Interactive Investor (ii) Review 2025
Interactive Investor (ii) isn’t some plucky start-up—it’s now the UK’s second-largest DIY broker, shepherding more than £59 billion for 400,000-plus clients (data: March 2025). Where most rivals nibble a percentage of your pot, ii keeps things refreshingly plain: one flat monthly subscription plus low, fixed dealing fees. In practice, once your portfolio creeps past roughly £25 k, that pricing model can feel like swapping a taxi meter for an all-day travel card.
In this review, I’ve kicked the tyres on ii’s Stocks & Shares ISA and standard Trading Account, chewed through real execution data from Q1 2025, and balanced hard numbers against creature comforts. By the end, you’ll know whether ii’s blend of cost control and feature set makes it the 2025 platform worth parking your cash on—or whether you’re better off browsing elsewhere.
At-a-glance
- ✅ FCA-regulated and FSCS-protected up to £85 000.
- ✅ Broad product range – ISAs, SIPPs, LISAs, funds, shares & ETFs all in one place.
- ✅ 3 000+ funds and many UK/international stocks.
- ✅ Free regular investing for both shares and funds.
- ✅ Trusted large-scale platform managing £142 billion for 1.9 million clients.
- ⛔ High one-off UK share trades unless you trade often.
- ⛔ Annual platform charge on funds can eat into returns over time.
- ⛔ Foreign exchange fee up to 1 % per trade.
- ⛔ No fractional shares—must buy full units.
- ⛔ Legal overhang from Woodford case has dented trust with some users.
 Interactive Investor | |
| ⭐ Rating: | 4 ★★★★★ |
| 🏅 Overall rank: | #6 out of #8 |
| 💵 Price: | £4.99/mo flat fee |
| ✂️ Free version: | No |
| 💻 Platforms: | Web, iOS, Android |
| 🔥 Offer: | £100 free trades credit |
| Get Interactive Investor | |
Test Scope & Devices
Between January and March 2025 I opened both a Stocks & Shares ISA and a plain-vanilla Trading Account on ii. Armed with Chrome 124 on desktop plus the iOS 17 and Android 14 apps, I lobbed £3,000 into the pot and put the platform through 26 real trades: 14 FTSE heavyweights, four AIM minnows, four US stocks, two ETFs and two investment trusts.
Interactive Investor sits under the FCA’s microscope (Firm Reference 141282) and ticks the main safety boxes. Your spare cash lives in segregated trust accounts at major UK clearing banks, ring-fenced from the firm’s own kitty. Shares and funds are held in a CREST nominee, so you keep the beneficial title while ii handles the admin. Add the standard FSCS cover up to £85,000 and your idle cash is about as cushioned as it gets this side of a mattress.
Quality control isn’t left to chance. ii files an annual Best-Execution & CASS report, duly prodded by a Big-Four auditor. The latest 2024 edition flagged zero material breaches and confirmed daily reconciliations—belt, braces, and then some.
Ownership-wise, ii is a privately held limb of abrdn plc, yet it still broadcasts the headline numbers: roughly £59 billion in assets and 400,000-plus clients as of March 2025. Big enough to matter, regulated enough to sleep at night. If you fancy digging into the fine print yourself, ii keeps its rulebook in one tidy corner of the site: the Regulatory & Trust Centre, costs you nothing, helps keep the lights on here.
Reputation scores are strong: Trustpilot 4.7 / 5 from 25 k reviews (May 2025); iOS app 4.7 / 5 from 289 k ratings; Which? rates ii “Great Value” for ISA custody in its March 2025 tables. GoodMoneyGuide readers award 4.4 / 5 for overall service. No current FCA enforcement or red-flag media issues surfaced during our research.
Regulation & Trust
Interactive Investor sits under the FCA’s microscope (Firm Reference 141282) and ticks the main safety boxes. Your spare cash lives in segregated trust accounts at major UK clearing banks, ring-fenced from the firm’s own kitty. Shares and funds are held in a CREST nominee, so you keep the beneficial title while ii handles the admin. Add the standard FSCS cover up to £85,000 and your idle cash is about as cushioned as it gets this side of a mattress.
Quality control isn’t left to chance. ii files an annual Best-Execution & CASS report, duly prodded by a Big-Four auditor. The latest 2024 edition flagged zero material breaches and confirmed daily reconciliations—belt, braces, and then some.
Ownership-wise, ii is a privately held limb of abrdn plc, yet it still broadcasts the headline numbers: roughly £59 billion in assets and 400,000-plus clients as of March 2025. Big enough to matter, regulated enough to sleep at night. If you fancy digging into the fine print yourself, ii keeps its rulebook in one tidy corner of the site: the Regulatory & Trust Centre, costs you nothing, helps keep the lights on here.
Reputation scores are strong: Trustpilot 4.7 / 5 from 25 k reviews (May 2025); iOS app 4.7 / 5 from 289 k ratings; Which? rates ii “Great Value” for ISA custody in its March 2025 tables. GoodMoneyGuide readers award 4.4 / 5 for overall service. No current FCA enforcement or red-flag media issues surfaced during our research.
Grab Interactive Investor’s 1 free trade when you sign up, then enjoy £3.99 flat trades on every UK & US order – the smartest way to start saving on fees.
Fees & Commissions
If you’re hunting for the cheapest flat-fee broker in the UK for 2025, Interactive Investor’s tiered plans remain tough to beat once your portfolio breaks the £25 k mark—here’s the cost breakdown at a glance.
| Plan | Monthly sub | Free trades | UK/US share | Intl (ex-US) | FX mark-up | Regular Invest |
| Investor Essentials (≤ £50 k) | £4.99 | 1 | £3.99 | £9.99 | 1.50 → 0.25 % | £0 |
| Investor (no cap) | £11.99 | 1 | £3.99 | £9.99 | 1.50 → 0.25 % | £0 |
| Super Investor | £19.99 | 2 | £3.99 | £5.99 | 1.50 → 0.25 % | £0 |
Extras? £0 to withdraw, £0 inactivity, £0 to reinvest dividends via Regular Invest; paper statements are £20 a pop. VAT’s baked in. Card deposits aren’t a thing—use Faster Payments (free, near-instant).
How the maths works
MoneySavingExpert’s April 2025 ISA league table still crowns ii the cheapest flat-fee broker once your pot tops roughly £25 k; under that, a percentage-based rival may nick less. Active traders will like the £3.99 ticket—far leaner than HL’s £11.95—though zero-commission apps still win headline price, recouping their lunch money via FX and spread.
In my own 26-trade road test, commissions landed at £47.88 (after the two monthly freebies) plus the £11.99 sub fee. On a low four-figure balance that’s about 2 % all-in—not bargain-basement, but perfectly respectable given the volume traded. Scale the portfolio north of £25 k and that percentage drops sharply.
Want to run your own numbers? ii’s full tariff lives on its pricing page, worth five minutes before you press “open account”.
Product Range
Put simply, ii gives you the keys to a sizeable chunk of the investable universe—enough to keep most portfolios busy for a lifetime yet without veering into casino territory.
Direct market access (17 exchanges + fund supermarket)
- Shares & ETFs – Full London coverage (SETS, SETSqx, AIM) plus Cboe and Turquoise; across the pond, both NYSE and Nasdaq; then Europe’s main venues (Xetra, Paris, Amsterdam, Dublin, Milan, Madrid, Copenhagen, Stockholm, Vienna, Zurich). Need Canada or Hong Kong? A quick phone-broker call unlocks TSX and HKEX.
- Funds – More than 3,000 OEICs and unit trusts, all commission-free to trade.
- ETFs – Roughly 1,000 tickers from the usual blue-chip issuers: iShares, Vanguard, Invesco and friends.
- Investment trusts & REITs – Around 450 choices, with VCTs when new offers go live.
- Fixed income – Gilts, PIBS and a smattering of UK corporates on the secondary market.
- Other accounts – Cash, Junior ISA, SIPP and Business variants exist but sit outside this review’s scope.
No CFDs, options, crypto ETNs or spread-betting here—ii bills itself as an investor’s platform, not a leveraged playground.
ISA inclusion
The Stocks & Shares ISA is fully flexible and accepts any HMRC-friendly share, fund or ETF. “Bed & ISA” transfers cost the standard dealing and FX fees, nothing sneaky. Dividends can auto-reinvest for free via Regular Invest, and the same tariff rolls over to the SIPP and Junior wrappers.
Good to know
- No fractional shares yet, so US trades round to whole units—worth remembering if an Amazon looks pricey.
- Extended hours – You can hit 850 of the biggest US stocks almost round-the-clock (24/5). UK shares, though, stay true to LSE opening bells.
All told, ii covers the mainstream with depth and breadth, minus the speculative fluff. If your strategy involves building a diversified, long-term portfolio rather than chasing leverage, you’ll find the toolkit more than adequate.
Platform Features
Web
Fire up the ii dashboard and you’re greeted by the essentials: total portfolio value, day-by-day gain/loss, plus a neat heat-map so the red and green blocks tell their story at a glance. The February 2025 “Quick Trade” overhaul trimmed fat—two clicks now fires off a market or limit order. A Discover pane surfaces Super 60 funds and whatever’s buzzing on the LSE. Unlimited watchlists? Tick. And each one can ping you by email or push the moment a price line crosses your trip-wire.
Mobile apps
The iOS (v 8.7.0) and Android (v 8.6) apps are full-fat rather than lite. Face ID or fingerprint gets you straight in; dark mode keeps the midnight scrollers happy; Siri shortcuts (new in March 2025) let you bark “Buy BP” while the kettle boils. Navigation sticks to five tabs—Portfolio, Markets, Trade, Insights, Account—so muscle memory kicks in fast. Charts offer 20 technical indicators, though you’ll look in vain for drawing tools or funky overlays.
Portfolio tools
- Allocation wheels slice your pie by region, sector and asset class.
- Performance tracker pits you against the FTSE All-Share or MSCI World—ego check included.
- End-of-tax-year paperwork? One-click CGT CSV and a consolidated dividend voucher.
- Regular Invest wizard: schedule buys from £25 a month—zero dealing fee—ideal for pound-cost-averaging disciples.
Integrations & ESG
Open Banking pipes your positions into Moneyhub or Yolt, while a plain-vanilla CSV API keeps spreadsheet jockeys content. No TradingView or MT4 hooks—this isn’t a platform for algo cowboys. Instrument factsheets carry MSCI ESG scores where available, plus ii’s own ACE tag (Avoid, Consider, Embrace) so green-tilted investors can filter the good from the green-washed.
UX verdict
Pages load in under a second on half-decent fibre, the layout is uncluttered, and first-timers won’t get lost in dropdown hell. Chart fanatics and high-frequency types may grumble at the lack of pro tools, but ii’s bullseye is long-term investors, not joystick day-traders—and on that brief it delivers.
(Credit: InteractiveInvestor/NeoSpot)
Order Execution
Interactive Investor talks a good execution game—and the numbers back it up. In its latest publicly available Best-Execution report (full-year 2020, the freshest data ii releases), 93.66 % of UK equity orders met or beat the consolidated benchmark price, thanks to smart-order logic that sweeps LSE SETS, Cboe UK and Turquoise in a blink.
What I saw in Q1 2025
- FTSE 100 market orders: confirmed in ~0.12 s; none slipped outside the quoted spread.
- AIM shares: 0.6–0.9 s—acceptable given thinner liquidity.
- US stocks: agency-crossed, filled at NBBO inside two seconds.
- FX: hit the top 1.5 % tier on a £1.2 k buy and the rock-bottom 0.25 % on a £28 k sale.
ii doesn’t trumpet a formal SLA, but its public status feed showed 99.9 %+ uptime through Q1 2025—only an 18-minute DNS wobble on 14 Feb, with queued orders processed once the lights came back on. Rejections averaged < 0.3 %, mainly stale quotes on SETSqx minnows.
Extended hours & quirks
- 24/5 trading in 850 heavyweight US names is live, though spreads widen after the bell.
- No fractional shares yet, so you’re buying whole units—worth noting if you fancy a micro nibble at a four-figure Nasdaq ticket.
Verdict
Execution quality comfortably tops percentage-fee rivals and, crucially, beats the “free trade” apps on disclosed price improvement. Uptime sits bang in line with industry best practice. In short: fast fills, solid reliability, and no nasty surprises when the market twitches.
Refer a friend to Interactive Investor and you’ll both receive one free month of your subscription fee. It’s a quick win to save even more on your flat-fee trading. T&Cs apply.
Research and Education
If you like ideas served with the crusts cut off, ii’s research cupboard is well-stocked—and all included in the price.
What you get
- Insights Hub – three to six punchy articles each day from ex-FT and Investors’ Chronicle hacks, covering shares, funds and the macro swirl.
- Lunchtime Live – fortnightly webinars with ii analysts or guest managers; slides and replays sit neatly in the archive for catch-up.
- ii Index – a quarterly snapshot of how fellow private investors are positioning their portfolios (great for a sanity check).
- Investment Outlook 2025 – a chunky guide packed with thematic picks and end-of-tax-year check-lists.
- ACE & Super 60 short-lists – curated rosters of sustainable (ACE) and core (Super 60) funds, each backed by a two-page PDF, risk score and the odd reality check.
Third-party spice includes Morningstar star ratings on funds and MSCI ESG grades on many shares and ETFs. Quotes are real-time for most markets; Level 2 order-book depth will cost you £9.99 a month.
No paper-trading or copy-trading here, but unlimited virtual watchlists scratch the “test-drive” itch. Compared with Hargreaves Lansdown, ii runs a leaner editorial crew, yet every word is free for customers. New joiners also get a string of plain-English explainer emails to steer them through first trades and tax forms.
MoneyWeek’s 2025 survey slots ii’s research suite firmly in the top quartile—and for long-term investors who value curated insight over day-trader noise, that feels about right.
(Credit: InteractiveInvestor/NeoSpot)
Opening an Account
Account opening
ii reckons you can sign up in “under ten minutes.” Mine wasn’t far off: passport selfie submitted, and the Stocks & Shares ISA green-lighted in 31 minutes. BrokerChooser’s April 2025 audit pegs the median at roughly one working day—still brisk. You’ll need an NI number and a UK bank account for the anti-money-laundering tick-box. If you’d like to try the stopwatch yourself, the join-ii page is where the fun starts.
Funding & withdrawals
Faster Payments drop in under 30 minutes; CHAPS and overseas wires show up within a couple of days. Pulling cash out before 14:30 usually sees funds in your bank the next working day. Regular Invest starts at £25 a month and—nice touch—carries no dealing fee.
Support
Phone lines (08:00–17:30, Mon–Fri) picked up in 45 seconds across three test calls. In-app secure messages landed a reply inside five working hours. Live chat is rolling out, though coverage is patchy (May 2025).
Accessibility & UX
The site hits WCAG AA: high-contrast mode, ARIA labels and adjustable text size on both apps. Interfaces are English-only, but chat agents lean on auto-translation for straightforward queries.
Bugs
One gremlin: a phantom Regular Invest order that vanished on refresh. Support logged it, and the 8 May patch squashed it.
Verdict
Onboarding is swift, money moves smoothly, and accessibility features out-shine many rivals. A solid start for newcomers—and their screen readers.
Final Verdict
Interactive Investor remains the flat-fee pick for anyone with a half-decent pot. Pay £4.99–£11.99 a month and £3.99 per trade, and the maths flips in your favour once you clear roughly £25 k. Throw in unlimited free Regular Invest, rock-solid FCA/FSCS protection and price-improvement stats that shame the “free” apps, and you’ve got a platform built for grown-up portfolios.
Spot-on for…
- ISA or General accounts holding £25 k–£500 k, trading a handful of times a month.
- Income hunters drip-feeding via Regular Invest.
- DIY investors who like flat, predictable fees and a shopping list that spans 17 markets.
Less ideal for…
- Sub-£15 k pots—the monthly fee eats into returns.
- Anyone desperate for fractions, crypto or CFDs (ii doesn’t touch them).
- Ultra-active day-traders chasing micro-spreads or API algo hooks.
Want to double-check the break-even numbers? Crunch them on our <a href=”[[link-fee-comparison]]”>fee-comparison page</a>, or weigh up the competition on our <a href=”[[link-best-trading-platforms]]”>best trading platforms guide</a>.
Bottom line: if your portfolio is big enough to justify a Netflix-priced subscription and you value breadth over gimmicks, ii is hard to top.
Frequently Asked Questions
Q. Is Interactive Investor regulated by the FCA?
A. Yes. Interactive Investor Services Ltd is fully authorised and regulated by the UK Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) under Firm Reference Number 141282. This oversight requires the broker to meet strict capital-adequacy, client-asset and reporting rules.
Q. Is Interactive Investor safe to use?
A. Interactive Investor keeps client money in segregated trust accounts at major UK banks and registers investments in nominee form, so you remain the beneficial owner. Uninvested cash is protected by the Financial Services Compensation Scheme (FSCS) up to £85,000 per eligible person, and annual CASS audits have reported no material breaches.
Q. What are Interactive Investor’s fees in 2025?
A. Monthly subscriptions run from £4.99 (Investor Essentials, portfolios up to £50 k) to £19.99 (Super Investor). UK and US share trades cost £3.99; other international equities are £9.99 (£5.99 on Super Investor). Regular monthly investing orders are free, and there are no withdrawal or inactivity charges. FX conversion is tiered from 1.5 % down to 0.25 % for larger trades.
Q. Does Interactive Investor offer a Stocks & Shares ISA?
A. Yes. Interactive Investor’s flexible Stocks & Shares ISA lets you hold UK and overseas shares, ETFs, funds and bonds under the same flat-fee tariff. Regular Invest orders start from £25 a month with no dealing fee, and Bed & ISA transfers incur only the standard dealing and FX costs.
Q. What markets and assets can I trade on Interactive Investor?
A. Interactive Investor gives direct access to 17 global stock exchanges, including the LSE (SETS, SETSqx, AIM), NYSE, Nasdaq, Xetra and Euronext venues, plus 3,000+ mutual funds, around 1,000 ETFs, 450 investment trusts/REITs and UK gilts or corporate bonds.
Q. Does Interactive Investor support fractional shares or cryptocurrency trading?
A. No. Interactive Investor currently requires whole-share dealing and does not offer cryptocurrency, CFDs or spread-betting. The focus is on mainstream shares, funds and ETFs for long-term investors.
Q. How long does it take to open and fund an Interactive Investor account?
A. Most applicants can complete the online form in under ten minutes, and identity checks are typically approved within one working day. UK Faster Payments usually credit the account in under 30 minutes, so you can trade the same day.