Anyone with experience of Fidelity Wealth Management?

jim1999

Just wondering if anyone has any information on what perks / benefits they've had from the Fidelity Wealth Management service?

To be clear, I'm not asking about financial advisors - at Fidelity that's still a separate and paid service as far as I can tell and I'm fully subscribed to passive investing, so not much I'd gain from that right now.  This is more supposed to have better day-to-day support, benefits etc for people having >£250k with Fidelity.

If I did some financial gymnastics with pension transfers I could probably hit that figure, but the main benefit would be this service (not a huge saving on fees etc), so no idea if it would actually be worthwhile.  For instance, if the events are ever interesting, or if the customer support is still markedly better than normal (not that DIY SIPPs / ISAs tend to need much customer support), or if they do special offers etc?

I know @Alexland has posted about them in the past, but that was quite a while ago now and couldn't locate any other conversations.

Albermarle

I qualify but do not actually use it actively.
I get additional e mails from them on top of the usual ones from Fidelity about general stuff about trends in markets. You get invites to seminars in person and virtually( the last one was from Fidelity CEO and was 'packed' apparently) and access to recordings of them if you can not attend.
Every Quarter you get an 8 page A4 booklet detailing all transactions, investment performance and a detailed X ray breakdown of your investments. 
You can talk to your wealth manager about your investments for free, but as they can not offer any actual personal advice, I am not sure of the value of this. Maybe if you were lacking in general knowledge about investments etc it could be useful for that.
The main advantage of course is the reduced fees. Once you reach £250K, the platform fee drops to 0.2% for all your funds on the platform ( not just those above £250 K) and it also applies to anyone else in your household with a Fidelity account, regardless of the size of their funds.

Alexland

If you read my previous post the main benefit was a 1 hour call with the Wealth relationship manager a couple of years ago and while they showed genuine interest in my situation and overall strategy including accounts elsewhere (with no pressure to transfer more) it stopped short of advice although some of their questions might have triggered me to take corrective action.
Consider it a bonus not something to influence your platform choice but with their ongoing fee cap of £90pa on holding exchange traded assets it suits my needs. I noticed they just relaunched transfer cashback which might be of interest.
Strangely I haven't had any Wealth stuff from them recently not that I really care - they should probably want to focus on those holding funds paying higher fees.

jim1999

Albermarle said:

I qualify but do not actually use it actively.
I get additional e mails from them on top of the usual ones from Fidelity about general stuff about trends in markets. You get invites to seminars in person and virtually( the last one was from Fidelity CEO and was 'packed' apparently) and access to recordings of them if you can not attend.
Every Quarter you get an 8 page A4 booklet detailing all transactions, investment performance and a detailed X ray breakdown of your investments. 
You can talk to your wealth manager about your investments for free, but as they can not offer any actual personal advice, I am not sure of the value of this. Maybe if you were lacking in general knowledge about investments etc it could be useful for that.
The main advantage of course is the reduced fees. Once you reach £250K, the platform fee drops to 0.2% for all your funds on the platform ( not just those above £250 K) and it also applies to anyone else in your household with a Fidelity account, regardless of the size of their funds.

Thanks, that was what I suspected might be the case - i.e. that it's nice to have but probably not worth letting it drive your decision making.  Given that I tend to favour passive investing, although seminars on market trends might be interesting from time to time, I can well imagine that after a few months I'd stop bothering with them anyway.

The reduced fees are less relevant to me, since the main benefit of Fidelity for me is the ETF capping.

Alexland said:

If you read my previous post the main benefit was a 1 hour call with the Wealth relationship manager a couple of years ago and while they showed genuine interest in my situation and overall strategy including accounts elsewhere (with no pressure to transfer more) it stopped short of advice although some of their questions might have triggered me to take corrective action.
Consider it a bonus not something to influence your platform choice but with their ongoing fee cap of £90pa on holding exchange traded assets it suits my needs. I noticed they just relaunched transfer cashback which might be of interest.
Strangely I haven't had any Wealth stuff from them recently not that I really care - they should probably want to focus on those holding funds paying higher fees.

Yes yours was the only one I came across, which in terms of the benefits sounded positive but probably not worth bending over backwards to obtain.  I can't imagine I'd get much out of a call, although as you say it's sometimes nice to have someone ask a few questions since it's not the kind of conversation I'd have with anyone else.

The situation you describe is more or less the predicament I'm in - i.e. the transfer cashback makes it seem like a particularly good time to move some assets in, but to get the wealth status I'd have to move more in, which would be a lot more effort and wouldn't increase the cashback at all, so I'd have to be convinced there was a genuine benefit - and based on what you have both shared I don't think it quite achieves that right now.

Nonetheless, with the ETF cap I'm happy to invest there for a while, so might hit it organically in a while.

Albermarle

The reduced fees are less relevant to me, since the main benefit of Fidelity for me is the ETF capping.

Yes that is a good benefit, even though it has increased from £45 to £90.

The HL cap is still £45 for its ISA, but a separate £200 in a SIPP. If you have a SIPP and an ISA with Fidelity, the £90 cap is across a combination of both.

I have a mixture of OEICS , ETF's and IT's on the platform and overall pay slightly less than 0.1 % fees.

billy2shots

They just concentrated on up selling for me. 
The questions and answers were not really relevant and I found it a waste of time. 

I asked one question that they didn't know the answer to, and they would get back to me. 

- As I opened my Fidelity Sipp before the age of access change (55-57) there were rumours that Fidelity customers would keep the age of 55 regardless of the rule change. 


2 weeks later I got a copy and paste answer from the government website about pension age changing from 55-57. 
I'm still none the wiser. 

jim1999

billy2shots said:

They just concentrated on up selling for me. 
The questions and answers were not really relevant and I found it a waste of time. 

I asked one question that they didn't know the answer to, and they would get back to me. 

- As I opened my Fidelity Sipp before the age of access change (55-57) there were rumours that Fidelity customers would keep the age of 55 regardless of the rule change. 


2 weeks later I got a copy and paste answer from the government website about pension age changing from 55-57. 
I'm still none the wiser. 

As it happens, I was looking at their website on this topic earlier in the week and I feel like the article they've put up is fairly clear, certainly much clearer than what they'd published previously - not sure if you've seen it or not https://www.fidelity.co.uk/normal-minimum-pension-age-nmpa

Specifically the section headed "Does Fidelity's SIPP have a Protected Pension Age of 55?"

billy2shots

jim1999 said:

billy2shots said:

They just concentrated on up selling for me. 
The questions and answers were not really relevant and I found it a waste of time. 

I asked one question that they didn't know the answer to, and they would get back to me. 

- As I opened my Fidelity Sipp before the age of access change (55-57) there were rumours that Fidelity customers would keep the age of 55 regardless of the rule change. 


2 weeks later I got a copy and paste answer from the government website about pension age changing from 55-57. 
I'm still none the wiser. 

As it happens, I was looking at their website on this topic earlier in the week and I feel like the article they've put up is fairly clear, certainly much clearer than what they'd published previously - not sure if you've seen it or not https://www.fidelity.co.uk/normal-minimum-pension-age-nmpa

Specifically the section headed "Does Fidelity's SIPP have a Protected Pension Age of 55?"

Many thanks for that. 

Crystal clear, even at a current 41 years of age, my protected  pension age is 55 not 57. 

I was 99% sure it was but my 'wealth manager' gave information to the contrary. 

Sums up my thoughts on that service.