Is Santander’s Stocks and Shares ISA Any Good?

What are you actually invested in?

You can only invest in funds through Santander’s stocks and shares ISA and can choose from risk-based, Ready Made Funds, individual funds from Santadar or funds from managers across the market.

However, if you are investing in funds through Santander, you are probably not that bothered about what you are actually invested in, you may be more interested in making life easy for yourself and just choosing how much risk you want to take. But I am interested, so when I picked the “Aiming higher” ready-made fund from Santander Asset Management, I took a little look under the bonnet.

It’s a new fund, so there are only figures from 2025, where it was up 14.29%, beating it’s benchmarch of similar funds that are hold between 40%-85% shares. (The less risk you want to take, the more shares (growth investments) as opposed to bonds (income-paying investments) are included in the fund portfolio). This is pretty good, and only a few per cent below what buying an S&P 500 ETF would have returned in 2025.

Which is relevant because just under 60% of the Aiming higher portfolio contains shares, the rest is bonds, so it sits in the middle of that benchmark (the other line on the chart that measures if the fund is doing well or not.

It’s nice to see there is around 5% gold exposure too, but the portfolio’s three main holdings are ETFs that track the S&P500 from Amundi, Invesco and SPDR, which have as their top ten holdings all the usual gems like Nvidia, Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, Alphabet, Meta (Facebook) and Telsa.

So even if you do fancy yourself as a stock trader and are disappointed that you can’t invest in individual shares through a Santander Stocks and Shares ISA, you will be delighted to know that you are still at the party.

The rest of the portfolio is in bonds that generate income to balance out the ebbs and flows of the stock market.

How much does it cost?

Santander’s stocks and shares ISA accounts costs 0.35% of the value of your investments up to £50k, which drops to 0.2% upto £500k and then 0.1% above that. Unfortunately, there is no cap on fees.

There will be a fee charged by whoever runs the fund that you are invested in. For the one I picked, the “ongoing charges figure” was 0.43%.

Which means that the overall cost of holding this fund in an ISA with Santander is 0.78% if you have less than £50k.

That’s not too bad for a managed fund, robo-advisors like Wealthify, charge 0.6% (+0.15% OCF) and Moneyfarm fees go up to 0.7% (+.0.21% OCF).

Is it easy to open an account?

Yes, it took me less than five minutes to open a Stocks & Shares ISA with Santander, although I nearly gave up at one point when the data protection document covered the whole screen. It took me a while to figure out how to close it.

During the account opening process, you are asked to make an initial deposit, and also given the option to set up regular deposits. Which is great because, this is very much a set and forget investment ISA, as you can only invest in funds. Which is fine, because with long-term investments, it “pays dividends” to not tinker with them too much and make the contributions as often as possible, letting compounding interest work its magic.

Talking of paying dividends, you also get reinvested dividend income back into the funds that generated them. Which you probably should, to further compound your returns, especially as Santander only pay 2.22% AER interest on uninvested cash.

What’s customer service like?

I’ve marked Santander’s ISA down a bit here, because whilst I was opening an account, and writing this review, I was logged out, and I haven’t been able to log back in. I requested a new password online, but it never arrived.

So I had to phone them up, but I couldn’t get through because I didn’t have my account number, because I hadn’t been sent one. However, within a minute or so I was transferred to an actual human agent.

However, he couldn’t find my account and said it may take up to a day for it to show up on the system.

But, I then checked the welcome email I received after opening the ISA, which said if you were new to Santander, “We need a little more time to set your details up… Within 10 days, you’ll be sent your Santander Online Banking login details. Once you have logged in, just click on Investment Hub in the account list and you will see your Investment Hub dashboard.”

Is there any added value?

If you need a bit of help choosing what to invest in, you can talk to a qualified advisor at Santander for a flat fee from £500. Which is pretty good added value, if you need it.

There are also some videos on how the platform works, but other than that, I couldn’t find much in the way of market analysis.