AJ Bell platform

EmmaMc

Hi all, if you have experience of using the AJ Bell platform can you please let me know what you think of it?  Any feedback welcome.  Thanks v much.

Jona

We did use them quite a bit a few years back but quickly realised, despite their promises of improvements, that quality and timeliness of administration and speed of platform development was lacking, which often led to errors, delays and customer annoyance.  As a result we've moved most clients off - which was a struggle and involved several complaints to AJ Bell from us and clients.

The platform, i believe, is built on top of old stock broking software and compared to other platforms we use regularly (Transact, Wealthtime, Standard Life etc) it is a bit of a pain to use.  Clunky, often broken, not a lot in the way of useful tools and resources and rather unintuitive to use.

In fairness I think improvements have been made.  For instance their phone lines are no longer an automated message saying "we're understaffed, someone will try to get back to you in 3 days and I see they have finally made public the promise of a CGT tool (which they promised us would be imminent a few year ago).

That said it's cheap in certain circumstances - particularly if you just want to buy and hold.  If you have clients with a lot of activity (be it trading, benefit withdrawal or transfers) then all the other "fixed" cost soon mount up and it can become more expensive than a lot of its competitors.

It can be the right choice in the right circumstances, but I think expectations around usability and client experience need to be borne in mind.

Hopefully they will continue to improve and they can get up there with the big boys....

EmmaMc

Great feedback, thanks very much Jona!!!

richallum

We've found them to be OK although only really used them for property purchase SIPPs and buy and hold ISA GIA.  They have improved since the early days as @Jona mentioned when we had similar issues.  The tech team are very good now.

EmmaMc

Brilliant, thanks Richard. Much appreciated.