How will depositing funds into Freetrade accounts work?
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I asked @Rob the same question at the Crowdcube event on Tuesday, for exactly the same reason, by the time your money finally hits your DeGiro wallet it’s too late! He said that they will be supporting faster payments so you should hopefully be able to use the funds the same day. Debit card top ups are also on the roadmap I believe.
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Hey there,
Do you need to verify accounts/investor information (Identification documents) from your users prior to them being able to trade?
We won’t be discussing our AML and KYC policies publicly in any great detail. I can’t put it any better than this great post on the Monzo community, which explains why it’s important to keep these things confidential.
Rest assured we will be working to get everyone onboard as soon as possible once they are at the front of the queue, and there shouldn’t be any circumstances where it is taking 7 days to get you trading. (If questions or issues do come up at this stage it will be resolved much more quickly by contacting us via support channels than via the community.)
How do you guys plan on over coming this issue or more to the point do you even see it as an issue?
It’s always difficult to balance user experience with regulatory requirements, but we have some great solutions in place and the majority of users should not be affected. Naturally, there will be exceptions to this but we’re ready to help everyone get their accounts opened as quickly as possible.
And will your user accounts support faster payments from bank transfers and debit cards for instant deposits?
Once you’re onboard, you can link your bank account and get going. Funds will be reflected in user accounts continuously throughout the day, so if it lands with us via Faster Payments it should be included in the next batch. Debit cards a priority for us as well, as @tommy mentioned.
Probably a longer answer than you were after but good to get these things covered now for future reference! Keep them coming guys 
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It currently costs Monzo £4m a year in fees to 3rd parties to provide debit card top ups.
Who’ll bear the cost of Freetrade debit card deposits?
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Due to this, we’ve changed our plans so users will need to top up by bank transfer / standing order, in order to fund their Freetrade account.
Open Banking should let us build functionality to enable you to trigger a bank transfer from your bank account to your Freetrade account in the future 
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Any more information than this?
I fear open banking functionality like this is a longgg way away?
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Realistically how long is it going to be until Open Banking has been adopted to the point where this is possible? Do you have any insight into that? As an outsider it feels like this might be YEARS off (perhaps with the exception of Monzo, but I’ve never heard them mention this specific sort of integration)
Edit: should have scrolled to the bottom of the thread. What @neovo said 
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It might take a while, unfortunately we don’t seem to have a viable alternative in the meantime.
It would be less painful if the money was quickly and automatically swept into the free trade account without human intervention where it had a valid ref. Many will sign up outside working ours, and faster payments means in theory it can be pretty fast if this was automated.
Re alternatives to the current system, I quite like these two possibilities (though both require work, if you’re talking 6-12 months and bespoke integrations for open banking, it might be worth it):
- Digital Direct Debit - e.g. HL or gocardless - would require work I know, but possibly less than open banking…
- Allow card deposits up to x amount with a fee - free trade could make some money from this, and this isn’t so bad to add with a processor like stripe. If people could add £100 for £1 say, probably lots would be happy to just to try the app out immediately.
Totally see why you don’t want to accept card payments if you foot the bill as you could lose quite a lot of money if you grow fast, but those could be offered in addition to the current solution, till we reach the sunlit uplands of open banking. This is a major stumbling block for new users, I’ve seen so many mentions of it in this thread.
PS Congratulations on almost reaching 1000 users 
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I agree with this, while my first transfer happened within a few hours we are increasingly living in a world where instant is the expectation.
A £1 charge for instant debit card transactions would fund processing fees, and greatly reduces the friction from having to login to online banking, double check account numbers, adding the reference and so on. The convenience alone would make it a preferred option (for me).
I think the cost to Freetrade themselves would be circa 0.5% and a flat fee may not cover it.
If the aspiration is open banking integration then launching card top ups is a bad idea. Have seen from Monzo that it’s hard to ever withdraw it without a huge kick up. To introduce something with the intention of eventually removing it isn’t the best way
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I was thinking more in the lines of flat fee with a cap, so people can get started quickly but not cost free trade money, say £100 for £1. Long term you’d want to encourage regular deposits of course, direct debit would be ideal for that IMO, open banking sounds worryingly far away.
I do see why they are avoiding card payments though, just think they need a slicker deposit solution to scale quickly.
What advantage would direct debit have over a bank transfer? That would take 3 days to transfer the money after it had been set up
You can set it up in app, tied direct to an account so doesn’t need fiddly ref, would encourage regular deposits and let people manage those within the app. I like the way the HL web app handles this. HL allows card payment and DD from the web app so that’s the competition I guess. Not sure what the solution should be but this felt the clunkiest bit of the setup.
It does mean you can’t get started straight away if that 3 day rule is in force, but then bank transfers manually assigned in office hours means that too (typically one day delay).
Open banking would be wonderful it just sounds years away for this sort of thing (in practice), is there a standard API for pulling money that banks have up and running?
10 working days to set up the direct debit and then 3 days to request it.
Haven’t heard of allowing customer to request funds from another app yet but all it will take is 1 bank to agree and fix their API to allow it and the flood gates will open.
I only found it clunky the first time when I didn’t realise you could copy and paste the reference. Now it’s happily in my banking app so I just have to select an amount. Would take me longer to find my purse and type in a card number than to do a bank transfer.
Ouch, thanks for the info. Banking is so old fashioned! Would be great to see banks open up, let’s hope.
Transfers from the bank would be fine I think if it didn’t have to wait for an annoying manual transfer. Perhaps that can be fixed in the meantime.
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Being an early adopter is so much fun.
Had my ISA account 10 minutes and have already missed a rather critical step - outlined in red writing and labeled ‘IMPORTANT’ 
I have just attempted to top-up this ISA with funds from my Monzo account (side question: I believe my HSBC account is linked & unsure how to change this to Monzo as my new primary account?) - but missed the important step of adding my unique reference number 
Monzo have confirmed I can’t alter my cleverly titled ‘ISA’ reference ex post facto. Good news is that the sort code & account number are correct…
Perhaps the funds will clear during your transaction processing window of 7am-4pm but if they don’t, any idea on how I can resolve?
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I did the same Jacob.
I spoke to Freetrade on the in app chat. Told them the date and the amount. They found the transaction and credited it to my account within a couple of hours.
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Ok so not just me! - very helpful, cheers Richard.