Invest by Freetrade, our brokerage platform, has arrived

For the past three years, we’ve been working to get everyone investing.

With a focus on that mission, we’ve built a simple yet beautiful stock trading app providing commission-free investing in US and UK stocks and ETFs, used by over 70,000 customers, and followed by a community of 100,000 people across Europe.

We decided to build our own brokerage platform to be able to move faster. While it’s normal to rely on third-party software in our space, we wanted to fully own this core piece of our tech stack: a system that would underpin and power everything we do.

A team of ten engineers, the majority of our tech team, have been quietly building Invest by Freetrade from scratch for a year and a half. Made in London and cutting edge — while most companies built their investment platform in the ‘80s.

Today, Invest by Freetrade is ready, and we’ve started migrating our first beta-tester customers to the platform.‍

Here are just a few of the improvements you can expect to see on the Freetrade app in the coming months.

Fractional shares on Freetrade

Fractional shares have been one of the most popular requests from the Freetrade community. The US market has some particularly pricey shares, such as Amazon at $1,700 as we write this for example, and not everyone can afford to invest a larger amount like this in one go.

We expect our fractional share offering to go live in the first months of 2020.

Thousands of new stocks

Using our own platform is going to make it much easier for us to add products to the Freetrade app. In the near-term, expect thousands more US and UK stocks and ETFs. We’ll also be adding European shares in the coming months.

Premium accounts

A premium subscription account (internally codenamed “Alpha”) is the pillar of our customer-aligned business model. A couple of things need to be fine tuned before they go live, but now that the investment platform is operational, they will be much easier to launch.

Faster development of new features

As our community members know, we are always looking for feedback from Freetrader users — it helps us add new features that improve your app. Using our own platform makes this process much easier and faster to implement. You can expect real-time deposits with Apple and Google Pay, for example, as soon as you migrate to Invest.

Invest by Freetrade will enable us to build a dramatically better product in 2020, and get hundreds of thousands of people into the healthy habit of investing.