St James’s Place FAQs

What services do St. James’s place offer?

St. James’s Place is a FTSE-100 wealth management business. Since St. James’s Place started trading in 1992, they have grown rapidly to be the largest company in their sector in the UK, with £135.5bn of client funds under management.

St. James’s Place offers personalised advice that covers financial, investment and tax planning, tailored to their clients’ lifestyle goals and stage of life.

What is St James’s Place’s approach to investing?

St. James’s Place looks to incorporate a 3-phased approach that aims to help clients achieve their unique financial goals. This approach typically involves:

  1. building an appropriate and specific financial plan,

  2. designing a portfolio that is tailored to the client, and,

  3. ensuring regular reviews to ensure plans stay on course.

St. James’s Place does not manage investments in-house, but instead utilises a broad range of external fund managers internationally. For oversight, an ‘Investment Committee’, comprising senior members of the organisation, is responsible for ensuring that the investment management services keep their clients’ interests at heart.

Moreover, the investment management team at St. James’s Place is assisted by a number of independent investment consultancy firms whose role it is to help provide objectivity when the team researches and reviews investments.

St. James’s Place’s approach to responsible investing

Environmental, social and governance (ESG) investing centres around recognising (and incorporating) these factors alongside traditional financial factors into the investment decision-making process.

St. James’s Place splits up their ESG investment approach into 4 parts:

Integration - The consideration of ESG factors into investment process

Engagement - The utilisation of their voice to discuss ESG factors with companies they invest in

Sustainability - Looking at the themes or companies at the forefront of driving positive long-term change

Promote - Reporting the impact of those investments

Alongside their standard ESG solutions, St. James’s Place has additional options for clients who want to invest more in companies at the forefront of social and environmental change.

Are St. James’s Place fees high?

St. James’s Place combines their advice, administration and fund management costs into a single charge to their clients.

Over a ten year period, SJP charges and costs average out at 2 to 2.5% per year. For example, their ‘Balanced portfolio’ costs averaged out over 10 years at 2.3%, the breakdown for which is as follows:

Initial charges on new investments: 4.5% advice fee

Product set up charge: 0.5%

Ongoing annual charges total of 1.7%, broken down as:

Advice at 0.5%

Administration at 0.8%

Fund management charges at 0.4%

Allowance for lost growth on charges taken, which amounts to 0.1% over ten years

In terms of how this example compares with the market, independent research by Numis in 2019 found SJP's charges to be similar to like-for-like offerings in the UK. Specifically, Numis compared SJP's charges with IFAs and alternative offerings such as discretionaries and other 'vertically integrated' propositions (this means where the investments are provided by the company the adviser works for).

Is St. James’s Place covered by FSCS?

St. James's Place operates as one fund management brand. This means that any investment in its products above £85,000 will not be protected by the FSCS.

That said, as with any regulated financial advice business, the Financial Ombudsman is in place to field complaints. It can instruct advice businesses to pay compensation higher than £85,000 if it finds evidence that the advice provided was inappropriate for a customer's needs.

St. James’s Place customer reviews

A comprehensive list of verified client reviews can be found here.