MEGATHREAD: European expansion 🇪🇺

Freetrade’s financial EU passport is here - check out our plans and make the case for our first EU markets.

If you’re in the UK, you can try the app right here.

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We have a view, but I’m very curious what everyone thinks: which EU market should expand into first and why? :thinking:

We can do: Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Croatia, Cyprus (Republic of), Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Gibraltar, Greece, Hungary, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, Latvia, Liechtenstein, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malta, Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden.

Unfortunately, polls have to be fewer than 20 choices. :frowning:

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Féliciations equipe!

For exchange access Frankfurt please, and Euronext.

In terms of territory roll out :de: Germany seems like a big opportunity. A large population that likes to save and invest. Then :fr: France, there’s a new game in town and Macron is extremely keen for France to be seen as a European dynamo driving social and economic innovation. Reforms have made it a lot easier to start up, and there are more in the pipeline.

As @vlad pointed out, I imagine Dublin makes for a good candidate, especially since if that’ll be the home of your European operation, for regulatory purposes. Barriers being fairly low for roll out, with a lot of cultural similarities between the UK and Ireland, however, fairly small market.

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I would say whichever’s market is more understandable by the core management (being English speaking). So Ireland would make sense due to, at least, lack of language barrier and (probably) more or less similar legislation to the UK’s.

I personally do not like Netherlands as DeGiro has plenty of leverage there due to it being their home market, I guess there are better low hanging fruits countries out there to start with.

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Go with whatever country has the biggest total addressable market. Guessing they’d be Germany and France (?)

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I think I’d agree with @Vlad and @saf with regards to path of least resistance (language and legislation) and massive TAM. One thing I’m uncertain about is the investor behavior or dynamics in Germany or France… they might be savers but traditionally have never really been interested in making investment decisions and prefer to lock away money in the bank or delegate decision making to their bankers. I guess the education angle comes into play here.

What about Scandinavian countries? Generally English speaking and fairly wealthy. Just a thought.

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This got me thinking maybe it’s the country that charges the most for stock dealing? Curious now if anyone knows or has a list?

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Although of course there will always be nuances and trends distinct to each country, we think our target (millennials) are far more globalised in their behaviour than their forebears, that they’ll think about money the millennial way more than ‘the French way’ or ‘German way’.

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Interesting - and definitely an aspect we’ll analyse. :+1:

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I lived in Dublin, Hong Kong and Munich before, and am fluent in German. :raised_hand: It was interesting to see how the various distinct cultural traits young Germans would still maintain. I do agree the generation is very globalised though!

Maybe there is someone from Germany or France or some of the other markets here who wants to weigh in and share how their generation in their native countries think about saving and investing. :wink:

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My vote is for Dublin, on grounds of talent and a stable and supportive regulatory environment. Although, is it possible Dublin can reach capacity in the wake of Brexit on top of what was already a booming economy? Property prices are getting crazy and the infrastructure can’t take much more if the taxi ride from the airport is anything to go by. Suspect the central bank is already under pressure from the increased activity which might affect speed of process. All wild speculation.

I have very limited and narrow experience but have often wondered if there is an (above average) cultural bias in France towards French organisations. If so I’m not sure how quickly that can change, notwithstanding the benefits of openining up.

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I think Monzo said they were going to focus on English-speaking countries and with Brexit does it perhaps make more sense to do Dublin, NZ, Oz, Canada? Save all that language nonsense?

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Germany
France
Italy
Spain
Switzerland
Ireland
Netherlands
Austria

Then Scandinavian countries

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Lol - straight to the point, I like it.

Not much love for Scandinavia though!

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They’re the happiest people on Earth, what do they need an app for Toby!

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Something to do on those long Nordic nights?

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I´m not living in the UK and I really hope that roll out to Europe will come soon (tomorrow maybe? :slight_smile: ).
So… Germany and Spain would be great!

It would be also great if we have the posibility to invest a fix amount automatically each month into ETFs! The more ETFs we can choose from, the better! Getting the market return is just fine…

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Check out Brewdog’s prospectus. A huge number of their investors are from Sweden. Either they are early adopters/investors or maybe they’re just crying out for some better beers, idk.

Stockholm is also a financial capital and fintech hub of Europe and (if you forget about China) Sweden are leading the way towards a cashless world. They also speak English better than us and are not passive-aggressive about speaking it unlike some of our closer neighbours.

I’m not Swedish btw and have no vested interests.

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A girl living in Germany here! :grinning: :de:
So naturally I will vote for expanding to Germany, not only because I live there, but also because I believe that in Germany you would have a huge market (the biggest in EU I would say). On top of that, here you have cultural diversity and from what I have noticed the people here really like to save and invest. The new generation is really globalised like Viktor said.

I see many have voted for Ireland mainly for the language spoken there, but you should also focus on where the biggest number of investors would be, the population of Ireland is about 5 million people whereas more than 80 million people live in Germany! so common :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:. Regarding the language obstacle, most of the new generation speak good English now, it’s not like the old days so I don’t think that language would be a barrier.

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Hi Batool and welcome to the forum!

Indeed, Germany is most likely the juiciest market in the entire EU. When talking about language barriers, I believe this is more in terms of contacting the authorities, any legislative implications and compliance. Should Freetrade provide retail brokerage services in Germany, they will necessarily be exposed to the local FCA/HMRC equivalent authorities (Bundesanstalt für Finanzdienstleistungsaufsicht and Bundeszentralamt für Steuern I guess?) and these guys are unlikely to operate in English.

But in any case, Germany must be one of the early destinations due to its wide potential, that is for sure.

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