Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the Aquis Exchange PLC final results investor presentation. Throughout this recorded presentation, investors will be in listen-only mode. Questions are encouraged and can be submitted at any time via the Q&A tab that's just situated in the right-hand corner of your screen. Please simply type in your questions at any time and press Send. The company may not be in a position to answer every question it receives during the meeting itself. However, the company will review all questions submitted today and publish responses where it's appropriate to do so. These will be available via your Investor Meet Company dashboard, and we will notify you by email when these are ready for your review. Before we begin, I would like to submit the following poll, and if you'd give that your kind attention, I'm sure the company will be most grateful. I'd now like to hand you over to CEO, Alasdair Haynes, CFO, Jonathan Clelland, and Finance Director, Richard Fisher. Good afternoon. Good afternoon. Thank you very much indeed for joining us. A warm welcome. We're gonna go through today the Aquis Exchange PLC results for the year ended 31st December, 2021. I just wanna start off, for those of you less familiar with the company, just a quick background about what we do. We're one company, a public company, Aquis Exchange PLC. We operate three divisions, the Aquis Exchange, that is the MTF, the Multilateral Trading Facility, which works in 15 different countries for 1,700 stocks, and we trade basically the large caps and the mid caps in those countries. We have the Aquis Stock Exchange business. That's the primary market business for listings, for IPOs, for capital raising, for growth businesses. We have the Aquis Technologies, which is the sort of SaaS model that we have, the technology licensing model to start-ups, other exchanges across multiple asset classes. We have multiple products under those divisions, but each division is a revenue stream, and underneath all of that is a data product and a, which we sell our data. We are three divisions, but four revenue streams. Let's go straight into the results, and I'm delighted about the performance in 2021. We've seen a pre-tax profit up over five times the GBP 3.2 million. We've seen continued growth in the exchange business, the Aquis Exchange business, where we've seen members increase. Most importantly to us, we've actually seen the members going up the tiers. If you remember, we start off with a very basic GBP 2,000 tier because we charge on message traffic. As people use more and more messages per day, that goes right the way up to the GBP 80,000 tier. What is pleasing to see is not only new members joining, but members actually climbing those tiers, which obviously immediately impacts the bottom line of the business as we increase revenues. The Aquis Stock Exchange has continued its transformation. We've introduced a new rule book. We've brought what we think for the market, more proportionality and regulation and appropriateness in trading mechanisms for small cap growth businesses. We think that the U.K. post-Brexit absolutely needs to be competitive in this space, and that's exactly what we're trying to achieve with Aquis Stock Exchange. We've seen good growth in the technologies business and in the data business. We've strengthened our board. Glenn Collinson became our Chairman on the first of January this year, and he has already appointed two new directors to the board. We'll go through that in a minute. It's been an encouraging start for 2022. We all know about the geopolitical and the macroeconomic issues that are tragic in the world today, which is not necessarily the best background for a stock exchange, but we have performed very well so far this year. Okay, so let's look at what are the sort of key elements to our performance. Well, in the Aquis Stock Exchange, we have had 24 IPOs last year. We raised over GBP 100 million for these companies. We saw data grow by 159% by actually harmonizing the data across the Aquis Exchange PLC and the Aquis Stock Exchange. We saw members increase from 33% - 39%. What is really important, in the core business, the original business, we've actually seen message traffic, which is how we actually make our money by the cost, by the amount of messages going through, grow by 24%. Overall, the business, I believe, has been underpinned and people are starting to really believe in this subscription model. Everyone knows that I've been passionate about how subscriptions change human behavior. In what we're doing here is we think we can enhance liquidity, improve markets by introducing and being the only exchange in the world that operates this subscription model. Alongside really cutting-edge technology and innovation. Sorry, forgive me. We strengthened last year also our executive team. David Stevens, who's become the Chief Revenue Officer. We have Richard Fisher here. Richard has done a fantastic job for us. He will be talking through some of the numbers later on, but will also become the Chief Financial Officer post the AGM and join our board. Jonathan, who is the current Chief Financial Officer, has moved to Paris as part of our Brexit strategy. He became the Chief Executive Officer of our Paris operation and remains the Chief Operating Officer. We think we've not only strengthened our board, we've also strengthened significantly our executive team. I want to now pass you over to Jonathan, who's going to talk through the numbers. Thank you, Alasdair. I won't dwell too much on the performances of the individual business lines at this juncture because we will be reviewing those in more detail in due course. Concentrate very much on the overall position. Revenue up. Gross revenue up 50% from GBP 11.5 million- GBP 17.2 million. Net revenue after provisions at GBP 16.2 million, a 42% increase on 2020. We continue to invest in our business. Expenses are up 20% from GBP 9.9 - GBP 11.9, and that is something that I think we have, we've signaled consistently over the last few years. We need to carry on investing in our business, particularly in the growth of technology and sales, and we're starting to see the rewards from that investment, which is underpinning an awful lot of the revenue growth. That translates through to an EBITDA profit of GBP 4.3 million and then a profit before tax of GBP 3.2, which we believe compares extremely favorably with the GBP 0.5 million of last year. In excess of 5 x growth. That comes through to an EPS, a basic EPS of 16p per share in comparison to the previous year of 4p. If we could move on the slide. We've included this slide because we'd just like to take a moment to look back on where this company has come from. We IPO'd in 2018, in June 2018, and at that point in time, revenue of GBP 4 million and we were loss-making, as you can see, GBP 3.4 million losses for 2018. We have continued to grow the business. The revenue has grown significantly over the last few years, and as we already indicated, a net revenue increase from GBP 6 million - GBP 16.2 million for 2021 and a profit after tax of GBP 4.3. If you looked at that growth over the four years, it has quadrupled since we IPO'd, which I think is a significant performance over that period. I'll pass over to Richard, who is going to look at some of the revenue and, I think, in more detail. Hi, good afternoon, everyone. Now, this is a slide that we first introduced last sort of the half-year results six months ago, because we wanted to explore a bit more about the nature of the revenues that we hold. The chart on the left-hand side is just a simple factual representation of the performance of the four divisions. It's the chart on the right-hand side, I think is of real interest as we sort of look into the nature of these revenues. What it seeks to do is to sort of split out what are those revenues that are deemed as recurring. In the financial year of 2021, 74% of the revenues are on a recurring basis. This is one of the beauties of the subscription model that we actually pursue is that this allows us to incrementally allow a layer revenue on revenue as we go forward. We've also added this through this slide now, a bit more subdivision about how we look at our transactional costs. As you'll see, of the 27% that is transactional, we split out 24%. What this represents is this is where we have new contracts with existing customers. That's quite an important distinction because this is almost another aspect of how we see revenues continuing over time. Where we have customers who we have technology license contracts with, where we do well in that relationship, we will see those contracts renew. Hopefully that's a useful insight into some of the revenues. If I then turn to the next slide, we also wanted to explore a bit more about our cash generation within the firm. Over the year, we've generated net cash of GBP 1.8 million, ending the year at GBP 14 million cash balance. What it's enabled us to do is a strong operating cash flow has enabled us to perform the financing activities that we needed to do through the year. We've issued shares, we've bought back treasury shares. We've also taken a new lease. For me, the key part of this is around investing activities. The strong cash we generate through our operating activities enables us to invest further in the growth of the business. Within the year, over GBP 350,000 has been sort of spent on internal development costs and a further GBP 320,000 with regard to our external technology and development. It's that ability to invest in our own future to generate future revenue growth is, I think, what helps to really drive this business forward. If I now pass over to Alasdair, who's gonna look at the divisional reviews. What I'd like to do now is just go through the four different revenue streams that we have to give you sort of a more deeper dive into them. What I'm pleased about on the exchange business is we've grown revenue by 26% to GBP 9.8 million. We've got these nine members in the top tiers. Remember, the top tiers are GBP 80,000, GBP 50,000, and GBP 30,000. We have 25 members in the bottom tiers and five market makers. The recognized market makers don't actually pay us a fee. They just supply us with liquidity. I think what is important here is you look at what the growth opportunities are. You take four of the banks that are currently today in tier three and, you know, there could be well, many more than that. Say, just say, for example, four, and we managed to move them by evidencing with data the quality of the product we have by going in and showing the analytics about the difference between our market and other markets because of the proprietary trading rule that bans the high frequency traders from crossing the spread or the subscription model and the benefits of that. You move those clients, just four of them, to the top tier. That gives you GBP 50,000 each a month more. That's GBP 200,000, it's GBP 2.4 million additional profit straight to the bottom line. That's 100% margin. What you can see by that example is the scalability and the opportunity of us being able to grow and gain substantial revenues over the coming years. Today, we operate 17... We offer 1,700 stocks in 15 different markets. As of next week, we will increase that by a further 300 stocks. We're adding all the Czech stocks and some additional stocks. We're doing this because many of you will have seen, and we'll cover this in a second, is our acquisition of the business assets of UBS MTF. We're getting into the dark trading space, whereas having always run a lit market, and I will explain why we're doing that and why the benefits of that to our shareholders and to our customers. The Brexit transition, I think we can take this off the table now. With our office in Paris going successfully, with the business now being able to offer all products to all clients, regardless of which jurisdiction they're in, means that I think we have had a very, very successful Brexit and been able to capitalize on that. I think when you look at what do we wanna do, what are the growth drivers? Well, we need to leverage the primary market and the secondary market by the growth of both and looking at the synergies that we can, the market makers on both markets, how we can actually get them to operate in each other's markets. We need to look at more order types, and we're working on that. Most importantly, we've hired quantitative analysis into the sales force. We now have quants working in the sales team, and they are there primarily to drive and evidence the type of liquidity we have to convince and show other members or new members the benefits of using Aquis. I think this is an incredibly important slide because while we talk about what we've done, we've seen some growth in members, we've seen growth in market share, but the last six months, we've actually seen a decline in market share. Now, I think this is really important to understand, and we've done the analysis, which looks at the three reasons we think and believe that the market share has declined and why we believe that trend will not continue and it will reverse. The first is, have a look at the chart on the top right-hand side of this slide. You will look at the orange line. That represents... That is the VIX index. That is, in effect, the volatility index recognized by the market. What you can see mapped against that is our market share. This chart clearly shows almost like a mirror image. Frankly, we shouldn't be surprised by that. I wasn't surprised because what you can see is as VIX, the volatility falls. At the beginning of last year, our market share rose. As volatility remains stagnant and stable, our market share is remaining stable. As volatility picks up as it did towards the end of last year with lockdowns, et cetera, and has continued this year even further because of Russia's invasion of Ukraine, we've seen market share decline. It's a mirror image, and I think we should be well aware that that is not a surprise because if markets get volatile, proprietary traders trade more. If prop traders trade more, volumes go up, but our market share will decline. I think it's really important to show people that volume and market share are not directly the same thing. While we've led people in the past to look at market share, and it's a good metric under normal circumstances, when things are volatile, it's less good. The reason I can say that is, one, we've looked and increased our liquidity. We have continued to build on our profits and our profitability and the revenues in this area. What I can say is that looking at since the invasion of Ukraine, we've seen volatility spike to a highest level for many, many years. Yet, we've actually in the last month had six of our top 10 trading days by value. By value, you can assume that those message traffic numbers will be higher, and that shows that there is not always a direct correlation between market share and actually the actual volumes that we're trading. The first point here about declining market share is it's caused by volatility. Do we believe volatility will remain consistent over a long period of time? No, 'cause history has shown that it doesn't, and gradually, we will find some form of way, and that will mean that our market share will just naturally increase. The second thing was a move towards dark trading. What we have seen again is over the last few months, an increase as the U.K. regulators liberalize regulation post-Brexit to take away what's called the double volume caps for things like dark trading. Those are the non-displayed venues, in other words, dark pools like UBS MTF. Now, what we've seen is a decline there, and our response has been to acquire this business. Because if we do see further movement there, we're hedging ourselves in an accretive way, and I'll cover that in a couple of slides' time. The third thing is we have seen, and this might sound bad news to start with, the recalibration of a particular market maker who was trading in our marketplace. In other words, we saw their volumes decrease quite substantially. Now, they won't say exactly the reasons, but the most logical reason is that they found that the models they were using were not necessarily as profitable as they had been on our marketplace. We were obviously very concerned for a period of time. The next few days, we were calling all the market makers and making quite certain that the same experience was not happening with them. I can absolutely assure every investor that that isn't the case. In fact, quite the reverse. We've seen people, market makers pick up the slack. This other market maker has not completely left, but their volumes are significantly lower. The good news is that we're seeing new customers come on board as market makers. We're testing with new people now. We have some pretty, you know, substantial market makers looking to join. By the end of this year, the three things of volatility, dark pool, and actually the recognition of getting newer people with the quantitative evidence behind it, we're very convinced that we will see another trend in market share change quite dramatically, and the market share will be substantially higher than it is today. The proof of that also is a slide that some of you will see before, which actually this represents the total liquidity on us versus every other MTF in Europe. What you can see by that, the blue line at the top, across all the indices, across every trade that's taken place or every liquidity provision that takes place across Europe, this is the bids and offers at the very best prices. What you can see is Aquis is by far the largest liquidity provider of any market, largest of the MTFs, and behind Euronext is the largest provider of any exchange in Europe. That is really, really important. Why? Because if anybody was concerned by a market maker removing liquidity, you would expect to see that substantially lower. Secondly, the hardest part of building an exchange is getting liquidity provision. Once you have that liquidity provision, it is about evidencing and getting people to take that liquidity. We remain as confident as we ever have been, that over a period of time, we will bring our market share above the 10% that we originally said we could do when we IPO'd the business. Let's talk about the UBS deal. What is this? This MTF is now gonna be called the Aquis Matching Pool. What is so good about this deal is it completes the toolbox of all the tools that we need for traders. The mistake I made a number of years ago was to emphasize just the lit book. What I found is that when markets are not in a normal state, people need all the tools at their disposal. When this was happening, people then moved away from Aquis to go and trade a dark pool somewhere else. With UBS, they were looking at a way, a strategic review of how they could expand or do something with their MTF. The customer also, they wanted to make quite certain that they were keeping and maintaining their customers' ability to trade in the dark. The perfect solution here was for UBS to transfer the business assets of this business. The customer sees absolutely no difference. In fact, this will be the one product where we will be charging in basis points for a period of time, which is the agreement we have with UBS, so that customers cannot be dissatisfied in any way. They see no change. We will close this deal within the next few weeks. We will introduce our technology in the next few months, and more importantly, we'll offer those customers a wider product by exporting it also to the European market, which UBS couldn't do today. Customers get more for the same. UBS gets what they need, and we get a perfect situation through an accretive model. This is an accretive deal for us. We will be taking the revenues, and we'll be using their market share as of the beginning of next quarter or the early stages of next quarter. This is a win-win for all parties. Gonna pass over to Jonathan just to talk about technologies. Our technologies division is focused very much on delivering matching engine and exchange solutions and surveillance systems to clients who wish to enter into the exchange world. What we are able to deliver is a high-performance, flexible and scalable exchange system. Typically, the clients that are attracted to this are relatively new companies, potentially startups, who will either be in different geographies to Aquis or who will be in different asset classes. Some of the asset classes that we are finding quite a lot of interest are around cryptocurrencies, around derivatives and digital assets. The one thing which is very, very strong in terms of the demand for our products is around cloud technology. Pretty much all our new clients now who are taking the technology platform that Aquis provide wish to have it deployed in the cloud. We have a particular expertise in this area. We think that over time, the industry, so more mature exchanges, high volume, low latency, will deploy into cloud. That is not really feasible at the moment. The newer startups, the ones who don't have such high volumes, that is already feasible, and that is something that we are delivering. It's very notable that the demand is for scalable platforms and Aquis' ability and expertise around auction products. We have the Auction on Demand. We have a market close product. Then watching how businesses scale and how they will be able to move towards a much higher volume. This is something that Aquis has demonstrated it can deliver. Revenue, as I mentioned previously, increased significantly, so net revenue up to GBP 3.4 million as a result of both existing customers and new clients. We believe that we will continue to see a strengthening of this division. We will be continuing to develop new products in the ability to attract new clients. With that, I will hand it back to Alasdair for the Aquis Stock Exchange. Okay. I want to talk about the Aquis Stock Exchange because this is a business that I'm very passionate about. It's not a business that is gonna give you immediate return. It's gonna take us a number of years to build this. We're gonna be the first serious challenger to the London Stock Exchange and the AIM Market, and a challenger in some ways to venture capital and private equity. One thing that I'm really proud of is that over the last year, we've managed to reduce the losses significantly in this business down to just a mere GBP 200,000. Which is really important because we don't wanna be carrying a loss-making business, but at the same time, we want to invest. Why is this so important to us? Never has it been more important in the United Kingdom to be able to get capital to growth companies at an early stage. It's something that post-Brexit is so important to make the United Kingdom more competitive. Now, what I do think, at the current way the markets operate, is the last place that a company decides to go to is the public markets. That is because there's no proportionality in regulation, there's no appropriateness in trading mechanisms. The public don't get involved in the public market, so it seems ironic. The public, the very word in that, is the public should be involved in the IPO process. The public should have equal opportunities to anyone else. What is important here is that I think that the public are an enormous capital pool for these growth businesses. If we're really going to stop tech companies from going off to Nasdaq, you're not going to prevent them when they are already GBP 6 billion businesses. That opportunity is gone. You can save the ones and help the ones grow at the earlier stage. Aquis wants to become a Nasdaq of Europe. It wants to provide capital to early stage. One of the great things that's happening out there today is the listing review and the regulatory change that's happening right now. Now, we would have noticed, some of you, that the standard market is changing and the London Stock Exchange, the Lord Hill review is looking at listings, not just focusing on the premium market, but also opening up the competition to growth companies. The really important thing is that being able to get this capital through retail, through institutional, through high net worth individual, through hedge fund, whatever it is, into these businesses at an early stage. Now, we think at Aquis, we can do this. Last year, we changed the rules, we made the regulation more proportionate, and we've managed to IPO 24 companies. We raised GBP 100 million, and we had more than 54, 55 asset managers actually invest in these Aquis businesses. We have 102 securities now in our marketplace, but the job is far from done. What we need to do now is make certain that by the end of this year, we've got to a stage that this market, you cannot tell the difference when you pick up your smartphone and you look at any price of any stock. Whether it's traded on us, whether it's traded in Europe, whether it's traded on the London Stock Exchange, you should be able to see all the data at your fingertips. Now, we know today that that is not the case, and we need to address that. We also know we've done a great job, I believe, in actually getting connectivity to a number of online brokers, AJ Bell, Jarvis, Interactive Investor, Barclays. But is it good enough? Far from it. Because Halifax, Hargreaves Lansdown, IG, these people are still not connected to the marketplace. We've worked aggressively with them, and we'll continue to do so. In fact, Hargreaves Lansdown now has six or seven stocks, they don't go public on it, which are electronically connected. They have told us that they will have our Apex stocks out there, and we will continue to push to make quite certain that we get equal access for all people to all stocks. Now, that is the work we do there. We need to get the data work done. But I'm also, you know, having painted that picture, very optimistic because we have over 60 to 65 companies wanting to come to our marketplace. What is exciting is it's not the origination that is the problem here. We believe that there are many, many thousands of businesses that actually want to raise capital at an earlier stage. With the changing of the rules by Lord Hill, it is clear with the standard market check and completely changing, that this area of GBP 10 million-GBP 20 million market cap, up to GBP 50 million-GBP 60 million market cap is absolutely ripe for the picking for the Aquis Exchange. Many of those companies will go on to become mid-cap, large-cap, Goliath-type businesses. That's what we're focusing on at the Aquis Stock Exchange. It's why I remain very excited because what does it do? Not only does it get you into the primary market space, it changes the economic value as such of primary markets within the United Kingdom, but it gets the retail involved to be able to participate. It also means these companies will remain as public companies in the United Kingdom. We will get value out of data. We will get value as these companies grow and there's more trading. We will get more people participating because we actually have a number of these great new economy stocks. The strategy is long-term. We're clear what we have to do this year, but this will take two to three years before it seriously gets monetized. That is exactly what we intend to do. If I look at data, we've harmonized that data. What is important is the more we grow in volume, the more we grow in presence on the exchange business, the more companies we bring to the market on the other side in the primary, the more those grow, the more valuable that data, because that data is unique. Therefore, we believe that while we had 159% growth because of harmonization, you're not gonna see that size of growth immediately, but over time, you're gonna continue to see growth out of data revenues. Of course, the absolute sort of cherry on the icing here is when the consolidated tape comes. Now, we're all aware that what's gone on in Ukraine has meant that the emphasis of regulators is no longer pushing much of what was on their agenda. While we know the consolidated tape is on the agenda, I don't believe it will be up there at the very top. It isn't up there at the very top. There might be a slight delay. The U.K. is certainly looking at it. We believe that will happen in the next 18 months to two years, and the E.U. 27 to follow after that. In summary, looking at this all together, is I'm unbelievably excited about the UBS deal that completes what we need to do on the exchange business. I believe very much in our capability of driving that market share, but even with market share, it's the volume that counts, and I think that is still an enormous opportunity which we still haven't fully harvested by any means. The Aquis Stock Exchange, a longer-term project, but actually serious progress being made and actual recognition by people, that Aquis is a serious challenger in the exchange space. We're investing in our business. I'm often asked, "When's the dividend coming?" We've now got GBP 40 million of cash. We're cash generative every year. I'm afraid the answer is, not soon. It's not soon because I think there are so many opportunities that we can invest in. Look at those opportunities as they arrive, we're being able to get faster growth for our investors and a better return for our investors. At this point in time, we're very much looking at trying to continue to invest, to allowing us to grow. Despite the uncertainty, despite the tragedy that we see, and we watch every day on the news, these awful geopolitical and macroeconomic problems, Aquis is actually very well-positioned. It's performing absolutely in line with expectations. I remain as confident as I ever have been, even when we IPO'd the business, as confident as then, that we can grow this business into a formidable exchange. With that, I'm willing to open up the questions. Alasdair, Jonathan, Richard, that's great. Thank you very much indeed for your presentation this afternoon. Ladies and gentlemen, please do continue to submit your questions just using that Q&A tab that's situated in the right-hand corner of your screen. But just while the team take a few moments to review those questions submitted already, I would like to remind you that a recording of this presentation, along with a copy of the slides and the published Q&A, can be accessed via your investor dashboard. Alasdair, Jonathan, Richard, as you can see, we've received a number of questions throughout today's presentation, and thank you to all investors for submitting their questions. If I could please ask you just to open up that Q&A tab, run through, and where it's appropriate to do so, read out the questions and give a response, and then I'll pick up from you at the end. Thank you. Well, I'm delighted to say there's lots of questions here, and we're all very, very happy to answer them. From John A. "Hi, Alasdair and team. Alasdair, Aquis is exciting, especially seeing the Aquis Exchange could really become the Nasdaq of the U.K. I'm really excited that you believe in that. I do too. However, can you talk to us, what are the barriers, challenges of scaling the exchange?" Well, the key here is what I was just describing. We have to get absolutely all the connectivity around to be able to have access for the retail. We have to make certain that the quality of the companies that come to us are true growth businesses, and that our standards are absolutely high as they can be as a recognized investment exchange operating an MTF. We also need to make quite certain that the quality of our data, the people who take our data, as I said, in smartphones and everything else, is absolutely identical to other markets. We've got to reach that standard, and that's work still to be done. It's a lot of work that you, as investors, retail market, can help us with. You know, the actual calling up of online brokers, the calling up of data vendors saying, "You want to see this data." I often get told, "Oh, there's no demand." Yet I can literally say there are hundreds, thousands of people who write to me saying, "There is demand. Please, you know, will you carry on that crusade for us?" Of course, what happens when we do this, and I think government recognizes it, regulators recognize it, and Treasury recognize it, is that competition is a great response to incumbents who fail to innovate. It's through that innovation that I think we can create primary markets, not just in the United Kingdom, I'd actually like to think across the whole of Europe, that are competitive for these young businesses. It is getting capital. The retail market should be allowed to invest in early-stage businesses in a way, in a public market, rather than having to do this privately where there's not necessarily a second market. That's where I think Aquis plays a very, very important role. From Ryan N: "Are you seeing the volumes and liquidity that you expected at this stage of the Aquis Exchange?" Jonathan, do you want to answer that? Yes. I think in reverse order. Liquidity, yes, absolutely. I think it is. If anything, it is probably greater than we had aspired to. It is 24% of all available pan-European secondary trading is a phenomenal achievement. We continue to try and grow that further. In terms of volumes, as Alasdair mentioned earlier, it has been very volatile. Whilst our market share has shown a temporary decline, volumes have remained very high. This is essential in terms of the growth of our business, that we see that the investment banking brokers continue to drive more and more business towards us. We are, I suppose I'd say that we are satisfied. We will never be completely satisfied because we have aspirations to continue to grow our business further, and we will continue to try and encourage the investment banking brokers to do more and more of their business with us. David B has got a question which I truly love, which is, "Thank you for the really excellent performance in 2021. That must be gaining attention as a market disruptor. Are you detecting a response from competitors?" I mean, that is so appropriate because over the last couple of months, what we have seen is our competitors starting to badmouth us. Now, one of the things, if you've been listening to us when we IPO'd, I remember being asked the question, "What happens as you start to truly gain traction?" The very first thing that people do is they badmouth you. The second thing is they then try and throw money at it and discount prices. Then the final thing is they sort of fall over and say, "Okay, you've won." Now, we're at the early stage. That's exactly what's happened in the last few months. Our direct competitors here, national exchanges across Europe, have actually been going around to our customers saying, "Oh, Aquis, you know, it's a terrible business. Don't know what you're doing. Why are you trading with them?" Type of thing. Actually, I'm really encouraged by that because that is what disruption is all about. The gaining attention piece, I think, is something we do need to note as a company. As somebody said to me very recently, one in 20 trades, one in 20 of the vol-value of those trades is going through Aquis Exchange today across the whole of European trading and equities. That's a big number. Yet this person turned around and said, "Well, your clients might know you, but I've never heard of you. Why isn't the message out there? I think it's something we need to address. When we were only a MTF exchange business, we were known by the marketplace. As we go into the primary market, we have to look at the way we brand ourselves, the way we sell ourselves, and I think we need to focus very much on how do we get that international reputation that people know. I go and talk to government, and quite often they turn around and say, "Aquis, you know, what is Aquis?" It's like, "It's a great British success story." "Oh, I've never heard of you." Well, we need to address that. The more attention, the more our results, the more we perform, the more you stoke up interest as such, as the people listening on this call, the better it is for us. Yes, we are getting a response. I take that as a positive response from our competitors. John A: "Sorry, would you mind reiterating what you think is a realistic growth rate for the company? What can we see in, say, five years' time?" Obviously, you know, I will give a point here, and I'll let Richard think about some of the answers from a financial director point. I've always been a great believer in the long term. I don't think I would necessarily say five years. People laughed when I said we can build an exchange, and we did. People said it's impossible to get traction, but we managed to. People now say, "Can you become a leading exchange?" The answer is yes. My ambition is always to be the leading exchange services group. I think with the model that we have and what we do, then I think we actually have the capability of getting substantially larger than now. I know that both here with our current CFO and future CFO are probably not in a position to give you any sort of straight forecast there. I don't know if either of you wanna make any additional comments on that. I think one of the points I would add is probably that we see scope for growth across all four of the revenue streams we've identified. I think it's quite important to see that we don't see any of those as having reached potential. I think it's one of the things that most excites me about our revenue mix, is there is scope to grow across that. Probably the other piece I would just talk is just about how we see revenues and costs moving across time. I think it's one we've spoken about previously. I think it's one of, again, the strengths of this company, the ability that we're able to scale revenues at a faster rate than cost. I think a lot of our activity. Yeah, Alasdair gave the reference about how if we push customers up tiers, we see revenues increase at a zero cost. It's that ability to try and drive revenues at a faster rate than cost, I think is one of the long-term stories that we'll see come out of Aquis. Just, I hope, sort of gives some flavor for how I see things. Simon C has said, "What challenges do you see from incumbent exchanges such as AIM as you attract away listings?" Well, you know, I don't think they love us today, in all honesty. I think, you know, the trouble is with a monopoly, an effective monopoly, is that they're not used to competition. I think we had a very good example of that. We dual listed a stock on AIM very recently, because they wanted to raise capital through warrants. AIM doesn't allow warrants to be listed. They wanted listed warrants, so they came across, they listed two series of warrants. They sold to institutions. They raised the capital. We got a dual listing. The great thing about a dual listing is that over time, I think people will look at it and say, "Well, why am I paying for the listing on AIM, where I have a Nomad fees, I have all these additional costs, whereas actually I'm getting the same thing, if not better, with a higher quality service and hopefully more access for retail and everything else, with Aquis?" Now, that's gonna take some time, but we're starting to see it. We dual listed today on our own market. I would love to be in a position where we were just quoted on our own exchange. Unfortunately, as I know with my own children, you know, children who mark their own homework tend to do quite well. I don't think as a regulator, and we are the recognized investment exchange, gives us that regulatory status for the MTF. Therefore, we regulate our market and obviously we cannot be quoted on our own market where we're the regulator. We will maintain our position within AIM, but we are also dual listed. We wanna get the benefits of tighter spreads, which we have with our market making scheme. We wanna get the benefits, all the other benefits that we have as being part of the Aquis group on the Aquis Stock Exchange. Jonathan has another question. "Do you have strong relationships with Seedrs, Crowdcube, and other fundraising platforms? As companies looking to raise private funding, some of them will look to list later, and I wondered whether if you'd had strong relationships with them, help them provide a pipeline for new companies. We do. We certainly have spoken to crowdfunders. We find that a fascinating business. You will know that the Treasury today is currently looking, along with the regulator, about the licensing as such of the changes within the Listings Review. In other words, the changes to the standard market, the changes that will happen to help and approach growth markets, and also what will happen with crowdfunding. I think crowdfunding here will become a regulated entity. It will have a different standard to an overall public company. I think that's really good news. I fully support because, of course, what crowdfunding is doing is getting retail into private companies at an early stage. There's a lot of talk about making markets as such in private companies, but there's nothing better. That what should happen is as these companies grow, as they succeed, they should be looking to come and get quoted or IPO. We think we're the perfect venue for them, and obviously building those relationships is really important to us. Yes, I think not only is there a strong pull from crowdfunders, I also think there's a strong pull from venture capital funds, from private equity funds, VCT funds, all sorts of things. Which, and I think very, very importantly, we need to look outside of London. I think it's absolutely critical. We're spending a lot of time talking now in Leeds and Manchester, in Liverpool, Edinburgh, et cetera, Belfast. Just places where there are so many great businesses, and I think that they wish to raise capital, and I think they can raise capital on an exchange like ourselves. The questions are coming thick and fast. I'm not certain we're gonna have necessarily time to go through all, but we'll certainly try. David B., you highlight an industry-wide move to dark trading venues and client trading strategies. Please can you explain the drivers for dark trading and the significance for Aquis? I'm happy to answer that if you are, but- Yeah. Yeah. Why dark trading? Well, you know, some people might say I was the grandfather now rather than the father of dark trading. I started in 1996 a company called ITG, which introduced POSIT. Dark trading plays a critical part, and the purpose behind dark trading when we founded that in 1996 is that what you get when you try to trade large orders is price movement that is unfair on either the seller or buyer. So if you can find the mechanism to find a price at the middle of a reliable price, then actually everybody benefits. It should be about large and scale type orders. The significance for us is that at Aquis, we didn't have that. As from time to time, as we've seen in the last few months, business moves towards the dark, then actually business moves away from Aquis. We spend a lot of time trying to keep that business and get that business into Aquis. If you don't have the product to be able to solve that problem, then the answer is the business then goes elsewhere, and they might trade lit elsewhere. They might trade other products elsewhere. It's really important for us to have the complete suite. The significance for Aquis is it completes that suite of products. We have a market close product. We have an Auction on Demand product. We have a dark pool product, and we obviously have our lit trading book. That basically sums up what's necessary to provide from your clients. The key here, though, is that it's also a fantastic hedge for the business. If the regulators in Europe are anti-dark trading, which they have voiced in the past, then there'll be a significant shift towards lit, in which case we're incredibly well covered, and we are serious beneficiaries. If, on the other hand, the regulators in the U.K. liberalize the regulation for trading, which they're doing through the Wholesale Markets Review, then actually there's enormous opportunities in the dark, and we need to be there to capture those opportunities. That doesn't mean that dark is suddenly gonna become 25%-30% of all trading because you know, there is a problem then about price discovery. Similarly, it doesn't mean in Europe the dark is gonna go away forever. We will compete, we will innovate, and we will bring in the newer technology to make certain that our product is absolutely a leading product in this field. It has been, I think, a very, very significant deal for us and very beneficial for our shareholders. This comes from David B. Does Aquis' high liquidity and protection afforded against predatory trading provide an alternative to dark trading venues for financial institutions? That's a great question, David, because when we started this business, I genuinely believed it would. The problem is that people don't trust as much the lit environment because it is completely open and transparent. There's a fear in the industry. Therefore, people want to trade in something which has semi-transparency, or in this case, no pre-trade transparency. That's why I got this so wrong. I actually believed in what you said, that we could create a marketplace that didn't have dark trading. I was wrong because customers want that dark trading. Our job as a company is to make quite certain that we satisfy our customers in the interest of our investors. We have moved into this space. The great news about the trade with UBS is that it wouldn't be easy for us to go and build a business from scratch. By buying a ready business that already has a revenue stream and a 0.5% market share, gives us an opportunity we couldn't resist, and that's why we did the deal. That's a great question. Another great question, David. What significance do you see in the $1 billion investment from Google into the CME and the transition to Google Cloud? Jonathan was talking about cloud technology, and cloud technology will be the way forward. It's not as, I think, Nasdaq sort of talk about they're involved in the cloud by putting servers into the cloud. That's not what this is about. Anybody can do that. What this is about is getting cloud technology that is built within the cloud in a way that actually you can provide a service that is incredibly efficient through the cloud environment. Now, the best way of explaining this is that, you know, it's a fact that 93% of the time, people in the United Kingdom have a car, leave it outside, and don't use it. So if somebody turns around to you and says, "For the 7% of the time you use your car, I'll tell you what, I'll sell you a car, and you only have to pay 7%," everybody would bite your hand off. It's the same thing with exchanges. One of the biggest costs of entering the market in exchange is the cost of the technology, the cost of the data center. If you transform that cost to only the time that you're using it, and most exchanges are open only for several hours a day, and certainly not at weekends, then you transform the economics of an exchange. On top of cloud, then you can think of all the other things one can do in cloud technology. So I think it's a really interesting thing. You know, as you have seen in the past, that we work very closely with Amazon Web Services. But as something which is called DORA, a regulation coming out of Europe, it's gonna be very important not only to have all your eggs in one basket. Therefore, it's gonna be really important that other cloud providers are there. We will build strong relationships with Google, with Amazon, and any other cloud provider that is providing the service that we want. I think it's really interesting. Watch this space in cloud, and I think this is one of the big drivers as to watch this space in Aquis Technologies and what we can actually provide. I'm losing my voice slightly here, so I'm gonna pass over to Jonathan. I'll read the question. Can you talk to us about large institutional investors? To what extent are they participating in the Aquis Exchange at the moment? This may or not be a fair, but the impression is that companies like L&G, Aviva, et cetera, do not currently get involved in these companies. How can we get these players involved? When, for example, do you think I could, as a private retail investor buy funds which specifically targets Aquis companies? Yeah. Well, I'll certainly try, although I think there's an element of trying to guess what the institutions wish to do in the future. The position is that growth companies are nearly always the institutions who invest in growth companies have specialist funds. You have got you know, an institution like an L&G or Aviva will have a whole range of different funds, which I'm sure you're aware. Often in the past, they haven't felt it was necessary. They haven't felt there was enough interest, enough growth companies, enough attractive companies to set up a fund to invest. You have seen over the last few years, you would have seen more and more specialist funds being created. That is, I think, a function of the marketplace. It's a reflection of the fact that the U.K. is becoming better at investing in growth companies. That's the whole point of the Aquis Stock Exchange. Aquis Stock Exchange is going to be the future exchange for growth companies. What we would hope to see, and what I'm sure we will see, is that institutions like the ones you mentioned will start to look at this as an attractive opportunity for them. They will see that there are enough quality companies available coming through to the marketplace for them to create and deploy a fund into these growth companies. That is something that as a retail investor, I think you should be looking at the institutions that have already created those funds. Hopefully we will see a continued growth of those. There are specialist ones out there now, and these are the ones that are definitely will be, I think, targeting the high-quality companies that are on or will come onto AQSE in the future. I think just to add on to that, I think there's two points I would look at here. The first is the quality of the businesses and the growth companies. You know, we're at the early stage here. We've set the scene, we've changed a lot of the stuff that's going on. We need to connect, but then we actually need to make quite certain we're getting high-quality businesses coming through the sales funnel. It is the point in time when you say, "When will these people come?" When they see not just one or two, but five, 10, 15 companies that they want to invest in. The second thing is actually a marketing problem, is that you go to these people. I've done it recently with Quilter, with Amersham, with all sorts of people. They run AIM funds. When I've talked about Aquis, they've gone, "Well, who's Aquis?" I said, "Well, would Aquis be eligible?" Most have turned around and gone, "Well, yes, but we didn't really know what you are. We need to know more about it." What we have to do here is promote ourselves better within this community. I don't think there is any objection to investment from these types of firms. It is a question today, do the companies that we have on our market fit into the portfolios that these people are running and are they appropriate? I think our job over the next 12 months is to make quite certain that people understand what we're doing and that the companies we do have, which is really exciting businesses. We actually have some incredibly exciting businesses coming up this year, which I can't give you the names, but, you know, I think they'll be really attractive retail products. I think we'd better take maybe one more question, and then I'm afraid we're gonna have to try and answer maybe post because we've got another call coming up in a few minutes. Jeremy M. "Please, can you explain why in the recent market volatility, you lost market share, but in the volatility in March 2020, you gained market share?" I think actually it's slightly. March 2020 was an extraordinary time. I think at that point in time, nobody had recalibrated their models. Nobody knew what was going on. March 2020 was the COVID experience, and that was really overnight. In fact, the market just sort of plummeted in effect, and then it came back. It was a very, very short-lived high volatility. Which it didn't actually, I think, go throughout the whole of March, if you look at the VIX during that time. Whereas in what we've seen in the last six months is very short-term volatility such a shake, it doesn't really, you won't see it so much in the charts. When you see it over the long term, which is prolonged volatility, which we've now seen for six or seven months, and you can see that by going back to that slide where you can see the growth of the VIX from more or less September onwards, right the way through. If you extend that to January, February, March, the same thing. That's when it starts to hurt, and that's when the decline in market share is more permanent. Again, I remain incredibly confident because there is such high correlation between the two. I hope that answers. I think at that point, I'm really sorry for everybody else. Alasdair, Fantastic to receive so many questions. I'm sorry we can't answer them all today. That's perfect. Alasdair, Jonathan, Richard, thank you for addressing all of those questions that you have time for this afternoon. Of course, ladies and gentlemen, the company will have the opportunity to review all of the questions submitted today, and we'll publish those responses where it's appropriate to do so on the Investor Meet Company platform, and you'll be notified by email when these are ready for your review. Alasdair, perhaps for redirecting investors to provide you with their feedback, which I know is particularly important to the company. Could I please ask you for a few closing comments to wrap up with? Thank you. Yeah. First of all, thank you all very, very much indeed. It means a huge amount to us. You know the importance of the retail sector and the professional retail sector to us. I would just leave you with the fact that this is an incredibly exciting business at an incredibly exciting time. I think our growth, which we've seen and performed over the last few years, can extend for many, many years to come. I'm really excited about our future and thank you all very, very much indeed for your support. Alasdair, that's great. Jonathan, Richard, thank you very much indeed for taking the time to update investors this afternoon. Could I please ask investors not to close this session, as you'll now be automatically redirected for the opportunity to provide your feedback in order that the management team can better understand your views and expectations. This will only take a few moments to complete, and I'm sure will be greatly valued by the company. On behalf of the management team of Aquis Exchange PLC, we'd like to thank you for attending today's presentation. That now concludes today's session. Good afternoon to you all.