Hargreaves Lansdown boss: UK still not a nation of risk-taking investors

EXCLUSIVE

CHARLIE CONCHIE

THE UK is not yet a nation of investors and Brits’ appetite for the markets still lags well behind the US, the chief of Hargreaves Lansdown has said.

In an interview to be published on City A.M.com today, the retail investment platform’s outgoing boss Chris Hill said investor confidence had been curtailed by historic turbulence in the past 12 months but Brits’ longer term taste for investment was still subdued.

“If you contrast the UK with the US, they've got the biggest stock market in the world, and you can see the impact [of that] on the national psyche and how they think about investing. We are moving that way, but much, much slower,” Hill said.

“If you talk to a taxi driver in New York, they know about stock prices,” he added.

Hill said that financial firms were sensing a shift among Brits, however, and money managers were now looking towards amateur investors as a potentially deep pool of capital.

“In the past, if you talk to the asset manager [about their] clients, it was very much about pension funds. Whereas if you talk to them now, they recognise the power of retail money,” he said.

The comments come after the investment platform reported a 30 per cent slowdown in net new business for the first half of the year last week, though profits were up.