The Brokers Who Stand Between GPW and EveryoneNarrow moat

GPW's customers, in the contractual sense, are its member brokerage houses. Everyone else — every fund, every pension manager, every individual — reaches the market through one of them.

The number of brokerage accounts in Poland rose by 500 000 in 2025 to about 2,5 million¹, one of the more encouraging statistics in the exchange's recent history, and the exchange has no relationship with the holder of a single one. It does not know their names, cannot market to them, cannot price to them, and cannot stop a broker steering them toward a foreign instrument that pays the broker better. What it can do is set a tariff the broker passes on.

Businesses elsewhere in this collection live with the same arrangement. McDonald's sells to franchisees, Coca-Cola to bottlers, Nvidia largely to integrators. In each case the intermediary supplies capital and reach the parent would otherwise have to build. GPW's version is the weakest of them, because a brokerage house is not building anything the exchange needs — the trading system, the clearing, the surveillance and the indices are all GPW's — and the broker's own economics increasingly favour products the exchange does not list.

What holds the arrangement together is that a member wanting to offer Polish equities has exactly one venue to connect to. That is a strong position for setting a price and a weak one for growing a market, which is a fair description of the exchange's last decade.

The number that tests it is the share of new brokerage accounts that ever place an order in a Polish-listed instrument. The exchange cannot see it directly, which is itself the point. What it can watch is retail's share of turnover against the account count.