New Year, new research. Platforum welcomes in 2018 with our latest Consumer Insights report published earlier this week.

We continue to track investor involvement with investments, or in other words, whether they are self‐directed, entirely reliant on expert advice or take a blended approach.

The tendency to be entirely self‐directed decreased in 2017. This contrasts with a substantial increase that we saw a year ago.

Similarly, we saw the proportion of entirely advised investors dropping off considerably a year ago but the latest figure is back in line with previous years.

  •  34% of British investors deal with their investments themselves with no help or advice from experts.
  •  18% leave it all to an expert and have as little to do with it as possible.

 Platforum Consumer Insights, January 2018

While the new data is consistent with a long‐term trend towards a higher level of self‐directed investing, demand for advice looks resilient.

Moreover, the future intentions of cash savers who are thinking about investing, suggests there is a healthy pipeline of new investors who may need advice. Half of these are likely to go to a high street bank and one fifth would go to an IFA. The battle is on.