Building a Bank From Scratch: The Future of Agentic Investing | Joakim Bruchmann

Joakim Bruchmann is the co-founder and CEO of Pluto Markets, a modern, vertically integrated investment platform challenging the Nordic brokerage landscape. After beginning his career on the competitive commodity trading floor at Goldman Sachs in London - navigating physical metals and derivative volatility under intense pressure - Joakim returned to Denmark determined to build an enduring financial institution. Recognizing that the Nordics represent the most profitable retail brokerage market in the world, with incumbent banks generating upwards of 70% profit margins, he made the contrarian decision to reject third-party wrapper APIs and spend nearly four years engineering core banking infrastructure and securing full regulatory approvals from first principles. In this conversation, Joakim unpacks the realities of "regulatory capture," detailing how legacy banks leverage compliance complexity to entrench their moats against challengers. He dissects the fundamental structural flaws of the European financial architecture - from fragmented national exchanges and archaic T+2 settlement cycles to the fatal reality that Nordic pension funds allocate less than 0.5% of capital to venture innovation, leaving American capital to fund Europe's future winners. Presented by ⁠Listed⁠ Powered by ⁠Reverion Capital⁠ Joakim Bruchmann Pluto Markets: https://plutomarkets.com LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/joakim-bruchmann