Leading the Transformation: Strategy for Sustained Growth

The core elements are:

• Continued 2025 momentum and firm commitment to 2026 targets as strong starting point to deliver long term structural topline growth and scale benefits
• Sustained profitable growth through 2028 and beyond, fueled by further developing leadership positions across our businesses based on secular trends and scaling of the businesses, as well as clear focus on driving transformation themes
• Evolution of our ‘OneGroup’ operating model to further increase efficiency
• Refined capital allocation principles with strong investment capacity and attractive shareholder returns, including regular annual share buybacks

Based on our long and successful track record, making us the leading European market infrastructure provider, we will continue our strong growth journey across our business portfolio until 2028 and beyond.

Secular growth trends fueling client benefits from our integrated infrastructure offering and the scaling of our business through technology leadership are the core elements of our growth path. Furthermore, we are positioning ourselves on key themes such as the transformation of the European capital markets as well as the rapid expansion of digital and alternative assets. This will further drive our long-term growth well beyond the current planning cycle of 2028.

Overall, we expect a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) in net revenue without treasury result of 8 per cent to €6.5 billion by 2028. Combined with only 3 per cent CAGR operating cost growth supported by the evolution of our operating model ‘OneGroup’, which focusses on scalability and qualitative improvements, this leads to significant scale benefits. We therefore expect an average annual increase in our EBITDA without treasury result of 12 per cent by 2028.

Our refined capital allocation principles that combine strong investment capacity and attractive shareholder returns round off our strategy. Organic growth driven by secular trends continues to have the highest capital allocation priority for us, while we expect M&A to continue if strategically and financially attractive to complement organic growth. Our dividend payout ratio is targeted at 30-40 per cent with a continuously increasing dividend per share. As a refinement to our principles, we now intend to complement our dividend with regular annual share buybacks, with volumes subject to the expected excess liquidity. In this context, our Executive Board has resolved to implement a share buyback program of €500 million in 2026.

Key financials: