HL Charges

Albermarle

Fidelity are late on paying my wife's transfer incentive from a previous offer period. It's been over 90 days since both her transfer completed and the offer period ended Fidelity have confirmed she qualified but have no ETA on when she will get paid.

Both my wife and I received transfer cashback cheques from them earlier last week . Mine will pay the platform charges for at least 18 months .
My money briefly appeared in a separate cash management account and then it disappeared again as a cheque had been raised ( without any intervention from me )
My wife also claimed exit fees for her transfer by filling in the PDF form . Payment arrived in about 10 days .

cloud_dog

We also never had any issues or particular delays in obtaining the cashback when transferring a couple of the OH pensions in to a Fidelity SIPP.

MarkCarnage

I've just done a quick compare on what I pay (accounts currently with HL).

I've restructured my SIPP portfolio into ITs, ETFs and one fund (where I can't find a replacement as good). This has taken the fees down a fair bit. They are now about £100 more than AJ Bell on assumption of a small number of deals a year looking forward. If I didn't deal at all, the difference would be less.

ISA and Share account combined difference is negligible. Again, pretty much all in ITs/ETFs.

HL service is very good, and website good too. I got a £500 cashback from them for consolidating all my ISAs/Share accounts to them last year. I am sure AJ Bell are decent enough too, but the differential cost for me doesn't make it worth transferring. The SIPP started off as a Group SIPP through former employer which I kept on through inertia at first. Worked out how much I was paying by using funds and changed that!

II would be cheaper still, but I had an awful experience with them (one of the platforms they acquired) which led me to transfer to HL.

Overall, I will be paying about £400 across all my accounts with HL, which is about 3bps. Yes, if I spend too much of my time looking I could get this down a bit yet, but service experience elsewhere was pretty variable, and life's too short. I'd rather spend the time optimising my portfolio. I don't deal very often at all though, which also helps reduce costs.

Good to see that some of the charges are coming down though, not before time.

aroominyork

Alexland wrote: »

When I asked about the incentive AJ Bell said that provided I opened my new account first then they would pay the incentive on my wife's new account. They are both currently unfunded (already used £4k allowance) and we sent the transfer requests in the same envelope (why waste a stamp...). We then emailed to request the incentive and they confirmed we had qualified provided the HL transfers complete. We also get another free book which I have previously sold for about £10 on eBay. If you are worried why not make a small investment? Also double check but I don't think their dealing account has a closure fee.

I knew you'd be the one to answer, Alex the bonus king! I just spoke with AJ Bell. They say my account can remain unfunded so I'll risk it: open an unfunded dealing account, save the hassle of making an investment, and keep a copy of the Ts & Cs.

bowlhead99

MarkCarnage wrote: »

Overall, I will be paying about £400 across all my accounts with HL, which is about 3bps. Yes, if I spend too much of my time looking I could get this down a bit yet, but service experience elsewhere was pretty variable, and life's too short. I'd rather spend the time optimising my portfolio. I don't deal very often at all though, which also helps reduce costs.

Good to see that some of the charges are coming down though, not before time.

Makes sense - if you could squeeze a bit more off the platform fees and get 3bps down to 2bps , the saving of one basis point would take a century to affect your total return by one percent, while the portfolio returns could differ by much more more than a percent every year depending on what asset allocation you choose.

If you have no obvious reason to move, I guess the exit fee reductions are not much of a benefit. A potential downside is that if HL are going to more evenly spread the costs across their client base (rather than have activity-based charging), you might expect them to increase the fee caps, thus adversely affecting people who don't need to move. And then maybe you would want to move. But it would be cheap to do so. Everyone's a winner!!

MarkCarnage

bowlhead99 wrote: »

Makes sense - if you could squeeze a bit more off the platform fees and get 3bps down to 2bps , the saving of one basis point would take a century to affect your total return by one percent, while the portfolio returns could differ by much more more than a percent every year depending on what asset allocation you choose.

If you have no obvious reason to move, I guess the exit fee reductions are not much of a benefit. A potential downside is that if HL are going to more evenly spread the costs across their client base (rather than have activity-based charging), you might expect them to increase the fee caps, thus adversely affecting people who don't need to move. And then maybe you would want to move. But it would be cheap to do so. Everyone's a winner!!

I have already wondered if and when the basic fee structure might change to maintain the top line revenue stream.

I did challenge them a while back on the fee structure and got a fairly lame response to be honest. As I've used ITs for years and all my ISA funds were already in them and some individual stocks there was no issue there, and I just switched my SIPP holdings to ITs too, generally with low TERs, though I have a couple which are specialist funds and over 1% TER but they have both done extremely well over a long time period - miles better than passive in one case, and passive doesn't exist in the other sector.

As you say, the barriers to transfer are now removed or significantly lowered. I don't have a problem with a small transfer fee in line with the cost involved, otherwise you get cross subsidy of the 'tarts'. That should also mean that the maintenance costs can't get too out of line, though providers will continue to differentiate their offering to aim for different types of customer - high turnover v low, high value v low value etc.

Alexland

AJ Bell just told me they believe HL have a 7 week backlog to looking at our transfer requests.

If true it might not be a good time to relax closure fees...

AnotherJoe

MarkCarnage wrote: »

I have already wondered if and when the basic fee structure might change to maintain the top line revenue stream.

I did challenge them a while back on the fee structure and got a fairly lame response to be honest. As I've used ITs for years and all my ISA funds were already in them and some individual stocks there was no issue there, and I just switched my SIPP holdings to ITs too, generally with low TERs, though I have a couple which are specialist funds and over 1% TER but they have both done extremely well over a long time period - miles better than passive in one case, and passive doesn't exist in the other sector.

As you say, the barriers to transfer are now removed or significantly lowered. I don't have a problem with a small transfer fee in line with the cost involved, otherwise you get cross subsidy of the 'tarts'. That should also mean that the maintenance costs can't get too out of line, though providers will continue to differentiate their offering to aim for different types of customer - high turnover v low, high value v low value etc.

My main annoyance with HL is that they dont make any recognition in their charges for accounts pooled across multiple accounts - ISAs, SIPPs etc.

£300k in each of SIPP and ISA woudl be charged very differently to £500k SIPP and £100K ISA or £200k in each of fund and share, ISA and SIPP.


At some point that might grate enough with me I'll move, at the moment i rationalise it away by saying that it affects my descendants not me (as I'll never use it all) , plus i really (mostly) do like their interface, and finally its not usually greener on the other side of the fence anyway. Mostly I've mitigated it by, as you've done, moving from funds to ITs and ETFs plus i have a fair few shares, and theres no charge on them.



It would be good if platform providers gave you a sandpit where you could try before buying. If I found somewhere cheap enough to tempt me to move and i coudl see i'd get on with the interface, i would be substantially more likely to move.

System

This may be old news, but Lloyds and Halifax Share Dealing have also eliminated charges for stock transfers:
https://www.lloydsbank.com/assets/media/pdfs/investments/direct-investments/costs_and_charges.pdf
https://static.halifax.co.uk/assets/pdf/filestore/CostAndCharges.pdf

Alexland

Alexland wrote: »

AJ Bell just told me they believe HL have a 7 week backlog to looking at our transfer requests.

AJ Bell were spot on - after nearly 2 months HL sent us letters confirming they will start working on the requests. Our overall experience with HL is that they are pretty average.

Alex