New year, new drive to get some stuff organised. Does anyone know of any ISA providers that allow you to setup an account and maintain it online only? Happy to do things via app, web or email but I’d like to go with a provider that is paperless end-to-end. Doing my bit to make a difference.
Last year I opened a Halifax S&S ISA and got reams of paperwork on opening the account. No option to go paperless at the time of opening to say I want to receive that stuff by email.
In this day and age do we really need to cut down more trees for this stuff. Email attachments work as do secure documents on an online account. Whatever I’m not fussed. Just no paperwork please.
Vanguard are great, particularly if you want something you can just set and forget.
One thing to bear in mind is transfers —depending on who you are transferring from, even Vanguard may ask you to print and sign a transfer authorisation form. Other than that they are paperless.
If you want to invest for the future and forget about it then Vanguard are pretty good with low fees. If you want to trade actively then you could consider Freetrade or Trading212.
Do note that with Wealthsimple you are relying on the competency of their fund managers. And generally speaking, 95+% of fund managers are not competent enough to beat the market over the long term.
Their annualised 3 year performance is 6.12%, vs 9.9% for Vanguard’s passive global market tracker.
On top of that, with Vanguard you only pay a capped 0.15% platform fee (plus built-in fund fee of 0.23% for that global tracker), while with Wealthsimple you pay a 0.7% platform fee (plus an average of 0.2% for the fund fee, depending on what you choose).
Imagine you invested a single lump sum of £1000, took it out 5 years later, and the above performance and fees remained constant.
With Vanguard you’d end up with £1,576.
With Wealthsimple you’d end up with £1,290.
(it’s a similar story with any of the robo-advisors)
You could also look at HSBC Fund Centre. All you need is one of their savings accounts to access their funds. You can chose from one of their Global Strategy Portfolios based on your risk profile or chose your own funds. Not the cheapest but not the most expensive either. For their adventurous portfolio the Platform fee is 0.25% and the ongoing fund charge is 0.21% so 0.46% total annual charge.
Thanks Sendu. Appreciate the detailed info. I’ve reached out to Vanguard asking them to confirm they are paperless but haven’t heard anything back. Do you know if their end-to-end process is completely paperless? I’m not transferring in from another ISA so need to have paperwork from previous provider sent to them.
It’s been a long time since I opened my own Vanguard account, so I’m afraid I can’t be 100% certain there was no paper involved. But I doubt it. IIRC it was a quick online process.
There is not even an option to receive paper statements. It’s all electronic.
That fee structure looks like the worst of all worlds. With a small holding, the £1 per month takes a disproportionate amount of your money, but as it grows, the 0.45% platform fee plus the (up to) 0.30% for the fund are really going to ramp up.
Vanguard on the other hand, it’s 0.23% total, including the platform and fund fee for their LifeStrategy funds.
