Lightyear

Lightyear's fee schedule is short enough to read in one screen, which is the entire product strategy. Figures below are for Lightyear Europe AS, the EEA entity; the UK entity charges in sterling on the same structure.

Trading:

• ETFs: EUR 0. No execution fee, no custody fee, in any currency. The fund's own TER still applies inside the fund.
• US stocks: 0.1% of order value, minimum USD 0.10, capped at USD 1.00. A USD 500 trade costs USD 0.50; a USD 20,000 trade costs USD 1.00.
• Euro-denominated stocks, bonds, ETNs and ETCs: EUR 1 per order.
• UK stocks: GBP 1 per order. Other European markets are 0.1% with market-specific minimums.
• Crypto: 0.45% per order on roughly a dozen major coins, where offered.

Everything else: no account fee, no platform fee, no custody fee, no inactivity fee, no withdrawal fee. Bank transfers in and out are free. Card, Apple Pay and Google Pay deposits cost 0.6%, and receiving a USD wire costs USD 6.11. Business accounts need an LEI at EUR 48 plus VAT a year.

The one fee that actually moves the needle is currency conversion at 0.35% over the live interbank rate. Buy USD 5,000 of US stock from a euro balance and the conversion costs roughly EUR 17 — seventeen times the USD 1 trading commission. Against a high-street bank charging 1.5-2%, 0.35% is a large saving. Against Interactive Brokers, which converts at a fraction of a basis point plus a small flat fee, it is expensive. If you run a US-heavy portfolio, hold a USD balance and convert in size occasionally rather than trade by trade.

Uninvested cash is swept into AAA-rated money market funds managed by BlackRock or J.P. Morgan, quoted around 2.2% APY on euros and benchmarked to the ECB overnight rate. The fund charge is 0.15% or less and comes out of the yield.

Lightyear runs two regulated entities and which one holds your account depends on where you live.

EEA clients contract with Lightyear Europe AS, an Estonian company (registration 16235024, registered at Volta 1, Tallinn) authorised by the Estonian Financial Supervision Authority (Finantsinspektsioon) as an investment firm under activity licence 4.1-1/31, with a separate crypto-asset services licence 4.1-1/147. The licence passports across the EU and EEA. Client assets are covered up to EUR 20,000 by the Estonian Investor Protection Sectoral Fund. Crypto-assets are explicitly outside any EU compensation scheme.

UK clients contract with Lightyear U.K. Ltd (company number 14367910, London), authorised and regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority under FRN 987226, with FSCS cover up to GBP 85,000.

Structurally, Lightyear does the right things and says so plainly. Client assets are held in separate accounts with authorised custodians, cash sits in a mix of AAA-rated BlackRock and J.P. Morgan money market funds and deposits at authorised commercial banks, and US securities are held with Alpaca, a FINRA-regulated SIPC member covering up to USD 500,000. Because Lightyear offers no leverage at all — no margin, no CFDs — a retail client cannot lose more than they put in.

Two honest caveats. First, the EEA licence is a national EU regulator rather than a top-tier authority like the FCA or BaFin, and the EUR 20,000 ceiling is a fifth of a bank deposit guarantee. Second, Lightyear was founded in 2020, is privately held, and has not been tested through a serious market dislocation or a liquidity crisis. Nothing here suggests a problem — but "no problems yet" is a shorter track record than an incumbent broker's, and no broker is ever guaranteed safe.

Lightyear is mobile-first and makes no pretence otherwise. The iOS and Android app is the primary surface, with a web app that mirrors most of it for people who prefer a bigger screen. There is no desktop terminal, no API and no third-party platform integration.

The app is genuinely well designed. Instrument pages carry fundamentals, valuation metrics, dividend history, a news feed and — unusually for this tier — earnings-call audio you can listen to in-app. Screening lets you filter for dividend payers or compare valuation across a watchlist. Auto-Invest plans, launched in late 2025, let you build a recurring basket across stocks, ETFs and funds and schedule contributions, which is the feature most people actually need and most low-cost apps implement badly.

The multi-currency handling is a quiet strength: you hold EUR, GBP and USD side by side, see which balance an order will draw on, and convert deliberately rather than having the platform do it silently at every trade.

The ceiling is order sophistication. You get market orders, limit orders and recurring orders — and that is the complete list. There is no stop-loss, no stop-limit, no trailing stop, no good-till-cancelled or good-till-date validity, and no conditional or bracket orders. If your process depends on leaving a protective stop in the market, Lightyear cannot execute it and you would have to manage exits manually.

Charting is basic — a price line with time-range toggles, not a technical workspace. UK stocks denominated in GBP cannot be bought fractionally, though US and euro-denominated instruments can. There is no demo account, so your first order is a live one.

Lightyear covers roughly 6,000 stocks and funds in total. That is a deliberate curation rather than a technical limit, and how you feel about the platform depends almost entirely on whether your intended holdings are inside it.

Stocks: around 4,000 US names across NYSE and Nasdaq, European stocks from more than 20 countries, UK stocks on the London Stock Exchange, and Baltic listings from Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania — the last being unusually good coverage that no other pan-European app matches. Fractional dealing is available on US and euro-denominated shares.

ETFs: commission-free and custody-free, drawn from the major issuers — Vanguard, iShares, VanEck, SPDR, Amundi, Invesco. The range covers the mainstream core-portfolio building blocks but is narrower than a full-service broker's, and reviewers regularly report that a specific accumulating share class is missing. Check your exact ISINs before you migrate a portfolio, because in-specie transfers are not always straightforward.

Money market funds: AAA-rated BlackRock and J.P. Morgan vehicles that hold uninvested cash and pay interest, with provider availability depending on your country.

Bonds: available in euro-denominated form at EUR 1 per order, but the range is narrow and Baltic-weighted. This is not a route to a diversified corporate bond ladder.

Crypto: roughly 12 major coins quoted in EUR and USD at 0.45% per order, offered under a separate EFSA crypto-asset licence and with no investor compensation cover.

What is absent: no options, no futures, no CFDs, no retail forex, no spread betting, no direct commodities, no margin and no copy trading. Lightyear has decided to be a cash investing platform and stopped there. For a buy-and-hold investor that is a feature. For anyone who wants to hedge, short or use leverage, it is a wall.

Opening is fully digital and takes 10 to 15 minutes in the app. You provide identity documents — a national ID or passport — plus proof of address from the past six months (utility bill, bank statement or rental agreement), then answer the standard MiFID appropriateness questions. Verification usually completes the same day.

There is effectively no minimum: you can fund with EUR 1 and buy a fraction of a share. Lightyear markets this honestly as "from EUR 1 to infinity", and unlike some rivals the small-balance experience is not degraded — fractional dealing, multi-currency balances and interest on cash all work from the first euro.

Funding: SEPA and UK Faster Payments transfers are free and typically credit same or next business day. Debit card, Apple Pay and Google Pay deposits are instant and cost 0.6%. Receiving a USD wire costs USD 6.11. Base currencies are EUR, GBP and USD, plus HUF for Hungarian clients, and you hold them side by side rather than being forced into a single denomination.

Withdrawals are free with no monthly limit and land in one to two business days. This is where Lightyear separates itself from brokers that charge per withdrawal — there is no reason to batch your payouts.

Account types differ by market. Everyone gets a General Investment Account. UK clients additionally get a Stocks & Shares ISA (no commission on trades inside the wrapper) and a Cash ISA launched in 2025. There is no pension or SIPP wrapper, which is the most commonly cited gap among UK reviewers. Business accounts are available but need an LEI at EUR 48 plus VAT a year.

Lightyear provides annual statements for tax filing but does not act as a withholding agent in most jurisdictions, so the declaration remains yours.

Research at Lightyear is contextual rather than editorial. There is no house analyst desk publishing buy and sell calls, and no morning note. What you get instead is data attached to the instrument you are already looking at: fundamentals, valuation multiples, dividend history, analyst consensus, a news feed and playable earnings-call audio, which is a genuinely differentiated touch at this price point. Lightyear AI layers contextual summaries on top, answering questions about a holding without you leaving the page.

Screening is functional rather than powerful. You can surface dividend payers or compare valuation across a watchlist, but there is no multi-factor screener, no backtesting and no portfolio X-ray showing overlapping exposure across your ETFs — a real omission for a platform whose core audience holds several index funds at once.

Education is the weakest dimension in this review. There is a help centre, a blog and periodic market commentary, but no structured course, no graded learning path, no webinars and — critically — no demo account. A first-time investor cannot practise before committing real money, which is an odd gap for a platform whose whole pitch is approachability. Competitors aimed at the same audience, including eToro and Trading 212, do considerably more here.

The counter-argument is that Lightyear's product is simple enough that there is less to learn: with no leverage, no derivatives and three order types, the ways to hurt yourself are limited by design. That is a fair defence of the platform, but it is not a substitute for teaching someone what an accumulating ETF is or why currency exposure matters. Expect to learn elsewhere and execute here.

Support is in-app chat and email only. There is no phone line, no callback service and no branch network, and coverage is business hours Monday to Friday rather than around the clock. For a broker that trades cash securities on exchanges that close overnight, the absence of weekend cover is defensible. The absence of a phone number is a genuine limitation if something goes wrong with a payment or a corporate action and you need a person rather than a ticket.

The evidence on quality is mixed but leans positive. Trustpilot sits around 4.7 out of 5 across roughly 2,200 reviews, with about four in five reviewers giving five stars — one of the strongest distributions of any broker we cover, and notably better than the large incumbents. Reviewers repeatedly describe the team as responsive and, unusually, as visibly acting on product requests: Lightyear has publicly claimed to have added the large majority of non-complex US instruments customers asked for within a three-month window.

The counterweight comes from independent reviewers who report inconsistent response times, with some queries taking several days. The pattern is what you would expect from a small, growing fintech: fast and helpful on common questions, slower on anything that needs escalation or manual investigation.

Language coverage is real but modest — the platform and support operate in eight languages (English, German, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Estonian and Hungarian), which covers most of the 28 markets Lightyear serves but leaves Italian, Polish and the Nordic languages on English-only support.

The practical read: if you are a self-directed investor who rarely needs help, this is a non-issue. If you value being able to phone someone about your money, it is a real reason to look elsewhere.