BGC (BGC) Q1 2026 Earnings Call Transcript

Chief Executive Officer — John Joseph Abularrage

Co-Chief Executive Officer — Sean A. Windeatt

Co-Chief Executive Officer — Jean-Pierre Aubin

Chief Financial Officer — Jason Williams Hauf

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Jason Chryssicas: Hello, everyone. This morning, we issued BGC Group, Inc’s first quarter 2026 financial results, which can be found at ir.bgcg.com. Any historical results provided on today’s call compare only to 2026 with the prior year period unless otherwise specified. All references on today’s call to historic record and strongest results are to BGC Group, Inc stand-alone financial results, excluding Newmark prior to the spin-off in November 2018. We will be referring to our results on a non-GAAP basis, which include the terms adjusted earnings and adjusted EBITDA.

Refer to today’s investor materials on our website for additional details on our financial results and for complete and updated definitions of any non-GAAP terms, reconciliations of these items to the corresponding GAAP results and how, when, and why management uses them, as well as relevant industry and economic statistics. The outlook discussed today assumes no material acquisitions or dispositions. Our expectations are subject to change based on various macroeconomic, social, political, and other factors. Information on this call contains forward-looking statements, including, without limitation, statements about our economic outlook and business. Statements are subject to risks and uncertainties, which could cause our actual results to differ from expectations.

Except as required by law, we undertake no obligation to update any forward-looking statements. For information on factors that could cause actual results to differ from the forward-looking statements, and a complete discussion of the risks and other factors that may impact these forward-looking statements, see our SEC filings, including, but not limited to, the risk factors and disclosures within these SEC documents. With that, I am now happy to turn the call over to John Joseph Abularrage, Chief Executive Officer of BGC Group, Inc.

John Joseph Abularrage: Thank you, Jason. Good morning, and welcome to our first quarter 2026 conference call. With me today are my fellow Co-Chief Executive Officers, Sean A. Windeatt and Jean-Pierre Aubin, along with our Chief Financial Officer, Jason Williams Hauf. BGC Group, Inc delivered another record quarter. Revenues increased 44% to $955 million, with growth across every asset class and geography. Excluding OTC, revenues grew 23% to $817 million, which was also a record. Pretax earnings hit an all-time high, up more than 44%. Our ECS revenues more than doubled to $330 million, reinforcing our position as the world’s largest energy broker. FMX posted its best ever quarter, setting ADV records for U.S. Treasuries, FX, and futures.

FMX UST ADV grew 51% in the first quarter to a record $90 billion, representing 41% market share. We built on last year’s $25 million cost reduction program, which is now expected to result in $35 million of annualized cost savings. We will continue to identify and execute cost savings throughout 2026 to drive further margin expansion. A final point on the macro backdrop. The Iran conflict, which began on February 28, drove elevated volatility across energy, rates, and FX through the final month of the quarter. Through February 27, before the conflict began, revenues were tracking up 41%.

Finishing the full quarter up 44% reinforces that our record results this quarter were driven primarily by our underlying business, with the conflict serving only as an incremental contributor. With that, I would like to turn the call over to Sean to go over the quarterly results of the business in more detail.

Sean A. Windeatt: Thank you, John. We delivered record revenues of $955.5 million, a 43.8% increase versus last year. Our total brokerage revenues grew by 46.7% to $895.8 million, driven by growth across all asset classes. ECS revenues grew by 120.1% to $330 million, driven by the acquisition of OTC and strong organic growth across our broader energy complex and shipping businesses. Rates revenues increased 27.5% to $256.2 million, reflecting strong growth across listed futures and options, interest rate swaps, and government bonds, supported by continued FMX UST market share gains. Foreign exchange revenues were up 19.1% to $131 million, primarily due to strong volume growth in emerging market and G10 products.

Credit revenues increased by 8.2% to $94.1 million, driven by higher emerging market credit, Portfolio Match, and structured credit volumes. Equities grew by 34.3% to $84.5 million, reflecting strong market share gains across all major geographies and global equity volatility. Data, network, and post-trade revenues grew by 23.2% to $34.5 million, excluding KACE, which we sold in 2025. This growth was driven by Lucera and Fenics market data, including KACE. Data, network, and post-trade revenues grew by 6.1%. Now turning to Fenics. Fenics revenues increased by 19.8% to a first-quarter record of $206.9 million. Fenics Markets generated revenues of $176.7 million, an increase of 20.3%.

This growth was driven by higher electronic trading volumes across rates, credit, and foreign exchange, and increased Fenics market data revenues. On December 31, 2025, we completed the sale of our KACE Financial business for up to $119 million. Excluding KACE, Fenics Markets grew by 24.1%. Fenics Growth Platforms revenues grew to $30.2 million, a 17.4% increase, primarily driven by FMX, Portfolio Match, and Lucera. FMX UST generated record quarterly ADV of $89.7 billion, 51% higher compared to last year. FMX UST grew its first-quarter market share to 41%, up from 39% last quarter and 33% a year ago. In March, ADV reached $107 billion, the single highest month in the platform’s history.

The FMX futures exchange delivered another quarter of significant growth. SOFR ADV climbed to more than 39 thousand contracts in 2026, up from 2.2 thousand contracts a year ago, while quarter-end open interest reached approximately 143 thousand contracts compared to 8 thousand in the prior-year period. FMX’s U.S. Treasury futures developed momentum in April, with volume building throughout the month to a new high of approximately 30 thousand contracts on April 29, 2026. FMX FX average daily volumes increased by 42% to a record $20.5 billion, driven by strong growth across spot FX and NDF volumes, resulting in continued market share gains. Portfolio Match ADV grew by 42% in the first quarter, setting a new all-time high.

Growth was driven by higher client activity across U.S. and EMEA corporate credit, reflecting new and deepening customer relationships and broad-based adoption of recently launched trading functionalities. Average trade size grew to record levels, supported by an increase in the platform’s global maximum trade size. Portfolio Match continues to capture market share in this critically important part of the credit market. Lucera, Fenics’ network business providing critical real-time trading infrastructure to the capital markets, grew revenues by 22.8% in the first quarter. Growth was led by continued momentum in its FX offering and increasing client adoption across fixed income solutions, including U.S. Treasuries and futures.

Looking ahead, a pipeline of new products across both FX and fixed income is set to come online, which is expected to provide meaningful sources of new incremental growth. And with that, I would now like to turn the call over to Jason.

Jason Williams Hauf: Thank you, Sean. And hello, everyone. BGC Group, Inc generated record revenues of $955.5 million during the quarter, reflecting growth across all of our geographies. EMEA revenues increased by 56.7%, Americas revenues increased by 29.9%, and Asia Pacific revenues increased by 31.1%. Turning to expenses. Compensation and employee benefits under GAAP and for adjusted earnings increased by 57.3% and 51.5%, respectively. The increase in compensation and employee benefits under GAAP was related to the acquisition of OTC, higher commissionable revenues, charges incurred as part of the cost reduction program, and the weaker U.S. dollar. The increase in compensation and employee benefits for adjusted earnings was driven by OTC, higher commissionable revenues, and the weaker U.S. dollar.

Non-compensation expenses under GAAP and for adjusted earnings increased by 33.4% and 27.4%, respectively, primarily driven by the acquisition of OTC. Excluding OTC, non-compensation expenses under GAAP and for adjusted earnings increased by 19% and 12.7%, respectively. During the quarter, we realized an additional $10 million of savings and now expect our cost reduction plan to result in $35 million of annualized savings. We remain committed to continuing our cost reduction initiatives throughout 2026 with the goal of achieving further margin expansion. Moving on to our record adjusted earnings. Our pretax adjusted earnings grew by 44.9% to $232.1 million, representing a pretax margin of 24.3%.

Post-tax adjusted earnings increased by 40.6% to $201.1 million, resulting in post-tax adjusted earnings per share of $0.41, 41.4% higher versus last year. Our adjusted EBITDA increased by 26.7% to $253.2 million. Turning to share count. BGC Group, Inc’s fully diluted weighted average share count for adjusted earnings was 495.2 million shares during the period, a 1% increase compared to last quarter and a 1.3% decrease compared to last year. As of March 31, our liquidity was $878.4 million, compared with $979.1 million as of year-end 2025. The change in our liquidity reflects payments for year-end bonuses, tax payments, and timing differences between commissions earned in the seasonally busier first quarter and commissions collected from the seasonally slower fourth quarter.

As cash uses are generally the greatest in the first quarter, we typically repurchase fewer shares during this period, and we expect share repurchases to increase throughout the remainder of the year. With that, I would like to turn the call back to John to go over our second quarter outlook.

John Joseph Abularrage: Thank you, Jason. I am pleased to provide the following guidance for 2026. We expect to generate revenues of between $785 million and $845 million compared to $784 million in 2025, which, at the midpoint of our guidance, would represent 4% revenue growth for the second quarter and 22% revenue growth for the first half of the year, or 13% organically. We anticipate pretax adjusted earnings to be in the range of $178 million to $196 million versus $173.6 million last year, which, at the midpoint of guidance, would represent 8% earnings growth for the second quarter and 26% earnings growth for the first half of the year.

We expect our adjusted earnings tax rate to be between 11% and 14% for full year 2026. We will now open the call for questions.

Operator: Thank you. If you would like to ask a question, please press star-1 on your telephone keypad. A confirmation tone will indicate your line is in the queue. You may press star-2 if you would like to remove your question from the queue. For participants using speaker equipment, it may be necessary to pick up your handset before pressing the star keys. Our first question comes from the line of Patrick Malcolm Moley with Piper Sandler. Please proceed with your question.

Patrick Malcolm Moley: Yes. Good morning. Congrats on the record quarter. I wanted to ask about energy, commodity, and shipping revenues. They were very strong this quarter. In the release, you noted that total revenues were already tracking up 41% year-over-year before the Iran conflict broke out and finished at a 44% increase in the quarter year-over-year. So how much of that growth do you view as structural versus cyclical? Then I am just curious, how do you think investors should think about the ECS revenue run rate from here as you lap the OTC Global Holdings acquisition in April, and as we think about some of the geopolitical-driven volatility normalizing from here? Thanks.

Sean A. Windeatt: Morning, Patrick. In terms of structural, as John said in his prepared remarks, we pointed out that the business was up 41% before the start of the conflict and ended up 44%. If you do the math on that, our opinion is that around $20 million of incremental revenue could be ascribed to the conflict. But most of the growth in Q1 was part of our normal business, which is incredibly positive. With ECS in particular, I do not think anything has changed between Q1 and Q2, and therefore, the rest of the year. We have now owned OTC for one year, and the integration of that business is virtually complete.

Going forward, you will see growth across the ECS spectrum for our multi-brands, and we will not be breaking it out between OTC and our core business.

Patrick Malcolm Moley: Okay. That is helpful. And then as a follow-up, you expanded the cost reduction program this quarter. In the press release, I think you said that you were going to continue to identify and execute cost savings throughout 2026 to drive further margin expansion. So could you walk us through what is driving that incremental $10 million, how much additional runway you see beyond the $35 million now, and how we should think about the pace of margin expansion flowing through the P&L over the remainder of the year?

Sean A. Windeatt: I like that. You see, we increased our cost reduction program in Q1 by 40%, and you asked what we are going to do next after that. I like that. As you know, having covered us for a while, as a result of the OTC acquisition, we identified that we should be able to save $25 million in cost reductions. Once we started on that journey, we wanted to exceed that and found an additional $10 million, so now that is $35 million. The bulk of that is within the compensation lines; there are some infrastructure lines as well.

For example, we closed one of the non–profit-making businesses that OTC had in its logistics business, which resulted in decreases in compensation and a small amount of non-comp as well. Once you do these exercises, we will continue to do that across the business. Do we expect to get more than the $35 million? Of course. That is why we said it in our prepared remarks. But having just done that incremental 40%, we will perhaps update you on what we think next quarter.

Patrick Malcolm Moley: Okay. That is helpful. Looking forward to that. I have another question, but I am going to hop back in the queue. Thanks.

Operator: Our next question comes from the line of Eli Abboud with Bank of America. Please proceed with your question.

Eli Abboud: Good morning. Thanks for taking the question. You pointed out a moment ago to Patrick that revenues were tracking 41% higher year-on-year before the Iran war even began. So my question is, if the Iran war was not a major tailwind for you in 1Q 2026, how do I bridge the 31% organic revenue growth in Q1 2026 with the 4% revenue growth implied by the guide for 2Q 2026?

Sean A. Windeatt: Thanks, Eli. I will take that one. It was interesting, actually. John, JP, and I, when doing guidance, would probably say it was one of the more challenging times to give you guidance, and that is for two reasons. Firstly, as we pointed out, in Q1 this year, around $20 million of incremental revenue was there as a result of the Iran conflict. And last year, you will remember that April 2025 was, I think, called Liberation Day, and there was the introduction of tariffs, which led to significant increases in volumes and trading in the month of April.

So if you put the $20 million of Q1 this year and circa $20 million of Q2 last year together, that will help you bridge. Also, we did not mention it in our numbers in our prepared remarks—I apologize—but we did sell the KACE business, and we also closed down the logistics business. That is $10 million of quarterly revenue. If you add those three things together, that is a $50 million difference. That is also why John gave you the six-month numbers in his prepared remarks, which said that, assuming mid-guidance, we are growing organically at 12.7%. April was challenged by comparison to last year.

But what we have seen—and, of course, today is May 7—is trading levels returning to what I would call normality, and we tried to reflect that in our guidance.

Eli Abboud: Got it. And then in the deck, you gave some new data that show your listed revenues are outpacing exchange volumes. Conventional wisdom is that electronification is a one-way trend and that your business, which is primarily voice, should actually have slower growth than that of the exchanges. These numbers suggest that maybe that is not true. Could you help us understand why it makes sense for the high-touch flow that BGC Group, Inc does to be higher growth than the fully electronic, low-touch flow that comprises the majority of listed volume?

Sean A. Windeatt: Two things. As my co-CEO, Jean-Pierre Aubin, pointed out last quarter, we are an exchange in how we operate, except we do it not just for electronic marketplaces but for voice, hybrid, and electronic. When there is volatility in the marketplace, it should not be surprising that when electronic volumes at, for example, CME and ICE are up, the trading that happens in voice, hybrid, and electronic with intermediaries like BGC Group, Inc is also positive. That is why there is a correlation between the two. You saw that in April where exchange volumes were lower, yet we still grew. Why are we outperforming them? For two reasons.

Number one is our strategy that has led to market share gains in multiple asset classes, including acquisitions. Secondly, overall increased volume. That is why we continue to outperform the market.

Eli Abboud: Got it. And I will squeeze one more in before I hand it back to Patrick. Could you help us understand the decline in FMX open interest quarter-to-date versus 1Q? What can be done to course-correct there?

John Joseph Abularrage: Hey, it is John. The drop in OI on the futures is simply a reflection of a risk-off mentality in the market. OI, as you know, is standing orders. That is something we would expect to happen as the conflict starts, and it is something we are seeing now start to recover, in the same way you are seeing volumes start to recover. We saw this in the UST cash platform when that was the nascent exchange—and obviously now it is not. Our cash platform performed beautifully when the conflict started.

If there was ever an opportunity where the climb back to the market share we had before—and we are virtually there now, and you will see that the next time we speak, we believe we will be there and above—it proves what participants in the market and partners have been telling us: you need a second player in this market. We are that second player, and that is why we believe our market share and volumes will climb back to where they were and higher. We are quite confident of that the next time we speak.

The risk parameters in the market are changing, but our place in the market has only been reinforced by the recovery in our volumes and our OI that you are starting to see.

Operator: Thank you. Our next question is a follow-up from the line of Patrick Malcolm Moley with Piper Sandler. Please proceed with your question.

Patrick Malcolm Moley: Thanks for taking the follow-up. Just a quick one. I do not have the live transcript in front of me, but in your prepared remarks, you said something about new products that you were looking forward to launching. I think you might have said FX. Could you elaborate on what those are and any way to quantify, maybe from a revenue perspective, what sort of impact that could have and the timing of those launches? Thanks.

Sean A. Windeatt: Yes. As you and I have discussed, Lucera is a gem within the BGC Group, Inc portfolio. In terms of quantifying that, you will continue to see it grow around the rates it has grown historically, despite the larger revenue size, so it grows at 20% plus. In terms of new product, the single thing that is most important in the Lucera world—and of growing importance in our world—is connectivity. Lucera is constantly rolling out other products within asset classes. The way to think about it is: yes, Lucera is dominant in FX and, to a slightly lesser extent but growing, in rates.

But there are other parts of the rates complex where Lucera is growing and getting more buy-in from existing and new customers. As Lucera’s connectivity within big clients continues to grow, it continues to expand in other asset classes, and the trust and white-glove service that come along with Lucera are really taking hold. We are pleased to see that they are doing a great job.

Patrick Malcolm Moley: Great. That is it for me.

Operator: Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, that concludes our question and answer session. I will turn the floor back to Mr. Abularrage for final comments.

John Joseph Abularrage: Thank you very much, everyone. As always, we appreciate your time and look forward to speaking to you next quarter.

Operator: Thank you. This concludes today’s conference. You may disconnect your lines at this time. Thank you for your participation.

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BGC (BGC) Q1 2026 Earnings Call Transcript was originally published by The Motley Fool