Dear ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the conference call of Flatex De Giro AG. At our customers' request, this conference will be recorded. May Call. I now hand you over to Mohammad Charu, CFO, who will lead you through this conference. Please go ahead, sir.
Yes. Thanks a lot. Morning, good afternoon, wherever you are located, dear friends, shareholders of Fladex, the hero. 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 them by our yesterday's ad hoc after our final figures of January were confirmed. So I'd like to spend a couple of minutes first before we go into the industry discussion to wrap up yesterday's talk. 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. And 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. And a couple of you were joining or who joined us years ago and and who are having this journey with us for a couple of years. Remember, there were times when we were winning with flat eggs 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, very important for our vision 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 Dequiro in 2019, we started very significantly to extend and to increase the brand awareness of both of Fletex and Dechiro. And the investments that we have started with last year are paying off now. We are evaluating the brand awareness of both brands in Europe again and again, and we see the pickup. We see the foods 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 quite strong trading activity by our client base. You know my perpetuum. You know philosophy and the philosophy of my colleague, Frank Nihade. Trading activity is something we cannot estimate very well. We don't know what will happen over the 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, so we were always told never extra polite January, something that we also did not do for the future. Nevertheless, we felt ourselves 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 base with what growth we grow day by day in customer acquisition, we feel super confident that we will achieve the targets the new targets that we set yesterday for 2021.
And we'll keep you here obviously posted latest with our quarterly updates. And if there are any reasons for another ad hocs, we will let you know via the ad hocs. The updated guidance for 2021 is again a 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. Again, just 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.
Yes. A big thank you to our teams that managed very, very well the load over the recent days and weeks. It brings us back to the key fundaments 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 11,000,000 transactions. And especially with respect to last week's developments, a lot of investors have approached us with respect to what happened. And this was actually the reason for this call today, to give you the chance to get a perspective from us as FedEx the Hero, 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. And third, what are the learnings going forward from what we have seen? I would like to start with a statement that I use very often over the recent months and years when I was asked about zero fee brokerage. And the statement has been always zero fee brokerage is is a business model where I'm still wondering about how these brokerage business models generate revenues.
Obviously, I know how they do it, but it still, especially in the European environment, makes it difficult to understand how how this should be on a on a sustainable base possible. Zero fee brokers have also one thing in common that distinguish them from from the rest of the pack, and it's applicable both, I think, in The US as well as in the European environment. But first and foremost, they seem to attract 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. And that leads or that might lead to situations as we saw them last week.
The evidence is there. I think you're all aware of that, that the average age of of Robinhood's client base is significantly below 30 years. Ours is significantly above 35 years. And this gives you a certain understanding of what the mechanisms, what the portfolio of clients look like, what the activity profile of each client basis look like. We have seen last week strong movements in certain assets, which is nothing usually untypical for brokers.
Obviously, the price movements in the assets were super exciting and rather an exception to the rule. But in terms of volume traded, in terms of the demand in assets with respect to load, with respect to number of clients being involved was relatively high, but nothing that online brokerage business models are not able to handle in normal circumstances. And 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 that also Robinhood has disclosed.
And usually, 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 bar that you're running entrances for free, assuming it's a dance club. And 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. And when they walk in, they go.
They have fun. They enjoy the the evening. Unfortunately, something we haven't been able to do over the last year. But they enjoy the evenings, and they have their drinks. And the first difference is that usually the prices of these drinks are higher than the drinks in in clubs and bars where maybe the owners ask for an entrance 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 such a club, they started to ask for drinks that were usually not in the stock of these owners. And these owners, these bar owners, they're usually supplied by by someone that brings the drinks. And 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 and we refer to as as the t plus two settlement. And this t plus two settlement results always and again the same issue if volatility and volume increase both in one and the same assets.
So 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 or rose water, and the demand for rose water explodes, volatility explodes. So that your 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 you is increasing, plus due to higher pricing movements. And 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. So what we saw there was was nothing nothing surprising, actually, that that you get also as brokers some kind of margin calls from the clearing houses that you should be better prepared of. And it seems 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.
Now if we take this, what happened, and try to apply it on flat ex the hero, and why is it not possible to happen or why didn't it happen, fortunately, with flat ex diffeero, 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. And if you don't pay the product, you are the product.
But they are fine with that circumstances. But 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 Fladex Hero were holding stocks of, for example, GameStop in their security accounts. And on a daily liquidity basis, it was usually something between 10% to maximum 15% of the total liquidity that went into these stocks with flat x or the hero, which is the is one of the most important things.
And a heterogeneous model, heterogeneous client pool that is not following any swarms. You'll never we we are never safe of having maybe at any time this type of movement, then we have our dormant. We have our risk mechanisms. So what we did, for example, immediately at day one day one when when the GameStop shares started to increase in volatility, we took down, for example, the LTVs for margin loans down to zero. So we were not taking any more any GameStop shares as collateral for loans.
Second, it's not only about the type of clients that you service, it's also how you service your back ends. And 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 or out of e commerce glasses. But online brokerage is is a very sophisticated business that you have to understand deeply, especially if you do execution settlement and clearing in house, which we do. And 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, much earlier.
And this is 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 €05,000,000,000 of equity. We're sitting on €2,500,000,000 of liquidity that would allow us at any time to provide the necessary and inevitable cash collaterals to our counterparties and to our clearinghouses if needed. But it's not the only issue. This was one type of issues one type of issue.
The other type of issue was many brokers were not able to handle the load. So it was virtually a technological problem. And also here, I don't wanna say we are perfect during these days, especially around GameStop. I think every brokers had their their difficulties, especially also with the market makers and big exchanges that also had a couple of downtimes. However, we were managing at that days an uptime of 99.5% plus.
So we're every every I think both Dequiro and FleTex were total over these two, three, four days less than less than an hour down. And what is important here 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. And, again, here, investors who are with us for longer time, they know how much we invested continuously invested into our platform and continuously invested into our hardware. We started 2019 to move out from our old server plants into new server plants.
We are running our own data centers, which are state of the art. We've invested over the last three years more than €30,000,000 into technology, into people for technology and into hardware. And we are now able to cover this load, especially because of these investments we did in advance. And as I always also say, like with good sailors, you better prepare your sailing boat when the sun is shining. And you don't 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 the storm in in great shape. So 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 at Strategic Bureau 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. But 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.
And by the way, there is an organic growth that we are going through. And again, we don't want to extrapolate January, but if the next eleven months will be only half as good as January, we will then end up the year with 500,000 to 600,000 new clients. So we will end up the year with almost 2,000,000 clients. And that means 30 more load on our machines. And 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, our the whole positioning of LedEx de Hero to clients in the age between 30 and 40, not only because these clients are usually the clients that are among the much more sustainable investors and much more sustainable traders, but it 's also, I would say, a type of cohort that is maybe less affected by movements as we've seen last week. We will continue also with our products like Flat X NEXT to penetrate the mass markets in Europe, but always with this important and necessary perspective on what are we winning, what type of clients are we winning. And as much as zero brokers might win, it's great for them. But again, for us, it's more important to continue to have a sustainable, stable and sticky and loyal customer base for the future. And third, and last but not least, we come back to something that I also very often refer to, capitalization.
We are perfectly capitalized, capitalized, both in equity and in liquidity. We are operating our business model after the 2020 figures will get audited on core Tier one capital ratios of 15% plus, 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, so I would love to make use of the next twenty 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 Q
and And the first question we received is from Mrs. Vishwanka of Morgan Stanley.
This is Shamali Ravishwanka from Morgan Stanley. Much for the 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.
But do you think it was enough to attract increased scrutiny over retail trading practices? Thanks.
Thank you for your question. It's always difficult question when these things happen, how regulators should should act. Right? And I unfortunately see very often the consequences that regulators tend to try to regulate the symptoms, not the sources of the issues. And as as we think that you should go back to the sources
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, and I think this has been evidenced now a couple of times, neither directly nor indirect. 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 it.
Otherwise, the broker that is offering you the zero fees could not refinance that zero fees. There is an alternative source of revenues, and this alternative source of revenues is somehow you. So, 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 larger ones and the more incumbent ones, irrespective of the fact that we are maybe challenging incumbents and not a incumbent that that is sitting in their own their own juice. We believe that there will be most probably a certain point where regulators will start to to rethink these situations.
Second, to make sure that brokerage businesses are capitalized to handle peaks. And the capital requirement ratios have increased over the recent decade. I think we are all aware of that. But 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. But the worst thing that could happen is that regulators regulate brokerage from a retail perspective.
You have to regulate the institutional brokers. You have to institute the online brokers to make sure that they fulfill all the requirements to be able to handle these kind of situations. And
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. But 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, and and and 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, that were not linked to each other, but together were were quite dangerous for the system.
The
next question received is from Benjamin Kornke of Stifel Europe.
Now the first question has already been answered that was around regulation. So thanks for your view on that one. Second one, really on basically what you call the doorman and
the
initiatives you've been you're taking there. I mean, obviously, it's going to be very, very difficult for you to turn down clients as they want to become new Fladex or Dezero customers. So 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. You know?
This is something that has been in place with us for fifty years. We have a pricing in place. Clients have to pay per trade. And, you know, if there if you have $500 to go the whole day long and short, so in and out, into into GameStop, and for each trade, you pay $5.90, you must only make yourself up the question, how often should I do this, and how much return can I can I do? Because every trade would cost me, like, one and a half percent.
Right? So the trade per se becomes more or becomes less attractive for clients by having prices pricing in the business model. What I meant with Dorman is that I was super surprised that certain brokers continue to run the type of trading knowing that this will end in massive volumes on one side. And 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, etcetera, as collaterals for margin loans.
So to avoid having people that are having whatever, 50 ks in GameStop to take whatever, another 20 ks in the margin loan to do even leverage trading on GameStop. And these things were, it seems like, not implemented by peers and competitors in timely manner. I mean, none of these players had the issues on day one of GameStop going crazy. It was the third day, I think, that that GameStop was traded in and out where one or two times the market cap per day went over the counters. So this is what I meant with Dorman, to have a closer look on your machines, a closer look onto your processes.
And this brings me back to what I said in the beginning that, unfortunately, online brokerage is here and there getting getting viewed as an ecommerce business, which it is not, absolutely not. It's an 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. So 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. Well, thank you for that. Sorry for mixing up three entrants and Doorman there. But in terms of your entrance fee, you're not sort of I mean, I know you're evaluating it all the time, but you're not considering faster moves on raising your entrance fee. Yes.
Not at this moment. You're totally right. We always said with respect to the Dehero acquisition that it is and it could be a supporting factor. But we also said we are going now, first and foremost, for growth all over Europe, and we'll take the chance at a later stage to rethink and to analyze whether the equilibrium between growth and price is 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, Ben.
The next question received is from Mario Zuerberg of Warburg Research. Your line is now open, sir. Please go ahead.
Yes. Hi, Mo. Thanks for the presentation. I have actually one question with regards to your guidance. I mean you raised your guidance to quite impressive numbers with the actual amount of customers for the year and towards €1,900,000 in the midpoint.
And in this context, looking at your Vision 2025, it appears or the Vision appears quite, I would say, conservative. And what did you or don't you think it is it was time to overthink Vision 2025 as well? Or do you wait until you have more insight on how the customers develop over the next one or two years?
Yes, indeed. I mean, first, we communicated the Vision twenty twenty five 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 the Hero. So a lot of things have changed since then.
This is what I would like to say. But 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. And you can imagine not only as a manager of this franchise and company, but also as a large shareholder, Frank and I will be the most happy person and people if we can achieve our vision much faster than 2025.
So 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 I'm feeling very confident, but I don't have the facts yet.
And 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, but maybe we will have to adjust the time line.
Okay, understood. Maybe one follow-up is on my on the guidance of new customers for 2021. Could you provide a split between Flavax and Tjero? So where do you aim for 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 one point eight million and two million clients. And again, we are following absolute growth strategy, and we are taking care of achieving the best and highest value per client by spending the lowest and most efficient client acquisition costs. And 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.
And the next question received is from Alex Niebirding. Hi, hello.
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 see how your customer base is reacting to that?
So first, we didn't implement the custody fee recently. We did it more than a year ago. It was in early twenty twenty. No. Pardon me.
It was in early twenty nineteen. So there's there's no no reason to see today any any assets that are going out. We are growing strongly in AUCs and assets under custody. We are growing massively in clients as we have communicated. In 2020, we won 550,000 gross clients.
In the 2021, we won 130,000 plus 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. And knowing that the average custody amount of our clients is €25,000, we're talking about €25 per year Yeah. Which is Okay. €2 per month. So 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. So that makes sense. That's consistent with your customer segmenting then. I wasn't aware that the average deposits
in custody was 25,000. That answers the question. Thank you.
You're welcome, Alex.
The next question received is from Peter Ban of Linkners. Your line is now open. Please go ahead.
Hi, thanks for the call. I just had 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. And especially, you know, how you, figure it's not really being driven by this sort of craziness around GameStop and retail trading in general. So can you just tell us more about sort of, you know, the age makeup or, you know, to what extent it was concentrated around the past couple of weeks or, you know, how much has been driven by Flatex Next? You know, any details on that would be great.
Yeah. I mean, first and foremost, we should keep in mind that we ended the year 2020 already with a strong growth. And this growth momentum was taken over into January 2021. With FlepEx Next, we have introduced a product that was very, very well received by our client base, especially by new clients. And that has allowed us also this was absolutely our rationale to attract the different or let's not call it a different type of clients, but wider target segment than in the past.
So 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, the subsidiary of BNP Paribas or ING. So the supporting factor was, for sure, also the circumstances around FlepEx next. Second, and to be fair, when we even look into December, we were in December having massively new income of clients. We did in December 2020 almost we had in December 2020 almost 100,000 customer registrations. So also in December, we saw the first sign of an increasing attraction and an increasing awareness of our brands all over Europe.
And I I am I'm still saying that the transaction between Dehero and Fletex was very well received by the people. It's created massive brand awareness for both. With this transaction, we built Europe's only and largest ten year so the only 10 European online broker and in the same time, the largest 10 European online broker. That that is is so unique for the market that a lot of press covered that story, that the analyst covered that story, that the investor base covered that story. Plus, second, I think also the the new capital market orientation being an s stocks company is not only beneficial to our shareholders and our governance, but also beneficial to our client base.
As an s stocks 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. And DeFido is doing a phenomenal job 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. And this dedicated and very focused execution of all these steps together has definitely increased the awareness all over the year. And then things like the Borussia Munching Lapa 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 millions people, especially with Real Madrid, is something phenomenal for us as a brand and for our marketing tools that we made use of. So these were all in all together driving forces behind this accelerated growth. As I said, than 10% of the clients are holding these type of stocks that were traded over the last two weeks very frequently.
So with with with no means do I see a causality between the last two weeks and our January figures. And, yes, what I believe is due to the fact that some online brokerage businesses in Germany and in Europe had 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. And I don't know who might have seen our advertisement in in in the social medias. Like, it was it was if I would translate it, it said like, where you gain stopped by your broker. And 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 twelve months. So those are things that will create momentum, but that did not really impact the January figures. And 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 those or this beneficial circumstance.
Okay. Thank you.
You're welcome. My pleasure.
And the next question is from Paul Kompansch of GBC. Your line is now open sir. Please go ahead.
Hi, Mohammad. Paul Kompansch here. Thanks for the call and congrats for the results of January. Recently, the CEO of Robinhood hi. The CEO of Robinhood has made a statement in favor of real time settlement.
So 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?
Paul, you're asking me a very very good question. Why is that? Because I find it very hilarious that someone that someone stands up to criticize the financial system that is in place for decades, and only then when when that party was not able to play with the rules. So it it reminds me a bit like in a game where where you you're losing the game and you start to talk with the referee whether you can change, you know, the goal sizes. Like, it's something we have also operated.
It's a systemic point. It's a systemic structure, and we have to deal with it. And t plus two has been in place now, I think, for three or four years. Before that, it was t plus three. It's something that we as brokers cannot determine.
We could settle t plus zero. It's something that that is driven rather by the clearing structures, so by by Clearstream, Euroclear in Germany, and the clearing houses in The US. And they they need the time to to do the 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 plus one?
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. However, settling cash transfers much faster would require that we have a payment system in Europe that allows for instant payments. Right? If if I would have the chance to wire that is you my so so I gave an order to Flepix to buy 100, whatever, Tesla shares, and you are the seller and used it with whatever. So I'm the buyer, so I have to tell my bank, hey.
Please wire for 100 Tesla shares the amount to to Spain. That's something to to settle it in t plus zero would request that there is a payment system between our two banks that allow the settlement in t plus zero, 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 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. So 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. But 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.
So yeah.
The next question received is from Charlie Main of Goldman Sachs.
I just have one on cost, if that's all right.
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?
Yes. Actually and obviously, yes. I usually love to start to answer this question with saying that two years ago, when Flatex was standalone doing 10,000,000, 12,000,000 trades per year, We used to have an internal cost per trade of 1.44 Now in 2020, we were able to double or even more than double the number of trades that were settled with Fletex only stand alone. And we were able to push down the internal cost per trade to less than $0.80 Actually, it was something around $0.78 So with respect to to to this year, it it gives us a very good feeling to say, okay. To settle 75,000,000 transactions, we needed 78¢ last year, and we know how scalable this business model is.
And I always say, just just take it very simple. Right? Just because we do 20,000,000 more transactions, I don't have to hire another Moe. I don't have to hire another Frank. I don't have to hire another Achin for IR.
I don't have to hire new accountants. I don't have to hire new techs people. I don't have to hire more HR people, and so on and so forth. There is there are one, two departments that have to be for sure. For example, first level support, so service center, customer centers, but those those adjustments are are not really impactful from from financial perspective.
So 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 11,000,000 times twelve months equals 130,000,000 transactions, let's assume we would come into a year where we would do 130,000,000, 140,000,000, 150,000,000 transactions. We still feel super comfortable with our IT. We are, however, continuously investing the proper amount into our technology via CapEx.
But in terms of cost structures, I have the clear vision that the end game should be something around €0.40 to €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 Kuylige of Berenberg.
You spoke quite a bit about the different types of retail investors. Yes, 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, do they differ in any way to your existing client base? When we talk about trading behavior, age that you mentioned? And 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 not worse than the older cohorts. And 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 last year almost 55%, 60% of all clients brought their assets with them from another broker. So that gives us a very good feeling for what type of clients we win.
Plus, especially with DeFiro and 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, products 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 of account size is even with the new clients, the five digit figure. So that are the right parameters that we are that we want to see for our growth. And 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. That's very clear. And then maybe the other thing you mentioned is that the Flatex, the shares 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? So when you look at 2019, the let's say, on a European scope, the market share of flat ex this year compared to at the 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. So 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 population of two hundred ninety million two eighty, 290,000,000 people, of which there's still like 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. So compare this to the matured brokerage countries like The Nordics, like UK, like Netherlands, where we have a much, much higher digitized population, where I think almost 90% of the people have an online banking account, and where onethree of the population has a brokerage account, more than onethree, we see first and foremost how underdeveloped the Continental European market is.
And although it is so underdeveloped as of now, again, only 8% of the 300,000,000 population has an online brokerage account in Continental Europe, that would equal roughly 24,000,000. We do have only 1,400,000 of these 24. So although it's a super undeveloped market, although we are the market leader in this market, our market share is something around 4% to 5% mature brokerage markets, like Sweden, like, as I said, like The UK, 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, organic growth of the market, could easily and should easily double the number or triple the number of clients. But in the same time, we are penetrating market by market and claiming market leadership market by market, and 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 1,400,000 clients easily to 10% in a market that has double the size than it has it today. So instead of a 5% market of a 20,000,000 population, to go to a 10% market share of maybe 40,000,000 brokerage accounts. And that is the clear ambition here, absolutely.
Yes. 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. So did you have any idea, like in terms of numbers, what was the progress terms of market share gains last year for the entire footprint?
We almost last year, we I mean, we doubled more or less the number of clients. We grew by more than 40% in clients. We take the gross figures. And 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 in the earlier weeks and in the earlier last three, four months.
So we assume that 7080% of our market growth was from stealing market shares and 20%, 30% was organic growth. And that's this this matches very well what I said before, that we saw that 50% to 60% of our clients brought their assets with them to us from other brokers. So this is pure growth out of stealing market shares.
Okay. That's very clear. And just a very brief one last question. How important was the, let's say, the good progress with the Flatpaks 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 a wonderful Q4. Q4 was the strongest quarter in our history, Q4 twenty twenty, and 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. And we truly believe that it will contribute also an impact to the holistic growth. But 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'll continuously release new updates to make it a really great app.
It is very good, but it still has some development iteration routes to go. And again, it might end up that we offer then the Hero Next in 18 countries that could accelerate even more the organic growth that we see today.
Okay, perfect. Thanks a lot.
My pleasure.
As we received no further questions, I hand back to you for closing remarks.
Yes. Thanks again very much for joining this call. Thanks again for your trust to all our shareholders and your interest for these of you who are maybe not shareholders yet. Thanks for your support over the recent years. We are going here, and we are walking a trailblazing path.
And 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. And 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 if you if you need something, if there are open questions, please reach out to Joachim and and to to me, and let us know if you need any further help. Apart from that, have a great day, and good evening for those of you who are in Europe, and speak to Thank you. Bye bye.
Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for your attendance. This call has been concluded. You may disconnect.