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ESMA's latest annual report puts Europe's reported cross-border retail client base at 15.5 million in 2025, up from 10.5 million a year earlier. CFD clients moved in the opposite direction, falling to 1.3 million as the product's share of reported holdings dropped to 6.7% from 11% in the previous report.
Shares and funds gained clients
Shares remained the largest category, with 7.3 million cross-border clients in 2025, compared with 4.6 million in 2024. Their portion of reported holdings rose from about 36% to 38.9%. UCITS funds increased from 3.9 million to six million clients, taking their share to 32%, against 30% in 2024.
Crypto entered the comparison
MiCA-regulated crypto-assets reached nearly 1.6 million clients and an 8.4% share, putting them ahead of CFDs in ESMA's data. ESMA includes crypto products made available through credit institutions or traditional investment businesses in this count. Providers dedicated to crypto-asset services are outside the dataset, so the figure does not represent the whole European crypto market.
Scope limits the reported picture
Execution services featured in the records of 87% of active clients. Portfolio management reached 11%, while investment advice was reported for 0.8%. The figures relate to services delivered across EU and EEA borders under the freedom-to-provide-services regime, rather than firms' whole retail businesses.
Domestic customers and activity through local branches fall outside the count. Reporting applied only where a firm served more than 50 retail clients in a host country.
The totals can also include the same person through multiple firms or products. As Finance Magnates reported, ESMA rounds product figures, making the implied fall of about 100,000 CFD clients an estimate. The data cannot establish whether individual customers moved from CFDs to another product.
What an operations team should check
Teams producing cross-border client reports should check that product classifications and country-level reporting rules match the scope ESMA describes. In particular, confirm how domestic activity, local-branch business and the more-than-50-client threshold are handled in reporting extracts. The report does not specify the systems firms use, so operators should verify their own data lineage. They should also check that the population used for comparisons follows the same cross-border criteria and reporting threshold.
Product counts may overlap at the customer level, and the crypto total omits standalone providers. Before using these figures to assess client migration or reconcile product trends, check whether internal dashboards deduplicate people across firms and categories, and whether their crypto coverage matches ESMA's.
The report does not say that customers switched products. Operators should ask whether their reporting can distinguish a change in holdings from a change in the clients counted, and whether any apparent movement between products is supported by customer-level data.
