Community Meetup - 8 PM Wed 24th Feb 2021, live on Zoom

ex Monzo and 15 years with Hargreaves Lansdown, so loads of domain knowledge.

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I did hear that but I think it was mentioned more in passing or as a joke. Happy to be proven wrong tho

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The Sweden office move makes sense to me now, will be used as a EU legal base. Someone made the AstraZeneca analogy or even Unilever works.

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I found it interesting that solving Fractionals is tricky, as surely they have done it once with America (even if others offered it beforehand) and so I’d have imagined that doing it for a new market could utilise experience from doing it the first time.

Does anyone know how does EIS works ? What are the chances of the UK crowdfunding being EIS compliant ?

Any word on Series B?

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US fractionals are supplied by drivewealth (via thirdparty). I believe if Freetrade crack UK franctionals they’ll have a real USP. It would also make them less dependent on drivewealth

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I may be wrong, but I believe it is provided by DriveWealth.

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Pretty much done. It’s in the final stages and expect an update soon

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I heard a lot of acknowledgement of issues that have been problematic recently (customer service and processing deposits, in particular, although they didn’t mention order execution issues). But these were just broad admissions that they weren’t delivering what they would like to deliver; what I didn’t hear were specifics about exactly how the issues were being solved. I’m a details guy, I would have liked to know some more specifics.

However, possibly the most reassuring item in the presentation for me was when it was briefly mentioned that they have around 100 employees now. Good to know that they are scaling up there.

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So no crowd funding? And any idea on size of raise and valuation?

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Drivewealth do this for them. Looking at their site there’s lots involved, they offer it at a cost, there’s rounding calculated in, they need to manage and buy the whole shares and keep that record correctly, voting rights are lost, there non transferable. They by the looks of it have to be managed and calculated separately from whole shares then fed back into the system to show up in your account as one set of shares.

Freetrade need to implement all of that for UK shares and get it right.

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I imagine we will heard about that once it’s a done deal. As for now, we’ll have to wait

As for crowdfunding they have hit there raise allowance of 8 million euros as per regulations so 7 million pounds converted by Freetrade

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I really hope this is working by the beginning of the new tax year for ISA contributions!

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Yes. Needs to be a year after the previous crowdraise (which would be May 2021) BUT they are not limited so much in size and can now combine a UK and EU allocation. I must admit I don’t know what this means exactly but it sounded good haha

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From what I remember:
In terms of customer service improvements, the feature that @Duncan mentioned where they will provide users with an accurate progress of transfer status will help a lot with customer confidence and should eliminate some of the customer service noise.
@Viktor mentioned new tools to monitor customer service levels in real time and they were going to clear the queues in 2 weeks time. He also mentioned better automatic matching on transfers to freetrade accounts.

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Sorry what is this 70 million allowance and how much room did they have? Personally I would rather have FT grow out of crowdfunding stage and do big ticket raise with Sequoia leading

Im not too sure on the allowance hence the question mark, but happy for someone to let me know

I’ve updated my comment

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Adam reiterated that FT grew from crowdraises and so wants to let us participate again and give back to the loyal investor base. I think this is awesome news personally because I need more shares! Appreciate the sentiment RE Sequoia…that too would be intense.

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According to HMRC: ā€œYour company cannot raise more than Ā£12 million from these sources in your company’s lifetime.ā€ Those sources include EIS, SEIS, VCTs, and SITR. So only a small portion of what Freetrade raises could be tax-advantaged…

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