The firm added that it wanted to focus all of its advisory research and resources on "the areas that actually matter to our clients", adding:
"As one of the UK’s leading investment specialists, clients come to us for investment advice. However, as independent advisers we are obliged to research investments that clients rarely hold and that we think are either overly complicated, opaque, expensive or carry excessive investor risk – for example, complex structured investment products."
Subject to a minimum fee of £495, Hargreaves Lansdown will now advise clients over the telephone regardless of the size of their portfolio. To achieve this it needs to describe its services as ‘restricted’ and not ‘independent’.
Danny Cox, Head of Communications, Hargreaves Lansdown, commented:
“This change will set the groundwork for us to simplify and reduce our advisory charges, develop our telephone based service and increase the use of technology to improve the efficiency of the advice process.
"At the same time we want to ensure everyone who wants personal advice can have advice and are removing our minimum portfolio requirement.
"In reality investors will see very little change in what we advise over. We shall continue to offer the same broad range of investment advice, including portfolio management, investment and pension advice, retirement planning and inheritance tax mitigation as we do now.”
In a statement, Hargreaves Lansdown said:
"To maintain the independent status, we have to be able to research and recommend complex and expensive product types, even if we do not believe in these products or, there is no demand for them.
"Through our Vantage and portfolio management services we offer an unrivalled choice of investments, including more than 2,500 funds from over 200 different fund management groups, and we shall continue to advise over these as we do today. Where there are more specific requirements we will continue to use other 3rd party providers and products which have been carefully researched and selected.
"The key difference to our service is that now we do not have to provide the systems, processes, research and controls in place to advise clients on complex and expensive product types we do not believe in and importantly that our clients don’t want or need."
