Dear ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the conference call of flatexDEGIRO AG. At our customer's request, this conference will be recorded. As a reminder, all participants will be in a listen-only mode. After the presentation, there will be an opportunity to ask questions. If any participant has difficulties hearing the conference, please press star key followed by zero on your telephone for operator assistance. May I now hand you over to Muhamad Chahrour, CFO, who will lead you through this conference. Please go ahead, sir.
Yeah, thanks a lot. Good morning, good afternoon, wherever you're located, dear friends, shareholders of flatexDEGIRO. It's a pleasure to have you on this call. Thanks for following our invitation. Actually, an invitation that was rather related to give you an industry update of last week's turbulences, that was a bit also affected then. Actually, as I said, we didn't plan to make this part of this call affected then by our yesterday's ad hoc after our final figures of January were confirmed. I'd like to spend a couple of minutes first before we go into the industry discussion, to wrap up yesterday's ad hoc. As you've seen, we have been through a massive January 2021. We've been through a massive year 2020. We set a new record for us as a group, as well as in Europe.
We were the online brokerage business with most retail transactions settled, in 2020 in Europe. We are very thankful and very happy that we were able to continue this growth path that we had in 2020 into 2021. January was an absolute record month for us. We were able to win more than 130,000 clients in just one month. It makes me really very proud of our teams and our strategy that we have executed and implemented so well over the recent years. A couple of you who joined us years ago and who are having this journey with us for a couple of years, remember there were times when we were winning with flatex in a whole year, not even 100,000 clients. Now we do it in just four weeks.
The continued traction and growth path is very important for our Vision 2025 to achieve a massive milestone and to continue to extend our market leadership position in Europe and to continue the penetration of the markets in Europe, with the best possible offering to our clients, and to the brokerage population. Obviously that growth was driven first and foremost by an accelerated brand awareness. We started when we acquired DEGIRO in 2019. We started very significantly to extend and to increase the brand awareness of both flatex and DEGIRO. The investments that we have started with the last year are paying off now. We are evaluating the brand awareness of both brands in Europe again and again. We see the pickup, we see the fruits that we can harvest now out of the investments we did over the last year.
Plus, obviously we had a quite good month, still healthy levels of volatility in the market that helped us a lot also to have a quite strong trading activity by our client base. You know my propedium, you know my philosophy and the philosophy of my colleague, Frank Niehage. Trading activity is something we cannot estimate very well. We don't know what will happen over the year. Our duty as a management is to take care of two things mainly, to continue to run our machines and our teams, so IT and people, as best as we can. Plus, to make sure that the growth path is followed pretty strictly by increasing the customer base. This is something we are in charge of, and thus are super happy that we were able to achieve this growth in January. We are all financial experts, I would say.
We were always told never extrapolate January, something that we also did not do for the future. Nevertheless, we felt ourself confident enough to update our guidance for 2021. Yes, it is a quick update after the release of the initial guidance. However, after seeing now on a daily basis with what growth we grow day by day in customer acquisition, we feel super confident that we will achieve the new targets that we set yesterday for 2021. We'll keep you here obviously posted, latest with our quarterly updates. If there are any reasons for another ad hoc, we will let you know via the ad hocs. The updated guidance for 2021 is again, the guidance that was updated mainly due to the increased customer base and to the accelerated growth of the customer base.
We are still expecting the trading activity that is more conservative than the activity that we saw in 2020. Because January was a great month in terms of trading activity, we will continue to be here humble. Not unambitious, but humble with respect to trading activity. A big thank you to our teams that manage very well the load over the recent days and weeks. It brings us back to the key fundamentals of this company. Superiority, stable systems, great capitalization of the company, and great structures and processes that have allowed us not only to onboard more than 130,000 clients, but also to manage to settle more than 11 million transactions. Especially with respect to last week's developments, a lot of investors have approached us with respect to what happened.
This was actually the reason for this call today, to give you the chance to get a perspective from us as flatexDEGIRO, as an industry player, of what happened last week. This is one thing. The other thing is, why it did not affect our business model and the stability of our systems. Third, what are the learnings going forward from what we have seen? I would like to start with a statement that I used very often over the recent months and years when I was asked about zero fee brokerage. The statement has been always, zero fee brokerage is a business model where I'm still wondering about how these brokerage business models generate revenues. Obviously, I know how they do it. It still, especially in the European environment, makes it difficult to understand how this should be on a sustainable base possible.
Zero fee brokers have also one thing in common that distinguish them from the rest of the pack, it's applicable both, I think, in the U.S. as well as in the European environment. First and foremost, they seem to attract a much younger population. A much younger population that is maybe more thrilled to the type of environments we saw last week that are trading in smaller amounts and higher frequency, than maybe more mature people. That might lead to situations as we saw them last week. The evidence is there. I think you're all aware of that the average age of Robinhood's client base is significantly below 30 years. Ours is significantly above 35 years. This gives you a certain understanding of what the mechanisms, what the portfolio of clients look like, what the activity profile of each client bases look like.
We have seen last week strong movements in certain assets, which is nothing usually untypical for brokers. Obviously, the price movements of the assets were super exciting and rather an exception to the rule. In terms of volume traded, in terms of the demand in assets and with respect to load, with respect to number of clients being involved, was relatively high. Nothing that online brokerage business models are not able to handle in normal circumstances. What we've seen was that, especially with certain type of brokers, the volumes increased massively with a big buying overhang. That led also to a high level of clearing and settlement payments. This was one of the main issues that also Robinhood has disclosed.
Usually I say you have to imagine, to make it a bit more into an anecdote, you have to imagine that you are running a bar, and in this bar that you're running entrances for free, assuming it's a dance club. All the other dance clubs around you, they charge fees, but you do not charge entrance fees. So you attract automatically people that are maybe more, let's say, front price stingy. When they walk in, they go, they have fun, they enjoy the evening. Unfortunately, something we haven't been able to do over the last year. They enjoy the evenings, and they have their drinks. The first difference is that usually the prices of these drinks are higher than the drinks in clubs and bars where maybe the owners ask for an entry fee.
The biggest issue that happened was that with an increasing volume and increasing number of people that were visiting maybe the first time or second time or third time such a club, they started to ask for drinks that were usually not in the stock of these owners. These owners, these bar owners, they're usually supplied by someone that brings the drinks. These suppliers usually request collateral margins because they supply you with drinks, and you sell these drinks, but you pay your supplier two days later. This is what we all know and what we refer to as the T+2 settlement. This T+2 settlement results always and again, the same issue if volatility and volume increase both in one and the same asset.
If the demand for a special drink, which is not wine or champagne or beer, which is the normal type of menu drinks that you're having, but when these people start to ask for whatever, apple juice or rose water, and the demand for rose water explodes, volatility explodes. Your supplier of rose water will ask for higher and higher and higher collateral margins, because the amount itself, the nominal amount that he's delivering to you is increasing, plus due to higher pricing movements, the risk for the settlement increases for him if something happens to your bar between the night where your clients are drinking the drinks and two days later when you pay your supplier. What we saw there was nothing surprising, actually.
That you get also as brokers, some kind of margin calls from the clearing houses, that you should be better prepared of. It seemed like there were a couple of brokers that didn't prepare that well about that, which I refer to not having a doorman. Not having the right risk mechanisms to take care of these situations. If we take this what happened and try to apply it on flatexDEGIRO and why is it not possible to happen, or why didn't it happen, fortunately, with flatexDEGIRO, it's again, as I always say, not because we are better, not because we are faster, not because we are smarter, it's just due to the type of business model we are running. First, the fees that we charge to our clients act somehow as gatekeeper.
We know that we most probably do not win the millennials that love to have everything for free. Like everything is for free for millennials, whether it's social media, whether it's Google, whether it's whatever it is. If you don't pay the product, you are the product. They are fine with that circumstances. Those type of clients are not the clients that we attract first and foremost. Thus, the number of these type of clients that can have an impact on your volumes and that can have a kind of swarm impact on your business model is not given with us. Less than, in total, 10% of all clients with flatexDEGIRO were holding stocks of, for example, GameStop in their security accounts.
On a daily liquidity basis, it was usually something between 10%-15% of the total liquidity that went into these stocks with flatex or DEGIRO, which is one of the most important things. You have a heterogeneous model, heterogeneous client pool that is not following any swarms. We are never safe of having maybe at any time this type of movement, but then we have our doorman. We have our risk mechanisms. What we did, for example, immediately at day one, when the GameStop shares started to increase in volatility, we took down, for example, the LTVs for margin loans down to zero. We were not taking any more any GameStop shares as collateral for loans. Second, it is not only about the type of clients that you service, it is also how you service your back ends.
It's something that I would love to highlight as well. Unfortunately, online brokerage businesses have become more and more considered out of e-commerce glasses. Online brokerage is a very sophisticated business that you have to understand deeply, especially if you do execution settlement and clearing in-house, which we do. When you have these things in place and you see that you're having a buy overhang on a certain asset, you should start to mitigate these things much earlier. Fortunately, again, we didn't have that issue, but if we would have that issue, we come back to a situation where I have to say we're sitting on half a billion of equity. We are sitting on EUR 2.5 billion of liquidity that would allow us at any time to provide the necessary and inevitable cash collaterals to our counterparties and to our clearing houses if needed.
It's not the only issue. This was one type issue. The other type of issue was many brokers were not able to handle the load. It was literally a technological problem. Also here, I don't want to say we are perfect during these days, especially around GameStop. I think every broker's had their difficulties, especially also with the market makers, and the exchanges that also had a couple of downtimes. However, we were managing at that day an uptime of 99.5% +. I think both DEGIRO and flatex were total over these two, three, four days, less than an hour down. What is important for you to know is that it's again, not because we were doing things in a better way. We were just preparing for these things for years.
Again, here, investors who are with us for longer time, they know how much we continuously invested into our platform and continuously invested into our hardware. We started 2019, to move out from our old server plans into new server plans. We are running our own data centers, which are state-of-the-art. We have invested over the last three years, more than EUR 30 million into technology, into people for technology, and into hardware. We are now able to cover this load, especially because of these investments we did in advance. As I always also say, like with good sailors, you better prepare your sailing boat when the sun is shining, and you do not start to look for ropes and for your sails when you see storms coming nearer.
You have to prepare the ropes in advance, and this is what we did over the last years that helped us massively to survive the storm in great shape. Covering all this up, I think it brings us down to three important points that are, from my perspective, in the end, life crucial for an online brokerage business. The first one is to operate an information technology platform that is big enough to ensure stability also during peak times. And this is something that we as flatexDEGIRO have made sure over the recent years, and that we will make sure with best efforts, whatever it takes, whatever it needs, to try to keep our uptime above 99.9% for our clients.
This means as well that we have to continuously invest, that we have continuously to build, and that we have continuously to develop our people, to be prepared for these type of peaks. By the way, there is an organic growth that we are going through. Again, we don't want to extrapolate January, but if the next 11 months will be only half as good as January, we will then end up the year with 500,000-600,000 new clients. We will end up the year with almost 2 million clients, and that means 30% more load on our machines. This is something we have to take care of, we will take care of as we did in the recent years.
Second, it was absolutely the right strategy to focus our branding, our marketing, the whole positioning of flatexDEGIRO to clients in the age between 30 and 45, 50. Not only because these clients are usually the clients that are the much more sustainable investors and much more sustainable traders, but it's also, I would say, the type of cohort that is maybe less affected by movements as we've seen last week. We will continue also with our products like flatex next to penetrate the mass markets in Europe, always with this important and necessary perspective on what are we winning, what type of clients are we winning. As much as zero brokers might win, it's great for them. Again, for us, it's more important to continue to have a sustainable and stable and sticky and loyal customer base for the future.
Third and last but not least, we come back to something that I also very often refer to, capitalization. We are perfectly capitalized, both in equity and in liquidity. We are operating our business model after the 2020 figures will get audited on core Tier 1 capital ratios of 15% +, which will make us to operate a whole system, a whole franchise, a whole business, with almost 30%, 40% more capital, more core capital and more liquidity than what is needed from regulatory perspective. It was very important for us to highlight these things and to highlight to our investor base these things. I know you will have most probably the one or the other question.
I would love to make use of the next 20 minutes to give you the chance to get a great understanding or a better understanding of certain questions or certain things that are crossing your mind, and would love to give you the chance to enter with us into a Q&A.
Dear ladies and gentlemen, we will now begin our question- and- answer session. If you have a question for our speakers, please dial zero one on your telephone keypad now to enter the queue. Once your name has been announced, you can ask a question. If you find your question's answered before it's your turn to speak, you can dial zero 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 received is from Mrs. Ravishanker of Morgan Stanley. Your line is now open, madam. Please go ahead.
Good afternoon. This is Shamoli Ravishanker from Morgan Stanley. Thanks very much for that presentation. It was very useful. I just wanted to ask about your view on how regulation over retail trading might change in view of last week's events. This was an unprecedented situation with different opinions from the various stakeholders, do you think it was enough to attract increased scrutiny over retail trading practices? Thanks.
Thank you for your question. It's always a difficult question when these things happen, how regulators should act, right? I unfortunately see very often the consequences that regulators tend to try to regulate the symptoms, not the sources of the issues. As we think that you should go back to the sources of these issues, we would love, yes, to get a better level of regulation with respect to retail clients. That starts with questions like, should you allow zero fee brokerage? Because zero fee brokerage is never zero fee for the clients. I think this has been evidenced now a couple of times, neither directly nor indirectly. What do I mean with directly? I mean, if you do a trade for zero fee, you as a client should know that there's someone in the system trying to make money with that.
Otherwise, the broker that is offering you the zero fees could not refinance that zero fees. There is an alternative source of revenues. This alternative source of revenues is somehow you. Yes, a higher transparency of how brokerage businesses are generating revenues is super welcomed, and I think here as industry leaders and experts, we as brokerage companies, especially we the larger ones and the more incumbent ones, irrespective of the fact that we are maybe challenging incumbents and not an incumbent that is sitting in their own juice. We believe there will be most probably a certain point where regulators will start to rethink these situations. Second, to make sure that brokerage businesses are capitalized to handle peaks. The capital requirement ratios have increased over the recent decade. I think we are all aware of that.
Again and again, there are a lot of players that are finding ways to get around these capital requirement ratios, something that also the regulators should and will most probably have a closer look to. The worst thing that could happen is that regulators regulate brokerage from a retail perspective. You have to regulate the institutional brokers, the online brokers, to make sure that they fulfill all the requirements to be able to handle these kind of situations. This is, I think, something that we might expect, as always, when things go wrong, that regulators tend to try to find ways how to avoid that it happens again. What we saw, especially with two, three, four brokers taking down the buy side for certain assets is unprecedented and has to be first and foremost analyzed.
We should get the right intelligence out of this analysis to avoid that these things happen in the future. I think there were multiple issues that happened during this week, so last week, and that were not linked to each other, but together were quite dangerous for the system.
Great. Thank you very much.
You're welcome.
The next question received is from Benjamin Kohnke of Stifel Europe. Your line is now open, sir. Please go ahead.
Yeah. Good afternoon, Mo. Thank you very much for that presentation.
Hi, Ben.
Question has already been answered, that was around regulation. Thanks for your view on that one. Second one, really on basically what you call the doorman and the initiatives you're taking there. Obviously it's going to be very, very difficult for you to turn down clients as they want to become new flatex or DEGIRO customers. I guess asking that in a different way, do you consider, do you evaluate changes to your pricing structure to basically implement that doorman and maybe even earlier than you had previously envisaged, and could that be, I don't know, not a big opportunity for you there?
Thanks for your question, Ben. I think it's important to distinguish between the doorman and the free entrance. With doorman, I didn't mean the pricing. The pricing is for me, the free entrance to the club. This is something that has been in place with us for 15 years. We have a pricing in place. Clients have to pay per trade. If you have 500 bucks to go the whole day long and short, so in and out into GameStop, and for each trade you pay 5.90, you most probably make yourself up the question, how often should I do this? How much return can I do? Because every trade would cost me like 1.5 %. Right? The trade per se becomes more or becomes less attractive for clients by having pricing in the business model.
What I meant with doorman is that I was super surprised that certain brokers continued to run the type of trading knowing that this will end in massive volumes on one side. This is something where we most probably would have reacted much faster. As I said, we did it even to the extent where we were involved, like taking down GameStop, Nokia, BlackBerry, et cetera, as collaterals for margin loans. To avoid having people that are having whatever, EUR 50,000 in GameStop to take whatever, another EUR 20,000 in a margin loan to do even leverage trading on GameStop. These things, it seems like were not implemented by peers and competitors in a timely manner. None of these players had the issues on day one of GameStop going crazy.
It was the third day, I think that GameStop was traded in and out, where one or two times the market cap per day went over the counters. This is what I meant with doorman, to have a closer look on your machines, a closer look onto your processes. This brings me back to what I said in the beginning, that unfortunately, online brokerage is here and there getting viewed as an e-commerce business, which it is not. Absolutely not. It's one of the most regulated industries, and I think it's not a surprise that none of the large big players had these issues, but rather the smaller zero fee brokers.
Maybe it's not only a question of pricing, it's only maybe a question of intelligence about what's going on there, and not only building fancy or nice platforms that attract people to do and to follow trading habits and structures that could endanger the whole business.
All right. Thank you for that. Sorry for mixing up free entrance and doorman there.
No worries.
In terms of your entrance fee, you're not sort of evaluating it all the time, but you're not considering faster moves on raising your entrance fee.
Yeah. Not at this moment, you're totally right. We always said, with respect to the DEGIRO acquisition, that it is, and it could be a supporting factor. We also said, we are going now first and foremost for growth all over Europe. We'll take the chance at a later stage, to rethink and to analyze whether the equilibrium between growth and price is the best one that we're having in place or whether it might make sense to shift this point to the right or to the left.
Thank you very much.
Thank you.
The next question received is from Marius Fuhrberg of Warburg Research. Your line is now open, sir. Please go ahead.
Yeah. Hi, Mo. Thanks for the presentation. I have actually one question with regards to your guidance. You raised your guidance to quite impressive numbers with the actual amount of customers for the year and towards 1.9 million in the midpoint. In this context, looking at your Vision 2025, the vision appears quite, I would say, conservative. Don't you think it was time to overthink Vision 2025 as well? Do you wait until you have more insight on how the customers develop over the next one or two years?
Yes, indeed. First, we communicated the Vision 2025 last summer, I think under circumstances where none of us has foreseen the accelerated growth. First, second, it was, I think, closely or shortly before we closed even with DEGIRO. A lot of things have changed since then. This is what I would like to say. It is the Vision of the company. I think this is the more important point than the point that it is the Vision 2025. Vision is, for me, more important than timing. You can imagine, not only as a manager of this franchise and company, but also as a large shareholder, Frank and I would be the most happy person and people if we can achieve our Vision much faster than 2025. However, we say this was the first month. Let's see how time progresses. Let's see how things progress.
Let's see whether what we truly believe, whether the customer growth is sustainable also over the next months. I'm feeling very confident, but I don't have the facts yet. As soon as we believe that the journey is going to be an accelerated journey, we will definitely, sooner or later, maybe we'll keep the Vision. Not maybe. We will keep the Vision. Maybe we will have to adjust the timeline.
Okay, understood. Thank you. Maybe one follow-up if I may. On the guidance of new customers for 2021, could you provide a split between flatex and DEGIRO? Where do you aim for the most of your new customers?
I think also something here that we will, and we have communicated it very clearly, we will not provide any splits between the two brands. Together, as the pan-European leading online brokerage business, we will have by the end of the year, if everything goes right, between 1.8 million and 2 million clients. Again, we are following absolute growth strategy and we're taking care of achieving the best and highest value per client by spending the lowest and most efficient client acquisition costs. Whether it's in the end, then a Dutch client, a French client, an Italian client, a Spanish client, a Portuguese client, an Irish client, or a Nordics client, or a German client, or an Austrian client, I absolutely do not care.
Okay, clear enough. Thank you.
You're welcome.
The next question received is from Alex Nieberding. Your line is now open, sir. Please go ahead.
Yes. Hi, can you hear me? Thank you for taking my question.
Yes. Hi, Alex.
Okay, good. I have a question about your custody fees. You recently imposed a 10 basis point custody fee. Are you tracking transfers of securities out of existing accounts to see how your customer base is reacting to that?
First, we didn't implement the custody fee recently. We did it more than a year ago. It was in early 2020. No, pardon me, it was in early 2019. There's no reason to see today any assets that are going out. We are growing strongly in AUCs, in assets under custody. We are growing massively in clients, as we have communicated. In 2020, we won 550,000 gross clients. In the first month of 2021, we won 130,000 + clients, which is for me the evidence for the point that people do not change their habit because of 10 basis points of custody fee. Knowing that the average custody amount of our clients is EUR 25,000, we're talking about EUR 25 per year.
Okay.
EUR 2 per month. With only one single trade that you would do per month, you would amortize all prices that you would have paid with our incumbent competitors.
Okay. That makes sense. That's consistent with your customer segmenting then. I wasn't aware that the average deposits and custody was EUR 25,000. That answers the question. Thank you.
You're welcome, Alex.
The next question received is from Peter Bevan of Linklaters. Your line is now open. Please go ahead.
Hi, all. Thanks for this call. I just had a question about if you could maybe tell us a little bit more about what your growth has looked like so far and what's been driving that growth. Especially, how you figure it's not really being driven by this sort of craziness around GameStop and retail trading in general. Can you just tell us more about the age makeup or to what extent it was concentrated around the past couple of weeks or how much has been driven by flatex Next? Any details on that would be great.
Yeah. First and foremost, we should keep in mind that we ended the year 2020 already with a strong growth. This growth momentum was taken over into January 2021. With flatex next, we have introduced a product that was very well received by our client base, especially by new clients. That has allowed us also. This was absolutely our rationale to attract the different, or let's not call it the different type of client, but a wider target segment than in the past. From that perspective, we felt very comfortable that flatex next will support our strategy in Germany, to widen our customer base by penetrating a deeper and wider market, which is today rather led by names like comdirect, the subsidiary of Commerzbank, or Consorsbank, a subsidiary of BNP Paribas or ING. The supporting factor was for sure, also the circumstances around flatex next.
To be fair, when we even look into December, we were, in December, having massively new income of clients. We had in December 2020, almost 100,000 customer registrations. Also in December, we saw the first sign of an increasing attraction and an increasing awareness of our brands all over Europe. I am still saying that the transaction between the flatex and DEGIRO was very well received by the people. It created massive brand awareness for both. With this transaction, we built Europe's only and largest pan-European online broker. That is so unique for the market that a lot of press covered that story, that the analysts covered that story, that the investor base covered that story.
Second, I think also the new capital market orientation, being an SDAX company is not only beneficial to our shareholders and our governance, but also beneficial to our client base. As an SDAX company, you're much more visible. You enjoy a much higher trust than if you are a Tom, Dick, and Harry shop operating under the radar as a hidden champion. DEGIRO is doing a phenomenal job and growing very quickly. We have penetrated the French market very successfully. We were, in 2020, the fastest growing online brokerage business in France. We were the online broker with most online retail trades in France in 2020. This dedicated and very focused execution of all these steps together has definitely increased the awareness all over Europe.
Things like the Borussia Mönchengladbach sponsoring, with the chance to play twice against Real Madrid, with the chance to play twice against Inter Milan, football games that were followed by double-digit and even triple-digit number of people, and triple-digit million people, especially with Real Madrid, is something phenomenal for us as a brand, and for our marketing tools that we made use of. These were all in all together, driving forces behind this accelerated growth. As I said, less than 10% of the clients are holding these type of stocks that were traded over the last two weeks very frequently.
With no means do I see a causality between the last two weeks and our January figures. What I believe is due to the fact that some online brokerage businesses in Germany and in Europe have failed to deliver promised services to their clients and products over the recent two weeks, that this might even push the number of new clients over the next weeks and months into the right direction. I don't know who might have seen our advertisement in the social media. If I would translate it said, were you stopped by your broker? You can imagine what kind of traction and what kind of awareness this created. We were actually honored by one of the most important German influencers by saying it is the best ad that he has seen over the last 12 months.
Those are things that will create momentum, but that did not really impact the January figures. After seeing the December growth, after seeing January growth, I feel quite comfortable that we will continue with this growth path over the next months, as long as the markets are providing this beneficial circumstance.
Okay. Thank you.
You're welcome. My pleasure.
Before we take the next question, for all participants, as a reminder, if you would like to ask a question, please press zero one on your telephone keypad. The next question is from Pol Companys of GVC. Your line is now open, please go ahead.
Hi, Muhamad. Pol Companys here. Thanks for the call and congrats for the results of January. Recently the CEO of Robinhood has made a statement in favor of real-time settlement. I would like to understand what would be the implications for the industry, your opinion in general, and if you think that's possible or real to achieve that?
Pol, you are asking me a very good question. Why is that? Because I find it very hilarious that someone stands up to criticize the financial system that is in place for decades.
Yeah
when that party was not able to play with the rules. It reminds me a bit like in a game where you're losing the game and you start to talk with the referee, whether you can change the goal sizes. It's something we have all to operate in. It's a systemic point, it's a systemic structure, and we have to deal with it. T+2 has been in place now, I think for three or four years. Before that it was T+3. It's something that we as brokers cannot determine. We could settle T+0. It's something that is driven rather by the clearing structure, so by Clearstream, Euroclear in Germany, and the clearing houses in the U.S. They need the time to do the accounting. They need the time to do the reconciliation for millions of trades every day.
What would be the implication if it would go down to T+1? It would actually be even beneficial to us because it would reduce the amount of collaterals that we have to provide, and we would settle then the cash transfers much faster. Settling cash transfers much faster would require that we have a payment system in Europe that allows for instant payments, right? If I would have the chance to wire, so I gave an order to flatex to buy 100, whatever, Tesla shares, and you are the seller and used it with, whatever, Renta 4.
I'm the buyer, I have to tell my bank, hey, please wire for 100 Tesla shares, the amount to Renta 4 to Spain. That's something, to settle it in T+0 would request that there is a payment system between our two banks that allow a settlement in T+0, which is again, something that is, from my perspective, to be fair and to be honest, it's something absurd to discuss because it's a systemic thing. We would help for a change, but this is how the rules are and have been for the last decade. It would reduce the collaterals that we as brokers would have to provide, because we then would immediately settle against the cash deposits of clients.
Even here, it would end up, as I said, in a structural change of the system, which might be helpful, but I find it difficult to discuss these topics after these things happen. Yeah.
Yeah. Thanks. Thank you very much.
My pleasure, Pol.
The next question received is from Charlie Mayne of Goldman Sachs. Your line is now open. Please go ahead.
Hi, Mo. Thanks very much for the call. I just have one question on cost, if that's all right.
Yes, please.
Are you able to give us any color on how your cost base will be impacted by the higher trading activity and the higher guidance that you've given for the year?
Yeah. Actually, obviously, yes. I usually love to start to answer this question with saying that two years ago, when flatex was standalone doing 10 million-12 million trades per year, we used to have an internal cost per trade of EUR 1.44. In 2020, we were able to double or even more than double the number of trades that were settled with flatex only standalone. We were able to push down the internal cost per trade to less than EUR 0.80. Actually, it was something around EUR 0.78. With respect to this year, it gives us a very good feeling to say, okay, to settle 75 million transactions, we needed EUR 0.78 last year, and we know how scalable this business model is. I always say, just take it very simple, right?
Just because we do 20 million more transactions, I don't have to hire another Mo, I don't have to hire another Frank, I don't have to hire another Achim for IR, I don't have to hire new accountants, I don't have to hire new tax people, I don't have to hire more HR people, and so on and so forth. There are one, two departments that have to be adjusted for sure. For example, first-level support, so service center, customer centers. Those adjustments are not really impactful from financial perspective. We assume actually that over the future, if we can double the revenues, that our cost base will not increase by more than 25%. The IT is super stable, is capable of handling the load.
If you take this month, and you would just extrapolate the month and number of trades, so 11 million x 12 months = 130 million transactions. Let's assume we would come into a year where we would do 130 million, 140 million, 150 million transactions. We still feel super comfortable with our IT. We are, however, continuously investing a proper amount into our technology via CapEx. In terms of cost structures, I have the clear vision that the end game should be something around EUR 0.40-EUR 0.50 per trade settlement of internal cost per trade.
Thank you. That's really helpful.
You're welcome.
The next question received is from Christoph Greulich of Berenberg. Your line is now open, sir. Please go ahead.
Yeah. Hi. Thanks Mo.
Hi, Christoph.
Taking my questions. Hey. You spoke quite a bit about the different types of retail investors. Firstly, I was just wondering when you compare the, let's say, the cohort of new customers that you've won in 2020, in January this year, do they differ in any way to your existing client base? When we talk about trading behavior, the age, as you mentioned, did you mainly win these new customers from other online brokers, or are they usually investing for the first time?
The new customer cohort, 2020, was characterized first and foremost by quite a nice and sustainable trading activity. If I consider the personal characteristics, the client average age was again in the 30s. The trading activity was much worse than the older cohorts. When we see where the clients are coming from, a very good indication therefore is to see whether they bring their assets with them or not, is actually to see that we had the last year almost 55%, 60% of all clients brought their assets with them from another broker. That gives us a very good feeling for what type of clients we win.
Especially with DEGIRO in the European markets, we are penetrating obviously the market, not again as a zero fee broker, but as a mature broker that is offering the right setup of price, product, and platform for our client base, and thus allows us to continuously grow with a very sustainable and loyal client base. I kept saying that if you take things like every client has to tell us what his job description is. Eight out of the top 10 job descriptions have an academic background. As I said, the average amount and account size is even with the new clients, a five-digit figure. That are the right parameters that we want to see for our growth.
This is also why we believe that the dilutive effect that we expected on our existing customer base will be not as strong as initially we thought, especially out of the learnings of 2020.
Okay. No, that's very clear. Maybe the other thing you mentioned is that the flatexDEGIRO together has been the largest online broker in Europe last year in terms of the number of trades. Could you give us an idea in terms of market share movements last year? When you look at 2019, let's say on a European scope, the market share of flatexDEGIRO compared to at the end of 2020.
It's a perfect question because it shows, I think, the massive upside that our business model is facing. We have included in our corporate presentation just recently, I think it was last week, a couple of new slides to ensure that the reader has a good understanding of the market itself. If you take the continental European market, which I consider to be our core market in Europe, so Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Italy, France, Spain, Portugal, Benelux, you will see that we have a market with a population of 290 million, 280 million, 290 million people, of which there is still a number of non-digitized people. Only almost half of the people have an online banking account, and only 8% of this population has a brokerage account.
Compare this to the matured brokerage countries like the Nordics, like U.K., like Netherlands, where we have a much higher digitized population, where I think almost 90% of the people have an online banking account, and where one-third of the population has a brokerage account, more than one-third, we see first and foremost how underdeveloped the continental European market is. Although it is so underdeveloped as of now, again, only 8% of the 300 million population has an online brokerage account in continental Europe. That would equal roughly 24 million. We do have only 1.4 million of these 24 million. Although it's a super undeveloped market, although we are the market leader in this market, our market share is something around 4%-5% in an underdeveloped market.
If I assume now that this market would converge over the next, whatever, 5- 10 years to a normalized level like the mature brokerage markets like Sweden, like, as I said, like the U.K., like Netherlands, it would allow us to believe that the market itself could quadruple. Let's assume it doesn't even quadruple, it triples only, or it doubles only. That would mean that we would just by organic growth of the market, could easily and should easily double the number or triple the number of clients. At the same time, we are penetrating market by market and claiming market leadership market by market.
That gives us absolutely the confidence to believe that we can bring our market share from today, 1.5% of the total market from roughly 1.4 million clients easily to 10% in a market that has double the size than it has it today. Instead of a 5% market of a 20 million population, to go to a 10% market share of maybe 40 million brokerage accounts. That is the clear ambition here. Absolutely.
Yeah. That's very interesting. Maybe just to double-check, because you mentioned you made quite strong progress in some markets, like in France, where you have outgrown the market quite significantly. Did you have any idea in terms of numbers? What was the progress in terms of market share gains last year for the entire footprint?
We almost last year, we doubled more or less the number of clients. We grew by more than 40% in clients. We take the gross figures. This is also, most of it is growth by stealing market shares. We didn't see a large growth in terms of client bases last year, despite the fact that COVID triggered a much higher volatility, but it didn't really push that many new people into online brokerage as we've seen in the earlier weeks and in the earlier last three, four months. We assume that 70%, 80% of our market growth was from stealing market shares and 20%, 30% was organic growth. This matches very well what I said before, that we saw that 50%-60% of our clients brought their assets with them to us from other brokers. This is pure growth out of stealing market shares.
Okay. That's very clear. Just a very brief one last question. How important was the, let's say, the good progress with the flatex Next initiative for the upgrade of the guidance in terms of new customer growth?
Again, we will not disclose the impact of separate brands. All in all, holistically, we were doing immense traction. We had a great first weeks in this year, but we had also the wonderful Q4. Q4 was the strongest quarter in our history, Q4 2020. This momentum was taken over into January. Of course, flatex Next is a driver. A large number of a five-digit figure is already using flatex Next, which is for us a massive progress, knowing that flatex Next is only seven, eight weeks now in the market. We truly believe that it will contribute also an impact to the holistic growth. Again, it's first and foremost so far developed only for the German market. We will see how well it is accepted by the client base. We will continuously release new updates to make it a really great app.
It is very good, but it still has some development iteration rounds to go. Again, it might end up that we offer then the DEGIRO Next in 18 countries. That could accelerate even more the organic growth that we see today.
Okay, perfect. Thanks a lot.
My pleasure.
Ladies and gentlemen, as a final reminder, if you would like to ask a question, please press zero one. As we received no further questions, I hand back to you for closing remarks.
Yeah. Thanks again very much for joining this call. Thanks again for your trust to all our shareholders and your interest for those of you who are maybe not shareholders yet. Thanks for your support over the recent years. We are going here. We are walking a trailblazing path. We are so excited to continue this growth over months and quarters and years. You know how much dedication Frank and I and the whole team is putting into this franchise and this journey. I'm really looking forward to having the chance to speaking to you soon again in person maybe. Take good care of yourself, stay healthy. If you need something, if there are open questions, please reach out to Achim and to me. Let us know if you need any further help.
Apart from that, have a great day. Good evening for those of you who are in Europe. Speak to you soon. Thank you. Bye-bye.
Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for your attendance. This call has been concluded. You may disconnect.