Could you provide a source to back up the Monzo failing in the US comment other than Revolutās CEO trolling them because he has stacks of cash raised pre-covid and they have none?
My understanding is that Monzo US is in stealth mode waiting on a full US bank charter for which they began the application process over a year ago and is estimated to arrive in late 2021 to mid 2022. At that time they will likely do a large fundraise with their strong US investor base and along with their CEO who lives and works in the US they will then look to launch fully in the US. Not sure how that is failing international expansion?
Anyway, back on topicā¦ sorry everyoneā¦ yes Freetrade has lots of customers!
That office was servicing the UK accounts out of hours and nothing to do with their US expansion.
Within the article āThe U.S. outpost employs 165 customer support staff, who will now lose their jobs, and provided overnight customer support to U.K. customers, a much loved feature of the bankā
Their US aspirations are still in Alpha stage and awaiting license developments and major funding round in 2021 or 2022.
If the recent user growth trend is maintained we will already be above 290K.
For goodness sake can someone please just open the phone book (does such a thing even exist anymore ) and randomly call someone and walk them through how to get set up on FT.
Does anyone knows how much assets under administration does FT have ?
FWIW, UK personal investigating market is massive. HL had Ā£100B under administration, the market is ripe for other players to bite into their market share imo.
Thanks. So plenty of scope to eat into HLās market share here in the UK.
I think there is quite a bit of inertia for moving ISA and SIPP accounts from HL and from my experience the relationship with a broker is quite sticky. Once you move your SIPP or ISA, you tend to stay for a while with that broker.
One of the barriers of moving from HL is the fact that employees who work in investment banks are subject to very strict Personal Account Dealing, which means that they need to use an broker from a small list of brokers who are set up with contract note reporting with the employer. I checked and only HL and another 1-2 brokers were set up with my employer, so cannot move my SIPP.
Surely if Freetrade had reached Ā£1bn AUM they would of announced it on here or on twitter.Hoping that they have past it by now.Just that I havenāt seen anything announced.
It was discussed briefly in the above thread. Others pointed out that the 4k average might not include 0 balance accounts so wonāt be exactly accurate but I would hazard a guess that more money has come in since the 3% announcement and we know user numbers are up the high 200ās now so not completely implausible.
Also, come to think of it, in another article recently there was a mention of freetrades transaction exceeding Ā£1bn in September, which again I could see being a piece that might have warranted a bigger announcement too.
Edit. Hereās the article. It was discussed briefly at the same time as the launch for 3%. All if this is found in the āfreetrade in the newsā thread.
This is a super important point for those working in financial services bound by rightly strict rules on personal account dealing. My firmās current policy is particularly fraught with complexity and while our compliance team is excellent, it really is a headache and frankly is a barrier.
It would actually be super interesting to understand Freetradeās client base by the sectors/industries they work in.
If they can facilitate the auto broker feed for contract notes then I think it works as a bit of indirect marketing as they are likely to be listed in the companyās PAD policies compliance guidance in the group of approved brokers
IMO HL have a very juicy client base, picked up from around 2005 onwards, as the popularity of equity funds and self investing grew among the middle class. They were the original DYI platform and at the time they also ran promotions of giving people cash back when they brought pensions to their platform.
The 100B was built over many years as they have added organically pensions that people transferred from old employers and consolidated. On the Stocks and Share ISA side they benefited from a lot of press coverage, as they were the only decent platform with a flexible and easy to use web application.
The problem for FT is how to target this demographic, as they donāt fall into the millennial category, they are most likely over 40 and probably slow to move due to inertia.
Or maybe, this is not even such a lucrative user set for FT as they are most likely to have tracker funds and wonāt trade single stocks, so they wonāt pay for the Plus membership and FX commission. Donāt know how much money do FT make from infrequent ETF transactions.
Regardless, weāre talking huge amounts of money vs. the current 4k portfolio size.
I kind of fit that demographic. I think I opened my HL account in about 2010 ish. At the time there werenāt that many options and they seemed the best. I found Freetradeās crowdfunding campaign after hearing about Robinhood and searching for something similar in the UK so I invested in R2
Iāve moved the whole lot to Freetrade now that all the stocks I had are available.
We could hit 300k users any day now, but almost certainly within the next two weeks! I wonder if an announcement might be combined with a Series B announcementā¦certainly hoping so.
) and randomly call someone and walk them through how to get set up on FT.