Best SIPP Provider?

dunny41

Perhaps in the wrong section but I was interested as to who is the most recommended SIPP provider.

I've got £30,000 to invest from a small pension that I had from a previous job that is releasable for no fee.

I contribute the maximum sum to my a civil service pension, own 2 properties outright and do additional work in my field and have about 200k invested diversely elsewhere so this is money I don't need if it all went wrong.

Its just a small expansion project to work on the various stocks that I buy and sell (normally within my ISA) but instead use the 30k I intend to transfer to invest in stocks etc.

Now I have looked at H&L, Share Centre etc and they all seem much of a muchness, I guess what I am looking for is somewhere I can make trades for reasonable cost but have good functionality on iPad/iPhone because I rarely use a PC these days.

bowlhead99

I use Sippdeal for one of my pensions. They handled a cash transfer in from AEGON without issue last year. No problems since. I'm far enough from retirement to not be looking at the price for processing drawdowns etc but the other transactional costs are fine.

I use TD Direct for an ISA who have their own trading front end and fee structure but use AJ Bell (who own Sippdeal) in the background for the pensions admin side of it. And when I was looking for a Sipp provider , TD had an additional annual fee which Sippdeal themselves didn't have.

Fee structures evolve over time though so you need to consider what you are planning to invest in, how often you'll trade, and what that will cost at the different providers.

- For example HL will currently charge you an annual half percent for holding shares, capped at £200; so it keeps going up until you hit £40k, and a fixed monthly platform fee for clean funds depending on each fund you hold (with no trading fees on funds);

- TD would charge you a percentage to hold clean funds, but nothing specific beyond the dealing costs to hold shares, then an annual 0.25% admin on the total but capped at £100 (again this will cap out when you get to £40k total);

- Sippdeal don't have a fixed annual fee at all, unless you hold certain funds (generally the cheap clean ones) which attract a £12.50 charge every quarter - you either pay it or you don't, it doesn't scale with asset values (like TD) or number of funds held (like HL). If you are shares only, this might be the cheapest route, just paying your £9.99 per trade which is lower than TD and HL. However, if you are doing a lot of funds investing you will be stung by those £9.99 transaction fees which neither HL or TD levy on funds.

So, there is no one 'most recommended SIPP provider' - those three are all used by many many people, and the fees while appearing 'much of a muchness' (none of them will charge you thousands on £30k) really do depend on what you invest in. They all have mobile apps, though I've only traded with TD's and Sippdeal's - which work fine.

You mention you mostly buy and sell within your ISA at the moment. Does your ISA provider not offer a SIPP that you could sign up to? If you perceive the costs from different suppliers to be, broadly, all much of a muchness, and subject to change periodically anyway, then a unique attribute like 'everything in one place' could make them a winner. Or failing that, move your ISA at the same time and have everything in a one-stop shop. I had both my ISA and trading account with TD, and only put the SIPP with sippdeal for two reasons

- a perceived price reduction offsetting a marginal loss of service on the sharetrading side for things I wouldn't miss in a SIPP (fewer international markets, no multicurrency cash accounts, no extended settlement trading, slightly reduced trading functionality on some stocks offset by better forex rates)

- to try out another reputable provider to see first hand if I preferred one to the other in terms of service or cost.

Overall nothing has convinced me to move all my business to one over the other.

dunstonh

Perhaps in the wrong section but I was interested as to who is the most recommended SIPP provider.

There is no one best option. It will depend on what you are after, what features you want and where you buy it from.

You also have to be wary of the pricing of those that have changed to 2014 pricing compliance and those that have yet to move to that method.