This Wealthify review will explain the attractions and drawbacks of this new UK investment platform. I’ll also show how you can get a welcome bonus for signing up and making your first small investment on Wealthify.

Wealthify review: sign-up bonus

I’m thrilled to share that if you sign up to Wealthify as a new user through this link and make a £500 investment, you’ll earn a £25 cashback which will be added to your account. T&Cs may change.

What is Wealthify?

Wealthify is an investment platform, founded in 2014, which seeks to provide an ‘effortless investing’ experience for its users.

An investing platform is the online portal you use to deposit cash and direct into investments. You don’t invest in Wealthify. You use Wealthify as a service to make investments and monitor your returns.

Wealthify is an alternative to a stockbroker or a fund supermarket. Wealthify is known by many as a robo-adviser because unlike a stockbroker, Wealthify will suggest a fully formed investment portfolio based on the information you provide.

To be clear, Wealthify doesn’t offer professional financial advice. If you want to be guided completely, you’ll need to find a financial adviser.

Wealthify has a five-star Defacto rating and a 4.4/5 review score on Trust Pilot. It charges an annual management fee of 0.6% on invested assets to cover the cost of the Wealthify service.

Who are Wealthify

Wealthify are a start-up company which were acquired in 2018 by Aviva plc for a reported £19m. Aviva plc is one of the UK’s largest life insurance providers. This, Wealthify feel, allows for continuous innovation within a stable financial environment.

It seems like Wealthify is enjoying the best of both worlds with this nimble size advantage, plus access to the resources of a FTSE 100 giant.

In 2020 it was reported that Wealthify had over 30,000 UK customers.

Why do investors use Wealthify?

Investors are flocking to robo-advisers such as Wealthify and Nutmeg (see our Nutmeg review) for 3 big reasons which I can explain in this Wealthify review:

1. Fewer decisions

Many people want to enjoy the returns of buying shares, but don’t know where to start.

When comparing stockbrokers and trying to research share prices, an investor can be confronted with too much choice at the beginning, which I know puts many off entirely. The fear of making a ‘mistake’ can be quite paralysing.

Wealthify starts by asking you a series of simple questions about your personal circumstances, your time-horizon, risk tolerance and so on.

From this, they will swiftly propose a portfolio which should align with your objectives. This curated approach helps slim down a thousand risky choices down to a few choices between sensible alternatives.

2. Meddling is discouraged

Studies have shown that buying and holding investments such as shares and corporate bonds is a sensible strategy over a lifetime. But with a stockbroker account, they feel tempted to begin ‘playing around’ with their investments, causing investing costs like trading commissions.

A simple platform like Wealthify obscures this detail, which encourages you to leave your money alone to work hard without interference.

3. This is the most convenient way to build a fully diversified portfolio

In my opinion, the greatest benefit of Wealthify is that you can create a fully diversified portfolio with a small starting sum, such as £1,000.

If you were using a stockbroker account, you would need to buy the shares of at least 20 companies (paying £10 fee each time) plus invest some money in bond mutual funds to be able to achieve something similar.

This would require 20-25 separate trades, which would trigger a tonne of investing fees.

Whats more, if you wanted to ‘top up’ those holdings? 20-25 more trades again! As a result, investors can’t actually afford to drip feed money across their entire portfolio – they tend to compromise by choosing a few companies holdings to top-up each month, but this results in the portfolio allocations changing over time.

With Wealthify, you can top-up your account with small sums such as £50 per month, which will be automatically spread across your entire portfolio!

This simply wouldn’t be possible with a stockbroker, as you’d lose your deposit in fees before it even touched the stock market!

Wealthify review: new customer offer

As I explained at the beginning, if you sign up to Wealthify as a new user through this link and make a £500 investment, you’ll earn a £25 cashback which will be added to your account. T&Cs may change.