Updated: 18th January 2022
Willis Owen Review
Dating back to 1982, Willis Owen have been around for a while and offers a traditional service focused on the accounts and products many investors need.
The overall score is calculated as the sum of the individual section scores and then rebased to be out of 5.
Overall Score
Our View
What accounts are available?
Almost top marks here for the Willis Owen guys – they offer all the main accounts like a Self Invested Personal Pension (SIPP) and an Individual Savings Account (ISA). For the SIPP they split out the account into two separate parts – one for when you’re building your pension pot and then another called the Income Drawdown SIPP for when you retire and you’re taking money out. Their ISA is better than many others because it’s ‘flexible’, meaning you can take money out and add it back again in the same tax year without it reducing your ISA allowance twice.
We upweighted scores for providers who had the basic accounts available - ISA, SIPP and GIA.
Score
What kind of investments can I make?
Willis Owen have a good range of available investments – not quite up there with the widest set, but not far off. The exceptions are shares in companies listed on the international stock exhanges outside London, and investments directly into bonds. Everything else (shares, funds, investment trusts and exchange traded funds) are all covered.
We upweighted scores for providers who made funds, investment trusts, exchange traded funds and UK shares available. Bonds and international shares were less important.
Score
What services do they offer?
On paper there’s some big gaps in the service Willis Owen offer. For example, there’s no facility to have dividends from your investments automatically reinvested in more of the same. Also, you can’t set up an instruction for regular monthly investing. Both of these are important features and big omissions in our view. On the plus side, they do offer a pension consolidation service called OnePlan to help track down and group together your old pensions. There’s some handy tools and guides too, and a regular ‘Insights’ blog.
The most important services were monthly investing, and dividend reinvestment, so we upweighted scores for platforms who provided these services.
Score
How much does it cost?
Charges for buying and selling shares are pretty good. No one can beat Freetrade’s ‘free’ but these are much less than some of the big players’ fees. If you see yourself doing lots of trading, then this could represent a big saving. However, for our imaginary £20,000 ISA the custody fee, or platform charges, are at the higher end. Not as dear as some, but by no means the cheapest.