Freetrade migrates hundreds of thousands of customers to ComplyAdvantage Mesh in a single day with zero downtime

Freetrade is a UK investment platform that makes investing more accessible, offering commission-free trading in stocks, bonds, exchange-traded funds (ETFs), and mutual funds. A pioneer in the UK retail investing market, it serves a large retail customer base that expects fast, frictionless onboarding.

Freetrade operates in a sector with significant financial crime risk exposure and intensive regulatory obligations. A ComplyAdvantage customer of more than seven years, Freetrade wanted to move its customer screening to ComplyAdvantage Mesh, the AI-native platform that unifies financial crime risk management. The company’s aim was to sharpen detection and improve the onboarding experience at scale.

A high-volume migration with no room for disruption

With hundreds of thousands of customers using the platform, any interruption to screening or onboarding would incur direct costs for both the business and its customers. The migration to Mesh had to move an entire live customer base without downtime, errors, or coverage degradation.

Freetrade’s compliance team wanted more than a like-for-like move. The goal was to leverage Mesh’s improved user interface and case management while reconfiguring screening to align with the realities of a high-volume onboarding model: reliably identifying genuine sanctions risk without generating false-positive noise that slows legitimate customers.

Configuring screening for both precision and speed

Mesh allows compliance teams to tune matching thresholds for different risk categories rather than applying a single setting across the board. Working with the ComplyAdvantage team, Freetrade set some screening categories to higher fuzziness to strengthen the detection of evasion attempts and name variants, while keeping other categories at lower fuzziness to control the overall match rate.

This configuration directly supports straight-through processing (STP). By reducing unnecessary alerts on lower-risk checks while increasing rigor where it matters most, Freetrade can clear more onboarding tasks automatically and reserve analyst attention for genuine, complex risk. The result is a smoother onboarding experience for legitimate customers and a compliance setup that scales with the platform’s growth.

Alongside the screening configuration, Mesh’s unified case management gives analysts a clearer view of alerts and a more efficient remediation workflow, replacing fragmented steps with a single, consolidated interface.

Hundreds of thousands migrated in one day, with zero downtime

The migration moved all of Freetrade’s hundreds of thousands of customers to Mesh within a single day, with zero downtime and no migration errors. For a live investment platform with continuous onboarding, this meant no disruption to customers and no gap in screening coverage at any point in the transition.

The project was a close, hands-on collaboration between the two teams over several months, with multiple rounds of testing and input from stakeholders across Freetrade’s engineering, compliance, and product functions. That joint effort is what made a migration of this scale a smooth one.

“The team was fantastic to work with throughout our upgrade. They were incredibly responsive, always quick to answer questions, and consistently explained things in a clear, easy-to-understand way. Their proactive support and clear communication made the whole process much smoother for our team.”

– Mollie Webb, Financial Crime Compliance Manager, Freetrade

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