Good morning, everyone. Pleasure to have you with us on the call. First and foremost, from the whole flatexDEGIRO family, a happy and healthy new year. I hope you had a good rest during the holiday season and are starting very well into the new year. Yeah, we kicked it off relatively early this year to come out with our commercial KPIs and the guidance to give you immediately a good insight into 2021, but more important, even to set the outlook for 2022. As we always say, 2021 is over. Books are closed, done and dusted. Full focus, full steam now on 2022. I'm happy to have the chance to discuss with you today the achievements of 2021 from a commercial perspective and the outlook for 2022.
You might have wondered about the fact that we only published the commercials, not any financials yet. They are still in preparation, as you can imagine, almost a week after year-end. Just as a side note, we plan around end of February to publish the preliminaries and end of March, as stated also in the financial calendar, to publish our annual reports. Let's dig into the prepared slides to show you our success over the recent quarters and years. I think the very first and most important point for us is that we have delivered on both as promised, with respect to our customer growth as well as with our transactions. As you might remember, we have guided nine months ago a customer number of 2-2.2 million.
At the end, we ended up with 2.06 million customer accounts. With respect to transactions, we got to 90-110 million and landed at 91.0, literally point oh, trades in 2021. The growth is, from our perspective, fabulous. The team worked very, very hard. I was just yesterday also communicating to the team saying, it's not an average milestone. It's not something very easy to do, to settle 90 million + transactions in a year, in a very turbulent year that started with big volatility that then fell to a normalized level and finalized the year with then something in between, so to speak.
A fabulous job by the whole 1,000 + people that we have reaching these milestones, focusing not getting distracted from anything left and right. There were in between obviously some steps that result from quarterly results that we discussed with the investor base, with the sell side analyst base, but also obviously internally. We always said, "Hey guys, let's focus on the whole year aim." We are there, we met it, and I'm very thankful and very happy to say it was the seventh year in a row that we fulfill our guidance and the seventh year that we deliver record figures. I think this is in a nutshell the situation with respect to 2021 internally.
If we look into the outside perspective, we managed to outperform any of our competitors in the European landscape with 730,000 new customer accounts. We grew again as fast as almost our two biggest peers, so to speak, in Scandinavia, but we outperformed the top five of our competitors all over Europe with a growth rate of 55% in customer base. I think again here, yes, we are a growth company, but that massive growth is fabulous and my thanks go again to all our colleagues that put so much effort into our systems, into our product, into our setup to allow for this growth, which is magnificent.
The outperformance that we show on a customer base is also obviously something that we can split down now into geographies. I hope, and I know that many asked for more detailed information around countries and, you know, our clear policy was we will not go into country-by-country basis because in the end we consider ourselves, and this is our clear philosophy, we are a pan-European online broker. We are totally indifferent and agnostic whether the client sits in Italy, in Spain or in Germany or in France or in the Netherlands and trades. For us, the trade counts, the client counts. This is for sure also the philosophy going forward.
However, we understood that you would have loved to get a bit more transparency with respect to at least regions to get a good understanding of how we split our business. We decided the first time, and we'll continue now to run it over the next quarters, to split the growth into our three key markets as we always defined. Our core markets consisting of the Netherlands, Germany, and Austria. Our growth markets, France, Spain, Portugal, Italy, Switzerland, Ireland, and U.K., and then the rest markets consisting of the Nordics, Poland, Czech Republic, Hungary, and Greece.
I think I'm not going through each and every number now, but I think what I would like to highlight here again is that we managed in each of our, let's say, customer buckets or regional geographical buckets, to grow double-digit%, in each of them almost with at least 50%. 46% in the core markets, 75% in the growth markets. Even in the rest markets where we literally spend no marketing at all, we managed to grow by 67% by 40,000 clients to 100,000.
Again, it's not big numbers as you might see them in the core markets, on the growth markets, but it shows we are in, so to speak, tier three countries, tier three research countries, doing much better than some other players, some other peers that consider some of their markets to be core, and not managing to have 100,000 clients in these markets. The focus continues obviously on the core and the growth markets, especially given also the introduction of the zero commission trading that we introduced in Q4. By the way, it became effective on the 20th of December, so it's now live. The new pricing is set up.
The whole marketing campaigns are running now for the last two weeks, two and a half weeks, since Christmas and then around Christmas and New Year, and full-fledged now in the process to continue throughout the whole first quarter, which we consider to be the most promising quarter, which is historically the most promising quarter and are very keen here to jump into the quick start into 2022. We truly believe that we will continue this growth also, especially given the significant measures that we started. I just touched on the zero commission. If we recap 2021, let's look into what we launched also and what we did in H1 2021. We finalized the merger.
Again, we have managed with our teams, with our people, a record, all-time record year during a merger process, which is also not the normal status to manage a merger of big companies, both with each 500 employees, and millions of clients to put these companies together and to deliver such a brilliant result. This is done and dusted. The merger is done. All measures have been implemented around, if you remember, the project IBAN, so an account for each and every client with the DEGIRO and so on and so forth. Plus obviously also the introduction. This was the first step of the zero commission strategy, the introduction of the zero commission ETF and fund savings schemes at flatex.
During H2, the introduction and implementation of Tradegate early and late trading, the ETP partnerships that we just also finalized in December, the crypto trackers that we also introduced only in November, plus the new pricing structure, I touched on that, and finalizing with flatex next 3.0, which will take now more and more shape and is going obviously in 2022 to be also part of the hero strategy. 2022, the early start, I said it, that we have started the campaigns all over Europe two-three weeks ago and are running them now throughout the whole January and February. We are driving the whole marketing strategy with an educational and informational basis. Our educational documentary will be started to be broadcasted all over Europe during Q1.
We're really looking forward to it. I had a chance to see it, but I will watch it also on the TV. We will put more and more effort into informational and educational aspects of brokerage. There are a lot of discussions around that, especially given also the inflation and potential interest increases. People are asking me again and again, "Oh, do you mind that maybe the interest in stocks will decline and people will rather go into bonds anymore or into savings?" I think it's important here, although it does not fit perfectly into what we are discussing as a topic now, but I think it's important to give also this side note. We truly believe that any changes with respect to interest rate might affect us in a positive way.
Yes, there might be clients going out of the stock market, but I doubt, and I literally mean it, to see banks offering higher savings interest rates just because lending rates are increasing. I think we have here more and more a macro environment and a phenomenon in the macro environment that this links the actual lending rates and inflation. Given the inflation, the best possible tool to mitigate inflation is investing in assets. Literally inflation should drive the interest in the stock market, especially, as I said, since I believe that we will not see banks raising now their savings interest to 100 or 150 or 200 basis points, irrespective of what the lending rate will become.
This is, I think, also a massive point why we are putting so much into educational and informational marketing to bring the people up to speed, how to set up dollar cost averaging ETF schemes, investing into equities and so on and so forth. Now all these measures that we have set in very late 2021, but they are kicked in in 2021, and now going into 2022, we expect to go this year for 2.7-2.9 million clients at the year-end, which equals a growth of 30%-40% of our customer base. It is a massive growth step again to grow double-digit and mid double-digit in percentages.
We truly believe that we have all ingredients is in place, and I truly believe that we can deliver here on our promises. With respect to transactions, we did something that we do always again and again to under promise and rather over-deliver. What we did here is to say, okay, 2021 was an exceptional year, given also the first quarter. For the whole year of 2022, we go back with our base assumption to what we know historically and what we learned from our data analysis. Also here, to be frank with you, it's not like we sit around and think about, okay, what could be possible? No. What we did is we dug into data.
We have analyzed over the last 10 years, the data that we have, what happened with respect to volatility, what happens in trading activity with respect to certain events that might happen throughout 2022, and tried to find a very data-based guidance, which ended up to be 95-115 million transactions, which assumes that our client base will do an average 40-45 transactions in that respective year. We started last year, if you remember, we started last year as well with a very strong, however cautious guidance. This is the same way how we start this year. Let's see how Q1 goes. Let's see how Q2 goes. The world is upside down, to be honest with you. I think you're all aware of that fact.
In H1 2021, we were discussing with investors how trading activity will change, given that lockdown is over, COVID is over, people are back to the normal world, finding ourselves five, six months later, again in many countries in lockdowns and in a very early corona stage environment again. I think this is also what drove us to be here more on the conservative side, on the cautious side, to say, "Okay, let's see how the year starts, and we rather increase our guidance over the year if necessary to do so.
If we see that quarter by quarter it goes much better than we expected, then to surprise negatively with any guidance cuts. In May 2021, we have presented our growth vision, 78 million clients, 250-350 million transactions. Both with respect to clients, we assume a 30% CAGR. We grew last year in 2021 with as I said, 55%, so overachieved that CAGR expectation. This year we're going to 30%-40%. We'll again exceed this CAGR assumption, but are absolutely in line with our expectation going forward to our vision. I always said that I believe, and I truly believe, that size creates markets.
Given our increasing size all over the European landscape, awareness will increase, brand awareness will increase, and that will over time accelerate also our customer growth on the one hand side. On the other hand side, we are in Europe at a tipping point of retail brokerage. Yes, the last two years, we're a massive accelerator. We're a massive accelerator to the whole environment, to the brokerage environment. Nevertheless, we are still in newborn shoes, you know, and as an industry in Europe. Again, keep in mind, a quarter of a billion people in continental Europe do not have a brokerage account. This is nothing that happens overnight. This is something that happens over years, and sometimes even over decades. This is a clear vision for 2026.
It's not a short-term aspect. It's a long-term belief that we have as a management with our team. It's obviously our duty and responsibility to deliver on this vision. I think 2021 was a perfect evidence and let's now focus and put full steam on 2022 to continue our road to the vision 2026. That is the summary of the commercial KPIs and of our presentation. The financial calendar is also included in the presentation where you will see when we will report what. Again, I'd like to thank you all for supporting us for being on our side, whether it's sell side analysts or the buy side investors during 2021.
Thanks for your belief and your trust in us and as a management, but also obviously as a whole team. We'll continue to put a lot of effort and a lot of work into our big baby that is now a big company. Again, when we always think back seven, eight years ago, it was very small set up now growing and growing. Expecting to continue the fabulous growth over the next years, given big markets, given big opportunities. But most and first and foremost, given also the big measures that we have implemented during the last, I would say, three months, that we will definitely harvest the fruits from. Thank you. That is all from my side.
I'd like to open the discussion for the Q&A by the sell-side analysts.
Ladies and gentlemen, we will now begin our question and answer session. If you have a question for our speaker, please dial zero and one on your telephone keypad now to enter the queue. Once your name has been announced, you can ask your question. If you find your question is answered before it is your turn to speak, you can dial zero and two to cancel your question. If you are using speaker equipment today, please lift the handset before making your selection. One moment please, for the first question. The first question is from Marius Fuhrberg, Warburg Research. Your line is now open. Please go ahead.
Yeah. Hi, Mo. Two for me, please. The first one would be, did you observe any different kind of trading behavior from your customers in Q4? Because, I mean, given the relatively high volatility we saw in especially November, in the middle of December as well, I would have expected a little bit higher trading behavior or more trades, to be honest. Nevertheless, you reached the guidance. Yeah, any color on this would be great. The second question would be, with regards to the new customers, did you experience any change in customer acquisition costs in Q4, or should we expect this to remain on the level we saw during the remainder of the year?
Thanks. Thanks, Marius. Your first question with respect to transaction activity, your second question with respect to CAC. Let me start with the first one. The trading activity in Q4 was quite surprising, to be honest with you. Also, if you look into the VSTOXX, which is also something that we very often use, October was horrible with respect to volatility and also the beginning of November. Volatility kicked in starting, I would say, the second week of November and continuing for four weeks. But what we saw was a very weak December. Compared to historic Decembers, so a relatively weak December. That is something that we have seen also across the industry.
When you look, for example, to our peers, Nordnet or Avanza, we actually outperformed their trade growth quarter-over-quarter. In general, you're absolutely right. We were expecting a higher trading activity in Q4. Yes, we had a volatility phase that was, but literally four out of 12 weeks or 13 weeks, so to speak. Second, what you should also not underestimate is we had three bank holidays in the U.S. We were missing three out of 60, which is 5%-6% of the total quarterly trading volume, giving the U.S. bank holidays, and with Columbus Day, Veterans Day, and Thanksgiving.
There were like three bank holidays, and since you know that U.S. trades have a big portion of our trading volume, we also saw less trading activity. Industry specific on the one hand side, on the other hand side also with respect to our setup and our focus also on U.S. equities, driven by company specific or strategy specific facts. With respect to CAC, no, we did not see any changes in client acquisition costs. To be honest with you, I do not expect to see any in the near future. We will continue with our dedicated approach that we budget EUR 50 per new client, per new gross client, obviously. This is something that we will carry forward with.
Indeed, what we had was that we prepared in Q4, especially in December, a lot of the campaigns. You will see again the timing gap between expenses and, so to speak, the profits, because you spend the whole Christmas time and during Christmas time. We started after the 15th of December to push out the campaigning, and that goes now until February to spend more money on growth in Q1. As we all know, Q1 is the most important quarter for us. This is what we are putting full focus on. Thus we will see also marketing expenses in Q4 that will only convert into clients in Q1. But no strategic change in CAC in general.
Okay. Thank you very much.
You're welcome.
The next question is from Mengxian Sun, Deutsche Bank. Your line is now open. Please go ahead.
Okay. Thank you very much for taking my questions. Several questions from my side as well. Could you please provide us an update on your marketing campaign in the growth countries? What have you achieved in the past quarters and what the upcoming activities for 2022? The second question is, again, on net customer addition. I noted there has been a slowdown in net customer addition in this quarter compared to the third quarter. Based on your guidance, it seems that you're still very confident that the growth momentum will come back. Could you give us some color on how exactly you plan to achieve the customer growth again, and in which regions you see the biggest potential?
The last question is the off-boarding of the 20,000 non-brokerage customers. Can you give us some information on what the financial contributions is coming from these customers? Thank you very much.
Thank you for your questions. The focus is obviously to continue our growth and our growth markets and to focus our marketing on our growth and core markets. What are we doing in marketing? What campaigns do we run in marketing? We just started the big campaign on TV all over our growth and core markets, as I said, starting mid-December during the holiday season, continuing now into January and February. Online media is obviously social media and online media with informative educational marketing. Now starting the big documentary that we have prepared throughout 2021, that will be broadcasted in all European countries and will be available to be downloaded and watched as well.
Not downloaded, streamed. Old-fashioned, who's downloading movies these days. Streamed online as well. Around all this, we are putting actually the media campaigns, the marketing campaigns. There is going to be a big push in marketing. We will also for 2022 budget a mid-number of millions in marketing. I think we will also be again between EUR 40 million and EUR 50 million in marketing spend, given also what we expect in new clients on a gross base always to keep in mind with a strong marketing push. Answer a bit your second question, where's our core focus? The core focus is the growth and the core markets, and it has to continue to be our focus.
Again, we are now getting better and better grip in Spain and Italy and France. We're doing super well, but also here have some ideas how we can even improve our setup, improve our offering. We feel very comfortable to continue the focus on the regions that we have defined as our key regions, which are our domestic markets as well as our growth markets. With respect to your last question, the slowdown in customer acquisition on the one hand side, and the contribution of the being off-boarded non-brokerage clients. Customer growth is always something, as you know, that is very, very much linked to also client acquisition costs, so the marketing spend that we do.
As I said, we expected a bit more from Q4. I have to be very honest and frank with you, both in trading activity as well as in customer growth. Both was a bit lagging behind. We see it industry-specific and industry-wide. We see it also with our peers. For us personally, it was a little, yeah, surprising that it was not as good as we believed the market can be before. There was a bit more push. We delivered, you're totally right. This is always our key fact, to deliver, and then to have a bit of playroom where we believe we can outperform at least the market.
Nevertheless, we grew all in all over the last three quarters, so to speak, by roughly give or take 450,000-500,000 clients. That means like 150,000 in average, give or take. If we continue with that speed only, so if you annualize this Q2 to Q4 growth, we would end up with something around 600,000 clients this year. But keep in mind that over the last nine months, we did not have all these measures in place that I just described. I truly believe that these measures, winged and fired by the marketing push, by the documentary push, by increasing brand awareness, will support us in delivering also our guidance in 2022. I'm even very convinced that they will do so.
With respect to off-boarding the non-brokerage clients, thank you for that point, because I think we might have also some investors and analysts that are rather new to the story. From our legacy business, we used to carry with us like 40,000-50,000 non-brokerage B2C clients that used to have with us sub-accounts and stuff like this. To be honest with you, the contribution of these clients is less than one per mille, so less than 0.1% of our total revenues. The headache and the calculation, the data driving the split between brokerage and non-brokerage is far too complex, first. Second, we decided strategically to get rid of all disturbing items on our brokerage strategy.
This is the reason why we started this year to off-board some of these clients, and we'll continue over the next year in 2022 to off-board actually the whole rest of these clients. They will, yeah, drop away and fall away, these clients. Without any, I would say, any significant impact on our P&L or financials. For sure not. I hope that answers all your questions.
Yes. That's very clear. Thank you very much.
You're welcome.
The next question is from Christoph Greulich. Your line is now open. Please go ahead.
Yeah. Good morning all. Two questions from my side, please.
Hi, Chris.
Hi. The first one is with regards to the market buckets that you have now introduced. How dynamic is that breakdown? Meaning, do you expect any of the mature markets to move into the growth bucket over the coming years? Secondly, could you remind me of the timeline for the introduction of the PEA accounts in France?
Yeah. Thanks, Chris. I think we discussed it a couple of times. I think it was a little belated Christmas present also for you. You always were interested in getting a bit clearer focus on the geographies. No, I mean, how dynamic is it? I would say relatively non-dynamic, to be honest. I don't expect now, you know, that countries shift every year from A to B. It might happen that over time, over two, three years, maybe a country from the research market goes into the core markets. Or maybe even from the growth markets move into the core markets over the next five years. I think there won't be more than three or four countries that shift from A to B. That's it, and nothing on the short term.
We'll try to keep these geographies as long as possible, very stable. Unless we see now whatever. We are exploding maybe, coming to your second question, in France, you know, and France becomes another big core market, where we go into number of clients very similar to the Netherlands or to Germany or even to Austria or even with respect to market share. The PEA accounts are. I don't know. I think we discussed it in the past. There were some legal uncertainties whether we can do it or not. Yes, we can do it. We will now put all the focus on the PEA accounts. It's a bit of work that has to be done technically, obviously, because you have to have separate accounts that they cover these tax complexity.
We are working on that. At the same time, we're going a step further and are doing the research on the need of the PEA accounts. How deeply needed are these accounts and whether there are opportunities to find also a way maybe without the accounts. I think that I assume that by the end of the first quarter, mid second quarter, we should have a clear visibility if we definitely go for PEA accounts. Second, when to have them. If we decide to go for them, I might assume that we will have them this year.
Great. That's all from my side. Thank you.
You're welcome.
There are currently no further questions. As a reminder, if you would like to ask a question, please press zero and one on your telephone keypad now. We have a follow-up from [Inaudible] Bank. Your line is now open. Please go ahead.
Hi. Thank you very much for taking my question again. Probably just one question on the retention rate. As I see that the retention rate decreased a little bit in this quarter, it is around about 97% in this quarter, and I saw it was 98% in last quarters. Do you have any customer feedback from that side or any information that you can give us on that?
I'm a bit. I think the 97%—Achim, please correct me. The 97% is a full year retention rate. It's not just a quarterly retention rate. We had, I think, as of half year, 1.4% of churn on the first half. If you annualize that, you will end up with 2.8% of churn. There was no, in any way, no structural movement. A little discrepancy happened actually by reducing the non-brokerage clients that we terminated, so that we had here terminated clients and accounts. Thus, the number dropped slightly. Even there, it was absolutely not structural.
Okay, thank you. That's all from my side.
You're welcome.
Once again, as a reminder, if you would like to ask a question, please press zero and one on your telephone keypad now. We haven't received any further questions at this point. I hand back to Muhamad Chahrour for closing remarks.
Yeah. Thank you very much. Thanks for your questions. Thanks for jumping onto the call on short notice. Yeah, wish you brilliant year. Stay healthy. A lot of success for all of us. We are, by the way, on a U.S. roadshow starting on Monday throughout the next 10 days. We are happy to be back end of January to see what the results of January were. As I said, the next big communication point is then the prelims, the financial prelims on 2021. If you have any questions, anything pops up in your mind, please reach out to Achim or to myself. Looking forward to speaking and seeing you. Take care. All the best.