Individual Savings Account - Fund Supermarkets and Self Select ISA Providers

Fund Supermarkets and Self Select ISA Providers

There is no legislative difference between a Fund Supermarket and a self select ISA provider. These are merely marketing terms used by stocks and shares ISA providers to distinguish the type of business that they tend to seek. Firms favouring collective investment business will often call themselves fund supermarkets while firms that have traditionally been involved in share dealing will often call themselves self select ISA providers. A firm can freely offer all types of permitted investment, regardless of its name, and many do. Others choose to specialise in only funds.

Except for fund houses themselves it's normal for providers to offer the ability to hold funds from many different houses. This makes it easy to hold funds from many fund houses and avoids the limitation to one fund house per year that the single S&S manager for new money each year rule would otherwise create.

Instead of charging the investor, the S&S providers are often paid by the fund managers out of their usual charges, though some may have both explicit dealing charges and collect the commission while others may make charges and refund all commission.

Examples of large Fund Supermarkets are Fidelity FundsNetwork, Hargreaves Lansdown's Vantage Service and Interactive Investor.