XTB's chief executive said on Thursday that the Polish broker had probably arrived in the UK late. Omar Arnaout told a third-quarter results conference that competing there with established local firms would take very large sums, and that he would approach the market very cautiously.
In the same answer, he said Indonesia now signs up more accounts each month than any XTB market except Poland. The conference followed a fourfold rise in XTB's third-quarter profit to PLN 213.7 million (about $54.4 million), reported on Wednesday.
Both countries were set up as tests for 2026. In January, Arnaout said this would be a test year for the UK, and in March he told FinanceMagnates.com that Indonesia, then a country with a question mark, had six months to prove itself.
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A Late Start in Britain
The UK business is small next to the platforms it competes with. XTB's British unit more than doubled its revenue to £8.64 million (about $11.6 million) in 2025, while Trading 212 booked £277.6 million in the UK over the same year.
That puts XTB's British revenue at about 3% of its rival's, by FinanceMagnates.com's calculation.
"I think we were simply a bit late to this market," Arnaout said.
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XTB launched a zero-fee stocks and shares ISA in December 2024 and added a cash ISA this year. It ran 11,767 ISA and cash ISA accounts at the end of September, up from 10,717 three months earlier, according to its quarterly reports.
The gain of about 1,050 accounts compares with the 152,000 customers AJ Bell added in the 12 months to September, as British platforms and CFD brokers compete for the same tax-free savers.
Where the Marketing Money Goes
XTB is planning next year's budgets now, and Arnaout said Germany would get a significant increase to compete with Trade Republic and Scalable Capital. He said in June that XTB would spend more on marketing in Germany than in Poland this year.
Germany has become one of XTB's most important markets by revenue, Arnaout said, though the company does not report the country separately.
In France, he said XTB should rank among the three or four most popular investing apps by the end of the year, while revenue there has yet to catch up with sign-ups.
Indonesia Moves Up the Sign-Up Table
Indonesia has moved the opposite way from the UK. XTB bought a 90% stake in the local broker Eagle Capital Futures in January 2024 and started with US stocks and exchange-traded funds, before winning approval to offer contracts for difference (CFDs) this summer.
Arnaout said earlier this year that the country produced XTB's fastest first 1,000 accounts but that deposits were low and the brand was unknown there. On Thursday he described the client intake as very large.
He said that "if my memory serves me correctly, only the Polish market signs up more accounts" each month than Indonesia.
XTB does not report accounts by country. Its Indonesian unit said in August that funded accounts rose 741.51% in the first half compared with the second half of 2025, a figure the company reports itself.
The unit also said in August that it had launched CFDs on gold, silver, palladium, oil and natural gas. Options followed in the third quarter, according to XTB's quarterly report.
Indonesia is also one of the markets in the advertising campaign with Zlatan Ibrahimovic and Tyson Fury that started on October 1. Arnaout said XTB stepped up marketing for the CFDs this week and should know within four to five weeks how much demand they draw.
Other Foreign Brokers Moved In Too
XTB is one of several foreign brokers that bought or licensed their way into Indonesia's regulated futures market since 2024.
Plus500 took over Global Intra Berjangka, a local broker that had stopped taking new clients, as FinanceMagnates.com reported last December, and AIMS opened a Jakarta office in May under a license from the Commodity Futures Trading Regulatory Agency (Bappebti).
The regulated customer base those brokers compete for runs to tens of thousands. Bappebti rated 67 active futures brokers in the second quarter, and the market had 70,676 active retail customers in November 2024, up 53.93% from a year earlier, FM Intelligence data show.
Indonesia drew 5.5 million organic visits to retail FX and CFD broker websites in the third quarter, 0.9% fewer than in the second, FM Intelligence's heat map shows.
Traffic across the Asia-Pacific region dropped 33% over the same period.
