The timeline for public rollout

Hey everyone, just this :smiley:

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This is the news we’ve all been waiting for! Bravo!!! Exciting times ahead!!!

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Oh crap, the hardest decision of my life, what will be my first ever Freetrade trade!?

:grimacing:

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Fantastic news!

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Hey @Cgwinning you’re not the only one disappointed we haven’t onboarded our first cohort of customers. It’s been painful for all of us on the team using the app but not being able to share it. Now we have circled a date for when we will start onboarding external customers and have committed to it.

On the rest of your post, a selective screenshot from our first Crowdcube round without context isn’t helpful for anyone. The plan we presented in July 2016, including the product, team, business model, regulatory permissions, services providers, etc are all different now, and that’s part of the journey. Ups and downs along the way, but I’m really proud of how a small team of millennials have built the financial institution we wanted to see in the world. Glad to have had you part of it from the start!

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Look on the bright side, at least you aren’t waiting to play Star Citizen :smiley:

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Public release schedule is great and very happy :slightly_smiling_face: :tada:

But seeing Chris’ post was edited is disappointing :frowning:

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Our financial year-end is 30 Sept. You’ll have to wait until the auditors (PwC) are done with the financial statements and then filed at Companies House before viewing them. We don’t disclose management accounts and the projections in the latest deck were high level by design (still a lot more detail than most companies disclose). I’m really scratching my head as to why a Freetrade investor would want sensitive non-public financial information posted in the forum. :thinking:

Transparency by default does not mean we provide all company information publicly.

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I’m disappointed that they missed their original estimate too. But Freetrade is a startup, this isn’t uncommon & there’s nothing that they can do to change that now.

What they have done is take steps to try to ensure that, that sort of thing won’t happen again by hiring Ian and we know when they expect to deliver now.

Although they haven’t called that a ‘win’, I think it’s pretty encouraging that they’re willing to commit to a specific date to start rolling out the app. Now we just have to wait & see whether they manage to meet it :crossed_fingers:

At the same time, although I’d be curious to hear the answers to the questions you asked, I’m not sure there’s a lot of benefit in sharing new guidance about the impact of the delays on their projections now. We couldn’t act on that information anyway and by their nature, any predictions now would be less accurate than predictions that’re made later which will be based on more solid information. So it seems sensible to wait until before the next crowdfunding round, when we’ll also be able to use any information that they’re able to share.

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Being selfish, and appreciating the pain of long time investors, this delayed rollout has been a blessing for me. It kept the market cap small meaning my money bought more shares, imagine if the app had been in circulation for 1+ year, company probably would be worth vastly more and make my investment very small.

Silver lining and all that.

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I’m a fellow round 1 investor! As I understood it back then: there was a decision made early on about whether Freetrade was to become an investing app connected to another broker (regulated as an ‘appointed representative’) or become a full stack stockbroker (directly authorised etc).

The former would have been much quicker and you can see start ups like Wombat, Plum & Oval taking this route. The latter means there is no middle man for Freetrade, so it can offer more competitive prices (which I’ve seen reduce since the 1st/2nd round :tada:), it’ll have more flexibility and this would be the long term plan for any stockbroker anyway. The downside is it takes longer, costs a lot more and dealing with regulation is difficult.

Long term > short term for the business (even if I personally have to wait!). Less than 7 weeks now though and this feels like an official date unlike previous approximations…

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As an R2 investor I’m glad they’ve gone the full stockbroker route, I would have liked to see the app released by now but I understand it’s better to take a bit more time that to release something broken and create a bad first impression

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Can’t wait to see it guys! Hope everything goes well over the next few weeks!

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Me too, I agree. As an R3 investor, your questions were the exact one that I had the later delayed onboarding has become.

Now for my genuine question, @Freetrade_Team why are you editing posts that are not your own and under what forum guideline are you citing to do so? I’m personally uncomfortable participating in a forum where my valid posts are liable for censor.

Hey @Diversify, we don’t like to censor but can’t think of a single product/brand community where admins and team members don’t have some adjudication and moderation over what they think is fair/appropriate to post. That’s a lot the point of having admins.

As @adam says:

In this case, it was non-public info presented out of context.

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I’m a user of the Monzo community for instance and while I haven’t necessarily agreed with their moderators, I at least know their process of moderation. They don’t operate as censors which you have without a guideline backing up what you did. I think this is an overreach.

Is the R3 Investor Deck consider as such?

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Moderation by definition contains some aspect of censorship. We’re a young forum and we’re still defining how our guidelines operate and to what extent they’re codified; as of now, we haven’t laid down many formal ones.

We certainly want to keep this space open but we still maintain the right to apply our judgment on posts. We very rarely moderate or flag and if we do, we do so with a lot of consideration.

In any case, non-public company info would not be fair comment in any company forum.

In some aspects, clearly yes.

If this is considered sensitive info can we somehow make it unavailable by registering and clicking on the pencil next to the Cris’ post?

I’d prefer it if you exercised such judgment with considered responses rather than editing posts. Fair enough, if you don’t want screenshots on the forum but other than this, I cannot see why @Cgwinning written questions were erased. He’s an investor/member who had legitimate questions based on semi-public info you released. This info was no longer private once you conducted a public crowdfund.

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