Becoming Germany's go-to investment platform with Finanzen.net

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Audio Transcript

Tim Smallbone

Hello and welcome to Inflexion Point, the podcast that explores those crucial moments in a company's journey that change the trajectory of success. Through conversations with business founders and entrepreneurs, we'll explore what those moments look like and how to recognise and harness them. I'm Tim Smallbone and in my 20 years as a partner at Inflexion, I've been lucky enough to witness a huge number of those moments that are a part of every success story. In today's episode, we're heading to Germany, a country where one in five people invest in the stock market. For a population of 84 million at one of the largest economies in the world, that's a striking number. But it is changing fast, and no business sits closer to that shift than Finanzen.net.

Jens Ohr

Since 25 years we designed the product because we have in mind what somebody that uses the product wants it to be. And this always was our main focus. And everything else came second.

Andrea Bertolini

Finanzen.net did jump out because of this rare combination of the portal and the investment platform. And that was from our perspective quite unique.

Tim Smallbone

As Germany's #1 financial media and investing platform, Finanzen.net attracts 6 million monthly users and helps everyday investors research and manage their portfolios. In 2025, Inflexion partnered with the founders to carve the business out of media conglomerate Axel Springer, giving it independence and the capital to pursue an ambitious vision, to become the leading investment and savings platform in the DACH region. To tell that story, I'm joined down the line from Germany by Jens Ohr, co-founder of Finanzen.net, who's been with the business from the very beginning. And with me in the studio is Andrea Bertolini, partner and head of financial services at Inflexion, who led the investment and who sits on the board. Jens, Andrea, welcome to you both. Thanks for joining me.

Andrea Bertolini

Thank you, Tim.

Jens Ohr

Thank you for having us.

Tim Smallbone

Jens, can we just start off, just give us an idea, what's the business we're talking about? What does Finanzen.net do today?

Jens Ohr

Finanzen.net, I always explain it to people as the Bloomberg for the end user that is also free. So that means if you come to our website, you will find every information regarding investment and quotes on the stock market. So whether it is securities, funds, ETFs, commodities. We have everything. We got you covered with everything you need to know if you want to invest.

Tim Smallbone

So it's an information portal. You come to Finanzen.net for information to help you with your judgments.

Jens Ohr

That's the first thing. A lot of people already know the brand or they come through Google because they are looking for information for their investments. And the second step is that you are also able to do a real investment on the website. So if you, let's say, are attracted to the Amazon stock and you want to buy it, then that's not a problem. You can do it right away on our website.

Tim Smallbone

And there are three businesses. So there's Finanzen.net, Xero and TraderFox. What's the difference between the three, just so I understand.

Jens Ohr

Finanzen.net is the information website. Xero is the brokerage where you buy the stocks. And TraderFox is where our experts are sitting and give you perfect advice regarding your investment strategies.

Tim Smallbone

So that's where you pay to get some advice specifically.

Jens Ohr

Exactly.

Tim Smallbone

I get it. So you founded the business, but going back to 1999?

Jens Ohr

That's true. Yeah, I didn't do it alone. I had two co-founders, Peter and Dominic, and we had been students at the University of Karlsruhe. And we were stock market enthusiasts because around 1999 there was the internet bubble and we were totally hooked with investing into stocks. And all the information was quite expensive back in the day. So it was not like today where everything was free and available in real time. And if you wanted to have better quality, you had to pay a lot of money, which we obviously didn't have. So this was the beginning because we said, okay, if we want to do proper investment, we need better data and better information. And if we do this for us, we could also do it for other people. And this was the idea behind our project because back in the day, we didn't plan to do a real company. It was just started out of a hobby because we were so much into this topic. And yeah, we just, we liked what we do. It was, as I said, like a hobby in the beginning.

Tim Smallbone

So it was part of that crazy time where internet businesses were popping up all over the place, when the internet was new.

Jens Ohr

Exactly.

Tim Smallbone

And your vision was to provide a free platform. How did you think you were going to make money out of that?

Jens Ohr

I mean, there have been some businesses that made a lot of money out of advertisement, and so this was our first goal. But honestly, in the beginning, we were not so much thinking about how could we make money out of it, because as I said, it was a hobby. And after a few weeks, to tell this little side story, after a few weeks of being live with the website, one small German bank called us and said, hey guys, can we put advertising on your website? And we would also be willing to pay you. And then we said, okay, that sounds good.

Tim Smallbone

Exciting calls to take.

Jens Ohr

Exactly, yeah.

Tim Smallbone

And how did you attract the users back in the day? There was no such thing as pay-per-click and presumably before Google.

Jens Ohr

Yeah, this was before Google, at least before Google was famous in Germany. But there have been other platforms, other search engines, other blog posts. And honestly, there was not a lot of competition back in the day. So word of mouth was our big friend after we launched. People that were also into the stock market, they talked to each other. And after a few weeks, we started to get traction with the traffic. As I said, it was not the time of real-time data back in the day. So we only got the traffic data from the day at 1 o'clock in the morning on the next day. So that is the reason why we always went to bed after we got this traffic information because we wanted to see did we attract more people today than yesterday.

Tim Smallbone

So you were waiting until 1 in the morning. How many people did we have today? And presumably when broadband came along, that must have been a help because even I can remember dial up and all the pains of getting those early websites to load.

Jens Ohr

Exactly. We all remember these strange sounds that these modems did back in the day.

Tim Smallbone

Exactly.

Jens Ohr

And of course, I mean, what it did is it gave a lot more people access to the internet and everything was more fun. There were no wait times. And speaking of wait times, this was always a big challenge for us because we provided a lot of data on the website and a lot of real-time data. And this was one of the biggest challenges. How could we update all the data in real time? Because usually websites back in the day, they were updated like every hour, every, I don't know, a few minutes or perhaps even once a day. But in our field, it was really necessary to update data in real time, which meant several times per second even because the quotes changed. And this was the first, I don't know if we can call it an Inflexion point, but this challenge that we had to solve became very important at a later stage because this really differentiated us from the competition. We were one of the first, if not the only company that provided all of the quotes that we got in real time out to our users.

Tim Smallbone

So you had to link up with Stock Exchange presumably to get that automatic upload of the latest data of the latest prices.

Jens Ohr

Yeah, exactly.

Tim Smallbone

Right. So that was like, that was an Inflexion point. And how did you manage that? Because you were a bunch of students. How did you manage to persuade them to do that?

Jens Ohr

When we managed this, we were not still a bunch of students. This is sometime down the road. But I mean, like in every successful business, it's crucial to attract good people. And of course, back in the day, we were very lucky to have very good IT people. And we taught them, guys, we somehow need to figure out whatever it takes to deploy all of the quotes we have in real time and self-refreshing. This was also, today it's a normal feature, self-refreshing data on the website. But back in the day, you had to refresh the site.

Tim Smallbone

Refresh the page.

Jens Ohr

Exactly. And we were the first ones in Germany to offer self-refreshing quotes. And this had been a very big challenge and it took us quite a time to develop it. But in the end, we managed to do it and this gave us quite an edge in comparison to the competition.

Tim Smallbone

Were you copying other models in the United States, for example, because often the United States is the leader in these things, or were you just making it up yourselves?

Jens Ohr

I would say also probably like most of the successful companies, it's a mixture of both. Of course, you look around and see what other people do and this sometimes gets you inspired and you get your own ideas and improve. But of course, there's a lot of our own ideas in the product, but also, of course, we tracked what other people in other countries do.

Tim Smallbone

And somewhere along the line you became part of that with Axel Springer. How did that all come about?

Jens Ohr

Yeah, that's quite a funny story because this was still back in the day when Peter and myself were students and we lived together in a flat near the university. And there was one big news headline, I think it was 1999, where the domain name business.com was bought for 10 million. And we said, oh my God, that's easy. You only have to register a domain name and then sell it for 10 million. That's the easiest way to get rich. So on that day, we just registered like 100 domain names, everything that came to our mind. And then we waited if somebody would call us and give us 10 million. That obviously didn't happen, but sometime Axel Springer called and said, hey guys, you have this certain domain name. It's the name of our new magazine that we are going to launch. Can we talk about having this domain name? And so this was a coincidence, of course.

Tim Smallbone

Piece of luck.

Jens Ohr

Yes, for probably both of us. But this is how we got in contact with Axel Springer because from that point on we said, okay, we can sell it to you, but could you contract us with making the website for you? And for that reason, it was win-win. They got their domain name and we got another contract.

Tim Smallbone

That's like white labelling a technology. So it looked like an Axel Springer page, but actually was using your technology.

Jens Ohr

Exactly.

Tim Smallbone

Yeah.

Jens Ohr

So this, let's call it B2B business. We sold this 10 years ago. But in the beginning, this was like our second big part of the company because after 1999, when the internet bubble burst, advertising was not as good of a model as before the bubble burst. So we said, okay, what can we do? Okay, let's license out our technology to other companies. And this enabled us to go through this very hard time after the burst of the bubble.

Tim Smallbone

Right, you had an extra string to your bow, an extra business line to lean on.

Jens Ohr

Exactly.

Tim Smallbone

Yeah, So how did they end up actually owning the business?

Jens Ohr

This was all, I mean, they, after we did our first project, they looked at the company and said, you know what guys, we just started an internet fund with Axel Springer because this was the time when a lot of media companies thought about their own future because the internet endangered the future of media business. Exactly. And for that, they started, I think, 200 million euro fund or whatever. And they said, guys, what you are doing seems promising. Why don't you want to be part of Axel Springer and why don't we join forces? So they were a very big help because they had a very big reach in Germany. They still have it. And so they could provide us with a lot of traffic and a lot of experience how to make a website big. And for that reason, it made a lot of sense for us as well. So we got some very experienced new shareholders. And they got some very motivated internet guys.

Tim Smallbone

So that was a partnership that really worked for both of you.

Jens Ohr

I would say so, yes.

Tim Smallbone

Yeah, And that gave you credibility as well, presumably, because you had them as an additional stakeholder in the business. And so.

Jens Ohr

Exactly, yeah.

Tim Smallbone

Suddenly you had credibility as well as financial muscle.

Jens Ohr

Yeah, I remember that one of the biggest German banks wanted to become our client, but before Axel Springer took a part of the company, the guy that we were talking to, he was not allowed to make a contract with this little company in Karlsruhe. But after Axel Springer was one of the shareholders, we got the green light. And this very big German bank became our client.

Tim Smallbone

So what led you on then? You created these trading platforms alongside, is that your idea? You started with the information portal. Was that actually Springer's idea or was that your idea?

Jens Ohr

It was our idea, but it took quite some time because after 2000 there had been other portals already established in Germany and we were the very small one. So our first challenge was how could we become the market leader in Germany? And then it took us roughly eight years to really become the market leader in Germany. And the next step was we wanted to expand into other countries. First of all, Switzerland and Austria, and also become the market leader there. And after we have achieved this, we thought, okay, what could be the next step? What could we do to further grow the business? And I think it was a very easy decision because we already had a lot of people on the website and they always had to open up two browser windows because in one they had Finanzen.net and in the other one there was a brokerage account of their bank and they always had to copy and paste the ISINs or the IDs of the securities. And a lot of them asked us, hey guys, I really love your website, but why can't I trade on your website.

Tim Smallbone

So the business is growing. Andrea, what led us to look at a business with this sort of structure and an information portal?

Andrea Bertolini

So let me take a step back before getting into what attracted us to Finanzen.net, because that is a sector where we wanted to invest. And then we assessed where in Europe we wanted to focus on and Germany was very much high in our level of interest, in our agenda. Why? Exactly for what you said at the very beginning, it's really less than 20% of people have any share ownership, which is very low for a Western developed country.

Tim Smallbone

And for a nation with a big culture of saving.

Andrea Bertolini

Indeed. So Germany is probably the largest saving market in Europe. And I was actually quite interested when I saw that share ownership was lower in Germany than in Italy, which is also quite a market that is very much cash based or used to be cash based or savings based economy. So when we looked at Germany, we identified a number of potential interesting opportunities. But the reality is Finanzen.net did jump out because of this rare combination of the portal and the investment platform.

Tim Smallbone

That was unusual.

Andrea Bertolini

And that was, from our perspective, quite unique because there are other firms that do have it. There are other firms outside of Germany that have successfully executed such a strategy where they've been able to convert a lot of the customers from the portal into the trading platform. And that is the opportunity that we saw.

Tim Smallbone

Axel Springer made the decision to divest of the business. Jens, why was that? What led them to make that decision?

Jens Ohr

The main business of Finanzen.net, after having sold the B2B business, obviously was the media portal. And over time, the brokerage part grew dramatically and got more important. And for that reason we said, okay, it might make sense to find a partner that is more into the topic of the brokerage and could help us grow faster and get to the next level in the brokerage business because it was obvious that this would be the future of the Finanzen group.

Tim Smallbone

And this was a carve out. You weren't put off by that. A carve out being the business doesn't entirely at the moment stand alone. So we had to build some structures around it. That didn't put you off.

Andrea Bertolini

No, in a carve out there needs to be a lot of discipline. So we need to really be careful on how to best assess it, both around the timing and the cost of it. But if you've done it a few times and if you have a full alignment with the management team, ultimately it's around having the right planning. And that's what we ensured that we did even before signing. So we spent a lot of time with Jens, with Peter, with Max, who is now the CFO, to really plan for this so that by the time we signed, literally 48 hours later, we were really starting…

Tim Smallbone

We knew how we were going to get the business.

Andrea Bertolini

So, yes, it can be, it's definitely a challenge to carve out, but it's something that if well managed can actually deliver quite a lot of value.

Tim Smallbone

I can see from the investor point of view the attraction, the business is growing, and these macro drivers. What was the attraction for you, Jens, in partnering up with us?

Jens Ohr

We were not only looking for money, we were mainly looking for a partner. And for that reason, it was very important to us as the founder and the management team that it would click — in Germany we say “it clicked,” perhaps as well in English — with the new partner. And obviously there was a lot of interest in the company, but Inflexion from day one stood out when it came to speaking the same language. They have the same attitude. They are available 24-7. They know the business. Because a lot of private equity funds that we were talking to also, of course, extremely smart people, but not that deep knowledge in the field that we were looking for. Because as I said, this was the main reason for us and Axel Springer to look for another partner. We wanted to have somebody that brings experience to the party.

Tim Smallbone

So the test is, how's it been? We did the deal in 2025. I see the financial results and they're racing away. How has it been from your point of view, Andrea?

Andrea Bertolini

Fantastic. To be honest, it has been really hard work, but it's great to see strong results. But in general, I think the critical component in those type of situations, as Jens talked about it, is a strong partnership. And ultimately what we are fully aligned on as stakeholders, as board, is on the core strategic principles of the business and the investment. And when you can go back always to the core strategic principles, that's where we're always aligned and ultimately we can always work together towards the same vision and the same common goal.

Tim Smallbone

And we're continuing to build all three parts of the business that we talked about before.

Andrea Bertolini

Yeah, we are building it as one business. So if you ask me what is the vision and what we hope to be saying in a few years from today is that we build a strong financial intelligence platform, which is a little bit clearly what Jens talked about in terms of Bloomberg in a way, but it's really about having everything into one place where you can trade, you have great access to great content, and ultimately you're housing the investors into one platform.

Tim Smallbone

And Jens, the continued growth of users, are we doing anything else to advertise for that? Or is it still, you referred to word of mouth earlier on, what are we doing to attract so many people?

Jens Ohr

I would say that one of the reasons behind it is that the founder team probably still is the biggest user of the product. And we, since 25 years, we designed the product because we have in mind what somebody that uses the product wants it to be. So, and this always was our main focus. And everything else came second. So this might be one of the reasons for the success.

Tim Smallbone

And what's the vision then from here? The business is racing away. We'll turn to you first of all, Andrea. What's the plan? How big can we make it? Are you going to go into other territories? What's the next plan?

Andrea Bertolini

So our vision, as I mentioned earlier, is really about building this financial intelligence platform. Our focus is Germany for the moment. We've been talking with Jens about whether we should expand into Austria and Switzerland. I would say the core principle in our mind is first, let's nail the German market. Once we actually have done that, then we can consider expansion into other DACH jurisdictions.

Tim Smallbone

And Jens, we referred to making ourselves the central platform for the DACH region. So it's Germany first.

Jens Ohr

It's Germany first, but very close, Switzerland and Austria, obviously. In the future, we want to be the home for every German, Swiss and Austrian that invests in the stock market, providing them with the best information and giving them the opportunity to transact their investments and mainly at the best cost that is somehow possible. Because one of the reasons why our brokerage business is so successful is that we managed to offer it for free. That sounds strange, but really people that use our brokerage, they don't have to pay for it. We only live on a very little margin that is the spread when you buy and sell. But this is possible because we have digitalised the whole process together with our banking partner. And for that reason, we can live off a very, very little margin and attract a lot of volume, which makes it a very attractive business for us in the end and also obviously for our users because they won't find anything cheaper.

Tim Smallbone

It can't get cheaper than 0.

Jens Ohr

It can't get cheaper than 0, exactly.

Tim Smallbone

Jens, the founder of the business, you obviously have a great emotional attachment to it. How was it handing over that control when Inflexion became involved?

Jens Ohr

Yeah, as you can imagine, it's a very, very critical point for a founder that invested 25 years into a business. Because for you as a founder, it's not just a business, it's more like a third child. Because you have invested so much time and emotions because as you can also imagine, 25 years, it doesn't always go up. It also sometimes goes down. And so this costs a lot of your own power. And for that reason, it's very hard to hand over. And in this process, for us, it was very important to have a good feeling when it came to the people that we had to hand over the company. And trust is a very, very important part of that. And it was also very good to have Inflexion by our side because they brought very intelligent people to the board, which had very deep knowledge, which had a career in finance and investing, and which had a lot of experience that we needed for this upcoming new stage of transforming the business to the next level.

Tim Smallbone

Andrea, how have we been able to make an impact on the business?

Andrea Bertolini

Part of the transaction and part of the interest in the transaction, clearly Jens, Peter and Dominic decided to take more of a non-executive role. That required, of course, to bring on board a new C-level. And that's what we did together with Peter and Jens, who have been fully involved in every hire that we have done, but it's really about bringing a new CEO to start, chief product officer, chief technology officer, and so on and so forth. And we have done that over the course of the last 12 months. And I would say they have started really well, integrating really well within the culture of the company and when you have such a big level of hires, that's the critical part is ensuring that the company doesn't fall apart and the culture stays strong. And I would say having a very strong collaboration with Jens, Peter and Dominic, that was critical.

Tim Smallbone

Jens, so reflecting on all that, what would you say to a founder who's sitting in your sort of position inside a corporate right now wondering about a carve out? How would you encourage them to do that or would you not?

Jens Ohr

I definitely would. It just sets free so much energy and potential if you can do your own decisions. And yeah, this is — you can be unleashed, exactly.

Tim Smallbone

Jens, it's an amazing story, how you created this business right at the start of the internet bubble as a bunch of students and building it into this powerhouse that touches the lives of millions of people. Jens, Andrea, thank you for joining me.

Jens Ohr

Thank you for having me, Tim.

Andrea Bertolini

Thank you, Tim.

Tim Smallbone

That's it for this episode. Remember to subscribe to Inflexion Point wherever you get your podcasts so you don't miss an episode. And you can listen back to our previous instalments as well. Thanks for listening.

About the episode

Inflexion Point tells the story of Finanzen.net, Germany's leading financial media and investing platform, and how a student hobby became a business built on the belief that good market data should be free. Host Tim Smallbone is joined by co-founder Jens Ohr, who launched the site from a shared flat in Karlsruhe in 1999 because the data he wanted to invest with cost more than he had, and Andrea Bertolini, Inflexion's Head of Financial Services who led the 2025 investment. They reflect on the moments that shaped it: the nights spent waiting until one in the morning for the previous day's traffic figures, the race to get live stock quotes refreshing on a page in the era of dial-up, the speculative domain name that brought Axel Springer to the door, and the users who kept asking why they could not just trade on the site. Along the way, they talk about the eight-year climb to market leadership in Germany, a savings culture where fewer than one in five people own shares, the brokerage that costs its users nothing, and why Jens pushed for a carve out after 25 years inside a corporate.