If it isnāt too late, a quick follow-up: could you talk a little about how you structure your product teams? From your answers it seems like youāre setting up specialist units to address particular problems, or is it more dynamic than that?
Weāre heads down working hard on this right now - itās a key objective for the team. Enabling European stock trading will be a major milestone on the way to launching in Sweden, so look out for news on that in the weeks to come.
We want to make our launch a success, and that means understanding the nuances of the local market, such as how Swedish folk make digital payments. Itās not always the same as the UK. So it takes a little time to adapt the product, but will pay off in the long run.
Thanks for the feedback. We donāt have plans to change the portfolio graph currently, but itās great to hear your thoughts on it. It is designed to represent the total value of your portfolio including your cash over time, rather than only investment performance.
We also show time-weighted rate of return on the Insights tab which shows your investment performance versus an All-World ETF.
Similar to the JISA question asked earlier, Lifetime ISAs are on the roadmap, and Iād love to be able to add these soon. As you know, we have a difficult job of prioritising where we focus our time, but are discussing Lifetime and Junior ISAs regularly.
Itās an interesting suggestion and discussion. I donāt have any news to share this time. We do of course monitor the forum very closely for anything that stretches beyond healthy discussion.
Weāve been working hard this year on both big features and incremental improvements.
Hopefully youāve enjoyed improvements like SIPPs, live prices and instant deposits. These were all widely requested.
Alongside this, weāre working on our Swedish launch, and, as mentioned above, a key milestone will be enabling trading of European stocks for all customers. So look forward to that very soon.
And, as we grow, thereāll be much more to come in 2022.
@Viktor is a generous guy, he letās Product have a little of the loose change from his marketing budget
In all seriousness, weāre growing all aspects of Freetrade and investing into the product and our technology. You only need to check out our careers page to see how weāre expanding the whole team.
Itās a great question. Weāre building a sustainable, robust business and technology platform rather than focusing on a thin veneer sitting on somebody elseās tech. Itās a long-term play, but itās time well spent.
Trailing stop losses are definitely a feature Iād love to include in future. Theyāre not offered by our trading partners currently unfortunately, but as we improve our trading features this is something weāll look at.
It has to be prioritisation - there are so many things Iād love to do, and I know everyone here would love for us to do. The really difficult job (aside from facing an AMA) is choosing which to do first, as I always know that decision will disappoint someone.
So my aim is to make my job easier by building a team that can take on as many of these things as possible, meaning I have to make fewer difficult decisions!
Bit late with the question @Duncan so no time for painful Rolling Stones puns.
Once the āhard workā of building the platform for EU stocks is complete how much work is required to roll this out to Latin America, Asia & to replace partners in the US?
Not the most imaginative answer Iām afraid, but I always think one of the biggest problems we need to solve for users is what to invest in next - how to discover the next best opportunity. Everybody needs to solve this problem somehow whether theyāre experienced or new to investing, so our job is to make it easier (without providing advice, of course!)
So on that level, something like Spotify has iterated over and over with their discovery features to help its users sift through millions of tracks and find something new and relevant for them. If they donāt do this well, people jump to the next streaming service. I think we can learn from this and help customers find the gems amongst the thousands of stocks on Freetrade.
One thing Iāve learned over 15 years working in product roles is that youāll always have someone who doesnāt like the way your product works or is designed. Our job is to make our products solve as many problems for customers as possible in a better way than theyāre solving it already. But different people have different views and challenges with investing, so one product rarely works for everyone.
So, once weāre armed with that knowledge and sufficiently thick-skinned, the easiest trick in our bag is talking to customers as frequently as possible. This way we really understand why they use our product, why they do (or donāt) invest, what role Freetrade plays for them in their unique context. Really understanding this makes designing products a whole lot easier than if we just used our best guess or personal views. But sometimes people will still they they donāt like it
Good question. I canāt give you any dates for employer contributions to SIPPs. But I definitely recognise the pension industry today is broken. We want to fix it by giving everyone a better way to save for their retirement, rather than being invested into a choice of two or three funds that charge high fees and deliver average performance. Rest assured, this is on the roadmap for growing the Freetrade SIPP.
Of course. I recognise how important withdrawals (and deposits) are - people want to feel in control of their money at all times. Weāve made improvements to both throughout the year, but Iād still like to cut the time it takes for a withdrawal.
We donāt control settlement times unfortunately, so we make the money available in your account to withdraw as soon as weāre told it has settled (and sooner, if you want to that money trade again).
Weāre looking at how we can reduce the time to receive the money once you hit withdraw - weāre in the hands of the banks at this point, and rely on the speed of their processesā¦ But theyāre gradually improving their tech, so Iāll be first in line to test it out!