Alpaca hascompleted its acquisition of UK investment infrastructure firm WealthKernel andlaunched European equities trading this week, putting the US broker-dealer indirect competition with Berlin-based Upvest in the region's brokerageinfrastructure market.Singapore Summit: Meet the largestAPAC brokers you know (and those you still don't!)WealthKernel,which holds UK and Spanish regulatory permissions and has built its businessaround tax-advantaged accounts like Individual Savings Accounts andSelf-Invested Personal Pensions, will now trade as Alpaca Europe. Alpaca Europe Takes ShapeWith Shanmugarajah at the HelmKaranShanmugarajah, WealthKernel's chief executive, has been named CEO of AlpacaEurope and will run the regional business. The rest of the WealthKernel teamhas joined Alpaca, bringing what Shanmugarajah described as "localregulatory expertise with global, API-driven infrastructure" into thecombined company.Founded in2015, WealthKernel operates from London, Nottingham and Madrid, and sells anembedded investing stack to neobanks, wealth managers and trading apps thatwant to add investing products without building their own compliance andcustody layers.[#highlighted-links#] Alpacacomes into Europe on the back of a busy 18 months. The New York-headquarteredfirm closed a $150 million Series D at a $1.15billion valuation in January, added Nasdaq exchange membership lastOctober and pickedup options and Treasury clearingmemberships earlier this year to cut out third-party intermediaries. The company says it now powersmore than 10 million brokerage accounts across hundreds of fintechs andinstitutions in more than 40 countries.Xetra Goes Live, Euronextand LSE to FollowSeparatelyfrom the acquisition, Alpaca flipped the switch on European equities trading.The first venue is Germany's Xetra exchange, with Euronext markets and theLondon Stock Exchange expected to follow. The company said partners can accessmultiple markets through a single API integration, while Alpaca handlesexecution, custody and settlement through unnamed global financialinstitutions.The launchgives Alpaca's existing US clients a way to route cross-border flow withoutconnecting to separate European brokers, and gives European fintechs and banksa path to US equities, options and fixed income through the same pipe. Alpaca haspushed this cross-border angle before, most visibly when it launched a tokenisation platform forUS stocks in October.The company claims a 94% share of tokenised US equities and ETFs referenced inthat effort, though it has not disclosed the methodology behind the figure orthe total market size being measured.YoshiYokokawa, Alpaca's chief executive and co-founder, framed the Europeanbuild-out as a complexity play. He said the combined setup is aimed at"reducing the complexity of cross-border investing" for institutionslaunching regulated products across multiple jurisdictions.Competitive Push IntoUpvest's BackyardEuropeanbrokerage infrastructure is not an empty market. The leader sits around 900 kilometerseast of Alpaca Europe's London base. Berlin-based Upvest, founded in 2017, raised $125 million last month at a€640 million valuation in a round led by Sapphire Ventures and Tencent, with CEO MartinKassing telling Bloomberg at the time that the firm was targeting more than€100 million in annualized revenue and profitability within 24 months. Upvestsays it processed over 100 million orders in 2025, up from 20 million the yearbefore.Upvest'sclient list reads like a roll call of European retail finance, includingRevolut, N26, bunq, Webull, Raisin, DKB and Santander's Openbank. In the pastsix months it has added IG Group, which went live with French equities trading on Upvest'srails in November,and CMC Markets, which will use Upvest to launch multi-currency cash equitiestrading in Germany this autumn. Upvest alsofaces competition from US-based DriveWealth and Danish multi-asset broker SaxoBank, both of which sell white-label trading stacks to banks and fintechs.Alpaca'spitch differs from Upvest's on one important dimension. Where Upvest's corefranchise is European retail investing plumbed into local tax wrappers, Alpacais selling a two-sided bridge, with US self-clearing infrastructure on one sideand newly acquired European licenses on the other. Alpaca'schief technology officer, Juha Ristolainen, joined from Upvest last year after five years as its co-founderand CTO.BNP Paribas BackingSignals Strategic InterestTheacquisition also closes with institutional backing from one of Europe's largestbanks. BNP Paribas, through its venture arm Opera Tech Ventures, participatedin Alpaca's January Series D, and Managing Director Vincent Baillin said thebank was "excited to support Alpaca's growing presence in Europe." Alpaca hasbeen expanding in other regions at the same time. It announced plans in Januaryto acquire Zincmoney IFSC, a broker-dealer licensed in India's GIFT City special financialzone, subject toregulatory approval. The India move, combined with the WealthKernel closing andthe European equities launch, gives the company live or pending regulatedoperations in the US, UK, EU and India inside a six-month window.This article was written by Damian Chmiel at www.financemagnates.com.