Trade Republic is a German neobroker that made investing cheap enough to become a habit rather than an event. Founded in Munich in 2015 as Neon Trading by Christian Hecker, Thomas Pischke, and Marco Cancellieri, it spent four years getting licensed before the app finally launched in January 2019 — then grew quickly by charging a flat €1 per trade at a time when incumbent German brokers still wanted €20 to €50. It is now headquartered in Berlin, employs around 1,100 people, and serves more than 10 million customers across 17 European markets holding roughly €150 billion in assets.
The pricing is the product. Manual trades cost €1, savings-plan executions are free, and fractional shares start from €1, which turns the app into a set-and-forget wealth-building tool rather than a trading terminal. Around 65% of its customers are first-time investors — a number that describes its real market far better than any comparison to Robinhood. Co-founder Christian Hecker has consistently framed the company around Europe's pension gap, and the product is built for accumulation, not speculation.
What separates Trade Republic from most neobrokers is the licence. It received a full banking licence from the European Central Bank in December 2023, letting it hold customer deposits directly instead of parking them with partner banks, and it has since added current accounts, local IBANs, a debit card, and interest on uninvested cash. A BaFin MiCA licence followed in May 2025, allowing it to offer crypto across 30 EEA countries. The company has been profitable since 2023, reporting €34.8 million of net income on roughly €340 million of revenue, and a €1.2 billion secondary share sale in December 2025 led by Founders Fund valued it at €12.5 billion — making it Germany's most valuable startup.
Its defining challenge is now structural. Trade Republic long earned a significant slice of revenue from payment for order flow, routing orders to the Lang & Schwarz Exchange in return for a rebate. The EU has banned the practice, with Germany's exemption expiring on 30 June 2026, removing a line that once accounted for roughly a third of the business. Its answer was to obtain a BaFin licence for its own multilateral trading facility in January 2026 and act as its own market maker, earning from the bid-offer spread instead. The €1 pricing survives — but the change swaps one conflict of interest for another, and execution quality is the thing to watch.