What is value - and who tops the value charts?

What is value?

Consumer Duty is forcing platforms and advice firms to join the asset managers in the uncomfortably grey arena of value. But what is value?

We have been researching this with consumers for over 4 years now, helping asset managers to define and then assess value. We have recently started to capture this at scale for platforms, although with over 6,000 customer reviews of platforms on our site, we start with a pretty good view of what this looks like.

In December we surveyed over 3000 platform customers to ask about features, value, service and outcomes. AS part of this, we ask a pretty simple question – how would you rank your platform in terms of Value for Money out of 10?

You can see the top rated providers below. PensionBee, Trading212, and eToro rank highest in value for money scores by their customers - AJ Bell and Vanguard round out the top 5.

Value for Money is of course only one piece of the puzzle. The same research also explored which investment platform brands were most likely to be recommended by their customers, by way of NPS (net promoter scores).

The data revealed that AJ Bell, Hargreaves Lansdown and eToro were the three most recommended brands. Fidelity is another big brand which ranks pretty well in terms of NPS but is not in the top 8 for Value for Money.

So what do we take from this?

Time and time again, when we research ‘Value’ with the end-customer, we see that they have an innate internal algorithm to decide value. Which is not strictly correlated with price. We can see this with funds, platforms and advice firms.

Fundsmith is one example. Overall its Value scores have been consistently high for 4 years. But when we ask customers to consider Value in terms of price, Fundsmith rank towards the bottom.

With platforms, Hargreaves Lansdown are not ranked in the top 8 for Value For Money, but are second in terms of likelihood to recommend. And their customers are largely very happy.

A final note. The component parts of value are not static. Data from our website shows that consumers are currently more cost-conscious than ever. Pricing related comparison and engagement on our best buy tables is at an all-time high. Consumers are filtering and browsing on pricing, more so than any other metric. Customer reviews are the next most important metric.

What do your customers think about you – and how does this compare?

We have extensive data from consumers for asset managers, platforms and advice firms. Please talk to us about how we can support you.