SAYE Shares ISA provider

SilverOx

Good morning,

Next year I will transferring my SAYE shares into a stock and shares ISA.
I think I'm ok with the procedure but unsure on the provider to choose as only a certain few do this (It seems to be the big established companies rather than the new app driven providers).


Can I ask the forum members with experience of this (obviously the forum member without experience can still comment 😊) and which company did you use and how it went?

Thanks.

eskbanker

No experience as such, but just to observe that you can use of the major players for the initial transfer and then, once done, transfer the ISA to any different provider, i.e. your restricted choice of SAYE-compatible providers only applies during what can be a very short window and is therefore perhaps not as significant a decision as you may have thought.

SilverOx

eskbanker said:

No experience as such, but just to observe that you can use of the major players for the initial transfer and then, once done, transfer the ISA to any different provider, i.e. your restricted choice of SAYE-compatible providers only applies during what can be a very short window and is therefore perhaps not as significant a decision as you may have thought.

Good point. Thank you.

artyboy

I used II - I had well in excess of the ISA allowance and they handled moving £20k into the ISA and the rest into a GIA with no issues at all...

timrowlands

We have just transferred some SAYE NatWest shares to Hargreaves Lansdown and the whole process went a lot smoother than expected.  First of all needed to go into a fund and share account, which took about a week to transfer from Equate Plus and then the transfer from the fund and share account into the ISA took a week.

artyboy

timrowlands said:

We have just transferred some SAYE NatWest shares to Hargreaves Lansdown and the whole process went a lot smoother than expected.  First of all needed to go into a fund and share account, which took about a week to transfer from Equate Plus and then the transfer from the fund and share account into the ISA took a week.

That sounds... odd. In order to legitimately avoid CGT, I thought the transfer had to be direct from the scheme to the ISA account. In fact, this is about the only situation I'm aware of that allows a direct transfer of shares into an ISA.

By routing it via a GIA (the fund and share account you mention), doesn't that effectively make it a "bed and ISA" process, thereby losing the CGT exemption? Did you provide HL with a letter of appropriation from the SAYE scheme administrator?

timrowlands

artyboy said:

timrowlands said:

We have just transferred some SAYE NatWest shares to Hargreaves Lansdown and the whole process went a lot smoother than expected.  First of all needed to go into a fund and share account, which took about a week to transfer from Equate Plus and then the transfer from the fund and share account into the ISA took a week.

That sounds... odd. In order to legitimately avoid CGT, I thought the transfer had to be direct from the scheme to the ISA account. In fact, this is about the only situation I'm aware of that allows a direct transfer of shares into an ISA.

By routing it via a GIA (the fund and share account you mention), doesn't that effectively make it a "bed and ISA" process, thereby losing the CGT exemption? Did you provide HL with a letter of appropriation from the SAYE scheme administrator?

It’s the way that NatWest do their SAYE share options. If you don’t exercise and sell immediately, electing to keep the shares, they hold them in a nominee account for you. You then have the option to sell or transfer them to a broker. As long as the exercise has happened within the last 90 days they can be transferred into an ISA. It wasn’t possible to transfer the shares directly into the HL ISA from elsewhere, they had to go in their fund and share account first.

artyboy

timrowlands said:

artyboy said:

timrowlands said:

We have just transferred some SAYE NatWest shares to Hargreaves Lansdown and the whole process went a lot smoother than expected.  First of all needed to go into a fund and share account, which took about a week to transfer from Equate Plus and then the transfer from the fund and share account into the ISA took a week.

That sounds... odd. In order to legitimately avoid CGT, I thought the transfer had to be direct from the scheme to the ISA account. In fact, this is about the only situation I'm aware of that allows a direct transfer of shares into an ISA.

By routing it via a GIA (the fund and share account you mention), doesn't that effectively make it a "bed and ISA" process, thereby losing the CGT exemption? Did you provide HL with a letter of appropriation from the SAYE scheme administrator?

It’s the way that NatWest do their SAYE share options. If you don’t exercise and sell immediately, electing to keep the shares, they hold them in a nominee account for you. You then have the option to sell or transfer them to a broker. As long as the exercise has happened within the last 90 days they can be transferred into an ISA. It wasn’t possible to transfer the shares directly into the HL ISA from elsewhere, they had to go in their fund and share account first.

Yes I get the nominee account aspect of it, I just wasn't aware that it could go via another broker's unwrapped GIA type account - interesting to see how HL do it compared to II. As long as it worked out for you!