Review contents
Evelyn Partners is a great all-round financial advice company, with local advisors up and down the country. It’s very popular, and very well established (nearly 200 years old). If you need personal advice, it could be a good option for you, with great service overall, but you will be paying for it.
Looking for a bit of help with your money, or perhaps expert advice on big financial decisions? Financial advisors can help – and Evelyn Partners are one of the biggest financial advisors in the UK.
They cover a wide range of services, which includes wealth management (that’s the financial advice bit), tax advice, and accountancy services.
We’re reviewing the financial advice and wealth management services of Evelyn Partners, rather than their accountancy services – our aim is to see if they’re a good option to grow your money over time.
They also provide services to expats (UK citizens living outside the UK), but these services are quite different from the UK services, and there’s different fees – so we’re just focusing on services for those in the UK.
Evelyn Partners also helps entrepreneurs, businesses, and charities too. If you choose to use them, you’ll be in good company, with some entrepreneurs such as Ben Francis (from Gymshark), and the founder of Moonpig and Dragons Den star, Nick Jenkins.
Anyway, fun facts, aside… Let’s run through the ins-and-outs of financial advice, and then see if Evelyn Partners could be right for you.
A financial advisor is an expert in all things relating to your finances (personal finance), so things like planning for retirement, or planning for big life events, such as a wedding, and even things like providing money for your children’s future – you name it, a financial advisor will likely be able to help.
They’ll typically partner with you for most of your life, to support you and help you achieve your financial goals throughout your life. Everything is personalised to your circumstances.
Sounds pretty good right?
You’ll likely benefit from using a financial advisor (wealth manager) if you already have a good amount of money saved up (for instance £50,000+, but often much more), or are earning a fair bit of money (e.g. £100,000+ per year).
It’s typically not too worthwhile using a financial advisor if you’re just starting out on your savings journey (often they have high minimum investment requirements), and there’s not too much advice that can be given if you don't have much money to start with.
If that’s you, don’t panic – there’s lots of options to get you on the right path (and they’re lower cost too)...
If you’re looking to build up your savings through investing, check out Moneyfarm¹, they’ve got experts on hand for free guidance, an easy to use app, and they can help with lots of different saving accounts including tax-free savings accounts (more on this below).
If you’re only looking to save for retirement, check out PensionBee¹ – their experts will handle everything for you, the app is easy to set up and use, it’s low cost, and they have a great track record of growing pensions over time. And, they’ll move over any old pensions you have too (for free). You’ll also get £50 added to your pension for free if you sign up with Nuts About Money.
Or, you could check out Bestinvest, which is a service from Evelyn Partners that offers online investing, with free coaching. Great for those just starting out – but you’ll still need to make your own investment choices. Here’s where to learn more about the Bestinvest investing service¹, and here’s where to learn more about the Bestinvest pensions service¹. We’ll cover Bestinvest in more detail below.
For all the other top options, check out the best investment platforms and the best personal pensions.
You could also speak to a financial advisor in your local area. To find great ones, check out Unbiased¹, it's a free service to find fully qualified advisors (you'll still pay for the advice).
Taking advantage of expert knowledge can pay off across all areas of your life, especially things like your career. And when it comes to the complicated world of finance, it’s even more important as it’s your life savings and hard earned money at stake.
A financial advisor has the experience, knowledge and skills that you aren’t taught in school or through life. If you want to learn, you’ve got to do it for yourself – and a financial advisor typically has years and years of experience managing other people’s money, that you just can’t learn in a few days.
They’ll also handle everything for you, and often achieve great results making you more money over time, so you can use your free time with your family, or spend more time on your business or career, rather than trying to figure out the complicated world of finance. And to be honest, you'll unlikely get better results investing yourself (although definitely learn the basics if you can).
Using an advisor can also give you the confidence to invest your money when you otherwise might not have – although most people think it's risky, investing is typically seen as one of the best ways to grow your money over time…
If your money is just sitting in a bank account, even when earning interest, it’s often actually losing value due to inflation (where the cost of things get more expensive over time). For instance, in 2002 a pint of milk cost 36p, and now it costs 66p – nearly double for the same thing!
Sensible, long-term investing is a great way to offset inflation, stay ahead, and keep your wealth growing.
Using a financial advisor like Evelyn Partners, or St James’s Place, or other independent financial advisors, will also keep you away from investment scams (sorry to scare you), which can catch some people out (even experienced investors).
And of course, they’ll make sure you’re using the right investment accounts and investments to make the most of your money and all the great tax-free benefits the UK has to offer (more on this later).
Let's rewind a second, Evelyn Partners is old, very old. Nearly 200 years old in fact. The business was actually started way back in 1836! So, it’s probably fair to say they know a thing or two about managing and growing money.
Note: Evelyn Partners used to be called Tilney, and has merged with, and purchased a few other companies over the years – a large one being Smith & Williamson.
They have over 170,000 clients in the UK, and manage a whopping £55 billion. Did we mention they were big?!
Evelyn Partners have over 600 professional advisors up and down the country to help and support clients wherever they are, and there’s 32 offices dotted around the country too – they’re branches where you can actually go in to speak to an advisor face-to-face (very rare these days isn’t it?).
As they’re a large company, they’re able to manage, train and monitor their advisors service – meaning the service is typically great up and down the country, and very consistent. The financial advisors are there for you, and personalise their service to achieve your financial goals.
Their services include financial planning, investment management and tax advice (among others depending on your circumstances).
Financial planning is advice and setting plans together for things like retirement, managing your estate (all of your money and assets), saving for your children, and passing wealth (money and assets) down generations, saving for certain goals and even how best manage your money when selling a business. And of course, how to minimise tax using the right investment accounts and strategies.
Evelyn Partners also manage all the investments too – of all the money their clients invest. That means they’re deciding the investment strategies, researching which investments to make, and building the right mix of investments (called a portfolio) for a range of different objectives, although predominantly, it’s building wealth over time. They’ll also buy and sell the investments too.
Alongside that, Eveyln Partners have a socially responsible focus, and their investment decisions consider the impact on the world and people in it. We’re big fans of this, and socially responsible investing here at Nuts About Money.
As mentioned above, Evelyn Partners will also ensure you’re not paying any more tax than you need to, and plan ahead to reduce your tax (legally) for certain life events, personalised to you – for instance selling your business in future, or any tax implications for your family in the future.
Check out PensionBee, it’s easy to use, has low fees and a great record of growing money over time.
This is the easy bit, their expert advisors simply handle everything for you (if you want them to) – they’ll need to get to know you, and your family, and your financial situation and retirement goals, or any or financial goal you’d like to achieve (like buying a home), and then they’ll get to work putting together the right plan to achieve it. Then over the years they'll manage and monitor the plan and results as you go.
You can either speak to them face-to-face in branches across the country, or over the phone.
They’re with you for the long-term, so you can shoot them over any questions you like, whenever you like – this is called ongoing financial advice), and they’ll schedule regular catch ups at suitable times that suit you, to update you on how things are going.
Evelyn Partners has four core concepts when it comes to their service: bespoke, specialist, holistic and comprehensive.
That means tailored advice, just for you and your financial goals, with knowledge from specialised experts across various topics (such as tax), and can cover the whole range of financial topics, such as pensions and investment management.
Investment management is a core element of wealth management and financial advice for clients – instead of an advisor recommending a range of investments from lots of other investment providers, which is typical of an independent financial advisor (often smaller local advisors), Evelyn Partners manage their own investments.
That means they have a range of experienced experts whose only job is to manage the money of all of Evelyn Partner’s clients (all £55 billion of it), and decide where and how to grow it based on a range of financial goals.
This comes in the form of investment funds (groups of lots of different investments), and each fund has a different financial objective, such as growing over the long-term, or providing income, and then that is broken down into risk levels…
Risk levels range from low to high and are essentially how much risk you are happy to take with your money, in order to grow it further over time…
Lower risk levels means there’s smaller ups-and-downs in the short term, but typically grows slower over the longer term, and higher risk levels aim for larger growth over time, but with bigger ups-and-downs along the way.
Your financial advisor will put together the right investment portfolio for you, you don’t need to worry about which investments to make – it will all come down to your financial goals and objectives that you will discuss with your advisor.
Typically, your money would be pooled together with other investors into a fund, and that fund can invest in a range of different investments (called assets), which can include:
Stocks and shares (equities): these represent the ownership of a company, where you own a ‘share’ of a company. Shares can increase in value as the company grows and performs well. All the shares combined equal the total value of the company.
Bonds: these are essentially loans to governments and large corporations in return for interest payments.
Property: with investing, this is typically commercial property, such as offices and shops, who pay rent.
Commodities: these are real things, such as gold, silver and oil.
Evelyn Partners has a range of funds, which include:
Evelyn Partners also runs Bestinvest, which is an online investment platform (a website and phone app to buy and sell investments).
You are able to manage your money and investments yourself, with a bit of help from a team of coaches – they’re qualified experts in financial planning, but won’t necessarily provide specific advice to your circumstances (unless you pay a fee).
You can open a range of investment accounts to benefit from various tax saving benefits, such as:
There are also more specialised investing accounts depending on your circumstances.
Within your accounts, you can make investments to suit your financial goals, which include a range of investment funds managed by Evelyn Partners, and a range of investments such as shares in popular individual companies from the UK and US, such as Barclays and Amazon.
We think Bestinvest is pretty good, thanks to the addition of the expert coaches. Here’s our Bestinvest review if you’re keen to learn even more. Or, simply head over to Bestinvest investing service¹ or Bestinvest pensions service¹.
As Evelyn Partners offer a range of different services, there are a range of different fees – which makes this a bit of a complicated section.
However, the important thing is that there’s no fees to have an initial consultation with one of their financial advisors and they’ll outline the services they can help you with, and the fees associated with them.
It’s a good idea to take this home with you and have a think, as financial advice can seem expensive – so you need to be sure it’s right for you, and that Evelyn Partners is the right choice for you too – it’s not the cheapest option.
However, don’t be put off investing by fees, investing for your future is one of the best things you can do, and advisors can really make a difference – don’t just leave your money sitting around collecting dust, it will lose value over time.
If it still seems too high, we recommend checking out lower cost options alongside financial advisors, where the experts also manage things too, such as PensionBee¹ for pensions and Moneyfarm¹ for investing – particularly if you don’t think you need specialist advice such as tax planning, passing wealth down to your children, selling a business, and things that could be unique to you.
Anyway, for Evelyn Partners, you’ll pay somewhere in the region of 1.5% to 3% of your savings per year as an average over 10 years, possibly more depending on your circumstances and where your money is invested. There could be one-off costs too.
This includes expert financial advice, looking after your money, the management of your investment accounts (such as a pension), and the management of the investments themselves.
It’s pretty much in-line with most financial advisors, in fact, the average financial advisor is 2.14% per year according to the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) – the people who monitor financial services companies.
To compare them with those online investment platforms mentioned, with PensionBee¹, the total annual fee is between 0.50% and 0.95% and Moneyfarm¹ is 0.65% to 1.05% per year (and both reduce if you have more savings with them) – so make sure you do in fact want the expert advice from an advisor, as it will cost more.
To compare with another large financial advice firm, St James’s Place, as an average over 10 years, you’d pay 1.92% for a pension, and 2.15% for an ISA, so fairly similar to Evelyn Partners.
To get an idea of the level of customer service, we typically like to look at customer reviews, and normally Trustpilot, the popular reviews website – however when it comes to financial advice, ‘VouchedFor’ tends to be more popular, as you’re able to review your advisor directly.
On VouchedFor, it’s got an excellent score of 4.9 out of 5 – however that is only from 300 reviews, but great nethertheless.
On Trustpilot, Evelyn Partners has a rating of 4.5 out of 5, which is again excellent, and that’s from over 150 reviews.
However, the number of reviews is quite low, so take them with a pinch of salt – there’s not enough to reliably understand the level of service.
The customer support is okay. Primarily, you’ll deal with your advisor directly, and typically they provide great service.
However, as a whole business, there’s not much support outside of this – there’s a general helpline you can call, but they simply direct you to the relevant person, which is typically your advisor (you can see how this might cause issues if your advisor isn’t contactable).
There’s no email or live-chat support, or no help centre online to help with any common questions (all of which are typical of more modern companies).
Yes, it’s safe to save and invest with Evelyn Partners.
They’re a very large company in the UK offering a range of different financial services, and are authorised and regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) – they’re the people who make sure financial companies are looking after you, and your money.
That means you are also protected by the Financial Services Compensation Scheme (FSCS), that’s where if anything should happen to Evelyn Partners, such as going out of business, your money would be protected up to £85,000 – although your money and investments are held separately to any of Evelyn Partner’s money, and all in your name, and can only be returned to you (no one else).
That also means that if you have been given bad advice, you could also receive compensation up to £85,000.
Here’s a quick recap and the pros and cons of Evelyn Partners:
We think Evelyn Partners is great, anything to help people save and invest their money for their future gets a big thumbs up from us here at Nuts About Money.
Evelyn Partners provide expert advice on a huge range of different areas within finance, including tax advice, so it will likely cover everything you might need (if you need personal advice).
It’s available up and down the country, which branches to speak to advisors face-to-face (and the initial consultation is free), or over the phone. The customer service is great too.
And, their experts manage all the investments themselves, and offer a great range of investment funds suited to pretty much every financial goal, with your portfolio of investments determined by your advisor for your specific circumstances and goals.
Although the lack of support outside of directly speaking to your advisor isn’t great. And you will be paying high fees for advice – so make sure you need it.
If you don’t think you need personalised advice just yet, perhaps you’re just starting out with savings and investing, don’t have unique circumstances (such as selling a business), or simply just want to squirrel money away into a pension, it’s probably likely you might not need financial advice.
You’ll be paying high fees for not much extra value – the value is in the personalised advice.
For most people, they don’t necessarily need a financial advisor to manage things, as there’s some great modern companies out there that offer a similar service (growing money and pensions over time), for a cheaper cost, and have easy to use apps to manage things.
Instead, you could opt for a lower cost, easy to use option, such as PensionBee¹ (for pensions), or Moneyfarm¹ (for investing and pensions) – where experts manage the investments for you, and on hand to provide advice, you simply add money (ideally monthly).
You could also check out the full range of the best investment platforms, which includes the Bestinvest investing service¹ and Bestinvest pensions service¹ (the online investment platform by Evelyn Partners, where you can get free coaching from experts).
Overall, it’s a solid 3 stars from us, and a great option if you’re looking for a financial advisor. To learn more, head over to the Evelyn Partners website.
Check out PensionBee, it’s easy to use, has low fees and a great record of growing money over time.
Check out PensionBee, it’s easy to use, has low fees and a great record of growing money over time.
Check out PensionBee, it’s easy to use, has low fees and a great record of growing money over time.
This article was written by the team at Nuts About Money, and fact-checked by 2 independent reviewers. You’re in safe hands.
Check out PensionBee, it’s easy to use, has low fees and a great record of growing money over time.
