Stephan Leithner: Letter from the CEO

Dear shareholders,
ladies and gentlemen,

the past financial year 2024 was again very successful for your Deutsche Börse AG. Our net revenue increased by 15 per cent across the Group. Organic growth accounted for 8 per cent and the remainder comes from SimCorp, which is now fully consolidated. And since our organic costs only rose by a very moderate 3 per cent, we also increased our pre-tax earnings or EBITDA by 15 per cent. This means we significantly exceeded our guidance at the beginning of 2024.

My thanks go to all the employees of Deutsche Börse around the world for making this great achievement possible. Our employees now number more than 15,000 individuals from over 120 nationalities at more than 60 locations. Our success is also a success for Europe. In addition to the 4,000 staff members here in Germany, we have over 6,000 colleagues in European offices, including Prague, Luxembourg, London, Cork, Copenhagen, Warsaw and Paris. No other company in our sector is as European as we are. In us, Europe has a provider of critical capital market infrastructure that competes at a global level.

The foundation for our success, as for our global competitiveness, is Deutsche Börse’s particular DNA. For me, this DNA consists of three strands: firstly, a long-term horizon and great continuity in how we do business; secondly, a consistent focus on innovation; and thirdly, a sense of responsibility for our special role in capital markets.

Continuity: building infrastructure often requires investment cycles that extend over many years – for us and for our customers. In return, the infrastructure aspect of our business and the high proportion of recurring revenue it brings form the basis for our continued strong organic growth. 

Innovative strength: our employees are the passionate engineers of the capital markets. This applies just as much to the 5,000 colleagues in IT as to those in the product and customer-facing areas. We strive to deliver solutions for functioning capital markets that are ever better, ever more efficient and ever more reliable. 

Responsibility: as entrepreneurs we have a long-term responsibility to our stakeholders – primarily to you, ladies and gentlemen, our investors, but also to our customers, employees, regulators and to society at large. Deutsche Börse clearly is not “just another company”.

Building on this DNA, we made important progress with the implementation of our Horizon 2026 strategy again during the past financial year – on all four axes:

First: we generated strong organic growth of 8 per cent in net revenue without treasury results in 2024. Here we can continue to build on our secular growth drivers. They will enable us to keep scaling our business. They include the trend from over-the-counter trading to on-exchange trading, for financial products, but also for power trading at the European Energy Exchange (EEX). Another vital trend for us is the growing importance of large institutional investors, i.e. pension funds, insurance companies and asset managers, as direct participants in all areas of capital markets.

Second: this focus on large institutional investors plays a particularly important role in our new business segment Investment Management Solutions (IMS), which we have continued to develop with great success. IMS now consists of two clearly focused companies: ISS STOXX, the data, rating and index provider, and the software provider SimCorp, where we have integrated Axioma. IMS already makes a significant contribution to our recurring net revenue, accounting for 22 per cent of Group revenue. Altogether, the Group’s recurring revenue now represents more than 60 per cent of our net revenue. This bolsters our resilience and stands for stable, dependable organic growth.

Third: we have been a pioneer in the digitalisation of capital markets for decades and intend to remain so. The efficiency and security of our underlying technological IT platforms are the backbone of digitalisation. At the start of the year the proportion of our computing capacity taking place in the cloud reached the 60 per cent mark. This not only enables us to increase data security, but also to strengthen our ability to innovate via the cooperation with our cloud partners Google, Microsoft and SAP. Alongside Google Cloud we are shaping the future of digital trading with our Digital Asset Platform. With our subsidiaries Clearstream and Eurex Clearing we successfully took part in the ECB trials of the potential of new technologies, such as distributed ledgers, for implementing a central bank money. Our D7 product for digital securities issuance plays a pioneering role here. Last year the volume of issuance on this platform passed the €10 billion mark. 

Fourth: effective allocation of our capital, which makes our promise to keep increasing the dividend per share from year to year particularly important – in addition to internal investments in adding value and highly selective M&A activities. This year we are proposing an increase to €4.00 per share. It would be the tenth increase in succession. We also use share buybacks as an additional, flexible instrument for distributing free cash flow. Because our cash flow is high, and our available funds have risen significantly. We resumed share buybacks in early 2024 and are making use of them again this year too.

As a result, we are stronger today than ever before – and so are in the best possible position for implementing our strategy Horizon 2026 again consistently in the current year. A clear organisational focus is an important foundation for our success! 

I would like to take this opportunity, dear shareholders, to thank you for your loyalty. Rest assured that we will do everything we can to increase your capital with an appropriate balance of risk and return. Our strategy gives us a clear guidance for doing so. 

Yours,

Stephan Leithner

Frankfurt/Main, 20 March 2025