In conversation with Yoni Assia 

Read time: 2:30 Minutes

At FIBE 2026, Yoni Assia, Founder and CEO of eToro, gave a fireside chat on “The Future of Finance: Will AI, Multi-Asset Platforms and Tokenisation Redefine Investing?”. Afterwards he stayed on to answer a few of our questions.

eToro is almost 20 years old. You navigated a big financial crisis, crypto winters, a pandemic – a lot of things. How are the recent global developments influencing your users and investors?

Yoni Assia: Any geopolitical event creates both risk and opportunity in the investing market. It doesn't impact eToro itself. We are a resilient company – we've been through COVID and many other things. What we are seeing, though, are very interesting times in commodities – in the oil market, gold, silver – at levels we've never seen before. 

Geopolitical risk impacts the markets and, in doing so, creates opportunities. The tariff situation last year was actually a great entry point for investors. So, any geopolitical situation is really a mix of risk and opportunity.

You've spoken about the Warren Buffett influence when it comes to educating people about finance and investing. In the past decade, we've made progress on financial education – but at a global level financial literacy remains pretty low. 
What do you think it would actually take to move the needle at scale? Is AI the answer?

Assia: I think it might be the answer. As people learn to talk to AI – and AI is very, very, very educated about finance, because finance is math – I think that could genuinely be a solution. 

When young people learn how to communicate with a finance AI like eToro's investment AI, they can learn a lot. And the learning is mutual: the AI learns about you, it knows who you are, and it can help fix your mistakes.

Bringing it back to eToro itself, talking about your 2025 IPO, how has it changed the company and the way you operate?

Assia: I think it has made us sharper. You have to be very precise about what you say, because the market counts every word, - which is not the case in private markets. When I speak now, everything I say will be read one way or another. In earnings calls, a single word can make the difference between the stock going up or down. 

So first, you must be sharp on aligning what you say. And second, you need to drive faster, or adapt to market expectations. 

In 2022, it was revenue growth at all costs. Then profit at all costs. Then profitable growth. And now suddenly it's shifting back to growth above profits. If you don't make those shifts, the market punishes you. 

It's also an opportunity to learn, because suddenly all eyes are on you; you can read 16 analyst reports about your own company and what they are saying about you, and you take the best out of it and forget about the worst.

You once said that everyone deserves a quant. How close are we to AI levelling the playing field between investment funds and retail investors?

Assia: I think we are very close. Not to the level of Renaissance Technologies (the $100+ billion quant hedge fund founded by mathematician Jim Simons), but everybody can have a quant today. How good the quant is, is up to the person managing it.

So, my AI is professor-level in quantitative trading – but telling it what to do, how to do it, making sure it has the right data infrastructure, the right knowledge, and knowing how to back-test, that's the thing. 

It’s like driving. The car itself is there. Now you need to learn how to drive it.