We execute our trades with the Retail Service Provider (RSP) network.
Longer explanation
At the moment, when your Freetrade order successfully completes the venue ID on your contract note will read: London Stock Exchange. This ID could mean two things:
- Your trade was placed on the LSE order book itself and matched with a counterparty. This is known as an order-driven market as all the bids and asks are displayed, which is great for transparency. This is the norm for trades above a certain value between certain parties (usually institutions), but there is no guarantee that someone is willing to take the other side of your trade and successful execution is much less likely for small orders (i.e. from individual investors).
- Your trade was placed with an LSE market maker, aka a Retail Service Provider or RSP. This is known as a quote-driven market as the market maker will provide a firm quote to take the other side of your trade. This is the norm for smaller āretail sizeā trades.
Most of our customer orders are at a suitable size for option 2. That means we take your order for e.g. 10 shares of Barclays and ask the network of LSE market makers to provide a quote.
We then choose the best price that can be executed quickly.
Sometimes trades can get rejected because the price quotes we get back from the market makers arenāt good enough based on the observable prices against big orders on the LSE order book.
This is part of our commitment to best execution, a regulatory requirement for execution-only brokers.
(Quote from this blog post)
As we write in our Order Execution Policy:
Weāre committed to taking all sufficient steps to achieve what is known as ābest executionā for your orders.
No we donāt 
Also:
We never make money from the spread or include hidden commission baked into the spread.
(Quote from this blog post)