Dan Malone

So the market maker can be any sort of independent third-party financial institution.

Okay.

In the case of Trade Republic, I believe the third party is called the Lange & Schwartz Exchange.

So Trade Republic was able to offer zero commission investing because it was redirecting all of its customers' orders to the single market maker, who in turn would provide Trade Republic with remuneration for doing so, right?

Now, that practice...

In some instances, caught a bit of flack because the downside of routing all customer orders to a single market maker is that it may not lead to the most favorable price for the customer, which ultimately is why it's banned now in the EU.

And by the 30th of June, 2026, it will be fully banned.

It's still technically legal in Germany only.

But that will be gone.

So a lot of the brokers will have to revisit their models and their pricing models.

That's a good example of how they make money.

The other way is something called securities lending.

This can be buried in kind of the fine print of some of the signup process for some of the brokers.

But essentially, when you sign up with a investing platform, basically,

the investing platform has the right to lend out your shares to other investors.

In practice, what this means is certain institutional investors or large kind of hedge funds, the reason why they would want to borrow shares from your broker is if they're looking to short it.

Essentially, all that means is they're betting on the price of it going down.

Now, it's a perfectly safe practice in reality, but that is how the brokers make some extra money on the side by lending out your shares and receiving a fee for doing so.

Sort of like that principle, yes.

So there are methods by which the brokers will earn revenue on their model and that in turn allows them to offer low cost investing to Irish ambassadors.