Any experience of 'Moola' robo-investment?

Alexland

All your Moola cash and/or assets are held by Winterflood who are extremely reputable and you would be covered by FSCS protection in the event their financial service failed to return your money. It's probably just a delay in their administration which might have worked in your favour given stock markets have been going up in recent days.

Shedman

We've finally pulled out as well (oooh matron). Nice return but fees too high plus we're trying to reduce the excessive number of accounts of various types we hold and which following intensive consolidation into the Santander claimathon have come down from over 50 to a more managable 38 :rotfl:). Mind you I'm waiting for Alex to find a few new ones for us to make some money on.

cfw1994

Anyone still with Moola will have received this notice of closure:

Closure of Moola Systems Limited trading as Moola
Individual Savings Account (ISA) investments

After a recent strategic review, we have regretfully decided to close Moola with effect from 27 February 2020. Any monthly payments will stop being collected from 17 January 2020.

My amount was small enough to just transfer out now, not worth moving to another ISA....

Shame: it has performed okay (adventurous fund), BUT it strikes me many of the smaller or robo FinTech companies may struggle as their investors realise they are mostly losing money.

LHZ

Yes I got that email too and like you I haven't got enough in to worry about transferring to another ISA so I'll just cash out (option 2). It's come at that time of year when HMRC ask for a ton of cash from me so I'll be using it to pay some of my 18/19 income tax bill. I do plan to look at replacing it with some other form of share investing platform but not really got time to look into that just yet.

Alexland

So they didn't even build up enough AUM to be worth selling the client accounts to Nutmeg etc?

Malthusian

Alexland wrote: »

So they didn't even build up enough AUM to be worth selling the client accounts to Nutmeg etc?

Sell to Nutmeg for what? Nutmeg doesn't have any money either. Nutmeg are also hoping to sell up to a bank or somebody else who wants a book of DIY investors who don't churn and don't have much money, once they've burned up enough VC capital.

Malthusian

To add to the above, Moola was bought by JLT for an undisclosed sum 18 months ago, to bolt on to their employee benefits package, or something. Whether or not it was worthwhile for JLT, nobody knows - this is the great thing about trade acquisitions, nobody outside JLT senior management knows whether it was a success or failure. Nobody invests their money via their employer unless it's a pension scheme (which JLT already did) or ShareSave (ditto, I think) so I'm not clear how they ever expected to make money from it. But easy to be cynical when nobody is ever going to tell you you're wrong.

It is however fairly clear that Moola did not get the clients investing £50,000+ it was targeting in large numbers, and that it wasn't turning a profit, otherwise JLT would either have kept it running or sold it to another business.

It looks like JLT is going to have to stump up for investors' capital gains tax bills as well. Although if Moola had very few investors, mostly investing trivial amounts, that will be paid out of petty cash.

The only positive for the robo-sales industry is that they managed to stuff it in a sack and flog it to JLT before it shuttered. Albeit for an undisclosed sum, so who knows if the VCs made their money back.

george4064

Malthusian wrote: »

To add to the above, Moola was bought by JLT for an undisclosed sum 18 months ago, to bolt on to their employee benefits package, or something. Whether or not it was worthwhile for JLT, nobody knows - this is the great thing about trade acquisitions, nobody outside JLT senior management knows whether it was a success or failure. Nobody invests their money via their employer unless it's a pension scheme (which JLT already did) or ShareSave (ditto, I think) so I'm not clear how they ever expected to make money from it. But easy to be cynical when nobody is ever going to tell you you're wrong.

It is however fairly clear that Moola did not get the clients investing £50,000+ it was targeting in large numbers, and that it wasn't turning a profit, otherwise JLT would either have kept it running or sold it to another business.

It looks like JLT is going to have to stump up for investors' capital gains tax bills as well. Although if Moola had very few investors, mostly investing trivial amounts, that will be paid out of petty cash.

The only positive for the robo-sales industry is that they managed to stuff it in a sack and flog it to JLT before it shuttered. Albeit for an undisclosed sum, so who knows if the VCs made their money back.

Moo.la was acquired by JLT around September 2018, however not long after that JLT was acquired by Marsh & Mclennan Companies (NYSE). So perhaps just a strategic shift due to change of ownership rather than not performing well, or a combination.

Malthusian

"A combination" is always a safe answer. But if Moola was making money and M&MC nonetheless wanted rid for strategic reasons, they would have sold it, not shut it down.

The M&M takeover of JLT was announced in September 2018 and negotiations and due diligence must have been going on for months before that. So if M&MC didn't want Moola, they could have said so and JLT could have pulled out.

Alexland

Someone has shown an interest in buying Moola.

In the final year Moola had a cost base of £1.3m and turnover of just 889 pounds!

https://www.ftadviser.com/investments/2020/01/24/advice-firm-offers-to-buy-closed-robo-adviser/