The $1B announcement was made in August, therefore considering the growth rate in number of accounts, that existing customers have probably continued investing more and that the overall stock market has increased in value over this time frame I would not be surprised if the assets under management were now around $3B.
Either way, that would just be $3000 per account, much smaller than the £55,000 ($75,200) you quote for HL, which is 25 times more.
Possible reasons:
- It could be that there are a lot of accounts created just for the freeshare.
- Retail investors particularly those starting investing, with mortgages or quite young have limited budgets. The survey on the community forum a few months ago indicated that most users on here are quite young (18-40), although this might not be a true representation of all T212 users (only the forum subset).
- It is likely that a large number of UK users will have both an ISA and an Invest account, hence the total number of users is likely to be lower than any combined number, so the average capital per user ill be higher (although not that much higher, considering EU residents/users).
- No in-specie transfer probably results in some customers not transferring in their portfolio despite being very happy with T212 as that would result in liquidation and incurring in capital gains taxes.
- Larger budget investors with significant capital may prefer to invest with traditional brokers that offer telephone assistance and even in some cases branch assistance if something goes wrong (thinking of banks like HSBC, Barclays, Santander, ING, BNP and Deutsche Bank). I can’t blame them, sorting something affecting 7 figure (or more) accounts on a chat pannel or community forum is not great, particularly if you live off that income such as retired investors.
Basis for “guess”:
$1B assets under management in August 2020:
500,000 ISA and Invest accounts in July 2020:
Age poll: