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The founders of GRATISBROKER, one of the first, free, online German trading platforms, had to assure that their platform could reliably deliver trade data and securely process trades in realtime to hundreds of thousands of customers. Familiar with the power of Diffusion, from their former work in banking, they chose Diffusion Cloud to handle their real-time data requirements.

GRATISBROKER was founded in 2018 by financial services experts, seasoned in the development of highly scalable and secure banking systems. Their experience was gained at Capgemini, DAB Bank, and Consorsbank (of BNP Paribas). The team believes that traders should not have to pay fees for buying and selling securities because it reduces one’s profit significantly. They built a platform, offering reliable commission-free trading, delivered on the no-frills promise.

The challenge is to reduce the costs on a minimum while offering customers an attractive product without noticeable cutbacks – compared to competitors. To remain profitable, GRATISBROKER concentrates on trading and is deliberately not a full-service provider.

In order to manage high-volume, live, event-driven information in real-time to many thousands of customers online, the GRATISBROKER platform had to be secure, reliable and easily scalable to support the constant ebb and flow of trading volume.

Further, to deliver a commission-free trading platform, the team had to:

• Assure competitively high quality-of-service
• Minimize administrative overhead
• Provide a responsive and intuitive frontend

The team was familiar with Push Technology because they first evaluated and selected Diffusion while working in with DAB bank. When DAB merged with Consorsbank, they told Consorsbank that Diffusion was the optimal choice to integrate data sources, provide secure access, and optimize real-time data delivery at scale. As a result, Consorsbank evaluated, selected, and continue to use Diffusion today.

When architecting the new cloud-based infrastructure for the GRATISBROKER platform, the team evaluated Diffusion Cloud performance against AWS web socket technology and streaming data support. They again chose Diffusion Cloud.

The GRATISBROKER team chose Diffusion Cloud based on performance and the seamless fallback mechanisms, even for traders sitting behind a restrictive corporate proxy server.

Running on Diffusion Cloud, GRATISBROKER provides their free securities trading website to customers. The platform operates on mobile phones, tablets, laptops, and desktops, delivering real-time trading, while efficiently minimizing the amount of data required to be sent to customers.

At the outset of the platform design and with no legacy systems to worry about, the team made several important strategic business decisions to benefit their future customers.

Their new trading platform would:

• Offer the several thousand stocks that comprise more than 90 % of trade order flow in Germany
• Eliminate exotic stocks that produce costs that spread across everyone on other trading platforms, despite the fact that the majority of traders have no interest in these.
• Be completely free to all customers - no commissions, setup charges, monthly fees or extra-costs

GRATISBROKER is targeting active traders who are self-directed, know what they are doing, and execute 50- plus trades per year on average.

Active traders often have multiple trading accounts, so the ability to execute a part of their trades at zero cost using the GRATISBROKER platform, is a huge bonus.

The platform’s single exchange format– using gettex – plus the absence of cluttering and unnecessary extras on the user application, simplifies and streamlines trading activities.

According to Philipp Röben,

“In addition to the simplicity of use for traders, we have architected our platform with Diffusion Cloud to seamlessly scale up and down based upon trading demand; and, using the cloud infrastructure in the most cost efficient way results in minimal administrative effort.“

GRATISBROKER has a bright future serving German traders.