Featured Country: Germany

A market-entry guide for retail brokers assessing product fit, licensing, competition, staffing, office costs, technology, compliance and first-year funding.

Germany is a large investment market, but not a large leveraged-trading market. In 2025, 14.1 million people aged 14 or older owned shares, equity funds or ETFs, while a separate industry study counted only 63,000 people who had actively traded CFDs or FX during the 12 months to February 2025. The datasets are not directly comparable, but the difference in scale is strategically useful. It suggests that a new entrant should treat stocks, ETFs, savings plans and cash management as acquisition products, with leveraged trading as a later monetization layer. For a locally licensed, 10-12-person launch, an FM Intelligence scenario indicates roughly €4.1 million to €9.3 million of first-year funding before any extra liquidity or hedging collateral.