Fineco vs IG — which broker is better?

Pros

• FinecoBank is an Italian bank directly supervised by the ECB as a significant institution, listed on Euronext Milan (FBK), with a CET1 ratio of 23.18% at 30 June 2026
• Conto Fineco Trading: no monthly fee and 0.19% per order with a EUR 2.95 minimum and EUR 19 maximum on Italian, German and US shares and ETFs
• Zero purchase commission on more than 700 selected ETFs from Fineco AM, Xtrackers, Amundi and iShares, in single orders and in Replay plans
• Regime amministrato: Fineco calculates and pays the tax on capital gains for Italian tax residents
• A very broad range in one account: shares on 26 markets, more than 4,000 bonds, BOT auctions, funds, ETFs, certificates, IDEM, EUREX and CME futures and options, and CFDs
• No custody fee, no inactivity fee and no minimum deposit; SEPA and instant SEPA transfers are free, and Fineco charges nothing for securities transfers
• Multicurrency service with 20 foreign currencies on One, Classic and Max, so trades in USD or GBP can settle without conversion
• FinecoX browser platform at no extra cost, with a multibook of up to 6 books at 10 levels, one-click orders and Excel DDE export

Cons

• Aimed at Italian residents: the service and documents are in Italian, UK operations ceased after Brexit, and accounts for non-residents can only be finalised at a Fineco Center in Italy, not online
• On One, Classic and Max an occasional investor pays EUR 19 per Italian order (USD 12.95 in the US) once the two-month entry price ends, unless monthly commissions reach EUR 100 or the holder is under 30
• Currency conversion carries a spread of 0.0033 points on EUR/USD, about 0.3%, and the Conto Fineco Trading has no Multicurrency, so every foreign trade is converted
• Fineco One and the Conto Fineco Trading come with e-mail support only for most clients; phone support needs Classic (EUR 3.95 a month unless EUR 50,000 of assets) or Max
• Replay ETF plans cost EUR 2.95 per instalment for one ETF outside the promotion, which is steep for small monthly amounts
• No real crypto coins, and we found no fractional shares or demo account; by Fineco's own disclosure, 65.44% of retail CFD accounts lose money

Pros

• Around 17,000 tradable markets in a single account — shares, indices, FX, commodities, bonds, ETFs, turbo warrants and crypto CFDs, subject to regional restrictions
• Six top-tier licences — FCA (FRN 195355), BaFin, FINMA, ASIC (AFSL 515106), MAS and JFSA — plus a mid-tier DFSA licence in Dubai; the FINMA licence among those six is a full Swiss banking licence at IG Bank S.A., which puts Swiss cash under esisuisse protection
• Zero commission on UK and international shares, and the GBP 24 quarterly custody fee was scrapped outright in January 2026 rather than merely waived for active traders
• Platform stack that scales with the trader: web and mobile for most, ProRealTime for charting and backtesting, L2 Dealer for full order-book DMA, plus MT4, TradingView and documented REST/streaming APIs
• US-listed options from USD 1.00 per contract to open with nothing to close, and futures at USD 1.00 per contract per side (USD 0.75 on micros) — rare for a European retail broker
• No inactivity fee at all, where most rivals start charging after three to twelve dormant months, and no minimum deposit on any account
• Weekend dealing on the FTSE 100 and Wall Street, plus published client-sentiment data showing how IG's own book is positioned

Cons

• The 0.8% currency conversion mark-up on foreign-currency CFD and spread bet trades is where much of the real cost hides — on a USD position round-trip it comfortably exceeds the spread
• EUR/USD at roughly 0.9 pips is mid-table; raw-spread brokers quote 0.1–0.3 pips plus a small commission and work out cheaper for anyone trading FX frequently
• Non-sterling share purchases now carry IG's standard 0.7% conversion charge — the discounted 0.49% rate IG had committed to only until 4 September 2026 no longer appears in its price list
• Fractional shares are advertised only for the General Investment Account, and IG's help article for the IG Invest app still says whole shares only — check where they apply before drip-feeding small sums into high-priced US stocks
• Pricing genuinely differs by entity and account type — UK GBP share dealing, multi-currency share dealing, IG Europe and IG Bank all run separate schedules, and the published tables are hard to reconcile
• Crypto CFDs are unavailable to UK retail clients under the FCA ban, so the headline market count overstates what a UK resident can actually trade