Megan is a senior researcher and writer at Which?, with a background in data analysis and stats in the public and charity sectors.
Transferring a stocks and shares Isa is unlikely to rank very highly in your weekly to-do list, but could be a small bit of admin that saves you hundreds of pounds in the long run.
In an October survey of 537 Which? members who currently have money invested in a stocks and shares Isa, close to one in five had transferred their Isa in the last five years.
Of those who hadn’t transferred an Isa in the last five years, 16% felt it was not worth the hassle.
Here, we consider the benefits of making a switch and whether it's actually a pain to do.
Please note that this article is for information purposes only and doesn't constitute advice. Please refer to the particular terms and conditions of an investment platform before committing to any financial products.
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A big factor that could make a switch worthwhile is the money you can save in the fees you pay while investing.
A third of those who moved their stocks and shares Isa in our survey did so because they had an opportunity to pay less in fees elsewhere.
As an investor, you’ll usually pay a regular fee to have an account on a platform, charged as a percentage of the amount you hold there or as a fixed monthly fee.
If you have £50,000 or less to invest, you’ll generally be better off with a percentage-based fee, while fixed-fee providers often work out cheaper for you if you have more than £50,000 invested.
Some providers don’t charge account fees at all, which puts them among the cheapest providers for all account sizes. But it’s worth remembering ‘free’ platforms still make money in other ways. For example, they charge transaction and foreign exchange fees, or they might offer pricey high-risk products to offset their losses elsewhere.
If you're investing less than £50,000 in funds, the cheapest platforms are Freetrade and NatWest. If you're investing more than £50,000 in funds, the cheapest platforms are Halifax Share Dealing, Lloyds Bank, and Scottish Widows212.
For those with the most money invested, the difference between the cheapest and most expensive provider can be thousands of pounds every year.
And those with less invested can find almost all their investment returns eaten up by fees in the most expensive cases.
If you’ve found another Isa provider you think would suit you better, you can set up an account with them and ask them to begin the process of transferring your Isa across. You’ll need to tell them if you want your money brought over still invested or as cash, and then they’ll take care of the rest.
Often that's all you'll have to do – of the switchers in our survey, only 10% had a negative experience.
When something goes wrong, it often shows up as delays in the switching process, which can leave you in the dark about what’s happening to your money and could cause you to lose out if your money is taken out of your investments. According to the government, Isa transfers should take 30 days, but cases raised with the Financial Ombudsman Service (FOS) have seen delays as long as six months.
In the event of delays to your transfer, you can complain to both the old and new providers. They might be able to offer you compensation for the inconvenience.
If you can't get a resolution you're happy with from those providers, you can complain to the FOS.
I recently took my own advice and switched my Isa over to another provider where I would pay less in fees and have access to more investments.
I opted for an ‘in-specie’ transfer as I didn’t want to have to think about the timing of buying and selling any investments.
But after about a month, when the transfer settled in my new account, I found it was all in cash.
I was confused because I knew at least some of the funds existed on both platforms but, as it turned out, the funds weren’t available in the same share class on both platforms.
Different share classes give investors different voting rights or fees, while all being invested in the same assets. This means they had the same name but weren’t technically the same fund and couldn’t be transferred over. You can distinguish the share classes of a fund from each other by the letters, eg ‘A’ or ‘Z’, that follow the name of a fund.
Some platforms let you search their funds before you register for an account so you can use a fund’s unique ISIN code – which looks something like ‘GB0123456789’ – to check if they have the exact funds you’re invested in.
In the end it wasn't a major hassle for me and I didn't have to pay any extra fees to set it right, but it could have been a big headache for someone with more on the line.
This article uses insights from the Which? Connect panel, collected from research activities with our members. Find out how to get involved
