Biggest Online Brokers in Europe by Client Assets (2026)

By Kai Schukowski

Updated 1 Jun 2026 · Fact checked

When people ask which online broker is the biggest, they usually mean one of two things: who has the most customers, or who holds the most client money. For European investors, the second question is more useful. A broker with hundreds of billions in client assets is not automatically the best choice, but it usually tells you something about scale, trust, product depth and staying power.

This ranking focuses on online brokers that are relevant to European investors. That does not mean every company must be headquartered inside the EU. Interactive Brokers, for example, has a US parent company but serves EU clients through its Irish entity and remains one of the most important brokers for European investors. By contrast, Robinhood and Webull are included only as global context because they are less relevant as broad stock and ETF platforms for EU residents.

The chart gives the quick visual version before the detailed table. Interactive Brokers is so much larger than the rest of the field that the smaller platforms look compressed, which is useful context in itself.

The ranking tells a clear story. Interactive Brokers is far ahead by client assets, even after converting everything to euros. Behind it sits a European middle layer of established national platforms: Hargreaves Lansdown in the UK, Fineco in Italy, Saxo in Denmark, AJ Bell in the UK, Nordnet and Avanza in the Nordics, Swissquote in Switzerland, and flatexDEGIRO across Germany and the Netherlands.

The newer app-based brokers are much bigger by customer count than by assets. Trade Republic has more than 10 million customers and €150 billion on the platform, which makes it the largest pan-European neobroker by assets. Trading 212, Scalable Capital, eToro and XTB are important, but their average account size is still much smaller than the older, wealthier platforms.

Should this be Europe-only or European-headquartered only?

We would not make the article European-headquartered only. That would remove Interactive Brokers, which is one of the most relevant brokers for EU investors and the clear leader by client assets. The better filter is whether the broker is meaningfully available to European investors, whether it offers real stock and ETF access, and whether its published asset figure can be verified from official sources.

The biggest broker is not automatically the best broker

Size is a useful signal, but it should not decide the choice by itself. A large broker can still have high FX fees, weak customer support, limited portfolio transfers or a product range that is not right for your country. A smaller broker can be perfectly reasonable if it is well-regulated, transparent, and fits how you actually invest.

For most EU investors, the practical checklist is still: regulation, asset segregation, investor compensation, total fees, currency conversion costs, ETF access, tax reporting and whether you can transfer your portfolio out later. We cover those details in our Interactive Brokers review, IBKR safety analysis, Trading 212 guide, Trade Republic review and eToro review.

Who did not make the list?

Revolut is the obvious missing name. It has tens of millions of customers, but it does not disclose a clean investing-specific client asset number. Its headline customer balances are a banking metric, not the same thing as client assets held in a stock and ETF broker account.

Freedom24 is also excluded from the ranking because we could not verify a comparable client-assets figure from official disclosures. That does not make it automatically bad, but it means we cannot place it in a table built around client assets without guessing.

Charles Schwab, Fidelity and Vanguard are also excluded from the main ranking. They are far larger than every company in this table, but they are custody, brokerage and asset-management giants with a very different business model. Including them would make the European online broker comparison less useful.

What this means for European investors

The most useful takeaway is not that everyone should choose the largest broker. It is that scale gives you one extra data point. Interactive Brokers has unmatched breadth and low costs, but it can feel complex. Trade Republic has huge customer growth and a German banking licence, but customer support and portfolio transfer complaints matter. Trading 212 is simple and low-cost, but still smaller by client assets. eToro is large and public, but its currency-conversion structure is a real cost for euro-based investors.

If you are building a long-term ETF portfolio, start with the basics: choose a well-regulated broker, keep fees and FX low, make sure you can access UCITS ETFs, and understand how your country taxes dividends and capital gains. Our ETF investing guide for European investors and our walkthrough on how to invest in the S&P 500 from Europe are the natural next steps.

About the author

Kai Schukowski is an investor and the founder of EU Investing Hub. He also runs Smart Money with Kai and founded MatchMyBroker, a broker comparison resource for retail investors. For this ranking, every client-asset figure was taken from official company reports, filings or press releases and converted to euros using ECB reference rates.