HL Active Savings to get a competitor

ColdIron

AJ Bell to enter retail cash savings market as clients and AUM rise

No indication of timescales yet

https://citywire.co.uk/wealth-manager/news/aj-bell-to-enter-retail-cash-savings-market-as-clients-and-aum-rise/a1383552

george4064

Sounds interesting, they did carry out some market research and surveys not that long ago which seemed to be gauging how much interest there would be from AJ Bell clients for a cash like savings product in their platform.

colsten

CEO Andy Bell: "AJ Bell cash savings hub will enable customers to manage their cash savings more effectively without having to go through lengthy, paper-based application processes each time they open a new account".

Lengthy, paper-based application processes? For a fixed term savings account?

I hope that's not an indication of the level of research they have performed.

However, a little more competition to HL, Raisin and Monzo savings can only be a good thing.

Audaxer

It would be good if this was an option for cash held within an S&S ISA, but I'm guessing it won't be.

firestone

There is also Octopus cash which was before HL by at least a year or so and might even have been the first to launch this type of product.They rather strangely only used to show 1 year and 35 day accounts but had other terms via a financial adviser (which apparently you could ask about anyway once you knew that fact)

colsten

firestone said:

There is also Octopus cash which was before HL by at least a year or so and might even have been the first to launch this type of product.They rather strangely only used to show 1 year and 35 day accounts but had other terms via a financial adviser (which apparently you could ask about anyway once you knew that fact)

Hmh. That sounds a bit dodgy. You wouldn't need a financial advisor to help you chose a savings account. It's also highly unlikely that a Financial Advisor would do much without making money, and they wouldn't get any significant (if any) commission for 'selling' a savings account. So their agenda must be to find people with money, whom they can then talk into making investments.

HL doesn't have any 'hidden' accounts that you only have access to via one of their advisors. 

firestone

colsten said:

firestone said:

There is also Octopus cash which was before HL by at least a year or so and might even have been the first to launch this type of product.They rather strangely only used to show 1 year and 35 day accounts but had other terms via a financial adviser (which apparently you could ask about anyway once you knew that fact)

Hmh. That sounds a bit dodgy. You wouldn't need a financial advisor to help you chose a savings account. It's also highly unlikely that a Financial Advisor would do much without making money, and they wouldn't get any significant (if any) commission for 'selling' a savings account. So their agenda must be to find people with money, whom they can then talk into making investments.

HL doesn't have any 'hidden' accounts that you only have access to via one of their advisors. 

 Sure its not dodgy and as a large company that has things like mortgages,investment trusts and a energy company etc i would guess their not looking to "an agenda to talk people into investments".But would guess when they started they where the first(or pretty close) to offering that sort of product and they probably went the adviser route at first as it was a way of explaining the product and getting some trust in it.And their landing page still ask's what sort of investor you are business/retail/adviser.
My wife got a 3 year bond last year after the 1 year matured by asking if they did longer terms but not sure the reason it was not on the home page only that it was available at that time.

colsten

“Explaining the product”? It’s only a fixed term savings account FGS.


The size of a company has nothing to do with how dodgy their practices are

masonic

No doubt it will be like the bank and building society financial advisors that used to talk people into signing up to rubbish structured products back in the day where those things were in vogue (Octopus happens to run a P2P platform, I'm not sure about other investment products they'd have on offer). I think dodgy is the right word to use for this sort of practice.

firestone

Not sure how its dodgy to offer fixed rate bonds for varying terms to different sectors of the market(or was at launch) as their business model to offer 1 year to retail and 18 months or 3 year to business/adviser at certain times that's hardly dodgy just a business decision.
Companies offer different products to different parts of the market all the time,who knows it may even work the same in reverse for Octopus or Raisin etc in that the Banks/BS may offer HL as a bigger name different products,rates or commission  then they do them                                                                             
At the end of the day i have been happy with HL active savings and my wife with Octopus

colsten

firestone said:

Not sure how its dodgy to offer fixed rate bonds for varying terms to different sectors of the market(or was at launch) as their business model to offer 1 year to retail and 18 months or 3 year to business/adviser at certain times that's hardly dodgy just a business decision.
Companies offer different products to different parts of the market all the time,who knows it may even work the same in reverse for Octopus or Raisin etc in that the Banks/BS may offer HL as a bigger name different products,rates or commission  then they do them                                                                             
At the end of the day i have been happy with HL active savings and my wife with Octopus

The dodgy bit is that some bog-standard fixed term savings accounts which they apparently offer are only available if you go through an "advisor" (glorious name for a salesman on commission). As there is no, or only very little, commission on savings accounts, the only logical explanation for this strange way of offering, or should I say not offering, these accounts through a salesman is so that the salesman can try and sell a more profitable product. 

Fixed term interest rates are hardly a secret, and neither are fixed term savings accounts. Even Branch-only accounts are now freely advertised on the Internet by the provider and by comparison sites. The Octopus approach is clearly not comparable with the transparent approach used by HL or Raisin.