When he was fired by Citi in 1999, a young Nick Bortot received some friendly advice from his soon-to-be ex-boss: don’t get another job in finance. Yet that’s just what he did, joining the Netherlands’ first online broker, before helping to build BinckBank into the first Dutch fintech unicorn. In 2013 he founded BUX, a pan-European trading platform, partly because he had a point to prove. Inevitably, it’s often compared to Robinhood, and not just because the two startups were founded within months of one another. It offers zero-fee trading, and has the size, scope and simplicity that have made Robinhood a household name. But it doesn’t get paid for order flow (it’s illegal in the EU). And with a focus on subscriptions, education and long-term investment, it’s also Europe’s anti-Robinhood. In that sense, it’s a bit like Schrödinger’s cat being alive and dead at the same time. So maybe we should call it Schrödinger’s app!