With Investec Click and Invest closing - what is a good alternative?

My wife and I invested our full 2019/20 ISA allowance with Investec's Click and Invest offering and were very sad to learn recently that the service was to be closed. We're now in the position of looking for a new ISA provider. I'd prefer to stick with a managed service, such as the one offered by Click and Invest, where our portfolios would be managed by experts, but will consider the DIY option if that proves to be the best on offer. Which platforms are well regarded ISA providers? I'd rather not go with a digital start-up offering, but a more established player with a track record of good performance. I suppose this sounds like I'm asking for advice, which I'm not, just a steer in the right direction as we were not anticipating to be in this position so soon after investing this year's ISA allowance. We actually opted for the Click and Invest service in part, because of the 5 star recommendation on this site; of which we are fond and value the content.

Hi,

Thanks for your note.

I was surprised to see Investec Click and Invest shut down. And I'm sorry you find yourself in this position.

You said that you don't want to go to a new digital start-up and that you are looking for a more established brand. Plus you'd prefer to stick with an option where the investments are put together for you.


One option might be to look at the AJ Bell Youinvest platform, which is well priced and well rated by its customers. They have what they call 'ready-made portfolios', which will guide you into a mix of investment funds within your ISA. The only problem with this option, is that it's not managed on an ongoing basis. So it will be for you to check in and see that this is perhaps re-balanced, and to check in once a year to see that the funds are still considered to be doing a good job.

If you want to completely wash your hands of this, another halfway house might be True Potential Investor. It's a very large financial advisory firm, which also takes DIY investor customers and will put them into pre-packaged portfolios, which they do manage for them on an ongoing basis. Otherwise, it's a tricky question because most of the groups offering portfolios which are continually managed and tweaked for you, do tend to be those digital start-ups.

Your other option, if you're happy with the investment approach which is called passive investing (you can read more about this here), could be to open an ISA with a more established investment platform - these could be Hargreaves Lansdown, Fidelity, or AJ Bell
Youinvest - and then put what we call a multi-asset fund inside your ISA. Now you can get these from groups such as Vanguard or BlackRock, and these will be managed and tweaked for you on an ongoing basis, to give you an access to a mixed bag of global shares and investments. They are what we call passive.

Investec Click and Invest was an active option. So read up on that, and see if you're happy to take the lower costs of passive, but potentially sacrifice some of the higher gains of active funds. Although of course these aren't guaranteed. Inactive funds may well end up costing more, and performing less.

Hope this is helpful.