There have been a number of changes to services offered by UK brokers over the last few weeks. I’m still in the process of updating all the pages to reflect these, but here’s a brief summary of the major ones:
- Saxo Bank has closed its Modern Wealth Management service and is transferring existing clients to the Saxo Trader service. This seems to have positive and negative implications: The firm appears to be retreating from the UK fund supermarket business altogether, but is bringing an ISA wrapper to Saxo Trader, which may now be the most cheapest ISA for international markets where CREST settlement isn’t available.
- Charles Stanley has closed its Fastrade service and relaunched it as Charles Stanley Direct. Changes are extensive – the key ones are that online trading fees have been reduced to £10 per trade, but there is now a custody fee of 0.25% per year (min £20, max £150) waived if you trade more than six times every six months. Given that one of the Fastrade service’s strongest selling points was that it offered at-cost personal CREST membership, the introduction of a custody fee will probably work out as a cost increase for less active traders using it for that purpose.
- In addition, the number of brokers offering personal CREST membership shrunk further. NatWest Stockbrokers apparently no longer offers this to new clients, so has been removed from the personal CREST accounts comparison table. Fyshe Horton Finney – which offered a relatively expensive personal CREST option – went into administration and its clients were taken on by Redmayne Bentley.
- iDealing now offers direct access to Euronext Amsterdam and Brussels.