Review contents
interactive investor is an excellent investment platform with a huge range of investments to choose from, their website and apps are great, you can save tax-free within an ISA and/or pension as well as opening a standard account and their customer service is excellent. There's a flat fee, making it a cheap option overall, and especially cheap if you have lots to invest. 5 stars from us.
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 percentage of the 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 great if you have a fair bit to invest!
interactive investors' range of investment options is huge, and it’s all handled online, via their website and great phone apps. On the App Store it's rated 4.5 out of 5 from over 19,700 reviews, and on Google Play it's rated 4.4 out of 5 from over 3,950 reviews. That's pretty impressive!
On top of that, their customer service is excellent. You can send them a message or even call them up (this is rare for modern tech companies in finance).
If you've heard enough, got a large(ish) amount to invest and want to get started visit the interactive investor website¹.
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 your portfolio was worth £100,000, with interactive investor your fee would be around £144 per year (more on exact fees later). With a typical investment platform paying 0.45% in fees it would be £450, so interactive investor is quite a bit cheaper!
But if you had £1,000 invested with interactive investor your fee would be around £90, but with a typical investment platform paying 0.45% in fees it would be £45. Half the price!
So, to be direct, if you don’t have a lot of money in investments, it probably doesn’t make sense to use interactive investor. Check out the best investment platforms and the best investment platforms for beginners, and finally our guide on investing for beginners.
It’s your classic investment broker really (a place to buy and sell investments), we say classic as it works in the same way as most brokers – you decide what investments you want to buy or sell, and they handle the process for you.
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 (again, more on fees below).
interactive investor has an excellent range of accounts to save and invest in. You can save tax-free within an ISA or a pension for your retirement, or invest within a standard account with no tax benefits called a General Investment Account (GIA). Finally, you can use a Junior ISA to save and invest for your kids' future.
A General Investment Account, also called a ‘trading account’, is a standard investing account with no tax-free benefits. If you make £3,000 per year in profits, 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!
A Stocks & Shares ISA is a great way to invest as everything you make is completely tax-free! Result. You can invest up to £20,000 per year. This is the most popular account for investors. Here's where you can 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 a higher rate (40%) or additional rate (45%) tax, you can get some of that back too. Nice. Here's where you can 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 a normal ISA (for adults) with interactive investor, you’ll get this account completely free for each of your kids. Pretty nice of them. However, you can’t open a Junior ISA on its own, you need to open an ISA or trading account. Here's where you can find out everything you need to know about Junior ISAs.
Heads up: there’s no Stocks & Shares Lifetime ISA, this is a great way to save for your first home as you'll get a free 25% bonus. 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 a pension and get £100 - £3,000 cashback
The range of investments is massive, 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 can think of. Other investment platforms can have as little as 500.
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.
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.
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 charge 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 £100,000 worth of investments, you’d be paying around £144 per year as an account fee with interactive investor, and with a typical investment platform paying 0.45% in fees it would be £450 per year, so it's a lot cheaper.
But with £1,000 invested, you’d be paying around £90 with interactive investor, and with other typical platforms paying 0.45% it would only be £45 per year.
And if you have £200,000 invested, you’d still only be paying around £144 per year with interactive investor, and £900 with other platforms (paying 0.45%).
So it all comes down to how much you have in investments. If you don't have much it’s probably better to use another platforms, check out the best trading platforms to find the best for you.
For a Stocks & Shares ISA and/or a General Investment Account (trading account), it’s £4.99 per month (under £50,000 invested) and £11.99 over £50,000.
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, funds, ETFs and bonds (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 is the same as the above, £3.99 per trade for UK and US shares, funds, ETFs and bonds (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: as with all platforms you use, you’ll pay stamp duty on UK stocks and shares (at a rate of 0.50%), but nothing for US stocks and shares.
The support is great, in the UK you can actually speak to someone on the phone, from 7:45am to 5:30pm – that's pretty rare these days!
There’s also the ability to send a message to their support team after you’ve logged in, and receive an email reply. There’s no live chat though unfortunately!
However, there is a useful help centre, with all the frequently asked questions you’ll probably have. So overall, it's a pretty excellent service.
Yep. interactive investor is very safe to use. It’s been around since 1995 (30 years!), 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 held in your name, so only you can access them, 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. An impressive 4.7 out of 5 – and that’s from over 25,800 reviews.
Most reviews mention the awesome customer service, and resolving issues very quickly.
We love interactive investor. It’s really great.
The fees are very low if you have lots to invest. 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, you can compare all the best options on our best investment platforms 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.
To find out more about investing in general visit our investing page.
Open a pension and get £100 - £3,000 cashback
Open a pension and get £100 - £3,000 cashback
Open a pension and get £100 - £3,000 cashback
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.
This article was written, reviewed and fact checked by the expert team at Nuts About Money. You’re in safe hands. Learn more.
We're experts in all things money, with years of combined experience working in the finance industry and writing about money. We understand the ins and outs, how to get the best deals, save money, and how to communicate money in an easy to understand way (we hope you agree).
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Open a pension and get £100 - £3,000 cashback
