Derivatives Trading Providers in Europe

DEGIRO

DEGIRO is a Dutch discount broker built on a single observation: the marginal cost of executing a stock trade is software and settlement, not human labour — so the fees European retail investors were paying bore little relation to what a trade actually cost. Founded in Amsterdam in 2008 by former BinckBank employees, it started as an institutional broker, opened to retail investors in 2013, and undercut the incumbents by a wide enough margin to expand across the continent within a few years. The product is deliberately unglamorous. No gamification, no social feed, no notification congratulating you on a €5 deposit. DEGIRO offers direct access to dozens of exchanges across Europe and the US, real market data, and low per-trade pricing, and it assumes you already know what you want to buy. That utilitarian positioning has aged well as the novelty of investing apps has faded and European retail investors have matured past the onboarding experience into simply wanting to invest efficiently. DEGIRO is no longer independent. German broker flatex AG agreed to acquire it for around €250 million in December 2019, with the legal merger into flatexDEGIRO Bank completing in May 2021. The combined group trades on the Frankfurt Stock Exchange, joined the MDAX in March 2025, and converted from an AG to a European Company (SE) at the end of 2025. It now runs three brands — DEGIRO for international European markets, flatex for Germany and Austria, and ViTrade for active traders — together serving more than 3.5 million customers across 16 countries, with over €95 billion in assets under custody and more than 75 million transactions a year. Group revenue reached €559.8 million in 2025 with net income of €160.4 million, up from €71.9 million in 2023. The regulatory record is less tidy than the pricing story. The Dutch AFM fined the bank €2 million in 2022 over late and inaccurate reporting of unusual transactions, reduced to €797,500 on appeal in 2025. BaFin has issued a series of penalties: €1.05 million in 2023 for breaches of banking supervisory rules, accompanied by additional capital requirements and a special representative appointed to oversee remediation; €560,000 in December 2025 for advertising free investment services without clearly disclosing that a processing fee applied; and €1 million in April 2026 for failing to publish inside information promptly. Leadership has churned alongside it — CEO Frank Niehage resigned in 2024 after a public dispute with founder and major shareholder Bernd Förtsch, and former Morgan Stanley Europe CEO Oliver Behrens took over that October.

Founded 2013

eToro

eToro is a social trading and multi-asset investment platform built on a simple, contested premise: that retail investors do better when they can see and copy what other investors are doing. Founded in Tel Aviv in 2007 as RetailFX by brothers Yoni and Ronen Assia with David Ring, it launched OpenBook in 2010 — introducing the copy trading feature that still defines it, where you follow other traders and their positions replicate automatically in your own portfolio. The platform spans stocks, ETFs, commodities, currencies, crypto, and CFDs, with fractional shares and commission-free stock trading. It reports around 40 million registered users across 75 countries, though the more meaningful figure is 3.81 million funded accounts holding $18.5 billion in assets under administration — a gap that says a good deal about how social platforms accumulate signups versus customers. After a $10.4 billion SPAC merger collapsed in 2022, eToro went public the traditional way, listing on the Nasdaq under the ticker ETOR on 14 May 2025. Shares priced at $52, above the expected range, raised roughly $620 million, and closed the first day valuing the company at about $5.4 billion. The business is solidly profitable — net income of $216 million in 2025, after $192 million in 2024 and just $15 million in 2023 — but the volatility of that trajectory exposes the underlying dependency: eToro's fortunes track the crypto cycle closely, with crypto volumes tripling to $12 billion in 2024 before investors rotated back toward equities. Its European position rests on regulatory infrastructure rather than origin. eToro is an Israeli company headquartered near Tel Aviv, operating in Europe through a CySEC-regulated entity that secured a MiCA permit for crypto services in February 2025, alongside FCA-authorised UK operations. The copy trading model itself remains genuinely contested — whether it constitutes investor education or a mechanism for propagating overconfidence is an open argument — and in 2024 the company paid $1.5 million to settle SEC allegations that it had operated as an unregistered broker in the US, restricting its American crypto offering.

Founded 2007