Not upheld: inadequate disclosure of transaction costs / failure to provide bid and offer prices complaint against Investengine (UK) Limited trading as InvestEngine

Decision detail

Summary

Mr M complained that InvestEngine failed to provide bid and offer prices for each of his historic ETD transactions, preventing him from verifying the accuracy of costs disclosed in his annual Costs and Charges Report. IE refused, explaining that market spreads are determined by brokers and market makers, not by IE, and that it provides aggregated cost estimates in annual statements instead. The Ombudsman upheld IE's position, finding that while FCA guidance requires transparency about spreads at the moment of trade execution, this detailed information is not required for historic transactions. The Ombudsman concluded that IE's annual statements providing exact costs broken down by category met regulatory expectations for execution-only clients and were clear, fair, and not misleading.

The Ombudsman's reasoning

The Ombudsman agreed with the investigator that IE had provided reasonable historic costs information. While the FCA expects transparency about bid and offer prices at the moment of trade execution, this level of detail is only required in real-time before a trade is placed, not retrospectively for historic transactions. For annual statements covering historic transactions, guidance requires only exact costs incurred broken down by category, which IE provided. The information was clear, fair, and not misleading, meeting regulatory expectations for execution-only clients.

How this compares

Source

Read the original decision on the Financial Ombudsman Service website