flatexDEGIRO’s Q3 revenue rose 13.8%, not the 40% repeated in a transcript

A public transcript of flatexDEGIRO’s third-quarter 2026 analyst call states twice that quarterly revenue rose 40% year on year. The company’s own reported figures do not support that percentage. Revenue was €150.3 million, compared with €132.0 million in the third quarter of 2025. The increase was €18.3 million; dividing that increase by €132.0 million produces 13.86%, which the issuer rounded to 14%. The 40% rendering is therefore not a matter of an alternative rounding convention. It is incompatible with the two numbers printed beside it.[1][2][3]

The distinction is important because the transcript format can make an error look attributable to management. The StockAnalysis page labels the text as a transcript and reproduces a passage in which the chief financial officer appears to say that revenue increased by 40%. The same page’s summary repeats 40%. Yet the company’s formal release, the quarterly presentation and the underlying table show 14% or 13.8%. Without listening to and authenticating the original audio at the precise moment, it is not possible to determine whether the speaker misspoke, the audio was misheard, or an automated or human transcription process converted ‘fourteen’ into ‘forty’. The defensible correction is to the published number, not an unsupported claim about who caused it.[1][2][3]

The arithmetic leaves no room for 40%

A 40% increase from the €132.0 million comparative would require quarterly revenue of €184.8 million, €34.5 million above the amount reported. Conversely, €150.3 million is 113.86% of €132.0 million. This cross-check is useful because it avoids dependence on any narrative description. It uses only the issuer’s current-period and prior-period values. The formal announcement itself says revenue rose 14% to about €150 million, while the more precise presentation table gives €150.3 million and €132.0 million. Both routes lead to the same conclusion.[1][4]

The transcript may have been contaminated by nearby figures. Total revenue for the first nine months grew 19.5%, net profit for that period grew 37.2%, and third-quarter total revenue in absolute terms was 39.9% higher than a different base only if one invents an inappropriate comparison. None produces exactly the transcript’s claimed 40% year-on-year quarterly revenue growth using the disclosed company table. A transcription error involving the spoken words ‘fourteen’ and ‘forty’ is a plausible explanation because of their acoustic similarity, but it remains a hypothesis unless the audio is checked.[2][4]

The rest of the quarter was strong without the erroneous percentage

Correcting the figure does not turn the quarter into a weak one. Net profit rose 29% to roughly €50 million. Commission income increased about 6% to €89 million, interest income increased 33% to €56 million, and settled transactions rose 8% to 19.2 million. Assets under custody reached about €113 billion and customer accounts reached roughly 3.7 million. For the first nine months, revenue rose 19.5% to €490.4 million and net profit rose 37.3% to €165.4 million. The company reiterated guidance and said it expected to reach or exceed targets originally set for 2027 one year early. None of that requires inflating quarterly revenue growth to 40%.[1][4]

The composition of growth also explains why net profit advanced faster than revenue. Interest income grew substantially more quickly than commission income, and the group reported operating leverage across the nine-month period. The third quarter was seasonally quieter for trading than the second quarter, while the interest contribution benefited from the treasury book, margin-loan utilisation and rates. An accurate reading is therefore more informative than the erroneous shorthand: the company produced mid-teens quarterly revenue growth, with a stronger increase in profit because of revenue mix and operating leverage.[1][2]

Why transcript errors matter in financial reporting

Analyst-call transcripts are often treated as searchable primary material even when they are hosted by third parties. They feed news summaries, investor notes, machine-learning systems and search results. A single incorrect percentage can propagate because the transcript appears to contain a direct quotation and because the error is internally repeated in a summary. The formal filing may receive less attention than the text that is easiest to search. In this case, the error is readily testable because the current and comparative revenue values are present on the same page. In less transparent cases, a transcription mistake can survive longer and be incorporated into valuation or growth comparisons.[2][3]

The appropriate source hierarchy is clear. Audited or formally filed financial statements come first; issuer announcements and presentation tables come next; authenticated audio can clarify spoken wording; third-party transcripts are derivative evidence and should be checked against the numbers. A transcript is valuable for management’s explanations and question-and-answer detail, but it is not self-validating. Where a percentage conflicts with the values it purports to describe, the values and the formal release should govern unless a subsequent issuer correction says otherwise.[1][2][3]

A correction with a defined boundary

The evidence does not show that flatexDEGIRO attempted to overstate growth. Its formal announcement used the correct 14% figure, and its presentation supplied the figures needed to reproduce 13.8%. The discrepancy appears on an independent transcript page. Nor does the evidence establish that the chief financial officer actually said ‘40%’: the page’s text is an interpretation of audio, and the available written sources conflict. An article that attributes the erroneous number to the company without this distinction would repeat the very source-control problem it is trying to correct.[1][2][3]

The transcript publisher could resolve the issue by checking the call recording, correcting the summary and body, and noting the change. The company could also publish an official transcript, although it is not obliged to repair third-party copies. Until then, researchers should quote the formal figures: third-quarter revenue increased from €132.0 million to €150.3 million, a rise of 13.86%, conventionally rounded to 13.8% or 14%. Nine-month revenue growth was 19.5%, and third-quarter net-profit growth was about 29%.[1][2][4]

There is also a practical control lesson for publishers that use automated transcript feeds. A percentage should be checked against the two values it describes before publication, particularly when the claimed change is market-moving. Here the control would have taken one division and immediately produced 13.86%. A second control could compare the transcript with the issuer release, which used 14%. These checks do not require privileged access to the call or subjective interpretation; they are deterministic and could prevent the error from entering summaries, alerts and training datasets.[1][2][3]

What the correction changes

At 40%, the quarter would imply an extraordinary acceleration in the top line and could materially alter expectations for annual growth. At 13.8%, the quarter still shows solid expansion but sits below the 19.5% growth delivered over the first nine months. That difference affects the narrative: the company sustained growth through a seasonally quieter quarter rather than producing a sudden 40% surge. It also makes the faster profit growth more clearly a story about mix and operating leverage, not a simple reflection of an explosive revenue increase.[1][4]

The finding is therefore narrow, reproducible and consequential. A widely accessible transcript says 40%; the issuer’s numbers say 13.8%. The company’s own announcement supports the lower figure. The error should be corrected at the derivative source, and downstream users should remove 40% from any model or comparison based on third-quarter 2026 revenue. This is not an allegation against the issuer. It is a demonstration of why financial reporting must be rebuilt from denominators and source hierarchy rather than accepted from a polished transcript line.[1][2][3]

The correction has a wider methodological consequence. Earnings-call transcripts are derivative records: automated transcription, speaker identification and editorial clean-up can all introduce errors even when the underlying call was accurate. Where a percentage can be rebuilt from an issuer’s tables, the reported numerator and denominator should govern. A responsible archive should preserve the transcript wording, attach the corrected calculation and avoid silently rewriting the historical record. That approach protects both the company and readers: it does not attribute the 40% figure to management without audio confirmation, and it prevents a visibly wrong growth rate from propagating through databases, summaries and valuation models.[1][2][3][4]

The same discipline should be applied to every percentage repeated from a transcript when the issuer’s own tables permit a direct reconstruction.[1][2][3][4]

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