Lydia adds stock and crypto trading to its payments app – TechCrunch

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French startup Lydia is entering a whole new category by adding trading to its super financial app later this year. The company is partnering with Bitpanda for this feature. Lydia users will be able to buy, hold and sell US and European stocks, precious metals, cryptocurrencies and ETFs.

Lydia started out as a peer-to-peer payment app that lets you send and receive money instantly from a mobile app. It has added more features over time such as debit cards, IBANs, money pools, cash back rewards, donations, personal loans, and more.

Like Venmo or Cash App in the US, the company attracts new users with peer-to-peer payments, then exposes them to more features and financial products that they can access directly from the app. And it works well since Lydia now has 5.5 million users.

A few months ago, Lydia launched Savings Accounts powered by Cashbee. It’s a good old, fixed rate savings account that offers 0.6% interest. It’s not much, but it’s better than leaving it in your main Lydia account.

And yet the feature worked well. On average, users who open a savings account on Lydia put thousands of dollars into this account. The next logical step is trading, which introduces more risk but better potential returns.

If you want to buy assets right away, it’s too complicated, Cyril Chiche, co-founder and CEO of Lydia told me. Even simple access to these markets is complicated. It takes several days for you to register and verify your account. After that you have to send money. And then there are minimum amounts.

With the Lydias trading function, creating a trading account only takes a few clicks in the app. You don’t need to resend your passport photo, you don’t need to create a new account with a separate password.

After that, you can buy your first share or fraction of a share for as little as 1. Lydia and Bitpanda offer fractional shares in French, European and American companies. You can buy precious metals, such as gold, platinum, silver, and palladium. You can invest in Bitcoin, Ethereum, and dozens of other crypto assets. It should be noted that Bitpanda started out as a crypto trading company. Finally, you can also access trackers (ETFs).

Essentially, if there is an asset accessible through a Bitpanda account, you can also access it through your Lydia account. The fees are the same on Lydia and Bitpanda. There are no fees associated with fractional shares, but there are fees for cryptocurrencies and precious metals.

We met a lot of potential partners and realized that we had a lot in common. [with Bitpanda], says Chiché. It’s a win-win partnership as Bitpanda can also use Lydia as a way to promote its white label service and integrate trading into other apps. The two companies have agreed to share the revenue from Lydia users taking advantage of the trading function.

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