TMX Group Limited (X) February 10, 2026 Conference Transcript

Thank you all for joining Bank of America's 34th annual financial services conference. I'm Eli Abood. Craig Siegenthaler and I cover U.S. exchanges at B of A. And I'm pleased to introduce John McKenzie, the CEO of TMX. TMX is Canada's largest exchange with a business that spans cash equities, options, rates, fixed income, and energy. It is also one of the largest listing venues in the world, providing capital formation services to almost 4,000 companies. John has been with TMX for over 20 years and has worn many different hats over that time. Among other things, he was the architect of several major acquisitions, including Maple, the Montreal Exchange, TradePort, and VedaFi. John, thank you for joining us. Thank you. Happy to be here. Let's kick things off with the IPO backdrop. TMX almost doubled its number of IPOs in 2025. What's your confidence in being able to maintain this pace? and to what extent do the ongoing Canada-U.S. trade disputes threaten to pour cold water on your momentum?

Well, it's a good question to start, and I actually think the numbers are the doubling. We went from one to two, so it wasn't huge numbers to begin with in terms of the IPO landscape, and there's been a quiet landscape for a couple years. But on IPO specifically, we have now one of the deepest pipelines of private companies ready to go public than we've had in a decade plus, and so it's really positive in terms of companies that are ready to go at different sizes and in different sectors so the potential to see a lot of new issues coming to market is there and you know prior to kind of 2021 we had been on a seven year run of being net ads to our public company ecosystem and it's just that last two years that we've seen that dislocation so if the conditions remain strong and we have confidence in the market i would see a lot of good new issues coming and the other indicator you can take to that was the financing activity of already listed companies. So you mentioned we have almost 4,000 listed names. We saw a 60% increase last year in the financing activity on exchange. And so that's really positive in terms of the leading indicator that the markets are strong and you can get good deals priced. But I always want to remind people that the IPO is not the only way onto our markets. The thing about our market structure with both venture and senior is there's actually a lot of different ways for companies to come on. and a lot of companies come on through the junior track on the small cap exchange usually through a capital pool company and then they can graduate up to the senior market so even though there was only you know two net traditional ipos last year there actually were 11 companies that came up from the junior market that in any other jurisdiction would have been an ipo and that's that's why when you look at any global stats on new listings you mentioned we were you know leading in the world on listings total we're also i think number two in the world for new listings last year got it And zooming out, which businesses do you anticipate will be the largest contributors to your organic revenue growth over the next couple of years? And I always lead some folks to you to look at the guidance we've given around the growth profile of the firm. So we divide our businesses up into what we call market growth, things that kind of grow with the economy and the market itself. Strong growth, which is kind of the mid-single plus, five to seven-ish, and high-growth businesses that are high single, low double, or more. And we've got a number of business segments. Actually, over half of our business is now in this high-growth category. And so the examples of the ones I'd point to that are going to drive growth for the firm are, it's the majority of our global insight space. So TMX Trayport, our energy platform, which has been a long-time high-growth business for us, is going to continue to have that strength going forward. And we have a lot of white space for that franchise. Our Vetify franchise that you mentioned earlier on, which is our index and benchmark piece, That business was up 25% in the last quarter of last year, 13% organic, 12% inorganic. And so we see that as another high-growth area going forward. Our derivatives franchise should be another high-growth area going forward. Now, it can be lumpy. The curves don't go like this. They go like this. And last year, we were up about 30% in that business. So it will be high-growth over the long term. And the last area that we're talking more and more about is actually corporate solutions. So within our capital formation business, we talked about the IPO capital raising, but we also do a full suite of corporate solutions for companies, be they private or public, to help them with capital raising activities. So these are like trust mandates, transfer agencies, employee plans, shareholder registry, things like that. And now disclosure tools, which we added just over a year ago. That's one of our high growth segments as well. It now represents 44% of capital formation is actually in this corporate solutions business, and we have ambition to make more than half of that franchise. So I'd say those are the key pieces that will drive the growth going forward.

And I know you just broke ground in a new office in New York. So can you talk about your ambitions in the United States?

My ambition is to get invited to Miami every single year when it's minus 32 in Toronto. Yeah, our ambitions are quite straightforward. Just over two years ago, I hosted our team in New York for a dinner, and we could see the entire organization around a table for eight. And now we have about 240, 250 people in the U.S. across multiple business lines. And that is intentional. We really are thoughtful about the fact that we've built some great capabilities in Canada just north of the border, and a lot of them have value-add in the U.S. market. So to give you just a few examples, some of this is we built, some of it's we bought. We're doing Trayport here as well because the energy solution that we've built out in Europe is applicable in the U.S. market in terms of solving for some of the fragmented energy markets here. So we're building that up and scaling it up. We have our market data business, and we've just now expanded in the U.S. with the acquisition of a team from Veta, from Verity, which is doing, you know, buy-side research management tools and AI-based improved information sets. So that's been a part of that solution as well. we have the vetify business obviously that we've been in a couple years now based in new york that is really doing index creation and etf solutions and actually while based in new york much more global than it used to be as well with everything we've added to it and the most recent launch being alpha x us so we took a lot of the capabilities that we built in canada around improved execution quality trading and we built it into an ats in the u.s market which we've now been live on for about a year. So we are intending to be a multi-solution player here in the U.S. to meet the needs of both the trading and the investing community.

Let's dig deeper into Alpha X U.S. I know it just celebrated its first birthday. So looking back on year one, how has progress trended relative to your expectations?

We had high expectations, and we've met all of them. So if you think about the timeline for this, First of all, this is a product that we built out in about a year from ideation to building out new technology stack to regulatory approval. So really fast path to bring a new marketplace to the public domain. And since that time, we've had continuous additions in terms of clients sign up. Our volumes are exceeding expectations. So we are really happy what we're delivering. And January is another record month for what we're doing. And it should be. I mean, every month should almost be a record when you're in that growth phase. So when we benchmark it, because this is not an exchange, it's an ATS, it's fit for purpose, but when we compare it to other ATS launches in the U.S., this is actually one of the fastest ones to its volume levels that the U.S. has seen in a number of years. So I'd say we're off to the races. Year two is even a bigger test than year one. It's just can you build on the success of year one, and we've got a great team doing that. And we'd like to see that growth continue now, because that'll be then the opportunity to add more product, more capability to it in terms of continuing to build out this marketplace.

Your U.S. peers, NASDAQ, ICE, SIBO, all of them have been de-emphasizing U.S. cash equities and investing in other areas. For intraday trades, they barely squeak out a couple of mils of revenue per share traded. So what do you see in this market that they don't?

I'm not sure it's that we see things that they don't. I think we're coming from a different size. And so what can be a meaningful opportunity to build out may actually be too small in terms of the priority for a NASDAQ and CBOE. And it gives us an opportunity to actually build some capability. I also think that, you know, candidly, we've proven ourselves in Canada competing against some of the same players who have competed north of the border and we've been very successful. And so it gives us some confidence that we can take those capabilities south of the border as well. And the last thing I'll put on that is that, you know, despite current geopolitics, Canada and the U.S. are some of the closest marketplaces in the world. They're very much interconnected. The border is almost seamless in terms of capital flow. So we actually have a lot of clients that operate both in Canada and the U.S. And so it's actually a natural extension for us to serve them in Canada and serve them in the U.S. market as well. You know, we've got a lot of, you know, nascent U.S. clients that are on the platform, But we also have a lot of clients like TD, BMO, that have both Big Canada and U.S. operations. They're active on the platform as well. So it just makes sense for us to serve those clients everywhere they want to work.

I wanted to go on two new products that you're scaling up right now. Secure General Collateral Notes, which is a new money market instrument. And then your Canadian Collateral Management Service, which brings tri-party repos to the Canadian market for the first time. What problems are these products solving and why are they a better solution than what currently exists in the marketplace?

Well, starting with the latter one, what collateral management is there to serve is the it's the inefficiencies in the collateral markets. So when when brokers and dealers and banks are trading different venues, you end up with lazy or trapped capital in them, because if you can't get your margins efficiently set and it's not easy to move capital from one to another, you end up just over utilizing your balance sheet and it's inefficient and that has a cost because you can't use that capital anywhere else so the collateral management solution is designed to help take that inefficiency out to be able to port your capital where it needs to be really identify how much you need and therefore bring down how much you need to have in these various entities and redeploy it to build your business other ways to trade more to support more clients etc etc so that's the basis of the solution we're not inventing it from scratch we've partnered with clearstream that's delivered the solution in the european market already and but really to get it off the ground we needed to get our own modernization of our stack done which we did last year so last year we went live with a whole new platform for post-trade went live in the first half of the year a full modernized stack and that allows us to do these products on top because it makes it much easier to move collateral around and create that mobility. The SGC note is really a funding solution. So, you know, a lot of, you know, companies do things like bankers acceptances to do short-term funding. And that market essentially went away when we changed overnight rates. So this was a way for us to create a unique product to fill in some of the gap for the industry. And we're kind of like the only people that can do it because we have both the derivative shop, the clearinghouse, and the trustee that it takes to put that product together. Now, interesting on both of these things is, you know, next gen, as we do more and more work on tokenization, there will likely be tokenized versions of these products in the future. And so tokenizing collateral is essentially the potential next step in doing this. But in the near term, these are the ones that create the efficiency for the users.

Got it. But can you share any details around these products' contributions, your results in 2025, and how that could potentially ramp into 2026?

I mean, it's a rounding error in 2025 because, you know, these products are essentially contingent on, again, getting our technology in place. They've potential to be meaningful as part of our post-trade business in 2026. The one that's the most meaningful is the collateral management solution. And that's when we're even – we've got clients like the Bank of Canada itself looking to how they participate.

Got it. And your competitors, NYSEA and NASDAQ, have been laying the groundwork for trading stocks on the blockchain. I think you teased it a little bit, but how is TMX viewing the opportunity to utilize blockchain technology?

Yeah, I'm not sure they're saying it's an opportunity or not or something they need to do. We've been active in blockchain technology for 15 years, and that's the interesting piece. A lot of us have been looking at different use cases over and over again. And it hasn't been a clear winner in terms of a use case that created real value to the industry. So on the tokenization of equities, we're staying very close to what both NYSE, NASDAQ, and DTC are looking at. From a Canadian marketplace, if we see demand, we think we're the right player to do that. Because we, again, we would have all that piece in our franchise, right from trading right through to clearing and settlement. And I do think it's critically important that if we do go down the path of tokenizing equities, we do in a way that interacts and is standardized with the central market ecosystem. If we do not, then a tokenized equity is just a fracturing of liquidity. It actually has potential for adverse price movements for investors. It's less efficient from a settlement standpoint. So we want to make sure we get the industry solution right to solve for that, so that if there is a valuable use case for someone to take a token form, it can be done with the same infrastructure so they still have the value of the efficiency of the centralized system at the same time you always want to remind folks that the you know the u.s canada this is some of the most efficient capital markets ecosystems in the world so when you actually tokenize a security and take it out of the ecosystem you lose some of that efficiency so that's what we're working on to stay close to it so we can modify the canadian market as appropriate if the u.s market goes there and then similarly at the same time we're exploring other tokenization solutions within that ecosystem so we think there may be opportunity to do that structure around private companies which then would allow you to have better ledger keeping and ease of exchange again we're not seeing a huge demand side for this yet but we're exploring the capability to do it you've done six bold on deals over the past two years how are you thinking about mna going forward you still feel like you're missing any capabilities well we never felt like we were missing capabilities before we've always driven M&A by by the strategy that we're trying to employ so the growth strategy we have across our three core pillars of of capital formation global trading global insights we've looked for what are those assets out there that can help us to accelerate so I mean to your point and maybe that's fair to weigh in terms of filling capabilities when we brought in new indices as we have a few times now with both index research the Credit Suisse indices, the nuclear indices at the end of the year. Each of those ones capture different either geographies or asset classes that we could add into the portfolio rather than build ourselves. And so they're kind of build-buy decisions. Similarly, ETF Stream that we brought on last year gave us distribution capability in the European marketplace. So we could do, you know, similarly like we do in the U.S. in terms of marketing for ETFs and distribution, we can do that now in the U.K. as well in that content creation. So we don't feel like there are any gaps, we're always looking at these kind of things in terms of how can we move the business ahead faster. Similarly on corporate solutions, I mentioned we brought in Newsfile, that is a complimentary product to the other products we've got in there and that's creating cross selling opportunities that we never had before. So I can go into a bank that is a trust client and say, how about you look at our Newswire solution as well rather than using another competitor from outside our ecosystem. So that strategy is going to continue going forward. So we are, you know, continuing to look at a lot of opportunities that we can tuck things in. We are looking at indexes that we can, essentially, these are asset purchases. They would be separated out from other businesses that we could then integrate into our platform. We were looking at the data operations as well, like the Verity piece that came in in the fall, as long as we can integrate it in and help it grow faster and help it grow us faster.

What about Box, the Boston Options Exchange? Right now you own a 51% stake and don't directly operate the business. Are you happy with the status quo there? How much do you have to gain by integrating that business into TMX?

So I'm happy with the performance of the business. It's a really good business. They've got a unique product set. The clients are very happy with Box. So I'm really happy with how the business is performing and what it can do. the structure is not ideal because that that structure the model you talked about does limit what you can do with the the business strategically so we're always open discussions with our partners around the table in terms of how do we take it to another level that would allow us collectively to do more with it and so that's our priority going forward is to continue to explore how we can use that asset with other things to find new opportunities to work with it And how are you thinking about capital allocation more broadly?

How are you weighing M&A against capital return and organic investment?

I mean, we're blessed with the fact that we do not have to weigh them against each other. We do look at return on capital and ensure we're deploying capital efficiently. But as we've demonstrated now multiple times the ability to lever up for a sizable transaction and then to de-lever back down, we've got a lot of confidence from our partners that we can continue to do that. Now, I will say that when we took on the leverage to do Vettify, we did suspend our normal course issuer bid until our leverage came back to kind of our target level, and it's back there now. So that is something that we could restart. So we are continuing to look to priorities that are keep building the business organically, and that's part of our plan of kind of reinvesting in our expense base to keep building the business. inorganic opportunities to accelerate the strategy maintaining a payout on our dividend of 40 to 50 percent so that the investors participate in the growth of the firm so as long as we're continuing to grow the bottom line at that double digit pace that we we guide to you would see the dividend moving at that same pace and that's why we were very comfortable bringing the dividend up another nine percent last week and then reconsider the the ability to buy back the stock now that our leverage is back in target range got it let's talk about trade port so you've had three years in a row of 20 plus percent revenue growth can you help us understand how much of this growth is sustainable and how much of it do you attribute to the really unique geopolitical situation over the past couple of years well so we've never guided to 20 percent we've always guided to high growth being you know high single low double but i will you know candidly the entire time we've owned trade port we've grown it more than 10 every year since we bought it in 2017 um and there are a number of factors the the the geopolitical piece is a bit of an aside the at the end of the day you've got an energy market which is the core part of our market the the european energy market which is still a long-term growth market so even though we've really developed it well and that business is more mature in europe that market will continue to expand so as you have demand for energy increasing you have different sources of supply you have transformation of the energy ecosystem that creates more points to trade and over time you bring more traders in to do that and again that's not a straight line you'll have some peaks and valleys in that we had a real big lift the year before last in terms of new traders and you know the new trader growth or subscriber growth in the fourth quarter last year wasn't as high is those other periods because you will have steps and valleys. When you've got periods with a lot of energy volatility, you have more traders that will come to the market. Folks will sit up and shop. We do more new logos. So that will continue over time. But the other piece that's going to drive the long-term potential in this business is there's a lot of also global white space to grow into. Now, these are harder to do, and they take time to scale up. But as I mentioned earlier, we are scaling up in the U.S., and that's particularly around gas and power we are now on the ground in japan and so as the japanese market opens up and matures we'll be able to support that market if it grows to potential the japanese power market can be as big as germany and france combined so these are sizable marketplaces but they're at different stages of development and the third area we're continuing to focus on is how do we actually expand Trayport from gas and power into refined oil? And so this is another marketplace that when you're outside of the liquid products on ice and CME, all the refined products are generally over the counter. And if we can bring them on the screen, we can make that market a whole lot more efficient. But it's step change. You've got to get there kind of broker by broker to start to build that liquidity and transform what is essentially a voice market today into something that's digital. And so that's what we're working to do over the long term.

I know a lot has been written about the multi-manager hedge funds getting into the energy space. So I was wondering if you could give us any insight into how you're seeing the growth, the trade port by client channel.

Great. More traders. It really is. The more traders and the more different channels you can bring in, the more valuable the platform becomes. Because the value of the platform is really when you've got disaggregated supply and demand, And you create that one space where people can see the entirety of the marketplace. So I always think those are positive to add new liquidity to the market and new traders.

Got it. The cash equity space has been another area of strength. Canadian equities trading volume was up 27% year over year in 2025. Can you help us unpack the acceleration over there?

Yeah, wait till you see January. And I always want to thank the U.S. for creating lots of volatility in the market. because I think January we're up 50% to 60% over the same time a year ago. Not that one minute a month makes a trend. But you're seeing a couple of features there. There's a lot of volatility in the marketplace. There's a lot of retail interest in the marketplace. And there's a lot of net new product. And so that's the trend over time when you think about it as we've moved from a mutual fund market more to an ETF market is there's more product that's tradable on exchange than there was in the past. So in 2025, not only did we see that lift in equity trading, in terms of new product, we had 239 new ETFs listed. That was the new record. The year before was the record. It was 124. So there's continued product innovation, very retail-oriented. You've got more retail-oriented brokers that are putting these products in front of their clients. And so it's a real nice spot to be in from an equity platform standpoint. Now, volatility can go away as well. And so I'm not saying that these are permanent marks or that trend continues, but the conditions are really good. The other place that you're seeing that track through is on the derivatives market. So our derivatives market, we trade options on ETFs. That platform is up 80% year over year in 2025. And so you're getting that trade into the options profile as well.

Got it. I did want to hit on artificial intelligence as well. I know the whole exchange space has, it's up for debate, whether you are a beneficiary or maybe it's a headwind.

Well, we're going to close the debate today.

Perfect. Yeah. How do you see TMX position for the rise of AI?

Yeah, I continue to think we're in a really strong position. And the reason being is the types of businesses that are the most likely to be disrupted as you bring AI tools to market and you normalize AI usage. are ones that have less proprietary nature to them so even though like 40 plus percent of our business is global insights which is data information sets and things and information tools the vast majority of it is actually proprietary nature so why data links is proprietary data that comes from our marketplaces that is our ip and that actually puts us in a very strong position to be the ones to build ai tools on top of to create new information sets and use cases on top versus someone outside who still needs to get the data from us. Now, where it can transform is it can transform the way data gets used and consumed. And so AI tools that may impact how a broker or a trader or a buy side consumes data, and let's be candid, we may see a lot fewer seats in the future in terms of the data users, but that doesn't mean the firms aren't going to be using actually even more data than before. So I see the model over time will convert more from being a seat-based model to a usage model. And I think that's actually a great transition for organizations like ours, because I'd rather go to an enterprise partnership with our clients and have them use and consume our data everywhere they can in the franchise, and we will just price it over time based on usage. So I think that's going to transform over time, what that looks like, but that's not necessarily a risk. TradePort is a screen platform, And I know we've had folks that have been worried about that piece. But again, it's a proprietary network. The data is private. You need to be in the network to use it. So there isn't an AI disruption risk around that. And even in our index business, we're looking at how we actually layer the AI tools on top so we can actually do a better job of index creation. But when you create an index, that is IP that's then baked into a product. So it's very, very sticky at that point. And then even within data sets themselves, One of the reasons we brought Verity into the organization last year is because they've actually created some really good AI-based analytics tools. And so they've built the tools to be able to take insider holding data, insider trading data, and turn it into investment signals. And I think that's what we're going to see more of in this space, where you layer on AI tools to create new information sets, and clients are going to want that from a trusted source. Because then the trusted source, that takes less liability out but then doing their own AI tools on top, and then they internalize their own risk. So we're in a good spot here. We also have a lot of opportunity on the efficiency side. As we deploy more things in our organization, we're already deploying things like co-pilot through our development chains. We're getting development efficiency in TradePort already. That's allowed us to increase the amount of development we're doing with the same size workforce. So this is the first year in the eight years we've been in this business that we haven't had to scale up our development team in 2026. So we're already seeing efficiency. And this is going to be a real year where we test how big the efficiencies are and try to get it in terms of, you know, how much coding can we do per person, those types of things. And we've deployed generative AI tools all through the firm. So we've already got, I think, 90-plus percent adoption in the company of people utilizing these things to make their own work processes more efficient. So it's not going to say that I'm not nervous and I don't lose sleep because I lose sleep about things I don't understand. But I do believe that we are very, our competitive moats here are very strong. And the opportunity for us to create new value-added services on top is very good.

And to wrap up, John, looking back at your meetings over the last couple of days, what other tailwinds or components of the TMX story do you think investors are overlooking or not fully appreciating?

I don't know if it's over. I mean, we've talked about AI and tokenization a lot. I mean, that's just the testament of what's gone on in the last couple of weeks. And the nice thing is I think our investors have really gotten it because most of the feedback I get back is, this doesn't really apply to you guys that much, does it? Like, that's right. So why do you think you're being sold off? And I think it's because the end investor, not the asset manager, but the end investor may not get it. So there is some onus on us to continue to do more education about the ecosystem the proprietary nature of it the way it works and how we're investing to actually continue to bring value and i've always been a believer in the long term is helping understand people understand what's our long-term potential of this organization and we are not backing off our long-term guidance in terms of where we're going to grow the ability to continue you know continue to create more operating leverage so that kind of mid to high single top line growth firm wide the ability to translate that into double digit growth at the enterprise level level bottom line the transformational metrics we have in terms of continuing to grow more globally um i mean we didn't talk about it earlier but even though we are canadian based 51 of our revenue is outside canada now um and i think that's an area that's going to continue to grow so more global more subscription base more data information in the sets um and a growth curve that's kind of top quartile of our peer group so i think people get it and as long as we keep proving it quarter after quarter uh we'll see that come back from where we were got it john on behalf of all of us at b of a thank you so much for joining us absolute pleasure hope to see you again next year thank you