Webull - Earnings Call - Q3 2025

Transcript

Speaker 1

Good evening, and welcome to Webull's Third Quarter 2025 conference call. All participants will be in a listen-only mode. Should you need assistance, please signal a conference specialist by pressing the star key followed by zero. After today's presentation, there will be an opportunity to ask questions. To ask a question, you may press star, then one on a touch-tone phone. To withdraw your question, please press star, then two. Please note, this event is being recorded. I would now like to turn the conference over to Carlos Questell, Webull's Head of Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Speaker 0

Good morning, good afternoon, and good evening, everyone. Welcome to Webull's Third Quarter 2025 conference call. Earlier today, we issued a press release detailing our third quarter financial results. A copy of the release can be found on our IR website at Webullcorp.com under the Investor Relations tab. Please note that this call is being recorded and will be available for replay via our IR website. During the call, we'll be making forward-looking statements about the company's performance and business outlook. These statements are based on how we see things today and contain elements of uncertainty. For additional information concerning the factors that can cause actual results to differ materially, please refer to the cautionary statement and risk factors contained in our filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission and press release, both of which can be accessed via our website.

Today's presentation will include a discussion on adjusted operating expenses, adjusted operating profit, and adjusted net income, all non-GAAP financial measures. Reconciliation of these non-GAAP financial measures to their most directly comparative GAAP measures are included in the press release that we issued today. It's important to note that although we believe that these non-GAAP measures provide useful information about our operating results, they should not be considered in isolation or construed as an alternative to their directly comparative GAAP measures. Furthermore, other companies may calculate similarly titled measures differently, limiting their usefulness as comparative measures to our data. We encourage investors and others to review our financial information in its entirety and not rely on a single financial measure. With me today is our Group President and U.S. CEO, Anthony Denier, and our Group CFO, H. C. Wang.

We will begin with prepared remarks and then take questions at the end. With that, I would like to turn it over to Anthony.

Speaker 2

Thank you, Carlos, and hello, everyone. Thanks for joining us today. Webull's third quarter results demonstrate continued momentum and growth in what remains a highly favorable market environment for our business. Our Q3 results reflect this environment, but also our global team's continued ability to achieve our goals, which drove strong results across almost every metric. Strong corporate earnings, interest rate reductions, and rallies in technology and AI stocks have driven robust market conditions, with the S&P maintaining near-record levels throughout the quarter. This backdrop, combined with our ongoing technological innovation, product expansion, and increased access across geographies, continues to create significant opportunities for our customers worldwide. Webull is exceptionally well-positioned to continue to capitalize on the global consumer shift towards mobile-first trading. We're executing well against this favorable backdrop.

This quarter marks significant milestones in product diversification and geographic expansion as we continue to see high growth across our platform on the heels of our public listing. We successfully reintroduced crypto back to the Webull app and expanded our offerings in the space to include crypto futures trading. We also introduced sports prediction markets through our partnership with Kalshi and are on track to achieve a major international milestone as Webull Canada will soon become the first non-U.S. brokerage in our group to reach $1 billion in assets under management. Just last week, we launched Vega, the latest evolution of our AI-powered decision-making partner, which will enhance the investor experience by providing personalized insights and analysis to inform trading decisions for our users. These offerings are already leading to meaningful ROI.

We're seeing strong adoption among both new and existing customers as the platform successfully reengages dormant accounts through compelling new products. During the quarter, we brought crypto trading back to the Webull platform and brought Webull Pay back into our group, which added $1.2 billion in AUM and over 140,000 funded accounts. Now, over 50% of new funded accounts are trading crypto. We will continue to meet investors where they are and increase our share of wallet by introducing them to our expanded products and solutions over time. Our differentiated offerings, including direct deposit enablement and the launch of corporate bonds, continue to set Webull apart from competitors. With each new product, we continue to strive to be the one-stop platform for traders looking to get the most personalized and agile investment opportunities on the market.

I'm proud of the Webull team for the innovation and execution they've demonstrated in reaching these milestones. We've reached another important milestone in our journey as a public company with the expiration of all shareholder lockup restrictions on October 8th, which significantly increased our public float, further enhancing our market liquidity. With that, let me now walk you through the key highlights from the quarter in more detail. Here, on slide two, I'll walk you through our third quarter highlights. We delivered another strong quarter for Webull shareholders, with year-over-year revenue growth significantly outpacing increasing operating expenses, driving solid margin expansion for another quarter. We recorded top-line revenue of $156.9 million, representing 55% growth year-over-year, driven by four key factors.

First, customer assets reached an all-time high of $21.2 billion, inclusive of the $1.2 billion in assets from the acquisition of Webull Pay, marking the third consecutive quarter of AUM growth. Second, equity trading volume surged for the third straight quarter, up 71% year-over-year. Third, our on-time delivery of new product offerings, including crypto futures and prediction markets, enhanced stickiness and new user growth. Fourth, we continue to broaden access to our leading platform across new and varied geographies. We recorded adjusted expenses for the quarter of $120 million, representing a year-over-year increase of just 13%. Our increase in expenses was mainly driven by increased brokerage and transaction expenses, reflecting higher trading volume, as well as higher general and administrative expenses driven by increased compensation and bonus pools, reflecting headcount growth and stronger-than-expected performance. The increase in G&A expenses was partially offset by a lower marketing spend.

Lastly, we delivered a fourth straight quarter of operating profitability, with a strong 28.7 percentage point increase in adjusted operating margin on a year-over-year basis to 23.4%, representing adjusted operating profit of $36.7 million for the third quarter. We continue to focus on execution and margin expansion, reflecting our commitment to delivering sustainable growth and value for our shareholders. Turning now to slide three and our 2025 roadmap. We continue to enhance our existing product offering while executing against the ambitious roadmap we outlined in Q2 to support our growing customer base and expand market share through new offerings and geographies. We're particularly excited about the launch of Vega. Vega is an AI tool that combines news, earnings, and technical data to deliver a focused, intuitive experience that helps both new and seasoned investors navigate modern trading and make smarter decisions.

Other key features of Vega include statistical insights for options trading that showcase investment opportunities and voice commands for placing trades as we continue to enable accessibility on our platform. As we continue to broaden our offerings to solidify our position as a one-stop investment platform for retail and sophisticated investors, Vega will play a crucial role in enabling further consolidation as investors gain powerful insights across their portfolio of equities, bonds, crypto, and more. Webull Premium, our subscription-based service for active traders and long-term investors, has now reached 90,000 subscribers, a 20% increase from just last quarter, and is tracking well ahead of our internal target of 100,000 subscribers by year-end. Our premium offerings have been further bolstered by the introduction of corporate bonds during Q3.

Corporate bonds provide customers with low-risk investment opportunities and steady yields while also facilitating asset transfers from traditional brokerages, positioning Webull as the one-stop platform for sophisticated investors. I'm excited to discuss the launch of prediction markets on our platform. Through our partnership with Kalshi, we've introduced sports prediction markets covering NFL, NBA, NASCAR, F1, and college football events. This offering provides an engaging and accessible trading experience that lowers barriers to entry. The results have been exceptional. More than 30 million prediction contracts were placed in October, nearly twice as many as were placed in September, over half of which were sports contracts. As I stated previously, the return of crypto to our platform has delivered instant results and has become a significant driver of funded account growth.

While we currently offer crypto trading to our customers in the U.S., Brazil, and Australia, we will continue expanding crypto offerings across geographies and are actively exploring digital asset licenses in numerous other markets. Finally, our expansion of products available internationally continues to progress. During the quarter, we launched our Webull platform in the European Union, beginning in the Netherlands, and anticipate launching in additional European markets over the coming months. We also entered into a strategic partnership with Meritz Financial Group to offer U.S. market access to Meritz customers in South Korea. In addition, Level 3 options trading is now live in Singapore and Hong Kong and is set to launch in Japan imminently. We are excited to continue to scale and reach even more global customers as our product offerings continue to grow.

We have now over 700,000 funded accounts outside the U.S., and we continue to prioritize delivering U.S. products to international markets and building diversified revenue streams globally. On slide four, I'll discuss our growth in both users and funded accounts. During the third quarter, we added roughly 1 million registered users, bringing the platform to a total of 25.9 million registered users, a more than 3 million increase from the third quarter of last year, representing a 17% increase. Importantly, that 1 million increase also represents a large sequential increase, showcasing that our product and geographic expansion is driving robust user growth. Webull was originally launched as a global market data platform before evolving to become the leading digital investment platform we are today. As a result, we have a significant number of registered users in geographies where our trading platform is not yet available.

We are committed to offering access to best-in-class market data and information to everyone, whether or not they currently have a brokerage account with us. On the right side of the slide, you can see funded account metrics. Funded accounts, defined as accounts where customers have made an initial deposit that has remained above zero for 45 consecutive calendar days as of the record date, showed healthy growth. We added approximately 200,000 new funded accounts this quarter, inclusive of accounts onboarded through our acquisition of Webull Pay, bringing the total number of funded accounts to 4.93 million, a 9% year-over-year increase. As we continue to innovate and enhance our offering, we're also happy to report that our quarterly retention rate remained high and grew slightly on a sequential basis to 97.7%.

Turning to slide five, as I previously mentioned, Webull customer assets reached an all-time high of $21.2 billion, inclusive of $1.2 billion in assets from the acquisition of Webull Pay, representing an 84% increase on a year-over-year basis and a $5.3 billion sequential increase. The growth in customer assets reflects strong momentum driven by favorable market dynamics and robust deposit activity. Our customers deposited over $2.1 billion during the quarter, a 31% increase year-over-year, bringing our cumulative net deposits over the last 12 months to $5.9 billion. On slide six, I'll provide an overview of trading volumes for the quarter. While we're always looking to expand and enhance our product offerings, growth in our core products also continued to accelerate. Our equity volume increased by 71% on a year-over-year basis and 26.7% sequentially, totaling $204 billion. Our options contract volume was 147 million in the third quarter.

The associated revenue continues to outpace contract volume growth after implementing a new pricing model in the second half of last year. We are pleased to see the continued results of that initiative with a steady increase in the monetization of our options business. We are now midway through Q4 and are on pace for further growth. October was our best month ever in terms of customer deposits, trading volumes, and revenues. Our new products are driving increases in market share and the consolidation of users' portfolio onto the Webull app. With that, I'll pass the call over to H.C. for a closer look at our financial results for the quarter. Thank you, Anthony. Thanks to everyone for joining us today. Slide seven shows that in the third quarter, Webull generated revenue of $156.9 million, up 55% year-over-year.

Adjusted operating expenses for the quarter came in at $120.2 million, an increase of 13% from a year ago. We continue to take a disciplined approach to balancing execution costs and operating efficiency as we continue to scale the business. We are pleased with our continued margin expansion and profitability. On the following slides, I will walk through the components of revenues and expenses in more detail. Now, turning to slide eight on our profitability performance. As Anthony mentioned earlier, Webull has now recorded its fourth consecutive quarter of operating profitability. In Q3, adjusted operating profit reached $36.7 million, our most profitable quarter ever, representing a 28.7% improvement in adjusted operating profit margin year-over-year. Adjusted net income for the quarter was $32.9 million, up $38.6 million year-over-year. Adjusted net profit margin improved 26.5% year-over-year, reaching 20.9% of revenue.

Turning to slide nine, our trading-related revenues continue to accelerate, supported by higher trading volumes across all asset classes and improved monetization, particularly in options. Momentum from the second quarter carried through to Q3. Daily average revenue trades increased 56% year-over-year, driving a 64% rise in trading-related revenues. On a per-trade basis, revenue increased to $1.53. Turning to slide 10 on interest-related income, this category includes interest earned on client and corporate cash, as well as revenues from margin financing and stock lending activities. In the third quarter, interest-related income grew 32% year-over-year to $43.4 million, driven by higher interest-earning balances across all categories: corporate cash, client cash, margin lending, and fully-paid stock lending, reflecting the continued growth of our client assets. Finally, let's turn to slide 11 for a closer look at operating expenses.

As a high-growth business with meaningful operating leverage, we expect operating expenses to increase as we scale, but at a much slower pace compared to revenue growth. In the third quarter, operating expenses grew 13% year-over-year, primarily due to higher brokerage and transaction costs associated with rapid growth in trading volumes and product expansion. General and administrative expenses also increased, reflecting headcount growth and higher bonus accruals tied to stronger-than-expected performance. These increases were partially offset by lower marketing spend as we continue to optimize our marketing and branding strategy. We remain committed to maintaining expense discipline while continuing to invest strategically in innovation, customer acquisition, and wallet share expansion to capture sustainable long-term growth opportunities. Now, thank you, everyone. With that, I will turn the call back to Anthony before we open the line for questions. Thanks, H.C.

This was a record quarter for Webull on many metrics, including revenue and funded account growth, marking an exciting new chapter for our platform as we successfully unveiled innovative product offerings, including crypto futures, sports prediction markets, and our AI-powered decision partner, Vega. We remain energized as we continue to deliver our product roadmap for U.S. and global investors. I want to recognize the global Webull team for their continued dedication as we continue to grow our platform following our public listing in early 2025. We look forward to engaging with you at several upcoming industry and investor conferences. On that note, we welcome any questions you may have, either here on the call or one-on-one. Thank you. We will now begin the question and answer session. To ask a question, you may press star, then one on your touch-tone phone.

If you are using a speakerphone, please pick up your handset before pressing the keys. If at any time your question has been addressed and you would like to withdraw your question, please press star, then two. At this time, we will pause momentarily to assemble our roster. Your first question today will come from Kareem Saif with Bank of America Securities. Please go ahead. Hi, good evening, everyone. Can you hear me okay? Loud and clear. Perfect. Okay. Congrats on a great quarter. My first question is on prediction markets. It was very nice to see you guys added sports contracts to the offering. Anthony, I was wondering if you could maybe help size the revenue opportunity for Webull from the prediction markets offering, as well as maybe share some of any of the economics that you have with Calshi. Sure. Happy to, Kareem.

Many people do not know this, but we have been partnering with Calshi since the very beginning of the year. We just recently got into the sports prediction markets at the beginning of the NFL season, late August, I believe, for Thursday Night Football. The prediction market pre-sports has seen some really nice growth as we did SPY hourlies, NBX hourlies, some major Fed events. The sports numbers have been completely blowing us away, right? We have all seen the headlines and how much growth we have seen from Calshi and Polymarket on a notional value. We are seeing that lockstep. The value of offering these sports predictive contracts is multifold the way I look at it, right? We announced 30 million contracts in October. We are already now halfway into Q4 on the 20th of November. That number is completely gone.

We're blowing that number away already in November, right? I wouldn't be surprised if we see a month-on-month growth at over 100% on a pretty consistent level. Now, the opportunity from a monetary standpoint is different with every partner that Calshi has. We do charge a one-cent commission to our clients that are trading per contract. We also get an exchange rebate from Calshi. The blended rate comes in anywhere between 1.25 to 1.5 cents per contract on the revenue side. That being said, I don't think it's merely a revenue catalyst for our business. These sports prediction markets are re-engaging dormant accounts, right? It's also addressing a completely new TAM of customer. If we have customers that might have came on the platform in 2021 during GameStop, the world opened up, they got quiet, right?

Life got in the way, and they were not actively trading. Now they are back because of these sports prediction markets in a big way. It is a great way to re-engage customers that have gone dormant. It is a great way to address a whole new addressable market of clients. Very exciting time for our industry. I do think prediction markets are going to be something that is going to continue to push us not only on new customer acquisition, but product expansion. Got it. That was very helpful. Thank you very much. For my follow-up, obviously, it was very nice to see, and I believe you called it in your prepared remarks, net deposits in October were very strong. It was the best, I believe, the best months for Webull.

When I look at net deposits in 3Q, very strong also, $2.1 billion, which I believe, when I look at it as a percentage of your AUA or AUC, it's almost 53% annualized. I was wondering if you could maybe help unpack that a little bit for us. Where are you seeing that strength coming from? If you could maybe unpack it by geography, that would be very helpful. Absolutely. One of the great advantages we have versus a lot of our peers is the fact that we are truly a global platform. We have 14 broker-dealers that are currently operating around the world. The U.S. is the largest and the oldest, but we just opened up the Netherlands in September, went live in 2025, and we continue to look to expand.

That expansion and us taking significant market share, not only in the U.S., but outside the U.S., is one of the great drivers for that AUM growth, right? We took in $2.1 billion of net deposits in Q3 alone. That is not including the acquisition of Webull Pay and the money we received as part of the AUM in that acquisition. I would put it on two different catalysts for that impressive net new money coming in. One is the evolution of our marketing style. We have been evolving our marketing over time, and we have seen a lot of success and great ROI on our incentive transfer programs. Offering sticky money to roll over 401(k)s into Webull, where we are offering matching deposits, is extremely successful in bringing new AUM into the platform, and then back to the geographic expansion.

We're seeing huge growth in markets like Canada that we didn't announce is about to cross $1 billion in AUM alone in that market. That's only, call it, 20 months old at this point. We have other locations that we're seeing huge amounts of growth, like Australia. Of all places, Thailand is growing in the doubling on a quarter-over-quarter basis in terms of what we're seeing in transaction. That's a recurring theme that we're seeing outside of the U.S. As we start expanding on U.S. products outside to the non-U.S. entities, we're seeing the customer demand for U.S. products really push new customer acquisition and new AUM coming into the platform. Got it. That was very helpful. Thank you so much for taking my questions. I'll hop back into Q. Next question will come from Stephen Schubach with Wolf Research. Please go ahead.

Hi, good afternoon, and thanks for taking my questions. I hope you guys are well. I wanted to ask a multi-partner just on expenses and margins. We saw really good expense discipline in the quarter. Total revenues were up 55%, adjusted expense up 13%. An impressive incremental margin just north of 75%. I wanted to understand the sustainability of those incremental margins, just given myriad opportunities to lean in on the investment side. For the second part, given the comments you just made, Anthony, around the marketing strategy, why not choose to lean in a little bit more in terms of marketing spend, just given the strong momentum in 3Q in October? I recognize the high ROIs. That was the one bucket that actually saw declines year on year.

I wanted to better understand how you're thinking about the opportunity to lean in there as well. Sure. No, happy to pick that up. When we look at our customers being able to transfer assets in, we're constantly improving on the product and the rails for them to do so easily. When we think of margin expansion, we are very cognizant that we are in an extreme growth phase of our business. Right where we are now in the mid 20s of margin, I think, is extremely healthy for a growth company. We're going to continue to deliver on that. I can hand it over to H.C. for a little more detail on the actual margin and the expensive side. Sure. Thanks, Anthony, and thank you for the question. Yeah.

For us, as you can see, we've consistently maintained our adjusted operating margin around 20% for the last four quarters. We are constantly optimizing and adjusting how we're approaching expenses. For example, marketing. I think you asked about why not over-invest in marketing when the market is good. I think in a certain sense, we are very opportunistic. We actually do a lot of work and review on a market-by-market basis to see where we get the highest ROIs in terms of our marketing dollars. We also want to be smart about investing in the forms of different promotions that we take. We have, over time, shifted more from giving away free stocks to customers to more of these asset matching promotions. As a result of that, we are seeing significant increases in net deposits in AUM growth.

Another result of that is there's a greater amortization of marketing expenses. It's not just given away immediately when the customer funds their accounts. The customer would have to deposit AUM and maintain their AUM for a number of months before they accrue and earn the whole marketing spend. Actually, that helps us in managing expenses to make the marketing expense more predictable quarter over quarter, which I think is a good thing in terms of managing the P&L. Also for the G&A expense, I think a lot of it is just proportionate to our headcount growth and to our continued investment in R&D as we continue to enter into new geographies and expand products.

We'll continue to remain disciplined and manage our expenses to make sure that we continue on the right path of margin expansion and continue to capitalize on this market environment and continue to drive growth. That's great color. For my follow-up, I did want to ask, given the relaunch of crypto in the U.S., how your crypto strategy might evolve now that you're getting that second at that? Specifically, wanted to better understand where the crypto pricing is today. Do you see an opportunity to potentially be more aggressive in terms of take rates to attract more users? How do you see that pricing evolving over time as competition intensifies in the space? Yeah. No, I appreciate that question. Extremely excited about the relaunch of crypto. I appreciate you mentioning it's kind of our second at that.

Obviously, we had crypto, and we launched crypto back in 2019 through the process of trying to get our company listed. Previous administration, we spun it out to Webull Pay. We brought that crypto back to the brokerage platform, the main brokerage platform, back in August, kind of like a light speed project, if you will. I look at it exactly like that. This is our second opportunity to really knock it out of the park. What does that mean for us, right? We are still in the early innings of crypto, at least the crypto for our at least crypto offering on our platform. I think we lean into the sophisticated fact of our active trading user base. Right now, we have approximately 100 basis points. Coinbase retail is about 150 basis points.

I know some of our competitors use a variable model based on the actual token itself for pricing. We are going to aggressively lean in to squeezing those take rates to attract active crypto traders. Now, timeline on that business is probably going to be early in 2026. I have to be careful on guidance. When I think about it, we have an amazing opportunity to relaunch our crypto product with a whole new vigor that attracts the customers that call Webull home. Sophisticated, experienced, and active retail traders, we are going to cater our crypto trading product specifically to them. As we roll out especially new products in the crypto world, I do not want to give up too much on this call.

We'll be announcing a lot of major new additions to our crypto offering to get us on the same level playing field as all of our competitors. Once we are on that playing field, we're going to aggressively take those active traders from our comps. That's great color. Thanks so much for taking my questions. The next question will come from Mike Rondahl with Northland Securities. Please go ahead. Hey, thanks, guys. Anthony, can you talk a little bit about the Meritz announcement and kind of the opportunity you have there globally? Is Meritz the first? Do you have other customers internationally you're helping like that? Meritz is the first publicly announced, but not the first. When we say Meritz, we're talking about institutional customer bases or B2B business, which is a completely new line of business for us.

We have been 100% focused on retail since we launched in 2018. Now, we're spending a significant amount of internal resources and a significant amount of focus on targeting B2B partnerships in geographies where we do not currently operate a broker-dealer. We're even talking to B2B partnerships, to institutional-type partners in places where we actually do have retail, a retail platform. Having said that, none of this revenue has yet even factored into our current models and our current growth. The future, Meritz is an example of getting access to South Korean retail without having to have a South Korean retail brokerage license. We're going to continue to focus on opportunities like that.

In my opinion, the institutional side of our business, which is just beginning, Meritz is the first announcement on a very long list of clients that are in the pipeline that's going to be a huge boom for not only our market share, but for our top and bottom lines. When would you expect Meritz to go live? Has it started? What does that timeline look like to ramp up? Typically, institutional onboarding takes much longer than retail onboarding, right? We can open up a retail account in minutes, and our retail customers can typically trade within five minutes of downloading the app. It's very different for institutional. There is a lot more checks. There is a lot more approvals, sometimes even up at the board level. That being said, we are currently live with Meritz.

We are currently trading on behalf of their clients' orders. As we continue to grow the relationships, the amount of flow that we receive from Meritz will continue to grow over time. Got it. Lastly, related to that, where will that revenue show up? Is that other revenues or in the equity and options line? This is actually one of the fun parts. The revenues actually show up in our transaction volumes. Even if we see a slowdown in U.S. retail trading volumes, our trading volumes will continue to tick up because we're onboarding a lot of these B2B relationships. It's going to be baked into the transaction revenue mixed in the equities and hopefully in the next several months' options. Currently, we're trading equities only with Meritz. Got it. Hey, thank you and good luck. Thank you.

Next question will come from Chris Brendler with Rosenblatt. Please go ahead. Hey, thanks. Good evening and congratulations on the strong results here. I'd like to ask about the funded accounts, which ticked up. I know even if you back out the crypto, you did see a nice tick up there. I know there's been a little bit of a refocus of your marketing strategy towards assets over accounts. Given the gap between registered and funding, I'd love to see that close a little bit. How are you thinking about funded account growth as you head into 2026? Thanks. Sure. Hey, Chris. Funded account growth, in my opinion, we're going to see, we're going to start seeing a lot more attribution coming from outside of the U.S.

Like we mentioned on the call earlier, we have more than 700,000 funded accounts now that are outside the U.S. We have seen the momentum and onboarding of funded accounts outside of the U.S. Basically, for the last six months, it was about 55%, 50%, right? 55% of new funded accounts coming from the U.S. broker, about 45% coming from outside. That number is now completely equalizing. We are at about 50/50. In fact, I would not be surprised if we start seeing new funded account growth outside of the U.S. outpace funded account growth in the U.S. I believe that is going to be the continued driver as the 13 broker-dealers that we operate outside the U.S. start to really mature. If you remember, the first brokerage outside of the U.S. we opened was Hong Kong in Q3 of 2021.

The second one was not until Q2 of 2022, which is Singapore. We just opened our latest one in the Netherlands in September of 2025. These are all relatively young businesses that are in hyperscale mode. We are going to see a lot of low-cost, low-customer acquisition costs, new funded accounts really being driven from outside the U.S. In the U.S., we are going to continue to focus on quality of our customers. That is super helpful, Carl. Thanks so much for that. I wanted to add a quick follow-up on numbers. Does crypto or prediction markets have any impact on third-quarter metrics like DARTs or trading revenues? Will those kind of transactions show up in those metrics in the fourth quarter? H.C., you want to take this? Yeah, sure. We actually closed the Webull Pay transaction at the very end of the third quarter.

What the third-quarter metrics include is the AUM and funded accounts that were consolidated as part of the transaction. What's not included is the revenues, the transaction volumes, and the DARTs, because those take place over the course of the quarter. The transaction did not close until the very end. They will start to be included and presented as part of the consolidated group results starting in Q4. Okay. Great. That's helpful. I just have one more quick one, which is on Vega. It seems like this is a product that would help attract folks to your platform and essentially stay there longer. Any insights on the initial impact of Vega and on the expense side? Is there an ongoing expense for running this AI that you're outsourcing, or is it all developed in-house so there won't be as much additional expense? Yeah.

The Vega AI launch is not only a huge thing for Webull. This is the future of investing, right? There is so much news flow, so much information at all investors' fingertips. Often, it's like drinking out of a fire hose. Now, we've created in-house, to answer that question, in-house, we've created our Vega AI trading assistant. Not only analyzes your portfolio, but can advise you on high levels of risk and give you insights into implied volatility in some of your options positions. This is a game changer for the industry. Because we developed it all in-house, there is no increased cost, and the user engagement has been phenomenal. We're seeing tens of millions of engagements of Vega, whether it's for actionable trading through the Vega AI trade assistant or just analysis of earnings or consolidation of news.

Every day, we're seeing more and more engagements, and we're seeing regular engagements, meaning we're seeing users come back to Vega regularly. I believe that this is now the beginning of a whole new way that retail engages in their own portfolio and accesses market information and market opportunity. Wow, that's great. I obviously need to try it out. Thanks so much. The next question will come from Brian Vieten with Cyber. Please go ahead. Great. Thanks, guys. Anthony, so nice pickup in funded accounts this quarter. I think you said 50% of new accounts are trading crypto. Does that include the Webull Pay folks? Looking ahead, could you speak to the opportunity in converting existing Webull funded accounts? Just curious on that, as I know your customer demographic is younger and digitally native. Thanks. Yeah, exactly right.

The average Webull customer is in their young 30s, so very, very crypto native. It really pained me back in September of 2023 when we had to strip out our crypto offering from our brokerage platform. Our customers were not happy with it. Bringing it back was imperative. Now that we have it back and we have the opportunity not only to knock it out of the park with a better offering of crypto, especially for our customer type, we've been seeing great engagement for crypto-native customers either coming back to Webull or discovering Webull for the first time. Like you mentioned, 50% of new funded accounts, 50% of them, the first trade they made was with cryptocurrency on the Webull platform. Those are not customers coming over from Webull Pay.

Those are new customers to Webull in and of itself, simply because we now offer crypto. We are going to continue to lean into that type of customer. Like I mentioned before, make sure we give the tightest spreads and the best trading experience for the customer that calls us home. That is the active, sophisticated type. Very good. Thank you. Just one more, if I may, just on the future listings. I think at one point, the plan was to get to 100 by year-end. I am not sure if maybe there is some—it is a little contingent on some of the regulatory dynamics, which you alluded to. Just the complexion of those future listings, are you envisioning more so listing established crypto protocols or kind of newer tokenized assets where you might be more differentiated? Just any commentary on the listing strategy would be great. Thank you.

Yeah. I mean, one of the fundamentals that we've always held here, whether it's crypto, it's equities, it's options, again, prediction markets, we want to give our customers the availability to trade as much as we possibly can offer. If that means—you mentioned 100 as a number. I don't want to go on record and say we're going to have 100 different tokens available to trade by year-end, but that certainly is our goal. Having said that, when we look at the opportunity for crypto, it's more than just offering new product types. It's offering a better experience to do so. Yes, the short answer is yes. We plan to have as many different opportunities and as many different offerings on the platform as we possibly can bring.

We plan to really lean into making sure our customers feel that this is the best place. Webull is the best place to trade. Thanks, Anthony. Congrats on a great quarter. Thanks. Question will come from Edward Engel with Compass Point. Please go ahead. Hi, everyone. Thanks for taking my question. Appreciate some of the color you gave about funded accounts outside the U.S. Just kind of wanted to get a better sense on maybe some of the localized features that you're offering in some of these markets and kind of where the roadmap is, whether it's tax wrappers or savings accounts or local banking connectivity. Thanks. Sure. It really depends on the region. We've always had a single mentality here. We have one global vision, but we make sure that we execute locally. What does that mean?

Simply, every Webull broker-dealer that we have, 14 around the world, has a local team. It's not an American that's sitting in London. We have a Brit sitting in London running the office there. There's a reason for that. Not only do they have a better feel for what that customer needs, they also have a better opportunity for local marketing, how to differentiate. That being said, a lot of those businesses are still relatively young, and we're constantly adding new products, things like tax wrappers, for example, IRAs in the U.S. or ISAs in the U.K. I'm using U.K., maybe too much. As soon as we have the regulatory approval to add those products, we always do. For the most part, there are two or three exceptions.

For the most part, every Webull entity will trade the local security in that country as well as give customers the ability to trade U.S. products. The one example I can think of is Indonesia. There is no license yet in Indonesia for our customers to trade U.S. securities. However, hopefully, that'll change by year-end. That all being said, we see the majority of transactions happening in our non-U.S. entities. The transactions are happening in U.S. products. That goes back to things I've been talking about for the last year and change. The exportation of the U.S. retail trading experience is one of the largest growth factors that I believe we're going to see in the next year, year and a half, especially when it comes to retail out of the U.S.

We have seen the adoption of not only, obviously, ETF trading outside the U.S., but options trading specifically. For example, a customer sitting in New York City has a position in NVIDIA yesterday, coming out with earnings at the close. We have a customer sitting in Japan also with a position in NVIDIA. They're looking at the same news flows. They're listening to the same podcast. They're watching the same Reddit feeds. They're reading the same comments on the Webull community. Yet a lot of times, they're not able to trade the same products. We're changing that. Now our customers in Japan can trade calendar spreads, can put on a condor. That doesn't exist for the most part outside of the U.S. We are working very hard to make sure that we export that U.S.

Retail investor experience to everywhere outside the U.S., which is one of the main reasons why we're seeing such amazing growth in our non-U.S. brokerages. Great. Appreciate that color. I mean, I guess quarter date, we have seen a bit of volatility in the U.S. equity markets. Curious if you're able to provide any color on, I guess, how your users are kind of holding up through some of that. Thanks. Sure. I think uniquely Webull, we are extremely well-positioned for a rising VIX. Our customers, I mean, we've been offering the ability to short sell since the first day that we launched the platform in 2018. Our customers, again, I keep saying this word sophisticated. I keep saying this word experienced. When there's volatility, our customers are trading more. Just the past couple of weeks, we've seen explosive volume due to volatility.

I think Webull is probably uniquely positioned to weather volatile markets a lot better than our peers. That, of course, being said, long-term volatility is never amazing for a cyclical business. I believe as a platform, we are accelerating into this volatility in the short term. Great. Thanks for that. Yeah, congrats on all the recent progress. Thanks. We'll conclude our question and answer session as well as conference call. Thank you all for attending today's presentation. You may now disconnect.