It’s time for our latest forum AMA, and this time we’re travelling to Stockholm.
We’d like to introduce you to @KarlB, who joins Freetrade as Managing Director, Sweden.
Karl brings fifteen years of experience working in senior compliance and risk roles in financial services and fintech. He joins from J.P. Morgan where he was Chief Country Compliance Officer for Sweden and Finland.
Karl is responsible for accelerating Freetrade’s European expansion plans, working closely with European and national regulators to establish operations from our Swedish headquarters.
You can also read more about our new Board members here:
Keen to find out more about Freetrade’s expansion in Sweden and across Europe?
Drop your questions for Karl below and he’ll jump on the thread and answer these on Friday.
Could you give us a brief overview of the Swedish and Nordic brokerage landscape? How many clients would you like to attract in the next 3 years?
We have had very few details with regards to choosing Sweden as the EU base. What have been the biggest drivers of this decision a part from getting you in the team of course?
In comparison to the U.K. what percentage of Freetrade revenues are expected from Sweden and do you think the target Swedish customers have the same appetite to risk and will trade more or less volume per capita?
Noting that the Swedish population is around 10m and the U.K. 66m, why did Freetrade pick Sweden when Spain(46m), France(65m) or Germany(83m) have much bigger populations?
Best of luck, I believe this to be a solid business decision and personally know of colleagues waiting for it!
I’ll continue in English so everyone can understand.
Our competition in the Nordics are the large local retail banks / internet banks. But there really is no other commission free investment service with a transparent and simple freemium pricing model, with its own tech platform and focus on open up stock market investing for everyone in The Nordics.
On Freeetrade becoming available in Finland I can say that we want to provide everyone with access to our app and once we have our Swedish regulatory license then the whole EU lies open!
The authorisation is in the hands of the Swedish regulator (Finansinspektionen). But we are working as hard as we can to make sure we get the authorisation as fast as possible!
Just like Slimshadyisback1Jack pointed out below we will be able to passport with our Swedish regulatory permissions to other EU countries. So, no need for extra licenses!
I would point to the the fairly fragmented landscape both from a regulatory perspective but also partially from a technical one. Then I would also think that while Swedes are generally very tech savvy and used to handling banking and investments online that is not necessarily true for all parts of the EU.
This is one of the areas I spend the most time on, ie. hiring! We are growing at a record pace, both in customers and staff so that we can get the Freetrade app to even more customers!
I’m really exited about getting access to the UK stock market which has not been practically possible in Sweden. Getting access to a large number of ETFs will also be awesome! But the first one I’ll buy depends on when we go live!
