Why it takes so long to transfer back the money and to settle the money from a sell

[Mansol (Solomon Manea)]

Fx sales taxes and stuff. I lost a lot of money from this and when I put money in account goes in that moment, but to take them back must be so complicated.

[FailedTuringTest]

Unfortunately, despite the fancy apps on the front end, a lot of financial systems are still rather old-fashioned on the back end!

Getting money credited to your brokerage account when you sell a share normally takes 2 or 3 days (this is normally written as T+2 or T+3) and is an industry standard across all stockbrokers. It is to give the brokers time to handle the administration behind the scenes (they have to transfer share ownership information and money between brokers). Lots of people say this should be able to be done faster in the modern age, but I think the industry is quite happy with having the extra time to sort things out and is in no rush to change. If you’re selling your shares, most brokers are confident that they will eventually receive the money from whomever you sold the shares to, so you can usually buy other shares before the first transaction is ‘settled’.

Transferring money from your Freetrade account to your bank account takes time because they use the low-cost and slow BACS bank transfer system, rather than Faster Payments, which would be more expensive. That’s just a matter of ‘you get what you pay for’.

It’s still more efficient than the old way, though, which was called ‘the cheque is in the mail’ (followed by ‘the cheque is clearing’).

[Mansol (Solomon Manea)]

Would be nice although to have an option for quicker withdrawal. If they trust that the money will be settled, they can do the same for withdrawal. Only for small amounts like 2000£ max. I guess you can have a quicker gain buying and reselling things than this, but it’ s a nice opportunity to get better earnings than a bank account.

[NeilB]

Hi @Mansol

@Duncan covered this in his recent AMA.

Forum AMA with Duncan Leslie, Freetrade VP Product, Fri 5th Nov, 1 PM

Of course. I recognise how important withdrawals (and deposits) are - people want to feel in control of their money at all times. We’ve made improvements to both throughout the year, but I’d still like to cut the time it takes for a withdrawal. We don’t control settlement times unfortunately, so we make the money available in your account to withdraw as soon as we’re told it has settled (and sooner, if you want to that money trade again). We’re looking at how we can reduce the time to receive …

Forum AMA with Duncan Leslie, Freetrade VP Product, Fri 5th Nov, 1 PM

Yep, there’s a change to open banking coming called ‘variable recurring payments’. Catchy Basically this means being able to move money easily, regularly and automatically from your bank account to your Freetrade account. It’s also a whole lot less clunky and expensive than standing orders and Direct Debit. The banks have been mandated to implement this, so we’re waiting with bated breath…

[Mansol (Solomon Manea)]

Maybe someone from freetrade staff is seeing this and will help me again with the money I need back. I am very bad at planification. Cheers

[Mansol (Solomon Manea)]

Still almost a week passed and I don’t have the money back. Is there a different type of account to facilitate a faster money transfer both ways not only one way.

Thanks

[Rajan07 (Rajan Lakhani)]

Hi. Please contact hello@freetrade.io and someone should be able to help you.