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Hargreaves Lansdown is delaying a set of controversial fee rises, but only for a select group of what it calls “valued clients”.
The UK’s largest investment platform has written to some of its 2mn clients to tell them it will postpone the increase for 12 months. The proposed rise in costs would have resulted in their maximum annual charge for holding shares, investment trusts, exchange traded funds and bonds more than tripling in Sipps, Isas and general investment accounts, from £45 to £150.
The fee increase, announced in late January, led to rival platforms such as AJ Bell, IG, Interactive Investor and Freetrade reporting rises in applications from HL customers seeking to avoid the price hike.
The transfer requests were most acute among HL’s wealthier clients with larger portfolios, who were hit particularly hard by the jump in the price cap, which came into effect on March 1.
The fee increase was part of a broader revamp of HL’s charges, the first for a decade, that it said meant 80 per cent of its customers would pay either lower fees or the same amount, with those with smaller portfolios benefiting primarily from lower account charges and trading fees.
Competition to reduce fees has increased in recent years as digital upstarts have entered the fray.
HL clients whose fee rise has been waived for the next year have been told that the company values their “loyalty” and is making them “an exclusive offer”.
Simon Belsham, HL’s chief client officer, said in the email that “only a small number of valued clients are eligible for this offer”.
HL denied that the offer was being made to all of the estimated 400,000 clients whose fees are due to rise.
“We run targeted incentives and promotions across the year as another way of adding great value and saying thank you to clients for trusting HL with their savings and investments,” it said in a statement.
IG said that in the month after the HL price changes were announced it saw a 670 per cent rise in customer transfers from HL. This one-month figure was 50 per cent more than IG saw in the whole of 2025, it added. However, it is understood from HL that IG generally accounts for a small number of transfers from the investment giant.
The fee shake-up comes after Bristol-based HL was acquired by private equity firms CVC Capital Partners, Nordic Capital and Platinum Ivy, a wholly owned subsidiary of the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority, in a £5.4bn deal completed last year.
Peter Hargreaves, the billionaire co-founder of the platform launched in 1981, also returned to the board following the deal, after castigating the previous management for presiding over a “shambles”.
Chris Bredin, an industry consultant at The Lang Cat, said HL had previous history of offering cut-price deals to some of its clients.
“Dealmaking isn’t as prevalent on the direct investment side [of the platform sector] as in the advisory market, but there are still deals around,” Bredin said.
“It doesn’t really surprise me too much [that HL is postponing some of the fee hikes], given the rise for some of their clients. If there is an exodus, then they are trying to stem it.”