Investors have a huge number of options when choosing where to invest and which products to buy. Here are some details on how we rate providers
Best Buys
Our Boring Money Best Buys are awarded to reputable firms, with decent products which are sensibly priced and are well-rated by their customers.
For novice investors, that means they must have a small range of easily understandable investments – a sort of pre-packaged investment 'ready-meal' which does lots of the heavy lifting for you. For experienced investors, they must either provide access to a wide range of investments from different investment managers or assume a higher level of knowledge about investments.
Our Best Buys are strictly independent. We make no money from click-throughs or sneaky deals. If we changed all of our Best Buys tomorrow, it would make no impact on our revenues.
For a firm to be one of our Best Buys we must have received reviews from more than 30 of their customers, with at least 70% saying they'd recommend them. The firm also needs a 'We Say' score of 4 or more and not cost too much.
Our 'We Say' scores
Our scores are based on a range of criteria:
- We gather reviews from platform users. These reviews currently make up 25% of the score.
- Each provider is rated by at least two of the Boring Money team, based on their website, ease of use, service and the quality of their communications. This is currently 26% of the final rating.
- We also rate platforms on phone customer service, based on their opening hours and the time they take to answer the phone – 4% of the final score.
- Cost is scored based on how expensive they are for small and large portfolios and makes 30% of the final score.
- For services that we categorise as better for novice investors this is based on the all-in cost including investment charges, since the service is often bundled together with the investments.
- For those services suitable for experienced investors we just look at the cost of the ‘platform’, since investors are free to pick from thousands of funds with different prices.
- We have a score for platform’s size and time in the market. It’s not a perfect proxy for future stability but does add weighting to larger and more established brands who are on balance more likely to offer stability to customers.
