Flagstone Cash Management service - opinions?

[dimots]

Has anyone used this: http://www.flagstoneim.com/

I get a terrible return on company cash reserves and this seems to offer a solution. Looks almost too good to be true.

[Burnham]

Bumping this as I need to spread some cash between accounts in the short term (and dont really want open up various different high street bank/savings accounts)

Has anyone had experience with Flagstone as an individual?

As I understand it, its effectively a portal for management of multiple accounts, ultimately via Barclays, allowing you to spread across a number of different banking licenses to ensure the funds are insured.

There's very little independent information available on the web it seems. I'm aware they are linked to SJP.

Any advice would be appreciated!

[dimots]

Well I didn't bother in the end. I did try https://www.akonihub.com but after signing up they were slightly pushy so I backed off.

[anonymous-user]

Burnham said:

As I understand it, its effectively a portal for management of multiple accounts, ultimately via Barclays, allowing you to spread across a number of different banking licenses to ensure the funds are insured.

I hadn't come across this before. We do have some company cash that currently doesn't do a lot so I called them up today - your description seems to cover their proposition pretty well.

They seemed to have a legitimate proposition as far as I could tell on an initial phone call.

The costs for their entry level tier is 0.25% which covers a value from £250k up to £1m. They expect you would achieve around 1.3% net of costs but of course this depends upon the prevailing interest rates being offered.

The one point I didn't like was their answer to some of my "what if" scenarios. After all, if you are keeping the money as cash, and you are spreading it around in order to maintain the FSCS protection, you are being quite cautious.

I was thinking about the scenario (which I accept is unlikely) that you decided you no longer trusted Flagstone for some reason and you wanted to take direct control of your money in your separate bank accounts.

Apparently this wasn't possible - you could choose to withdraw your money, but only via their portal. The sales chap tried to explain how it wouldn't make sense to allow direct access as I would be losing the benefits of their system. But I would have preferred some kind of "emergency stop" button where, if you wanted to exclude Flagstone in the event of some unforeseen serious issue, you could.

[Burnham]

dimots said:

Well I didn't bother in the end. I did try https://www.akonihub.com but after signing up they were slightly pushy so I backed off.

Cheers dimots, one to avoid at least!

EddieSteadyGo said:

Burnham said:

As I understand it, its effectively a portal for management of multiple accounts, ultimately via Barclays, allowing you to spread across a number of different banking licenses to ensure the funds are insured.

The one point I didn't like was their answer to some of my "what if" scenarios. After all, if you are keeping the money as cash, and you are spreading it around in order to maintain the FSCS protection, you are being quite cautious.

I was thinking about the scenario (which I accept is unlikely) that you decided you no longer trusted Flagstone for some reason and you wanted to take direct control of your money in your separate bank accounts.

Apparently this wasn't possible - you could choose to withdraw your money, but only via their portal. The sales chap tried to explain how it wouldn't make sense to allow direct access as I would be losing the benefits of their system. But I would have preferred some kind of "emergency stop" button where, if you wanted to exclude Flagstone in the event of some unforeseen serious issue, you could.

In my case I'm less concerned about the interest, and more about it being insured, especially with some uncertainty next year (don't mention the B-Word). Ultimately with Barclays being involved (I couldn't figure out where, but I think its the Hub Account) and the funds actually being with the Banks selected, I think its a neat method of managing multiple accounts.

I'm in between houses so its likely I'll only need it in there for a short term. Nice problem to have and all that.