Seems impressive from Starling! 775,000 customers following its advertising campaigns and due to break even
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I’m a Starling customer. Very happy.
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Same here, a solid app and pretty good experience with it in general
Informative article. Interesting contrast to see Starling heading for European expansion versus Monzo heading for the USA.
Sidenote: quietly hoping Freetrade consider an advertising campaign for 2020. London Underground Tube advertising just works imho and is a good starting point to compliment incentivised referrals. Could also learn something from Starling’s incessant YouTube ads later down the line and then Monzo’s TV ads.
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Evaluating these channels is always on the agenda for us. We just have to go along our priorities, and free shares, which is quite a complex product, have been the priority. As I noted before, we’d much rather give money to our community members than to advertising companies. That said, we expect to diversify over time.
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Well done to the Starling team! 
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Starling user here also, they provide a very good service.
Another happy Starling customer here. Would love to see a Starling Marketplace integration with Freetrade so I can see my portfolio balance in the app.
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Are you going to make it an individual referral link rather than 1 per person? Also will you be opening it up to non-crowdcube investors? I have at least 10 who would open accounts if I told them about FT. Probably 100+ if you made the app available in Czech Republic
No. By design, one free share invite = one friend. We’d like people to choose wisely and spend some time with their friend chatting about Freetrade and helping with any questions. If you successfully invite a friend, we’ll allocate multiple invites to you. We’ve seen many people in this very community getting 10+ invites due to their success of inviting friends.
Yes, we plan to start rolling out the feature later this week.
That’s amazing. If you invite one successfully, we’ll start allocating multiple invites to you.
Wow. We’d love to be in the Czech Republic (and Hungary, Poland, Slovakia - the whole region). It will happen in the next few quarters!
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By design, one free share invite = one friend
A link would be much better. e.g. at work we have various wiki-like pages related to finance (selling company shares etc). People there have listed their Revolut/TransferWise referral links…not possible with FT one-time links
Our community members use this kind of spreadsheets at their companies. They just list all their free share links, and the recipients mark them as taken.
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Been using this bank over a year now and super happy. Now planning to migrate my business account also!
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Me too, been using over a year and happy with them.
They’re not my main bank account but their Spaces/pots are useful for saving and I use them exclusively when I’m on holiday as there are no fees.
I wasn’t aware of any advertising campaign but I just an opened an account earlier this week as I needed a second bank account and it was between Starling & Monzo (and Starling clearly won overall for me).
My biggest annoyance already is that they didn’t offer me an overdraft and I need to wait 3 months before I can apply for one.
I don’t even need it but it won’t show on my credit scores without one and that’s what I’m mainly after.
Perhaps it’s because of your current credit score that they didn’t offer one immediately?
Just wondering as when I opened my account, I was given one immediately.
My credit score is generally decent, but it’s my credit utilisation that’s likely the issue, or possibly the ratio of credit I already have available vs my yearly salary.
Hopefully they’ll view me more positively in 3 months time or I might end up switching to Monzo (though may still hold onto Starling for holiday purposes).
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It’s not even just that but even if two banks use the same credit score there’s chance their attitude towards you as a risk will differ - just like insurance!
Just hoped they’d have at least offered me even just a £50 overdraft just so I’d get them on my credit score portfolio 
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