You can review your decision. It was always smooth for me personally, but I think @HannahCrowdcube might have some more guidance on this.
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The first 24 hours is the exclusive period.
We aren’t distinguishing between existing investors and community members (although technically it does constitute the period during which A shareholders can exercise their pre-emption if they want).
As long as you are suitably engaged on Wednesday afternoon and into the evening I’m sure you’ll be fine!
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Hi Vlad, @Cgwinning is completely correct! Once a pitch has been closed to further funding we will send all investors an email providing seven working days to review the investment opportunity and read the Articles of Association. After this period has expired we aim to collect payments from all investors within 2-3 working days.
You can cancel your investment any time while the pitch is live. If the investment is under £2,000, you can go to the ‘Portfolio’ section of your account and click on ‘View all transactions’. You can then choose to ‘Cancel’ your investment. If the investment is over £2,000, please email support@crowdcube.com. In the email please confirm the email address attached to your Crowdcube account, the name of the pitch, and the amount you wish to cancel or reduce. A member of our team will then process this for you, and email you a confirmation of the cancellation.
We experience a fair few issues with banks blocking transactions because they think they’re fraudulent. In these cases we will contact the investor to notify them of this issue, and advise that they contact their bank. Once the payment has been unblocked we can retake it. Please be assured your investment will not be cancelled until we have worked all possible solutions to the issue.
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Thanks Hannah, that is incredibly helpful and reassuring. The main part for me is that I have a chance to reattempt the transaction if it is rejected.
@Viktor, thanks for signposting to the right person, @Cgwinning, thank you for sharing your own experience, very much appreciated!
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the only time I’ve had something blocked is when I made multiple investments of the same amount into the same company - I think it was £200*2, and the bank stopped the second one since it seemed fraudelent - quick text message to say it’s okay, an email response to Crowdcube and everything was fine.
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Your £2 example with Halifax is based on a monthly purchase, rather than ad-hoc. If you compare delayed purchases, Freetrade are free, so they’d win?
Also, assuming you made 12 trades a year (1 per month), even on your deferred-purchase through Halifax, the total cost for Halifax would be £36.50 and Freetrade would be £36. Small victory, sure, but if you trade more often then the gap widens.
With Halifax, when you sell a position it will be £12.50 per position sold (excluding offer rates) but Freetrade don’t mention costs to sell positions. Given the extra costs on both sides for most investment brokers, Freetrades model is more attractive than you make out.
Please correct me if I’m wrong though.
Edit: Cheers @Viktor for clarifying.
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What could be more attractive than free trades?
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As a basic trade, selling is free, of course.
(“Trade” means both buying and selling here: https://freetrade.io/pricing/)
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In our opinion, we are highly competitive, disruptive and transparent (no surprise fees) when you look at the all in cost of trading (although I would like to think £1 per instant trade is pretty competitive as a standalone option!).
We have not sought to be cheaper than every competitor on every element of their fee schedule, but are focused on driving down the total cost of investing. This does mean that you can find an element of a brokers fee schedule that is lower than ours, however most brokers charge for services we don’t, e.g. live pricing, custody fees, exchange access etc
To clarify, we are not charging a 0.5% commission - we are saying that you will get the interbank rate+0.5%. The rates you’ve quoted are the amount that the other brokers charge on top of the rate they get. The two are not straightforward to compare, as they do not typically state the benchmark they use. We felt it was important to be transparent on the FX rate you get against a recognised benchmark.
@Louis the cost to sell is the same as the cost to buy, we don’t differentiate, so no hidden charges to exit positions ( https://freetrade.io/pricing/)!
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I wish I had the £1000 and invested it in the other round. Definitely won’t be able to afford the reward now it’s £5000. Well done to everyone that got it the first time round.
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The reward itself is only a drop in the ocean. Even originally it would have recouped itself in 10 years.
Think of Freetrade as a company having an exploding growth potential. Even £100-£1000 will multiply if the Team will make it right.
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i think my point in that example is, will people snub a trusted broker to trade with an unknown just to save £2 a trade (degiro is less than £2 for instant uk trades btw)? and if you have an account with iweb would you pay £36 a year for an isa with freetreade? i have an account at iweb and i can get my isa allowance filled for just £5 a year and that includes access to funds i wouldnt get on freetrade plus i can make several trades a year and it will still be cheaper than freetrade.
if you were asking me personally as a potential customer, actual free trades and not 0.5% in 0.5% out. the uk market is quite limiting for me and you can see in this table on fineco just how expensive these FX markups can get for overseas trading Trading solutions & brokerage services online | Fineco
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all those quotes from ib, degiro and fineco are interbank rates but it makes little difference as they all let you trade in $/€ anyway and i understand freetrade accounts will be restricted to £? im not saying you should race to the bottom, you wouldnt make for a very good investment if you did, just that youre a poor option for overseas shares.
edit: actually fineco are about a 0.2% hidden markup on interbank rates after digging a little deeper.
I don’t think we can be 100% sure that people will do this yet - I expect that people won’t mind using an FCA regulated provider (Freetrade) but we’ll soon find out…
Freetrade isn’t just about offering competitive pricing, they’re also offering far better user experience & service, transparency, strong ethics, engagement (this community) etc. which are the same things that’ve helped propel Monzo to their hockey stick growth.
And we’ve already seen some encouraging signs of demand with over 30k users signing up to their waiting list as a result.
By making trading shares more accessible than ever before, they will hopefully attract a significant portion of the untapped market of people who have never invested in shares before, despite the fact that investing in the stock market has recently offered high returns. I expect they’ll share more details about this sort of thing in their pitch deck for their next round of crowdfunding.
Ultimately, I’d recommend reading through their blog posts to get a really good sense of how they’re approaching this. If you believe that they’re approaching this the right way then that’s the best way to predict whether they’ll be successful, in my experience.
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The US peer to Freetrade, called Robinhood, gave a funding update yesterday (10th May):
- Raised $363m
- $5.6bn valuation
- Have over 3m registered accounts
- That’s a valuation of $2,000 an account
You can read their press release here.
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Alex is right in that we’re not just implementing disruptive pricing but also disruptive transparency, UX and customer service
But specifically re pricing, as Rob said before, the thing is pricing is an overall proposition.
There’s commission, FX, account fees, transfers etc
We’re very competitive on every point and the very cheapest (i.e. free) on many but you might find a cheaper data point at some broker if you look at each one in isolation.
Degiro are low on fx but they don’t have ISAs and they charge commission.
iWeb have no year-to-year ISA fee but charge hefty commissions and 1.5% FX
You can’t bundle together the absolute best price point of every broker and claim that makes them a better deal. That’s not on the market! If it were, you’d be pointing to a single broker. Why aren’t you asking iWeb to match Degiro’s FX?
You’re not just trying to compare apples and oranges, you’re saying an apple should combine the best qualities of the entire fruit bowl!
We designed our pricing model to be the best deal and the least restrictive for most people’s overall investing behaviour and use cases. We’re also transparent and up-front.
If it’s not right for you, that’s totally cool.
By the way, I really hope you don’t feel like we’re shouting down your comments. We like people scrutinising us - it enhances open debate and transparency.
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Hi Hannah, cheers for clarifying the transaction process post-pledge. This will be my first Crowdfund investment so I’m wondering which bank account of the 3 I have that you’ve seen less issues with blocking transactions:
- RBS
- Monzo
- Revolut
Equally if any member of this community has used or tried using any of these 3 & incurred an issue can you give me a heads up? I was planning on using Revolut but I’m more inclined to use my RBS account now 
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@Diversify, I’ve funded Crowdcube investments using Monzo debit and Amex charge and never had any issues.
I’ve have had transactions blocked by HSBC when using my debit card to fund my dealing accounts when I was unable to make a bank transfer.
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