"I Simply Believed": Octavian Patrascu on Clearing NAGA's Clutter and Returning to Profit

NAGA has climbed out of a multi-year loss-making stretch and returned to profitability, chief executive Octavian Patrascu has said, describing a turnaround built on capital from the broker's 2023 reverse merger with CAPEX.com and a deliberate reshaping of its business mix. The Frankfurt-listed platform had accumulated heavy losses even as retail trading volumes surged during the pandemic, culminating in a €37 million net loss in 2022.

The 2023 combination with Patrascu's own brokerage, CAPEX.com (Key Way Group), injected close to $20 million in fresh capital. According to the CEO, that sum was split evenly, with half directed at legacy loans and half toward growth. He funded $9 million of the total personally through a convertible bond. "Why my own capital? Because I believed in this merger then and I believe in it today," he said. The growth spending has included branding partnerships with boxer Mike Tyson and Bundesliga club Borussia Dortmund.

Clearing the clutter

Patrascu characterises the restructuring not as blunt austerity but as removing accumulated clutter: over-hiring to patch broken processes and stacked systems that operated without clear plans or data-driven decisions. Underperforming units were cut, and the group rebalanced its geographic exposure away from a congested, heavily regulated European retail market. NAGA's revenue split now stands at roughly 33% Europe, 33% Middle East and 33% Latin America, with Latin America's share of group revenue rising from 5% to 22%. Patrascu said the company will consolidate in its current markets rather than chase new ones.

He also flagged culture as the hardest hurdle, contrasting NAGA's speed-first, Silicon Valley-inspired approach with CAPEX.com's more process-driven operations, where projects carry KPIs and defined objectives. Unifying that baseline, he argued, underpinned the return to profit.

AI and the Super App push

On NAGA's Q1 2026 earnings call, Patrascu told investors AI would drive the next phase. The broker has deployed it in marketing, lifting output three- to fivefold, and in customer support, where it resolves roughly 66% of inquiries. Marketing headcount is down 20%, though he conceded it is "still too early" to quantify client conversion gains. NAGA has built a dedicated AI team supported by consultants from Microsoft and developed an internal AI foundation called Citadel, with AI chat support and agentic trading on the roadmap under strict guardrails and no committed timeline.

NAGA is also pursuing a Super App strategy alongside NAGA One, with plans to fold NAGA Trader into the same ecosystem. Patrascu acknowledged Revolut, valued at $115 billion, leads the field with an inverted model that starts from banking. He said owning payment infrastructure is a matter of timing, noting an in-house EMI licence in Cyprus requires at least €350,000 in upfront capital. "We'll let the numbers tell us when," he said.