Donāt know about all the old banks, but for the ones I have accounts with (HSBC, Santander, Nationwide) I think the difference to the new bank apps is still vast. Do agree on customer service though. Prefer the old banks for this.
On the main topic of this thread, I think HLās app has been excellent ever since the current version replaced HL live in around 2017. This predated Freetradeās launch.
Wowee Ā£175million over 5 years,Last of the big spenders. What are they spending it on? They would need about half that amount just to develop an app and keep pace with Freetrade,who at last are starting to produce the goods!
And they also have a magnificent community forum 
Gut feeling. I canāt for the life of me understand how a company can do so well with so many complaints.
They have an app and as others have said it is a very good one.
They have 20m+ customers.
Of course some are unhappy.
20m is like 1/3 of the UK population. How can you possibly please everyone?
Generally they do extremely well on all customer satisfaction surveys and the app has the same score as Monzo on the app store.
Could the 212 limiting your order thing have come about due to the influx of sign ups. They back-end of IBRKR and maybe IBKR have set some limits for a while as a temporary thing.
Who knows. I got invited on 03/08/22 and joined the same day, also I suspect that they have essentially turbocharged their waitlist approval process to get everyone on the waitlist signed up by the end of September.
Sure itās speculation, and none of this can be provenā¦ But itās a form of speculation that has some possibility to be plausible.
My ignorance knows no bounds! They actually have 0.4 better rating than Freetrade which I canāt quite get my head round,Freetrade being a āFintech so to speak. But do you know what,it doesnāt surprise me!
HL share price up c7% today. Guessing theyāve had an analyst upgrade or two.
Today Abrdn the owner of Interactive investor announced its Half year results | abrdn. Abrdn presented an interim loss (quite a swing from H1 last year) for the group. This is not altogether surprising for a fund manager group with the on-going economic turbulence.
What might be of interest to avid readers of this forum topic is that embedded in the CEOās statement is commentary about Interactive investor:
ii has seen a 17% increase in revenue and 47% increase in adjusted operating profit on a full year 2021 run rate basis (excluding Share), while the cost/income ratio improved by 9 percentage points to 56%, highlighting iiās efficiency.
The financial performance is ahead of expectations and is
driven by three fundamentals - customer acquisition, subscription revenue growth and improved operating leverage.
What we can see is the shifting sands of brokerage in play - II is the main competitor of HL. And II has a compelling proposition for many different client types. It also has quite a few offers in place which makes it very attractive for people who are seeking what they perceive to be a robust and stable provider who has staying power.
Thatās my thought as well.
Abrdn has acquired a number of customers under the ii brand I think recently. Theyāre also in a few ways better than HL. Cheaper, flatter fees. They offer voting rights on foreign stock as well which is a nice plus.
Definitely a main competitor to HL, and probably freetrade once they get closer to feature parity
Totally agree with II being the main competitor to HL.
T212 and Freetrade are most direct competitors to each other at the other end of the spectrum.
Interactive Brokers I think will compete somewhere in the middle.
Speaking of ii, they just added real time prices to their app for LSE stocks
Fascinating article on Robinhood:
In a nutshell active users have fled the platform.
Part of Robinhoodās problem is demographic. The broker attracted younger customers who found themselves with cash to invest from their stimulus cheques.
āTraditional investors investing for retirement, theyāve pulled back but havenāt disappeared. Those lower income, less sophisticated customers are the ones that have just gone away,ā
Basically a bunch of first generation investors who were enticed by free trading and easy to use app have headed for the hills.
Yes, much of the wild swing in fortunes is down to Crypto taking a tumble.
Many brokers have benefited from rising interest rates: cash in client accounts - they can get get interest/investment income on this. But of course, as account balances are significantly lower at Robinhood compared to say Schwab ā¦ they get a lot less. To put it in perspective a rise of 0.25% means Robinhood can earn $40 million more in rev, whereas Schwab can earn $350-550 million.
Revenues were down for the Q YoY, whereas they were up for Interactive Broker and Charles Schwab.
The article also talks about morale deteriorating as staff leave. x % of jobs were made redundant and since then a further y % have left the company.
Did they leave? Or did they lose all their money on gambling on robinhood options trading and then leave when they had nothing left?
interesting move by ABRDN
trading 212 got my bank account verified and ready to withdraw my funds on the same day, freetrade Iām waiting 5 days for them to tell me everything is ok but it just might take other 3 to 5 days.
Yes, that is very frustrating tbh.
Iām allowed to deposit, so not for money laundering precautions this waiting time, just weird flex and 1900 customer service