How our ratings work

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.

From 26 February 2020, for a firm to be one of our Best Buys we must have received reviews from more than 50 of their customers, with at least 65% 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, with a weighting applied according to the date of the review.
• Each provider is rated by six of the Boring Money team, based on their website, ease of use, service, the quality of their communications, content and how likely we would be to use this platform. This is currently 25% of the final rating.
• We also rate platforms on phone customer service, based on their call centre opening hours and the time they take to answer the phone – 5% of the final score.
• Cost is scored based on the type of proposition offered 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.
• Providers are scored according to ‘future stability’ based on the size of the platform and longevity in the market, which makes up 15% of the score.