Consorsbank

Consorsbank prices in three parts, and understanding all three is the difference between this being a cheap broker and an expensive one.

Part one, the base fee and commission, which depend on your status tier:

Part two, the venue cost, which is where the money is actually saved: EUR 0.00 for off-exchange direct trading with a Consorsbank StarPartner, EUR 0.95 on Tradegate Exchange, EUR 1.95 on gettex, LS Exchange, Quotrix, non-StarPartner OTC and Xetra, EUR 2.95 in Frankfurt, München and Stuttgart, and EUR 4.95 plus transaction and courtage costs at other domestic exchanges.

Part three, the pass-throughs — exchange transaction fees, broker courtage, stamp duty on some foreign venues, and a EUR 14.95 surcharge if you place the order by phone.

Two structural details work in your favour. From the second partial execution onwards only the percentage commission applies — the base fee and venue cost disappear, which meaningfully cuts the cost of a large order that fills in pieces. And the Platinum 6-star tier has no minimum commission at all, so a EUR 500 order costs EUR 3.95 plus EUR 0.40 plus EUR 0.95 of venue cost.

Direct foreign exchange access is priced to discourage you. Venue costs per order: London EUR 34, Paris EUR 36, Zurich EUR 41, Amsterdam EUR 42, Vienna and Milan EUR 56, Madrid EUR 59, Tokyo EUR 72, Sydney EUR 101, Singapore EUR 121, Hong Kong EUR 124, Wellington EUR 136. The USA Smart Order route is EUR 21 and Canada Smart Order EUR 69. Buy the German listing on Tradegate for EUR 0.95 instead unless you have a specific reason not to.

The genuinely free parts: depot, Verrechnungskonto, additional sub-accounts, depot transfers, order and limit changes, setting up or cancelling savings plans, and every ETF savings plan at 0% of the rate.

The Consorsbank brand belongs to BNP Paribas S.A. Niederlassung Deutschland, the German branch of a French joint-stock company, headquartered for these purposes at Bahnhofstraße 55 in Nürnberg and registered at the Nürnberg commercial register under HRB 31129. The parent is BNP Paribas S.A., 16 boulevard des Italiens, Paris, R.C.S. Paris 662 042 449 — one of the largest banks in Europe, listed in Paris, operating in 64 countries with roughly 178,000 employees.

Because it is a branch of a French bank rather than a German subsidiary, the supervisory picture is unusually crowded — and unusually strong. Consorsbank's own price list names five competent authorities: the European Central Bank (BNP Paribas is a significant institution under the Single Supervisory Mechanism), BaFin, the Banque de France, the Autorité de contrôle prudentiel et de résolution (ACPR) and the Autorité des marchés financiers (AMF).

Deposit protection. The branch belongs to the voluntary Einlagensicherungsfonds of the Bundesverband deutscher Banken, which currently protects private individuals up to EUR 3 million per bank — the same top-up Commerzbank customers get at comdirect, and far above flatex's statutory-only position. The structural nuance most German customers never notice: because the account is booked with a French institution, the statutory layer beneath that voluntary fund is the French deposit guarantee at EUR 100,000, not the German EdB. In practice the German ombudsman scheme applies and complaints go to the Ombudsmann der privaten Banken in Berlin, so the customer experience is domestic even though the legal entity is not.

Securities are not deposits. Shares, ETFs, bonds and funds held in collective custody are your property and sit outside the bank's insolvency estate. Consorsbank will, for a fee of EUR 30,000 plus VAT to set up and EUR 32,000 plus VAT a year, run a fully segregated individual depot at Clearstream Frankfurt for clients who want their holdings physically separated — an institutional service disclosed in the retail price list, which is unusual and worth noting as evidence of how the standard collective custody works.

Two honest caveats. Negative balance protection is a CFD concept and Consorsbank offers no CFDs; the Margin account for futures and uncovered short options carries a genuine Nachschusspflicht. And no regulation makes any broker guaranteed safe.

Consorsbank gives away software that other German banks charge for, and that is the most attractive part of the proposition after the free savings plans.

ActiveTrader is free. It runs as a portable 64-bit Windows build, on macOS, and as a browser Webstart, and it does the things an active trader needs: real-time market monitoring that keeps running without a permanent login, an integrated charting module for trend and resistance work, one-click ordering directly from price lists and watchlists, and — since May 2025 — fully editable watchlists that can be created, renamed and synchronised across web and mobile.

ActiveTrader Pro adds professional order management including Iceberg orders on Xetra. It is free at Platinum status and scales up to EUR 119 a month for standard-status customers, with market data packages from EUR 19 a month. That is the honest catch: the best tooling is free once you already trade enough to have earned it, and expensive if you do not.

The Trading API is free and encrypted, and lets you connect your own software to a Consorsbank depot. Very few German retail banks offer programmatic access at all, and fewer still without a fee — this is why Consorsbank is a credible home for a retail algorithmic trader.

The Consorsbank Pro App is the mobile trading front end and is better thought out than most bank apps. Next Order lets you define the sell condition at the moment you buy. There is one-click trading, a minimisable order mask that keeps the chart visible, an order book with filters over executed, open and pending orders, push quotes from Tradegate and US venues in the portfolio view, a leveraged-product search for knock-outs and warrants, and per-security news snapshots. Watchlists synchronise with ActiveTrader on the desktop. A separate Consorsbank App handles everyday banking and TAN authorisation.

The web brokerage itself is competent rather than exciting, though the newer status overview — showing your order activity and the tier pricing you currently qualify for — is a genuinely good idea given how much the tier matters.

Consorsbank reaches 34 German and international exchanges and is the only one of the three German incumbents with a serious listed-derivatives offering.

Cash securities: shares, ETFs, funds, bonds, certificates and warrants across Xetra, Tradegate, gettex, LS Exchange, Quotrix, Frankfurt, München, Stuttgart and the other domestic exchanges, plus off-exchange direct trading with StarPartner issuers at zero venue cost. Direct access to Amsterdam, Brussels, Dublin, Helsinki, Copenhagen, Lisbon, London, Luxembourg, Madrid, Milan, Oslo, Paris, Stockholm, Vienna, Zurich, Hong Kong, Singapore, Sydney, Tokyo and Wellington exists but is priced steeply.

Savings plans: more than 1,700 ETFs at 0%, more than 1,000 funds through the fund company at the front-end load, more than 5,000 shares and over 100 certificates at 1.50% of the rate, all from EUR 10 a month with no fixed term.

Derivatives, on a separate Margin account:

• Eurex options — EUR 12.25 base plus 0.50% of the premium in euro, minimum EUR 7.25 commission, plus Eurex fees; exercise or assignment EUR 17.50 per series
• Eurex futures — EUR 6.00 per contract per half turn, falling to EUR 2.00 at 2,000+ contracts a month per product; the MINI DAX future is EUR 1.00
• US futures on CME and CBOT — EUR 2.50 per contract plus USD 1.00 clearing and execution, plus exchange and NFA fees, with 150% of exchange margin required as collateral
• US options through the OCC — EUR 2.50 per contract plus USD 1.00, plus ORF, SEC and exchange fees
• Market data: CME and CBOT level 2 at EUR 5 a month for non-professionals, the OPRA options feed at EUR 5, a US derivatives chart module at EUR 29

Multi-currency: free sub-accounts in USD, GBP, CHF, CAD, AUD, JPY, SEK, NOK, SGD, TRY and ZAR, held on a credit basis at 0% interest, so foreign proceeds can be kept in currency rather than round-tripped through euro twice.

What is missing: no CFDs, no spot forex, and no spot crypto — crypto exposure is limited to ETNs traded as ordinary securities. If you want leveraged retail products or actual coins, this is the wrong broker.

Opening is online but not instant: you complete the application, verify your identity, and then receive access credentials by post. That is a day or two slower than flatex's advertised five-minute onboarding and comdirect's photoTAN activation, and it is a fair criticism in 2026. There is no minimum deposit, and the depot and Verrechnungskonto are free. The Margin account for Eurex and US derivatives is a separate application and requires Finanztermingeschäftsfähigkeit — the German competence declaration for forward transactions.

Funding runs through the Verrechnungskonto by SEPA transfer, with a 16:30 cut-off for same-business-day handling, or by SEPA instant transfer, which Consorsbank executes around the clock and settles within roughly ten seconds. Currency exchanges have a 12:00 cut-off for same-day conversion, settling value date plus two business days. Online SEPA transfers and SEPA instant transfers are free, as are direct debits and standing orders, but not everything on the payments side is. Each currency exchange costs EUR 19.95, whether ordered online or by letter, fax or phone, plus a margin deducted from the euro amount: 0.30% for G10 currencies and 0.60% for non-G10 currencies. A SEPA transfer ordered by letter, fax or phone costs EUR 4.95, a domestic express transfer (Eilüberweisung) EUR 19.95, and a worldwide foreign transfer or incoming credit outside the SEPA format and/or outside the EU and EEA also EUR 19.95, with any third-party charges added to those last two.

The tax question, which for a German investor usually decides the argument. Consorsbank is a German-supervised branch acting as a domestic paying agent, so the account is fully steuereinfach:

• Abgeltungsteuer of 25% plus solidarity surcharge and, where declared, church tax is withheld automatically on realised gains, dividends and the annual Vorabpauschale
• Your Freistellungsauftrag is applied against the Sparer-Pauschbetrag without any action from you
• The statutory loss-offset pots for shares and for other securities are maintained and applied automatically
• An annual tax certificate is issued, so most investors copy a handful of figures into their return or nothing at all

Foreign withholding tax reclaims cost EUR 19.95 including VAT per income payment — cheaper than comdirect's EUR 20 plus VAT, and Consorsbank publishes the number plainly. Buying a US listing on a German venue avoids the direct-routing fee entirely while keeping the tax treatment identical, which is the single most useful piece of practical advice for a Consorsbank customer holding American shares.

Consorsbank's research proposition is functional and, importantly, mostly included rather than metered.

Real-time data comes with the software. ActiveTrader carries real-time monitoring and charting at no charge, and prices marked as realtime on the website are live rather than delayed — other quotes on German and international exchanges are delayed 15 or 20 minutes, as is standard. That contrasts sharply with flatex, which meters real-time queries at EUR 0.01 each beyond a small monthly allowance. Where Consorsbank does charge is at the professional end: US derivatives feeds at EUR 5 a month for non-professionals (EUR 79 for professionals), the OPRA options feed at EUR 5, and a US derivatives chart module at EUR 29 a month.

The daily "Daily News" newsletter is free on subscription and delivers market information before the open. The website carries market data, indices, derivatives search tools, a knock-out and warrant finder and a Derivate-Einsteiger section for people new to leveraged products. Consorsbank publishes its FX Global Code adherence statement and execution principles, which is a small but real transparency signal about how your currency conversions are handled.

Education is the thinner half. There is an FAQ and knowledge base, a Wissen section, and product-level explainers on derivatives and savings plans, but there is no structured academy comparable to flatex's webinar programme or comdirect's seminar series and magazine. Consorsbank writes for people who already know what a knock-out certificate is.

The overall shape: adequate research included for free, professional data available cheaply for non-professionals, and an expectation that you bring your own investment thesis. For an active trader this is a better arrangement than paying for basic quotes; for a beginner it is a colder start than comdirect offers.

This is where Consorsbank loses most of the ground its pricing and platforms win.

The published channels are a Betreuungsteam reachable by telephone on +49 911 369 0, a contact form, a live chat, and secure messaging inside online banking. Orders cannot be placed through the contact form — those go through online banking, or by phone at a EUR 14.95 surcharge. Consorsbank does not publish fixed service hours on its public pages, which is a straightforward transparency failure; the live chat is frequently shown as offline.

The public record is poor. Consorsbank scores 1.6 out of 5 on Trustpilot across 300 reviews, and unusually the profile is not even claimed by the company. The dominant complaint is not price or product — it is access: reviewers report technical problems with online banking that blocked access to accounts and depots for weeks at a time, alongside slow responses, unresolved payment problems and processes described as illogical. For a broker whose main advantages are self-service tooling and derivatives access, being locked out of the platform is close to the worst possible failure mode.

Two things temper the score without excusing it. The review base is small — 300 reviews against comdirect's 4,117 — so individual bad experiences carry more weight. And Trustpilot systematically over-represents people with a grievance, which is why comdirect at 1.4 and Consorsbank at 1.6 are both well below what their product quality would suggest. Measured on the same platform, flatex scores 3.7, more than two points ahead of both.

We have scored support at 2.6 rather than the raw 1.6, reflecting that Consorsbank does staff a real phone line, does offer live chat and secure messaging, and does provide a specialist derivatives desk for Margin account holders. But if responsive service is what you are buying, none of the three German incumbents in this comparison is the answer, and Consorsbank is not the exception.