WealthTech in Berlin

WealthTech is software for wealth management and private investing: brokerage apps, robo-advisors and the tools banks use to advise clients at scale. Berlin has been Germany's largest startup city for a decade, and its fintech scene grew out of the same pool of engineers and designers that built the city's e-commerce and marketplace companies before it. A WealthTech founder in Berlin can hire from a labor market shaped by consumer apps, which shows in how these products look and onboard a customer.

The city also has scale on its side. It hosts more funded fintech startups than any other German city, and several of the largest, Trade Republic among them, chose Berlin as their base rather than Frankfurt, the traditional home of German banking.

Trade Republic, founded in Berlin in 2015, built a mobile brokerage app that let retail investors trade stocks, ETFs and, later, crypto for a flat low fee, and grew into one of the city's most valuable fintechs. Fintech News lists the company among Berlin's fastest-growing fintechs and reports a valuation in the billions of euros. Trade Republic is licensed by BaFin and the Deutsche Bundesbank, not merely registered as a broker acting through a partner bank.

Around Trade Republic, Berlin holds a wider set of WealthTech firms working on adjacent problems, from portfolio aggregation for advisors to retirement planning platforms that sit between an employer and a pension provider. Several trace their funding back to Berlin-based venture investors who specialize in fintech.

A brokerage app or robo-advisor operating from Berlin needs the same authorization a bank branch needs. Executing client orders and holding client securities are regulated activities under section 32 of the German Banking Act (KWG), and BaFin applies the same licensing standard to a software platform that it applies to a traditional broker or advisor.

Where the app also gives investment advice or manages a portfolio automatically, MiFID II adds the suitability test: before it proposes an investment, the platform has to establish that it fits the client's goals and risk tolerance, gathered through an onboarding questionnaire rather than a branch conversation. A Berlin fintech designs its cost disclosure and risk profiling around this rule from the start.

Product breadth is the current push. Berlin's neobrokers add savings plans, fractional shares and, for some, crypto trading on top of core brokerage, competing directly with bank-owned apps that bundle a current account with the same features. Retirement products are a growing lane too, as pension reform pushes more private savings toward capital markets and fintechs build the interfaces for it.

Family wealth above what a retail app covers moves into a different part of the field. Family offices in Germany include several Berlin-based single and multi-family offices that manage larger private fortunes outside a standard brokerage relationship, often working alongside the private banking arms of Germany's larger asset managers.

Finance Loop is the meeting place for people who build and invest in WealthTech in Berlin: product managers from neobrokers and asset managers, advisors and the founders of new investment platforms. It connects the finance, IT and AI communities and holds events in the city alongside its base in Frankfurt.

For portfolio questions that touch bitcoin, the masterclass Bitcoin for Investors runs in Berlin as well as Frankfurt and Munich, and covers access routes and custody for professional investors. Related pages: WealthTech in Munich, WealthTech in Frankfurt and WealthTech in Germany.

WealthTech is software and digital services for wealth management and private investors, covering robo-advisors, brokerage apps and the portfolio tools banks use with clients. The WealthTech answer in the knowledge hub goes through the category and its licenses.

Trade Republic, a mobile brokerage app licensed by BaFin and the Deutsche Bundesbank, was founded in Berlin in 2015 and is one of the city's most valuable fintech companies. A wider group of smaller WealthTech and retirement-planning startups is based in Berlin as well.

WealthTech sessions run inside broader fintech and blockchain meetups in Berlin rather than at one standalone WealthTech event. Finance Loop lists the meetups and conferences where the field meets in Berlin in the events overview and in the calendar on this page.