Latest news with #Flagstone
Scotsman
28-07-2025
- Business
- Scotsman
Boomers boosting savings pots for Gen-Xers and Millennials
Handing on wealth | Moonsoo - Savers in the UK are expected to hand over £7 trillion between generations by 2050 as part of what has been called the 'great wealth transfer'. Sign up to our Scotsman Money newsletter, covering all you need to know to help manage your money. Sign up Thank you for signing up! Did you know with a Digital Subscription to The Scotsman, you can get unlimited access to the website including our premium content, as well as benefiting from fewer ads, loyalty rewards and much more. Learn More Sorry, there seem to be some issues. Please try again later. Submitting... The concept of 'giving while living' is seeing Baby Boomers pass their wealth onto Generation X and Millennials – helping to reduce the amount of tax Boomers owe in the process, according to online savings platform Flagstone. And its survey ranks Edinburgh as one of the top UK cities when it comes to how much parents are saving to transfer to their children. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad Flagstone commissioned its survey from Censuswide to discover how much this generation of parents is saving for their children, consulting 2,000 parents in the UK in May this year. It found that saving for their offspring's future is a clear priority for UK parents. Almost three-quarters are setting money aside for their children – an average of £18,212 parents who are saving are setting aside between £5,000 and £9,999 (21.3 per cent). The second most common savings amount is £40,000 to £49,999, although only 10 per cent of UK parents have saved this much. For 40.2 per cent of UK parents, these savings will go towards education or university costs. That's why more than a third plan to hand it over when their children reach 18 and higher education begins. The second biggest savings goal for parents is to help their youngsters onto the property ladder (38.9 per cent), reflecting the continuing rise in house prices. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad More than half of parents keep their savings plans secret from their children, partly because they think they are too young to understand, or they want the money to be a surprise, while some believe their children should build their own savings pots first. When broken down by city, London parents save the most on average (£23,859), closely followed by Edinburgh (£23,669). Sheffield, Cardiff, and Birmingham complete the top five. Claire Jones of Flagstone says: 'It's encouraging that so many parents are already saving for their children's futures. But it's not just about how much they save – it's also about where they put it. 'Junior ISAs are one option, letting parents save tax-free until their child turns 18.'Beyond that, finding accounts with better rates can make a meaningful difference to the amount children eventually receive. That's where platforms like Flagstone can help, by giving parents access to a wide range of competitive savings accounts – all in one place.
FF News
11-07-2025
- Business
- FF News
Flagstone to Launch Up to 10 Cash ISAs by January 2026
Flagstone, the UK's largest savings platform*, is pledging its commitment to Cash ISA savers with plans to launch as many as ten Cash ISA products for savers in time for the 2025/26 ISA season (running January to 5 April 2026). Flagstone's announcement comes as new research** shows that: Cash ISA savers are concerned about the prospect of investing over saving: 70% of UK Cash ISA savers say it feels unfair to be expected to take risks with their cash that would usually be perfectly safe in an ISA 46% of Cash ISA savers aren't confident in their ability to make good investment decisions 59% worry they won't be able to access money they've invested if they need it And, reducing the Cash ISA limit is unlikely to force a shift to investing anyway: Currently, UK adults are almost twice as likely to have a Cash ISA (41%) than a S&S ISA (22%) Less than a fifth (18%) of Cash ISA savers say they will put surplus cash in stocks and shares ISAs (S&S ISA), and less than a tenth (9%) will invest it outside of a S&S ISA Cash ISA savers are more likely to use surplus cash to pay household bills and repairs (11%), reduce their mortgage (11%), or top up their pension (11%), than invest it (9%) Simon Merchant, CEO of Flagstone, comments: 'Reducing how much a saver can put into a Cash ISA is unfair, shortsighted and irresponsible. Our Cash ISA products will offer competitive tax-free rates to savers who deserve to be rewarded for taking action and trying their best to make their money work harder for them. We're relentlessly told we don't save enough, so why punish those who do? 'What has happened to encouraging aspiration and good savings behaviours? Reducing how much you can save in an ISA isn't going to fuel more action on the part of savers, only greater apathy. As a nation, we're very poor at saving as it is. Take away the greatest incentive (tax free interest) and it becomes even harder to encourage more people to make their money work harder. 'It's fundamentally wrong to encourage people to invest instead of save without equipping them with the education and insight to do so well. Our research shows that savers are understandably worried about what happens to their money if they invest it, and doubt their ability to invest it well. On top of needing to understand market dynamics to some degree, investing requires a certain risk appetite too – something that, for many, takes years to build, and then declines significantly as they get older.' Flagstone's new Cash ISA products will be delivered by up to 10 UK banking partners. The ISAs can be easily managed on Flagstone's single platform, enabling savers to move their cash easily between the ISAs to maximise interest potential while continually minimising risk. Savers will be able to transfer existing cash ISA holdings into Flagstone's Cash ISAs. Further details on the ISAs' terms and providers will be shared later in the year. With the upcoming expansion of Flagstone Cash ISAs, the platform's position in the UK savings market gets stronger by offering a wider range of high-interest ISA products. Companies In This Post Flagstone
Yahoo
20-05-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
‘I retired from my six-figure banking job to be a tour guide'
This is the first in a series about early retirement: how our readers did it, and what they are doing now. Would you like to take part? Get in touch at money@ The only word on the exterior of St Paul's Cathedral is 'resurgam', meaning 'I shall rise again' in Latin. The discreet reference to the second coming of Christ is one David Harry is keen to point out to guests on his walking history tours of London. But Harry feels the motto also reflects a second coming of his own. 'It's a symbol for my ongoing change in career; my own rebirth, as it were.' For the past five years, the 61-year-old has been one of the capital's most prominent tour guides. Donning a stripey blazer, Hawaiian shirt and a Panama hat, Harry leads guests through London's forgotten back alleys and ancient landmarks to reveal a history 'you can't Google,' he says. His evenings are spent combing through his own extensive archive of old magazines, books and sundries to unearth forgotten chapters in London's storied past that can be related to his guests. This second career came after an early retirement from a stressful job in a bank. 'I can't believe how happy it makes me,' says Harry of his new role. 'I just love every minute of it. I am glad I made the decision to retire when I did and I can't believe how lucky I am.' Harry's life is unrecognisable from what it was before the pandemic. After almost 25 years in a corporate job, he retired in 2020 aged 55 and gave up his comfortable six-figure salary. Most people can only dream of doing this. Just 5pc of workers retired when they turned 55 last year, normally the earliest someone can access their pension pot, according to analysis by cash deposit firm Flagstone. The majority of workers retire at state pension age, which is 66 for both men and women and expected to rise to 68 by the middle of the 2040s. About one million people have continued to work full-time after hitting the current pension age, according to official figures last year. Fortunately for Harry, when he began his career in 1996 he signed on with one of the last remaining gold-plated private sector pension schemes. It meant the former Deutsche Bank vice president – who joined the German financial giant as a photocopy operator and worked his way up – retired with about £40,000 a year. 'I knew you could retire at 55 and I was in the final salary pension scheme, so I was very lucky indeed,' Harry says. 'My friend left [his job] and told me how much better life was outside the bank too. I realised I could afford to do it and if I did well as a tour guide I could live comfortably.' It was then that he decided to take the leap and hand in his notice. The money would serve as a safety net, Harry planned, allowing him to turn a hobby into a second career. Shortly after retiring, Harry's mother died, leaving him with a modest inheritance that allowed him to further cushion himself during the transition. He says she would have backed his decision to quit, having given him plenty of encouragement when he trained to become a magician. 'My mother had always been very supportive of me and she passed away between when I made my decision to leave the bank and hand in my notice.' He had qualified with the City of London as an official tour guide while working at Deutsche Bank and steadily built up his confidence in the role. 'I was moonlighting in the last few years before I made the jump,' Harry says. Years performing as a Magic Circle magician under the pseudonym 'the Delusionist' at corporate events in his spare time had also convinced Harry of his ability to hold an audience. 'I was already a performing magician so I had those presentation skills,' he says. Looking back on his time in the corporate world, Harry says he was 'institutionalised'. He adds: 'I had been there for 25 years, I didn't understand how much freedom could come from being self employed.' He says that overall he enjoyed his time with Deutsche Bank. 'They trained me up and paid me reasonably well.' Yet he recalls how the 'pressure from deadlines and enormous decisions' that came with his senior position 'wears you down' over time. 'Every morning I would wake up in terror before having to look at my inbox thinking what's the next thing I am going to be asked to do or look at.' The father-of-two soon saw a steady trickle of interest in his tours of London, building out a small following from his existing work tour guiding in the Square Mile. Despite losing 'about 60pc' of his salary, he soon qualified as a tour guide with the City of Westminster, receiving hundreds of positive reviews on travel website TripAdvisor. His first tours took guests to filming locations from the Harry Potter franchise, following the young wizard's journey through London from being dropped off by the purple Knight Bus in Borough Market to the Ministry of Magic entrance in Westminster. 'I started doing Harry Potter tours straight away,' says Harry. Other tours led by Harry focus on London's espionage history, following the footsteps figures like Ian Fleming and notorious Cambridge Five member Kim Philby. He says his success as a guide has matched the income from his pension, while he also sees healthy demand from corporate clients, for whom he creates bespoke tours, as well as occasional viral hits on TikTok. 'Two and a half years ago I posted a random video on TikTok and it went viral. Now I post every day about London stories, so TikTok pays me and I sometimes get recognised in the streets.' His best ever month on the video sharing platform earned him £1,000, after signing a monetisation agreement which pays content creators a small fee per 10,000 views they receive. A recent video of Harry's on the site attracted almost 200,000 views and delves into how an IRA bomb explosion in 1992 at the foot of the City's Gherkin had the effect of revealing the remains of a teenage Roman girl. A Latin inscription now marks her final resting place. 'Now I have got more work than I need and I have to turn it down,' says Harry. He is kept busiest in the summer months, when tourists flock to London. 'It's seasonal,' he adds. 'In the winter I can do two or three tours a week, and in the summer I have done up to three tours a day. But that's quite tiring.' Some of his favourite guests are Londoners. 'I love guiding Londoners because they've already got quite a lot of knowledge.' He adds he only wishes his mother could have seen how he has spent his retirement because he knows it would have won her approval. 'It's the one regret I have that she wasn't around to see what I have done with my career.' Error in retrieving data Sign in to access your portfolio Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data
Daily Mail
17-05-2025
- Business
- Daily Mail
What would REALLY happen if you didn't buy a daily coffee and saved the money instead?
The price of a takeaway coffee has soared in recent years. Some towns, especially those in and around London, have already seen the price of a takeaway coffee nudge beyond £4 and experts say we're just three years away from the £5 cup of coffee becoming the norm. And in the past decade, it has been repeated time and time again: 'Stop buying coffees out and you might actually be able to save some money' - or better yet, it's the answer to saving for a house deposit... second only to ditching the avocados. Now, savings platform Flagstone has crunched the numbers to see if the debate stacks up. It says the average daily spend on a takeaway coffee is £3.40, amounting to £102 a month. This is based on buying a takeaway coffee every day (not just the regular working week). If the money was diverted each month into a savings account and compounded annually at an interest rate of 4.5 per cent, it could add up to nearly £7,000 over five years. Putting £102 a month into a savings account compounding annually at 4.5 per cent over five years would grow to £6,849. This assumes that each monthly deposit earns interest at 4.5 per cent annually for five-years. The magic of compound interest, branded the eight wonder of the world by Albert Einstein, is to partly to thank for this. Compounding is the addition, repeatedly, of interest to the principal amount of a deposit. It describes what happens when you earn interest on both the money you initially deposit in a savings account, plus the interest you have already earned on that starting amount. If the same tactic was adopted for money spent on regular nights out, it could prove even more lucrative when it comes to helping to build up a savings pot. The average person splashes out £317 on nights out a month, according to Flagstone, making it one of the biggest black holes in monthly finances. If this sum were redirected monthly into a savings account instead, it would grow to £21,285 over the five years. The second highest earnings opportunity could come from doing more housework yourself and putting the money you would have spent on a cleaner into a savings account. While having a cleaner can save time, spending on cleaners rose by 9.4 per cent last year, driven by increases to the national living wage. Currently, the average monthly cleaning cost is £150. If this money was saved instead - and compounded at 4.5 per cent interest - you could earn an extra £10,072 after five years. People spend around on £237 average a month on meal kits, meal deals and takeaways. Putting this money into a high-interest savings account instead would save £15,914 over five years in a 4.5 per cent savings account. While cancelling subscriptions Subscriptions to Disney +, Amazon Prime, Audible and Apple TV and funnelling what you would save from this into a high-interest account would save between £536 and £537, per subscription, over five years. The table below allows you to see the daily spend, monthly spend and finally, how much it would save you over five years. If you were to stop spending on all of the above, you could save £76,479, if you placed the savings into a savings account offering 4.5 per cent interest. This figure relies on saving across all categories above. This is well over the average deposit on a new home, which is now around £53,414 Savers can currently get easy-access accounts payng 4.75 per cent, but this is likely to fall over the next six months as the Bank of England base rate is prediced to fall. Claire Jones, head of strategic relationships and new dusiness at Flagstone said: 'Spending on common items like nights out and coffees might not seem to have a huge impact on your bank balance. 'But reducing outgoings and redirecting that money to high-interest savings accounts could prove lucrative for individuals keen to focus on their wealth goals.'
Finextra
07-05-2025
- Business
- Finextra
Flagstone appoints former MoneySuperMarket executive as chief growth officer
The former Chief Customer Officer for MoneySuperMarket and MoneySavingExpert has joined Flagstone, the UK's largest savings platform* and the fintech engine behind the savings proposition for over 1,000 UK financial services providers, as Chief Growth Officer. 0 Darren Bentley brings to Flagstone two decades' experience of leading growth strategies for some of the UK's fast-growing, consumer-facing finance brands. Darren spent more than seven years at MoneySuperMarket (now Mony Group Plc), and was appointed to the executive team to lead marketing and growth strategies for the group's three chief brands: MoneySuperMarket, TravelSuperMarket and MoneySavingExpert. Between joining the business and stepping down as Chief Customer Officer in 2019, the group doubled EBITDA (to £129m) and its market cap tripled (to £2.2 billion). Darren joins Flagstone at a pivotal point in the company's growth trajectory. In 2024, Flagstone recorded its second consecutive year of profitability as revenue grew 48% to £55 million and the platform's assets under administration increased by £1 billion a quarter to end the year at £16 billion. In the same period, Flagstone customers generated cumulative returns of more than £500 million on their savings. Simon Merchant, Co-Founder & CEO of Flagstone, comments: 'Adding Darren to our executive team is a coup for Flagstone. In the last two years, Flagstone has achieved formidable growth and satisfied an enormous demand for better, simpler savings for hundreds of thousands of individual and business savers. But the job is only part-way done. Bank of England data tells us that three quarters of UK savers' money is languishing in low or no interest accounts**. Darren's experience and insight will help us invigorate more of these savers to take action with their money - particularly those for whom maximising returns on their money and minimising the risk of financial loss are equally imperative.' At Flagstone, Darren will oversee how the company increases the speed at which billions of pounds are added to the platform by savers every year. Working with marketing, data, product and technology colleagues, Darren will direct strategies around how Flagstone drives awareness of savings as an asset class in its own right, invests in digital marketing to reach the customers that Flagstone is best suited to support, and develops a superior user experience that customers don't ever want to give up. Darren Bentley, Chief Growth Officer, adds: 'Flagstone isn't just selling a great service, but waking savers up to a better way to achieve more with their money, with minimal risk and the simplicity of having access to hundreds of savings products in one place. But signing up more customers is only one of the key metrics for long-term sustained growth. Flagstone savers are trusting the business with their life savings. It's our duty to repay that loyalty with a first-rate experience and to continue to enhance our product and service.' Darren joins Flagstone from LumonPay, the currency exchange service serving 70,000 customers who transfer approximately £9 billion overseas across Europe and North America every year. Prior to Lumon Pay, Darren spent four years at online used car retailer, Cazoo, during which time the company reached £1.2 billion in revenue, selling 120,000 cars a year. Having achieved a second year of profitability and closed one of UK fintech's largest investment rounds in 2024, Flagstone is well positioned for significant growth. Over 2025 and into 2026, the company will launch a Cash ISA and hit milestones on its long-term product roadmap to automate a customer's savings process to maximise interest accrual and security protection. 'I'm thrilled to join a company with such a strong reputation for innovation and customer-focused product solutions,' said Leslie Witt, Chief Product Officer of AffiniPay. 'I look forward to collaborating with the talented teams at AffiniPay to amplify our impact and continue to set new standards of excellence while helping our customers achieve greater business success.' This appointment underscores AffiniPay's commitment to providing professionals with innovative technology to drive better business results. This addition follows the appointment of Nathan Waite as Chief Revenue Officer earlier this year.
