Fintech Finance presents: The Fintech Magazine 18

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WEALTHTECH

Power to th he people Technology has long been praised for its ability to democratise but, while it has already worked its revolutionary magic on many aspects of personal finance, it’s been a little slower off the mark when it comes to trading stocks. For many people, their concept of traders is still skewed by the images of excess and privilege on a Wall Street populated by wolves like the real Jordan Belfort and fictional Gordon Gekko. But innovative apps and other platforms are now putting a slice of the same pie into the hands of the average Joe. London-based Freetrade is a commission-free trading app that aims to get everyone investing. Founder and CEO Adam Dodds set up the company in 2015 after relocating from Canada as a manager with KPMG and discovering that the investment account options in the UK were archaic and clunky, to say the least. “When I moved here, six years ago, I needed to open up an investment account and realised how underwhelming all the options that were available to me were, and how painful it was to open an investment account,” explains Dodds. “There was an oligopoly that still www.fintech.finance

Adam Dodds was keen to break up the oligopoly that he saw operating in UK stockbroking when he launched the everyman investment app Freetrade in 2015. Now, 250,000 ordinary users later, he’s still finding ways to change things somewhat exists, here in the UK – a handful of stockbrokers that had settled into a nice, comfortable £12 commission structure. So it was painfully obvious someone needed to come in and smash that up.” That person, it turns out, would be Dodds. Setting up Freetrade proved to be something of a personal challenge, too. Having worked as an accountant and then in corporate finance mergers and acquisitions, he saw plenty of companies with what he calls ‘shakier business models’ than the one he was proposing attracting funding. “I was really getting sick and tired of my day job, at the time, so it was just ‘let’s go and do this,’” he explains. – ‘this’ being the

funky Freetrade app, which now boasts more than 250,000 users. With the coronavirus pandemic and Brexit pushing already-low savings interest rates even lower in the UK, there were plenty more people this year looking for alternative forms of investment. Indeed, the app has seen its customer base double in 2020. Appropriately for an investment expert, Dodds had an eye on future growth from the get-go and determined that the only way Freetrade could become commission-free and sustainable was by owning its platform, end-to-end. So, the company built its own tech stack running on Google Cloud, in order to give the app the agility and ability to scale to meet its future ambitions. From a user perspective, its proprietary Invest By Freetrade system enables them to carry out trades cheaper and faster than if it used third-party solutions. But perhaps Freetrade’s most important innovative features are those on the surface – most notably its game-changing fractional shares approach. Some US stocks cost hundreds of dollars, if not more, for a single share – meaning many smaller investors miss out due to the share price being beyond their budget. Issue 18 | TheFintechMagazine

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