Web analytics company SimilarWeb published a report on finance app marketing on Thursday morning, with the results focusing primarily on app downloads in the US, UK, France, Germany, and Japan.
One of the most striking data points in the report was a significant increase in usage of XM’s app in Japan. According to SimilarWeb, the number of people using the app in Japan on a monthly basis increased by 90% last year compared to 2023, across iOS and Android combined.
This put the company in fourth spot for growth in that category, ahead of big name companies like moomoo, Nomura, and local payments app J-Coin. We have looked at XM in Japan before, where the company has proven to be hugely successful.
Last week, broker iFOREX also published a report as part of a prospective IPO. That showed the firm made close to $20m from reverse solicitation in Japan last year.
Trading 212 and Crypto.com top the UK charts
Back across in Europe, SimilarWeb data also showed that Crypto.com and Trading 212 topped the app growth charts in the UK last year.
The crypto app saw a 422.1% increase in downloads last year, something we looked at towards the end of last year when Trump was elected. Trading 212 was up 257.5%.
The more remarkable thing about Trading 212 was the sheer scale of downloads. SimilarWeb estimated that 3.4m people downloaded the broker’s app in the UK last year. As reported earlier this week on TradeInformer, the company more than doubled its UK entity’s ad spend last year, hitting a total of close to £40m.
4/5 of the top 5 apps in Germany – by download growth – were crypto companies
One other interesting part of the analysis was the equivalent app growth stats but in Germany.
Those showed that four out of the five apps that saw the biggest download growth in Europe’s largest economy were in crypto.
The remaining firm was Trade Republic, a neobroker that offers standard investment products, as well as derivatives, crypto, savings, and payments products.