European investment platform BUX has appointed Juha Ristolainen as its new Chief Technology Officer, bringing in a fintech veteran with more than 25 years of software development experience and 15 years in executive leadership roles.

Ristolainen arrives at BUX after co-founding Upvest, a Berlin-based investment infrastructure provider, where he served as CTO and built the backend investment infrastructure used by several major neobanks and brokers across Europe. During his time there, he also grew the engineering team and worked through BaFin licensing requirements — BaFin being Germany's financial regulator — covering investment services and crypto custody. He most recently held the CTO position at Alpaca, a US broker best known for its developer-facing trading APIs, where he oversaw the expansion of the broker dealer's global API infrastructure and built out its engineering organisation.

Across a career spanning Europe and the US, Ristolainen has focused on balancing fast product development with the strict security standards expected in financial services. At BUX, he will lead engineering and product strategy, with a particular focus on rolling out the company's new cross-country savings offering.

"BUX has made investing simple and accessible, and now we're extending that same clarity to savings across our markets, always built around what customers need," Ristolainen said. "This is the kind of work that first drew me into fintech, and I'm glad to be doing it with a team that's this curious and customer focused."

BUX, a challenger brand under ABN AMRO, which acquired the Amsterdam-based app as the Dutch bank sought to broaden its digital retail offering, provides a mobile app for trading shares, ETFs and ETCs, along with automated Investment Plans. The company is now broadening its offering to include savings products, aiming to give customers a single app for both investing and saving — a direction European neobrokers have increasingly taken, with rivals such as Trade Republic and Scalable Capital also moving beyond share trading into interest-bearing cash and savings features. The expansion also comes as EU policymakers, through the European Commission's Savings and Investments Union agenda, work to make it easier for retail customers to hold and move savings across borders. BUX currently operates in the Netherlands, Belgium, France, Germany, Spain, Italy, Austria and Ireland, and the announcement did not detail how the savings offering will roll out across those markets.

Source: LeapRate