European and UK Revolut Metal customers are now able to trade on the New York Stock Exchange and NASDAQ.
The company’s standard and premium clients will also get access to this option in the next few weeks. The FinTech app, which services millions of people, has rolled out the new service to make “trading and investing accessible to more people.”
The plans to enable European and UK customers to trade commission-free were first announced back in 2018. Making it commission-free means removing another costly hurdle for people, Revolut argues.
Revolut’s new stock-trading service comes splattered with interesting features. The ability to buy fractional shares sets the new service apart in particular. Often, people buying stock have to buy at least one share in a company. Revolut’s new feature curtails this by enabling clients to purchase partial shares. This could come in handy when trading with expensive stock – like Amazon, Apple and Facebook – that can cost thousands of dollar, according to the company.
That being said, the new service comes with some restrictions. For one, customers will only be able to do 100 deals per month and spend $1,000 max per order. The opening times will only be limited to US trading times to begin with.
Moreover, customers must have a verified email address and may be asked to provide a new photo ID to be eligible to access the new trading feature. This last part depends on what type of ID clients used to sign up to Revolut’s services to begin with.
The news about Revolut’s new option comes a few months after the FinTech scaleup suffered massive scrutiny in the beginning of 2019. In late February and March, a series of stories raised concerns about how the company had grown and been managed.
Some reports accused the London-headquartered FinTech unicorn of forcing job applicants to work for free – asking them to recruit at least 200 new clients in a week to be eligible for a job, for instance – a practice that the British edition of Wired noted could be breaking UK governmental recommendations.
Other stories described how Revolut’s technology allegedly failed to block thousands of suspicious transactions. The Telegraph reported this was due to the company apparently switching off the automated service that would stop transfers flagged as suspicious.
Following the reports, Nik Storonsky, founder and CEO of Revolut, stated that the company had cleaned up its act. He said the company was no longer the same business it had been in the years following the 2015 launch. “Our internal working culture has been evolving as fast as our business and we have come a long way from where we were before,” Storonsky stated. “When I look back at some of our past mistakes, I’m certainly not proud of them, but I am proud of what we have learned along the way, and the direction that we’re now heading in.”
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