Trade Republic sees Irish opportunity due to attitudes towards investing

“Ireland is a very interesting market for us given, that the social acceptance of investing in general is higher than maybe in the continent,” said Hecker.

The company was founded in 2015.

“We recognised that as Europeans we were standing in a front of a problem that is the pension gap, meaning the generational pension system – in Ireland, Germany, France, Italy, Spain – is inherently broken. There is a huge requirement for the core of society, middle income, to create own-wealth.”

He said that the European household can only save €300 a month on average. “And if you pay fees to invest – say €10, €20 –  it doesn’t make sense to invest.”

The company took until 2019 to build Trade Republic, firstly establishing an investment bank in Germany.

“If you fast forward to today, we are offering two basic products – the first is self-directed investment into stocks or Exchange Traded Funds (EFT, which is a basket of securities). The second one is so-called savings plans – which are basically a monthly subscription into an EFT or stock at no cost. And the majority of our customers do have such a savings plan.”

The company has raised well in excess of €1bn, most recently from Sequoia and the Ontario Teachers Pension Fund in Canada.

He said its customers were predominantly young and in their second or third year of employment. While online trading has raised some concerns about the exposure of small retail investors, he said its customer base was mainly interested in savings.

“In January, at the height of the meme stock situation (around Gamestop), only 5pc of our customers ever engaged with the meme stock.”