TMX Group Is Tracking to Hit Its 2029 Revenue Target Three Years Early, and the MEMX-BOX Deal Is Getting Cheaper as Shareholders Rush In
Scotiabank Financials Summit, September 9, 2026
TMX Group's management used a fireside chat at Scotiabank's 27th Annual Financials Summit to reveal that the exchange operator's long-term growth targets are being blown through years ahead of schedule, while offering new detail on how favorable shareholder demand is reshaping the economics of its pending MEMX-BOX options merger.
TM2X Target Now Look Conservative
TMX's TM2X strategic plan called for doubling revenue to $2 billion by 2029, a pace management had already flagged as roughly twice as fast as the climb to $1 billion in 2022. Analyst Phil Hardie of Scotiabank pushed CEO David Arnold on whether the company was now tracking to beat even that accelerated timeline. Arnold confirmed it, and added that Hardie's math undersold the momentum. First-half 2026 organic revenue came in at $975 million, meaning the exit run rate could put TMX within reach of the $2 billion mark by the end of this fiscal year, purely organically. "So obviously, the organic transactions -- which you touched on -- they do help, but they really help to accelerate it. But on an organic basis, we're literally within spitting distance," Arnold said. That implies TMX could hit a 2029 target as much as three years early on an organic basis alone, before layering in the recently announced Cboe Australia, Cboe Canada, and MEMX-BOX transactions, which represent roughly $2 billion of inorganic investment in aggregate.
MEMX-BOX Economics Are Improving in TMX's Favor
The most actionable new data point in the session concerned the pending combination of TMX's Boston Options Exchange (BOX) stake with MEMX, a deal designed to create a more credible fourth-place options venue in the U.S. TMX had guided to roughly a 59% ownership stake in the combined entity and disclosed it would need to disburse around $800 million to fund the transaction. Arnold said the final ownership number will likely land between 55% and 60%, with the disbursement figure coming in below $800 million, because shareholders in both MEMX and BOX have responded more enthusiastically than expected. Investors who initially indicated they would roll only 50% of their equity into the combined entity are now asking to roll 100% or more. "The reaction from the shareholders and the marketplace to this announcement has been incredibly positive," Arnold said, framing the shift as a direct read on how the market views the combined venue's prospects. The deal is also expected to modernize BOX's technology stack using what Arnold called MEMX's "state-of-the-art" matching engine, addressing a platform that was overdue for an upgrade.
Balance Sheet Has More Room Than the Street Assumes
With three major deals in flight simultaneously (Cboe Australia now closed, Cboe Canada still awaiting Competition Bureau approval, and MEMX-BOX pending SEC review), Arnold pushed back on any suggestion TMX is stretched. Leverage is expected to peak around 3.4 times, comfortably under the 4 times level Arnold said he is personally at ease with, and well within investment-grade tolerances given the company's stated priority of protecting its credit rating. Outside of acquisitions, TMX targets 1.5 to 2.5 times leverage and a 40% to 50% dividend payout ratio; it has raised its dividend three times in the past twelve months. Management also used the 2026 share-price weakness tied to AI-disruption fears, which peaked last June, as a buying opportunity, accelerating its buyback program during the dip. Arnold called the disruption narrative "unfounded" at the time.
Addressing the Disruption Overhang: Fast Follower by Design
Hardie noted that 2026 has felt like "the year of disruption fear" for exchange operators, with investors fixated on AI, tokenization, and perpetual futures eroding incumbent moats. Arnold's response was a defense of TMX's deliberate positioning as a "fast follower" on retail-driven U.S. product trends rather than a first mover. He argued that prediction markets, perpetual futures, and tokenized securities are largely solutions to problems that don't exist in the same form in Canada, where cash equities are already effectively digitized. "It's not because we don't have the skills and capabilities to lead," Arnold said. "It's just in some of these, we really need to see a proven client demand." He cited TMX's Canadian Collateral Management System, co-developed with Clearstream, as an example of demand-led innovation, and pointed to a September 15 industry forum on securities digitization as the next test of whether Canadian broker-dealers actually want a tokenization solution before TMX builds one. The counterpoint, he said, is that TMX will lead aggressively in areas that are core differentiators, such as matching-engine technology, where the Alpha-X U.S. platform and incoming MEMX technology are being fused into what he expects to be next-generation infrastructure.
Listings Franchise: Strong Pipeline, Structural Advantages Over London
Capital Markets head Loui Anastasopoulos characterized 2026 as a strong IPO year for the TSX, with roughly six large IPOs completed against a historical benchmark of ten in a good year, plus two or three more expected before year-end. He emphasized that headline IPO counts understate actual activity: TMX has seen close to 300 total listings this year once reverse takeovers, direct listings, and the 15 companies that graduated from TSX Venture to TSX are included. The long-term pipeline stands at more than 2,000 private companies, with roughly 500 in active near-term dialogue and 85 to 90 in discussions for the next twelve months. Asked about U.K. regulatory reforms aimed at reviving the London Stock Exchange's listings appeal, Anastasopoulos was pointed in his contrast: "I think with some of the transactions that London has done over the years, their big Refinitiv deal, the listings part of their business, I think, became a bit of an afterthought. And I think they're paying a little bit of the price of that now." He argued TMX has spent 15 years on the same regulatory and tax-policy advocacy that London is only now pursuing, and has never let its core listings business slip into "care-and-maintenance" mode even as it diversified globally.
Corporate Solutions Is the Quiet Growth Engine
Perhaps the least appreciated growth driver flagged in the session was TMX's Corporate Solutions business, which now represents about 40% of total capital-formation revenue and is growing at high-single to double-digit rates, versus 5% to 7% for the core listings business. The unit, which includes transfer agency, trust and employee-plan services, and a newswire business acquired roughly a year ago, has expanded its addressable market beyond listed companies to private firms, governments, and law firms across Canada, the U.S., Latin America, and Europe. Anastasopoulos said TMX is increasingly cross-selling five to seven products into individual listed companies, deepening wallet share and stickiness, with a formal target of pushing Corporate Solutions to 50% or more of cap-formation revenue by 2030.
Trayport: Not a SaaS Business, Despite the Metrics
On the data and analytics side, Arnold addressed what he called a persistent misunderstanding of the Trayport energy-trading network, whose growth decelerated somewhat in 2026 after years of strong expansion. Because TMX reports net revenue retention and annual recurring revenue metrics that are common in software-as-a-service reporting, some investors have concluded Trayport is a SaaS business. It isn't. "We effectively sell access to a network... we sell it based on user subscribers," Arnold said, describing a mix of one-year pay-as-you-go licenses and longer-term, all-you-can-eat site licenses. Near-term growth is expected to come from product additions such as algorithmic trading tools and data-visualization capabilities, medium-term growth from diversification into new asset classes including oil, and longer-term growth from geographic expansion, with Japan's energy market deregulation flagged as a specific opportunity alongside roughly $10 million of existing Trayport revenue already generated in North America.
Arnold closed by naming AI as a net positive rather than a threat to the franchise, describing internal productivity gains from AI deployment in client-facing workflows as "jaw-dropping," though he did not disclose specific use cases or quantify the financial impact on the call.