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Interactive Investor is a popular investment platform with a flat fee, making it a cheap option if you have over £30,000 of investments. There’s a huge range to choose from, their website and apps are great and their customer service is excellent.
Interactive Investor (or ‘ii’ to their friends), is a bit different to your typical investment platform (that’s somewhere to buy and sell investments). Instead of charging a fee based on the total amount you have invested, you’ll pay a flat monthly fee instead. Simple!
That means the more money you have invested, the cheaper it gets. Pretty good if you’re loaded!
Interactive Investors' range of investment options is huge, and it’s all handled online, via their website and great phone apps (Apple and Android). Plus their customer service is excellent.
Interactive Investor is tailored to slightly more advanced investors, but it’s not bad for beginners – there can be a lot to learn with investing, and Interactive Investor is a great place to learn, but there’s no experts to handle things for you – you’ll be making all the decisions yourself.
But this bit is important for beginners to understand: the fees are also suited towards investors with a fairly large amount of money invested (called your portfolio), because it’s a flat fee, rather than a fee charged on the amount you have invested, it means only those with more money invested will benefit.
Here’s an example, let’s say you have £50,000 of investments, with Interactive Investors, your fee would be around £120 per year (more on exact fees later), and with let’s say, Hargreaves Lansdown, another large broker, your fees would be around £225, so quite a bit cheaper!
But if you had £1,000 invested, with Interactive Investor, your fee would again be around £120, but with Hargreaves Lansdown it would be around £4.50. A big difference!
So, to be direct, if you don’t have over £30,000 in investments (and not many of us do!), it probably doesn’t make sense to use Interactive Investor. Check out the best investment apps (UK) and the best investment platforms UK for investment options suited to beginners, and our guide on investing for beginners too.
It’s your classic investment broker really, we say classic as it’s works in the same way as most brokers – you decide what investments you want to buy or sell, and they take care of it for you. There’s not too many bells and whistles that are different from other brokers.
If you’ve bought investments before, you’ll be very familiar with how everything works.
The biggest difference between Interactive Investor and other brokers is how they charge fees. Most brokers will charge you a percentage of your investments, whereas Interactive Investor is a flat fee! (More on fees below).
They call this a ‘trading account’, and it’s your standard account with no tax-free benefits. If you make a profit over £3,000 per year, from all of your investments wherever they might be (not within an ISA or pension), you’ll pay Capital Gains Tax. Don’t be put off though, you’re still making profit!
Invest up to £20,000 per year with a Stocks & Shares ISA, and everything you make is completely tax-free! Result. This is the most popular account for investors.
Learn more about Stocks & Shares ISAs.
Manage your own personal pension with a self-invested personal pension (SIPP). By using Interactive Investor you’ll benefit from their huge range of investment options – so you can find the perfect investment for your pension.
You’ll get a 25% bonus from the government too, and if you’ve paid higher rate (40%) or additional rate (45%) tax, you can get some of that back too. Nice.
Learn more about personal pensions.
If you’ve got a kid(s), you might want to open a Junior ISA for them – you can save up to £9,000 per year completely tax-free, all in their name, which they can access when they’re 18.
If you open an ISA with Interactive Investor, you’ll get this account completely free for each of your kids. Pretty good. You can’t open it without an ISA or trading account however.
Heads up: there’s no Stocks & Shares Lifetime ISA unfortunately. They also don’t have specific ethical ISAs – but offer ethical investment options, so you can clearly see which investments would suit your ethical investment style.
Open an ii ISA, Trading Account or SIPP and pay no monthly fee for your first 6 months.
The range of investments is big, there’s over 40,000 stocks, shares and investment funds to choose from, from across the world (and the UK of course!). You’ll probably find every investment option you’ll ever need.
For comparison, newer investment platforms like InvestEngine¹, have a great choice of investment fund options (they just do funds), but they still only have 500! (that’s still a good amount).
If you’re just investing in funds, it’s worth checking them out too – they’re the cheapest option out there. Here’s our InvestEngine review.
A pretty good feature with Interactive Investor, is that they can sometimes get access to company shares just before their IPO. An IPO is when a company launches their shares on a stock market, and they become publicly tradable – so people like us can buy their shares.
To get in before a company launches on a stock exchange can sometimes be quite lucrative, especially if it’s a big brand and their shares are in demand. The share price can always fall however.
Unfortunately, you can’t trade crypto with Interactive Investor. If this is something you’re looking for check out our eToro review, and our best crypto exchanges (UK).
If you’re a more advanced trader, you might be looking to trade with leverage (which is trading with money borrowed from a broker), and to use CFDs (contract for differences), which are types of strategies some brokers offer which allow you to make trades on the price of an asset going down.
Interactive Investor don't offer these unfortunately. It’s worth checking out eToro¹, if you think you might want these features. Here’s our eToro review.
With Interactive Investor, you’ll pay an account fee, which is slightly different depending on which account you want, and then you’ll pay for each trade too – but you’ll get your first trade each month free!
It all depends on how much money you have invested. If you’ve got lots of money in investments, it’s going to be super cheap. If you haven’t got much money in investments yet, it’s pretty expensive.
How does that work? Well Interactive Investor charges a flat fee per month, and not a percentage of your investments. That means the more money you have invested, the lower the actual charge will be as a percentage of your investments.
In case you missed it, let’s go over the example we shared above again, with £50,000 worth of investments, you’d be paying around £120 as an account fee with Interactive Investor, and with Hargreaves Lansdown, you’d be paying £225, so it's a lot cheaper.
But with £1,000 invested, you’d still be paying around £120 with Interactive Investor, but with Hargreaves Lansdown, which charges 0.45%, you’d only be paying £4.50. A huge difference!
And if you have £100,000 invested, you’d still only be paying around £120 per year with Interactive Investor, which is only 0.12%. Now that is cheap.
So it all comes down to how much you have in investments. Roughly speaking, if you have investments under £30,000, it’s probably better to use another platform. Check out the best trading platforms to find the best for you.
For a Stocks & Shares ISA and a General Investment Account, called a trading account, it’s £4.99 per month – you get both accounts!
And then to make trades, your first trade per month is completely free, whoop! After that it will cost you £3.99 for UK and US shares, and £9.99 for other international shares.
For a pension (a SIPP), you’ll pay £5.99 per month if the value of your pension is below £50,000, and £12.99 per month if it's above £50,000.
Making investments costs £3.99 per trade for UK and US shares, and £9.99 for other international shares, unless you’re making a regular investment, such as buying a certain investment monthly, then it’s free!
There’s no fees for taking money out of your pension either.
Regular investing: investing regularly, such as every month via a direct debit, is completely free! (providing you invest £25 or more).
Reinvesting: to reinvest the dividends you make from your investments, it’s just £0.99.
Transfers: there’s no fees for transfers in or out.
Stamp duty: you’ll pay stamp duty on UK shares, at a rate of 0.50%, but nothing for US stocks and shares.
The support is great, you can actually speak to someone on the phone, from 7:45am to 5:30pm – pretty rare these days!
There’s also the ability to send a message to support after you’ve logged in, and receive an email reply. There’s no live chat though unfortunately, sorry millennials and Gen Z!
There is a useful help centre though, with all the frequently asked questions you’ll probably have. So overall, excellent service.
Yep. It’s very safe. It’s been around for quite a while, since 1995, and is owned by abrdn, a massive global investment company.
It’s authorised and regulated in the UK by the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) – meaning they’ve been approved and are trusted to look after your money.
Your money is also protected by the Financial Services Compensation Scheme (FSCS), which gives you protection up to £85,000 should anything go wrong, which is incredibly unlikely.
Any cash you have is held in trust accounts by separate banks, and Interactive Investor can never access it. Plus, your money within investments are with the investment funds themselves, so there’s even more protection.
Let's run through the pros and cons of Interactive Investor.
Interactive Investor has an excellent score on Trustpilot, the popular reviews website. A massive score of 4.7 out of 5 – and that’s from over 20,000 customers.
Most reviews mention the awesome customer service, and resolving issues very quickly.
We love Interactive Investor. It’s great.
The fees are very reasonable, and very low if you have lots invested. In fact, you’ll struggle to find somewhere cheaper.
However, it’s not the cheapest option if you’re just starting out investing with a smaller portfolio, there’s better options, which you can find on our investing page.
The customer service is excellent, and the investment options are huge – exactly what you’d expect from a top investment broker.
There’s not much to fault at all, overall a great option, and 5 stars from us. If you're ready to get started, head over to the Interactive Investor website¹.
Yep! And a pretty good one.
Get 6 months free, simply open an ii ISA, Trading Account or SIPP and pay no monthly fee for your first 6 months.
Offer ends 30 November 2024. Capital at risk. Terms & fees apply.
Here's where to claim the Interactive Investor deal¹.
Open an ii ISA, Trading Account or SIPP and pay no monthly fee for your first 6 months.
Open an ii ISA, Trading Account or SIPP and pay no monthly fee for your first 6 months.
Open an ii ISA, Trading Account or SIPP and pay no monthly fee for your first 6 months.
Christopher Dowling combines a communications degree with over 10 years experience in the financial services industry in London – with focus on educating people on a wide range of money topics in an easy to understand way. He writes about savings, investing, pensions, mortgages, insurance, banking, loans, business finance and other money topics.
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Open an ii ISA, Trading Account or SIPP and pay no monthly fee for your first 6 months.
