PLSQF (PLSQF) Q2 2026 Earnings Report, Transcript and Summary

Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the Plus500 H1 2026 Interim Results. [Operator Instructions] Please note, this call is being live streamed to our webcast for a wider audience and will be recorded. I would now like to hand over to David Zruia, Group Chief Executive Officer, to open the presentation. Please go ahead.

Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining our 2026 interim results presentation today. I'm David Zruia, CEO of Plus500, and I'm joined today by Elad Even-Chen, our Group CFO; and Owen Jones, our Group Head of Investor Relations. The first half of 2026 delivered strong financial and operating momentum across Plus500 businesses. We achieved record results, which directly reflect the compounding quality of our customer base, the resilience of our global businesses and the power of our best-in-class proprietary technology, underpinning our deliberate evolution into a diversified global multi-asset fintech group. Today's presentation will highlight the continued delivery of our key strategic initiatives. A key part of our strategy and driven by the vast opportunity in the prediction market space is our U.S. business, which represents a multiyear growth engine. At the same time, the broader structural opportunities across our target markets remain substantial and continue to expand. We entered the second half of 2026 with real momentum and look to the remainder of the year and beyond with confidence and excitement. With that in mind, I would like to take a moment to thank all my colleagues across Plus500, the people who made these record results possible for their hard work, dedication and commitment to driving our strategic ambitions forward. Slide 2 outlines the agenda for today. We will take you through the first half highlights and the operating review, followed by an in-depth look at our unique proprietary technology and product suites and then continue with the financial highlights. We will then conclude with a summary and outlook section before taking your questions at the end. Slide 4 summarizes 5 key takeaways from today's presentation. First, our record results demonstrate the continued delivery of our strategic objectives, entering new markets, broadening our product offering and deepening customer engagement, which together drove significant and accelerating financial and operational momentum across the group. Customer income reached a 5-years' high, while revenue grew to a 3-years' high, reflecting our focus on higher-value customers. During the period, we deliberately increased investment in customer acquisition, technology, product development and the local operational capabilities required to scale our expanding geographic footprint. These investments are incurred ahead of the associated revenue, but they are already converting into customer income faster than prior periods. This disciplined conviction-led investment is intended to support our sustainable growth. Second, our U.S. business continues to scale and represents a multiyear growth engine and highlighting this, non-OTC revenue grew significantly by approximately 30% year-on-year. We deepened our existing strategic B2B relationships and recently welcomed Wealthsimple in Canada and Nelogica in Brazil as new partners, reinforcing Plus500's position as a trusted partner of choice. Third, in our CFTC regulated prediction markets business, we achieved a major milestone with the initial introduction of our B2C offering on the Plus500 Futures platform in February 2026, which we quickly followed with the launch of sports event-based contracts in June. This completed our next-generation B2C offering in the industry's highest engagement category, establishing Plus500 as a leading participant in one of the fastest-growing markets. Building on this strong performance and excellent strategic position, our non-OTC business is on track to deliver annualized revenue of approximately $140 million this year. Our differentiated position in futures and prediction market provides significant further opportunities for value creation, beginning in the short term and for growth to compound over the medium to long term. Finally, we announced today additional returns of $182.5 million, comprising $82.5 million in total dividends and $100 million in new share buyback programs, reinforcing our strong commitment to generating value for our shareholders. In conclusion, our robust financial position underpins everything we do, and we remain highly cash generative and debt-free, holding over $860 million in cash. These highlights, together with our disciplined approach, generate a compelling investment case. Plus500 is a business that has transformed, delivers and will continue to grow. We have become a fundamentally stronger group, delivering record results today while investing in growth engines already contributing to our performance with further investment sets to drive it for years to come. Turning to Slide 5, which illustrates our long-standing track record of profitable growth and cash generation since our IPO in 2013. Our performance is built on 4 fundamentals: high operational efficiency driven by technology and automation, business model stability, consistent growth through market and product expansion and a strong financial position. Since listing, Plus500 has generated $4 billion in cash from operations, $3.3 billion in cumulative net profits and a 16% compound annual growth rate for the group's revenue. Crucially, we have returned approximately $3.1 billion to shareholders through dividends and share buybacks, including the returns announced today. The shareholder returns, combined with a strong share price performance have resulted in Plus500 being the best performing share in the FTSE All-Share Index over the past 13 years to the end of June on a total return basis, delivering a total shareholder return of approximately 12,000%, which is a remarkable achievement. Moving now to Slide 6, which highlights our evolution from a single product provider to a market-leading global multi-asset fintech group across OTC, futures and share dealing and most recently, with a notable expansion of our offering to include prediction markets in the U.S. This deliberate evolution reflects a clear and consistently executed strategy to broaden the product offering and expand our geographic reach. Every growth opportunity has been pursued with discipline and with the infrastructure to support it at scale. The result is a business that is not only more resilient, but structurally better positioned to capture compounding growth across multiple areas simultaneously. Importantly, we operate in attractive growing end markets with powerful structural growth drivers, which I will highlight in more detail shortly. Our OTC businesses cover 7 asset classes, now enhanced with 24/5 trading on stocks and ETFs and our non-OTC business include futures, which we further enhanced through the recent launch of single stock futures, prediction markets and share dealing. Our futures and prediction markets businesses, which covers large and rapidly growing addressable market opportunities with significant long-term potential can be split further into B2B, institutional and B2C retail channels with the new B2B2C subline. Together, these channels provide execution and clearing services across a growing range of global exchanges and venues to an expanding list of partners. We also highlight Plus500 Cosmos here, our industry-leading client portal for our B2B futures customers, which has become a meaningful and growing source in accelerating customer onboarding and retention within our B2B businesses. Expanding on our new B2B2C channel, the subline of our U.S. operation delivers an end-to-end institutional solution that enables strategic partners to seamlessly power their own customer trading experience built on our proprietary technology and clearing infrastructure, the full suite package encompasses order routing, streamlined KYC onboarding, single sign-on integration, treasury management, regulatory reporting and full clearing services, allowing partners to scale efficiently while extending Plus500 market reach. Our overall offering provides customers with a broad and expanding range of relevant products, enabling them to tailor their trading strategies to their own individual needs. The breadth of our business is a direct reflection of the scale of opportunity we see, and diversification remains a key pillar and a vital part of our success, and we will continue to drive this agenda as we maximize the attractive growth opportunities across our markets. Moving to the next slide. Here, we show the critical and increasingly important role that Plus500 plays as a provider of accredited, trusted institutional-grade market infrastructure built on our innovative proprietary technology and deep market expertise. Our role has evolved significantly as the group has diversified its operations, and we now sit at the heart of the financial ecosystem, connecting our global customer base of institutional and retail customers to over 30 exchanges and clearing houses worldwide. Our futures business, in particular, which we'll discuss in more detail shortly, continues to outperform our expectations, delivering an exceptionally strong performance in the first half of the year as customer demand for our compelling offering grew meaningfully. Moving to Slide 8, which details our U.S. market business, a self-reinforcing growth engine driven by 3 channels: B2B, B2C and B2B2C, creating a unique proposition. As shown on the left, we own and operate our proprietary technology, our full clearing and execution capabilities and our institutional-grade B2B infrastructure. This complete ownership allows us to power the entire offering across all channels within our futures and prediction markets business. On the right, you can see how this capability is delivered in practice through our various platforms, Plus500 Futures platform, T4-Pro and Plus500 Cosmos. Because we built and control every layer of this stack ourselves, each component reinforces the others, creating a structural competitive moat that compounds as we scale our market share. The prediction market space covered here on Slide 9 represents a compelling and fast-growing market opportunity for Plus500 driven by a surge in retail and institutional engagement, regulated exchanges and next-generation trading tools, this new financial asset class has experienced significant growth over the past year. Prediction markets enable customers to train on real-world outcomes within a trusted CFTC regulated framework underpinned by advanced technology and infrastructure, which generate a seamless and highly intuitive trading experience. Plus500 customers can trade on our highly robust and reliable platform, providing them with direct regulated access to act on real-time events as they unfold. Our technology-led position in this market speaks for itself and explains why we are established as a provider of choice for a growing number of blue-chip partners. We combine deep market expertise, institutional-grade infrastructure and a robust proprietary ecosystem to serve an expanding customer base. We entered this market in 2025 as the clearing partner for a joint venture between the CME and FanDuel, our first strategic partnership. Then in early 2026, we launched our own B2C prediction markets offering via the Plus500 Futures platform in the U.S. And most recently, we enhanced our offering with CFTC regulated sports event-based contracts, the highest engaging category in this prediction market space. Thanks to the unique strength and deep competitive moat of our proprietary technology and our trusted institutional infrastructure, we are exceptionally well placed to maximize the substantial opportunities in front of us. And the most exciting part is we are only just getting started. I will now hand over to Elad, who will take you through the operating review section.

Thank you, David, and good morning, everyone. It is a pleasure to present to you today the operating overview of our 2026 interim results, one which reflects a strong set of financial and operational performance. The operating review section will include an outline of our operating performance as well as a closer look at our growing futures business, including our entry into the prediction market space and the newly announced institutional partnerships. On Slide 11, we highlight the key financial and operational achievements from the period. Building on a strong 2025, the group carried forward substantial momentum into 2026, delivering record results for a 6-month period. This reflects our consistent strategic focus, which includes entering into new markets, broadening our product offering and deepening customer engagement. Additionally, we will continue to invest in customer acquisition and the localization of our proprietary trading platforms to meet local customer preferences in order to drive the business forward. In the first half of 2026, we delivered record level of results with customer income up by 24% year-on-year to a 5-year high and revenue up by 12% year-on-year to a 3-year high. This performance reflects strong momentum across both our OTC and non-OTC businesses. Non-OTC revenue grew by approximately 30% year-on-year, now accounting for approximately 15% of total group revenue. This momentum was driven by significant developments across the U.S. business, where we expanded our capabilities to accommodate customers across B2B, B2C and B2B2C channels. We continue to strengthen our position at the center of the fast-growing U.S. futures and prediction markets industry, onboarding new B2C futures customers and expanding our B2B customer base, leveraging our end-to-end Omni-set solution. Internationally, we completed the acquisition of Mehta in India in February 2026 and recently secured new strategic partnerships with Wealthsimple in Canada and Nelogica in Brazil, alongside the established partnership with the CME Group and FanDuel as part of the growing B2B ecosystem. We also launched single stock futures shortly after the period end, which I will return to later. Our new B2B2C channel, which David mentioned earlier, delivers an end-to-end institutional solution that enables our partners to seamlessly power their own customer trading experiences. Building on this momentum, our OTC business accelerated performance by converting acquisition investment into revenue faster than in prior periods. We significantly advanced our localized propositions, tailoring our offerings to align with local customer preferences and launching high-demand trading tools like 24/5 trading on stocks and ETFs. We also continue to expand our global footprint with recent launch in Canada progressing well, while our UAE business contributed a strong level of revenue and profit, thanks to the enhanced local operation. As shown on Slide 12, we now serve more than 34 million registered customers across more than 60 countries. This global scale, combined with a tailored localized offering is an important source of both current and future value as we focus on maximizing activation, retention and monetization of our global customer base. This is further supported by our highly innovative and agile offering, driving customer engagement with our compelling multi-asset product set as well as a strong debt-free balance sheet that provides the flexibility to keep investing to generate growth. All of this is underpinned by our strategic advantage, a global portfolio of 17 regulatory licenses paired with proprietary technology that is designed for rapid expansion of localized services. Together, these strengths are delivered alongside a dedicated best-in-class customer service, enabling a consistently high-quality user experience. On Slide 13, we show some of our operational KPIs alongside regional performance data. As the group has consistently demonstrated historically, new customer acquisition and deeper engagement with existing customers lays the foundation for future growth, making it an investment today to drive value creation over the medium to long term. Also, as we have demonstrated in recent years, our increasing focus on attracting and retaining higher value and more sophisticated customers keeps us well positioned to drive sustainable, high-quality growth. During the first 6 months of 2026, we onboarded more than 65,000 new customers, a 17% increase year-on-year, supported by continued momentum in our strategic growth markets and active customers increased by 10% year-on-year to more than 197,000. We continue to invest in attractive growth areas, including customer acquisition, new markets and product development. This is also reflected in total customer deposits, which rose 10% year-on-year to $3.4 billion with an average deposit per active customer of more than $17,000 alongside a higher number of trades executed in the period. Moving ahead to Slide 14, which shows the customer tenure and longevity. Over recent years, we have invested consistently in retention technologies and global premium account programs to enable a superior customer experience. These programs aim to deepen engagement with higher-value customers and extend customer longevity. We aim to establish long-term relationships with our customers through tech-enabled retention initiatives and a wide range of products and services, supported by our best-in-class robust, secure, intuitive and reliable trading platforms. Operating entirely on a self-directed basis, customers retain complete discretion over their trading activity. As can be seen on the pie charts, in the first half of 2026, 20% of the OTC revenue was generated by customers who have been with us for up to 1 year, while 50% of the OTC revenue was generated by customers who have been with us for more than 5 years. This is an excellent achievement, which is more than double the equivalent metric in 2022. reflecting the depth of trust and engagement that Plus500's proprietary platform inspires as well as the group's ability to acquire high-value customers at attractive levels of ROI. This is a direct result of sustained deliberate investment in our proprietary retention and monetization technology, which continuously optimizes the customer life cycle and drives measurable improvement across the business. Turning to Slide 15. Customer income is a key measure of the group's underlying performance. And in the first half of 2026, it reached a 5-year high of approximately $461 million, a 24% increase year-on-year, which is an excellent achievement. This growth reflects the expanding scale of the group's operations and the increasing quality, longevity and value of our customer base made up of more sophisticated customers who continue to engage our reliable and scalable proprietary trading platforms. It also demonstrates the wider progress we have delivered, including the structural resilience of our OTC business, alongside the increasing revenue contribution from our non-OTC business, which grew by approximately 30% year-on-year, a point we will expand on in the next slide. The group continues to expand its global footprint, both organically through new regulatory licenses and the establishment of local operations and inorganically through selective bolt-on acquisitions. Every part of the business contributed to this record result, and that breadth of contribution is exactly what we have been strategically working towards. Over the next few slides, I will highlight the impact that our non-OTC business as a whole and particularly the futures business has had on the group's revenues, customer mix and other KPIs. Turning to Slide 16. We can see the rapid expansion of our U.S. business. Non-OTC revenue increased by approximately 30% year-on-year in the first half of 2026, accounting for approximately 15% of the group's total revenue and 23% of new customers, reflecting a business that has evolved into a material and rapidly scaling driver of the group's performance. The non-OTC business is anticipated to generate annualized revenue of approximately $140 million in 2026, representing a meaningful contribution from this business as it continues to scale. Three growth drivers are powering this expansion. First, our B2B business continues to establish itself as a trusted provider of critical market infrastructure, growing our number of strategic partners while deepening relationships with existing ones. Second, on the B2C side, our Plus500 Futures and T4 Pro platforms have enhanced their performance significantly over the past year, with both customer acquisition and trading volumes growing year-on-year, underpinned by our integrating infrastructure and best-in-class proprietary technology. And third, our B2B2C channel, a new subline in our U.S. operation allows our partners to power their own customer trading experiences using Plus500's proprietary technology and infrastructure. By embedding this technology across our B2B, B2C and B2B2C channels, together with our clearing and risk management infrastructure, this valuable technology is what has driven and will continue to drive the growth and scaling of this line of business. Within the prediction markets, we first launched our B2C prediction markets offering in 2026, then expanding it in June 2026 with our next-generation proposition, introducing CFTC regulated sports event-based contracts, the highest engagement category in the industry. Our positioning in these markets provides significant further opportunities for value creation to begin in short term and for growth to compound over the medium to long term. This has driven a near doubling of non-OTC revenue from around $35 million in the first half of 2024 to approximately $70 million in the first half of 2026. And this positive momentum is expected to continue. Turning to Slide 17, which shows the strategic foundations and the building blocks that have enabled our U.S. business to perform so well. In our futures business, our portfolio of exchange and clearing memberships, including ICE Clear US and ICE Clear Europe as well as Kalshi Klear allows Plus500 to offer B2B customers a holistic solution covering clearing, execution and order routing with direct API connectivity across venues and geographies. During the first half of 2026, we added 6 new exchange memberships in India, further strengthening our position as increasingly global infrastructure provider. Our institutional offering is underpinned by Plus500 Cosmos, an end-to-end proprietary platform built for our B2B partners to manage their business and service their end customers. It brings together a full range of services, which includes funds management, real-time risk monitoring and streamlined onboarding within a single scalable system, materially improving the experience our customers can offer and deepening their engagement with us. Across all these 3 channels, B2B, B2C and B2B2C, we have expanded our core technology architecture to deliver dedicated clearing, order routing and risk management solutions. Our B2B2C infrastructure enables our partners to power their own customer offering and to extend our market reach beyond our direct audience. Our offering to B2C customers is powered by our proprietary technology and includes specific functionalities developed especially for this business. At its core is our Omni-set solution, enabling customers to onboard, fund and trade seamlessly through a single integrated and secure platform. This reflects a strong and unique combination as we own and operate both the trading platform and the clearing infrastructure needed to deliver this seamless end-to-end experience. In the prediction market space, our focus has been on developing and launching a high-quality product with a full service offering, positioning us to build quickly across all 3 channels in one of the fast-growing segments in today's financial markets. As I've mentioned, we launched our B2C prediction markets offering in February 2026. And in June, we build on this by expanding our addressable market with CFTC regulated sports event-based contracts. We will also continue to target additional B2B partnerships in this space, further extending our reputation as a premier provider of market infrastructure. Turning to our exciting blue-chip partnerships shown here on Slide 18, which demonstrate the scale and caliber of institutions now choosing to collaborate with Plus500. We recently announced on strategic partnerships with Wealthsimple, Canada's leading financial innovator, serving more than 4 million Canadians and Nelogica, a leading trading technology provider in Brazil, marking our expansion into Latin America region. We will also continue to build on our role as a clearing partner for FanDuel prediction markets as part of our joint venture with the CME Group exchanges. These partnerships reflect just how much we have developed our offering in the U.S. and how our status as an accredited trusted market infrastructure provider built on proprietary technology and deep market expertise enables us to drive institutional collaboration to the very highest level. They also demonstrate the strength and maturity of our operational processes and status as a global multi-asset fintech group on the international stage. These partnerships are expected to build progressively, creating value in the short term and growing their contribution to group results over time. Securing this caliber and number of partnerships within such a short time reflects the strength of the group's technological capabilities and its ability to build solution tailored to each partner's specific needs. Together, this combination of advanced technological capabilities, regulatory position and robust clearing memberships with strong financial foundations and deep market expertise is a scarce and durable competitive advantage, representing a meaningful barrier to entry in this expanding market. This leaves us extremely well positioned to capitalize on the growth opportunities ahead. I will now hand back to David, who will take us through the technology section.

Thank you, Elad. Turning to Slide 20. Technology is why Plus500 operates efficiently at scale and why we are so confident about our prospects. Our proprietary technology is one of our core competitive advantages, powering every aspect of our business from operations and product to marketing and customer service. By seamlessly integrating these in-house systems, we deliver specialized services such as search and data analytics in marketing, payments processing and customer onboarding while maintaining a holistic view of our infrastructure. Ultimately, this resilient and agile architecture underpins our best-in-class global multi-asset offering in highly regulated markets. Our domains are built using our own technology, and they are integrated and optimized with one another, giving a holistic view of our systems. It is a capability which compounds in value with every new market we enter, every new product we launch and every new transaction processed. We power the complete customer journey through our proprietary technology and the end-to-end ownership is a significant competitive advantage, whether driving acquisition through our multichannel marketing machine with increasing level of AI input, processing payments via our in-house cash or delivering unique trading products, our technology stack covers every touch point of the customer experience, every improvement to this journey, whether in onboarding speed, payment processing efficiency or trading experience directly reduces friction, improves conversion rates and enhances the lifetime value of each customer. Plus500 is committed to developing cutting-edge solutions that provides our global user base with a secure, localized and user-friendly trading experience. And we are investing continuously to make that experience better, faster and more intuitive. Our best-in-class technology stack provides our customers with a reliable, robust and seamless trading experience across mobile devices, tablets and the web. We offer over 2,500 different underlying global financial instruments across more than 60 countries and in 30 languages via our product portfolios of OTC, share dealing futures and options on futures and prediction markets. As you can see on the slide, the graphical user interface and overall user experience across our mobile-first product offering are seamless, enabling greater level of customer satisfaction, engagement and longevity. Plus500's new tech stack for the U.S. futures market available across various platforms serves retail, professional and institutional clients. These include Plus500 Futures and its prediction markets offering, T4 Pro and Plus500 Cosmos, along with advanced clearing risk management, middle office and execution technologies. And our strategic partnerships, which Elad covered earlier, demonstrates our ability to offer bespoke API connectivity and other tailored services to meet the specific needs of prospective partnerships across futures and prediction markets, a flexibility that is a direct product of owning and controlling our own technology. For institutional clients, we offer enhanced control over the end-to-end process. Plus500 Cosmos leads industry innovation with a proprietary platform built for our B2B partners, featuring advanced risk management tools and trade monitoring services, streamlined onboarding and other functionalities. With these advancements, Plus500 has established itself as a key market infrastructure provider in the futures industry. We made significant progress during the first 6 months of 2026 with the launch of 24/5 trading on stocks and ETFs in our OTC business, giving customers continuous weekday access to financial markets. Continuing this momentum, shortly after period end, we also extended around-the-clock trading to our U.S. futures customers to the launch of single stock futures further enhancing our product suite and strengthening our position in this fast-growing market. This response to structural shift reshaping our industry. Extended hours trading is now accounting for a significant and growing share of global retail activity and customers increasingly want the flexibility to act the moment news breaks regardless of time zone. We have also introduced an exciting new feature for our OTC customers called +AI Bites. This is a proprietary AI tool that provides near real-time market analysis in seamless intuitive way. It rapidly processes complex data sets and translates them into easy-to-understand insights. Key features include AI-driven news summarize, technical analysis and real-time sentiment displays. The launch of +AI Bites reflects our ongoing commitment to equipping our customers with innovative and effective tools. Turning to Slide 25. The mobile trading space has become increasingly important for retail customers, and we work extremely hard to maintain and extend our leading position in this field. Many of our customers have a mobile-first approach to trading, which is why Plus500 customer experience is seamless between mobile, tablet or web and each interaction is designed to have the same look and feel. This consistency in trading experience for our customers is extremely important to us. Highlighting this, 90% of OTC revenue was generated from customers trading with us on mobile and tablet devices and 87% of OTC trades took place on mobile or tablet devices in H1 2026. I will now hand back to Elad, who will take you through the financials before I conclude with the summary and outlook section.

Thank you, David. Shown here on Slide 27 are some of the financial and operational highlights for the period. We're really pleased to be reporting today on such a strong set of results, which include multiyear highs for customer income, revenue and customer growth, results, which reflects our discipline and consistent delivery of strategic road map objectives. The group delivered revenue growth of 12% and EBITDA growth of 1% year-on-year, translating into a strong EBITDA margin of 41%. This reflects a deliberate decision to accelerate investment in customer acquisition and significantly scaling our U.S. presence across futures and prediction markets through B2B, B2C and B2B2C channels, leading to a natural rise in our cost base and consistent with our strategy to prioritize long-term high-quality earnings. The growth in our cost base was driven by 3 main factors: first, continued investment in customer acquisition, including a deliberate incremental investment of approximately $60 million in marketing during the period, which is already converting in revenue faster than in prior periods. Second, the natural scaling of revenue-linked costs as the business grows, including higher payment processing costs driven by a 10% growth in customer deposits and commissions and infrastructure costs tied to our non-OTC revenue, which grew by approximately 30% year-on-year. Third, the period experienced major external FX headwinds as the Israeli shekel strengthened by approximately 20% against the U.S. dollar, an external dynamic affecting the broader Israeli tech sector. While this affected the group, the impact on us has been comparably modest, reflecting our continued focus on automation and technology over headcount alone, supported by a lean, highly qualified workforce and geographic diversification outside of our headquarters. We view the FX impact as a short-term effect rather than a midterm one. And on a constant currency basis, our underlying performance was meaningfully stronger, underscoring the resilience and quality of our operating model. Our focus on attracting and retaining higher-value customers enabled by our sophisticated marketing technology investment and additional investments during the period drove 17% growth in new customers and $3.4 billion in total customer deposits, supporting the record customer income delivered in the period. None of this would have been possible without the platform strength we have built, best-in-class customer service, extremely resilient technological infrastructure and ongoing innovation that continues to compound our advantages. We also grew average revenue per user by 2% year-on-year, highlighting our sophisticated multichannel marketing technology and ability to attract and retain higher-value customers at scale. This was achieved alongside a favorable decrease in average user acquisition cost by 1% to $1,230, consistent with the group's strategy of scaling customer acquisition while improving cohort quality and more efficient levels of acquisition costs. On Slide 28, we can see the financial performance Plus500 has delivered in recent years. The group generated revenue of approximately $463 million in the first half of 2026, representing growth of 12% year-on-year, and EBITDA was also extremely robust at $187.5 million. The strong delivery, combined with the ongoing share buyback program during the period led to basic earnings per share of $2.17, representing growth of 6% year-on-year. These results reflect the quality, resilience and compounding strength of our business model. I will now take you through our financials, starting on Slide 29. Here, we show a breakdown of our income statement in more detail. Starting with revenue. Trading income, our primary revenue driver, grew by 15% year-on-year to $441.8 million. This growth was driven by increased customer and trading activity, underpinned by higher customer deposits, which together are the key drivers of our performance. It also outweighed a decline in interest income as global interest rates fell. We view the growing contribution from trading income very favorably as it reflects a reduced reliance on rate-sensitive income and a greater contribution from a key driver of the business, customer engagement. These are high-quality earnings, underscoring the increasing quality and resilience of our underlying revenue model. In the first half of 2026, selling and marketing expenses increased by 20% year-on-year to just over $201 million, reflecting a deliberate step-up in customer acquisition investment, which directly supported the 17% growth in new customers during the period. Administrative and general expenses increased by 20% year-on-year to just over $76 million, reflecting the growing scale of our international expansion and the related impact of the FX headwinds during the period. Slide 30 shows our cost base in more detail, and it reflects a business that is both disciplined and structurally flexible. Approximately 70% of costs are variable in nature, a key part of our financial strength and a significant source of resilience through different market cycles. The structural flexibility enables us to scale investment in attractive opportunities while continuing to deliver strong level of operational profitability. Advertising, technology and marketing investment increased by 16% year-on-year to $80.9 million, driven by our increased customer acquisition investment via multichannel marketing technology. Payment processing costs also increased by 10%, reflecting the higher customer deposit volumes and our continued success in attracting and retaining a larger base of active higher-value customers. Commission and fees increased by 34% year-on-year, reflecting the continued scaling of our U.S. futures business, where the cost base scales directly with trading volumes, growing customer numbers and revenue. We view this dynamic very positively, and we expect it to persist as we continue to scale our non-OTC operations. Slide 31 shows the group's balance sheet. Our strong financial position underpins all of our activities, giving us the optionality to invest both organically and inorganically and to enhance our shareholder returns where appropriate. The group ended the period with cash balances of approximately $860 million with no debt or loans, representing an extremely strong and flexible financial position. Slide 32 represents the cash flow statement. Plus500 remains a highly cash-generative business, underpinned by a lean cost base and our proprietary technology. During the period, operating cash conversion was 99%, reflecting the quality and efficiency of our business model. In the first half of 2026, cash generated from operations was approximately at the level of $185 million and cash and cash equivalents at the end of the period stood at approximately $860 million. Turning to Slide 33. We set out our disciplined approach to capital allocation across the group, an approach that has underpinned our exceptional track record of value creation since the company's IPO 30 years ago. Our objective is to maintain the right balance between maximizing shareholder returns, investing strategically to support future growth, pursuing highly selective bolt-on acquisitions and continuing to build a sustainable business for the long term. As shown on the slide, our capital position can be broadly divided into 2 categories. The first, representing approximately $550 million comprises 4 pillars: regulatory capital, working capital, clearing funds and risk management balances. These pillars are essential to supporting the ongoing operations of the group, including our growing clearing and execution activities across our B2B, B2C and B2B2C channels. The second category is surplus capital, which stood at approximately $310 million as of 30th of June 2026. This provides the group with significant flexibility to invest in future growth opportunities while continuing to deliver enhanced returns to shareholders. I will now cover those shareholder returns in more detail on Slide 34. Our shareholder returns policy stated 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 to 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. The Board will also consider executing special share buybacks or dividends on a half yearly basis, dependent on fiscal year results as well as on investment and growth opportunities. Accordingly, today, we're really pleased to announce on additional shareholder returns of $182.5 million. This takes the total returns announced during 2026 to $370 million, comprising $200 million in new share buyback programs and $170 million of total dividends, which equals a dividend distribution of more than $2.40 per share. This is consistent with our proven capital allocation framework and reflects the record financial performance, robust balance sheet and highly cash-generative business model that underpins everything we do and this is all part of a truly exceptional long-term evolution. Since our IPO in 2013, Plus500 has delivered a total shareholder return of approximately 12,000%, making us the best performing share in the FTSE All-Share Index over that period. This is a remarkable achievement, one we're extremely proud of, and we remain absolutely committed to extending this over the years. Thank you all, and I will now hand back to David for his final remarks, and I look forward to taking your questions at the end.

Thank you, Elad. Let's now move to the summary and outlook section, starting on Slide 36. As we have shown today, the first half of 2026 was another strong period for Plus500 with accelerating strategic, operational and financial progress across the business. We have carried this momentum straight into the second half of the year, and our confidence in Plus500 Futures growth prospects remains exceptionally strong. Looking further ahead, we remain confident in our ability to build on our track record and deliver real long-term value for our shareholders. As shown on this slide, our growth is driven by 5 compounding engines. First, geographic expansion. We will continue to target new markets to boost our already excellent portfolio of 17 global regulatory licenses with areas of focus, including Latin America and Asia. Second, customer quality and retention, where our efforts have delivered real and significant benefits across the group, and we will continue to drive this initiative forward. Third, our U.S. Futures business, where continued product enhancement built on a highly successful infrastructure, and we have begun the integration of Mehta in India. Fourth, prediction markets, where we launched our next-generation offering of CFTC regulated sports contracts during this period extending our early mover advantage in this fast-growing, dynamic and transformative new asset class. Finally, and underpinning all of what I've just mentioned, our proprietary technology and trading platforms, which are not simply operational enablers, they are the engine of our customer economics, continuously improving acquisition efficiency, retention rates and lifetime value. Together, these 5 drivers gives us a clear, compelling and well-funded path to sustainable growth. Value creation from our unique position in the futures and prediction markets business has already begun, and we expect growth to compound over the medium to long term. Building on those growth engines, Slide 37 shows why the opportunities ahead remains so compelling and why we are so excited about the future for Plus500. Plus500 has a clear and durable technology edge in large growing markets. The retail trading opportunity is substantial with meaningful sustained growth expected across exchange-traded futures, prediction markets and OTC trading over the coming years. We hold strong differentiated position across all 3, a global leader in OTC, a fast-scaling futures business and an early mover in prediction markets. Our technology, experience and infrastructure put us in a strong position to capture this growth as these markets continue to expand and we intend to capture it strategically. Bringing everything together, shown here on Slide 38 is our compelling investment case and it has never been stronger. In recent years, Plus500 has evolved significantly, materially diversifying its operations to become a leading global multi-asset fintech group. Today, we provide trading platforms and critical market infrastructure, all supported by our leading proprietary technology and unique system architecture, a combination that is difficult to replicate and that compounds in value as we scale. Over our 13 years as a public company, Plus500 has delivered an exceptional track record of growth, innovation and attractive shareholder returns. Importantly, as we have grown and diversified, we have maintained a highly cash-generative business model, and we continue to invest in our group-wide capabilities. Our financial position remains extremely strong with significant levels of cash and no debt. This financial strength gives us the flexibility to pursue growth opportunities, both organically and inorganically, while continuing to deliver attractive returns to shareholders. And with our strong strategic position in growing end markets, we remain extremely well placed to capitalize on opportunities as they emerge with confidence, speed and with the technology to execute at scale. And to conclude, Slide 39. Looking ahead, the opportunity for Plus500 and the growth runway has never been more significant. In 2026, we are accelerating strategic progress across the group, including B2C prediction market expansion and additional B2B partnerships. The second half of 2026 has started well, supported by positive momentum across global financial markets and continued progress on our strategic priorities. As such, we are confident in delivering full year results in line with current market expectations, which have been upgraded several times during 2026. Over the medium term, we will continue to expand our non-OTC operations, pursue strategic growth through targeted investments and bolt-on acquisitions and continue to expand into new OTC markets and deepen customer relationships. And over the long term, we have the solid financial and technological foundations in place to keep delivering expansion, innovation and attractive shareholder returns. We look to the future with confidence and absolutely focused on executing with precision against our strategic priorities to deliver growth and value creation for all our stakeholders. Thank you all for listening, and that marks the end of our presentation. We will now move on to take your questions. Thank you.

[Operator Instructions] Your first question comes from the line of Barun Singh from Panmure Liberum.

First of all, congratulations on a great set of results. A couple of questions from me. You announced the Nelogica partnership today alongside the results. Could you talk more about what Brazil adds to non-OTC footprint and how you think about the pipeline of similar partnerships from here? Secondly, 20% of OTC revenue now comes from the customers acquired last year, alongside half from clients of more than 5 years. What is driving the faster monetization of your cohorts? And third, your U.S. approach has been to monetize infrastructure through partners rather than acquire a customer franchise. How do you think about strategic advantage of capital-light model versus buying distribution?

So as for kind of the first question for Nelogica, you could have seen the great momentum we've had over the last few months and more specifically even last week and today is with the announcement on Wealthsimple and Nelogica. The beauty of Plus within the prediction market and other kind of segments as well is also to act as a clearing party to those great institutional bodies. We're not just the one to provide B2C services with our technology as the best that knows also how to market itself very strongly and provide a great user experience. But also we established our B2B operation together with the new segment and line of sub-business of the B2B2C. And together, we're bringing the clearing services, the order routing, and we are also facilitating their needs locally from a technology standpoint of view and back-end level. Now when we're looking at Nelogica and other kind of factors in Brazil, we're having the benefit to service them and other kind of sub institutional bodies down there. And as you've seen, we'll continue the expansion elsewhere in the world. As for the second question -- yes, go for it.

Yes, go for it. It's okay. Go for it.

As for kind of the -- just the second question of the 20% and the 50% all together, we can see the continuous evolution that David will follow also with the explanation on the technology. And we'll just add that this is kind of a reflection of the strength of the business behind the scene, the fact that on a calendar year, we do not start a year empty of revenues, profits and a clientele, but rather with the stickiness and the journey of the service that we provide to those customers alongside the monetization, the increased monetization that took place this year, and David will be able also to explain a bit about the monetization technologies that took place.

Yes. So obviously, as Elad mentioned, we focused a lot over the last 2 years, and we see the results of a lot of optimization of the marketing of the retention and also higher focus on the premium accounts, premium customers. We added -- we invested a lot in our trading proposition. We've added options, weekly options. We have added 24/5 trading. And all of this together leads to the great results.

Yes. And the third question as well, both the U.S. approach has been monetizing infrastructure rather than acquiring. So how is that capital-light model better you can put some comments on that would be great.

Yes. So first of all, it's both. Over -- the plan is basically to expand going live with the super app, one-stop shop trading up, and this is what we are working at. So we started organically. We built and we added the prediction markets, and we are working and looking always for bolt-on acquisitions also to support us with that to be able to add the required licenses and other layers that are needed in order to be able to go live with the super app. I hope it answers the question.

Your next question comes from the line of Bharath Nagaraj from Cantor Fitzgerald.

Just a few questions from me. How should we think about the capital intensity of the non-OTC business in terms of clearing memberships, et cetera, versus maybe a lower capital requirement for the OTC model? Does this non-OTC change -- does the scaling of the non-OTC business imply that the excess capital generation to fund the buybacks, et cetera, will change in the future or not really? That's the first question. I'll go one by one, if that's all right.

Of course. As for kind of the capital optimization or the capital necessities for the non-OTC line of business, very much that line of business is one that may require additional capital. But yet again, that's the beauty also of having the ability to navigate within the clientele and also to onboard applicable clients with the service to them according also to the offering, which they kind of provide to their end customers, i.e., we are in a position also to have clients, for instance, that are institutional bodies that are offering to their clients as IBs short trading on corn while also having the natural hedge for those that are offering or their clients are trading on long trading on corn and if it's cattle or if it's other kind of agricultural commodities and other indices as well as kind of crypto as well as kind of other prediction market as well as kind of hedge funds that are actually coming and having their clearing services through Plus500 on the prediction market product. So all together, it's not just a question of the capital on an absolute level, but rather as well the composition behind the scene of your clientele. And we are very proud not just to offer our services, but also to have that level of natural hedging that takes place behind the scene that enables Plus to scale its business on the ongoing basis. We can also see, by the way, that movement and that kind of flow within the OTC business that as time goes by, is very much natural hedged on the ongoing basis on the longer term. And you could see that being reflected through the CTP that is very de minimis as time goes by.

Okay. No, makes sense. Just a question on the outlook. I know the second half outlook implies a significant ramp in the margin profile on the operating margin side. How do you expect that -- what do you expect that to be driven by? And also, given that the second half started strongly, can you quantify the July or early August trading versus the Q2 kind of run rate given that the VIX has kind of fallen to the 15 -- the range of 14 to 15 at the moment?

Yes. So we are -- obviously, as mentioned today, we're in line with the market consensus, and I cannot add in addition to that. And please repeat again the second part of the question.

I was more interested in the ramp-up in the margins in the second half. What is that to be driven by in your internal expectations? What is that to be driven by?

So obviously...

Yes, go for it, David. Sorry.

Yes. So obviously, we just initiated, as stated, the prediction market on H1. We entered the sports. So obviously, this should contribute. We have all the new markets that we entered recently that we went live on. We have the new trading opportunities that we introduced over the last 2 months of the 24/5 trading, the options. So all of that basically should contribute to the growth in H2 and going forward. And later on, next year, we will also add to that equation also the Super app that I mentioned earlier.

I'll also add that, obviously, kind of if you're looking at specifically and more specifically at the second half and its kind of evolution and the market expectation as a whole, you could see that actually we're on track to meet that level also at the year-end with the market expectation. If you take the second quarter as even a run rate and even if it will be higher as a given, but also within its current run rate, we're very much established to deliver the market expectation. So as mentioned this morning, we, as management and Board, we're very confident about delivering it.

Sure. If I may just sneak in one more, please, on the prediction markets. Is there any color you can provide on the unit economics of trade in the prediction markets versus like a CFT trade, for example?

So obviously, kind of the unique economic is very different from the perspective that it's a cleared product as well and the commission to be charged. There is a commission that we're gaining and there is kind of a differentiation between B2C to B2B. From the B2B, there are 4 different components for the revenues to be generated. The first one is a SaaS service that we may get from the applicable parties that we cater. Then there is the clearing fee all together that we charge, the order routing that may be applicable for the one that would like to use our execution service. And the fourth one is, of course, the interest that may be applicable on an omnibus level. the service or the fee associated with the B2C is, of course, to come altogether from the commission. And that's in contrast or in parallel to the OTC, which there the charges are, of course, the spreads and the overnight charges that comes all together.

Your next question comes from the line of Alexander Bowers from KBW.

One question on the non-OTC business, if I may. Is there any color you can provide in terms of the kind of profit margin or the PBT margin of that business as it stands today? And any kind of color you can provide on what you expect that to look like kind of in the medium term, like any sort of profit margin expansion in that business going forward?

So as we are having, of course, the line of business of the non-OTC with its expectation to have a margin, which is at the level of approximately the market practice is 10%. We truly believe we're more towards the 20% and above on the ongoing basis. And we didn't split it more specifically just into the prediction market, but the beauty here is to have not just the B2C, but also the B2B and by that, by acting as the clearing party, also having the ability to increase the level of profitability.

Your next question comes from the line of James Allen from Berenberg.

I could ask 2 questions, if I can. First one, obviously, non-OTC is still growing really well, 30% year-on-year growth in revenues. And presumably, that includes the new Mehta Equities acquisition. So I was just wondering what that growth was when you exclude the Mehta Equities contribution in the first half? And then the second question, you've obviously plugged some geographic gaps with the new licenses in both Colombia and Canada. You've now got pretty good global coverage from a licensing point of view. But are there any other geographies where you'd like to add another license?

Yes. So with regards to Mehta, so Mehta is still in the early stages. Obviously, we bought the company in India with licensing with the team, with the proposition with a running operation, and we are now in the phase of optimizing it. And we are yet to include this in our near-term plans or numbers, which is also a positive thing because it has a lot of potential for the later stage. Regarding the other geographies, so as mentioned, we put a lot of focus recently on LatAm, Latin America, both with the prediction, but also with other products that we are having or working at. And we see lots of potential with Latin America. It is a market that basically it's quite untapped for us. We didn't utilize the potential that we have over during the years. And it's time for us also to add more resources there, marketing capabilities and operational ones in order to increase our market share there.

There are no further questions. That concludes today's call. Have a nice day.