Questions about app & Crowdraise

Crowdfunding Freetrade šŸ™
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Hi everyone.

Itā€™s lovely to see the team progressing with the app. It is a bit of a jump to get into another round without the app in hand yet and a video could only clear so many questions one of your investors would have.

So hereā€™s a couple of questions I had & would be quite grateful if as many could be answered as possible:

App UX

  1. How fast is it to get started & how do you deal with legal requirements such as KYC/W8-BEN. How much would it cost to onboard someone (roughly)

  2. Given iPhoneā€™s and Androids are moving to OLED screens will you have some kind of dark theme/mode?

  3. Are you able to proxy vote? (a long shot but it can be meaningful to our age & era)

  4. Is there a limit to the sign up age?

  5. For your pricing you list Fx costs, do you have Euro denominated accounts as well as Sterling?

  6. How do you deal with companies where there is less visibility, for the Icons you use in the app. I imagine this is hard work to maintain for a small team. Do you use turkers or some kind of crowdsourced process to acquire these?

  7. Will you have a web version?

  8. Will iOS and Android follow their respective native theme sets (Material design and a separate iOS style)

  9. Will there be such a thing as a demo account?

Other confusing things

  1. What is the difference between a Basic and ā€˜Instantā€™ trade?

  2. If UK shares are free to trade, this does exclude stamp duty?

Process

  1. How quick is a deposit processed & what options are available to make a deposit

  2. How long does it take to liquidate & withdraw funds

  3. Who will be allowed to sign up (Do they have to be UK, EU resident?)

  4. How do you deal with dividends, is it into Freetrade or the clientā€™s bank account & is there an option for re-investment

  5. With fractionalising, how does this work? Do you take on any inventory risk? If you do does this limit the number of shares/etfs available in fractionalised form?

  6. With fractionalising, are the shares held in the name of the client or someone else?

  7. Do you engage in ā€˜nettingā€™ with the fractionalised element (or anywhere)

  8. Are you able to bring in your shares from another broker?

  9. I dream of the ability to buy not ETFs but Berkshire shares in fractional amounts, how would the spread of these work, would they be the same as on the markets in the US (quite wide for such large denominations) or would they be thinner.

B2B

  1. If someone came to you with a wholesale type/B2B partnership where you offer an API or something to someone elseā€™s app/service/what you maā€™ call it would you take it?

  2. Other fintechs seem to be going to create platforms/marketplaces (Monzo, Revolut, Starling, N26), would you be open to integration into their app? (or have anything in the works?)

Acquiring users

  1. Has the appā€™s signup flow/funnel been tested with anyone yet? What sort of conversion rates do you expect?

  2. What marketing channels are you looking at other than word of mouth growth. If you have an upper band on your CPA what would it be?

  3. What will you do once the waitlist is over?

Offering

  1. Will you offer margin type products such as CFDs and for the US margin lending? (I think youā€™ve answered this somewhere but is this open to change?)

  2. Do you offer after-hours trading

  3. If you do offer Crypto assets will you allow withdrawals and deposits via Cryptocurrency?

  4. Who can sign up, is it just individuals, or can you sign up with a joint account?

  5. Will EU listed shares be trade-able in a ā€˜freeā€™ way in future?

  6. Will the full suite of US listed securities be available or only a vetted selection

Other

  1. Which companies do you feel are the biggest competitors presently?

  2. With the business model, is there a point where too much trading can cause losses. Iā€™m not sure how to phrase this one, but is there a variable cost being subsidised by a fixed one (i.e the Ā£10). So if one trades a lot that the customer could be loss making?

  3. Is there an optimal number of users that you would need to break even, what would this be?

  4. Do you envision a business model shift in future, or can the current one reach profitability in a way (with additions to the offering without changing it)?

Thank you! I hope these questions have not been too many. Very keen to see some answers

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These are great questions! The only thing is, Iā€™m sure the teamā€™s super busy gearing up for the launch of the app..so are there certain questions here that you need answering now that you could highlight so that the team could answer the rest later? :raised_hands:

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Hi!
Iā€™ll try to answer some of these that relate to my area of work (the mobile apps).

This is not currently on the backlog since we are building a minimum viable product, but when we have resources we could look into it eventually.

For launch we will only offer Sterling denominated accounts.

Not initially, we have already talked about it because it shouldnā€™t be too difficult to do once we have more resources available. We already have all the necessary APIs for the mobile apps anyway.

Yes! The iOS and Android apps have been developed separately and I can confirm that our designer James and myself are obsessed with doing material design correctly on Android. I canā€™t speak for iOS since I donā€™t know the iOS guidelines but I can tell you that it looks beautiful.

We wonā€™t be doing demo accounts since you will be able to start live trading from just Ā£1.

Basic trades get queued up and executed at 4pm and you donā€™t have to pay any fees. An Instant trade gets executed straight away and costs Ā£1. You can find more information on our pricing here.

Hope that helps answer some of your questions. As you can see, we are really working hard to try to get an excellent minimum viable product experience out the door and into peopleā€™s hands before we start focusing on some of the more advanced features we may offer in the future. Personally, thatā€™s exactly what Iā€™m looking for at the moment for managing my portfolio of shares and ETFs.

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Welcome to the forum @Tyranosar, Iā€™ve tried to answer a few more below! :wave:

See @gregā€™s answer above! :slight_smile:

They will be utilising the Faster Payment system so deposits should be available the same day, see Depositing funds :arrow_right:

UK :uk: residents, see Can people from other E.U. countries trade on the platform?

Not on launch, see Transferring portfolios from other Brokers

They would be open to these kind of integrations, see @adamā€™s point about Monzo here :smiley:

No, see @adamā€™s point here about margin trading. :skull_and_crossbones:

See this list of US stocks & ETFs that will be available in the future, you can make requests here Stocks/ETF Requests :earth_africa:

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Great questions - quite a few have been answered before on the blog, in the FAQs, in this forum. But maybe we can make a good wiki or two out of them.

As @anon2636484 said, we are quite busy, so let us know if any of these questions are a priority.

Iā€™ll tackle a few.

Weā€™ve done internal tests using various user backgrounds, and weā€™ll do more structured testing when we are onboarding external users (our first user @adam onboarded without issues, but you are looking for a larger sample size). FWIW, the signup process is quick and painless, so weā€™re starting from a good base.

Our word of mouth is on fire - we are seeing hundreds of people signing up daily. We expect to amplify our reach via good editorial coverage across relevant media and traffic from search engines as our product and related content takes off. our plans are in-depth, and unlike a few fellow fintechs, we acknowledge there exists an acquisition cost to each customer. Our CAC is a fraction of the industry average.

Onboard customers directly! :muscle: The fundamentals of acquisition wonā€™t change.

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