I work in the investment banking space where my employer requires my personal trading account to be housed with one of their approved brokers.
These approved brokers include Hargreaves Lansdown, AJ Bell, Interactive Investor, Charles Schwab and other well established brokers. They’re approved brokers because they’re setup to feed automated trade confirmations and monthly account activity reports to my internal compliance department for monitoring purposes.
Freetrade is not on this approved list. Myself and many others would love to move over our six-figure (mostly) static trading portfolios to FT and save £100’s on annual account fees that these established brokers charge. There are hundreds, if not thousands in my industry that are forced to keep our accounts with approved brokers.
Why can’t FT built out the pipe work that allows the compliance departments at Goldman, JP Morgan, Bank of America, Morgan Stanley, UBS, Credit Suisse, Barclays, Deutsche Bank etc. to receive whatever they need to receive to monitor their employees trading activity, and get on their approved brokers list?
If FT even throw in transfer incentives for bank employees, they may even be promoted by compliance departments ahead of other competing brokers. I’ve seen my own compliance department promote AJ Bell after agreeing some sort of preferential offer with them.
Absolutely we need to be on all ‘approved broker’ lists. We are on it and currently conducting testing with our first partner (a large financial services firm) to go live next month. We’ll then systematically add many more (such as the names you mentioned above). This is particularly close to my heart (as I too had similar restrictions at my previous investment bank employers) - so please do DM me @NP123 so I can follow up with you
@NP123 Have you asked them why Freetrade is not in the personal account dealing approved list? I had the discussion and it is nothing to do with pipes you talk about - at least at the large fund management group I worked at. Admittedly the discussion might turn to those issues but the first step came down to the risk profile of many of the neo-brokers.
Also for US stock any UK broker will find it hard to beat brokers like Charles Schwab - because of commission free trading.
My place require automated trade confirmations and/or monthly account activity statements sent directly from the broker, and I assume FT is not listed because this automated feed isn’t yet possible.
But yes, I can believe there may also be concerns about banks onboarding neo-brokers that are not as well established as the likes of HL, CS, AJB etc.
Brilliant! Glad to hear it’s on your radar, and totally appreciate it’s not an overnight thing that can just be rolled out.
I’ll DM you. When you guys are ready, I’m very happy to connect you to the compliance department at my place so you can have the conversations directly about what they need.
This would be neat, I can currently use FT under an exemption but typically we require use of a select list of brokers with automated feeds so if/when that exemption expires I’d be forced to drop FT.
It was the same with me - I was using FT under an exception where I had to manually provide quarterly statements. But last year my place stopped providing exemptions, and I was forced to move from FT to one of their (expensive) approved brokers.
I am round 3 investor, and I have been asking the same thing since December 2018, (went back to look at my conversations). Happy to help as well if needed @JordanS.
