Dan Malone

You certainly go under the microscope by the regulator and they'll look into things like whether or not your business is safe, whether or not the founding team is qualified to run the business, your technology, all that kind of stuff.

And then whenever you do get regulated and authorized to offer your service, you have to continue to prove on an ongoing basis that you are compliant.

And the reason why that's so important is because in the European Union, we have what's called passporting,

you know, if Baffin, the German regulator, authorizes a investment firm as a brokerage, that brokerage can come to Ireland and passport their services into Ireland without having to get separate regulation in Ireland.

From the central bank.

Yeah.

Okay.

Now, they're still regulated here for conduct of business rules, but the actual license that they hold is still German.

And that is the case with Trader Public, and it's also the case with IG, I believe, and then Trading212 recently got a German entity as well.

So,

the regulator and the oversight of things is one really important factor to be aware of.

What comes with that then are European protections, right?

So specifically for investments,

The protection that's available is what's called the investor compensation scheme.

And what the ICS does is it essentially says that if your investing platform goes under and you suffer a loss of assets due to their failure to safeguard those assets, and I'll talk more about what that means in a second.

you can receive compensation up to 90% of your loss up to a maximum of €20,000.

Now, it varies depending on the institution.

If it's Revolut, it's actually just a flat €22,000.

But the 90% maximum of €20,000 is kind of the more common one that you see.

So that's the first protection that applies specifically for your investments.