ING Review 2026

Verdict: ING review

ING is Germany's largest direct bank, and its brokerage offer lives chiefly off that connection: customers who already run their current and savings accounts there get a securities depot with no base fee and manage everything inside one widely praised banking app. Trading routes through Xetra, Frankfurt, domestic OTC venues plus NYSE and NASDAQ, and savings plans start from as little as one euro per instalment. The backing of an established major bank with millions of customers, BaFin oversight and German deposit protection completes a genuinely solid foundation.

The trading costs, however, strip much of the appeal away. At 4.90 euros plus 0.25 percent of order volume with a 9.90 euro minimum, ING ranks among the most expensive providers in this comparison, and the savings plan fee of 1.75 percent per execution is the highest in the entire field: on a 200 euro monthly instalment, 42 euros per year go to the bank for a service neo-brokers perform for free. The settlement account pays no interest, options, futures and fractional shares are unavailable, and there is no demo account either.

The fairest comparison is with comdirect, the other big direct-bank depot: it offers more venues, derivatives and stronger analysis tools at similarly high order costs, while ING counters with a leaner product world and arguably the more popular everyday banking app. Against Trade Republic, Scalable Capital or Smartbroker+, ING loses on price in every single discipline; the one-euro savings plan entry threshold does not change that as long as every execution is charged a percentage.

For German residents, the tax side is flawless: automatic capital gains tax withholding, exemption orders, loss pots and clean annual reporting, with nothing left for the customer to handle — though the German-only platform makes the offer largely irrelevant outside the country. The verdict: ING is a comfortable depot for loyal banking customers who place a handful of orders per year and value the account-depot combination above cost. For regular savings plan investors the fee structure is objectively unattractive, and the 3.5-star rating captures exactly that tension between solid bank and expensive broker.