Global Banking & Finance Review: "EIS Wallet launch ahead of tax return deadline"
By CoInvestor | 17 January, 2017
New online service digitalises paperwork for tax relief around Enterprise Investment Schemes
The brains behind alternative investments platform CoInvestor have launched a new online service, EISWallet.com, allowing investors and their financial advisers to record and manage all of their Enterprise Investment Scheme (EIS) and unlisted investments digitally for the first time.
The service, which is free to use and currently in beta phase, aims to take the hassle out of managing income tax relief as well as any capital gains implications from investing in EIS and other unlisted investments.
Instead of trawling through paperwork as the self-assessment tax return looms, investors can store details of their investments and upload share and EIS certificates to their EIS Wallet throughout the year, allowing them to track the value of their tax savings in real time.
The simple interface allows users to easily enter information about their investments or products, link these directly to Companies House and add them to an overarching dashboard which tracks the valuation, tax relief amount and the key EIS benefit expiry dates.
Charles Owen, Founder of CoInvestor and EIS Wallet, commented: “Being in the business of alternative investments, many of which offer tax efficient savings, we realised that there was no standardised way for investors to record their unlisted product holdings, with paperwork in many cases still the main means of proof.
“Pairing this insight with the trend of growing demand from investors to access financial products, information and services online, we came up with the EIS Wallet – a digital solution aimed to make managing investments easier and take the pain out of completing tax returns.”
The EIS Wallet is free to use and currently available to the public in beta mode, with future plans to embed the functionality within the CoInvestor platform and deliver further added value for existing CoInvestor customers.
CoInvestor is an online marketplace for alternative assets that allows private investors to co-invest alongside experienced fund managers. The platform is endorsed by top fund managers including Oxford Capital, MMC Ventures and Chelverton Asset Management and has the backing of a number of major industry figures including Matthew Peacock, Founding Partner at Hanover Investments, who acts as Non-Executive Chairman.
CoInvestor is an online marketplace for alternative assets that allows private investors to co-invest alongside experienced fund managers from as little as £5,000.
The idea was conceived to capitalise on a new investor mind-set, which sees individuals increasingly using technology and seeking out alternative asset investments, but lacking either the time or experience to properly mitigate their investment risk.
At the same time, CoInvestor benefits fund managers, who have rigid distribution models and are increasingly losing market share due to the growth of direct online investing, by giving them a secondary distribution channel to access these direct investors.
It also allows financial advisers to better advise their clients on how to mitigate risk and boost returns on alternative investments, helping them to retain their clients in a changing investment landscape.
CoInvestor has so far focused on launching an initial EIS proposition but is looking to rapidly expand its remit to further products (e.g. SITR, BPR, IHT) that reflect private investor trends, as well as asset classes, such as VC, private equity, institutional property and high yield debt, that have traditionally been limited to institutional investors.
