Speak of the devil and they shall appear 
Scm just popped up
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NatWest hasn’t!
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They’ve not specifically said what’s happened. I guess we’ll need to wait and see if we get a more detailed update. But the service is clearly degraded.
Hopefully it’s temporary, prompt payments was one of the benefits of freetrade
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The end of September seems to be a busy time for big companies paying dividends (it is for me anyway) so the delays are probably going to get worse in the short term I do hope the powers that be realise what a hot potato this is and use all available actions to get on top of the situation.
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There is no reasonable explanation.
On the topic of delayed dividends -
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I got mine this afternoon.
Just had mine too.
Yes, me too now thanks.
We’re sorry that you’ve experienced longer timeframes for some of your dividend payments recently. We’re aware that these are taking longer to process at the moment and we’re working to bring this back to our normal processing times as quickly as possible.
Two important things to clarify:
- For UK dividends we generally receive a dividend payment on pay date and process these either on the same or next day depending on the method of payment to us.
- For US dividends you can normally expect to receive these two days after pay date due to when we receive these from our US partner and the FX conversion required.
So what’s changed?
There have been two key things that have meant increased processing times recently:
- Operational capacity: Following some changes in the team, capacity has been temporarily reduced within our Corporate Actions team.
- Process change: Our FX conversion process for dividends has changed, causing some additional time to process these at this time.
How will we improve this?
We are working on a number of process and system improvements, including:
- Increasing team capacity through training and resource management.
- For US dividends, working to optimise this process to speed up payments.
- In addition to this, we are working with our Product team to make enhancements to our system that could help us process quicker.
While we can’t give exact timescale on these things, we are doing our best to get our service back to normal as quickly as possible.
Thanks for your patience in the meantime.
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So you sacked a load of people, then now trying to get others to ‘skillup’ and do that work? All whilst trashing the previous service.
And while trying for ‘investors’. Not a good look.
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Thanks Gemma, that is useful to know.
Will there always be some form of manual human work needed here or are you working towards a fully automated distribution payment system?
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Not good enough,£60 a year totally unjustified,212 will be happy come april trust me.
Every department had to make difficult decisions are headcount and I’d imagine these decisions weren’t easy. Freetrade didn’t act unilaterally this week Meta announced a 10% reduction in headcount.
@Dannyd - I’d almost guarantee this will be smoothed out long before April. That said when it comes to wealth building you should use whichever provider you feel supports you in achieving financial goals. If that’s not Freetrade you should be moving to a different platform.
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Yuno I’m more interested why people making such a Fuzz over the Dividend - In sure a few days delay nor going to kill anyone
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Hello,
OK, I will try to explain.
When you don’t get the dividend on time, it’s an opportunity cost. I can’t exactly remember the details but I have been in the situation where I’ve been expecting a £30 or so dividend and have wanted to buy a stock that was going cheap that day but couldn’t because the dividend was about two days late. Same applies if it is the day before the ex-dividend date on the stock and your dividend that was due two days ago still hasn’t arrived, you miss out on the opportunity to accrue even more dividends since you can’t buy that stock before it expires. Even if you don’t find anything you want to buy, you’re still missing out on accruing interest in your account, ok it’s not much, but every little adds up. I don’t expect the dividend to be there that exact minute or even the same day, but if it’s a UK stock, I certainly don’t expect it to be delivered more than 24 hours later.
Now I hope other forum members would back me up when I say that I’m generally very positive about FreeTrade, I love how they offer access to the market at such a cheap price (and yes, £5 per month is cheap for such a good package!). I find them very friendly when I contact support and generally everything in the app is easy and works very well. Yes there are some really annoying niggles like some inaccurate average stock purchase price but I’ve got round that by logging everything in Excel as well. So generally, I’m not wanting to move away from FT.
However, the delay in dividend payment is a red line for me. I’m already angry at having missed certain opportunities and I will not be doing this imminently as I hope FT will fix this issue in the near future, but I will be looking around for alternatives if this problem continues indefinitely!
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Totally agree could not have put it better than that 
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It wasn’t the delay that was necessarily the issue for me. It was the degradation of service with no information on cause. Which Gemma has now provided more info on what’s happened.
Now we know what’s causing the issue and why more clearly and what their next steps are to bring it back to proper service.
Worth noting that it’s not just a few days either. And without more info (and with tbh) we now need to keep more careful track of dividends to make sure we know if it’s a delay or if they haven’t been paid
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I can see your point on this , i have noticed some of my dividend payment have come though 2 to 3 day later than its expected. And a buying opportunity comes on that dividend payment day.
As the dividend i receive is at a small amount at the moment its not a big issue for me making reinventing opportunity’s the dividend back into my holdings.
But as my holdings grows and dividend payments increases to the point were the dividend payment could make a big difference/ good opportunity on that day would be great if the payments would be payed on the payment date.
But like all the best investors in the world say we carnt time the market.
Its unfortunate that its a good buying opportunity on dividend payments date and carnt buy more.
Its good that the issue has been identified and looked at by FT team and there looking to sort this issue out. And in the future less likely this issue will happen.
Peace all
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Why do you wait till getting the dividend to buy some other opportunity?
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