Investment platform Lightyear has today announced the launch of its ‘Plans’ feature, enabling users to personalise and automate long-term investing to build their wealth and meet their individual financial goals.
With Plans, investors can create a set of stocks and ETFs tailored to their personal goals. They can give each Plan a name based on financial targets or life events, and set up automated contributions into each Plan on a weekly, fortnightly or monthly basis — taking the complexity and hassle out of long-term investing. UK investors can choose from thousands of global instruments, as well as equities closer to home. This includes a range of recently fractionalised ETFs that hold UK companies, such as FTSE 100 (Vanguard & iShares), FTSE 250 (Vanguard) and UK Property, meeting demand for buying locally while helping users diversify their portfolios and create healthy investment habits.
The need for more simple, intuitive ways of helping people grow their wealth and meet their long-term goals is reinforced by a recent report from the European Financial Planning Association, which found that just 16% of people in the UK feel their financial situation allows them to fulfil their life goals, while only 27% said they feel secure about their financial future. Plans help to address this, as users can automate their investing so they are consistently contributing to their portfolios in a way suited to their budgets and lifestyles. This gives everyone the ability to grow their wealth and secure their financial futures at a pace and scale tailored to them.
While UK full equities are already available to add into Plans, they will also be rolled out fractionally in the coming weeks, at which point they’ll be eligible for autoinvesting. Research by Lightyear finds that the average price of a UK stock (£331.50) is 234% higher than the average price of a US stock (£99.16). Fractional shares will therefore expand access to usually dearer UK equities by allowing users to invest a steady, fixed sum into their Plans each month in a low-effort way so they can meet financial goals more easily.
This comes in the wake of Chancellor Rachel Reeves’ push to get more people growing their investments through the stock market. And, as speculation mounts over the long-term future of Cash ISAs, it is becoming more and more important that everyday investors have accessible and affordable options for saving and maximising their money.
Wander Rutgers, UK CEO of Lightyear, said: “At Lightyear, we want to make investing as easy, affordable, and accessible as possible, so everyone has the ability to build long-term wealth and achieve their personal goals. However, research clearly shows that in the UK far too many people feel that their finances do not allow them to live their lives to the fullest. Our new Plans can help to change that by allowing people to tailor their investing to their own budgets and targets, so investing becomes a healthy habit rather than a complex chore.”
Paul Murphy, Partner at Lightspeed Venture Partners, said: “We know people want to be financially successful and secure their futures, but it’s been made far too difficult by expensive platforms and providers that make people believe financial wellbeing is far out of their reach. Lightyear is changing the game with Plans - making long-term investing as simple, intuitive and low-cost as it should be.”
The rollout of Plans comes off the back of Lightyear launching a host of AI-powered market intelligence tools earlier this year, aimed at widening access to high-quality, concise information about stocks, funds and market sentiment that can be hard to obtain and is often limited behind subscriptions or paywalls.
For example, the ‘Why Did It Move’ feature lets users see instantly what caused a share to spike or dip at a particular point in time, while the interactive ‘Bulls Say, Bears Say’ tool carefully analyses hundreds of trusted sources to build a case both for and against a particular instrument.