Bestinvest Customer Reviews
Very good
Very good
Very good
Very good
Been with them for many…
Been with them for many years. Never failed to obey my wishes
Brilliant, easy to use, efficient
Brilliant, easy to use, efficient
simple, accesible
simple, accesible
intuative and easy to navigate….
intuative and easy to navigate. Go App also.
no comment
no comment
Easy to set up, easy…
Easy to set up, easy to use. Great customer support and education
Very Good
Very Good
Excellent – great customer service….
Excellent – great customer service. Have consolidated from IQ, Lloyds & SL
5/5
Lots to offer and useful…
Lots to offer and useful coaches
5/5
Very good information easy to…
Very good information easy to access and understand
Not bad – comms not…
Not bad – comms not brilliant
Great information
Great information
has got relatively more expensive…
has got relatively more expensive over time V Interactive Investor
OK, my investments with them…
OK, my investments with them are old ones
Easy to use
Easy to use
Taken over by Evelyn Partners
Taken over by Evelyn Partners
Fairly new customer but happy…
Fairly new customer but happy with service
good all round and improved…
good all round and improved since becoming part of Evelyn
used for SIP
used for SIP
Fine
Fine
Great Coaching, Tools & value
Great Coaching, Tools & value
Excellent value for money …
Excellent value for money – the free coaching is amazing
Good digital experience supported by…
Good digital experience supported by expert coaching
Coaching service is really great,…
Coaching service is really great, plus portfolio projection tools
4/5
Pros:
access in one place to etf’s IT’s aand funds and shares
Cons:
the admin staff quality is variable.I have had 2 instances when requesting a new sharee to be put on when nothing happened
4/5
4/5
Pros:
Flexibility
Cons:
DonÔÇÖt use it enough to have any strong opinions
4/5
Pros:
Part of a group
4/5
Pros:
all facilities needed to research and trade in the one place
5/5
Pros:
Good analysis
Cons:
Better communication to me
2/5
Pros:
It’s easy to use.
Cons:
I get the impression they are not so interested.
5/5
Pros:
Range of funds available
Cons:
Transactions sometimes fail and require putting through manually by customer support
5/5
Pros:
coaching
Cons:
more information on non core funds, feedback on the funds held and adise on better funds
2/5
3/5
Pros:
some good ideas
Cons:
investing for income suggestions
2/5
Pros:
Cheap
Cons:
Customer service
4/5
5/5
Pros:
Wide range of instruments
Cons:
Address spread/costs for Bed and ISA
5/5
4/5
Cons:
Improve web site
5/5
3/5
Pros:
Good
Cons:
Good
5/5
Pros:
No comment
Cons:
ƒÿî
5/5
4/5
5/5
5/5
3/5
Pros:
Good value for money
Cons:
Online experience
2/5
4/5
Pros:
Vcts
2/5
Pros:
Spot the dog
Cons:
Analysis
4/5
Pros:
responds well to request for shares to be added to their current offerings
Cons:
provide access to more funds ,etf’s and Investment Trusts
5/5
3/5
Pros:
–
Cons:
–
4/5
Pros:
Good combination of value and information
Cons:
Expensive
2/5
2/5
Pros:
n/a
5/5
Pros:
Free US Share dealing
Cons:
more intermnational shares
2/5
3/5
2/5
Pros:
Don’t know
Cons:
Be the best
5/5
Pros:
Free coaching, competitive RMPs
Cons:
Lower fees
5/5
Pros:
Coaching
Cons:
Smoother app
5/5
Pros:
The client support team are wonderful and knowledgeable. The app is also really handy so it’s always accessible.
Cons:
Add a filter their search to single out ESG funds
4/5
Pros:
Easy to access
5/5
Pros:
ease of use
Cons:
improve stability
4/5
Pros:
Calidad de productos
Cons:
Rebajar precios
3/5
5/5
Pros:
Intuitive App Navigation
5/5
Pros:
User friendly and customer support
Cons:
Nothing coming my mind
5/5
Pros:
layout / choice of funds and investment performance charts
Cons:
show historical transactions
5/5
5/5
Pros:
Free Coaching advice
5/5
Pros:
Easy to use and kept well informed
5/5
Pros:
Ease of use
Cons:
More advice
5/5
Pros:
The personal relationship with their support team.
Cons:
Make it easier to open an account.
5/5
5/5
1/5
Pros:
The ease of use and the access to a meeting with a coach
5/5
5/5
Pros:
Ease of use
5/5
Pros:
Easy to use
Cons:
Communications
5/5
Pros:
Ease of use and access to great support
Cons:
Keep improving the platform
5/5
Pros:
Dealing costs
Cons:
Have real time pricing for stocks & shares on all markets
5/5
Pros:
Simple fee structure
Cons:
Improve range of investments but US stocks are coming I understand
5/5
Pros:
Coaching service and the portfolio projection chart
Cons:
Reinstate VCT star ratings
5/5
Pros:
Love the new goal planning tools
Cons:
Add automated share voting
5/5
Pros:
Access to human advice
Cons:
Continue investing in mobile app
5/5
Pros:
The new coaching service
Cons:
Add US shares – apparently coming soon
3/5
Pros:
NIL
Cons:
lower prices
4/5
Pros:
research
Cons:
make it easier for those who cannot access their account
5/5
Pros:
free investment coaching
Cons:
add US shares
5/5
Pros:
The fee coaching and ready made funds!
Cons:
visual recommendation of the stocks and shares graph
5/5
Pros:
New coaching service is excellent
Cons:
Add US equities
5/5
Pros:
the tutorials, and although I didn’t use, the curated portfolios seem excellent for a beginner
5/5
Pros:
Free financial coaching
Cons:
Introduce an app but that has just gone live
Leave a review
- Tell us what you think of this company and help others make more informed financial decisions.
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Bestinvest Expert Review
For this Bestinvest review, I’ve interviewed the CEO (in the studio and over a lovely lunch at Cobette on Gresham Street) and put some trades and investments on the app and desktop platform.
Bestinvest Review
Name: Bestinvest
Description: Bestinvest is one of the most established investment platforms in the UK. Bestinvest was founded in 1986 and is now owned by Evelyn Partners (a financial services firm with £52 billion under management). Bestinvest primary offering is low-cost premade portfolios costing as little as 0.2% a year, fund investing and discount UK share dealing.
Is Bestinvest good for investing?
Yes, Bestinvest has combined low-cost online investing and share dealing with personalised expert advice to help clients choose the right investments for their portfolio. A good choice for large long-term investors who want a bit of added value from their broker.
Pros
- Expert advice
- Lowest comparable costs
- Ready-made portfolios
Cons
- Basic data on platform
- App a bit clunky
- No hedging products
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Pricing
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Market Access
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Online Platform
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Customer Service
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Research & Analysis
Overall
4.2Bestinvest Review Ratings Explained
- Pricing: Bestinvest scores top marks for their low-cost ready-made portfolios and cheap dealing fees
- Market Access: There is a huge range of UK and US shares, bonds and funds to invest in, although they are let down by not offering emerging markets
- App & Platform: This could be a lot better and the app was only released last year
- Customer Service: Bestinvest gives excellent personal service, although advice is charged on a flat fee basis
- Research & Analysis: There is a really good coverage of funds with their ‘Spot the Dog’ report.
Another way to phrase this review title would be that one of the worst things about investing online, is having to invest online…
This is because investing is a fairly solitary activity. Gone are the days of weekly investment club meetings down the pub, or regular lunches with your stock broker. Plus, if you search for information on investing online, it’s awash with social media influencers coaching newbies, not for the purposes of providing financial advice (which they are not allowed to do anyway), but for clicks, likes and views.
Modernisation
I wasn’t going to talk about how the internet has revolutionised investing, because that is almost as outdated spiel as how RDR has discouraged investors from getting advice on their investments. But both are true so I sort of have to talk about it in a review that takes online investing offline.
There are very few legitimate online resources that help people invest their money well. It’s absolutely staggering that TikTok users spend on average 95 minutes a day scrolling through the app, almost double what people spend on Facebook and Instagram*. The worry here is that, particularly after the pandemic and meme stock mania, more and more people are turning to social media for investment advice.
Social Media
It’s genuinely terrifying. I didn’t have TikTok before today, but I downloaded it to see and searched for videos on investing. Hyperbole aside, 20 minutes later, I looked up after having been hypnotised by a series of kids selling the dream.
It’s a trend, that has even worried Google, as people look to videos to answer questions rather than websites. Luckily they own YouTube, where users ‘only’ spend 74 minutes a day zoning out and watching ‘how to’ videos.
But there is a solution for investors who want actual advice and don’t have a wealth manager.
Advice & Guidance
What Bestinvest has done is added another layer to their historically, execution-only platform in the form of ‘Coaching’. This hybrid approach means you can invest online, but also have a one-on-one chat with an expert.
For new clients, you can have a free 45-minute session with a qualified financial planner who will talk you through the various investment options on the platform and what may be most appropriate. Once you have an account, this service is unlimited.
When I spoke to Jason Hollands, the head of corporate affairs at Bestinvest before writing this review, he was keen to highlight that coaching is not financial advice, it’s guidance. Before you have a coaching session, you can go through a suitability questionnaire that sets out your investing goals and risk tolerance, but it’s not a full-on ‘know your client’ process, as coaching is about what you could do, rather than what you should do.
If you want actual investment advice, to fine-tune your portfolio, get investment ideas, and help with what to buy and sell, Bestinvest can do that by delving a bit deeper on the phone or by video chat. Which is something that most of the other investment platforms out there don’t offer.
If you are a new investor, Bestinvest charges £295 for a consultation and will recommend a ready-made portfolio (similar to what robo-advisors offer). Or, if you have an existing portfolio, for £495 one of their investment advisors will analyse your holdings and suggest what to keep, what to get rid of and what to replace it with. They can’t help with tax planning or inheritance issues, but if you need proper wealth management Bestinvest is part of Evelyn Partners which can offer those services (Evelyn currently looks after over £52bn).
Quality Costs
Before you gawk at the prospect of having to pay for something investment-related and bemoan ‘investing is for making money, not spending it’, think about what you are getting in return. In the past, this would have been free yes, but it would have been provided by a half-com hungry adviser stuffing new clients into any new old fund for the purposes of generating commission. But those days are over.
I’ve seen a pattern emerge over the last few years across all investing, trading and currency providers: They want their customers to do well. Because a profitable customer is a happy customer, and happy customers stick around (and yes, to the cynics, incidentally generate more commission that way).
But this is where Bestinvest says they win business. Not from new investors signing up to start investing, but from established investors with larger portfolios transferring in who need a little bit more from their broker. Which to be fair, are a better type of customer for Bestinvest anyway.
Why? Because they are cheap.
Bestinvest & Low Cost Portfolios
Annual account fees for Smart portfolios start at 0.2%pa up to £500k, then 0.1% to £1m, then nothing over £1m. To put that in comparison, Hargreaves Lansdown charges 0.45% up to £250k, and even upstart digital wealth managers like Nutmeg charge 0.35% for portfolios above £100k (0.75% below that), whilst Moneyfarm charges up to 0.45% above £100k.
Ongoing charges at Bestinvest are a little higher though (the fee to the investment manager for running the fund) of 0.34%, versus about 0.2% for Smart ready-made portfolios.
Another advantage of Bestinvest over Nutmeg and Moneyfarm is that you can also buy individual UK shares for growth, dividends or if you just fancy a punt on the market. For share dealing, Bestinvest has the lowest commission of the big platforms. It’s £4.95 for dealing online, whereas HL is £11.95, Interactive Investor £7.99 and AJ Bell £9.95.
Ready-made portfolios are the ‘investments de jour‘, and people like them because they are low-cost and diverse. Bestinvest launched a new range of Smart portfolios with Evelyn funds in January 2022 containing ETFs and trackers to keep costs down. You can also invest in more actively managed Expert portfolios, which target better returns, however fees are higher with ongoing fund charges around 1.5%.
They have some quite nifty widgets as well. The Goal Planning tool will analyse your holdings and produce a graph of where your investments may be in the future. This is based on what you actually hold, rather than just an averaged-out market performance calculator, which is what you tend to get elsewhere.
Lagging Tech
However, for active investors, the online dealing platform is nowhere near as good as Interactive Investor or Hargreaves Lansdown. The fund and share research on the platform is limited to a fairly poorly integrated data portal from Digital Look, although the fund factsheets are integrated well. When I tested it I found it quite hard to navigate to the actual ‘Invest’ button kept disappearing. But as I said earlier, this is online investing without investing online. It may actually be a blessing as too much tinkering with your long-term investments can be counter-productive.
Personal Service At Bestinvest
What makes Bestinvest one of the best places to invest is if you want to research stocks and funds and don’t want to trawl through online screeners on Trustnet or get waylaid by pump and dump chat on Reddit you can pick up the phone and talk to someone who knows what they are talking about.
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Bestinvest Awards
Bestinvest won best added value account in the GoodMoneyGuide 2023 awards as they are one of the only major investment platforms to offer both advice and guidance.
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Bestinvest Video Review
Watch as we invest live on the Bestinvest website and app as well as highlight some of the key features that make them stand out from other providers.
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Best investment funds list revealed by stock broker Bestinvest
Bestinvest has released its latest list of the best investment funds in the view of its research team. The Best Funds List singles out funds identified by the investment platform as having qualities beyond mere outperformance of a benchmark. The List (viewable in full via this link) screens for criteria such as fund managers investing
Is Bestinvest’s general investment account any good?
I’d say the best thing about Bestinvest’s GIA is the added value. Market access is a bit limited, but you can get advice on what to invest in as and when you need it (at a cost). Bestinvest’s GIA has recently launched a series of low-cost ready-made portfolios. You can also buy individual shares, funds
How much can you pay into a Bestinvest Junior SIPP each year?
Bestinvest’s Junior SIPP lets you start investing up to £3,600 a year for your children’s retirement. At 18 it turns into a regular SIPP which they can manage themselves (or with your help). One of the key advantages of Bestinvest’s junior SIPP is that you can ask qualified investment experts for advice on what to
Is Bestinvests ISA any good?
Bestinvest offer some of the best interest rates on uninvested cash in a stocks and shares ISA. Current Bestinvest interest rates are over 4%. Bestinvest has combined low-cost online ISA investing and share dealing with personalised expert advice to help clients choose the right investments for their portfolio. A good choice for large long-term investors.
Bestinvest’s latest ‘Spot the Dog’ report reveals that many ESG funds are underperforming
Twice a year, Bestinvest publishes its ‘Spot the Dog’ investment fund report. This highlights actively-managed investment funds that are underperforming their benchmarks. The most recent Spot the Dog report was published by the investment platform on 16 August. Here’s a look at some key findings. £53 billion in underperforming funds Bestinvest analyses the performance of
Oliver Plant Head of Bestinvest on how important the right type of advice and guidance is for investors
In our latest interview, we talk to Oliver Plant, head of Bestinvest. As the name suggests we rank Bestinvest as one of the best places to invest and as such they won “Best Added Value Investment Account” in our 2023 awards. They are in fact one of the few stock brokers left in the UK
Bestinvest add IPO access through partnership with PrimaryBid
Digital wealth manager Bestinvest has announced a new partnership which will allow customers of the firm to participate in IPOs and secondary offerings. Bestinvest IPO Investing Bestinvest has announced a new partnership with PrimaryBid which opens up the world of new issues to Bestinvest clients. Bestinvest was founded way back in 1986 so it’s perhaps
How many investment trusts are on Bestinvest?
You can invest in around 270 investment trusts on Bestinvest and as they are regulated by the FCA your funds are protected by the FSCS. Richard BerryRichard is the founder of the Good Money Guide (formerly Good Broker Guide), one of the original investment comparison sites established in 2015. With a career spanning two decades
Can you invest in OEIC on Bestinvest?
Yes, Bestinvest do not charge commission for buying or selling open-ended investment companies, but their annual account fee is slightly higher than other providers like AJ Bell (who do charge commssion). Richard BerryRichard is the founder of the Good Money Guide (formerly Good Broker Guide), one of the original investment comparison sites established in 2015.
Is Bestinvest a good platform for buying ETFs?
One of the best things about buying ETFs through Bestinvest is the ability to ask a financial coach or advisor which ones are the best ones for you to buy with their advice service. Picking the right investments can significantly make up for costing a little bit more, or not having as broad ETF universe
How are Bestinvest share dealing fees taken?
When you deal shares on Bestinvest you are charged commision after you trade. You also have to pay an annual account charge that is deducted monthly. Expert opinion: Bestinvest reviewed & rated Richard BerryRichard is the founder of the Good Money Guide (formerly Good Broker Guide), one of the original investment comparison sites established in
Avoid bad funds with Bestinvest’s Spot the Dog list
If you want to invest in funds with Bestinvest, they have since 1994 produced a list of underperforming funds to avoid. It’s a great way to help you pick better funds to invest in if you have any in your portfolio. Available funds: 1,000 Fund account fee: 0.2% Fund dealing commission: £4.95 Minimum investment: £1 Fund Fees: Bestinvest charge a
Can you invest for your children with Bestinvest junior ISA?
Yes, with a Bestinvest Junior ISA you can invest upto £9,000 tax free in a JISA for your children for when they turn 18. One bonus here is that when they do turn 18 you can get them to talk to a financial advisor at Bestinves for some advice on what to invest it in,
Richard is the founder of the Good Money Guide (formerly Good Broker Guide), one of the original investment comparison sites established in 2015. With a career spanning two decades as a broker, he brings extensive expertise and knowledge to the financial landscape.
Having worked as a broker at Investors Intelligence and a multi-asset derivatives broker at MF Global (Man Financial), Richard has acquired substantial experience in the industry. His career began as a private client stockbroker at Walker Crips and Phillip Securities (now King and Shaxson), following internships on the NYMEX oil trading floor in New York and London IPE in 2001 and 2000.
Richard’s contributions and expertise have been recognized by respected publications such as BusinessInsider, Yahoo Finance, BusinessNews.org.uk, Master Investor, Wealth Briefing, iNews, and The FT, among many others.
Under Richard’s leadership, the Good Money Guide has evolved into a valuable destination for comprehensive information and expert guidance, specialising in trading, investment, and currency exchange. His commitment to delivering high-quality insights has solidified the Good Money Guide’s standing as a well-respected resource for both customers and industry colleagues.
You can contact Richard at richard@goodmoneyguide.com