European Broker Freetrade Realizes Exponential Growth, Adds New Features

Benzinga will be holding its annual Benzinga Global Fintech Awards, a day of dealmaking, networking, and recognition in the financial technology space, on Nov. 10, 2020.

In recognition of those disruptive innovators creating positive and diverse change within the financial services space, Benzinga sat down with Alexander Campbell, Communications Lead at Freetrade.

Lockdowns Come Alongside User Growth

In light of the COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic lockdowns, investors flocked towards engaging activities, such as investing. The interest was a boon to U.K.-based commission-free trading platform Freetrade, whose user base has grown exponentially since March.

“We went into lockdown at the end of March. From March to the end of August, we’ve had about a 90% increase in the number of customers,” Campbell said. “As of last week, we’re at about 225 to 230,000 customers on the platform.”

Freetrade is a newer platform co-founded by Viktor Nebehaj and Adam Dodds, both of which saw the need for a democratized investing portal for globally listed stocks and ETFs. According to Campbell, the ride since inception has been incredibly successful, mostly due to the platform’s focus on intuitiveness and product innovation.

“I would say this is less a fad and more something that’s going to be sticky for the long term,” he noted. “The average portfolio size on the platform has effectively doubled from around £1,000 upwards to £2,000. That suggests people are adding more money and assets to the platform.”

Platform Innovation Keeps Clients Around

“We’re building something that’s giving people access to tax efficient products that are going to serve their investing needs for the next 30 years. Not just the ups and downs of the next six months or so.”

Freetrade’s core product enables zero-commission, fractional trading access to U.S.- and U.K.-listed securities. The platform also allows users access to ISA tax-efficient accounts, as well as free shares for sign-ups and referrals.

As part of building a new infrastructure for wealth creation, Freetrade is adding Freetrade Plus, a subscription that allows access to features such as a wider range of investments, special order types, and priority support.

“Freetrade Plus includes a much greater investable universe of stocks. We did a huge upload of about 400 new stocks last week and we have a big list of a few thousand that we need to work through in the next couple weeks before we do the full public launch.”

The service is about £10 per month and is designed to be a catchall product.

Innovation Outlook

“We want to be bringing in more features and tools.”

In helping its users achieve better long-term financial outcomes, Freetrade is looking at ways to increase the amount of available insights and opportunities on the app.

“We’re looking at ways we can do the heavy lifting,” Campbell said in a discussion regarding the addition of portfolio optimization tools. “We want to do things that are good for our customers and we want to build a platform that helps our customers. For us this means not offering a certain subset of investment products such as options, derivatives, and leveraged products. Those sort of products don’t belong in retail portfolios.”

To learn more about Freetrade, click here.