Interactive Investor

koru

In relation to the original question, I have been with them since shortly after they changed their fees and they have been fine.

One thing I like about their website is that they have a secure message facility, so I can raise queries this way. I prefer this to phoning, because then I have a written record of the discussion, although of course it does mean it sometimes takes longer to get an answer. There has often been a delay of two or three days, but recently they seem to have started responding within a day.

It did take about six months for one of my accounts to be transferred in, but it was never clear whether this was the fault of Interactive Investor or the predecessor platform, because both blamed the other. What I can say is that I and my family have transferred in four or five other accounts from other platforms and this went very smoothly, so I tend to think that the massive delay was probably caused by the particular platform.

I would say that the website is not the easiest to navigate, and it is not always easy to know which funds and fund classes they are able to supply, although once you are logged in to your account you can use the search box in the trading page.

They are often extremely helpful, for instance when I have queried whether they are able to supply a particular class of the particular fund, there have been a number of cases when they have been able to add this class to the platform at my request.

A few members of my family will now be transferring accounts in from Hargreaves Lansdown, so in total we will have 11 accounts all linked for the purpose of the quarterly fee, so if we were to share the £20 fee between us it would work out at less than £2 per account per quarter. (We don't bother, because it's all in the family and I get to use the trading credits anyway.)

WatsonNimrod

Just an update from me, I moved my SIPP and ISA to them and so far so good.

I looked very closely at all the others and for what I was doing (low 6 figure balances in both accounts) it was definitely the best option.

I do however avoid the Bulletin Board!

Many thanks for all the replies

cepheus

How long does it take when the transfer goes OK?

koru

cepheus wrote: »

How long does it take when the transfer goes OK?

Several weeks, I seem to remember.

WatsonNimrod

My ISA transfer over was very simple, the SIPP took about 3 weeks .

Imnoexpert_2

In preparation for what might be the transfer of my Wedge to another provider, of which the cheapest seems to be Interactive Investor I have opened a research account with them and plan to use it to model my current portfolio and find out how good their website is. Too early to say at present but I notice a few things.
The help online chat wasn't online today when I tried it.

My favourite fund - a First state one isn't showing as available.

I was a bit confused that both clean and dirty funds seem available and I will have to dig down a bit to understand which is which.

None of this is a barrier to switching I'll just have to adapt.

As I don't intend to rush this decision, or make a change if it only saves a small amount I shall persevere and maybe try out some others in this way.

gterr

Yes, I was browsing their available funds yesterday and came across some anomalies. You can apply a filter so that you see only funds available in an ISA, yet some of the funds within this grouping are marked as NOT available in an ISA if you look at further details about the fund.

I, too, was confused by the different versions of a fund. Eventually I left the site and went on to the CSD site to do the fund research - much easier there - then went back to iii to find the correct version of the fund. It wasn't always there, and sometimes there but not available in ISAs.

This is partly why I've decided to use CSD for my ISA and iii for my (much simpler) unwrapped fund.

Also, I've sent a few questions out to different fund platforms over the last couple of days, starting with a question to iii on Wednesday. All the other answers have come back, except for iii who haven't replied (yet). Not hugely encouraging.

masonic

gterr wrote: »

Yes, I was browsing their available funds yesterday and came across some anomalies. You can apply a filter so that you see only funds available in an ISA, yet some of the funds within this grouping are marked as NOT available in an ISA if you look at further details about the fund.

I've had a similar experience. The only way I've found to bring back certain funds is to do a text search for them by name. The fund manager/sector dropdowns do not seem to return everything they should.

colalba

WatsonNimrod wrote: »

Mainly though I am interested in the reliability of their trading platforms, customer support and user friendliness of their systems.

I wondered if there were any other views on the question the OP posed from current clients of ii.


It would be particularly interesting to hear from anybody who had left H-L highlighting what, if any, the key differences were in the facilities on their website, either good or bad.

Michael_Nottingham

I am with both, though given the recent HL announcement, I probably wont be with HL much longer!

III have been fine, the trading platform took a bit of getting used to but is actually no more difficult to use than HL. However, I have only bought a few UTs through it - not shares etc

I did ask III a few questions to start off with - and to be honest found that they weren't mega helpful compared to HL e.g. werent prepared even to point out the clean share classes. HL on the other hand have always been excellent and very helpful and knowledgeable on the phone).I have taken the view that 99.99% of the transactions I do are fully online anyway and I am not prepared to pay £100s more for the HL service