tl:dr
Lotās of innovation, still low fee but very very worrying trends fee wise, intransparent on the direction and still bad at pr. Reliability is reasonable but needs improvement. Still lacks basic functions like transfer and corp actions. Dividends still arrive late.
This is all from my personal experience so other people definitely have had other experiences
I only use Invest
I have been with T212 for some time now and feel like its time to write something, especially after all the recent changes.
First I would like to say that T212 has really allowed me as a person to invest in a way that fits me which I couldnāt have done at any other broker due to their high fees. T212 was far ahead and still is ahead feature-wise to a lot of its competition (just mention fractional shares or pies).
Seeing all this new stuff coming out has been very exciting and has helped a lot of people but problems in more basic parts still exist like the dividend payments arriving late (personal record was 4 weeks late this january for my second largest position), intransparency on the direction of the company and very bad pr (just think of the GME saga as a recent example). A very important lacking thing is corporate actions (personal example: I own Engie shares and each December you can register them through your broker so youāll receive a bonus dividend if you hold continually for two years, I didnāt receive any message so I forgot)
T212 has experienced explosive growth and this has brought a multitude of problems (and opportunities) to the platform. I have noticed that on high volatility days the platform becomes slow and sometimes even inaccessible for short periods of time, this has been a reoccurring problem and I donāt have confidence that its solved now. But for me, thatās a minor thing as I donāt really care if my orders are executed 1 hour later or not (although it throws a wrench at the reliability of the platform).
What I do care about are some of the more recent changes. It all started with the introduction of securities lending for invest (first there was no securities lending and now there is and T212 takes 100% of that) to have invest profitably on its own (and also compensating for ISA). This in itself isnāt a problem for me as it would have been a negligible amount on a yearly basis and for me, nothing really changes. T212 told us that because of this the Invest/Isa part became profitable on its own.
The rise of the fees
Great, then we shouldnāt expect any fees or anything right? Well, thatās where youāre wrong kiddo. The explosive growth made securities lending income bigger but also brought along increases in other costs among other problems. T212 decided to remove the referral programme for new users (they can only get a free share once but canāt refer friends for free shares). Minor for me as Iām already on the platform but annoying for new people. Then we got the 0.7% deposit fee, but that was avoidable for me by going through bank transfer (although it does take 2+ weeks now for the deposited money to arrive, seems to be improving) and now we got a 0.15% forex fee which really changes things.
Personal example:
I still have 50+ years until retirement, a large part of my portfolio is in other currencies.
Letās say I have 10k invested in other currencies. Assuming a growth rate of 8% then we can see the large difference a 0.15% makes.
(this is an illustration, not entirely what happens at T212)
10000x1.08^50 = 469016 (rounded)
10000x1.0785^50 = 437529 (rounded)
So 437529/469016 = 0.93. So I would have 7% less (in this case ~30k or 300% of initial) in the end which is quite a significant difference from a 0.15% yearly fee.
The above example is not exactly what happens at T212 as itās not a yearly fee but for each transaction (so could be higher or lower but this is an illustrative example). So it really depends on what you do, but for example when you receive dividends and reinvest you lose an additional 1-0.9985^2 = 0.299775%. So depending on if you have a dividend portfolio or a lot of transactions and sales you could get out with more costs
Multi-currency could partially soothe the pain (especially for the currently forced dividend conversions) but for me personally would complicate taxes a lot in combination with a fx fee.
This is especially worrying as was pointed out in the Introduction to FX conversion Fee thread
Very bad pr, no clear transparency in which direction T212 is going (will we end up with transaction fees as well, the FX fee already is a transaction fee in a way). What are the new features that are promised? We havenāt really heard anything about anything related to the pie in pies (and with the ā¬/$1 etc minimum itās use also is reduced), API (if a good API is released for me personally it would compensate for most of the stated things), late dividends, corporate actions and additional markets.
All in all, Iām very happy with what T212 has helped me achieve but Iām very worried about the direction weāre going in and the recent fee introductions among other restrictions show the growth pains T212 is having.