The LSE Directory / Retail brokers
DEGIRO is an Amsterdam-based online brokerage that gives retail investors direct, execution-only access to global financial markets. Through its own proprietary trading platform, clients can buy and sell stocks, ETFs, bonds, options and futures on more than 45 exchanges across 30 countries, including markets such as Australia, Japan and Hong Kong that many European retail brokers do not offer. DEGIRO does not provide investment advice; it is a self-directed platform where the client makes every buy and sell decision. Its main point of differentiation is cost. DEGIRO built its own back office and trading infrastructure rather than licensing a third party platform, which it uses to justify running at a lower cost base than brokers that outsource execution and custody. That structure supports flat, low per trade commissions and a selection of commission free ETFs, aimed at price sensitive self directed investors rather than active traders seeking advanced order types or heavy margin products. Client securities are held through a legal entity structurally ring fenced from DEGIRO's own balance sheet, a custody design the company presents as keeping client assets protected even if DEGIRO itself became insolvent. The business traces to 2008, when a group of former BinckBank employees, including Gijs Nagel, Jasper Anderluh, Niels Klok, Stephan Keetman and Mark Fransen, set it up as an institutional broker; it launched its retail brokerage service in the Netherlands in 2013. German online broker Flatex AG acquired DEGIRO B.V. in December 2019 for approximately 250 million euros, and DEGIRO was legally merged into Flatexdegiro Bank AG in 2021, becoming that bank's Dutch branch; the combined group subsequently listed on the SDAX segment of the Frankfurt Stock Exchange. As the group's Dutch brand, DEGIRO is regulated as a branch of flatexDEGIRO Bank SE, supervised primarily by Germany's BaFin, with conduct oversight from the Dutch central bank (DNB) and the AFM. In its most recent disclosures the wider flatexDEGIRO group reported more than 3.6 million customer accounts across 16 European countries and over 100 billion euros in assets under custody, with DEGIRO the largest of the group's three brands (alongside flatex and ViTrade) by customer numbers. In October 2025, DEGIRO changed its long standing securities lending program from opt-out to opt-in: client shares are no longer lent by default, and clients who choose to enable lending now receive a share of the revenue rather than DEGIRO retaining all of it, addressing a long running criticism of the platform's earlier default lending policy. Outside Germany, DEGIRO does not offer direct cryptocurrency trading; it instead gives clients indirect crypto exposure through exchange traded products tracking coins such as bitcoin and ether rather than custody of the coins themselves.
