Brokers beyond your home system: a brokerage outside the EU framework

With bank accounts the case is clear: bail-in regimes, account registers and freezing orders make distance from your home system a factual argument. With a securities account, the picture is finer, and we explain it honestly rather than with fear marketing. Securities in a brokerage are segregated client assets: they belong to you, not the broker, and do not fall into the insolvency estate if the broker fails. The bail-in argument therefore touches brokerages only at the margin, namely at the cash account where your money sits between two trades, because that is an ordinary bank deposit with all the risks of one.

The real reasons for a brokerage beyond your home system are different. First, access protection: a brokerage at a domestic or EU broker is findable through the registers and blockable by an attachment order exactly like a current account, segregated assets or not. Second, product freedom: EU PRIIPs rules effectively lock retail investors out of US ETFs and many international products; the UK inherited the same regime at Brexit, and while the FCA's replacement framework is being phased in, access to US funds remains restricted in practice. Third, diversification of legal spaces: whoever spreads bank, broker and custodian across several jurisdictions does not hang on the rulebook and crisis politics of a single bloc.

You save no tax by doing this. Without a domestic broker, nobody withholds your capital-gains tax automatically; you declare income yourself, in Self Assessment's capital-gains and foreign pages or the Nordic annual returns. That is extra work, neither an advantage nor a disadvantage, just handwork. Two routes lead to the goal: international online brokers (list below) and brokerage accounts at banks in our destinations, for instance in Switzerland, Liechtenstein, Singapore or Georgia. If the brokerage matters to you, tell us before you order.