Is the MoneySuperMarket investment platform any good?
- Robin Powell
- 11 minutes ago
- 8 min read
For close to three decades, MoneySuperMarket has made its name telling people where to find the cheapest deal on someone else's product. The MoneySuperMarket investment platform, launched this month, asks them to buy its own product instead — marketed as low-cost, and, for the first time, compared against rivals by the company doing the selling. Both of those claims are worth a closer look.
Most people know MoneySuperMarket as the place you go to check whether you're overpaying on car insurance, a credit card, an energy tariff or a broadband deal. The business was built on standing between buyer and seller and pointing to the cheaper option. This month it stepped across that line and began selling an investment product of its own. Investments by MoneySuperMarket is a stocks and shares ISA or general investment account, charging 0.34 per cent a year with no trading fees, open from £1 and run entirely through an app.
The MoneySuperMarket investment platform has been marketed on price. It is described as low-cost, and prospective customers are invited to compare its fees with other providers and see where their money could go further. That invitation is worth taking up, because the company whose reputation rests on impartial comparison is now one of the products being compared. The funds themselves, as we'll see, are sensibly chosen; the questions worth asking are whether 'low-cost' is accurate, and whether a comparison run by the seller is one a buyer should rely on.
What you get for 0.34 per cent
Strip away the branding and the mechanics are straightforward. The platform charges 0.34 per cent a year and nothing to trade, with no minimum-account fee and a starting balance of £1. It offers a stocks and shares ISA and a general investment account, and works only through an app. New customers get their first three monthly platform fees back as a SuperSaveClub reward.
What sits on the shelf is more encouraging than the marketing around it might suggest. The range runs to more than 40 funds and is built index-first. Five ready-made options are Vanguard's LifeStrategy funds, spanning 20 to 100 per cent equity; alongside them are broad global and regional trackers from iShares, HSBC, State Street and others, a full set of bond, gilt and money-market funds, and a smaller tail of values-based and real-asset options. The fund providers are mainstream names: Vanguard, BlackRock's iShares, Legal & General, Fidelity and Invesco among them.
What's absent is as telling as what's there. There are no active stock-picking funds run by a star manager, no individual shares, no cryptocurrency and no leverage. The narrower options that do exist — single-country trackers for China, India and Japan, a NASDAQ-100 ETF, clean energy, gold, commodities — are a small minority of the list. Custody sits with Seccl, part of the Octopus group, and MoneySuperMarket runs the service as an appointed representative of P1 Investment Services. For a first-time investor, this is a sober, sensible starting point. The fund range is not the main concern.
Is the MoneySuperMarket investment platform low-cost?
Set against the wider market, 0.34 per cent is not especially low. Boring Money, whose figures were reported in the Financial Times, puts the average administration fee for a £20,000 stocks and shares ISA at 0.31 per cent for funds and 0.22 per cent for exchange-traded funds. MoneySuperMarket sits above both. Vanguard, whose own platform has long been a benchmark for cheap investing, charges 0.15 per cent — less than half the rate, though a £4 monthly minimum applies to smaller balances. And several newer platforms charge no platform fee at all: Trading 212, InvestEngine, Freetrade's free tier and the app Prosper among them.
There is a case in which the pricing is fine, and it is worth conceding plainly. For someone opening their first ISA with a few hundred or a few thousand pounds, a percentage fee with no trading charges is genuinely cheap in cash terms. At 0.34 per cent, £1,000 costs £3.40 a year, and at that size the flat monthly fees charged by some rivals would cost more. For a true beginner starting small, the platform does what it says.
As a blanket description, though, 'low-cost' does not survive the comparison. Chris Bredin of the research firm the Lang Cat, quoted in the Financial Times, called the platform's 0.34 per cent charge 'fully priced, even though trading is free'. Cheaper percentage-based options exist, and several credible platforms charge no platform fee at all — though, as ever, they earn from you in other ways, through currency charges, the interest on your cash or a narrower menu of funds.
The fee that grows as you do
Whether the platform is cheap has no single answer, because it depends entirely on how much you hold. A percentage fee is light on a small balance and heavy on a large one. A flat fee works the other way round: a fixed number of pounds that barely registers on a big pot and stings on a small one. The two structures cross over, and where they cross is the whole question.
On a £1,000 balance, MoneySuperMarket's 0.34 per cent comes to £3.40 a year. Interactive investor, whose cheapest plan is a flat £71.88 a year for balances up to £100,000, costs far more at that size, so the beginner is far better off with the percentage. But the percentage climbs as the balance grows while the flat fee stays put, and the two cross sooner than you might expect: interactive investor becomes the cheaper of the pair from around £21,000. By £100,000, MoneySuperMarket charges £340 a year and interactive investor still £71.88. Vanguard sits differently again: its £4 monthly minimum makes it £48 on a £1,000 pot, dearer than MoneySuperMarket, yet at 0.15 per cent it charges only £150 on £100,000. And a platform with no platform fee charges nothing to hold them. The same money, the same kind of funds, four very different bills.
The percentage structure is kindest to investors with the least, which is the group MoneySuperMarket is courting, and least kind to anyone who invests steadily and successfully over years, which is the outcome the platform is ostensibly there to help produce. The better a customer does, the worse the deal gets, unless they notice and move. Nothing about that is hidden or improper. It is simply how percentage fees work, and it is why the honest answer to 'is it cheap?' is 'cheap for whom?'.
A comparison the comparison site didn't make
MoneySuperMarket does not only invite buyers to compare. It shows them a comparison of its own, built into the platform: a chart of annual costs setting its fee against a handful of rivals. The methodology is stated in the small print. The figures show the yearly cost of investing £500 a month for 12 months into a stocks and shares ISA, priced from each provider's website on 17 June 2026, for someone paying in by bank transfer with less than £100,000 invested.
Every choice that shapes the result runs one way. The balance is capped just below £100,000, but a flat-fee rival overtakes a percentage fee well before that point, as the figures above show, so even inside the chart's own window the percentage mostly flatters itself. The pot is small and funded monthly, so it spends most of the year smaller still. And the field is chosen: AJ Bell, Moneybox, Hargreaves Lansdown, Vanguard and interactive investor. Trading 212, InvestEngine, Freetrade and Prosper — the platforms that charge no platform fee, and would sit at zero on the chart — do not appear.
One feature of the graphic is fair enough. It leaves out fund charges, which is reasonable, because you pay a fund's own charge wherever you hold it, and MoneySuperMarket says as much. The point isn't the exclusion. It is that the company built on impartial comparison has drawn the scenario and picked the field, with the result that its own product comes out well.
Why a price-comparison company is now selling investments
Why would a comparison site start selling the thing it compares? The economics of comparison have been getting harder. Price-comparison sites make their money largely by generating leads and referrals, sending a customer to an insurer or a bank and taking a fee.
That model faces a changing search market, including AI tools that can do some of the searching themselves; earlier this year the share price of Mony Group, MoneySuperMarket's parent, touched a 13-year low after one such development before recovering. Selling an investment platform is a different kind of business. Instead of a one-off referral fee, the company earns a small percentage every year for as long as the customer stays — it moves from pointing customers towards other firms' products to earning from a product of its own.
That shift changes the incentive underneath the brand. The pitch moves, by degrees, from 'we'll find you the best deal' to 'we've built you one'. Peter Duffy, Mony Group's chief executive, has framed the launch as a natural next step in helping customers, and denied it was a reaction to AI pressure on the core business. Holly Mackay of Boring Money has made the counter-point: selling investments directly puts at risk the independent view people come to a comparison site for in the first place.
There is a precedent worth remembering. Which?, the Consumers' Association, spent decades testing other companies' products before offering its own, mortgage and insurance advice among them. When the organisation that grades everyone else also has something to sell, its recommendations have to be read a little differently.
"When the organisation that grades everyone else also has something to sell, its recommendations have to be read a little differently."
The one comparison missing from the app
Put the pieces together and a shape emerges. The fund range is sensible. The fee suits small pots and turns costly on large ones. The 'low-cost' billing is most convincing for smaller balances, and the comparison the customer is shown has been drawn by the seller. None of that makes the MoneySuperMarket investment platform a bad place for a beginner to start. It makes it a platform to read carefully rather than take at its word.
The single most useful thing a prospective investor can do is the thing the app doesn't do for them. Work out roughly how much you expect to hold over time, and check whether a percentage fee or a flat one costs less at that level; the answer flips somewhere in the low tens of thousands of pounds. Then compare across the whole market, including the platforms MoneySuperMarket's own chart leaves out.
A comparison, in other words. The one thing the comparison company didn't put in the app.
Resources
Financial Times, launch coverage of Investments by MoneySuperMarket, July 2026.
MoneySuperMarket, Investments platform, fund options and fees pages, 2026.
Boring Money, average platform administration fees for a £20,000 ISA, 2026 (as reported in the Financial Times).
Vanguard UK, fees and charges page, 2026.
interactive investor, charges page, 2026.
Dodl by AJ Bell, charges page, 2026.
Trading 212, InvestEngine, Freetrade and Prosper, published pricing pages, 2026.
Which? (Consumers' Association), history of its own financial services.
A second opinion on what you're paying
If this piece has left you wondering whether the platform and the fees you're paying still suit you, a good adviser looks at the whole picture rather than selling you a product of their own. TEBI's Find an Adviser directory lists advisers who have publicly committed to evidence-based, low-cost investing.
For readers who would rather work it out for themselves, How to Fund the Life You Want by TEBI editor Robin Powell and Jonathan Hollow sets out how fees, funds and platforms fit into a wider plan. Bloomsbury published the second edition, and it's available on Amazon.
