout of activities in 2027. But I think it's a bit too early to put them on the table other than saying that it's a meaningfully higher number of single items compared to what we would have done last year or the year before. And with respect to securities lending, I would maybe hand over to Oliver.

Yes. Maybe to add on the customer growth. I think what people tend to ignore a bit is the raise in interest rates. The rise in interest rates in the U.S. and in Europe in the last six or eight weeks, putting the last two weeks aside, is the fastest rise in history in five decades and in Germany, I think, or in Europe, also in the last 25 or 30 years. So that obviously has also led to a massive rotation in equity markets that created also some uncertainty, and we still have at least two wars we are talking about. And it looks like we are ignoring this as we speak a bit. Nevertheless, we are enjoying solid growth, as Benon explained, which is around the 10% area through the cycle. Sec lending, as we mentioned, there are certain, we are not the United States of Europe, unfortunately, and we are advocating for that every day wherever we meet regulators across Europe. Every country has individual interpretations of what is allowed and whatnot, yes. In France, for example, securities lending reflects the sell process of the securities, which makes it absolutely disastrous for a client to engage in that. For those markets where we have rolled it out, I think you all know we are dealing with self-directed investors. At the same time, securities lending is not self-explanatory. So we need to communicate with clients. We're enjoying good growth there. We are probably a little bit behind our own planning. But nevertheless, it's a significant contribution to additional revenues of our clients, and they appreciate that. And we are rolling this out through the DEGIRO site in Germany now for German clients, which should give us significant competitive edge over and above of our professional competition. What I think you should also recognize on the positive side is that the growth per trade over the last years went up by around EUR 1,000 per trade per year on average. Is this a straight-line appreciation? Definitely not. Is the trend on our side? Absolutely. When I was just attending the World Bank Conference in Bangkok, and it's very clear from a, if you fly high enough, Altersvorsorgedepot and you can argue very long that this is a low-profit product, and it doesn't fit the zero into your spreadsheet. The reality is it will create a complete new group of investors. It will enhance the penetration rate in Germany, and all of this is also happening in other countries. That's why it's so essential that we roll out on the DEGIRO side, the auto-invest savings plans. And this is combined with our own co-launching of funds for those savings plans, which should enhance our margin and pays into our strategy of increasing recurring revenues, which you're all aware that we have one of the lowest proportion in the industry. So yes, there's always in life a little bit of setbacks here and there. But no, we are in a good course to steer the ship exactly into that direction where we wanted to be. And we have overdelivered on every single quarter in the last two years on numbers. So sometimes we also like to be hugged for that.

Can I just, just a small clarification on the answer to the first question about specific single items. By that, do you mean sort of specific country initiatives, marketing projects, pricing changes? Is that the sort of thing we should be thinking about ahead of February in terms of that number of single items that you might look to introduce compared to prior years?

Yes, but that's part of that. So there is more compared to what you said.

Look, the plans to be localized country by country.

And your next question comes from the line of Christoph Greulich with Berenberg.

It's three from my side, please. And I would like to take them one by one, if that is okay. Firstly, on the retirement savings accounts. I'm just curious to hear your thoughts in terms of the expected demand across the three different versions. Do you expect it to be very much dominated by the core standard version? Or do you think that demand might be quite balanced across the three different account types?

I think the best answer, Christoph, is that we're not entirely sure just yet. we are also not sure whether we should launch all three at the same time or whether we should start with two of them in order not to make it too complicated. But the pricing for the ones where we plan on making a bit more money over the short term because they has not been set just yet. We are literally in the middle of the final preparations for that as we are starting our small Q4 campaigns on that specific topic as well.

And then on...

Yes, sorry. Broader question, you have to ask how much of the overall market is a bought product or a sold product? And what everybody can contribute that clients get more educated because the likelihood that there's 80% of a sold product by those guys who continue to charge 200 basis points on the product is not low. And we cater for self-directed, as you know, who know what they want and what they want to invest. So there's a good likelihood that they will choose their own funds because they are already used to the funds. The beginners will most likely choose the simple default version. There, the big question is, is it great for a beginner to have 70% of their assets in U.S. dollars, which I think the government has not really looked into, but that's a personal observation.

Yes. That was very helpful. Secondly, I wanted to ask about the segment performance that you've shown in the press release. And I mean, the flatex brand segment has seen slightly stronger customer growth in the first nine months compared to the DEGIRO segment. We had, I think, quite a lot of discussions about competitive dynamics in Germany this year. But I was just wondering on the DEGIRO side, if you could provide a bit of color if you've seen in the relevant DEGIRO markets, some meaningful shift in the competitive dynamics this year.

I don't think we've seen a tremendous shift in competitive dynamics in the market. Ever since Europe woke up to equities, and this happened a couple of years back, maybe make even the point to start with COVID that people had more time at home. We've seen an increased level of competition across countries. There are countries where we sometimes think we may feel more. And then a couple of months later, we find out that wasn't the case. So those are micro trends. In terms of overarching trends, competition today is harder compared to the competition five years ago. It's less clear. And then on a country-by-country basis, you have different dynamics, which change. But, the German market continues and remains the most competitive as it has been over the last five or six years.

Look, with the reappearance of interest rates, some of the competitors are basically flushing every and Joe with 2.5% for whatever you put on the account, yield on cash. The question is, can they really make money with these clients or not? What gives us a lot of confidence is that our clients' transaction volume on average goes up every single year-over-year. So we'd rather take the adults with the money than the kids with no money, if I may say so.

And then lastly, on the buyback program. What is your expected timeline to get the approval from BaFin and to actually launch the program?

We don't have a precise answer on that. We are in preparations to do the full submission of the document. Last time, it took eight or nine weeks, roughly, give or take, but we don't know how long it's going to take. It's just not something they would commit to when we discuss with them. And we want to put any pressure on that. It's a normal process. And once it's out of the bag, we'll make another announcement and then we'll start buying shares.

Last time it took months or so. Eight weeks or nine months.

And that concludes our question-and-answer session. I would like to turn it back to Achim Schreck for closing remarks.

Thank you very much, everyone, for joining today's call, and thank you very much for your questions as well. As always, any follow-ups, Laura, Emma and myself are happy to support, and we are looking forward to speaking to you again soon. Thank you very much, and have a good day.

Thank you. And ladies and gentlemen, this concludes today's conference call. You may now disconnect.