More hands doesnāt necessarily mean things get done quicker.
The reality is that good developed takes time - weād all love to wake up tomorrow to a mature product but the reality is FT is building a scalable and reliable product.
Honesty I get where youāre coming from but on the other hand they have no requirement to give you any significant detail on what theyāre working on, nor do they have to give deadlines. As much as weād all like to be in the product meetings itās often more detrimental then beneficial.
Is it though? Or are people just obsessed with instant gratification?
I like the faster payments in but theyāre not a major requirement for planned long term investing. Theyāre more commonly wanted by people making snap emotional decisions.
But thatās going off topic.
I get it, Iād love a more detailed roadmap, but Iāve also seen how those roadmaps can ruin a company. Maybe freetrade should just get on with what they want to get on with and keep doing what theyāre doing? Theyāve a bunch of stuff in the works.
I think the mantra of āMove Fast and Break Thingsā is terrible, especially for a regulated financial company.
Weāve seen how angry people get when they forget to enter their reference code - imagine the complaints if Freetrade actually did lose customers money or holdings.
Iād much rather wait for a sustainable and robust system. Iām sure there is a stack of legalese to wade through with fractional ownership.
Isnāt it likely the case that Freetrade have some really big plans for this year and weāre likely keen to get them out straight/soon after Sipps but then all the WSB madness happened which has made them have to modify their timelines slightly. I mean, if people are on a waitlist for signing up, or still waiting for messages about sorting initial depositsC then launching auto-invest and probably with it UK fractionals, is probably something that needs to wait a few weeks at least until they have caught up with the unexpected backlog A which clearly they are working mega hard to do.
I know your heart is in the right place Brian, you show that all the time, but I have to agree that tone here is important, and also everything you mentioned will be high on Freetradeās priority list. They know exactly what we all want, they will be going flat out to get there and are well aware of the competition being hot on their heals trying to get ahead. Luckily Freetrade have taken the opinion that it is worth doing things right and this seems to be a good way of doing things.
On Ireland, etcā¦ it would seem that potentially the focus has shifter to being Sweden first as their EU base - largely down to the conclusion of certain Brexit complications which were partially up in the air until recently. But who knows, maybe we will have several countries launch together. Great fun to speculate for sure, but Iāll trust that they are tackling their growth and product development efficiently. We mustnāt underestimate the difficulty in scaling from 100k to where we are now either. We could be at 1 mil users in anywhere from 4-12 months and the systems need to be able to handle this demand smoothly, or we know how an angry mob of newb stock app users can be (see 2 weeks ago on most platforms lol).
I donāt doubt weād have already seen some big new stuff if WSB/GME hadnāt happened a few weeks ago but it did. Freetrade have to react to that and make sure prioritising new user experience over new feature release in the short term. As has been mentioned above - when youāre a startup, with fine margins during rapid growth, you canāt prioritise everything at once either and thus plotting the correct course is crucial. I love the roadmaps, but they were a honey and privilege, not a right, and Iām sure weāll be getting more of that going forward in the āthings we are working on, etcā¦ā. This year is going to be a huge one for Freetrade and one weāre all excited to be a small part of!
To rephrase Brian a bit it is easy to recommend the app right now to potential customers with relatively small portfolios and hard to convince people with large portfolios to consider moving.
In private discussions with other founding members we are bit worried about some of the strong players moving in the UK while targeting investors with high net worth
SIPPs are a game changer for FT as for future investing rounds being able to show total AUM is going to make a big difference in attracting investors.
Having users is great but FT has to move up the AUM value pool and start getting those with bigger pots to move across.
The more AUM, the more investors FT will be able to get, and this network effect will allow more features to be added.
Having some kind of auto invest feature is going to be really key in my opinion. Some people will have moved their SIPPs across but will may not want to manually add to it each month as it can be a hassle compared to having it done via DD like HL can do. So hopefully this will come in 2021, which will further increase AUM.
The problem with detailed roadmaps is that they almost never get delivered upon. Monzo used to publish a detailed roadmap but just stopped suddenly, and even in bigger companies Iāve worked in roadmaps are always caveated as at best a guide or aspiration and not a strict timeframe.
I can imagine the whole Gamestop situation has led to a realignment of priorities in the short term. But from what Iāve seen of FT itās clear they have a long term plan theyāre working towards.
I actually donāt follow IPOs too much, as I mentioned it was a list off the top of my head, but I do remember an IPO calendar launching, thereās categories for them in Plus now, and it seems every ābigā IPO is now available on the day of launch, much faster than it was before? It certainly seems to me like recent IPOs have become available very quickly and with great comms around them too.
Thanks Sergey. Sadly I wasnāt invested early enough (or big enough sums later on) to be in that lofty founding members group.
I agree about that totally - it is an increasingly crowded space, and the bigger portfolios are disproportionately valuable prizes for sure. Freetrade definitely seems to be an easier sell to newer, smaller amount investors at the moment. They can only move at a certain pace though when you are smaller and likely loss making still, and surely Sipps is a good first step in the right direction regarding attractiveness for larger net worth clients?
Also, in terms of high net worth. It may prove to be very tricky to get many of these potential customers (who are likely to be in general - older and more reluctant to switch once setup with a broker for many years, etcā¦) to move and perhaps Freetrade are actively targeting the younger generation (average age 31 on the app, etcā¦), hoping that they win with larger base that sticks with them and grow their wealth over a long time frame as an alternative strategy to directly targeting those larger portfolios so aggressively. Just putting out that they may be intentionally aiming at a certain slice of the potential user base built on large numbers that hopefully develop brand loyalty and grow in value substantially, rather than simply aiming at every part of the whole (not saying I agree with that, just thinking out loud).
Genuine question - what kind of things do you think would help on this front that they could do relatively quickly? I do think it is worth going after the big whales hard though - as like you say a relatively small number can make a big big difference to AUM - as HL typify. Iād be interested to hear what changes/suggested solutions have been put forward to address this worry.
It would be so great if Freetrade could find a way to disrupt on the live-pricing front somehow but very difficult when it is so expensive.
Price alerts and auto-invest I hope come very soon as they are crucial and like you say, are pretty much a must-have going forward.
The desktop/web interface is interesting as it seemed for a long time like it was very low priority for Freetrade and Iām not sure it is at the absolute top of their lists still, but I think theyāve got the message that is is important now. I guess its much trickier to do when youāve built the product as app-only to start with.
One other point for the long term which hasnāt been mentioned yet - the ability to manage multiple portfolios for a family via one account. I manage my wifeās HL SIPP for instance. Iām sure in some families there is one person managing multiple ISAās, but Iām sure not an easy thing to implement.
Is there any update on fractional ETFās and UK shares?
Iām sure it was on the roadmap at some point, I remember seeing the union jack emoji (for those of you that remember the roadmap when it was emoji heavy).
It doesnāt seem to be on their current āThings weāre working onā list.
Well that is ehat they said above.
Maybe they are focusing on all these stock launches.
As they will get more customers more people will ask for this and will happen.