Scalable Capital Becomes First European Bank to Enable AI Trading Through ChatGPT and Claude

German broker Scalable opens investment platform to major AI chatbots

FRANKFURT, Aug 25 (Reuters) - The German broker Scalable Capital on Tuesday said its account holders could now use major artificial platforms like ChatGPT and Claude to conduct trades and analyze their portfolios. The new service, which Scalable said was a first for a European bank, comes in addition to the app and website as ways to access customer accounts and includes a ⁠number of security measures. Scalable founder and Co-CEO Erik Podzuweit said the service is a "first step" ahead of the mass adoption of AI for its customers that is likely to occur after it provides the capability directly within its own app. "A lot of people might still be hesitant to let ChatGPT look at their portfolio, manage their portfolio. So I think ⁠that it's a first step," he told Reuters. He also said his hypothesis is that usage of AI will on average result in better returns but that it remains to be seen. Scalable, founded ⁠in 2014, has more than 1 million clients with more than €60 billion in assets. It is primarily used in Germany and Austria ⁠but also operates in Italy, Spain, France and the Netherlands. New financial firms like Scalable have further increased competition ⁠in an already crowded German banking landscape, offering retail investors an easier and cheaper path to investments than at many traditional lenders. Reporting by Tom Sims Editing by Linda Pasquini Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles., opens new tab * Suggested Topics: * Artificial Intelligence Tom Sims Thomson Reuters Covers German finance with a focus on big banks, insurance companies, regulation and financial crime, previous experience at the Wall Street Journal and New York Times in Europe and Asia.

Scalable Capital connects €60bn of client assets to outside AI assistants

Scalable Capital says it is the first European bank to connect accounts to outside AI assistants, and admits it does not yet know if it helps returns. Scalable Capital has opened its investment platform to ChatGPT and Claude, allowing its clients to analyse their portfolios and place trades through the two AI assistants rather than through the broker's own app. The Munich company says it is the first European bank to do this, and it arrives as the industry works out what handing trading capability to an AI agent actually looks like in practice. The company is not small. Founded in 2014, Scalable has more than a million clients and over €60bn under management, operating chiefly in Germany and Austria with a presence in Italy, Spain, France, and the Netherlands. The sequencing is the interesting decision. Most institutions build an assistant inside their own product first and expose it to third parties later, if at all, whereas Scalable has gone to the external platforms before integrating the capability into its own app. Erik Podzuweit, the founder and co-chief executive, framed it as an opening move rather than a finished product. "A lot of people might still be hesitant to let ChatGPT look at their portfolio, manage their portfolio," he said, calling the launch "a first step". He was also unusually candid about the evidence base. His hypothesis is that using AI could produce better average returns, but he acknowledged that this remains to be demonstrated, which is a more honest position than most launches in this category adopt. It is worth being precise about what has changed. A chatbot that can read a portfolio is a convenience feature, while a chatbot that can execute a trade is a different category of thing, and the distance between the two is measured in what happens when the model misunderstands an instruction. Prompt injection is the failure mode that has no clean answer yet either. An assistant that reads a portfolio also reads whatever text it is pointed at, and a model that can place orders is a considerably more attractive target than one that can only summarise. Scalable says security measures protect customer accounts, without detailing them publicly. The obvious questions are how a trade instruction is confirmed, what limits apply, and who is liable when an assistant acts on an ambiguous request, and none has a published answer yet. European banks have been moving towards conversational interfaces for a while, with bunq shipping its own generative AI assistant and Citi's Jane Fraser arguing that two AI races will decide banking's future. Almost all of that work has kept the model inside the institution's perimeter. Going outside it changes the regulatory picture. A German broker operates under MiFID II suitability and appropriateness rules, and it is not obvious how those obligations apply when the interface advising a retail client belongs to OpenAI or Anthropic rather than to the firm holding the assets. Scalable presumably takes the view that the assistant is executing instructions rather than giving advice, which is a defensible line and also a fine one. Where a model summarises a portfolio and a user acts on the summary, the boundary between information and recommendation is doing a lot of quiet work. There is a distribution argument underneath all of it. Brokers spent the last decade fighting to own the app on a customer's home screen, and if the entry point moves to a general-purpose assistant, that investment stops compounding. The commercial logic is easier to follow. If people increasingly start financial tasks inside a chatbot rather than an app, the broker connected to that chatbot captures the flow, and the one waiting to build its own assistant does not. Rivals will not wait long to find out. Trade Republic, Revolut, and the incumbent banks all have the same distribution problem and none of them has an obvious reason to concede the channel to a Munich competitor. That is the bet, and Podzuweit has essentially said so. Whether it produces better returns for anyone is a question his own framing leaves open, and one that will take considerably longer than a launch cycle to answer.

A major German bank just let Claude and ChatGPT trade for customers. In one test, Claude beat human traders 76% of the time -- but there's a catch | Fortune

Watch out, investors -- the AI boom is making its way to you. Scalable Capital is opening its investment platform to AI assistants including ChatGPT, Claude and Grok -- giving European investors the ability to analyze portfolios, set up savings plans and place trades through prompts. The Munich-based bank told Reuters that it is the first bank in Europe to open its platform to major AI assistants. Its new "Agentic Investing" service allows customers to connect their Scalable accounts to supported AI agents through the Model Context Protocol, or MCP. The move puts AI directly into the trading workflow. Scalable Capital Chief Product Officer Alexander Siepp told Fortune the company sees the integration as a way for investors to begin their financial "client journey" inside an AI assistant and complete it through Scalable's regulated banking infrastructure. "It certainly creates a level-playing field," he said. "Access to information and to compute and to intelligence is now available -- really -- literally in your pocket, 24/7." But Siepp noted it may take time to become fully integrated with Scalable's client base. "Maybe not for all client segments at the same speed," Siepp said. "But we clearly see potential that there is a large group of clients that would be interested in doing it." Scalable Capital, founded in 2014, has grown into one of Europe's largest digital investment platforms. The company also told Reuters it has more than €60 billion in client assets and more than 1 million customers, primarily in Germany and Austria, with operations also expanding across countries including Italy, Spain, France and the Netherlands. The company's roots are in making investing more accessible through digital brokerage and wealth-management services. Scalable has also expanded its trading offering to include derivatives, and said in July that it would offer more than 1.8 million derivatives from seven major issuers. Siepp said that the program can fundamentally change how investors interact with their brokerage accounts. A customer could, for example, ask an AI assistant to identify stocks that have fallen for consecutive months and monitor them. The assistant could then prepare an order based on the user's instructions. "It's just a few prompts," he said. Is AI a reliable investor? But the effectiveness of AI when given the reins for making trades remains to be seen. A June research report from Elm Wealth offers a mixed answer. Researchers Jerry Bell, Victor Haghani and James White tested Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini and Grok in a "Crystal Ball Challenge," giving the models historical Wall Street Journal front pages with market-moving information but withholding the actual market outcomes. The experiment found that Claude and ChatGPT were relatively strong at predicting market direction. Across roughly 200 sessions, Claude beat human players in 76% of sessions, while ChatGPT beat them in 63%. Gemini did so in 43% of sessions and Grok in 51%. But the models had a major weakness, the study found. Elm found the AI systems generally took too much risk relative to the trade context. The researchers distinguished between two investment decisions -- what to invest in and how much to invest. AI performed relatively well on the first factor but poorly on the second. The study found the models understood concepts such as the Kelly criterion and Merton share in theory but struggled to apply appropriate risk management when making actual simulated trading decisions. "The US stock market has moved by over 5% on 23 days and by over 9% on seven days since the year 2000," the study read. "Given average position sizing in stocks of 7x to 12x across the AIs, we think they were taking too much risk of a catastrophic loss of capital, given none of them had (or could reasonably expect to have) super high hit ratios." OpenAI, Anthropic, Google and xAI did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Fortune about using AI assistants for financial trading. But Scalable is not handing over unrestricted control of customer accounts to AI. The company said users must approve trades and savings plans before they are executed, and its current system does not allow AI assistants to make payments or withdraw money from Scalable accounts. Siepp said the AI connection follows the same core security protocols as Scalable's existing applications, including strong customer authentication. "Whether you end up finding the holy grail together with your AI assistant on high returns and low risks or not, I think that remains to be seen," he said. He also stressed that the arrangement is not a formal partnership between the German bank and OpenAI or Anthropic. Instead, Scalable is using MCP -- an open technology for connecting AI systems to external tools and services. "We are using available resources, technologies, the MCP -- the Model Context Protocol," Siepp said. "This is really a standalone offering that comes only from Scalable users, ready-made technology integrations offered by those AI assistants."

AI trading platforms: German broker Scalable opens investment platform to major AI chatbots

The new service, which Scalable said was a first ⁠for ⁠a European bank, comes in addition to the app and website as ways to access customer accounts and includes a number of security measures. The German broker Scalable Capital on Tuesday said its account holders could now use major artificial platforms like ChatGPT and Claude to conduct trades and analyze their portfolios. The new service, which Scalable said was a first ⁠for ⁠a European bank, comes in addition to the app and website as ways to access customer accounts and includes a number of security measures. Scalable founder and Co-CEO Erik Podzuweit said the service is a "first step" ahead of the mass adoption of AI ⁠for its customers that is likely to occur after it provides the capability directly within its ⁠own app. "A lot of people might still be hesitant to let ChatGPT look at their portfolio, manage their portfolio. So I think that it's a first step," he told Reuters. He also said his hypothesis is that usage of AI will on average result in better returns but that it remains to be seen. Scalable, founded in 2014, has more than 1 million clients with more than €60 ⁠billion in assets. It is primarily used in Germany and Austria but also operates in Italy, Spain, France and the Netherlands. New financial firms like Scalable have further increased competition in an already crowded German banking landscape, offering retail investors an easier and cheaper path to investments than at many traditional lenders.