Strategy & Prospects

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We constantly seek to provide better pricing, more unique features, updated content and real-time trading and investing tools. This we believe will appeal in the future to a much broader segment of retail consumers in our global markets than in the past including investors who are not necessarily attracted to leverage. As a result, we have created our next generation platform and product offering to appeal to this wider community and a new global service model delivering consistency of our service promise and customer experience.

During the financial year we made significant progress in making this vision a reality with the successful launches of our next generation platforms in the UK and Germany and by early 2012 we will have launched in all of our global markets. Through innovation, CMC Markets has always set the pace for the rest of the industry and we are very confident that we have created a trading and investment business which is capable of becoming a hugely successful financial services company of the future. It is now two years since we started the transformation of our business and it is really pleasing that our underlying business and customer base has continued to remain very strong. Active customers increased to 75,922 reflecting the reprioritisation of investment from new to existing customers as we successfully invested in new services to retain loyalty in our brand.

There has been significant investment in our next generation change programme including technology, trading risk management and corporate support functions. We are particularly proud of our next generation platform which we launched in July 2010 to UK spread bet customers and in March 2011 to our CFD customers in Germany and Austria. These products are based on the next generation technology which enables radically new investment functionality as well as significantly enhanced trading capability. As a key measure of our spread bet success, over 40,000 participants have downloaded and traded on our new demo platform since launch and live account growth has also been very impressive exceeding 10,000 applications. The new CFD platform was launched in the UK in April 2011 and will follow shortly in Australia and Singapore before being rolled out to all other areas globally over the next year including our global institutional partners.

There were however many other achievements including the move to our new London HQ in August to house our 450 London based employees in a project delivered to time and budget. This programme also included the implementation of a brand new back up data centre in our HQ. We now have two state of the art data centres providing leading resilience, capacity and scale for the future.

We have also worked very hard at ensuring that we are well positioned for future regulatory change. We have seen significant change over the last year including higher capital requirements, capped leverage standards, full segregation of retail customer margin requirements in certain regions and enhanced standards on money laundering controls, disclosure and customer appropriateness in all regions. We welcome these changes and in many areas have been actively engaging with regulators as these will we believe give customers an even greater degree of confidence in our industry. In addition, we have continued to ensure that we maintain sufficient levels of surplus regulatory capital and adequate liquidity which the Group Board monitors on a regular basis as well as planning our requirements for the business in the future.

The next generation of CMC Markets is here. The transformation of the business is now in its final and most important phase whereby our growth strategy will begin to deliver outstanding shareholder returns. Huge thanks to all our employees who made 3D thinking (Dream, Dare, Deliver) happen this year.