What Is Social Investing? A Guide for Banks and Brokerages

In short: Social investing adds community features (portfolio sharing, peer benchmarking, community feeds, and messaging and discussion) to a bank or brokerage app, converting passive account holders into habitual investors. Banks deploying StockRepublic's platform report 75% inactive-to-active conversion, 40% DAU/MAU (double the industry average), and 81% higher revenue per customer.

Most bank app sessions are balance checks, transfers, bill payments, and the occasional fund purchase. That pattern, of mid to high frequency and low depth, is the passive user problem in its simplest form, and it costs retail banks revenue they cannot recover through acquisition spend.

This guide is written for product and digital leaders at retail banks and brokerages. It defines social investing in that context, shows what live deployments at Avanza, interactive investor, and comdirect demonstrate, and walks through how to evaluate the integration paths and vendors.

What is social investing?

Social investing is the addition of community features to a bank or brokerage app: portfolio sharing, peer benchmarking, community feeds, and messaging and discussion between investors. Instead of each customer investing alone against a price chart, account holders can see what verified peers actually hold, compare performance, and discuss decisions, all inside the institution's own regulated environment. No amounts are shown, only percentages and execution prices for buys and sells, so the community stays about strategy, not the size of someone's wallet.

The commercial logic is engagement. A community gives account holders a reason to open the app that isn't administrative, and that shift turns a utility into a destination. The result shows up in trading activity, retention, and revenue per customer; the results section below covers the figures.

Two adjacent terms cause more procurement confusion than any other part of the category, so it is worth fixing the vocabulary early:

• Social trading usually refers to B2C platforms built for direct consumer use, often with copy-trading at the core; social investing in the bank context is B2B infrastructure that connects to the institution's existing account and portfolio data. The intent differs too: social investing is about making your own informed decisions, not blindly following someone else's trade.
• Socially responsible investing (SRI) is an investment philosophy about selecting assets on ESG criteria: environmental impact, labor and community practices, and governance standards like board accountability. Social investing is an engagement architecture. The terms share vocabulary and nothing else.

What features does a social investing platform include?

The feature set typically combines some or all of the following:

• Portfolio sharing: users opt in to make holdings or aggregate performance visible to the community. Others can follow successful investors, observe allocation decisions in real time, and use those portfolios as reference points.
• Peer benchmarking: performance compared against peers, curated top investors, or indices, so personal context replaces the abstract experience of watching a number move.
• Community feed: a stream of updates on the investors and instruments a user follows (individual stocks, ETFs, funds), alongside commentary and insights from community members and professional editors. Filtered by portfolio composition and stated interests, the feed also surfaces investment ideas and insights the user would not have found alone: discoverability, not just tracking.
• Messaging and discussion: private messages and group chats let investors discuss specific holdings and strategies directly with each other, rather than only broadcasting to a public feed.

What separates a platform from a feature list is the layer underneath: verified data connections to real brokerage accounts, moderation tooling, and compliance controls designed for regulated institutions.

That verification layer runs through the bank's own systems, not StockRepublic's: when an account holder opts in, the bank's existing KYC and AML processes (the same checks that already identified and vetted them as a customer) issue an anonymous ID, which StockRepublic uses to pull holdings and transaction data and build the social profile. Inside the community the user appears under an alias: anonymous to StockRepublic and to other members, though never to their own bank. The result, as the social trading and compliance handbook sets out, is that every portfolio shown in the community is verified against real brokerage activity without any personally identifiable information ever leaving the bank.

What results do social investing deployments show?

The figures below are drawn from live StockRepublic deployments across regulated institutions.

Source: StockRepublic platform data, aggregated across bank and brokerage deployments, 2019–2026. Figures reflect observed engagement behaviour at regulated financial institutions.

The DAU/MAU figure is the one to sit with. At 40%, a bank's community platform is returning four users in ten every single day. The financial app industry average sits at approximately 20% (per Adjust's annual mobile app benchmarks), while the stickiest consumer apps, Facebook among them, are commonly benchmarked well above 50% (per CleverTap's stickiness benchmarks). Moving an investment app from 20% to 40% DAU/MAU is not optimising a metric; it changes the unit economics of the digital channel.

That frequency translates directly into trading events and cross-sell opportunities. A 42% increase in weekly transactions, compounded across a large account-holder base, is a revenue shift most product teams will have no trouble building a business case around. There is an acquisition effect too: user-generated community content has driven a 25% increase in organic new customer growth at client platforms by improving search visibility (StockRepublic client platform data).

The +4pp returns figure deserves its caveat. It comes from analysis of a specific client's user base after community features were activated: directional evidence of the relationship between community participation and investment outcomes, not a guaranteed return.

Two client perspectives:

For a modelled view of what these metrics would mean against your specific user numbers, use the revenue impact calculator.

Which banks have deployed social investing?

Here's a selection of three regulated institutions that run live social investing communities powered by StockRepublic: separate, client-specific deployments built on the same underlying technology and operational playbook, with no shared users or overlap between them.

• Avanza (Sweden) is Sweden's largest retail brokerage by number of customers, with over 2 million active savers. Social investing went live on Placera Forum, Avanza's own standalone online investment community. StockRepublic built and operates the social investing infrastructure with live, verified brokerage data, so community members can see the real holdings and transactions behind the commentary rather than self-reported claims. The Avanza case study covers the deployment model and outcomes in detail.
• interactive investor (UK) is the UK's second-largest investment platform by assets under administration. Following the StockRepublic deployment, interactive investor was featured by Forbes Advisor UK among the top platforms in the category. The recognition reflects the platform's ability to combine regulated investment content with community engagement, an outcome that owes as much to the compliance architecture as to the feature set. The ii Community case study covers the deployment in detail.
• comdirect (Germany, part of Commerzbank) is one of Germany's largest online brokers, operating under BaFin regulation. comdirect specifically cited the platform's ability to serve Generation Z investors who expect social and comparative features as standard. The deployment demonstrates that compliance architecture designed for Germany's regulatory environment is a meaningful reference for any DACH-region institution evaluating the category. The comdirect case study covers the deployment in detail.

See all three in the client case studies.

What do banks get wrong when evaluating social investing?

Seven years of deployments across regulated institutions has surfaced five consistent misreads that delay or derail social investing projects.

1. Treating it as a feature rather than a network.

A community feed with two hundred users behaves differently from one with twenty thousand. Social investing value is not additive; it compounds as the network grows. Banks that plan a feature rollout and evaluate success at month three are measuring the wrong thing at the wrong time. The correct frame is closer to a marketplace than a product feature: the early phase is investment, and the return arrives later.

2. Underestimating the compliance layer.

Deploying a social feed inside a licensed financial institution is not a software problem. User-generated content in an investment context may constitute a regulated financial promotion in several jurisdictions, and reviewing it calls for a compliance-aware policy, not just a standard customer-support queue. None of this is impossible, but banks that budget for the social features without budgeting for this compliance layer will revisit the project.

The regulatory surface is broad and varies by jurisdiction: MiFID II in Europe, FCA financial promotion rules and Consumer Duty in the UK, BaFin in Germany, and FINRA Rule 2210 alongside the SEC's Marketing Rule in the US.

For all that surface area, though, the workload behind the compliance layer is smaller than most banks assume. In one live client community, more than 21,500 social profiles have produced over 55,000 posts, and fewer than 0.1% of those posts were ever flagged and removed, amounting to 29 removals and 3 user suspensions following user reports, per the compliance handbook. Those are one client's figures rather than a category average, but they show the compliance layer running as a routine process, not a standing department.

3. Conflating social trading with social investing.

The distinction was drawn in the definition above, but it resurfaces at procurement, where it gets expensive. Evaluating social investing vendors through the lens of consumer social trading platforms like eToro, ZuluTrade, and Robinhood Social leads to the wrong shortlist and, more practically, to the wrong contract. A B2C platform that attempts to embed inside a regulated bank is solving a problem it was not designed to solve, with compliance machinery that was not built for that context.

4. Confusing social investing with socially responsible investing (SRI).

The two terms are separated in the definition above, but the confusion carries an operational cost: a compliance team that hears "social investing" may reflexively flag ESG concerns. Resolving the vocabulary in writing before internal vendor review begins saves real time and prevents misaligned procurement.

5. Adopting a generic community platform instead of a purpose-built one.

General-purpose community and forum software can host discussion, but it has no concept of a portfolio, an instrument, or a verified trade. It cannot surface relevant financial insights or peer comparisons because it is built for engagement in the abstract, not for helping an account holder understand their position or find a useful idea. The regulatory gap is wider still: financial promotion handling, market abuse monitoring, and data separation are absent from generic tooling and must be bolted on after the fact. That layer is hard to retrofit. A platform built for regulated investment communities carries both the finance-specific product layer and the compliance controls in its core architecture.

White label or API: how do banks integrate social investing?

Banks integrate through one of two paths.

A white-label deployment uses StockRepublic's pre-built community application, skinned to the bank's brand and available across iOS, Android, and web. It can run as a module embedded inside the existing app, or as a fully separate, standalone app. Because the interface, moderation tooling, and compliance controls already exist, this path typically asks the least of the bank's own engineering team.

An API integration gives the bank's own engineering team full control over how the features surface inside their existing app, and the bank takes on more of the build itself.

The right path depends on two variables: how much in-house engineering capacity the bank wants to spend on a custom build, and how much control it wants over the interface itself. White label suits banks that want a proven, ready-made community with less internal dev work. API integration suits banks with the engineering capacity and a specific UX vision they want full control over. Either way, StockRepublic's own products go live in weeks, not months.

Should a bank build social investing in-house?

The case for building in-house is clear on paper: full control over UX, data, and roadmap, no dependency on a third-party platform, and direct ownership of the intellectual property.

The case against is not necessarily cost. It is the combination of two underestimated factors.

Time to first user. Banks that have attempted in-house social investing typically spend 18–24 months before a working product reaches users. The software is not the bottleneck; architecture decisions, compliance review cycles, and security sign-off are. By the time the first version ships, the vendor platform they passed on has iterated through multiple feature generations.

Operational knowledge. Running an investment community requires decisions that software cannot make: what constitutes financial advice, how to handle a coordinated pump attempt, how to moderate a politically sensitive post about a publicly listed company. These decisions need clear policy and a defined escalation path. Banks that build the feature without the operating model find out what they've missed at the worst possible moment: after launch, with active users, under regulatory scrutiny.

The buy vs build handbook structures this decision for internal stakeholders, and the story of how StockRepublic pioneered B2B social trading explains why the infrastructure came before the interface.

How should banks evaluate a social investing vendor?

Four questions carry most of the signal in a vendor evaluation:

• Is the platform built for regulated financial institutions?

The compliance architecture described above should be core to the product, not a roadmap item.

• How does the platform keep community members anonymous while staying verifiable to the bank?

See the verification architecture described in the features section above: a vendor that can't explain that mechanism clearly hasn't thought it through.

• Has the vendor actually operated live investment communities at regulated institutions, or only shipped software?

Building a social feature and running a regulated community for years are different capabilities.

• What named institutions are live, and what outcomes do they report?

Avanza, interactive investor, and comdirect are among StockRepublic's live deployments (see above).

Frequently asked questions

What is social investing in the context of a bank app?

In bank product strategy, social investing refers to adding community portfolio-sharing, peer benchmarking, and collaborative investment features to a bank or brokerage app. It is distinct from socially responsible investing (SRI), which concerns ethical asset selection.

How is social investing different from eToro or other social trading platforms?

eToro and similar platforms are B2C products designed for standalone use by retail investors. A bank's social investing deployment connects to the institution's existing account and portfolio data and serves a pre-existing account-holder base.

How long does a social investing deployment take?

StockRepublic's own products go live in weeks, not months, through either a white-label or API integration. The bank's own timeline varies by path: white label typically requires the least engineering effort since the interface is pre-built, while an API integration takes longer to the extent the bank takes on more of the build itself. The 18–24-month timeline applies to banks that attempt to build these capabilities from scratch internally.

What compliance requirements does social investing create for a regulated bank?

Three primary areas: financial promotion rules (user-generated content may be a regulated financial promotion depending on content and jurisdiction), a clear escalation policy for content that crosses from opinion into advice, and data separation between community users. Platforms built specifically for regulated institutions handle these within their core architecture. General-purpose social tools do not.

Does social investing expose a bank to investment-advice liability?

The platform is architected to keep peer-generated content on the peer-guidance side of the line between commentary and regulated financial advice. Community members share ideas and commentary as peers, not as advisers, since they are not employed by the bank or by StockRepublic (an arm's-length separation that is a deliberate design choice). StockRepublic also pays no contributors on its platforms, so there are no incentivized or sponsored posters. How the distinction applies in a specific jurisdiction is a question for the bank's own legal and compliance review.

What results can a bank expect from social investing?

Live StockRepublic deployments at regulated institutions (2019–2026) show 75% of previously inactive users becoming active investors, a 42% increase in weekly transactions among engaged users, 81% higher revenue per customer, and a 40% DAU/MAU ratio, roughly double the financial app industry average of ~20%. Outcomes depend on user base and deployment scope; a modelled estimate is available via the revenue calculator.

In summary

Social investing is not an emerging category. It is deployed and generating measurable revenue at regulated banks. The evaluation question for most product teams is not whether to do it, but which integration path fits their current roadmap and how quickly they want to be live.

See how social investing features would perform for your specific user base.