Platforms need scale to generate wealth for their customers

We need to keep creating better and better content and services, to do this requires a very important thing called SCALE.

It’s a hard-enough task choosing an investment platform to entrust your life savings to. Comparing services and costs is difficult enough and then just when you think you’re done, you might find someone has acquired the platform you chose. And over the last few years, as often as not, that ‘someone’ has been interactive investor. 

Let’s be clear. This is not a case of growth for growth’s sake – far from it – it is growth to help our customers take control of their financial future. 

In order to deliver value, we have to make things easy and convenient. We do this by offering secure, relevant and reliable tools and technology and charge transparent, value-for-money flat fees. 

But it doesn’t stop there. Take my Netflix account for example. I could in theory have paid a fee to watch The Crown (my cousin works on it so I had to...), and after it was over, I could have ended my subscription. But then I wanted to watch The Stranger (I binged that one) and the documentary on pandemics (not helpful) and I could do that, all for the same monthly flat fee. 

It’s the same at ii. We need to keep creating better and better content and services, while keeping prices low, underpinned by the same monthly subscription. To do this requires a very important thing called SCALE. And as the UK’s leading flat fee investment platform, that is particularly important for us because we do not take a bigger chunk of your wealth as it grows. You keep it. 

Scale enables us to keep costs low while continuously investing in technology and allows us to challenge industry practices that have gone unchecked for too long. It also enables us at the same time to migrate customers from one platform to another with minimal fuss while allowing customers to carry on investing without interruption; our specialist migration teams make sure of that. Our customers should expect nothing less. 

We migrated approximately £9 billion of Alliance Trust Savings business in October last year with no fuss. And in 2017, we similarly migrated customers following the acquisition of TD Direct Investing. So much change makes us even more appreciative that you now rate our service as “Excellent” on Trustpilot, our highest ever. That said, nothing is ever perfect, we do make mistakes and we have to always improve so there will be no resting on our laurels. Onwards.