What is a professional client?
A professional client is deemed capable of making his or her own investment decisions, and understanding the risks involved, with greater autonomy than retail clients. This means they can access favourable rates and benefits, but will waive some FCA protections afforded to retail clients.
Some clients may be eligible to classify themselves as professional clients. If you’re eligible, you’ll be presented with the option in My IG when you log in.
What are the benefits of becoming a professional client?
The benefits of being a professional client are:
- A significant reduction in your current margin rates, allowing you to trade with more leverage (eg the FTSE rate of 5% is reduced to 0.45%)*
- Access to a dedicated account management team
- A three-month free trial of ProRealTime, an advanced charting platform
- Pay zero IG management fees for our award-winning** wealth management service, IG Smart Portfolios, instead of the usual 0.5% annual fee. Click here for more information
What are the risks?
You will waive some FCA protections as a professional client, such as:
Negative balance protections will not apply to you. You will have an obligation to make additional payments if your account falls into a negative balance
- When talking to our retail clients we need to use clear language, and be very balanced when talking about the risks and benefits of leveraged trading. We can use more sophisticated language when talking to our professional clients
- We may assume your level of knowledge and experience when assessing whether our products are appropriate for you
- When executing your orders, we owe you a duty of best execution. For retail clients we must prioritise overall prices and cost of a transaction when giving best execution. As a professional client, we may prioritise other factors in giving best execution, such as speed and likelihood of execution if we determine they are equally or more important than overall price. In practice, we will not change the way we execute your orders
How do I become a professional client?
You can apply to be categorised as a professional client by logging in to My IG and selecting ‘settings’ and then ‘client and account status’.
To qualify as professional, you need to meet certain criteria related to your trading history, investment portfolio, and/or your employment history.
Other questions
* European regulators have announced restrictions on the sale of certain products to retail clients, due to come into force in early July. This means minimum starting margins of between 3.33% and 20% (depending on the asset class) on CFDs and spread betting, and a ban on digital 100s.
If you meet the FCA’s criteria and you choose to be treated as a professional client, these rules will not apply to you – however you will lose other regulatory protections as listed above.
**In the two years since we started offering IG Smart Portfolios, we have won ‘Best Overall Wealth Provider’ twice at the annual Online Personal Wealth Awards.
