Do you have plans to have instant bank transfers? Waiting 2-4 hours is very annoying and it will lose you many customers. What is so difficult about bringing this about?
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I believe it’s been mentioned a few times that once the Investing platform goes live, that’s when it will become more automated
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Hey Brian, the main reason for it is the cost of faster payments. Whilst other brokers could amortise quicker top-ups with higher fees, it may take longer for Freetrade to support that.
There is an idea to top up instantly for a fee which may be of interest to you.
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I use Google Pay. It’s very straight forward and much easier than a bank transfer
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I have reached my £1000 limit on Apple Pay so I have to use bank transfer
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This is why I moved back to AJ Bell, I’m taking the fee on the chin for most of my trades but I make up in being able to make trades near instantly.
Will be back once deposits are much faster.
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Hey Brian, this is not far out. When we roll out the Investment Platform, it will enable us to consider Faster Payments.
In the meantime, we are looking at the usage of Apple Pay and Google Pay during this current ‘£1,000 / lifetime’ testing phase, before we decide on the next steps. 
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What is the rationale behind the £1,000 lifetime for Apple/Google Pay? Does it cost you guys more to process those payments? I don’t understand how it works, so curious to know.
Exactly that, bank transfers are much cheaper. So, as a test, we’ve started with £1,000 to be able to get data on the usage before we make any further decisions.
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I am sick of hearing about the Investor Platform,fixing all the worlds problems and yet no one from Freetrade has ever been able to say when it will be functional to the nearest month. “It will be SOON”??
Makes perfect sense - thanks! I can’t wait for the Investment Platform to be released. I’m just glad you guys are spending time and effort into releasing a great product rather than just doing it willy nilly.
Within the team, we have a ban on the word “soon”, so I doubt anyone said that? DM me though, we’d love to improve any comms if we did say that, as the word itself doesn’t mean anything, and sets everyone involved up for disappointment. We also tend to talk timelines when we can guarantee them.
The Investment Platform is not far out. It’s a complex product, but we’ll be able to share a few of the milestones, and the migration timeline.
But we are not waiting on the platform to make progress! A couple of things that are happening right now:
- More stocks
We have an internal drive to add up to a thousand stocks prior to the platform roll-out. We don’t know yet how many are possible, but we’re very conscious that more stocks are a top request. Please get your votes in here: Stock Requests 📈 - Freetrade Community - Free shares
You and the friends you refer get a free stock from a poll of stocks worth ~£2.5 - £200. We’ve been testing this feature, and it’s extremely popular. We should be able to roll out the real share reveals in the next two weeks or so: MEGATHREAD: Free Share updates and feedback 🎟 - #500 by Drew - Radically improved discovery tab and insights.
We’re doing this iteratively, with the help of the community. Current testing: Sectors in Discover 🧱 🚌 💊
And a lot more. For quicker transfers specifically, as soon as you link your bank account, it’s a relatively fast process. I normally transfer during the weekend (which is when I get to it, really), and the funds are on my account around the time the markets open. But we’re looking into how to improve this with quick wins even prior the platform rollout.
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Thanks for correcting me for using the word soon and for once again not being able to answer even within 1 month WHEN the investor platform will be functional. What if I put £500 in at the weekend and then invest it at 0830 on the Monday and I want to invest immediately as the share price has dropped or for whatever reason,I have to wait between 2-4 hours. Your not on!
I personally don’t see this as a massive issue. Most of the time, waiting for a couple of hours for your funds to come through won’t make that much of a difference, unless you’re trying to ride some sort of a kneejerk reaction to a market change (and arguably that is quite a gamble to blindly jump on a trend) . Yes, it would be a nice thing to have, but I’d rather have more stock options and things such as the improvements to the Discover section first 
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In software development it’s difficult to drop a “go live” date within a month, especially for large projects. As an example, video games tend to have very early announcements when some game will be released, and most of the time that ends up being a half-baked product that then needs multiple rounds of improvement.
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You are right,it is better to get the product as good as possible before release. I just feel that for every query they roll out theInvestor Platform” speil as if it’s going to fix everything ie: 1000’s more stocks,faster payment transfers etc.
What would you prefer them to say?
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Slightly off topic - but can you confirm if the £2.50 starting point is correct? I thought the minimum was originally £3, but was then scrapped when you raised the maximum to £200 from £80?
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I mean it is quite a big deal. For example, Acacia Mining shares rose the other day at market open by 18% based upon the news of a buy out offer at 8:21am. Luckily I had funds in my account to profit from the news but if I had not, I would not been able to trade on that information.
Even instant bank transfers presumably wouldn’t have been fast enough. If you might need to trade very quickly, keep a load of cash in the account ready to deploy.
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