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Fineco is a very low cost investment platform. It’s suited for both long-term investors (with a tax-free ISA), and regular traders, with a great trading platform and advanced features. There’s a wide range of investments and you can trade in multiple currencies (saving on currency conversion fees). Highly recommended.
FinecoBank (often just called Fineco) is one of the largest investment companies in the world, and has recently started operating in the UK (from 2020). In fact, it was founded way back in 1999, has over 1.4 million customers and looks after over £90 billion. They have also recently been named one of the World’s Best Banks by Forbes¹, a great achievement.
Fineco has raised the bar, bringing very low cost investment trading to the UK, and has a wide range of investment options. It offers both regular trading (CFDs), and long-term savings options such as a tax-free ISA and investments managed by experts. We’ll cover all of this in detail below.
The platform itself is great, and available on your computer, tablet and mobile. It’s highly rated, 4.5 stars out of 5 on Apple, although only 3.7 on Android.
Let’s dive into the details and see if it’s right for you.
Yep! It’s great for beginners who are getting started with investing.
First of all, there’s a wide range of investment options, where the experts manage everything for you – and you can benefit from the low fees of Fineco. We’ll cover that in more detail below.
And second, if you’re looking to trade and make your own investments, it’s a great place to get started. As the fees are low, they won’t eat up as much of your investment balance as it would on other investment platforms (such as Hargreaves Lansdown).
There’s also a huge range of resources to learn how to trade, including a wide range of video tutorials, covering specific topics, and very easy to understand and in-depth.
For instance, you can learn the basics of technical analysis (looking at the price history and trading volume, among other things). Or, specific trading methods such as breakout trading (trying to catch a price trend early).
There’s also webinars every week (which are live videos), running through various topics, such as advanced trading, or big economic decisions and debates.
Plus they're adding more all the time, there’s also full courses for both beginners and advanced traders to help you learn in a more structured way.
Check out our top picks for investment platforms.
Fineco has 2 different investment offerings, suited for different customers. Firstly, they offer a trading platform, which is suited to regular trading, for instance day traders, who are buying and selling investments regularly to make a profit.
Often, this is not buying the asset itself (such as a stock), but trading its price, using something called a CFD (Contract For Difference). And we’ll cover what these are in a bit.
Secondly, there's a more general investment platform, which offers investments more suited to long term investors – where you can buy the asset directly (such as shares or an investment fund), and hold for as long as you want to (sometimes many years).
The great thing about Fineco is you have a multi-currency account, which we’ll cover in more detail below. Spoiler: it’s a real money saver when trading global assets.
We’ll run through the trading side first, and then investment side after (so just scroll down if you’d only like to learn about the investment platform – where experts can handle your investments too).
For traders, Fineco is great. It has its own trading platform called PowerDesk, which is available on their website, and as a mobile app – perfect for on-the-go trading. (We highly recommend mobile trading if you haven’t experienced it yet!)
With PowerDesk, you can trade the full range of investment options, so thousands of global shares, ETFs, foreign exchange (currencies), bonds, CFDs, and more advanced options such as futures and options. Plus margin trading. Not sure what any of these are? Don’t worry, we’ve explained below.
You can also access the margin trading features directly from the platform. Along with a news section that updates in real-time. So you never have to leave the platform while you’re trading.
It’s got all the advanced features you’ll ever need, such as the charting system, a range of indicators, plus drawing tools, and trading features such as stop-loss and take profit orders (where you set prices to automatically buy and sell).
In fact, it’s so good, it’s won multiple awards in recent years, such as ‘best platform’ and ‘provider of the year’ at the ADVFN International Financial Awards.
There’s a wide range of trading features within the trading platform, such as:
Now this is where it gets really interesting. With Fineco, you can have multiple currencies within your account (except in an ISA) – and that means you can make investments and trade in the native currency (for example buying American stocks in US Dollars).
Seems simple enough right? But it’s not possible on most platforms. Normally, you would have to convert your local currency, so Pounds (GBP), into the specific currency that your investment is in, everytime you make a trade.
For instance, if you wanted to buy US stocks, the platform would convert your currency (for a fee), and then buy the US stocks.
With Fineco, you don’t have to convert your money every time you want to buy an investment or trade. You can convert your money on the Fineco platform commission free, at the current market exchange rate (although there’s a small fee included in the exchange rate itself).
There’s also no admin fees, or any other fees. And you can convert your cash 7 days per week. There’s over 20 currencies you can use, which range from Pounds, Euros, Dollars, Yen – essentially all the major currencies across the world.
You can even just send and receive currencies outside of the platform, using the account as a bank if you want to. Or, hold currencies for long-term investments, and diversification.
Having the ability to do this means you can save some serious money. Foreign exchange fees (converting money) can range from 0.5-1.5% depending on which broker you are using – charged every time you want to make a trade. Pretty pricey!
This is in addition to a share dealing fee too (where Fineco is also one of the cheapest – more on that later).
It could be the difference of £100s per trade, depending on how much you are trading, and of course this fee eats away at your trading profit.
With trading, most traders use CFDs. These are ‘Contract For Differences’ and work by instead of buying an asset directly (such as a share), you’ll actually enter into a contract with the broker (Fineco) about the price of the asset instead.
When you buy a CFD, everything works the same way, and the price of the asset is the same – just when you sell, you’ll settle the difference in price with the broker, rather than selling the asset itself, so you’ll get cash if you are in profit, or lose cash if you’ve made a loss.
CFDs are great for traders as they often have cheaper fees, and you can also trade both price directions of an asset (so price going up or price going down). Plus you can use leverage (margin), which is borrowing money to buy more than you otherwise could do (with the prospect of making more profit per trade).
For instance, if you wanted to trade with £50, and you use 5x leverage, you can actually make a trade for £250. If the stock you buy goes up 10%, you’ll have made £25 rather than £5. Pretty great right? That’s actually a profit of 50% on your own cash.
However, it also magnifies your losses. If the stock went down 10%, you’d lose £25 instead of £5, which would be a 50% loss on your own cash. So please use it sensibly!
There’s a wide range of investment options with Fineco. Which include the full range of assets (types of investments). In fact, there’s 20,000 investment options from over 26 countries. Here’s a rundown of the main assets:
Foreign exchange is super popular with traders across the world. With Fineco you can trade 21 hours per day, Monday to Friday. There’s a huge range of currencies too (called currency pairs), for instance selling Pounds (GBP) for Dollars (USD), represented as GBP/USD. In fact, there’s over 50 currency pairs.
With the multiple currency account you can store and hold currencies in your account too.
And you've guessed it, Fineco is one of the cheapest places out there to trade foreign exchange (forex).
There’s a wide range of stocks and shares from across the world, including UK, US, Europe and Asia. Shares are where you own a small part of a company, a share of a company. And trade (buy and sell) on stock-exchanges.
ETFs are investment funds, these group together a wide range of investments, such as a group of shares, and can represent things like companies on a whole stock exchange, or could represent an industry, such as electric vehicles. ETFs make investing in a range of options much easier, and also cheaper.
Indices (an index) are set groups of investments, similar to ETFs, but represent a set group of companies on a stock exchange. For instance, the top 100 companies in the UK is an index called FTSE 100. There’s a huge range of indices from across the world.
Commodities are real things like gold and silver, and there’s a wide range on Fineco.
There’s also bonds, which are governments and large corporations borrowing money in return for interest. These have their own prices, just like a stock, and are a very big market for traders.
You can also trade futures and options with Fineco. These are where you are trading the option to buy or sell an asset in the future (often at a certain date), such as a stock. You can profit from the price difference between the current price and the future price of the asset. This is sometimes used to reduce risk of investments.
Unfortunately, you can’t trade crypto with Fineco. If you want to trade crypto, it’s often best to use a crypto specific exchange. Here’s the best cryptocurrency exchanges in the UK.
For the investors out there, there’s the investment platform. This is where you can buy, sell and hold your investments for more long-term investing.
You have access to the full range of investments, such as stocks and shares, ETFs, and general investment funds (more on them below). And can benefit from Fineco’s low fees (more on those below too).
You can invest on their website, and mobile phone app – both are very easy to use. It’s a separate section (platform) to the actual trading software, so you don’t need to go near that if you don’t want to (leave that for the day traders!).
The great news is Fineco offers UK customers an ISA – which is where you can invest up to £20,000 per tax year (April 6th to April 5th), and everything you make is completely tax-free, forever!
This is technically called a Stocks & Shares ISA, and is a government scheme. Note: you can only pay into one each tax year.
Within your ISA (or General Investment Account), you can also let the experts handle everything for you, while still benefiting from FinecoBank’s low fees.
There’s a range of investment funds to choose from (which are a collection of investments managed by experts) from some of the world's biggest and best investment firms. These include Fidelity, J.P. Morgan, Abrdn, AXA and lots more.
All you need to do is select which fund you want, and then the experts at that fund will take care of the investments for you. They know what they’re doing – and you’ll pay a fee for them to manage your money within the investment fund itself too, which goes to them, not Fineco.
As we've mentioned, Fineco has low fees compared to most other companies. But how low are they actually? Let’s find out.
Let's start with the account fees for holding investment funds within your account (so not trading CFDs). For instance, an ISA.
And this is capped at £2.95 per month in total for shares, ETFs and bonds.
It’s likely the cheapest you’ll find as an annual fee. It’s on par with AJ Bell¹, who are also a low cost investment platform, and both are much cheaper than the most popular broker in the UK, Hargreaves Lansdown¹.
Here’s a fee comparison up to £250,000:
When you buy funds within your Fineco account, there’s no fee at all. With Hargreaves Lansdown there’s also no fee, but with AJ Bell, you’ll pay £1.50 per deal.
However, here’s where it gets really interesting – when you buy shares. With Fineco, you’ll pay a maximum fixed fee of £2.95 (for UK shares), and a comparable fee for foreign shares if you’re buying them in the local currency (e.g. $3.95 for US shares).
This is very low, and is still lower than both AJ Bell and Hargreaves Lansdown even after you get the multiple deal discounts.
If you’re buying and selling investments regularly, this would really add up. But even as a percentage of each investment, it can make a real difference to your profits.
When you buy foreign investments, such as US stocks, there’s no fee with Fineco. This is a major saving. With almost all other platforms, you’ll have to pay a currency conversion fee, and can be much more than the fees above.
With AJ Bell¹, this fee starts at 0.75% up to £10,000, and then reduces to 0.50% (over £10,000) and 0.25% (over £20,000).
With Hargreaves Lansdown¹, it starts at 1% up to £5,000, and then reduces to 0.75% (over £5,000), 0.5% (over £10,000) and 0.25% (over £20,000).
Let’s imagine you buy £5,000 worth of US stocks. With Fineco, there’s no fee. With AJ Bell, you’ll pay £37.50, and with Hargreaves Lansdown, you’ll pay £50. Pretty big difference right?
If you’re looking to trade more regularly, rather than buying long-term investments, you’ll likely be trading CFDs.
When trading UK, US and European shares, there’s no commission fees, and no spread fees. That’s super low, well, it’s free!
A spread fee is a fee included in the price of the asset, and is the difference between the price to buy, and the price to sell, if you were to do it at the same time.
With other popular providers, such as IG, you’ll pay spread fees of around 0.1% to trade UK, US and European shares. Which is still a reasonable fee, but it doesn’t really compare with free (and there’s often a minimum charge of £10 with IG).
With indices (such as the FTSE 100 or S&P 500), fees start at 0.4 points (a point represents the lowest whole number in the index, so £1 or $1, etc). Overall, with all the different indices, this is either cheaper, or exactly the same as other low cost providers, again such as IG¹.
Futures and options, and other trading types, also follow suit and are low cost. We won’t go into detail on these, but if you have your favourite assets to trade, it’s worth checking the FinecoBank website¹, to check the exact costs for you.
And if you hold a CFD position overnight, you’ll pay an overnight charge. As you would with all trading platforms. This changes depending on what you are trading and essentially interest to keep the trade open.
There’s a range of accounts options:
Unfortunately, there’s no self-invested personal pension (SIPP). These can be super useful for long-term saving, as your money grows tax free, and you’ll get an amazing government bonus on everything you put in (25%).
If you’re looking to invest within a pension, check out the best personal pensions.
The customer support is good.
It’s mostly phone based, and they’re pretty responsive. You can call anytime from 8am to 9pm on weekdays. And you can also send an email if you like.
There’s no live-chat unfortunately, and no online help-centre that answers frequently asked questions (FAQs are common with most brokers).
Yep! It’s completely safe to use Fineco.
In the UK they are authorised and regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA), which means they have been reviewed and approved to look after your money and investments.
Your money is also protected by the Financial Services Compensation Scheme (FSCS). This gives you protection up to £85,000 should anything happen to Fineco, such as going out of business.
However, if you’re buying investments directly (not CFDs), your investments are actually held all in your name, and separate to Fineco funds. And these can only be returned to you. So even if Fineco went out of business you could still access your investments.
Also, Fineco is so big, it even trades itself on a stock exchange (Italy), and is actually one of Europe's largest banks and part of the Euro Stoxx 600 (largest firms in Europe). This means its operations and management processes are very strict and continually reviewed.
To get a good idea of the service, we like to look at customer reviews. On the popular reviews website Trustpilot, it has a score of 4.7 out of 5. That’s excellent! And from over a whopping 27,000 reviews.
Lots of the reviews mention the low cost and the good service. Some people gave it 1 star as they had trouble opening an account, as you’ll need to verify your ID before you can get started.
Here’s a quick recap and the pros and cons of Fineco:
We love Fineco here at Nuts About Money. It’s a very low cost platform for both traders and investors. And who doesn’t love saving money on fees?!
What’s particularly great is the low cost annual charge for an ISA (0.25%), combined with low cost dealing fees. In fact, it’s one of the cheapest out there.
And for traders, it’s commission-free, with very low trading fees (low spread fees).
You can also save a lot of cash if you trade or invest in foreign investments (such as US stocks). There’s no currency conversion fees, you can buy investments within the local currency, rather than converting your currency every time you make an investment. This saving can really add up!
The investment platform is super easy to use, and available on desktop, tablet and mobile. The advanced platform for traders has everything you need to trade effectively, such as great charting tools and stop-loss and take profit orders. Plus the ability to trade with leverage (borrowed money).
There’s also a wide range of investment options, from super popular foreign exchange, to bonds, future and options.
Overall, it’s a great investment platform, and highly recommended. 5 stars from us.
To get started, or learn more, head to the FinecoBank website¹.
Check out our top picks for investment platforms.
Check out our top picks for investment platforms.
Check out our top picks for investment platforms.
Edward Savage is a leading expert on money, with a background of 8 years working in financial services in London, has a business, accounting and finance degree, runs an investing community, and teaches people about money. He writes about all aspects of personal finance, including pensions, investing, mortgages and insurance.
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