Swedbank vs Lightyear

For investment services, Lightyear and Estonian banks are regulated identically — with investments covered up to the same amount in both.

Lightyear is a regulated investment firm, and is strictly regulated in how we handle and protect your assets. Customers’ cash and investments always sit separately to our own and are held by authorised custodians. There’s no way for creditors - in the unlikely event of anything happening to Lightyear - to get hold of the investments or cash that you hold with us.

Lightyear’s customers’ assets are held with our global partners — mainly in the Netherlands, Ireland and US.

When compared with Swedbank, global investments with Lightyear cost you 10x less in transaction fees, plus 3x less in currency conversion fees (0.35% compared to ~1%).

If you buy one ETF and one US stock every month for a year — you’ll pay a minimum of 93.60€ of transaction fees with Swedbank. With Lightyear, that would be 12€. That’s 81.60€ you could’ve put to work for your future, instead of paying for fees.

Good question. Swedbank doesn’t show its currency conversion fee anywhere in the process. What they do is that they mark up the live exchange rate, giving you a worse rate, so they could make profit on it without you realising.

The ~1% we calculated from our own investments with Swedbank.

Investing doesn’t need to cost as much as it’s made out, or as much as local banks are charging you out of habit (and a little bit of greed). Our mission is to bring the best quality investing to every European at a fraction of the cost.

We can do this by building technology that scales. We’re building for 500 million people across Europe, whilst Estonian banks build for a million. The technology we’re building allows us to cut middle-men, bringing extra costs to customers, from processes. The stronger our tech and infrastructure, the more we can pass on cheaper pricing it brings us, to our users.