Currently it takes 2-4 hours for easy bank transfer to arrive in my Freetrade account whereas a bank transfer from my Barclays app using the old method (with reference, sort code and account number) took me 5 secs.
Monzo also use TrueLayer for easy bank transfer and it only takes a few seconds. For new customers I’m not sure if they would be happy with 2-4 hours especially when they could use the old method to get the funds within a minute.
Is easy bank transfer going to be optimised; if not, is it worth still displaying the old option for people who want their funds in their account a bit faster?
Using either the old manual bank transfer or the new Open Banking integration won’t make a difference in how quickly your deposit is processed yet. All it really does (okay, slightly oversimplified) is pre-fill the correct bank details and reference at this point.
The primary benefit at this point is a smoother experience and making the process clearer - we’ve already noticed a very significant reduction in the number of deposits missing a reference.
This also has a knock-on effect as our Cops & Bops teams get freed up from dealing with unallocated deposits.
We do have further work planned (I don’t think I can share any details or ETA yet I’m afraid) which relies on the open banking integration and should see a significant speed up processing received bank transfers.