Keeping our fees as low as possible without compromising on service is important to us. That’s why, even with this price increase, we have made sure that we remain one of the most competitive financial advice providers in the market.
There are lots of DIY and robo investment providers who will charge a similar rate, simply for them holding your investments. They won’t provide any advice or guidance on how to maximise them and it will be down to you to decide how to optimise what you do.
Robo advisers are digital platforms that provide automated, algorithm-driven financial planning services with little to no human supervision.
While that may work for some, we believe that financial advice is key to ensuring your investment efforts are successful. Everyone has different financial goals and therefore require different products and plans to make them a reality, and there is no one better placed than a qualified financial adviser to help make that happen.
When you invest with us, as a standard part of our service to you, we offer all of this for no additional cost:
- Access to financial adviser appointments, whenever you want or need them
- Tailored investment recommendations based on your circumstances
- Annual reviews of your financial circumstances and an updated recommendation
- No withdrawal or exit fees
When determining our new pricing structure, we made sure we looked at what our competitors offer in comparison to this so we could continue to keep our fees some of the lowest out there.
The below table shows the amount you would pay in charges over the first 12 months of investing, based on a £10,000 investment, across various firms in the robo advice, hybrid advice and holistic advice industries:
As you can see, every provider has a different approach to pricing, but what is clear is those offering hybrid advice like us tend to have either a hefty initial fee or a higher overall cost.
Hybrid advice involves the use of technology to enhance, rather than replace, the work of the financial adviser so that processes can be more efficient, compliant, and cost effective without losing the human touch.
We didn't want to introduce any initial fees because we believe advice should be an ongoing part of our service to you, and we also wanted to make sure that the total cost remained as competitive as possible.
So, when the new prices come into play on 1st September 2022, it’s just our management fee that will be rising, taking our annual total fee from 0.51% to between 0.73% and 0.76%, depending on which portfolio you invest in.
Presuming you invest £10,000 in our lowest risk portfolio (as per the data included in the competitor comparison table above), the annual fee you would need to pay is £76 which is the lowest of all hybrid advice platforms, and lower than a lot of the robo advisers too.
We hope this blog has helped answer some of the questions you had about the price increase, but if you would like to discuss the fee increases in more detail, our support team would be more than happy to help.
