For nine years following its 2017 Frankfurt listing, NAGA stood as a Silicon Valley parallel for European retail fintech: technologically inventive, product-rich and chronically incapable of turning a profit. Even as retail trading volumes exploded during the pandemic, the trading platform’s ledger continued to bleed red ink, leading to €37 million net loss in 2022. Still, Octavian Patrascu stops short of calling it a struggling business. “It was a company with commitments from the past and not enough fuel for growth,” NAGA’s CEO asserts. “A fintech needs cash to grow, to maintain the licences, to keep investing in product and marketing.”
London's trading industry is coming home!
In 2023, a reverse merger with his own brokerage CAPEX.com (Key Way Group) brought almost $20 million in new capital. This year, through an unapologetic restructuring mandate, Patrascu has pulled NAGA out of its multi-year red-ink struggle and straight into profitability.
The merger’s capital injection was divided down the middle. “Half of it has gone to legacy loans, and half of it has gone to grow the company,” he explains. This included new branding initiatives with boxing legend Mike Tyson and perennial Bundesliga challenger Borussia Dortmund.
Unlike a conventional merger, this deal had Patrascu putting his own skin in the game, funding US$9 million of the $20 million total through a convertible bond. “Why my own capital? Because I believed in this merger then and I believe in it today,” he says. “Mergers are hard. You need experience, discipline, and you need to move fast. I think that's what we proved.”
Clearing the Clutter
The turnaround was not a blunt austerity regime, but what Patrascu sees as “clearing the clutter.” This meant ending the habits of over-hiring to patch broken processes and stacking systems to keep things moving without a proper plan or data-driven decision-making.
An axe was taken to underperforming business units to channel resources toward proven revenue drivers. Crucially, the group re-engineered its geographical exposure. Historically, NAGA had lived by European retail traffic, an increasingly congested, heavily regulated and margin-compressed market.
The geographic distribution is now evenly balanced: roughly 33% Europe, 33% Middle East, and 33% Latin America. Notably, Latin America’s contribution to overall group revenues also grew, rising from an initial 5% to 22%.
Nonetheless, Patrascu stresses that NAGA won’t chase fresh footprints for now, but instead will focus on further entrench its position across its current geographical footprint.
Yet, even with the clutter cleared and the geography balanced, the most formidable hurdle on the road to profitability proved to be bridging a cultural divide. NAGA’s fast-paced, Silicon Valley-inspired mindset, where execution speed ruled above all else, stood in contrast to CAPEX.com’s culture. “We were more driven by operations, making sure that we're going to launch products in the correct way. Every project has a KPI, with an objective and it's easy to maintain,” Patrascu explains.
Harmonizing NAGA’s push for rapid product innovation with a structured operational framework demanded substantial effort. And Patrascu is convinced that establishing this unified cultural baseline is precisely the foundation it needed to achieve profitability.
“Cutting People Is Not a Growth Strategy, It’s Just Cutting.”
During NAGA’s Q1 2026 earnings call, Patrascu told investors that AI will anchor the company’s next growth phase. The firm has already integrated the technology into its marketing, increasing output three- to fivefold, and into customer support, where AI now resolves roughly 66% of inquiries.
Patrascu speaks with evident passion about AI. For one, he believes it can give a mid-size company, like NAGA, a fighting chance against industry titans. “In the past, if you wanted to penetrate 10 markets, maybe you needed four or five media buyers. Today, you can do all of this with just one. AI breaks the old cycle where scale needed headcount,” he notes.
Indeed, NAGA’s marketing department headcount has shrunk by 20%.
However, increased output has yet to materialise into something quantifiable, such as converting clients. “It is still too early,” he argues.
Despite the headcount reduction, Patrascu doesn’t see AI as a slash-and-burn exercise.
“Cutting people is not a growth strategy; it's just cutting. It only works if you replace what you removed with something better: talented people plus technology that automates the work, and AI pointed at growth, not only at savings. Reduction wasn't the goal; it was the result of automating processes that never should have needed that many people.”
Indeed, NAGA has invested in a dedicated AI team tasked with creating both internal and client-facing tools, supported by enterprise consultants from giants like Microsoft. In partnership with a tech provider, it also invested in building a foundation for AI called Citadel to securely plug in both external and internal models.
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Their client-facing roadmap includes AI chat support. “I believe that this will be a big thing and companies need to be ready for it,” he stresses.
The roadmap also includes agentic trading. Patrascu explains that NAGA will follow broader industry trends by placing strict guardrails on what the AI agent can do. “Agent trading would be where you can have a separate account where you can fund, and this is what we're trying to do,” he notes.
Patrascu won’t commit to a timeline for these tools, which highlights the operational transformation NAGA underwent. Being first is not as important anymore as getting it right the first time.
“It’s very important how you're going to incorporate all of these in one single app, in one single user experience while also managing the compliance and reporting,” he says.
Challenging Revolut’s Super App
The idea of bringing every service under a single app – the “Super App” in common fintech parlance – has become something of a trend in the trading space. NAGA is actively pursuing this strategy, joining the ranks of major players like Coinbase, Robinhood and XTB.
Patrascu says that this is an architectural necessity to solve chronic fragmentation. “Today, every client has multiple accounts; an account for crypto, for stock trading, for CFD trading, for a card and so on,” he notes. Although the group’s NAGA One platform has received the full Super App treatment, Patrascu plans for NAGA Trader, which is focused on trading and copy-trading, to undergo an identical ecosystem integration.
In the race to build the ultimate Super App, however, one player is completely lapping the field. Revolut dominates the space, offering its own trading products, including CFDs, and reigns as Europe's most valuable startup with a staggering $115 billion valuation.
Indeed, one could say that Revolut represents the kind of industry giant that Patrascu believes AI could give NAGA a fighting chance to compete.
Revolut’s playbook is essentially inverted, hooking retail clients with everyday banking before cross-selling trading features, whereas platforms like NAGA do the opposite. Yet Patrascu maintains that both approaches can win, as long as companies avoid critical pitfalls like a bloated user interface.
“It's easy to say ‘I want a Super App and I also want AI trading.’ But it's very important how you are incorporating these in one single app, in one single user experience. Because then you're going to have something like a Christmas tree where you put every ornament on a single side. It will not look great; you need to have some aesthetics there.”
It’s All About the Numbers
Central to this Super App ecosystem is owning the payment infrastructure itself. While white-labeling a payment provider is the typical first step, the ultimate goal is securing an in-house EMI license from a central bank, a notoriously cumbersome process. In Cyprus, for instance, securing one demands at least €350,000 in upfront capital, before factoring in a steep pile of application and advisory fees.
Trading platforms have a compelling reason to build out their own payment infrastructure: traditional banks have historically viewed the sector with deep scepticism.
For Patrascu, the question of whether to own the underlying payment rails is operational in nature.
“It's a question of timing,” he says. “In the beginning, it's better to partner with an established EMI; you move faster, and you learn. But once the business proves itself and the volumes grow, it's only natural to own the infrastructure yourself: better margins, full control of the product, and the customer relationship stays with you.”
For when that inflection point arrives, he points directly to balance-sheet metrics: the volume of assets under management (AUM), dedicated payment AUM, daily transaction velocity, and baseline revenue scale.
“Having an EMI license is not cheap. Once you have the users, the revenues and the volume, then it makes sense to look at how to be more efficient by building your own ecosystem. We'll let the numbers tell us when,” Patrascu notes in what is perhaps the clearest sign of how hard metrics now guide NAGA’s operations.
