For the first time, Smartbroker Holding (SBH) reported monthly trading stats which can be seen as starting point of the future of the Smartbroker. Further, the longstanding Group CFO Roland Nicklaus will leave the company in April. In detail:

The number of customers declined to 175k (-3% mom, excluding 79k deleted, inactive customers, including c. 44k FondDiscount customers), which is clearly a negative read considering the growth ambition. Positively, after the deletion of inactive customers, the share of active customers should be close to 100%, far above the industry average of 20-40% (eNuW), visible in strong 25 trades p.a. per customer.

Only 0.36m executed transactions in January. While this is fully in line with the avg number of monthly transactions throughout 2023, it is disappointing given that January is usually one of the strongest months of the year.

AuC declined to € 8.9bn (-5% mom, incl. c. € 0.6bn AuC at FondsDiscount), despite the overall solid capital market performance in January, indicating significant outflows. Positively,  AuC per customer of € 51k is above levels of neobrokers (c. € 7-10k).

Promising KPI´s from the Media segment. In contrary to the Transaction segment, the KPI development in the Media segment was sound: Site visits increased by 7% mom to 227m and the number of unique users grew substantially to 3.8m (26% mom).

CFO on the leave. SBH announced that Roland Nicklaus will leave the company end of March after being with the company for 15 years. As he will remain shareholder of SBH, member of the supervisory Board of the Smartbroker AG and external advisor of the company, the effects should be limited.

Overall, the Smartbroker is still seen to be the growth driver of the Group, as Smartbroker+ is offering a unique combination of the service range of an established full-service broker at a neobroker pricing that should drive customer inflows and transactions, fueled by the reach of the proprietary media portals. For FY24e we now expect € 50m in sales and € 1.5m in EBITDA.

As the investment case remains intact, we reiterate our BUY with a reduced PT of € 10, based on DCF.