Good afternoon, everybody. Thank you for joining us. I'm Graham Ryding. I cover Canadian diversified financials for TD Cowen. With me today is David Arnold, CFO of TMX. He's been the CFO since 2021. Previous to that, he was a 20-year executive at CIBC. So, David, thank you for joining us today. Appreciate it. It's my pleasure, Graham. Good to see you. David, maybe we could just start with, I'll ask you, maybe just give us a brief description of TMX today, maybe describe the business mix across all the areas and capital markets that you touch, and maybe also some of the financial targets that you strive to manage the business towards. No, not a problem. My pleasure, Graham. So, as many of you know, that actually study our company. For those of you that might be new to it, we have quite a diversified business model. We have a Global Solutions, Insights and Analytics segment. It's the largest segment of our business, which accounts for roughly 44% as of Q1 of 2024. Sitting inside that business are effectively our Trayport business operating out of London, U.K., our Datalinx business, which over half of it really comes out of revenues from the U.S. And most recently, the acquisition of TMX VettaFi, which is our index and benchmark solution, also based out of the U.S., out of New York City. The balance of the business really consists of our derivatives trading and clearing business. It's roughly about 20% of the revenue. Our traditional capital formation, our listings business for TSX Venture and Trust, that business accounts for roughly 18%. Our equities and fixed income trading and clearing business, roughly 18%. So that kind of gives you the landscape of our revenue mix across the four segments. Now, to your point about kind of the financial targets, Graham, I mean, over the long term, we're targeting high single to double digit growth for four businesses. The first being our TSX Trust business. The second is our derivatives trading and clearing business. And then last but not least, our TMX Trayport and TMX VettaFi businesses, which, as I touched on earlier, are in our Global Solutions, Insights and Analytics segment. We then have a couple of businesses we classify as our strong growth businesses, and that's our listings business, so both the Toronto Stock Exchange and the Venture Exchange, as well as TMX Datalinx, which is our traditional data business. And we define strong as five-plus percentage growth. TMX Datalinx has really outperformed that in the last fiscal year with double-digit growth. And then overall, we're targeting revenue growth around five-plus percent, which is that strong definition. The CAGR, since our last investor day, has been closer to 7%. And then on an EPS side, we're looking for double-digit adjusted EPS growth. And then last but not least, Graham, and these you're quite familiar with, but some of our participants might not, is about a year and a bit ago, we set out some long-term transformational objectives. The first objective was really about recurring revenue. That was for us to get our recurring revenue at TMX to be at least two-thirds of our revenue base. At the end of Q1, we're at 55%. We've made incredible strides. We started with that number in and around 50% back in 2018. Really, really strong progress. We also aspire for our Global Solutions, Insights and Analytics segments. Remember, that's TMX Trayport, TMX VettaFi, and TMX Datalinx to account for over half of our revenue. At the end of Q1, we're at 44%. Also making very strong progress there. Then last but not least is for the revenue outside of Canada to be more than 50%. At the end of Q1, we actually, for the first time on one of these transformational measures, actually met the low end of the threshold where we ended Q1 at 50%. So hopefully, Graham, that gives enough people a good feel for kind of the business and the various different segments. No, that was perfect. It's a good segue into my next question. Before I go there, I forgot to remind people that are in attendance today that if there is a question box at the bottom of your screen, so if you do have a question that you'd like to throw into our conversation, feel free to put that into the message box. Your VettaFi acquisition, it was very much in line with your stated strategy of increasing that recurring revenue. As you said, now 55% of your revenue base is recurring, and that market data GSIA piece is 44%. You're certainly moving closer to your targets. Do you have a timeline in place for when you want to achieve these thresholds, and can you get there organically, or do you likely need to do some more M&A to hit those benchmarks? That's a great question, Graham. I mean, the key thing here is these are long term targets. Really for us, that horizon is 10+ years. The short answer to your question is we can get there organically without M&A. It just takes time. That's really the strong power of the core franchise for us here at TMX and the compounding effect as we go through the years. But herein really lies the crux of our M&A activity. M&A for us isn't a strategy. M&A for us is really about, can it help accelerate our strategy? To the extent there were opportunities, for example, with the case of VettaFi, we had identified that we wanted to get into the index and benchmark space. It was a direct response to a lot of our clients' needs for real niche indices and bespoke benchmarks. It was something that was really difficult for us to support without that capability. So with us, we started down a commercial partnership road with VettaFi, and it really helped us kind of get a little bit of traction in that space. Now that we actually own the TMX VettaFi business, it's really going to help accelerate that strategy. So that's the key is we will get there naturally. M&A will just hopefully help accelerate the strategy. Okay, understood. On the VettaFi growth side, so I believe you said you're expecting a high single digit or low double digit sort of organic growth CAGR from this business. How should we think about what's baked in there in terms of what you would consider growth coming from just U.S. momentum with VettaFi that's within the business already versus growth you think you could achieve from cross-selling VettaFi into this Canadian relationship and client base that you have today? Yeah, another really good question, Graham. So I mean, TMX VettaFi has grown on average 16% a year prior to our acquisition. So that's the first kind of data point. And so while it's classified in our high growth segment, which is really the part that is high single to double digits, it's really got a demonstrated track record of double-digit revenue growth, much like Trayport. Q1 was obviously very high at 33% on a reported basis, but that's because we had some acquisitions that took place in the latter half of last year. So on a pro forma basis, as John said, when we did our Q&A session on the Q1 analyst call, it was around 17%. So once again, well within the kind of range that we're targeting. So I'm pretty confident that TMX VettaFi can grow high single to double digits without any cross-selling. Cross-selling for me is a further opportunity for growth and an acceleration of growth. What I really mean by that is TMX VettaFi has a large number of international clients, and I think they stand to benefit from access to the TMX content. Then more importantly, TMX VettaFi also generates a lot of indexing and ETF data that I think can benefit TMX Datalinx clients. That will just further help accelerate the growth of the TMX VettaFi franchise now that we're the owners. Okay, great. Staying within the GSIA bucket, maybe we could talk about Trayport. So you acquired this business in 2017, still putting up very strong growth numbers. In Q1 this year, I think it was trader subscribers were up 26% year-over-year and 17% quarter-over-quarter. So very strong growth. Given it's got a recurring revenue nature, does this suggest that this strong start to the year sets you up well to achieve your sort of double digit revenue growth for Trayport again this year? Well, the short answer, Graham, is yes, it does. An emphatic yes. If you unpack the growth in Q1, it included some existing clients expanding both usage, including a couple of large European energy utilities, and a couple of new clients signing on, including 11 new trading firms. So that was a really, really good quarter. But what's also happening in Q1, which is a normal course phenomenon, is typically in Q1, we have our annual licensing renewal rate increase, which is really our cost of living adjustment that's baked into all of our contracts. That occurs on January 1st across the portfolio. That's based off the Bank of England's Consumer Price Index. What was really, really interesting this quarter is, and it happens pretty much in every quarter, is we have a lot of our site license clients that have a three-year agreement, as an example. This quarter in particular, we had a number of three-year site license agreements that were up for renewal. Each one of those renewed at a much higher rate. They'd either decided that they'd expanded their trader seat base, and they needed more trader or read-write licenses. Some actually went further into the product stack, moving into charting and analytics, which is one of our premium products. Also, some of them moved into algorithmic trading. As we touched on earlier, it is one of our high growth businesses, which is high single- to double-digit. I mean, it's expected to hit those numbers. As you know, the last five years, we've kind of grown at an average of 12% a year. This year, once again, looks to be in that kind of low-teens range as well. Okay. Those factors that you're mentioning there, David, those are baked into Q1 reported Trayport revenue, correct? Correct. Maybe just looking at energy trading volume in Europe that's coming through your Trayport platform over the last six months has notably picked up. Is that, first of all, what's driving the uptick there? And is that a factor that's leading to new client, new trading clients coming in or increased sort of seats within your existing client base? So let's talk trading volume first. I think it's been influenced by a couple of factors. The first is spike in volatility off the back of the shift from Russian gas. That's got a little bit to do with the Russia-Ukraine conflict. Also then the shift to liquefied natural gas that's being shipped, or LNG. So that has really created some volatility and really driven some higher volume. Then there's also price volatility. It's resulted in higher local participation in many of the markets in which the products are traded. It's also attracted some more international interest, especially from some financial sector firms that are actually viewing it as an opportunity to actually trade speculatively in that space. Now, in Q1 specifically, the growth was driven by increased subscribers. It was really across the board. But in particular, as I said just a minute ago, those read-write licenses, or as we'd refer to them as the trader subscriber license, or those with the site licenses that are the multi-years and how they're renewed in various different quarters when they fall due. And we had a couple, as we said in Q1, that renewed at a really good upsell rate. And then I think I touched on it when we did our Q1 MD&A and analyst call. We had 11 new clients who were onboarded in Trayport in Q1, 9 clients onto the core kind of what we'd call the dual platform, and 2 were also Tradesignal only clients. Okay. Maybe we could switch to the derivatives part of your business. So there was a transition away from CDOR to the CORRA benchmark in the fixed income markets here in Canada. So you've got a CORRA futures product that is designed to replace the BAX futures product. So how is that going? Can you give us an update on that transition? So it's progressing really well. The three-month CORRA future, or CRA product, not to be confused with Canada Revenue Agency, but the acronym for that product is the CRA product. It's been reaching average daily volumes around 93,000 in Q1. And open interest for the CRA reached approximately 730,000 contracts at the end of Q1 of 2024. So really a lot of momentum and really going well. The additional thing is the transition from the Canadian Dollar Offered Rate, which is CDOR, to the Canadian Overnight Repo Rate Averag e, which is CORRA. That remains key. And the full cessation of the CDOR rate is scheduled for later this month. So we're continuing our efforts to ensure a smooth transition from the three-month Canadian Bankers' Acceptance futures, or BAX, as you refer to it, Graham, to the CORRA futures contract. The way we're doing that is by making sure we have the proper products in place, but as well the appropriate market-making arrangements in place to ensure that there's lots of liquidity through this transition. Okay. Let's maybe stick with the theme of interest rates, but a little bit more broad, perhaps. There's several areas of your business that I think are impacted by the level of interest rates, either directly through the interest expense or the interest income that you would earn, but also indirectly just in terms of market activity. So maybe can you help us take a step back and sort of flesh out how you think about the different areas of the benefits and the offsets if we are going to move into a period here of sort of sustained interest rate declines over the next sort of 12-18 months, perhaps? Yeah. So it's very interesting. I mean, as rates moved up and as rates have moved down and then up again, given the diversified business model, you touched on it, Graham, and you said it well, we have some places where we benefit and some places where we don't benefit. So I'll start with the immediate place where we typically wouldn't benefit as rates would go down. That would be our TSX Trust business and really to a lesser extent, CDS. As you know, given various corporate actions and arrangements with our clients, we might be sitting on very short overnight money. And obviously, with the decline in rates, there'll be a slight decline in net interest income on a rate basis. Obviously, offsetting that could be a balance rate increase. So all things being equal, if balances were held constant with absolute rate declines, you would naturally see a little bit more of a negative drag on TSX Trust and, as I said, to a lesser extent, CDS. On the flip side, obviously, as a corporate company ourselves with borrowing, we obviously can benefit from the lower interest expense on our commercial paper program because that's a variable rate program for us. And then most notable, and I think this is the big crystal ball, the last 18 months, it's been one of the most challenging capital market raising environments. And it's not just in Canada. I mean, this has been internationally. And I think a reduction in rates is going to bring some much-needed relief to the market. And if that starts to catalyst a bit of a market comeback, I think our listings revenue would indirectly benefit. That obviously could then create additional momentum for our transfer agency revenue in our trust business, which would be naturally linked to listings activity. That might then offset or more than offset any of the decline in rate on our trust balances. What about the derivative side of your business? Does your interest rate futures products, is the activity there impacted at all in your mind when you do see a move down in rates or move up in rates? Or what drives activity on that side of your derivatives business in Canada? That's a really, really good question, Graham. So look, volatility in fixed income markets and monetary policy uncertainty does drive strong volume activity and liquidity in many of our products. The challenge, and we've chatted about it before, Graham, is for us is when it is, and we sometimes use the phrase destructive volatility, when things are adequately well signaled, there aren't many surprises in the market, and there is volatility. There's a lot of speculation that occurs, and it's healthy. Where there are moves by central banks that are way outside the norm of expectation, that sometimes has a negative consequence. But I think with what Bank of Canada has recently signaled, it's sending a strong signal to the marketplace in Canada as to their intended path for various different rate reductions over the next 12-24 months. I think this is going to bode well for fixed income markets and volatility on the markets. Okay. Maybe we could jump to your U.S. equities trading initiative underway. I think you're building it out this year. Can you just talk about the strategy there? It sounds like you're building off maybe something that you've already built for Alpha here in Canada, but maybe you could sort of dig into that initiative a bit for us. No, you're right, Graham. I mean, you know us well. So we recently innovated and launched Alpha X in Canada, and it was very well received. And based on a lot of client conversations, the indication has been we trade in the U.S. too. We would love a lot of the capabilities of Alpha X to be made available in the U.S. region. And we would welcome that. So at this time, I mean, the focus for us is launching the ATS platform to really allow the flexibility and market structure to achieve the desired outcomes. But we still don't have regulatory approval yet from the SEC. We're well down the path. We've received a couple of gating steps. But the key is the strategy here. And for me, it's the U.S. is an adjacent geography. It's a very similar client base, similar market structure. We have experience. We have the ability, and we can leverage our existing relationships. So there's no reason why we can't participate in the U.S. And this makes logical sense for us as our next foray. Client engagement has been really, really good when we assess the demand. And the early due diligence phases was very, very positive. But we are very, very focused on execution right now, which is building the technology, listening to our clients, making sure that the technology meets their needs, but then staying squarely focused on making sure we can receive regulatory approval. And I mean, given it's the U.S. is the largest marketplace for equities, it just makes logical sense that it would be our first foray. It's something that we've spoken about as well, is that we are using this as an opportunity to actually develop next best next or best in class next generation matching engine technology because that will serve us well, not just in the U.S. for this initiative, but also for our ability to continue to innovate in Canada in the marketplaces we operate. Okay. It's an order-like execution quality product that you're rolling out here? Absolutely. Okay. Speaking of the U.S. market then, capital formation, it does feel like there's a bit of a shift globally towards volumes and valuations in the U.S. public equity markets seem to be maybe taking some market share or at least premium multiples here. We've heard some multinational companies even talk about considering listing in the U.S. to access that greater liquidity. So my question to you is, are you hearing the same narrative from corporations here in Canada, perhaps in maybe specific verticals and thinking technology or healthcare? But are you hearing a similar narrative, and how are you responding to that? Yeah, that's a really, really good question. It takes a little bit to unpack it. Let me start off with kind of what we're hearing and what the move is towards the U.S. It's more actually a move to North America versus continue at TMX to rank in the top 3 for new listings on TSX and venture for total number of issues amongst global exchanges. We're winning our own fair share as the migration to North America is occurring. But I periodically hear that narrative, Graham. And what I can say is it's very rare that we actually see a Canadian company completely bypassing the Canadian market. I mean, I can only count on a few hands, what we would refer to as bypassers in the last 5 years compared to the 130+ international companies that we have brought to our market. That really is almost like a 6-7 times over. So even if these bypasses are roughly like 15 or 20 even, over the last 5 years, we've brought more companies to the Canadian marketplace than we've actually seen bypass it. Now, I think some of it is because of the strong value proposition of listing in Canada. The first part is if you're an international business and you're not of size and scale, listing in the Canadian market is really smart because it gives you access to the U.S. market because there's strong connectivity between the Canadian and U.S. markets. And a company that's listed on TSX has very deep access to U.S. investors, same time zone, integrated clearing and settlement, et cetera. And then also the Canadian companies that feel that they want to add a U.S. listing, they can dual list. But there's also an apparent cost and time to market advantage because you've got lighter SEC filing requirements if you're in Canada. So those that we do see going to the U.S. kind of maintain a dual listing as opposed to not listing in Canada and then solely listing in the U.S. Okay. Do you feel like you can and you are competing? Is the message. Okay. Great. We are competing and defending the moat at the same time too. Great. Okay. Maybe we could talk about your balance sheet and your free cash flow. I'm just looking at the time. We do have several minutes left. But so you have stated after the VettaFi deal that you want to bring your leverage down below your sort of longer-term target of less than 2.5 times debt to EBITDA. So I think that implies by early 2026, within two years. I'm forecasting that you're going to generate around CAD 400 million in free cash flow this year and next year. Feel free to tell me if I'm wrong on that one. And about half of that is going to your dividends. So how much free cash flow do you feel like the business is generating so that you can redeploy or deploy that towards deleveraging over the next couple of years? I'm going to answer your question, Graham, but I'm kind of not going to answer your question. I'm not going to compare your forecast to my forecast because, as you know, we don't really provide guidance on free cash flow or EBITDA, right? For sure, our free cash flow generation is very strong. We expect to return capital to our shareholders, as you've speculated, through dividends. We intend to stay at the top end of our 40%-50% range, right? You can kind of do a little bit of math based on how you project our earnings. That then bodes really, really well for our deleveraging plan. We're on track and still committed very much on the time frame that you've outlined to get under 2.5x levered. Remember, that's on a gross basis, right? Like when we reported Q1, I think our gross leverage was slightly over 3.5x, but on a net basis, 3.2x. So well on track to deliver the deleveraging plan as we had intended. Okay. And then what about sort of thinking about optionality here? If there was an acquisition opportunity that surfaced, would you be open to pushing out that deleveraging timeline? Would you be open to issuing equity? How committed are you to deleveraging versus potential M&A opportunities? That's another really good question. So let me go back to what we chatted about right near the beginning, Graham. So M&A for us is really, it's about accelerating our strategy. And so we have a number of strategic vectors that we're committed to. To the extent there was an opportunity to acquire a business that would help accelerate that strategy, we're open to it. We've said many, many times that we have no problem with our leverage going as high as 4x. So if there is the right asset, it was strategically very compelling, and it helps accelerate our strategy, then there's a lot of comfort looking at leverage going even higher. We would once again have to then reforecast and set out a new deleveraging plan if that were the case. But you did touch onto equity, right? As I said, it's always an opportunity to explore equity issuance. The transaction really needs to make sense to do it, right? Because naturally, with that comes a dilution impact of issuing more common stock. There are the positives too, right? Diversifies our shareholder base, gives access to new geographies potentially that maybe don't own TMX. More importantly, it gives us an opportunity to create a little bit more liquidity in the marketplace too. Okay. Great. We've got a few minutes here. Maybe I could go back to just VettaFi, given I feel like it's topical and investors care about it a lot these days. Can you describe how you're actually going about executing on selling your new sort of VettaFi indexing capabilities into your Canadian relationships? And then on the other side, what is TMX bringing to VettaFi that you can perhaps accelerate what they're doing already in the U.S. market? How are you going about actually executing on that? Yeah, it's a great one. So the current focus for us, honestly, with TMX VettaFi is the strategy that existed prior to us acquiring it, which is really focused on the U.S. market and then the global market, right? And obviously, we have a relationship with S&P, and that covers really Canadian equities and Canadian derivative indices. So that isn't really a primary focus for us with TMX VettaFi because it's a well-served niche with our relationship with S&P. But this is going to help us expand our delivery and scope to achieve what I would refer to as kind of a global growth and outreach program. And we'll do that with digital distribution, both data analytics and indexing. And it's going to provide a little bit more alignment to our key clients and our ETF issuers. So that's really a primary focus. Remembering, we have a lot of ETF issuers listed on our exchange that aren't clients of TMX VettaFi. Our focus is to focus on TMX VettaFi penetrating and really winning some of those clients over. There are some planned synergies, but it's really enabling TMX VettaFi's ETF issuers and asset managers to reach what I would refer to as a broader universe of clients by leveraging TMX Datalinx's clients, right? We have several thousand clients in TMX Datalinx. And I think that that network can actually come to the fore by actually making those introductions for our TMX VettaFi colleagues. And then last but not least, we host an industry-leading conference every year in February. So it's the Exchange conference. What's really unique about that conference is, A, it brings together asset manufacturers, investors, and asset managers, as well as ETF issuers, and really a whole bunch of thought leaders in the ETF space all together in one location for a couple of days. The amount of leads that are generated for not just TMX VettaFi, but all of our participants and constituents at that conference is in the hundreds. So that for us is also part, Graham, of how we're actually going to drive a little bit more acceleration of growth, but even penetrating a little bit of opportunities in terms of synergies integration that we hadn't even contemplated. Excellent. Well, I think that's a good place to finish. We might be 30 seconds ahead of schedule, so people might be happy with us here. But thanks a lot, David, for your time. I appreciate it. Thank you, everybody, for joining us for this conversation. Thanks, Graham. It's a pleasure.