Over the past year, we’ve seen direct platforms significantly improving the investor experience and there are more companies that can genuinely claim to offer a top rate service. In particular, content and guidance have improved and new mobile features have been added.
All the leading investment platforms now put mobile at the forefront. Features such as investment search, articles, watchlists, and in-app trading ability, have become must haves. Challenger banks, new stockbrokers and ‘robo-advisers’ with a mobile-first approach, are raising user experience expectations and even the likes of Brewin Dolphin now offers an app for its upmarket discretionary clients.
We’ll be publishing the Platforum Investor Experience Leaderboard next week which benchmarks 13 major direct platforms across all aspects of their services. What we’re seeing is that several companies are now jostling at the top of the rankings. Hargreaves Lansdown has been the one to beat in the past but others have made substantial strides and are able to offer an attractive alternative usually with more competitive charges.
If we step back, we see a massively competitive DIY investing market with over 100 companies competing for assets. There are too many business plans that have been sold in to backers with unrealistic expectations of customer acquisition and asset growth. As a result, consolidation is happening through M&A and the closure of several robos. We expect to see more of this in the next two years and the improving investor experience offered by a number of incumbent services puts them in a good position to benefit.
In our UK D2C: The Investor Experience report, we compare and benchmark the leading direct-to-consumer platforms against a set criterion, including the choice of investments offered, investment content, guidance solutions, service usability, pricing, customer service and mobile proposition. Download a report outline here or get in touch for more details.