It’s quite disappointing to hear the news about Freetrade pulling out of Sweden, especially when teased about EU expansion since 2018. So many resources interested going to waste.
It will be very hard to raise a round this year - good thing you’re EBITDA positive for now.
Also, a web version? Like why? It’s not just creating it, now you have a continuous liability for any updates. Monzo doesn’t need a website with 10mil users. So you create something that pleases 3-5% of users? Would love to see some stats on web churn rate. I bet 90% of people opened it once and never again.
Better fix the recurring investment flow and bring back weekly newsletters, those were fire.
When I left FT, I went with a provider with a web version, it’s practically all I use. No web version is a deal-breaker as far as I’m concerned and I’m sure I’m not the only one.
I agree with you about the newsletter though, I used to read them when they were sent by email but stopped when they became app only. I use my mobile phone out of necessity but no more than I have to.
Thanks for your comments and I appreciate the candour
We’re in the strongest position as a company that we’ve ever been in. And the UK market is a huge opportunity for us. It was the right decision for us to focus on the UK at this juncture.
This is also where web comes in. It’s long been the most highly requested feature amongst the community and it always comfortably ranks highest in any research we’ve done.
When it comes to managing your life savings, people appreciate the flexibility and ease of the app, but they also want the ability to sit down and dedicate some focused time to research and monitor their investments.
I won’t get into this more as we’ve got an investor update dropping in September and @Viktor will cover this in more depth.
I’m disappointed that Freetrade is pulling out of the EEA. As companies like N26 have shown, it is possible to address practically the whole EEA market - and particularly the euro area - with only a limited amount of country-specific customization (which you can then add in later). Freetrade seemed to instead be spending a lot of cycles customizing every last detail for Sweden, which no doubt consumed a lot of resources. I hope Freetrade might come back to the EEA in due course, this time using the N26 playbook.
That said, if the focus is the UK market, why can we still not pay our monthly subscription fee by direct debit?
I 100% support the existence of the web version. Three things put me off using it currently:
Auth is more hassle than with the mobile app. The web version needs to support passkey. (Even this forum supports passkey.)
Lack of features. I want to be able to do everything in the web version, including things that you don’t do very often like updating the funding source for your monthly subscription fee (or even checking what the funding source is). If I don’t feel confident that the web version will allow me to do an arbitrary task I might have, I won’t rush to use it over the mobile app.
Different layout to mobile app. Things are just laid out differently, which makes it a pain to use if you’re very used to the mobile app.
The number 1 feature I’d like to see Freetrade offer (more than a web version) is auto rebalancing. Using recurring orders to get somewhere close to this feels like a cumbersome hack and in any case it only gets you so far. I want to be able to deposit some new funds in my account and have them automatically go to the right places, taking account of my existing investments. (Indeed, that could be a compromise v1 - no selling of existing investments, but take account of them when making new purchases.)
Any feature in this area also needs to allow specification of decimals in allocation percentages. It might look good on a mock-up to only allow whole number percentages, but this is not the real world.
