Lightyear was founded by Martin Sokk and Mihkel Aamer, both former Wise employees. The Wise lineage shows: itemised pricing, multi-currency wallets with real local account details, and no bundled spread games.

The structure matters more than most reviews let on. Lightyear Europe AS serves EU and EEA clients, regulated by the Estonian Financial Supervision Authority under activity licence 4.1-1/31. Lightyear UK Ltd serves UK clients, authorised by the FCA under FRN 987226. These are not two front doors to one price list — UK personal accounts pay no order commission and 0.10% on conversion, while EU accounts pay per-order fees and 0.35%.

Personal accounts are open to residents of 26 countries: the UK plus 25 EU and EEA markets. On Trustpilot, Lightyear holds a 4.7 out of 5 rating from around 3,000 reviews.

The practical difference is real. With Trade Republic or Trading 212, idle euros earn something by default. With Lightyear, euros earn nothing until you deliberately move them into Savings — and once you do, you are holding a fund, not cash. Capital is at risk, it is not a bank deposit, and no deposit guarantee scheme applies.

Savings is unavailable in Belgium entirely. Elsewhere, which fund manager you get depends on residency: BlackRock across most markets, J.P. Morgan in Bulgaria, Croatia, Cyprus, Greece, Ireland, Portugal, Slovakia and Slovenia. UK savers also have the Cash ISA, which tracks the Bank of England base rate inside the ISA wrapper.

Plans lets you group chosen investments into a mini-portfolio inside your main account, each with its own percentage allocations totalling exactly 100%. Fund the Plan and contributions distribute automatically by weighting. You can run several at once — retirement, house deposit, a child’s future — without opening separate accounts. There are no extra fees beyond standard trade costs.

Contributions can be scheduled from your Lightyear cash balance or funded by standing order from your bank. Ready-made Plans, built on BlackRock and Vanguard funds, exist for people who would rather not set allocations themselves.

Plans are not the only way to automate. Lightyear also supports Repeat Orders on individual instruments, set up per holding rather than as part of a portfolio. Frequencies are daily, weekly or monthly, against weekly, fortnightly or monthly for Plans auto-invest.

Repeat Orders are funded from your Lightyear cash balance or by standing order, execute as market orders, and are skipped silently if there is not enough money at the scheduled time. You can opt out at any point. If you want one ETF bought every month and nothing else, this is the simpler mechanism — you do not need to build a Plan around it.

Lightyear charges nothing in either direction, though your other broker might. The constraints are the part worth knowing before you commit: whole shares only, and each position must be worth at least €1,000, £1,000 or $1,000 — or the local equivalent such as 400,000 HUF or 10,000 SEK.

The instrument must already exist on Lightyear and trade on the same exchange in the same currency, or the transfer cannot be accepted. Fractional positions and crypto cannot be moved at all. Transfers out are started by emailing Lightyear rather than in the app. Named guides exist for Interactive Brokers, Scalable Capital, Freetrade, Swedbank, LHV and Shareworks.

Payment for order flow is banned, not avoided. MiFIR Article 39a prohibited it across the EU from 30 June 2026, when the last national exemption lapsed, and the FCA has effectively banned it in the UK since 2012. Lightyear’s execution policies commit to taking no third-party payments outside MiFID II, MiCA or FCA rules. This is a legal fact about every European broker, not a Lightyear differentiator.

EU orders. Lightyear Europe AS has direct membership of just two venues — Nasdaq Baltic and Tradegate. Euronext Paris, Amsterdam and Brussels, the LSE, Frankfurt, Cboe Europe and Equiduct are reached indirectly. US orders go to Alpaca Securities; certain non-EEA, Central European and Nordic instruments go to Interactive Brokers Ireland; crypto is executed and custodied by Kraken.

UK orders are the interesting case. Lightyear UK is a direct CREST member and routes UK-listed shares and ETFs through Infront, a request-for-quote hub. Four market makers — Optiver, Jane Street, Peel Hunt and Winterflood — quote firm prices simultaneously and the order goes to the best. These trades settle bilaterally and off-exchange. So a UK investor buying an LSE-listed UCITS ETF is not hitting the LSE order book. Competitive RFQ is the cleaner version of this model, but it is not on-exchange execution, and it is worth knowing.

IBKR wins on currency conversion at size, on access to bonds, options and global markets, and on being a platform you will not outgrow. Its headline FX rate looks dramatically lower than Lightyear’s, but a per-conversion minimum applies — so the advantage only becomes real once you are converting meaningful amounts at once, not €200 a month.

The trade-off is setup complexity and a less polished mobile experience. If you convert large sums or want the broadest product range, IBKR saves real money. See our IBKR currency conversion guide for the workflow.