Guest Article

Julia, you say the industry is missing the mass market. What are you seeing?

Half the banks I talk to tell me the same thing: "We're building a new brokerage app." And nine times out of ten, Trade Republic is the reason. The worry is real. According to an industry analysis of Bundesbank data, roughly three out of four brokerage accounts opened in Germany in 2025 went to direct banks, online brokers and neobrokers. Savings banks, cooperative banks and the big high-street banks barely grew.

So almost everyone reaches for the same playbook: one euro per trade, free savings plans, a slick app. But that means fighting Trade Republic over the same 20 percent of people who already own stocks, equity funds or ETFs and now just want lower fees. Even if a bank wins some of them over, it's then locked in a price war with a company whose entire business model is being the cheapest. That's not a war you win.

And the other 80 percent? You never reach them. Not because the product is bad, but because it was built for traders.

So what's keeping the other 80 percent out? Surely it isn't the fees.

It isn't. Ask people without any investments why, and price hardly comes up. The top answers are "I don't have anything left over," "I don't know enough about it" and "it's too risky." And across everyone surveyed, two thirds say safety matters most to them when it comes to investing. Those are problems of knowledge and trust, not price. Zero-euro trades don't fix any of them.

Meanwhile, staying out of the market has a real cost. More than a third of German household wealth is sitting in cash or bank accounts. The Bundesbank itself points out that the less well-off half of households is losing money after inflation, because almost all of their savings are in deposits and insurance policies.

What is it about these apps that doesn't work for beginners?

We sat beginners down with five of the best-known brokerage apps and asked them what helped and what didn't. Feature for feature, the apps are basically the same. They even look alike. And every one of them left people overwhelmed.

It starts with the sheer choice. Brokerage apps are built around offering thousands of products, and more is always better. A first-time investor needs the opposite: two or three options they can actually make sense of. We've known this for years. A large US study of workplace retirement plans, covering nearly 800,000 employees, found that the more funds people could choose from, the fewer signed up: roughly two percentage points fewer for every ten extra funds.

Then there's the home screen. You open the app and the first thing you see is a chart, and some days it's red. To a trader, that's information. To a beginner, it's anxiety. We hear it all the time: "It's red again. I don't even want to look." If you're investing for the long run, you shouldn't be checking daily swings at all. But that's exactly the habit these apps build, and that's when people give up.

So what should traditional banks be doing instead?

I think many banks underestimate what they're sitting on. Most people in Germany still bank with a traditional or cooperative bank. Those customers are already verified, they trust a human at their bank far more than an AI when it comes to investing, and they're already in the app. What's missing isn't another order screen. It's a path from their checking account to their first savings plan.

And that path starts with understanding. The OECD finds that people with strong financial literacy are more than twice as likely to own investments as people with weak financial literacy. What people dislike about neobrokers is telling, too. In a representative survey, almost 30 percent complained about too little information and guidance, and just over a quarter about the lack of personal service. That's precisely what non-investors need, and precisely what a bank can offer.

Sounds like you learned this firsthand.

We did. beatvest started as our own learning app for beginners, and we saw that it works: nearly half our users want to invest after just one lesson.

What does that look like in practice?

Picture a customer who's had a checking account with the same bank for years and has never invested. She opens her banking app, and instead of an ad for a brokerage account, she's invited to a 10-day money challenge. A few minutes a day: What's an ETF? What does it cost me not to invest? How much risk is right for me? Instead of thousands of products, she gets one next step at a time, level by level, and each level ends with something real: opening an account, making her first investment, setting up a savings plan.

All of it runs under the bank's brand, with certified content, and no personal data ever reaches us.

Does investing remain a business built on advice?

It's becoming hybrid, and that's great news for banks. We see the same thing with our users again and again. They've done the learning, they understand ETFs, fees and risk. And still, at the end, many of them say: "I'd like to talk it through with someone first."

That's not a knowledge gap. It's a moment of trust. Digital education gets people right up to the decision, and that's exactly where a bank, with real advisors, can do something no neobroker can. The difference is that advisors no longer have to start from scratch in every meeting. That makes advice scalable, even with fewer branches.

In 2027, Germany launches the Altersvorsorgedepot, a state-subsidized retirement investment account. What will that change?

Everything, and faster than most people expect. From January, the government will top up retirement savings held in an investment account.

The price war is over before the product even launches. The first standard accounts cost between 0.1 and 0.3 percent a year, some are free for the first year, and all of them sit well below the legal cap of one percent. Nobody is going to win this on price.

And unlike the UK, where employers enroll staff automatically, or Sweden, where a state default fund steps in, nothing happens on its own in Germany. People have to act. One industry study expects 4.5 million accounts in 2027, and up to ten million if providers actively reach out to their customers. That gap is the mass market.

And the industry will pour millions into advertising to close it. Awareness won't be the problem: plenty of people will hear about the new account for the first time this winter. The problem is what happens after they click. They land in an app built for people who already know what an ETF is, get confused and drop off. Awareness alone doesn't open accounts. What's missing is a smooth bridge from the ad to the first savings plan.

The mass market will go to whoever builds that bridge: explains things clearly, makes people feel safe and already has the customer relationship. Banks only get a shot like this once.

Where does AI fit in?

It's huge, but in banking it has barely reached the customer yet. According to EY's latest German banking barometer, 42 percent of German banks have already identified concrete use cases for generative AI, and another 38 percent are planning them. Yet only four percent see the biggest opportunity in customer-facing roles. Three in four see it in the back office.

That's understandable. At a bank, every word that goes out is reviewed by the business side and by legal. A language model whose answers can't be signed off line by line just doesn't fit that process.

But financial education is the perfect place to start. Explaining how ETFs or compound interest work isn't financial advice. An AI that gives the right person the right lesson at the right moment, with clear guardrails against recommending products, is entirely possible today.

Why don't banks just build this themselves?

Because it's harder than it looks. Usually it goes one of two ways. Either you end up with a podcast, a handful of blog posts and a learning section tucked away in a menu, all things that already exist. Or you try to do it properly: content beginners genuinely understand, placed at the right moments in the app, with a clear path all the way to the first savings plan, and every word compliant. That has to be designed end to end, across product, the business side, legal and IT. It's a multi-year project on top of everyone's day job. Honestly, I think only Revolut has really nailed it so far.

And the hardest part isn't the tech. It's the language. Banks tend to write in a very complicated way. If you've never invested, that's an instant turn-off, and frankly, it's boring.

We've been building financial education at beatvest since 2021, together with the people who actually use it. Our focus is on making it simple and fun without cutting corners on quality, and our content is certified. We know exactly which sentence makes a beginner tune out and which one keeps them reading.

That's why we now offer the whole package: the content, the learning journey inside the app, and the nudges that take customers all the way to a diversified portfolio. The bank doesn't have to juggle five different vendors. It only has to decide where in its app the journey starts. It runs under the bank's own brand, and customer data never leaves the bank. Instead of a multi-year project, it can be live in a matter of weeks. With the pension reform just around the corner, that's the difference that counts.

Fast forward three years. Who won?

Not the bank with the cheapest trades, but the first one to turn its own checking account customers into investors. The relationship is already there. Banks that don't use it are simply giving it away.