The UK subsidiary of Warsaw-headquartered broker XTB has launched a Cash Individual Savings Account (ISA) offering a market-leading interest rate for new clients.
The 6% AER interest rate touted by the broker includes a 2% boost for 90 days for new customers, after which the rate reverts to a standard variable rate of 4%.
The offer applies only to UK clients who join XTB between 1 March and 30 April 2026. Existing clients will receive the standard variable rate of 4%.
The new flexible Cash ISA carries no account fees and has no withdrawal limits, though it does have a minimum deposit of £10, above the £1 deposit required by rival Trading 212.
The next Trading 212?
With this offer, XTB appears to be following the playbook used by Trading 212, which has attracted a large number of customers in the UK through offering a high interest rate on its ISAs.
Until now, Trading 212 had offered the market-leading rate for several years for new customers. It then offers them more profitable products, such as CFDs.
Its Cash ISA currently offers 4.4% for one year, including a 0.8% bonus, which is still above XTB’s new offering after 90-days.
Given that these rates are far above the current Bank of England base rate of 3.75%, it seems likely the savings products are loss-leaders.
The success of this strategy has led Trading 212 to become the second biggest CFD broker in the UK.
So far, only a few players have made the cross-selling model work, one of which is XTB – in Poland. It had 854,000 active clients globally, though mostly in Poland, as of the first half of last year.
The importance of this model to the broker was shown in its results for H1 2025. Then, XTB reported that almost 80% of first client trades were in cash equities, ETFs, or “investment plans”.
However, those products generated only 3% of overall revenue for the broker, with 97% coming from CFD trading.
In its latest set of accounts, for the year to the end of 2024, the group’s UK subsidiary XTB Limited reported its overall client numbers in the country grew 59%, while the number of active clients grew 73%. It launched a Stocks & Shares ISA towards the end of this reporting period.
Its strategic report noted the competitive landscape in the UK had been “intensifying”, and it hoped to gain an edge through expanding its investment product offering, though it was also still focused on growing its retail CFD business.
With this new offer, XTB could be positioning itself as the first serious competitor to Trading 212’s business model in the UK. Unlike many entrants, it has the experience and the operation capabilities to back it up.
However, the Financial Conduct Authority has indicated that it may crack down on cross-selling from low risk to high risk products. In which case, if XTB is going down this route, it may ultimately find it to be a dead-end.
