Report of the executive board

General review of 2009

2009 began as a period of uncertainty. The markets were falling, economies worldwide were hard hit, interest rates were low and the prospects were grim. Despite these difficult circumstances, 2009 was a good year for BinckBank in which it made record profits.

The private investor saw in the sharply falling share prices an attractive moment to invest, or to begin investing again. Our offering of high quality products and our customer-centred approach led to an unprecedented inflow of new account holders. We welcomed 100,748 new account holders in 2009. After the initial fall, the markets showed signs of resilience from March. Our customers continued trading in the rising stock markets throughout the year, and taken on average our customers’ assets saw solid growth.

In Belgium we have as good as equalled the market leader after almost four years, and the number of Retail accounts and transactions at the end of 2009 were 32,757 and 973,059 respectively. In France our market share among the French online brokers has risen to approximately 5%*. Our national television campaign was very successful to this.

In addition to private investors, we also serve professional parties via our Professional Services business unit. In 2009 it grew on a number of fronts. Subsidiary company Syntel sold a software licence to ING Bank Nederland, and in July we welcomed our second BPO customer, Robein Leven. Professional Services also introduced the innovative investment product “Giraal beleggen”.

We have high expectations of TOM (The Order Machine), the joint venture with Optiver that was launched in 2009. TOM is a share search engine with which we can offer our customers possible better prices for their securities. In addition, we expect that in time it will result in a lowering of the execution costs of the securities transactions. The first share transactions via TOM were done in September 2009. TOM operates in compliance with the best execution requirements imposed by MiFID. Thanks to TOM and the possibilities it offers us to search for the best price on various markets for private investors, we are now front runner in the market.

From the perspective of cost control and long term growth, the redesign of our IT infrastructure is of particular importance, and we have made progress in this area in 2009. The migration of the Binck platform to our new data centre was successfully completed, and we expect that the migration of Alex will be completed in the first half of 2010.

On 22 December 2009 BinckBank announced that it would be suspending the share buy-back programme for an indefinite period. The buy-back programme for 2009 was fully completed. BinckBank repurchased a total of 2,041,647 shares in 2009 at an average purchase price of €8.81. To continue to facilitate future growth, and in anticipation of stricter capital requirements for banks, BinckBank decided to suspend the share buy-back programme for an indefinite period.

* Source: Acsel (l’Association de l’economie numérique) Key figures online brokerage December 2009