Good afternoon to everyone here at Aquis' new offices. My name's Glenn Collinson. I'm the chairman of Aquis Exchange PLC, and it falls to me as my great pleasure and privilege to set the scene for us today at our inaugural Capital Markets Day. I thought it would be right just to say one or two words about myself, as I'm newly inaugurated as chair myself since this year. In fact, I've been with Aquis since 2019. I joined the board then. My background is in technology. I was the founder of a couple of businesses in the UK, which grew to be large. Probably the foremost of those was CSR. One or two of you may have invested in that company back then, which was a great success in Bluetooth technology. You may still be using Bluetooth today, in which case you're using British technology. You may not know it, but that's the case. That's me. Since joining Aquis, we've seen the board of Aquis change and become more experienced in the markets in which we operate. I'm pleased to say that continues to be the case as we add more experience to our board. We have several people who have had senior executive roles within the stock exchange business. Most recently, Fields Wicker-Miurin joined us this year as a non-exec, and now a senior independent director. Ruth Wandhöfer was also a non-exec within the London Stock Exchange, brings her experience. Deirdre Somers, who was the CEO of the Irish Stock Exchange, also joined us a couple of years ago. The board itself has grown since our IPO. I also wanted to say a few words about the growth of the management team here at Aquis, which has significantly grown and matured since that time when the company floated in 2018. We're very pleased to have attracted very senior talented people to join the management team, and you'll be seeing those presented to you today. Just let me say a few words up front. We have David Stevens, who joined as Chief Revenue Officer last year. We have Richard Fisher, who joined as our CFO also last year. You'll also meet today Philip Olm, who's our general counsel and company secretary and MD of our regulation department. He joined at the time of our acquisition of what is now AQSE. Last but not least, in fact, the first person you'll see part of the management team today is Adrian Ip, who's really spearheaded Aquis' growth into its technology business. That's important, I think, today, because I think you'll see that the technology side of Aquis is becoming more important as we grow, and it really underpins not only the technology licensing that we're doing, but all of Aquis' activity increasingly. I think it's no exaggeration to say it's that technology which will enable Aquis to meet the vision, which is to become the next generation stock exchange. With that, I would like to hand over to Alasdair to describe the evolution of Aquis Exchange PLC. Glenn, thank you very, very much indeed. When I founded the business ten years ago, we had one idea, one model. That model was pretty simple. I am a subscription junkie. Really believe in the subscription model. Subscriptions change human behavior. Every one of you in the room, every one of you online has a subscription, and they change the underlying product. We watch more movies because of Netflix. We listen to more music because of Spotify. We shop more because of Amazon Prime, and you can go on and on. The idea is that, of course, a marginal cost of zero has enormous attraction if you can increase the liquidity in the marketplace, something that we all want. I had that dream then, and I believe in that dream today, that one day all trading will be under such a model. Ten years ago, we could have been described as a one-trick pony. A good trick, but nevertheless a one-trick pony. We were not diversified. By the time we went public just over four years ago, we'd introduced our ban on non-proprietary trading, and we created a fledgling technology business, one which really specialized in surveillance systems. Today, things are very different. We've gone through Brexit. We've seen a pandemic. We have a war in Europe. We have moved with the times, and we have developed and diversified and built synergistic businesses. We've built the building blocks for what I believe will become, as Glenn just said, the next generation stock exchange. These building blocks consist of our original execution business, our technology business, and our primary market. Today, we want to show you how the strong foundations that we have built will deliver extraordinary growth in all these areas. We have members from our executive team who will talk through the headlines of what will make Aquis the stock exchange of the future. Before we do this, let me set the scene with some views of the current environment and my thoughts about the next generation of public markets. First, let's talk about public markets, the primary market. This country is brilliant when it comes to startup capital. We have EIS, we have SEIS. Any entrepreneur, whether in this room, online or anywhere in this country with a good business plan, you can find capital. We are appalling as a country when it comes to scale up capital. The belief that government has today, and recently I received a letter actually from government yesterday talking about sort of the issues of scale-up capital. The belief that they've changed the rules so that unicorns will not go to America is just ill-founded. Today's unicorns will not come to the London Stock Exchange regardless of the rules because the market, Nasdaq, has created an environment that allows for better valuations, more investment. I do not believe that companies like Arm, et cetera, will come to London. I think they will go to America. However, the growth companies of today, the unicorns of tomorrow, that's the opportunity because if we can get these companies into the public markets and we can provide them the growth capital that they need, then we have a phenomenal opportunity in front of us. Getting capital to the future unicorns should be done through the public markets, and we at Aquis have plans to do that. You may have seen I wrote an opinion piece in The Daily Telegraph recently, which talked about we need to get capital, we need to get tax advantages, tax reductions for retail in regulated growth markets. For retail as well as for institutions. In fact, without sort of showing off, I've actually had the chance of meeting 3 chancellors in 4 months, thank you to this government, to express our views about tax incentives, competitive tension amongst exchanges, to create that innovation and to get a wider range of investors involved in the equity business. History has shown that small cap investing has given some of the best returns of any asset class over the last 100 years, and yet ironically, we prevent many investors from buying these high growth stocks both in the IPO or in the secondary markets. The new Consumer Duty that the FCA is going to introduce next year is all about best outcome for the client. You can't achieve best outcome if you're preventing your clients from investing in a top performing asset class. We have to get the public back into public markets, and we need to make it easier and more efficient for them to do so. This will help aid liquidity for the institutional funds, those of you in the room today, and the funds, these funds themselves need more incentives to get more players into this segment of the market. For example, the average age of today's online broking client, those of the eToro's or the Robinhood. Anybody have ideas? It's mid-twenties. The average age of your UK stockbroker in the traditional, late fifties. The paradigm has changed. With this shift, we need to look at the secondary trading of equities, both in large cap, mid cap and small cap. We're building the Aquis Stock Exchange that will give the retail and institutional investor the same tools to operate in a faster and more efficient market. The country looks to level up. We are looking to level up. The opportunity must be available for both retail and institutional investors to trade these large cap, mid cap, and small cap stocks by using advanced products such as auctions on demand, dark pools, sweeping products, closing auctions, et cetera. We can go on and on. The more participants we see, the more liquidity will be available and the more institutional investors will be able to invest in size. Now, my colleague, David Stevens, will tell you more about this later and go into detail on how we will enhance both the primary and secondary businesses. David has a daughter who has just won the bronze medal for the under 18 European Championships for shot put, and she's just won a scholarship to train in the U.S. as a heptathlete. Why is that relevant? To put it mildly, this family, they are sports fanatics. He recently told me a story of the Olympic rowing team, and their now very famous phrase, "Does it make the boat go faster?" When you think about that, what they did is, "Well, shall we go to the opening of the Olympic ceremony?" "Well, does it make the boat go faster?" "No. We're gonna annoy a lot of people by not going to the opening ceremony." They won the gold medal. The boat does go faster. We've taken this approach at Aquis, except we use the phrase, 'Is this the next generation stock exchange?' Simple questions such as quote-driven markets. Are they the most effective way of providing capital for the trading of small caps? Is T+2 an efficient way of settlement? Is it creating credit risk? Can you instantly get a list of shareholders of any of the stocks that you may hold as an institution? Again, we can go on and on. In this case, all the answers tell you that today these are not the acts of a next generation stock exchange. Vested interests. Old traditional ways of trading and settlement add costs to our industry. You will hear more later from my colleagues about some of the things that we have done, some of the things that we are looking to do, and how we are going to do them. We don't have all the answers today, but I am sure we're going to find them in the future. We have an incredibly strong executive team. All this change can only work if we have advanced technology. Aquis Technologies is modernizing the way that exchanges operate. You'll have heard me talk about cloud technology, or certainly some of you, and this is true. Why is cloud so important to the exchange industry? Almost all of you will own a car, I expect. Certainly, I know a number of you own cars. In fact, I know some of you, some of the cars some of you own. Ninety-three percent of the time, that car of yours sits in a garage or outside your drive. You're not using it. A simple question to you is, if I turn round and said, "Do you know what? You can use the same car anytime you like, whenever you want, but you only have to pay me 7% for it." Not one of you online or in the room would turn me down. Well, if you did, I'd certainly question your sanity. You know, it's an obvious thing to do. Cloud technology is that. Exchanges do not operate generally, so not all, and we'll come onto this in a minute, 24/7. A lot of startup exchanges operate, and they have to have the infrastructural costs as if they are operating 24/7. It completely changes the economics of the business, and we want to use that cloud technology for those businesses that is appropriate to. I mentioned 24/7. Some businesses, the foreign exchange world, the crypto world, the digital asset world, is now moving towards 24/7. Does cloud help them? The answer is yes. We have created a version of our technology that can now operate 24/7 without ever needing to stop for upgrades, never needing downtime for updates, never stopping for new orders or new products. In fact, it never stops. That is the world's first, and we've already built it, we've sold it, and we will be delivering it. Adrian Ip, you will hear a lot more from him, who is our head of product management and head of technology sales. This technology is a major breakthrough and a very, very exciting part of our new story. As you know, Aquis is made up of three business divisions but four revenue streams. I'm excited by the opportunities that exist in all four revenue streams. Building a stock exchange that can get scale-up capital to growth companies, making us the home of growth businesses, developing and leading the latest technology to modernize an exchange industry, allowing it to grow. This will give more opportunities for retail, more opportunities for institutional funds to invest in exciting industries in a growing market, rather than what we've seen, the current de-equitization that has actually taken place for the last forty years. We need to change that trend. We will continue to diversify the trading platform to get more innovative tools and products to our customers, so that they can become more efficient, more effective, and get better returns for their customers. Of course, we will continue our crusade on the consolidated tape, which we know will lower costs of data to the industry, but which of course will significantly increase the data revenues for this company. I truly believe that Aquis is not just today's challenger stock exchange, but will be a world leader in the provision of primary and secondary markets founded on a proprietary, groundbreaking technology. On that note, I would like to pass you over to Richard Fisher, our CFO, who will talk about the revenues of our business. All right. Thank you, Alasdair, and good afternoon, everybody. Yes, as Alistair said, I'll be talking through our revenue story and why we're so excited about some of the opportunities that we see ahead of us. Now, I've put up two charts here, and the one on the right-hand side is a very simple progression over time, showing how our revenues have grown year on year from 2017 through to 2021. We're incredibly proud of that growth journey. Each year and every year, we've been increasing forward. Actually, it's the pie chart on the left-hand side is what I'm most excited about, and this is looking at the split of our revenues. If you look, exchange fees at GBP 9.8 million for the year in 2021, they made up 57% of our revenues. As Alasdair said, if you step all the way back to the origins of Aquis, we're a one-trick pony, and that was 100% revenues. If you went to 2018 in the IPO, we were still at 78%. This is the diversification that Alasdair's been speaking about. It's not diversification for diversification's sake. It's the fact that in each and every one of these four areas, we believe we have an opportunity set ahead of us. From data revenues, the potential for what consolidated tape can bring. Technology licenses, Adrian will talk to you later about how we see that world developing for ourselves. In exchange fees, David and Philip will be speaking how we see that move forward. All four areas taking us forwards. If I move to my second slide, and apologies for those of you who I've shown this before, this is perhaps the one I get most excited about, and it's about the nature of our revenues. We've just put up a simple split of our 2021 revenues, and 74% of those are on a recurring basis. This is one of the real strengths of the subscription model and the way that we recognize our revenue. Each and every year, we're able to step forward with a certainty of where we've been and where we see ourselves going. Actually, again, it's the other part that most excites me. Of the residual 26%, 22% relate to our long-term technology contracts. Now, for us, those are not one-off revenues. For us, this is perhaps for me the singular point I'd like you to take from this capital markets day, is how we view those contracts. We see these as long-term relationships where we partner with clients and to help them take forward on their growth journeys. It could be a 3, 4, 5-year contract, but at the end of that contract, we believe that they will renew and move forward with us through a new contract. As we step into the future, we see new contracts being earned with new clients, and Adrian will talk about the space we're looking at there, but we'll also see the existing clients we have renew. For us, I think we see that as a very valuable contribution to our revenue, and we'd really like you to change how you view this as not being a one-off, but part of a go-forward relationship. Now, my third and final slide is almost helping to start to talk what do we see as the drivers of future revenue within the Aquis Exchange group. Now, it goes back to our one-trick pony at the start. When Aquis started, exchange fees was the only sort of revenue source we had. Market share was a reasonable proxy for how did you perceive the company might do, and it's still very important to us. As sort of David will speak to, though, it's the components of that market share. How is that built up? Where do we see it going? It's not the only sort of driver of our revenues. Within the Aquis Exchange space, it's also the number of members we have, and how are they performing within our subscription tiers. As those of you who've seen the investor decks over the last sort of six months period, we started to disclose how many members we have, for example, in the top three tiers. For AQSE, it's gonna be the total number of quoted companies we have. I love the fact that today we actually listed our 100th company, this very morning, and it was brilliant because it means I can remember the number 100. I can go, "We've had 100 today." As that number grows, and we believe that it could be multiples of that's gonna be a significant growth driver for our revenues. Lastly, in Aquis Technologies, it's going to be the number of these licenses that we hold. Also, how many of those are renewing each year. To be honest, this is one that really excites us. This is a very good segue, it's almost as if we planned it, for handing over to Adrian to talk about what do we see happening in this space and what can this mean for us. On that note, I'd like to hand over to Adrian. Thanks very much, Richard. Good afternoon, everyone. Next generation stock exchange, and please forgive me for what will be the longer section of today. What I'm gonna do is take you through a number of different areas of what does the next generation stock exchange mean to Aquis, but actually not just to Aquis, and how we think we're going to be changing the industry overall, with the technology that we're providing that doesn't really exist anywhere else in the industry. We're going to talk a little bit about what is our vision of the future of stock exchanges around the world and ours, how the current fragmented ecosystem contributes to and tempers the considerations that we need to take into account for the next generation stock exchange, what the current model brings in terms of problems and high cost structures and fees and things like that across the industry, and how we're going to solve for those with the future state of what we're building. We're going to talk obviously quite a bit about how we are leading the industry in terms of technological advancements and developments to actually really bring what is going to be the next generation of stock exchange technology stacks. Obviously, I think there have been a couple of mentions, so I'll be talking about cloud, which is a very important part of the overall piece of the puzzle. In addition to that, we're gonna be talking about 24/7, and then we'll talk a little bit about the pipeline for technology sales and how we're progressing on that side of the business. What is a next generation stock exchange? What does it look like? Obviously, as I've mentioned, you know, we talk about cloud, we talk about 24/7 with no downtime, but actually these are tools. These are tools which will allow us to actually significantly change the way that the technology provision in the exchange industry is occurring today. Today as an industry, the technology provision of exchange systems is very much based on what we term as like a copy-paste kind of implementation. As exchanges that license technology, we export our business models to everybody that licenses our technology. You want an exchange? Great. You need to spend GBP 1 million on hardware. You need a data center. You need software licenses. You need lots of people. All of these things which actually contribute to a relatively high cost traditional model of the exchange industry. Actually what we're talking about in terms of next generation is the possibility for Exchange as a Service. What I'll show as we go through is that that brings a lot of opportunities with it to actually change the entire dynamic of the exchange technology provision landscape. There's a few different models here for, you know, today we license technology and we say, "You want to exchange? Here's the technology, there's your license fee." Doesn't matter whether you do one trade a year or 100 million. Actually, you know, that is setting a very high bar in terms of cost and barrier to entry to a lot of people that want to run serious exchanges but actually don't have the financial resources to do so. I'm not gonna say the D word. I am. Democratization. This is really what we're talking about here in terms of how we're trying to change the industry. What are the considerations? The considerations are quite important to keep in mind because today we live in a fragmented ecosystem. There are a lot of traditional institutions that exist. Obviously, we have the exchange over here on the left, but in addition to that, we have investors, brokers, market makers, CCPs, CSDs, and all these other acronyms that I'm not gonna go into too much detail of. In addition to that, although this model is fairly common around the world, what we also have is a lot of jurisdictional differences that exist around the world in different areas that we need to solve for. For example, you know, in Europe we have MiFID, in the U.S. they have Reg NMS, and there are a lot of different rules that come with that. There are also different regulatory approaches to single cloud versus multi-cloud and things of that nature as well. We need to figure out how all of these various pieces of the puzzle fit together when we deliver the next generation stock exchange. The future of trading. This slide is quite interesting to me because actually what it does is it really talks about, obviously on the left-hand side, we can see where we are today as an industry, what the exchange business is all about. There are quite a lot of commonalities here. You'll notice at the top, there are a lot of things which we mark out as high cost, okay? We have data centers, we have spare capacity, we have spare data centers, we have disaster recovery capability. We have hundreds of servers that are sitting there burning energy 100% of the time, which are actually doing zero, all in the name of resilience, all in the name of keeping capital markets ticking over in the event that something bad goes wrong. Guess what? That brings a lot of cost with it, brings a lot of energy consumption with it. It also means that as we export our business model to the world, you know, we have companies that are licensing our technology that need to staff up with quite expensive teams of people, experts in our industry, operations people, infrastructure people, regulatory and compliance people, surveillance people. What does that lead to? Actually, that leads to the fact that we have a lot of fees as an industry. We charge people. Okay, we don't. Aquis doesn't do colocation. A lot of exchanges do charge for colocation, charge market data fees, charge fees for ports and connections. This is all built up to actually facilitate the fact that, as an industry, we are, you know, spending quite a lot on just maintaining all of these things. We also have, you know, inefficient capital in the post-trade cycle. If we look over to the right-hand side, you know, what we talk about when I talk about Exchange as a Service is really that it's a sort of a shared economy and a shared technology stack, which allows us to have one system that is servicing not just one exchange, but multiple exchanges. At Aquis, we have 1, 2, 3, 4. I've lost track a little bit with all the assumptions of business activity and acquisitions we've done over the years. These exchanges run on different platforms, on different technology stacks of physical infrastructure that underpins it all. What happened if we could actually run all of that on one technology stack? What happens if we didn't just run Aquis markets on this technology stack, but exchanges from New York, exchanges from Asia, all over the world can run on a single cloud 24/7 environment that we all share and that we all benefit from. That also lowers costs throughout the industry on that previous slide where I talked about the ecosystem. You have a lot of banks, brokers, market makers in the world today that pay connectivity fees again and again and again to hundreds of exchanges around the world. Actually, if you have a shared exchange system, those fees can be shared. You can connect once and go into an ecosystem of exchanges where you don't need to pay 20 different connectivity fees. That's really what we talk about in terms of how the industry is today and how we're positioning Aquis to provide the next generation stock exchange of the future with these capabilities. What are we doing? We are paving the way. Aquis is the leader in two very critical technologies that exist in the world of exchanges today. One is obviously cloud, and several of you may be aware that we did a groundbreaking piece of work with SGX, the Singapore Exchange, a couple of years ago. It wasn't just with SGX, it was also with Amazon and AWS. Actually, it was a 3-way agreement where we were competing against other major exchange groups, and SGX is actually a Nasdaq shop. They run Nasdaq for all of their markets. They approached a number of different vendors to say, "We wanna put things into the cloud. We wanna test its viability, but we want to make sure that what we're doing is really the software platform is not going to be the bottleneck." Aquis won that deal. We were the first to put major exchange grade technology, matching engines, market data systems into Amazon's cloud environments. In addition to that, we're also working very hard on delivering 24/7 trading capabilities, and this is really groundbreaking. 24/7 is really going to change the way that the entire markets operate. A lot of people talk about 24/7 trading today and appreciate, you know, there's a lot of crypto markets out there and things like that that say they do it, but a lot of them, although they offer 24/7 trading, it's not continuous. It may be 24/7, but it's not 365. They will break for updates, they'll have planned maintenance, they'll have outages and things like that. Aquis is really working and leading the industry in both of these areas today. What does that mean for us as a business, though? Size of the prize. These are sort of a few high-level numbers that we're talking about. Exchanges in the world today that we estimate are outsourcing their technology, and there will always be some exchanges that will just never outsource their technology. There are a lot of exchanges that are licensing technology from traditional vendors that are paying a large amount of money and are outsourcing their technology stacks today. There are also a lot of other smaller exchanges that are probably not outsourcing their technology simply because it's too expensive. They're very small markets. They don't really have a need for high-frequency trading matching engines and things like this. This sort of universe is known. Obviously, there are a limited number of markets and, you know, primaries and ATSs and MTFs in the world. Estimate of current outsourced around 100. Total addressable market, 200-250, something of that order, that actually once we lower the cost of ownership of high exchange grade matching systems, it potentially opens up that market to us. Actually, also, even more excitingly to me, there are a lot of industries outside of traditional financial services and securities trading that could benefit from the capabilities of exchange grade matching engines and order books. We've actually had approaches from some of them. These are large industrial companies that look at supply chain procurement systems and order books and scheduling of deliveries and things of that nature. Unfortunately, simply because, you know, this isn't their primary business of running exchanges, when we tell them, "Yeah, you know, you need a data center, you need another data center, you need to spend a fortune on hardware, and on top of that there's license fees. But don't worry, you can recoup all of that by charging people market data." Doesn't work. Really, this is the important thing, is that actually there are a lot of industries out there that are doing, you know, heavy industry procurement, supply chain management, chip shortages and wafer fabrication capabilities, all the way through to video gaming and all these other industries that could use exchange grade matching engines and order books. Really with the capabilities offered by Exchange as a Service, cloud-based computing, 24/7 infrastructure and exchange architectures that are always running, what that does is really open up these bottom 2 segments of the market to companies like Aquis. That brings me onto the technology pipeline. I've been at Aquis a little over 5 years now. It's larger than it has ever been, a lot more growth to come, and it's a really positive message from us. It's also important to note that, you know, when Richard talks about stickiness of these contracts and long-term client relationships, this is a traditionally quite a long sales cycle within this industry. Exchanges, the reason that these things are sticky is because actually exchanges are extremely risk-averse, particularly obviously regulated trading venues and markets. Whenever you have an existing market, you need to make sure that if you're undertaking a massive technology transition project, you do huge amounts of risk analysis to make sure that you've mitigated against all the possible risks involved in such a heavy lift. These contracts, they're long-term contracts, and actually typically they renew and they roll, because actually making these changes, it's not a six-month-long process. It's potentially a 12, 18, you know, in some cases, you look at ASX, for example, these are multi-year projects to transition these sorts of things. Actually when you go through that sort of effort, you don't wanna do that every 3 years, every 5 years. A lot of these contracts, you know, they don't come up for grabs on a very frequent basis. We have a solid pipeline in place. Like I said, it's as large, it's larger than it's ever been. The good news is that while we have this sort of long-term visibility, we have a decent understanding of what is coming down that pipeline and approximately the time frames that are involved around it. We're competitive. We are winning today against top-tier opposition. Not gonna name them. Everyone knows who they are. We are beating them regularly, and that is, you know, truly game changing. We are credible. We are on the map now as a technology provider. There are national stock exchanges, central banks of currencies of countries that run bond markets for their countries that are speaking to Aquis about providing technology. Actually, predominantly, almost all of them in the cloud. That's what they want. We're service-led. We work with our clients. You know, you don't just get a technology salesperson. You get access to the entire senior management team and all the expertise that comes with it, and the personality of Alasdair and our reg team with Philip, who you'll meet later. We really partner with people. Of course, you know, my final point is, you know, we are offering attractive pricing. We're not, you know... I was quite surprised to learn about how some of our competitors price. It's equivalent to what, you know, I have a bit of a tech background, as you'll probably guess, what I refer to as DEC or Digital Equipment Corporation. This was a great computer company decades ago. It was a groundbreaking leader in the world, but actually it got complacent, their technology got old, they started pricing for every single thing that they could, and, you know, attempting to put modules and prices. Actually, you'd buy a system you think was a system, but it wouldn't be, because actually you'd find out you hadn't bought module 12, and you need to pay another $1,200 a month for that. That is the approach that is being taken by a lot of our competitors today. That is an approach that we are not taking. We are taking an ecosystem approach, and we are gearing up towards delivering next generation stock exchange services. What we're gonna do now is I'm gonna introduce you to David Stevens, who's our Chief Revenue Officer, and he's gonna talk about the Aquis Exchange, the original core business, and what we've done and how we're changing that. David, over to you. Good afternoon. I want to talk to you about the changing dynamics of the European markets and how Aquis is positioning itself to take advantage of those changes. We're moving even within the MTF, not just the whole business, but from a one-trick pony to a multi product offering. That's what we need to allow us to challenge against the really major exchanges. If there's one message you want to take from this next five minutes is that Aquis MTF is diversifying, and we're diversifying into high growth segments of the market. This graphic shows 2022 year to date market volumes split by trading mechanism. You'll see the lit continuous is 61%. That, if you remember, is our original business. First trade almost 10 years ago, the core business, driver of revenues. Over a third of the market is not lit continuous. You can see it's 22% closing auctions, 10% dark, and 4% auction on demand. What you're finding is that there is a slow shift. I'll talk about the growth rates in those different segments in a minute. There's a shift from lit continuous towards those other markets, and we have to be positioned to take advantage of that. All throughout today is a lot of three-letter acronyms, so I'll just tell you what they are. For our lit closing auction, we have a product called MaC, Market at Close. For dark, we have a recent product called AMP, which is Aquis Matching Pool. For auction on demand, very simple, we have a product called AoD. As of today, we're seventh in the core business. We've got the largest alternative closing mechanism in Europe. We've recently launched AoD in the UK about a year ago, in Europe this May. We assumed UBS MTF assets in April. I'll talk about those in more detail. Going forward, what do we expect? We expect a cyclical rebound in the lit. I'll talk about why cyclically depressed. We expect to grow the number of MaC clients, and we've got made some progress. We expect AMP and AoD will grow significantly. I'm gonna go through the sort of products, and at the end, I'm gonna talk to you what I think are the achievable growth rates and where that puts us compared to the other exchanges. You'll see why we need these products to compete. Firstly, where are we today? H1 2022, GBP 5.4 million revenues, up 10% year-on-year on those numbers. 5.2% market share for the last month. 400 members, steadily growing up from 39 a year ago. 9 TLPs, Rakesh from XTX is with us. We've got four products. A year ago, we only had two of significance, and that is the key. I'm gonna expand on that. Before I do, just to talk about the markets these products are in and how fast they're growing. Lit trading, 61%. That has actually shrunk in the last 5 years. It's shrunk by 10%, approximately. We have a 5% market share. Dark trading has grown and actually new regulation could mean it grows further. We're well positioned within dark as well. That's 10% of the market and growing. Periodic auctions, we have a fledgling product. They didn't exist four years ago, and they're now 4% of the market. Fast-growing. Lit closing auctions, which is dominated by the primaries, 22% of the market. They've grown 50% in the last five years. We've got 7%. I think yesterday actually was our all-time peak. We're just 7.1% in lit closing auctions. It's fast. We are diversifying into the fast-growing markets. Let's talk about the lit book, our core business. You'll know this very well. We are a unique offering. We have subscription fees and tiers, totally different from anybody else in the market. We charge by message, not value. We have this rule which means the trading outcomes, and I think Ritesh might talk about it a little more, the trading outcomes in our venue are very different from other venues. We do not allow non-client proprietary aggressive trading. That means we are effectively a low toxicity venue. However, it makes us unique, but also makes us susceptible. In current market conditions, market share can be impacted by high volatility. High volatility, you have a lot of high frequency trading, which don't trade in our market, and therefore we suffer. Markets are cyclical. We expect a cyclical recovery. You'll see that in my assumptions. Volatility will settle, high frequency become less dominant, clients will value low toxicity more, and we will rebound. We're not just sitting around waiting for that to happen. In the meantime, we've completely changed our sales structure. We built a quant team, we're going to clients with evidence-based data about the outcomes that they can achieve in our market versus others. We have an increased number of LPs. We've got more in the pipeline, and we are constantly marketing to new clients. We're not sitting still waiting for that recovery to come. That will help it when it does eventually arrive. Closing auctions, I think absolutely a success story. The market is dominated in closing auctions by primary exchanges. They're exceptionally expensive, and Aquis has given the market a real alternative. We bring competition to the close. We offer clients significant price savings. We had 2 large clients in 2019, and they've grown their volumes in the last 2 years. This year, we've really gained momentum, and that's important because it's the momentum and the trading volumes that lets us market to other clients. If you see the volumes here, this is what is being traded, half 2020 right up to half 2022. We're trading well over EUR 600 million per day. What's also more important is the value that's not matched in the closing mechanism, and you'll see that has increased from under EUR 500 million up to over EUR 750 million. That is our advertising logo. We go to clients, say, "If you trade on our market at close, this is what you can trade up against, and you'll make significant savings." That momentum is 2022 and actually is not a big surprise that we've now won a third client. We've recently added that, and we have a pipeline for 2023. Our goal there is to achieve tipping point, where we get so big you can't really ignore the other market close mechanism, and we are getting there. Aquis Matching Pool. We had to be in the dark, 10% of the markets, potentially growing more. We assumed the assets of UBS MTF in April 2022, much easier than us just starting our own dark pool one day. We had to transition those clients from the UBS technology onto our technology, no small feat, in September of this year, and we did that with no real loss of market share, and we maintained all the clients. We are exceptionally pleased that that has happened. That's what's done. Now it's how we take this forward, because we're very ambitious for the dark. We're gonna maintain a pricing advantage with significant pricing advantage against every other dark pool in Europe. We're gonna innovate, so we're completely different on the lit. I've talked about that before. We want to be innovative and unique in the dark, and we'll be able to do that. We're gonna build a Dark Lit Sweep that integrates our trading books, and we'll do that next year. And we will bring other innovations. We're working on other stuff right now, which we can't really talk about, but will be interesting as we progress. On our goal, we see no reason why not we can't become Europe's biggest matching European dark pool. And we'll talk about that when we talk about our assumptions. Okay, those are the products. What is achievable? What are our goals? We think on the lit book, we can bounce back from where we are today, which is 3.4% of the overall market, 5% of the lit market. We think we can bounce up to 5%. We think that'll be a cyclical rebound. We were at 5%. We have been at 5% in the past before volatility really hit. We think on the dark book, we can grow to 2% of the overall market. If you think about the math, that's 20% of dark volumes. We think on periodic auctions, which are 4%, we can take 1% of that, which is 25% of what's available. Conservatively, we think the closing auctions with addition going from 2 clients to 3 to 4, depends on how much they trade, but we think we can grow them up to 2%. What does that mean for our ambitions and what Alasdair talked about right at the beginning about us becoming a top-tier exchange? I think if we can execute part of this plan, that lets us have the Swiss and Nasdaq very much in our sights. I think if we can execute the whole of that plan, it lets us really attack the very top tier of the European exchanges. That's where we are today, but the real message is that a lot of diversification, 2 products to 4, and those products are in fast-growing areas, and we think they will continue to grow. Okay, the Aquis vision. We want AQSE to be the home of growth companies. I think you can see Alasdair's passion, but I think the business is committed to making that happen. We wanna be the venue of choice specifically for scale-up capital, specifically for companies in the 5-50 million GBP range. I think when Philip talks about our USP, you'll see why a lot of the changes we've made in our rules let that be apparent. Ultimately, we think, and I know that IPO markets are shut at the moment, but ultimately think once they open up, we'll be able to win a large market share of growth company IPOs. In fact, actually this year we're outselling AIM. We think if that happens for a sustained period of time, in the medium term we can get 300+ companies onto the exchange. Therefore, if you do the math and you look at the recurring revenues, what that means, we think that actually could become a material impact on the group's future revenues. Over to Philip on the USP. Thank you. What is different about Aquis? Well, Aquis's regulatory status is that of a recognized investment exchange. This is a coveted authorization that allows us to operate a true stock exchange. This stock exchange status means we have a unique access to policymakers within government, treasury, and the FCA. Alistair is a member of the influential FCA Practitioner Panel and has met with three chancellors in four months. We are also authorized to operate an SME growth market, meaning investors in Aquis companies can benefit from the full range of SME tax reliefs such as stamp duty exemption on share trades and CGT loss relief. Shares are also eligible for SIPPs, ISAs, and can benefit from VCT and EIS status. With regards to our markets, we have designed two market segments on which growth companies can IPO, Access and Apex. Access is designed for early-stage companies, and Apex is designed for companies with more developed business models that are looking to scale up. What is AQSE's USP? When we consider how best to develop the market, we started consulting the industry on the key challenges experienced by growth companies and their advisors in the IPO process. From this exercise, we set down a three-point mantra to build the best markets for growth. The mantra is be efficient, be service-led, and be innovative. On efficiency, we have designed our market rules to support a streamlined process, entrepreneurship, and investor protection. How have we done this? We've simplified and standardized the IPO documentation process. We reformed our rules to be practical, principle-based, and easily understood, and embedded good corporate governance and market disclosures. On being service-led, our teams have a real and continuous relationship with companies on our market. The regulation team are available to talk directly with companies and provide guidance as to the application of the rules without the Nomad as a middleman. On innovation, we are always horizon scanning. An example of our innovation is our rules for admitting alternative types of securities, such as warrants and convertible notes. For example, we recently admitted to trading a leading battery manufacturer. Institutional investors in Ilika had been issued with short-term and long-term warrants alongside equity investments. Aquis was able to fast-track and admit the warrants alongside the equities to its Access segment, providing a mechanism for trading in a product that was previously unlisted. No other UK exchange can do this. We recognize further inefficiencies within growth markets remain, particularly in secondary trading. AQSE is an ideal sandbox to work with government and other stakeholders to challenge existing market practice, and we have a roadmap of future innovations in this space. Those changes to our rule book, and our positioning are there already. We think our USP exists. But there's a lot more to a successful foundation attracting that number of companies than just the rule book. These are the basic sort of plumbing I would describe of an exchange, the boring stuff, but it has to be done. Actually, when we bought the company two years ago, this had not been done. We spent a lot of time, especially this year, focusing on this, and we've made really significant progress. We set ourselves a lot of targets for December of 2022, and I think we'll achieve them. Philip's already talked about refining the regulatory framework, but I also want to talk about market data parity, what that means. Online retail brokers, massively important to have access, onto the exchange, and also branding and awareness. If we are to not just attract companies that would go on to AIM, but also to attract those companies that are thinking about crowdfunding or venture capital, we'd have a much stronger brand, much more across the rest of the UK, much wider, than we currently have. Market data parity, I'll show you in a second. We're connected to vast number of, market data vendors. Our aim is to have AQSE stocks, the information be exactly the same in parity as it is versus other exchanges. We're not there yet, but we're working very hard, and we're making a lot of progress. Online retail brokers, I'll go through who we've connected, but we've connected a lot of them this year. Our aim is to get 80% coverage by the end of 2022. We're online. We're all on target. Branding and awareness, massively important. People don't know us well enough. We've just hired Adela, who many of you met, new head of marketing. We're changing our website completely. We're changing our branding completely. We're gonna really make a big push on branding and awareness, not just with the broader markets, but with advisors, brokers, the whole community. We're also seeing the progress. Here are the numbers. This is 2021. 2020 we did 7 new issues. 2021 we did 24 new issues. This year we've done 18. 18th this morning. As I said, that's more than AIM have done this year. We've got quite a few more in the pipeline. We're pushing hard to get up that 24 number for the end of the year, but markets are not easy. Fundraising capacity, 2020 we just raised over GBP 40 million. 2021 we're up over GBP 160 million. We have massively increased the number of investors prepared to invest in AQC stocks. When markets come back, we think we're really well-positioned. We've currently got 52 investors, wealth managers, PBs who are already invested in AQC stocks, and we've got 75 who are prepared to invest in AQC stocks when the right IPO comes along. That's real progress. Just wrapping all this up, Alasdair mentioned at the very beginning of the presentation the U.K.'s problem with scale-up capital, and we think AQC can be the solution to that problem. We've done a lot of work on our rules and regulations to do that, and those rules and regulations we're changing, but without lowering our standards. That's very important. We think we can provide more appropriate trading mechanisms. We talked about small cap and liquidity earlier on. We think we've got the technology to make those changes in due course, and we're doing a lot of brainstorming and working with Adrian and his team to look into that. We think with all the regulations and all the shifting sands, you know, now really is the time for change. By doing all this, by doing all these changes, we're gonna drive competition in exchanges and in the markets and provide the next generation stock exchange. With that, thank you very much. The capital markets are a vital part of capital provision to companies, but they also have a dramatic impact on the UK economy. Nobody knows this better than our last government that recently saw the impacts of what happens if you ignore markets. In fact, there are certain new things here about Trussonomics and everything else. Markets really are fundamentally important. It is therefore imperative that efficient markets adapt and progress in line with the changes in our environment. Therefore, global incumbent stock exchanges today tend to use 15-, 20-year-old, sometimes 25-year-old technologies. They haven't changed their settlement process for sort of over 30 years. Many of their participants, unfortunately, thrive on the vested interests created by this lack of change. Technology is so unbelievably different to what it was 20 years ago, and it's time to move with the times. I promise you Aquis is going to lead that charge. I believe we are in an extraordinary position to make this happen. We have three complementary business lines which are strongly related and driven by a leading technology. All three businesses today have strong growth opportunities. They're individually profitable, and I believe that each one will add extraordinary shareholder value. Today, you've heard about Aquis the company, but hopefully today we've also shown you what we believe markets will and how they will evolve and how Aquis can shape that industry. For the trading business, I maintain the vision of the subscription model. We're not downgrading our view of lit markets, and as Ritesh so eloquently put, the benefits of the rules that we put in place. We are still passionate believers in that. What we have done is launch additional products to enhance our position in the market, and we will be launching new products, which unfortunately I can't discuss today, over the coming months and years, that I will believe will achieve more than our original goal. For our technology strategy, this is beyond what I originally thought when I founded the company. This is an opportunity that we have grabbed, we've already built, and we will continue to develop it and continue to sell. I think that powerful slide when you looked at the exchange opportunity, and then we look at what the opportunities are outside of that for matching engines. When you think of how many people need to match buyers and sellers, not in financial services, all over the world in different ways, there is an opportunity we'd never dreamt of that I believe we can capitalize on. As for the primary markets, there's never been a better time, post-Brexit, post-pandemic, to see a radical change, to bring in the much-needed competitive tension among exchanges to create that innovation that will lead to great growth companies getting scale-up capital. We want to bring in that tension that has made the United States so successful between Nasdaq and the New York Stock Exchange. That competitive tension has forced and created innovation, and we wonder why our great companies move to the United States. We create that tension here, we create that innovation here, we will keep our companies. In fact, we will make the United Kingdom the place to go and find capital for growth companies. I believe the future is bright for Aquis, and although it may not feel like it today in what are complex and difficult market conditions, I also believe the future is incredibly bright for our industry. Most importantly, we are completely and utterly set up to bring extraordinary value to our shareholders. Thank you all very, very much indeed.