Last week IG released its results for the 2025 calendar year and some projections for the first three months of 2026.
There were a few fun bits of non-financial info there and I thought it would be interesting to go through them.
US listing and mergers
The biggest news is that IG announced a strategic review of its business, with a re-listing of the business in the US as a potential option.
This isn’t that surprising. The US will (probably) give IG a higher valuation and put it in a better position to expand in the US, which offers its only meaningful growth market.
The company has no other obvious areas where it can grow meaningfully, primarily – in my opinion – because it is too risk averse to target emerging markets and was too slow to launch products like crypto and commission-free trading.
The US is also embracing financial gambling, whereas the FCA is trying to kill it in the Yookay.
The other related point is on mergers. The company’s CEO Breon Corcoran said in an analyst call…
“our primary two geographies are the United States and the United Kingdom and M&A that will allow us to either go faster there or have more scale there. It’s hard to pass by opportunities there to pursue ambitions further afield.”
Corcoran’s main ‘claim to fame’ is merging Paddy Power and Betfair, so he has some track record here. There is also a level of similarity between the gaming and trading sectors, with organic growth increasingly hard to come by in a highly saturated and heavily regulated industry.
The interesting question here is who to merge with? Merging only makes sense if there are, to use that most corporate of corporate phrases, ‘synergies’. We reported last year that IG had been in talks to merge with Kraken.
Something like this would make sense. IG’s main ‘weak’ areas are crypto, futures, and prediction markets. Kraken is strong in futures and crypto. IG is strong in CFDs and options, where Kraken is weak.
I’m not saying a merger would involve Kraken specifically but it is the type of retail-facing company that I can see it making sense to merge with. The only other would be a company that has a strong prediction markets offering.
They will add prediction markets
On that point, and although this is not exactly new, IG has said they will add prediction markets this year.
More interestingly, they also said they are looking at “gaming adjacent experiences”. It’s plausible this is just prediction markets but there is one slide in the group’s presentation that implies it includes other products as well.
Will it be prop? Probably not. But it’s nice to dream.
Multi-product adoption up 138% in the Yookay
IG noted in its report that the number of people who made a first trade and then moved on to trade another product within 3 months of that rose 138% last year, compared to 2024.
Unfortunately there is no clarity on what that meant in more concrete terms (ie. how many people did this, what the actual conversion rate was, what products they were switching between).
Nonetheless, it’s a sign that having multiple products does help broaden your marketing mix and drive new trading activity. Again, the downside here is we don’t know what people were switching between.
In theory you would want someone to move from stockbroking to CFD trading, with the former having a lower marketing cost…
Super app
…And the main way IG looks like it will try to do that is via the sort of ‘all in one’ app that is becoming increasingly popular in our sector.
We got a brief snapshot of what this would look like below:
I feel like this is fairly standard at this point for all big players, so it’s not surprising IG is doing it. The current set up on mobile is pretty lame compared to others – like Capital.com or Trading 212 – and this would presumably be better at helping cross sell.
Customer resolution via digital up to 71%
One of the more random bits of information in IG’s presentation was around customer queries. The company put a small graph in the document showing the increase in “the share of customer queries resolved through AI-driven digital channels including webchat and WhatsApp.” This rose from less than 1% to approximately 71%.
AI-driven is not the same as AI, meaning this could still involve human interaction.
The graph also doesn’t distinguish between Freetrade and IG’s other brands. Given Freetrade has many more customers than IG and probably has much better digital communications capabilities, it’s plausible this is skewing the numbers.
Nonetheless, if we assume it does cover IG’s main brand in a meaningful way and it really is fully automated AI-generated responses, it’s a sign that this tech works. You can just do AI comms.
I also think it’s a sign of change at IG. I still think of the company as kind of like HL for spread betting. They serve higher value customers with high touch service. Stuff like this makes it seem like they are moving to the Trading 212 / Plus500 / Revolut model, where there is almost no human customer support and everything is digital.
I guess if it works, it works. The potential problem is that IG’s own accounts show it still makes the large majority of its money from high value CFD and spread bet traders. Can you keep hold of those people if you switch to something more like a ‘fintech’? It looks like we’re about to find out.
