The election of Donald Trump was a wake-up call for Europe. In future, we will be operating in an environment in which the US is turning away from multilateralism and making unrestrained decisions with a view to its own advantage. It is all about tax breaks and deregulation for US companies and at the same time trade barriers for others. In other words, they are no longer playing by WTO rules.

Europe looks like a continent of herbivores surrounded by carnivores. It should be clear that Europeans cannot be the last ones in the world to play by the rules. The most important thing for Europe now is not just that we change the rules, but above all our speed of decision-making. We must accelerate integration and produce more European champions, otherwise we will remain in a position of weakness.

The need for consolidation is obvious in the defence industry, and urgent in the financial industry. The market capitalisation of BNP Paribas, the largest French bank, is 70 billion euros, around a tenth of the market capitalisation of J.P. Morgan, the largest US bank. Deutsche Bank has a market capitalisation of only 5% of that of its US rival. The picture is the same for asset managers. If Europe wants to remain relevant in the world, we need bigger players.

We have a fragmented financial market with strong competition and low profit margins, in contrast to an integrated American market with large players and fat margins. They utilise their opportunities to develop products and services at home, which they then use to compete in Europe. We believe that competition and open markets are the best way to achieve prosperity for all. The reality is that happy, well-off consumers are not a civilisation project. We are heading towards a society of consumers who buy cheap things that have been produced elsewhere, so that these consumers will end up without a job themselves. We need a balanced structure with producers and buyers, preferably in all industries.

We have a very promising pipeline. I am confident that it will be a much more dynamic year than 2024. Companies will try to raise money in a much more aggressive way than in recent months. There are a lot of uncertainties, but I'm still confident when I look at the pipeline.

We don't give any figures or names, because a pipeline is flexible. Companies join, others drop out, sometimes there are delays.

The lack of capital is our biggest weakness overall. Why is that the case? Most of the capital has to be mobilised in private households. And here we see a historical difference: in the USA, private households represent 30% of the stock market, in Europe the average is 3%.

The USA does not have the social security systems that we have in Europe. In order to finance retirement, there is no way around shares for individuals. In Europe, everyone relies on the next generation continuing to pay into the social security system. The introduction of a funded pension scheme, which would channel household savings into the capital markets, often conflicts with the simultaneous funding of pensions. In order to mobilise capital, a radical reform of old-age provision is needed – at national levels. Unfortunately, promising plans in Germany have just been halted due to the break-up of the coalition, and we are six months behind schedule.

A new risk perspective is important. In the financial crisis between 2008 and 2012, major risks were uncovered in bank balance sheets, and taxpayers had to step in to bail out a number of financial institutions. As a result, regulation was tightened, through Basel and the Solvency regime. Today, 15 years later, we have a different situation. We don't have too much risk on our books, but too little, because banks and insurers face high hurdles for capital investment.

The driving force behind every IPO market is firstly liquidity, secondly liquidity and thirdly liquidity. This requires capital that is available in the long term, just as it is used for private pension provision in the USA. There is nothing magical about it. All European countries have launched programmes to promote new technologies. As a result, we have an unprecedented number of young companies that are ready for the stock market.

For one thing, companies have an alternative: private equity. It is also available to finance growth. And also, as I said, the demand for capital is not always high enough to make an IPO attractive.

Yes, I think so. We can't remain herbivores and welcome the carnivores and offer them to share the grass and water with us, only for them to tell us that they have other plans. But maybe we should take more basic initiatives instead of waiting for the rules from above to change things. We need to build concrete things. For example, at Euronext we have decided to create a single prospectus for IPOs, what the US calls an S1 form. Instead of lobbying for it at the top, we decided to introduce it at the seven exchanges of the Euronext group, with their seven supervisors. So we will soon have a single prospectus in English, a single summary in a standardised form, at least in our seven countries.

If other countries want to join in, they are very welcome. But first I want to have something that works in our seven markets. Then I want to go to the other big markets, Germany and Spain, and ask them if they want to be part of it. We need to drive initiatives like this much more often in the future. Euronext has a leading position as a platform, so it's a good starting point.

A quarter of all shares in Europe are traded on the Euronext platform: one order book, one liquidity pool. Between 10 and 12 billion euros in shares are traded daily on Euronext, twice as much as in London. The cumulative market capitalisation is around 7 trillion euros. This is also twice as much as in London. We take care of equity capital, and we get more international listings than any other exchange operator in Europe – even CVC, who are based in London, have chosen Euronext. For the other exchanges, share trading often plays a lesser role.

At Deutsche Börse, for example, the share of turnover accounted for by equity trading is around 5%, I believe, whereas for us it is 15%. Overall, including fixed income, currencies, commodities and electricity, the trading share is 35%. What I would also like to emphasise is that the post-IPO performance on Euronext is significantly better than on the Nasdaq or the Nyse.

We don't actually have an exodus of companies from Europe to the US that are ready to go public, with the exception of two sectors, pharma and biotech. These already have better financing opportunities in the USA before going public. But for many others, the disadvantages there also weigh heavily: a listing in the USA is associated with considerably more bureaucracy, and permanently higher costs due to strict regulation. Valuations are generally higher, but this trade-off only works as long as companies manage to be visible in the USA. Many do not succeed in this.

That has already been achieved. Many European companies that want to go public now choose Euronext. Ten years ago, they would have gone to London. We are looking less at the USA, we want to be the European platform that replaces London. When I became CEO, Euronext operated more or less as it did in 2000. Since 2017, we have consolidated the European stock exchange landscape, we have taken over the Irish Stock Exchange, the Oslo Stock Exchange, VP Securities in Copenhagen, not to mention Borsa Italiana. Today, we have an integrated market in seven countries.

Several companies belong to the Vivendi Group. Two of them remain on the Paris exchange, the holding company and Louis Hachette, and two units are listed in Amsterdam, Havas and Universal Music Group. Only one subsidiary has opted for London. This has nothing to do with liquidity, but with more flexibility for future consolidation plans.

Perhaps. I talk to partners all the time. I have great respect for Theodor Weimer. He is an impressive leader in our industry, very straightforward, honest, open and pragmatic. Deutsche Börse can consider itself very lucky to have had him as its boss. He will be missed in the industry.

We have talked from time to time about what we could achieve together.

That was his idea. I can't speak for him, but in my view, equities have become less important to Deutsche Börse's strategy over time compared to other asset classes. For two reasons: Firstly, equities have historically not been the main source of financing for companies in Germany, or at least not as important as in other European countries. Secondly, Deutsche Börse's success is based on non-equity products.

I believe that certain interest groups in Germany and other European countries feel that more needs to be done for the financing of tech companies in Germany. He came to me with this in mind. But I told him that we are not going to build something from scratch, because that would be totally artificial. There is a lack of liquidity. The situation is comparable to building a regional airport that no airline flies to. You build a beautiful European stock exchange for technology companies and then nobody comes because there are no investors.

We at Euronext already have a technology franchise, the Tech Leaders initiative, and we do a lot to attract tech companies. With success. That's why I asked Weimer what we can do together without creating something new. There are many ideas.

In the past, we have never found a way to come together. This is because Deutsche Börse has a much larger market capitalisation than Euronext. When it comes to share trading, it's the other way round – we are much stronger than the stock exchange in Frankfurt.

You would have to talk to him. I don't know what he thinks and what he wants to achieve during his mandate.

The main reason that I want to focus on organic growth is that we don't have an immediately realisable M&A transaction. This requires not only a willing buyer, but also a willing seller. I could entertain you now with all sorts of consolidation projects, but if there is no willing seller, there is no deal.

We now have an operating margin before depreciation and amortisation of 60% and are the most profitable stock exchange in Europe. The company has an Ebitda of 1 billion euros and is converting this into cash at a rate of 75% to 78%. We have net debt of 1.5 times adjusted Ebitda, which is quite low. We have 2 billion euros put to one side, and the ability to borrow money.

We have the means to make acquisitions. But we don't want to spend money on deals that don't make sense. There are other exchanges in Europe that we could buy. But they are not for sale. We will of course continue to monitor how the situation develops.

Yes, we had a strike. It was settled peacefully. In some countries strikes happen quickly, in others not. In Italy and France, people have gone on strike before. In reality, there were a few of the usual union demands.

Since the takeover, we have not only achieved twice as many synergies as originally planned, but there are also 18% more jobs at Borsa Italiana than before. We have moved the Euronext data centre from London to Bergamo and we have internalised all clearing activities in Rome.

We want to try to expand our CSD business. We now have the third largest CSD network in Europe after Euroclear and Clearstream. We already have good traction with issuers who are moving away from some players to become our customers. The second area where we want to grow is clearing. Now that we have a brand new clearing platform, we want to start with repo clearing. We also want to develop our derivatives offering.

We have decided to list and trade electricity derivatives. We already have a strong electricity exchange called Nord Pool, a competitor of Epex. So far, we have only traded cash products, but in future we also want to trade electricity derivative products like Epex. We also want to expand our corporate services. We have been relatively small in this area so far, but we want to grow significantly. Our fixed income business is doing extremely well. MTS is now four times the size it was in 2021 when we bought it. MTS grew by 38% in the last quarter. This is a business where we can accelerate organic growth, partly because it has been selected by the European Commission to offer secondary trading of Next Generation EU Eurobonds.

We are confident that we can deliver more than 5% organic sales growth and more than 5% Ebitda growth. We are trying to achieve much more, but we will deliver at least 5%. Since 2015, we have always made modest promises and always delivered better results than talked about. I want this to continue in the future. Some competitors do it the other way round, but we can't afford a profit warning.

We are prepared. We have developed our CSD business. In my view, the changeover is not a major revolution.