Smartbroker - wallstreet:online capital AG CEO Thomas Soltau in an interview on the market launch

With FondsDISCOUNT.de, we have been committed to the self-deciding customers for almost 20 years and have been reducing the costs of capital investment in the long term. So far mainly in the material asset and fund area. And that with large success. But we wanted to achieve these fee reductions also for the shares, bonds, or also the derivative trading and change the market there in the sense of the investors.

This was not possible with our previous cooperations, so we decided to go down this path with our own broker. Thanks to the strong community that we have in the group, we were able to use the know-how and fulfil the wishes of the users and have thus managed to build up a full-service broker that leaves almost no wish unfulfilled.

With our current pricing model we are already significantly cheaper than most providers on the market and at the same time we have an extremely extensive product range, which the so-called no-fees brokers cannot offer, but which is very important for many investors. Ultimately, it is the price or the investor himself who should decide which exchange is the best trading opportunity and not the limited selection of my broker.

In addition, we offer our customers personal service with direct contact persons and thus handle enquiries in an extremely qualified manner, where most of our competitors customers have to contact a call centre.

The demand for ETFs is of course high due to the press, but if you look at the numbers of retail clients, you quickly notice that the share of ETFs in the portfolios is still rather low. ETFs are a good instrument for adding on, but certainly not suitable for representing one's entire capital investment, as many customers have also recognised.

Here too, however, we are pursuing our goal of reducing fees in the interests of our clients:
ETF purchases and sales are only EUR 4.00 per trade. We are also probably the leader in savings plans: 0.2% per trade (at least 0.80 cents) and with 295 ETFs we even offer the savings plans completely free of charge.

With this pricing, we will certainly continue to stimulate customer demand.

We started out with a comprehensive range of products and, at the same time, an extremely favourable conditions model, but are already aiming for price leadership in the German broker market in the coming year and are planning to further reduce fees to down to EUR 0.00 per order for a large part of our product range. With this price leadership, of course we expect extensive customer growth in order to become the fastest growing broker in Germany within the coming years.

At present we do not expect this to happen. Thanks to the reach that the wallstreet:online portals can provide in precisely the target group we want to address, as well as the extremely profitable business in the Group, the marketing activities for our smart broker are basically financed for the coming years. But one should never say never ...

The German-speaking market is extremely extensive and still offers great potential. Especially with Smartbroker we still have a lot of homework to do and a very large market ahead of us, which is currently undergoing major changes, so that a corresponding expansion is not yet planned. But of course we would not exclude it.