flatexDEGIRO Reports 55% YoY Increase in Customer Accounts in 2021

​• In 2021 customer accounts grew to 2.06m (2.04m customers), an increase of 55% (2020: 1.33m customer accounts, 1.30m customers)

• Customer retention rates of approx. 97% demonstrate high customer loyalty

• With 91.0m settled transactions in 2021 (+21% versus 2020) flatexDEGIRO leads the European retail online brokerage market

• Growth expectation 2022: 2.7m to 2.9m customer accounts, 95m to 115m transactions

​flatexDEGIRO AG (WKN: FTG111, ISIN: DE000FTG1111, Ticker: FTK.GR), Europe's largest and fastest-growing retail online broker achieved its commercial guidance for 2021, reaching a customer base of 2.06 million customer accounts and settling 91.0 million transactions. For 2022, management expects to grow the number of customer accounts by 30-40 percent to a range of 2.7 million to 2.9 million and to settle 95 million to 115 million transactions. Management bases this expectation on conservative assumptions regarding this year’s market volatility, resulting in an average customer trading activity of approx. 40 to 45 transactions (compared to approx. 55 in 2021).

Frank Niehage, CEO of flatexDEGIRO: “In 2021, we have marked another record year. Even more important, we have also laid the foundations for future exponential customer growth. We have invested heavily into IT to offer highest stability and security on our platform, while further enhancing the usability and relevance of our trading app with the launch of ‘next 3.0’. We have expanded trading opportunities for our DEGIRO customers with early and late trading and our unique product partnerships with global leading investment banks. On top, we have optimized our pricing structure, including zero commission trading for key products and markets, to further retailise capital market access. Together with a strong push for educational marketing, this unmatched combination of best-inclass platforms, products and prices will drive our exponential growth over the years to come, allowing us to support 7 to 8 million customer accounts by 2026.”

Muhamad Chahrour, CFO of flatexDEGIRO and CEO of DEGIRO: “After an exceptional start into the year, which allowed us to raise our initial guidance twice, we have demonstrated a very solid performance and fully met the guidance given nine months ago. The last quarters were characterized by rather average market volatility, the absence of external drivers like at the beginning of the year. Nevertheless, we continued to grow structurally our customer base in this normalized environment much faster than any of our direct peers. Just the continuation of this trend would already bring us to the lower end of our account growth guidance in 2022. However, given the multiple growth measures we took in 2021 to improve our customer experience and product offering, I am very confident that these actions will support a significant acceleration of our customer account growth.”

With presence in 18 European countries, flatexDEGIRO clusters its market presence based on the size and growth dynamics of its customer base. Core Markets, with the highest customer base, include Germany, the Netherlands and Austria. The strongest growth opportunity is seen in France, Spain, Portugal, Italy, Switzerland, Ireland and the UK (Growth Markets). The remaining markets (Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Finland, Poland, Hungary, Czech Republic and Greece) are grouped within Research Markets. In 2021, the highest absolute number of new customer accounts (+408,000) were added in Core Markets (+46%), while the Growth Markets showed the highest relative growth (+75%), adding 285,000 new customer accounts. flatexDEGIRO’s Research Markets reached crossed the 100,000 customer accounts threshold (+67%).