When we started Freetrade, we did things that didn’t scale, to service you as best as we could. One of those things is same-day withdrawals that we process outside of the app, and a small portion of our customers used it.
Due to our growth, that small portion of customers has become a very large number!
As a result, we’re retiring the feature on 1 October 2020, and we’ll work to provide this option in an automated way in the future.
As always, standard withdrawals are free and will complete within 3-5 working days once requested in-app.
Are there any plans to make same day withdrawals a Plus or generally paid feature? Is the problem that the human cost doesn’t scale or that maybe its costs more for faster transfers? If the former, is that something that may come back in the future with automation? (Cc @Ian of course, developing that has costs, so maybe still Plus or paid)
having said that, investing in the stock market when you need same day access to your funds doesn’t sound right, so this shouldn’t be a problem. But in reality, I think this happens. Especially if people are just keeping cash in the account. I hope people aren’t less likely to keep cash in FT after Oct 1, given that cash interest is a source of revenue for FT.
Customers have been able to request a withdrawal in-app as usual and then message the customer support team before 2PM asking that this is processed as a same-day withdrawal. There is a £5 administration fee, the entirety of which is deducted by our bank, in order to process this as a faster payment. The withdrawal would then usually arrive in the customers bank account in the late afternoon.
There’s no plans to make the same-day withdrawal feature only available to Plus customers at present. When we talk about scalability here, it’s relative to the manual effort of processing these withdrawals. We’d like to revisit the offering in the future when we’ve built something to manage them better, e.g. providing the option as self-serve in-app.
As you mentioned, most customers investing in the stock market don’t need this feature, hence why we’re retiring it for now until we can provide a more automated solution in the future!
