Wander Rutgers, Lightyear UK CEO On Winning Best Investing App 2026

AI Generated Interview Transcript

Holly Mead (00:03)
Welcome to Good Money Guide. My name is Holly Mead and today we are talking to Wanda Rutgers. He’s UK CEO from Lightyear, which has just been voted best investing app in our 2026 investing awards. Congratulations.

Wander Rutgers (00:16)
Thank you so much. We’re delighted.

Holly Mead (00:18)
Good,

we’re pleased to have you here. So tell us a bit about Light Year because you launched in the UK last year, but what has the journey been to this point?

Wander Rutgers (00:26)
Yes, so Lightyear, the company itself is about three years old. We got regulated and launched our ICES here in the UK in January last year. And since then, I’ve gone from strength to strength. We’ve expanded the product, added a lot of instruments for customers, seen a lot of growth post in our retail and business use cases. We launched investment plans. We launched Fractional for EU shares and ETF, which was the most requested feature that was still in the pipeline.

We got a lot of support for our mission. So last summer we raised a new round of funding and announced that we had a billion in AUM across the group and the growth is accelerating month by month. So very exciting times and we feel very supported in our mission to create successful investors also in Britain.

Holly Mead (01:12)
And what’s it like to get an award after your first year here? You must be doing something right.

Wander Rutgers (01:17)
feel

really delighted. I think it’s great to hear from customers that they like us. I think it’s great to get rewards, particularly those that are really informed by what customers are telling about us or sharing about us. And of course, it’s very good to get feedback constructively and not constructively, but getting a reward is a wonderful recognition. And also we realized that the product is not done. Our customers are telling us every day.

what they love about it, but also what can be improved. And we’re working very hard. Yeah, for sure.

Holly Mead (01:48)
There’s no pleasing some people.

What does Lightyear do differently, do you think, to other companies?

Wander Rutgers (01:55)
So Lightyear was founded by the founders that were early in years of Wise. And I think what Wise did very well, kind of a decade ago, was realize that money transfer was too expensive. It needed to be a lot cheaper, but that also needed to be a lot more transparent. And so the founders there, they went back, they built fundamental financial infrastructure that then made it much cheaper for people to move money. And at Lightyear, we’ve kind of taken the same approach to investing.

We believe that the distance between the capital market and the customer should be small. It should be like a thin layer in between which Lightyear represents, but we need to be bringing very low costs and a very seamless experience to our customers. And so we’re doing that from the ground up. We’re integrated with some of the biggest blocks of financial infrastructure in Europe, in the UK, directly so that we can pass on a very low cost to customers.

And we spend a lot of energy trying to also close the distance when it comes to understanding, when it comes to information for our customers. We try and make it easy to do the right thing.

Holly Mead (03:02)
Do you have to do anything different for a UK customer? Like expansion from Europe over here? It’s a different market. mean, we’re really blessed with the ISO. There’s not really an equivalent to that elsewhere, but the customer’s different to serve as well.

Wander Rutgers (03:17)
For sure. UK customers, in every market, there’s a lot of nuance around investing because investing is something that is very personal. It kind of brings together your hopes and dreams and fears. And in the UK, of course, there are a lot of nuances that are quite different from other markets in Europe. In the UK, we care a lot about buying that house. We have this deep culture of saving and saving for our house. And that home equity is kind of the way towards investing.

And think we need to do a lot of work to kind of people that investing is a good alternative to that. It has some risk, but also has a lot of benefit. And of course, there’s a lot of products that British people need that are not there on the continent. UK shares, which we offer, UK versions of ETFs, and then of course, the tax wrappers. So the Stocks and Shares ISA is the most amazing vehicle. No country or very few countries have.

such a great way to invest, that means that you’re not going to pay taxes on the gains or you’re not going to pay taxes on the dividends. And so we have to build those features, but also, of course, the UK has very strict rules around how you protect money and how you protect assets. So we built a whole separate system and a whole separate brokerage to make sure that we do that in a way that is regulated by the FCA, is protected by all the protection schemes so that UK customers can rest assured that this is a

It’s a safe place to put your money.

Holly Mead (04:48)
And you mentioned that, you know, the stocks and shares is a amazing product, but UK savers aren’t very much savers, not investors. I think that’s going to be a big theme for this year ahead. seems something the government’s on a drive to do to get more people investing. What do you think your role in that is as a company? ⁓

Wander Rutgers (05:10)
We think it’s really important that as an investment company, we make it very easy to do the right thing. And so for ourselves, that expresses itself in making the right things to work cost-effective things and creating features for customers to invest in a way that creates a positive financial result for them. I think the biggest risk we have now that a lot of people are looking at investing is that we pull people away from saving to investing and they don’t become successful. They don’t build wealth.

And so for us, that means, for example, buying broad trackers of the market, ETFs, that invest in a large set of instruments rather than just in specific stocks. We don’t charge any fees on our side. And so doing the right thing, which for a lot of people is investing in trackers through light years is made a lot easier because there are no fees from us. And we try and build features that help people invest recurringly, for example. For most…

Most of us, if we go from a saving habit to an investing habit, dollar cost averaging month by month into a broad based ETF is a pretty reasonable strategy. And so we built investment plans, which means you can put your investments on autopilot. You can set a recurring deposit to go into Lightyear and then every month it will just be invested in the basket of instruments that you choose or in a basket of ETFs that you choose. And so for us, we think it’s the role of the brokers is to make sure that we help people.

the right thing and of course to educate them on the long-term benefits of investing over saving. We did a bit of research on saving for your kids’ university and if you do that inside an ISA and you would have taken the last 10 years of FTSE 100 returns, you would need to have put in half the amount of money than if you had taken the cash ISA rate over the last decade.

And so trying to make it as tangible as possible to help users understand that yes, the stock market has some risk and markets go up and down. And particularly in the short run, is volatility, but if you invest in the stock market, your money works a lot harder for you. ⁓ I think that’s really important.

Holly Mead (07:22)
Do you think there’s a lot of talk about sort of the risk warnings that are in place at the moment and whether we need to calm those down a bit because they are putting people off from investing, I think. Do you think that might be a nudge that helps people more see some traction on that?

Wander Rutgers (07:36)
I think it’s really important that people understand the risks that come with investing and that they also understand that investing doesn’t have like the same risk, whatever you invest in, right? There are different products, there are investments, there are stocks, there are ETFs, there are more exotic products that have very different types of risks. So I think this idea that capital at risk or a phrase like that appropriately helps users understand what their risk is.

think is not super helpful. And I think we need to go a level deeper to one, educate people on what the right behavior is, but also ⁓ be more creative in the ways in which we explain risk to them. Like be more creative in ⁓ speaking to customers in a way that ⁓ they can understand that speaks to them what risk is. I’m very confident. And I think the FCI has also said this, that capital at risk.

as a fallback option isn’t that helpful. And that we all need to do better as an industry to explain risk in a way that people actually understand and are encouraged to understand. And we take that very seriously ourselves, like making sure that customers understand our product is really important. We do a lot of customer research whenever we launch a new feature. ⁓ When it’s big enough, we do research and we listen to what users say when they go through the journey and we try and make the product better there where we see there’s confusion.

Holly Mead (09:02)
So I mean, getting back, you’ve won investing app. What is one thing that Lightyear users can do to make more of their app? You talked about some of the features you’re introducing. there any secret passageways? They’re not aware of that.

Wander Rutgers (09:18)
Well, so we are known as an investing app. I think people are less aware that we have ⁓ both a mobile application and a web application. And the web app as a whole is a lot bigger screen. So also a lot more features for customers that want to explore a bit more, want to explore the instrument universe, want to do. We have stock screeners, price comparison ⁓ features. So the web, because it creates a lot more surface area.

also is a place where users can more broadly explore investments. And I think other areas that people are not super familiar about, but I think one of the biggest pet peeves of investing is, for example, doing your taxes. And sometimes it can feel very intimidating to start investing just because you know at some point you have to pull some reports. And at Lightyear we try and make that very easy too. So we have reports that give you a good view of your capital gains, that give you a good view of your income.

that are like the first input when at the end of the season you need to figure out how much you owe HMRC. Or of course if you use a Doxin shares I say you don’t have to do that at all.

Holly Mead (10:25)
And I think something else you talk about a lot on the app and on the website is fee free. How important is that to you and how underestimated do you think that can be?

Wander Rutgers (10:36)
I think fees are the most predictable way in which you can become unsuccessful. So if you think about the long-term growth of the stock market, over the long-term we expect that markets go up, even though in the short run they might go down. But then if you look at account fees, for example, if over a 30-year period every year you have 30 basis points or a fraction of a percent,

in account fees that can compound to a very big number. ⁓ And so what we do at Lightyear is we charge some fees ⁓ for an exchange fees if you’re converting between currencies. The ISA is commission free, but on the basic account, the business accounts there, there’s some commission fees or execution fees. ⁓ And we charge those transparently because we think it’s important that users understand what our business model is, that we don’t make money from taking positions against them, but just by charging them.

⁓ fees in places where that’s important. ⁓ But the most important thing you can control in investing is that you want to invest in the right thing, that you stick to your plan and that you do it in a place where your fees are not going to erode your return. And we know that’s very important, but the way we try and solve for that is to build financial infrastructure that sits as much as possible directly on the exchanges and the…

places where assets are held so that we can pass on a low cost to the customer, but also do that forever and do that in a way that it’s not necessary for us to upsell some other product that might not be so good for you in order to make the economics work. So we are religiously trying to focus on building cheap infrastructure so that we can pass on that near zero variable cost to customers. And we think in the end,

Going back to why we exist, we exist to create successful investors. And the best way we can do that is by making sure that over time you pay us less and less and less in fees, because that means it’s more in your pocket. That means you’re more free to do whatever you want or retire earlier or whatever your financial goal is.

Holly Mead (12:46)
So other than overpaying, what’s the biggest, most common investment mistake that you see people making?

Wander Rutgers (12:53)
Yeah, I think particularly here, people err on two sides. And I do it myself too. I think the biggest mistake, the biggest percentage of the population probably makes is putting their money following the advice of their bank, which is you have a current account, you get a measly bit of interest on that money. And then you… ⁓

You get upsold into a cash asset, which still doesn’t pay you fair market rate, and then you never think about investing again. And you think that magically money will increase, not realizing that actually that rate that your bank is paying you is probably almost fully going towards inflation, eating away at your returns. So I think not starting is the most obvious way in which most people fail, including myself. It took until my third job in finance before I had an investment account. And so I, at this point, should have been much better.

educated and understanding of what the markets are like. And I was very well informed in some areas of finance, yet still in my personal finances, I just hadn’t gone through the effort, the cognitive load of researching where to put my money and invest. think step one is get engaged and put money, put money that’s appropriate into the market. But then a lot of people err on the other side too, which is invest in things they do not understand.

It is important that when you invest, you have a reasonable understanding of the type of investment you are putting your money into. As a stocks, they’re relatively vanilla or funds of stocks are relatively vanilla, simple to understand. They’re little chunks of the biggest companies. And if the companies are successful, then the value of the companies will go up and they’ll be successful over time. think most people can understand that. But there are a lot of products out there that are much harder to understand that have.

and leverage and that price risk in a funky way. Or I think for most people it’s probably not worth engaging with. And I think there’s a risk that if you go, so we have to find a path of investing, which is don’t take too little risk, but definitely take too much risk. And I think too much risk for a lot of people just means investing in things that they don’t fully understand.

Holly Mead (15:16)
So I feel like this is a good moment to ask because you’re the CEO of an investment company. So I have to ask what kind of investor are you?

Wander Rutgers (15:24)
That’s a good question. So as I said, I was quite a late bloomer in investing myself. So my best investments were probably just through working. So I worked at Lightyear. I started very early. I built up little bit of equity net over time and I did the same thing at Wise. When it was a small company, I worked and as part of working, you earned.

equity and the nice thing about that is you have to hold it for a very long period of time and you’re invested in something that you understand. So I have some of that through my jobs. I get stocks of companies that are generally not public yet and eventually it might become public. And then for me and for my family, the most important goal that I save for is financial freedom for my family. making sure that me and my kids over time build more and more freedom to either spend more time.

with each other, not necessarily to buy anything, but just to make sure that we are as free as possible. And so that means having a combination of mostly just trackers, instruments that track the market ⁓ in both the SIP and an ISA. And I think outside of that, I do have some beliefs in the way the world is headed that I like to support by buying some individual instruments. And so I think like a lot of people, like most of their investments are just

tracking the market if the world does well, then I will do well. And then a little bit, I believe a bit more in what used to be FinTech now, it’s a bit of other sectors than the market does. So I buy some individual stocks of companies that I like, but it’s mostly quite vanilla. I like to spend my creative energy on building light year and spending time with my kids, not spending too much of my time in investing.

Holly Mead (17:19)
But will you encourage your children to invest when they grow up?

Wander Rutgers (17:24)
For sure. think the best thing we could do to educate the broader population on investing is just give every kid, it can be a small amount, like give them a hundred pounds or 500 pounds into an ISA when they’re born. So that when they’re 18, you can give them an ISA and say, look, I put in a hundred and it has 300 in it. Look what happens if you just wait and see, look at the long, let the world work for you for a long period of time.

I that’s the most amazing thing to do. don’t think I’ll encourage. So I think that type of investing, my kids are already invested. They just do not know it yet. They’re like two or four. ⁓ But I will definitely encourage them to think about this early. Like I left a lot of money on the table by starting so late and I would hope that I can educate my kids to avoid those mistakes.

Holly Mead (18:17)
Yeah. I think I might know the answer to this based on that, but what would you say is your biggest investing mistake that you’ve made?

Wander Rutgers (18:25)
I think for me, it was also investing in something I did not understand. in the early, when I first saw it, I was like quite a late bloomer. And then when, when I think over the pandemic, a lot of people got into investing, also started looking around, just trying to understand a bit, play with different instruments. And at some point I bought one of these ⁓ leveraged ETS without properly reading the kids for them, I think.

some of us make these mistakes. ⁓ I will never do it again. I didn’t put a lot of money in, but it was, I think, an investment that went to zero. ⁓

Holly Mead (19:05)
They can get very spicy very quickly.

Wander Rutgers (19:07)
They get very spicy very quickly. And I think it’s just, it educated me on just making sure that I invest in things that I know don’t get too swept up in wanting to see, ⁓ this line goes up, but this other line goes up even faster. It’s kind of this idea of that you want to be a game that gives you a reward in the short run. I think this is something that, it’s just something to avoid. You shouldn’t look at the investments too often. ⁓

And you stick to things that you know and like fit your strategy. So for me, I’ve learned that now, like I buy things only for the long run and I buy things that are relatively passive. Cause that’s the amount of energy I want to spend on investing and the rest of the time I want to spend on other things.

Holly Mead (19:48)
So I think 2025, kind of gold was one of the biggest stories in the investment world. What do you think are going to be the biggest themes for this year?

Wander Rutgers (19:58)
Yeah,

I think one, it’s always important to caveat it by saying that for most people, it probably doesn’t matter that much what the hippest story is in investing, right? So for the average investor, and for me, for most of my history, it’s been just like stick with it, come up with a plan, save money regularly, and then put it in the market. ⁓ Works fine. And if you pay too much attention to the FT, there can be a lot of noise.

think it’ll be an interesting year. Last year was so tumultuous. I think there was gold. And also, of course, we had Trump getting elected again. A lot of chaos around tariffs. A lot of AI companies in the private markets that are become very valuable. And a lot of public market companies got a lot more valuable kind of on this AI trend. I think what probably will dominate the zeitgeist will be a few of these companies going public. I think that’ll attract.

a lot of people to the idea of investing. I think the opportunity for us is to take that energy that’s going, the curiosity that gets driven by the news, talking a lot about investing and channeling that in the right direction to help people start investing for the long term.

Holly Mead (21:10)
I mean, that’s like your own portfolio as well though, you know, have that vanilla thing in the middle, the areas of interest around the side, they’re the things that are exciting, aren’t they?

Wander Rutgers (21:21)
Yeah, for sure. And I think there are a lot of companies that really grab the imagination that might go public this year, the SpaceX, the OpenAI. Of course, these companies have been dominating the news for so long. ⁓

Holly Mead (21:32)
Do you think, what do you think is going to happen in the AI world this year? There’s keeps being talk about the bubble popping. Doesn’t seem to be popping.

Wander Rutgers (21:42)
I mean, it’s fascinating, If I knew that, if I properly knew what would happen in the stock market, then of course I probably, I would still be sitting here because this is fun, but that would be financially a lot freer. I think we did an interesting webinar with Lightyear customers about the way the markets are developing. And I think there’s some interesting things that you see that the price to earnings multiples in the U.S. they are much higher than they are in Europe. And that’s a lot because of course a lot of the…

interesting AI companies that are very driven of the prices are also in the US. And so having very high price earnings multiples means that we’re expecting a lot of growth and a lot of earnings growth. So what we should see this year is steadily a growth of revenues coming from AI investments. And we’ll see if the revenue catches up. I think it’s very hard.

Yeah, it’s very hard to predict the future. I think what we see this year is one of two directions. Either we see the revenue catch up or we see the prices potentially come down again. ⁓ But I don’t know which of the ones it will be. I think what will be interesting for investors will be ⁓ now private companies in which you can only invest if you’re an institutional investor going to the public markets and so becoming part of your S &P 500 tracker potentially so that ordinary people

that are now kind of excluded from investing in some of the most exciting companies can start investing in them too.

Holly Mead (23:16)
Yeah, the fractional shares bit you sort of alluded to it earlier. I think that’s such an interesting piece of the puzzle that could democratize that part of the market.

Wander Rutgers (23:26)
Yeah, we think that that’s really important. So in the end, again, if we think about how do we make the layer between you and the financial markets as thin and seamless as possible, then it is really silly that you can only buy an investment in like a thousand pound chunk or like a hundred pound chunk. The UK stock market has always been pretty good at this and that the valuations are generally quite, the prices for a single stock are quite low, but you have, you know, in Europe, ad-in shares that are more than a thousand euros. And the idea that you can…

If you have a hundred pounds a month to invest, that you have to wait 10 months before you can buy a whole share. Is of course a bit silly, particularly in a world where like it’s all bits and bytes, bytes moving around. In the olden days of investing, if I bought a stock, there was a physical process where humans exchanged tickets and then we took a bit of paper to a guy who then like changed something in a real book. And so that’s the old idea. And in that world, stocks as units make a lot of sense.

But in the modern world of like bits and bytes moving around, it should be as seamless as possible. And the way in which we think about our investments predominantly is in currency, right? What I have a hundred pounds to invest, I want to invest a hundred pounds. I have a thousand pounds worth of a certain stock. And so it’s important that in order to make investing easy, the investing experience matches how people already think about money and about investing. And so we’ve tried to introduce that along the way we launched US fractional shares.

at lunch and I’ve been working hard to make it also possible for ETFs in European instruments and now also in the ISM.

Holly Mead (25:03)
And speaking of making investing easy, I’ve asked you to bring along a book. What is the book that you always recommend to people to get their heads around investing or finance generally?

Wander Rutgers (25:08)
Yes.

Yeah, there are a lot of interesting books about investing. read a lot of complicated ones and simple ones. The one I brought today is the little book of behavioral investing by Montier. I think the basics of what you should do are not very complicated, but I think in order to do them, takes a lot of understanding of self, a lot of managing of emotions.

a lot of understanding your own hopes and dreams to some degree. And we are all humans. And the nice thing about humans is we are rational creatures to some degree, but also hugely affected by our biases and emotions. And if you don’t learn about them, it can be quite hard to stick to your plan. And so think this book talks a lot about the psychology of investing and the things to look out for. think one of the main reasons people do not invest is because

It’s just scary the amount of new things you have to consider when you go from being a simple saver, something you’ve been taught from school, to an investor. And having those describes takes a lot of the power away. if you can understand, yes, for most people, there’s a fear of trying new things. For most people, when they see a big gain, they respond in a certain way and they want to take a certain action. Or if they see a loss, they want to take a certain action.

And these are biases that are built into all of us and we need to be conscious of them so that we can take their power away and do the right thing for the long term. Because investing for most people, it is about sticking to it for a long period of time. ⁓ Not taking action when it’s scary, continuously taking action, even when maybe that doesn’t feel like the right thing. And so I think that’s really important.

Holly Mead (27:06)
What’s the best thing that book taught you that where you were like, my gosh, I’ve done that.

Wander Rutgers (27:13)
No, I think it is really just about the way you feel when you see a certain thing. Right? when I first started investing and then on the second day I lost, the money was down and my thought was, okay, well, clearly this does not work. And even though I intellectually understood that markets go up over the long run and up and down in the short run, still this idea that that is just…

Like this is a very common thing that people think about that and being afraid, being made aware in like, and there’s so many of these little biases that flow all the way through. think it’s just very, very useful. It’s also generally just nice to know that it’s not something about yourself that is broken, right? But it’s something about all of us in the human condition and the fact that we are in the end like creatures that have only very recently in our history, we’ve been introduced to financial markets. So it’s good to understand that we don’t respond to it supernaturally in every way.

Holly Mead (28:13)
So Lightyear is in its second year in the UK. What is coming up for the year ahead for you guys?

Wander Rutgers (28:20)
Yeah, ⁓ we’re working very hard to make the product better and better for customers every day. This month we launched fractional shares inside the ISA, investment plans inside the ISA, so features that help users ⁓ invest regularly with small chunks. So that was already a big start of the year for us. The ISA season’s coming, we’re going to add a lot more instruments ⁓ and we have a lot of additional features in the pipeline.

Our core job is to build features as fast as we can that respond to the needs of our users. And so we’re going to keep on doing this this year and hopefully win more awards, get good feedback, and continue the growth that we’ve been seeing so far.

Holly Mead (29:04)
So if you had just one tip for investors, what would it be?

Wander Rutgers (29:10)
⁓ I think it would be make a write down the plan, stick to the plan, or at least if you vary from it, do it very consciously. I think the key thing we can do to create wealth is to do something for a long period of time. And so having a clear plan and sticking to it, I think for most of us, leads to the best returns.

Holly Mead (29:35)
Well, congratulations again on the award and thank you for your time today. And thanks very much for joining us. If you have used Lightyear, if you’re about to sign up to Lightyear, if you’ve got any thoughts and feelings about Lightyear, head to the review page on the Good Money Guide and we look forward hearing your thoughts.

Wander Rutgers (29:39)
Thank you.