Co-founder and CEO of EToro Yoni Assia Talks TradeZero Deal

**SPEAKER_1** (0:02)
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**Tim Stenovec** (0:07)
I'm looking at shares of EToro Group. They're lower today, actually having the biggest decline ever, down about 13%.
This after the Fintech company reported revenue from crypto assets for the second quarter that missed the average analyst estimate. Also, big news, it announced to buy TradeZero, based in Brooklyn, for up to $231 million. We've got with us Yoni Assia, the CEO of EToro. He's back with us here in the Bloomberg Business Week studio. So the numbers, you were saying you had a good quarter, and this is an acquisition that you think is a right move, obviously, at the time. What's the market getting wrong about this?

**Yoni Assia** (0:42)
Well, I can't control the markets. I can control the business. Q2 was another beat quarter. Great 9% growth year over year, both top line and bottom line. 18% exceeding actually market expectations of funded accounts.
Huge road map coming in across AI in the company. We actually released a new app, which is taking the old app and rewritten 100% with AI, with AI focus and center around Tori or AI agent, which is the GROK frontier model. And we were talking now about Denpi Petone from TradeZero and the team, a great team joining us here in the US to lead EToro in the US with the TradeZero acquisition.

**Tim Stenovec** (1:25)
Yeah, let's talk about the TradeZero acquisition. Dan's been on our program. I used to speak to him all the time just a few years ago.
So certainly a familiar name to our audience. Why buy TradeZero rather than build something internally? Like what does bringing on TradeZero do for EToro that you couldn't offer US customers before?

**Yoni Assia** (1:43)
So when you look at our business, the vast majority of our business is outside the US. We have a huge franchise Europe, UK, Australia, Singapore, Abu Dhabi, and the US a bit got left behind sort of the rest of the world for us where the big part of the business is. What this brings is one, a great team based here in Brooklyn in the US with a significant also franchise, $80 million revenues and a lot of knowledge and experience in US capital markets infrastructure. So a lot of the great products that we actually have outside the US, which include leverage stock trading, long short.
On top of long short trading, we actually created quantitative smart portfolios, which create hedge fund like strategies, market neutral strategies outside the US. So all of these products operate and work for EToro outside the US. And we believe that together with TradeZero, we can actually bring all of these products, including futures trading, which is a lot of our customers were trading oil, gold, silver during Q1, so all of these products will now be enabled to our customers through the integration with TradeZero.

**Kristine Aquino** (2:56)
Yeah. How are you planning to differ your approach when it comes to dealing with your international clients? Because I lived in London for almost 10 years, and the average retail investor there tends to be more conservative. They tend to prefer physical assets, whereas US investors are really just very much into this. And so, yeah, how would you differ the approach now that we're looking at a broader base of international clients?

**Yoni Assia** (3:17)
So I think this actually shows the huge opportunity that we have, right? So EToro has been hugely successful outside the US and places like Germany, Spanish, France, Italy, the UK, across multiple, by the way, both geographies and products, 24-7 trading of both stocks from 26 different capital markets of commodities, indices, currencies, as well as investing, copying the top trades all around the world. We actually feel our products have a huge untapped market here in the US.
But until 2025, until the IPO, basically, we just took a step back, waited actually for also the crypto environment to be the right environment here in the US, and together with the TradeZero acquisition, we are going to double down on the US market, introducing our US customers and US customers to basically the global community and the collective intelligence in EToro.

**Tim Stenovec** (4:10)
You mentioned AI, and one thing that we're increasingly hearing more about is agentic trading. There was a great piece in Bloomberg just last week, big take, everybody should check it out if they haven't already about the way that some retail traders are harnessing this technology. EToro is allowing customers to use AI agents to trade autonomously, but that's within certain defined parameters.
Give us an update on adoption and activity that you're seeing thus far.

**Yoni Assia** (4:35)