How do you evaluate whether an investment platform suits you?
Platform choice comes down to three things: what it costs at your actual balance, whether it offers the accounts you need, and whether it can do what you will need at retirement. Everything else on a comparison table is a feature list, and most of it will never be used.
- The cost: the total in pounds at your balance, not the headline percentage.
- The accounts: ISA, SIPP and a general account, held with one provider where possible.
- Drawdown: not every platform offers flexi-access drawdown, and some charge for it.
- The protection: FSCS investment cover, which is different from deposit cover.
01 Cost in pounds, at your balance
Convert every charging structure into pounds at your actual balance. A percentage fee and a flat fee cross over at a specific figure, and comparing 0.25% against £120 tells you nothing until you divide one by the other.
Include the fund charges, dealing charges and any foreign exchange spread. The total is what leaves your money, and a platform with a low headline fee and an expensive fund range can cost more than a dearer one.
Then project it. A platform that suits a £30,000 balance may be poor at £300,000, and the balance will grow — so the crossover point matters more than today's cost.
Shows: the total annual cost of a platform at your balance, including fund charges. Ignores: dealing charges, foreign exchange spreads, and any cap on the platform fee.
On the defaults above, the worked example shows £846 a year. Platform £450 plus funds £396 — a total of 0.47% a year on your money.
Source: FCA consumer information
02 The accounts and the retirement features
Most households need an ISA, a SIPP and eventually a general investment account, and holding them with one provider makes the household position visible and rebalancing simpler.
The feature that decides this in the long run is drawdown. Not every platform offers flexi-access drawdown, some charge separately for it, and moving a pension at 60 because the platform cannot pay an income is an avoidable annoyance. Repeated partial crystallisation is worth asking about specifically.
Ask also about the death benefit options the platform supports, because beneficiary drawdown is a scheme-level feature rather than a universal right.
03 Protection and what to ignore
FSCS investment protection covers the failure of the provider up to a limit, and is different in kind from the £85,000 deposit protection on cash. Assets held in your name through a nominee are generally ring-fenced from a platform's own insolvency, which is the more important structural point.
What to ignore: the number of funds available, the app, the research, the model portfolios. A household holding three index funds does not need a choice of four thousand, and none of those features affects the outcome.
What to check instead: how a transfer in and out actually works, and whether the platform supports in-specie transfers. That is the feature you will use if you ever leave.
Choose the platform you will still want at 65, not the one that is cheapest at 35. The feature that matters most is one almost nobody checks when opening an account: whether it supports flexi-access drawdown and repeated partial crystallisation, and what it charges for them. Beyond that, convert every fee structure into pounds at your actual balance and add the fund charges, because the total is what leaves your money. Ignore the fund count, the app and the model portfolios entirely.
FAQ
How do I compare charging structures?
Convert both into pounds at your actual balance. A percentage fee and a flat fee cross over at a specific figure, and the headline rates are not comparable until you do that division.
What feature matters most in the long run?
Drawdown. Not every platform offers flexi-access drawdown, some charge separately for it, and repeated partial crystallisation is not universally supported — which is what you will need at retirement.
Are my investments protected if the platform fails?
Assets held in your name through a nominee are generally ring-fenced from the platform's own insolvency, and FSCS investment protection covers provider failure up to a limit. That is different in kind from the £85,000 deposit protection on cash.
Sources
Regulator references
- FCA consumer information · Financial Conduct Authority · 2025The regulator's own consumer guidance on the products discussed here.Last verified: 2026-09-07
- Tax on your private pension contributions · GOV.UK · 2025The relief, allowance and charge framework the whole post sits inside.Last verified: 2026-09-07
- Individual Savings Accounts (ISAs) · GOV.UK · 2025The annual subscription limit and the rules on transfers between ISAs.Last verified: 2026-09-07
Calculator unit tests · the assertions this page's worked example is checked against, and their last result
Changelog
- 2026-09-07 — initial publish (new format)
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Jordan Reeves
Founder of Talk Through Wealth. A software engineer for over a decade before turning to retirement planning, Jordan built the projection engine after watching family members get fragmented, country-by-country advice that never reconciled. He writes about retirement the way the engine computes it: month-by-month, lifetime-long, and skeptical of any rule of thumb that hasn't been run through the math.