TRADE REPUBLIC

Christian Hecker was working at Goldman Sachs when he looked around and noticed something embarrassing about European finance: if you wanted to buy a single stock in Germany in 2015, you were paying €10–€25 in brokerage fees per trade. The industry was essentially designed to make retail investing inaccessible to anyone without a fat portfolio to absorb those costs.

Hecker teamed up with Thomas Pischke and Marco Cancellieri — two co-founders with backgrounds in finance and tech — and they set out to fix it.

They launched Trade Republic in 2019 after spending four years building the infrastructure and getting licensed as a securities trading bank by BaFin, Germany's financial regulator. That licensing process is brutal.

Most fintech startups route around it by partnering with a bank. Trade Republic decided to become the bank.

That took longer and cost more, but it meant they could control everything — including that €1 flat fee per trade that became their entire pitch.

The timing was almost accidental genius. They launched just as a generation of young Europeans was starting to worry about retirement savings in a zero-interest-rate world, and just before COVID-19 locked everyone at home with nothing to do but watch their cash do nothing in a savings account.

The first lockdown in March 2020 sent signups through the roof. They weren't ready for it.

Their systems buckled. But they survived it, and what came out the other side was a company with serious momentum.

Trade Republic makes it trivially easy to buy stocks, ETFs, derivatives, and crypto through a slick mobile app. You sign up, verify your identity, and you're investing within minutes.

Every trade costs €1. That's it.

No percentage fees, no hidden charges, no inactivity fees.

So how do they make money? A few ways.

First, they earn payment for order flow — brokers route customer orders through market makers who pay a small fee for that flow. This is controversial (Robinhood got into serious trouble over it in the US), but it's legal in Europe and keeps the €1 flat fee economics viable.

Second, they earn interest on uninvested cash held in customer accounts — a revenue stream that got dramatically more interesting when European interest rates stopped being zero. Third, they offer a savings plan product that lets customers automatically buy ETFs on a schedule, which generates recurring revenue and sticky customer behavior.

In 2023 they launched a high-interest savings account offering 4% on cash deposits, which was significantly better than what most European banks were offering. That product alone reportedly drove a wave of new customers who weren't even interested in investing — they just wanted somewhere to park their money.

Trade Republic suddenly wasn't just a brokerage. It was a challenger bank going after savings deposits too.

The core product is the Trade Republic app — a mobile-only brokerage that lets you buy stocks, ETFs, bonds, derivatives, and crypto with a flat €1 fee per trade. The interface is deliberately minimal.

No charts with seventeen indicators, no news feed screaming at you. You search for what you want, you buy it, you close the app.

That simplicity is a feature, not a limitation.

The Savings Plans product is arguably more important to their growth than the trading app. You pick an ETF or stock, set a monthly amount as low as €10, pick a date, and Trade Republic buys it automatically.

No fee on savings plans (the €1 applies to manual trades). This turns passive savers into long-term investors without requiring them to make active decisions.

Millions of Trade Republic's customers use nothing else.

The Cash Account is the newest piece. Launched when European interest rates finally got interesting again, it offers a competitive interest rate on uninvested cash — well above what most high-street banks offer on savings accounts.

This product repositioned Trade Republic from 'investing app' to 'place where your money actually works for you,' which opened up a much larger total addressable market.

They also offer a Trade Republic card — a debit card linked to your account — pushing further into the everyday banking territory that Revolut and N26 have been occupying.

Trade Republic's growth story is less about a single hack and more about being the right product in the right market at exactly the right moment — and then not screwing it up.

The €1 flat fee was the hook. It's the kind of pricing that makes you do a double-take.

German brokers were charging €20 a trade. Trade Republic charged €1.

That's not a better product. That's a different product category.

When you remove the per-trade cost almost entirely, the mental math of investing changes. You stop asking 'is this trade worth the fee?' and start actually investing.

What amplified that was the savings plan feature. Rather than just attracting active traders, Trade Republic let people set up automatic monthly investments into ETFs — €25 a month into a MSCI World ETF, basically on autopilot.

This pulled in a completely different customer: people who don't want to think about the market, they just want their money to grow. That's not a trading app customer base.

That's a wealth-building customer base. Much stickier.

Much larger.

The 2023 cash savings account was the next move. Suddenly Trade Republic was competing with Deutsche Bank's savings products, not just with other brokers.

They acquired millions of new customers who had never traded a stock in their lives. Their total assets under custody reportedly crossed €35 billion by late 2023.

For a nine-year-old app company, that's a serious number.

Trade Republic's biggest challenge is the one every fintech with explosive growth eventually faces: regulation, trust, and what happens when the market goes down hard.

The payment for order flow model is under serious pressure in Europe. The EU has been debating banning it outright, which would force Trade Republic to rethink how it subsidises those €1 trades.

If PFOF disappears, either the fee goes up or the unit economics get painful. They have the interest income from deposits as a buffer, but it's not a comfortable situation to be in.

There's also the Robinhood problem. Robinhood's reputation collapsed partly because it was seen as gamifying investing and luring inexperienced people into risky trades.

Trade Republic hasn't faced that scandal, but they operate in the same space and the risk is real. When retail investors lose money — and they will, because markets go down — someone will write the story about how the €1 app encouraged them to take risks they didn't understand.

And then there's the straightforward competitive threat. N26, Revolut, and every European neobank is now adding investment products.

The €1 brokerage isn't a moat if everyone else charges €0. Trade Republic needs to win on trust, product depth, and customer experience — which is harder than winning on price.

Trade Republic raised €62 million in a Series B in 2020 led by Accel and Founders Fund — Peter Thiel's venture firm. Having Founders Fund on the cap table was a signal.

These are the people who backed Facebook, SpaceX, and Stripe. They don't do boring.

In 2021, Trade Republic raised €900 million in a Series C at a €4.3 billion valuation. That round was led by Sequoia Capital — one of the most prestigious VC firms in Silicon Valley — alongside Ontario Teachers' Pension Plan and Accel.

Sequoia's involvement was notable because they rarely lead European rounds. They saw something in Trade Republic that made them treat it like a category-defining company, not a regional fintech.

The backing matters beyond the money. Sequoia and Founders Fund don't just write checks — they open doors to talent, to regulatory relationships, to the kind of institutional credibility that makes European regulators and banking partners take you seriously.

For a company trying to be trusted with billions in customer assets, that credibility isn't nothing.