I generally find my US dividends are a few days late.
I generally find my UK dividends are a day late.
I generally find my UK ETFs are erratic. Some quite quick. Others tediously slow or missing all together. Freetrade need to look at their ETF dividend operations. Especially since LightYear are now moving in to this space. I might split my portfolio and hold my ETFs on LightYear if it looks good.
I haven’t yet seen a valid reason why the dividend payment times are so poor and erratic,if it doesn’t change I’ll be having my ISA with 212 next year.
I’ve received the odd late dividend from HL and AJ Bell so I just see the lateness as something which happens sometimes (some of my divis with Freetrade are paid on time, others are not). As long as I get them in the end, I’m not bothered, it’s not like I need them to arrive on a specific day so I can pay bills etc.
Hi @Dannyd
Please see my post above. Gemma is head of operations for both UK & Europe and only reports to CEO & COO. She knows what she’s talking about when she says she expects things fairly quickly.
glad to hear it
Thanks for mentioning that meetup conversation, Neil. Indeed, Gemma and her teams know very deeply how we can improve dividend processing and are working on it.
What I don’t understand is why only recently there have been delays?
Let me start off by saying as long as I get the money, in the end, it’s no big deal. My biggest payments have been £5.45 and could hardly pay bills or anything like that.
My curiosity, and it’s only a curiosity
I was impressed with freetrades dividend processing time for ages, only as of recent times does there appear to be noticeable delays.
Yeah, i don’t mean to be cynical, but i don’t get it. There never used to be a problem. UK dividends almost always came on the day, and US dividends were largely at most a day late.
Now even well oiled machines like Shell aren’t being received on the payment date, where they used to be.
I know NeilB mentioned cheques, but that doesn’t make sense either. Did everyone suddenly switch to posting cheques in the post with a second class stamp?
Its not seriously being suggested that the likes of shell and others used to send dividends electronically but have now switched to sending cheques or something like that?
Prompt dividend payments were one of the things that set Freetrade apart from the likes of 212, at least it used to be.
I guess the main concern is whats caused Freetrade to go from prompt dividend payments, to much larger delays in both UK and US dividends (and presumably European as well?)
This was only for certain companies and 100% isn’t the norm, It was an example of how poor some of the processes are coming into Freetrade. As I mentioned above @Gemhappe who is ultimately responsible for this department said that improvements would be seen relatively quickly.
With the reduction in headcount earlier this year I don’t think it’s too wilder a guess to attribute the additional dividend friction to this.
Could be the head count reduction. It’s more just a frustrating situation, especially as it was something that kept freetrade as pace with competitors and kept it ahead of 212 but we don’t know why it happened
Discussion continues on Megathread: Dividend fest
