Trade Republic

Trade Republic is a Berlin-based fintech company founded in 2015 that has grown from a commission-free trading app into one of Europe's most comprehensive consumer wealth management platforms. Through a clean, intuitive mobile interface, it gives retail investors access to stocks, ETFs, and derivative instruments without the commissions and minimum balance requirements that historically limited active market participation to wealthy or financially sophisticated Europeans. The founding thesis was both simple and disruptive: the cost of investing in Europe had been too high for too long, maintained by an incumbent banking and brokerage system with little competitive incentive to change. By eliminating transaction commissions and reducing the friction of account opening and first investment, Trade Republic reached a cohort of first-time investors — younger, mobile-native, without pre-existing relationships with financial advisors — who responded in significant numbers to a product that finally felt designed for them. The company's growth in its early years demonstrated that latent demand for accessible retail investing was far larger than the traditional industry had assumed. Over time, Trade Republic evolved well beyond its original brokerage proposition. It introduced automated savings plans that allow users to invest fixed amounts in any available asset on a recurring schedule, making systematic, disciplined investing available to people without the expertise or time to actively manage their portfolios. Fixed-income products offering competitive yields were added to address the needs of more conservative savers. More recently, access to private market investments — historically restricted to institutional and high-net-worth investors — extended the platform's reach into asset classes that retail clients had no previous pathway to. In 2023, Trade Republic obtained a banking license from German regulators, a milestone that substantially expanded the range of financial products the company can offer directly without routing customers through partner bank infrastructure. The license positions Trade Republic not just as a broker but as a genuine financial institution, capable of offering deposit accounts, lending products, and payment services under its own regulatory umbrella. The numbers tell the story of remarkable commercial execution. Trade Republic now manages more than €150 billion in customer assets for over ten million clients across Europe — figures that rival the scale of established retail banks in several markets, achieved in approximately a decade without a single physical branch or traditional sales force. In 2025, the company raised a €1.2 billion secondary round at a valuation of €12.5 billion, cementing its position as one of Europe's most valuable private fintech companies and as a structural participant in the financial lives of a new generation of European investors.