£36.20 for Gladstone Capital, and in the morning too 
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All my dividends over the past 3 months have been coming around a week after the pay date. The few years before that they would only be delayed by 1 or 2 working days. Has anyone else noticed the deterioration?
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Maybe a sign of FT growing (more customers dividends to process) and keeping costs down (not increasing processing staff accordingly).
Probably a positive sign…managed growth.
Im sure if we all paid double the subscription they could process your dividends a little quicker…but that wouldn’t necessarily be a positive.
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US dividends should be faster. And I think they said they were going to work on a better process for non US ones
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I always find that if the dividends are higher value they always take longer, I suspect the idea is the longer they take on the bigger dividends the more interest they earn on the money and less interest they pay us on having it in our account.
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Do you have proof of this?
I’ve seen no such correlation myself between my large or small dividends. I probably get around a dozen divis a month on average for comparison.
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So for clarification, you’re claiming that Freetrade deliberately delay and withhold dividend payments to customers for their own financial gain? Based on …?
I can only go my my experience which is when there is small dividend payment it turns up very quickly and when the payment is a larger payment it always seems to take longer to pay.
And so yes they do earn more money on it because they will get interest as soon as the money hits their account and they don’t pay us interest until it hits our account so there is the delay in between where they are making money off our dividend payments.
The bit that i find annoying is dividend payments are always an issue for freetrade and every time they say they are going to improve it, yet they don’t, and if its not their goal to make money from it then there is no reason why they can’t pay the interest from the dividend payment date rather than based on when they put it in our account.
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The reason for delays are manifold. One of them is that some dividends are paid by cheque. Another is the sheer number of transactions. Imagine how many individual dividend shares are owned on here, and then how many calculations it takes to attribute those individual shares to us, then calculate withholding tax - all without making any mistakes and probably double checking that we have got we should.
You could contact FreeTrade and ask them why dividend payments are delayed, or search the forum. They are quite open (as long as we don’t go feet first accusing them of fraud) and will explain the issues to you.
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I haven’t accused anyone of fraud at all, so please so not read things into what I have said.
Nothing that they do is fraudulent in any way, but like many people we would like to have freetrade deliver on what they promise and improve dividend payments and all I have suggested is that with the extra money they make on the deposits they could pay us interest from the dividend payment date rather than when they get the money to our account that way we don’t lose out again there is nothing wrong with making a suggestions for our benefit.
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For the past few months all my US dividends with one exception have been paid next day. nice improvement here.
Sadly not the case for Canadian divs.
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Not in so many words, however if FreeTrade did what you suspect that they do, I think that you would find that they would be committing fraud in the eyes of the law. One is not required to say the word fraud to suggest that someone is committing it.
My suggestion to you was to ask them the question as to why dividends are delayed, rather than accusing them of something that you suspect based on your own biases.
I occasionally see people on the forum complaining about what bad experience they have with FreeTrade customer services and suspect that it is because they make assumptions about what is happening, contact support with all guns blazing and then wonder why they don’t get the support that other people receive.
The delay in receiving dividends is frustrating for many but FreeTrade are a startup, designing a system from the ground up while trying to maintain their share price for investors and value for their users. It is my understanding that the servers that calculate, distribute and notify us of dividends can not do this instantly and so there are delays in the processing. There are other issues but I this is what I was told by FreeTrade support.
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Nothing I have said suggest any fraudulent or slating them, possibly venting and suggesting improvements.
I have been with freetrade for a while and unlike some people I am a true supporter of freetrade for UK stocks (never trade US stocks as I can get cheaper FX deals elsewhere and equal or better service, which is shame as I would rather do both with freetrade unfortunately thats not an option)
See that is the part I do not understand I have asked people before on the issue on paying dividends and as I was told it shouldn’t be a difficult for this to be an automated process.
I.e one person said its just a case of inputting certain data i.e amount per share, date the share needs to be held and payment date and then it should automatically pay them on the payment date so thats why its surprising that its not yet implemented given the time saving it would achieve.
Except if they were doing what you suggested that they might be doing, it would be.
Take a look at the FCA Handbook here. A company MUST pay money due to a client as soon as possible. Client money MUST be segregated. Your post suggested that FT keep your dividends as it made them more money. That would be against the law and they could be prosecuted for it. Purposely acting against the law for financial gain is called fraud.
If i suggested that someone took my wallet out of my pocket so that they could spend my money without my knowledge, would I not be accusing them of theft?
Was the one person you asked a member of the Free Trade team? FT have explained the reason for the delays to me. Unfortunately every time I try to read my old messages the app crashes, so can not offer it word for word, however I did explain above. It is certainly not as simple as that one person suggested. If it was that simple, Free Trade would have implemented fixes as they have to operate in our best interests - I believe that they have changed systems in some cases to speed up dividend payments.
Interestingly this is not just a Free Trade issue. Other brokers have had issues at times with delayed dividend payments and that is due to it’s complexity. There are multiple agents involved in payments, not just the broker, so getting things running smoothly must be quite a challenge.
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Maybe paid by cheque that could be held up and then still has to clear before freetrade can pay out.
So not always in Freetrade hand but I’m sure it’s never sat not being paid out!
Is this not accusing? Your suspicions are based on zero facts.
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No this is me making an observation and a suggestion.
What really annoys me is that I have said northing wrong all I have said which is accurate and common sense.
Freetrade get paid money and are often slow at distributing the money to people and of course they make money its in a bank account and they make money from the day its deposited.
What I have accurately said is that often there are delays in depositing the money in to our account which is when we start earning interest so there is a period where they make money from that and as I said we should at least get the interest from the payment date which is of course the date they are earning interest on the money rather than the day they deposit it in our account so we get fair interest while waiting for the deposit to arrive.
So who pays for the interest when Freetrade don’t have the money from the company paying the dividend?
You say what you have said is accurate yet ‘suggest’ the bigger payments take longer, can you provide evidence of this?
What about when a dividend may be small for you but another user has 100 times more shares than you? Are you suggesting Freetrade pay you first but keeps the money for the user who is owed substantially more for a couple of days?
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I am not going to keep repeating myself because you obviously don’t agree with something i have said and thats your issue not mine.
my previous responses which make it clear it based on my experience and everything else is detailed in my previous replies.
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Hey @WayneSoton your dividend money goes into the nominee holding company, this means all dividends will come in a few tranches not all arriving at the same time due to bank clearing. Once they have all the money they’re expecting they can then distribute it. Some of this is automated and some not.
For clarity FT never have your money in ‘their account’ they’re not allowed. All client funds are ringfenced to stop them paying wages or rent with your money. They simply cannot earn interest on it by processing it slowly.
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