Thoughts on the trading 212 deleting notifications and other recent issues

Hey @Sasha,

Thanks for joining us for a discussion.

Sure, we don’t mind the criticism. We encourage it in fact. For the sake of the transparency, and also to avoid misinterpretation by your audience, we believe that we have to elaborate further on some of the topics to clear up the concerns you raised in the video.

  • The part with the notifications was already covered I believe. The in-app notifications are aimed to provide timely updates to our clients before they’ll have to reach our customer care team or search in our HelpCentre & Community. It is expected that those notifications expire - the expiration date is set manually by a member of our team upon sending those. It makes no sense to store that many messages in your account while you have it all listed in the official sources of communication, i.e. HelpCentre and Community;

Regardless, the matter concerning notifications is just a tiny part of the video. We have covered pretty much all aspects of the email we’ve sent you, and I’ll share the points we made:

  • There are no cash flow or liquidity issues or concerns whatsoever. Trading 212 has been profitable for many years and has no debt. The introduction of a waitlist relates only to scaling up our capacity which is also mentioned in the form itself. We’ve also specifically provided the reason for the waitlist itself with posts on Twitter and our community post. It is painful for the whole team that we are temporarily unable to on-board all clients wishing to open an account. Yet, we strongly feel that it also wouldn’t be fair for existing clients not to have access to the great service they deserve, due to scaling issues;

  • In the video, you mentioned that scaling up should be fairly easy to do. We have been heavily investing in new infrastructure, but unfortunately, it isn’t just down to adding new hardware. To meet the exponentially growing demand for our service, our IT team has been tirelessly working on implementing a ton of upgrades and optimisations throughout the pandemic. Despite that, the recent events caused even higher spikes in both influx of new users and unprecedented activity by existing users, bringing the demand to levels outpacing our scaling abilities.

  • The whole matter is not related to the “Invite a friend” promotion. If this was the case, then we were going just to pause the referral programme. All facts above are pointing out the contrary, I believe.

  • The GameStop halt was caused by events that were outside our scope of control, as the halt was introduced by our intermediary. We were not restricting orders until we were indicated that our intermediary was not able to process them. After our intermediary proceeded to lift the trading restriction, we immediately opened the stock for trading on our side as well. This is precisely the reason we sent out a notification informing clients that they were now able to place orders with the company, however, that they should be aware of the market conditions and that they might severely affect their trading experience;

  • The restrictions were lifted on Friday 29th, and since then there haven’t been any. However, in the video, you mention that we have introduced new restrictions on the 1st of February, which is not true;

  • In regards to why we had to set a higher minimum for pending orders, as mentioned in this Community post and in our Help Centre. In the video, you imply that the higher minimums also apply to market orders placed outside trading hours, which is not true. Market orders are not affected in any way;

  • As for your point on content creators not being able to automatically receive free shares for the customers they’ve referred to the waiting list. As you know, in most cases people using your referral link to download the app are automatically enrolled in the referral program without any additional processes. In the rare cases when the automatic attribution between a link usage and an install fails to work, there is a workaround - check this;

To preserve the smooth process, we are working on associating the link usage to the submission of an email to the waitlist, which would again automatically enroll the user in the referral program.

  • As for concerns that this video might lead to the discontinuation of your unlimited referral link, we’d like to reassure you that we never interfere with any content creator for the reason that they are providing constructive feedback. Up until now, there hasn’t been Đ°n instance of a referral link suspension due to the nature of the content itself. However, we do not tolerate or condone the spread of misinformation and the deliberate misrepresentation of facts in a way that is construed toward sensationalism and could harm individuals or companies.
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