Dan Malone

Now, that doesn't cover you from losses arising from normal market conditions.

Like if your investments just go down in value, you can't make an ICS claim and get compensation for that.

The other aspect of it is when you deposit money onto your investing platform, a lot of the times that money is held with a partner bank of the investing platform, right?

Because they're not banks.

In some cases, you will have a platform that is also a bank.

So, for example, Trade Republic has a banking license, but it's also a broker.

And specifically for Irish users, when you deposit money on the Trade Republic website,

A lot of the times it's actually held with Citibank, who are based here.

So your money is covered under the Irish deposit guarantee scheme, which applies to Citibank, Europe PLC, up to 100,000 euro.

So that's an important thing to check with whatever investing platform you're using is, who is their partner bank?

Where is your uninvested cash being held?

Because that will let you know which deposit guarantee scheme applies, which is very important because you want your uninvested cash to be protected.

Yeah, so a lot of the times it will just be flat out on their website.

Nearly every broker will have a tab on their website called safety or protections or something to that effect.

And they'll normally have a couple of tabs like tab number one, how your cash is kept safe, which refers to your uninvested cash deposits.

Tab number two, how your investments are kept safe, which refers to your actual shares.

Now,

They're just the two European protections, but the main way that your investments are actually kept safe on a day-to-day basis is using what's known as asset segregation.

This is really important to understand.

So essentially, when you invest in shares...