I had the opportunity to narrow down and invest with Raiz Investments after going through a list of micro-investing and custom-investing service providers based in Australia. Their phone based support won over the runner-up choice of Superhero as Superhero does not offer any phone based support (yet) to individual investors using their trading platform.Though it was hard to connect with a phone-based support agent, they always returned my call (a positive sign). Their web-app or phone-based app design is poor as "invest" in their language means, you are "committing to invest" and with no absolute warning over what you are going to invest in. The default Portfolio selection is "conservative" and if you think that you are charging/seeding your account with money before beginning to invest, you got it wrong!Once the money is transferred over from your bank account to your Raiz Invest account, it automatically gets invested in the default Portfolio set by Raiz. In order to prevent this from happening, if you are a custom Portfolio investor, you would have to select Shares/ETFs and/or other investment options and then opt to "Invest" in their product.They don't offer any Pay ID which means it prohibits instant bank transfers within the Australian realm. It takes 24 to 48 hours on business days to see the transferred fun reflect on your Investment account. Once there, it is already allocated to your default Portfolio or a custom portfolio that you have set. Again, I repeat, remember to set a custom portfolio (if that is what you want) before you transfer the fund. "Invest" is different from "Add fund" - which is what the Product team should have thought about (face-palm).*IMPORTANT* Raiz Invest also offers a subset of ETFs (about 20 or so) that are traded in the ASX. This means, you cannot pick an ETF of your choice and traded in ASX as it might not be offered on their platform. In short, this platform is meant only for budding investors and not for serious long term investors. If you are happy with their selection of ETFs, you can choose their platforms but this is not made explicit when it comes to custom Portfolio investment.At the time of writing this review, I have asked them to refund the amount that I transacted to my investment account and I am awaiting the money back into my bank account. The other reactive thing that their Support team did was to immediately process my request to cancel the transaction knowing very well that the amount would be invested first into the default portfolio and could potentially be at a loss. I had requested them to cancel the transaction without knowing that the amount will be invested first. Duh!This means that I will have to bear any loss due to the investment before I get back the amount to my bank account. This is very insensitive of their Support team as common-sense says that you should atleast advice the customer on what might happen before processing an immediate account closure. In short, when you don't have control over how the automated process is, you better not close the account without realising a break-even or at-least no-loss (face-palm).I understand an investor is responsible for their financial decisions but not for the poor design of a product that is not in their hands.
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Raiz automatically invests your spare change. Our mobile-first investment platform enables commission free investing, portfolio management with automatic rebalancing and dividend reinvestment, and real-time account monitoring.