A typical UK self-directed investor does not hold their portfolio in one place. The ISA is at one provider, the SIPP at another, and a GIA — for the bits that no longer fit in either — is at a third. Sometimes there is a fourth: a legacy share account from an old employer's SAYE scheme, or a Junior ISA opened for a child. The total is your real portfolio. The brokers each see only their slice.
Aggregation is the work of pulling those slices into a single view. This article explains how it works in the UK in 2026, why Open Banking only solves part of the problem, and how the leading tools handle multi-broker reality.
This is not financial advice. Past performance does not guarantee future returns. Consider speaking to an FCA-authorised financial adviser for personalised guidance.
Why most UK investors hold across three or more brokers
It is rarely a deliberate strategy. The UK platform market makes multi-broker the path of least resistance for anyone who has been investing for more than a few years.
ISAs and SIPPs are bundled differently by different platforms. Hargreaves Lansdown is competitive on SIPPs and dear on ISAs. AJ Bell sits in the middle on both. Vanguard UK is competitive on ISA fees if you only buy Vanguard funds, but has no SIPP option for many fund ranges. Trading 212 is fee-free for an ISA but does not offer a SIPP at all. The result is that the platform that suits your ISA usually does not suit your SIPP, and the rational investor ends up with at least two.
GIA breakages. When you fill an ISA — £20,000 a year — the overflow has to go into a GIA. If your ISA provider's GIA fees are uncompetitive (HL charges the same percentage on the GIA as on the ISA, which adds up at scale), opening a separate GIA elsewhere makes financial sense. That is broker number three.
Legacy positions. A SAYE scheme matured, an old workplace share scheme transferred out, an inheritance came as Hargreaves Lansdown holdings — and you never quite got around to consolidating. Most UK investors have at least one account they would close if they did the paperwork.
Specialist needs. Crypto exposure usually sits at Coinbase or Kraken, not at the mainstream brokers. International stock access is wider at Interactive Brokers than at any UK retail platform. EIS and VCT investments live at the EIS/VCT manager directly. None of these aggregate cleanly with a mainstream UK platform.
The end state for a moderately experienced UK investor is three to five accounts across two or more brokers. The financial reality is one portfolio. Reconciling those is what aggregation is for.
Aggregation methods
There are three methods and a hybrid. Each has a different security model and a different maintenance burden.
Open Banking AISP
The Open Banking framework, regulated by the FCA, allows licensed Account Information Service Providers (AISPs) to read account data on your behalf with your explicit consent. The classic use case is letting a budgeting app see your current account transactions; the same plumbing extends, partially, to investment accounts.
How it works. You log into your bank or broker through a redirect inside the AISP's interface. You authorise the AISP to read your account data. The AISP receives a 90-day token and can pull updated balances and transactions for that period without you re-authenticating. After 90 days the consent expires and you re-authorise.
What it gives you. Cash balances, ISA cash, sometimes investment account values at the wrapper level. For a small number of brokers, transaction-level data.
The catch. Open Banking was designed for cash accounts. Investment account coverage is patchy. Hargreaves Lansdown, AJ Bell and Vanguard UK expose limited Open Banking endpoints — usually account totals but not position-level holdings. Trading 212 and Freetrade do not currently expose investment data through Open Banking at all. So an Open Banking-based aggregator can tell you "you have £42,318 at AJ Bell" but not "you have 312 units of VWRL at AJ Bell at an average cost of £108.21". Position-level data is what you actually need for any serious analysis, and Open Banking is not, in 2026, a complete answer for it.
Broker CSV export
Every UK broker supports CSV export of trades and holdings, sometimes via the user interface and sometimes only by request to support. CSV is the universal lingua franca of portfolio aggregation.
How it works. You go to your broker's account, export trades or holdings as CSV, upload to your tracker. The tracker parses the file and updates your records.
What it gives you. Full position-level detail, including units, cost basis, dates, prices, dividends and corporate actions, depending on the broker's export schema.
The catch. Maintenance. You have to remember to do it. Most CSV-based trackers have you on a weekly or monthly cadence. The plus side is that you stay in control — no shared credentials, no third-party token sitting in your account — and the data is reliably complete because you are reading the broker's own export.
Manual entry
You type each trade in. For a few positions or for assets that no broker exports — private investments, cold-storage crypto — this is the only option.
How it works. Self-evident. You enter the trade.
What it gives you. Coverage of anything.
The catch. Time. Active investors do not want to do this for their main accounts.
Hybrid
In practice, most investors run a hybrid. Open Banking for the cash side. Broker CSV for the investment accounts. Manual entry for the long-tail and the unusual.
This is the realistic working model for UK aggregation. No single method covers everything; the aggregator that handles all three with low friction is the one you stop fighting.
Why Open Banking does not fully solve investments yet
This is the frequently asked question and it deserves a direct answer.
Open Banking under PSD2, and the UK's domestic implementation, mandated read-access to payment accounts — current accounts, credit cards, e-money. It did not mandate equivalent access to investment accounts. The Investment Association and FCA have explored extending the framework (sometimes called "Open Finance") but in 2026 there is no regulatory requirement for a UK broker to expose your ISA or SIPP holdings to a third party via Open Banking.
What you actually get when you connect a broker to an aggregator via Open Banking depends on what the broker has voluntarily chosen to expose. Most expose account-level totals. A minority expose holdings. Almost none expose full transaction history with cost basis. The result is that "Open Banking aggregation" for investments is mostly cash and balances, not positions. For real portfolio intelligence, you still need either a CSV import or a broker-specific API integration.
This will probably change. The "Open Finance" workstream has been moving for several years and the Treasury's smart-data framework is intended to extend the Open Banking model to a wider set of financial accounts. As of 2026, that future is not yet here.
Sharesight's email-import method
Sharesight has been doing UK aggregation for longer than most and has a distinctive workaround for the gaps in API coverage.
For brokers that do not expose an API but do email contract notes after each trade, Sharesight provides a unique email address per account. You set the broker to copy that address on every contract note. Sharesight parses the incoming emails, extracts the trade details, and adds them to your portfolio automatically.
This works surprisingly well for UK brokers like Halifax Share Dealing, iWeb, and some legacy platforms that do not expose APIs but do email statements. It is fragile in the sense that any change to the broker's email format breaks the parser, but Sharesight has been maintaining these parsers for over a decade and the coverage is mature.
The trade-off is that you are forwarding broker correspondence to a third-party email address, which some investors are uncomfortable with. The forwarded emails contain trade details and your name; they do not contain login credentials. The decision is a personal one about data flow rather than security per se.
Other UK-relevant tools and how they aggregate
Snowball Analytics
CSV import for the major UK brokers (Trading 212, Freetrade, AJ Bell, IBKR), API integration for Interactive Brokers and a small number of others, and manual entry for the rest. Open Banking is not the primary method. Coverage of UK platform CSVs is good but column-mapping for non-listed brokers requires manual setup.
Delta
Delta started as a crypto tracker and added equities later. The UK broker integrations are limited; most users add positions manually or via CSV. Strong on aggregation across crypto, weaker than competitors on UK ISA/SIPP/GIA distinction.
Kubera
Designed for "wealth tracking" — the broader picture including property, private equity, art and crypto alongside listed investments. Kubera uses several aggregator backends including Plaid (which has limited UK broker coverage), Yodlee (more UK coverage but variable reliability), and direct CSV. Kubera's strength is breadth of asset class; its weakness for a focused UK equity investor is that the portfolio analytics are thinner than dedicated portfolio trackers.
Native UK broker dashboards
A few UK platforms have built rudimentary aggregation themselves. AJ Bell's "Dodl" and HL's mobile app will let you view multiple accounts within the same provider. None of them aggregate across providers.
How Invormed handles aggregation
Invormed is a UK-native portfolio intelligence platform built around the realistic UK working model: CSV-first aggregation, with broker-specific importers tuned for the UK platforms most retail investors actually use. The current state at launch:
- Trading 212 is the lead broker. The CSV importer is built around T212's full export schema and is the most refined integration on the platform. T212 is the largest UK retail broker by new-account volume; if it is your main account, ingestion is materially smoother than on a generic CSV importer.
- Other UK brokers — AJ Bell, Hargreaves Lansdown, Freetrade, Interactive Investor, Vanguard UK — are supported via their native CSV exports, with column-mapping handled by the importer.
- ISA, SIPP and GIA are first-class concepts. You tag each imported account with its wrapper type, and the platform's analytics treat them differently — looking through to true exposure across all three, but reporting wrapper-level efficiency separately.
- Open Banking is not used at launch, on the basis that current UK broker coverage does not justify the additional consent flow for the limited data Open Banking returns on investment accounts. This may change as Open Finance matures.
- Broker APIs are on the roadmap for the platforms that have them (Trading 212, Interactive Brokers). The CSV-first approach is the realistic launch state.
The pragmatic position is that CSV import is unglamorous but works. Until UK Open Finance matures or more brokers expose investment APIs, the difference between "manual CSV that the importer handles cleanly" and "automated API sync" is mostly cadence — once a week instead of continuously — for a use case where weekly is usually enough.
Aggregation methods compared
| Method | What it covers | Maintenance | Security model | UK reality (2026) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Open Banking AISP | Cash balances, account totals, partial holdings | Low (auto-refresh during 90-day consent) | FCA-regulated, OAuth flow, no credential sharing | Investment coverage limited; usually balances not positions |
| Broker CSV export | Full position and transaction detail | Manual (weekly/monthly upload) | No third-party access; you control the file | Universal — every UK broker supports it |
| Email parsing (Sharesight) | Trades from contract note emails | Set up once, then automatic | Forwarded emails contain trade detail not credentials | Mature for legacy UK brokers; format-fragile |
| Direct broker API | Full data with auto-sync | Low | API token, scoped access | Limited UK retail coverage (T212, IBKR; not AJ Bell, HL, Vanguard UK) |
| Manual entry | Anything | High | None | Fine for long-tail; painful for active accounts |
Privacy and security considerations
Aggregation involves giving someone — software, a service, a third-party API — visibility of your investment data. The relevant security questions:
What permissions does it have? Read-only access is the standard for portfolio aggregation. No tracker should ever ask for trading rights. If it does, that is a red flag worth taking seriously.
Where does the data sit? Most UK trackers store your data in the cloud (Vercel, AWS, GCP). Reputable providers encrypt at rest and in transit, and store credentials (where they have them) separately from data. Check the provider's data residency — UK or EU data residency is a stronger position than US-only for GDPR purposes.
Who is the AISP, and is it FCA-regulated? If you use an Open Banking-based aggregator, the AISP is named in the consent flow. The FCA register lists every authorised AISP — the firm name, the permissions, the date of authorisation. Check it. An aggregator that uses an unauthorised intermediary is operating outside the regulated framework.
What happens if you stop using the service? Reputable trackers let you export your full data and delete your account. Check the terms before you put years of trade history in. Sharesight, Snowball, Kubera and Invormed all support full export.
Two-factor authentication on the broker side. Whatever aggregation method you use, your broker accounts should have 2FA. This protects against credential compromise on the broker side, which is independent of the aggregator.
The general security position for UK aggregation in 2026 is reasonable: AISPs are FCA-regulated, broker exports are read-only by design, and the major trackers have not had material data breaches. The risk is not zero but it is well-bounded — and lower than many of the things investors do with their data without thinking about it (such as forwarding statements to their accountant by email).
Frequently asked questions
Can Open Banking show all my investments?
No. Open Banking under PSD2 was designed for payment accounts (current accounts, credit cards), not investment accounts. UK brokers expose investment data through Open Banking voluntarily and inconsistently — most expose account-level totals, a minority expose position-level holdings, and almost none expose full transaction history. For real portfolio analysis you still need broker CSV import or a direct broker API. The Open Finance workstream may extend the framework in future, but it is not complete in 2026.
Is it safe to share my broker login?
You should not have to. Reputable UK aggregators use one of three methods: Open Banking AISP (you log in directly to the broker through a regulated redirect, no credentials shared), broker CSV export (you export the file, no credentials needed), or broker API tokens (scoped, read-only access generated through the broker's own flow). Any service that asks for your raw username and password is operating outside the FCA's regulated framework — the framework exists precisely to avoid this — and is worth treating with suspicion.
How does Sharesight pull my UK trades?
A mix of methods depending on the broker. For brokers with API integrations, Sharesight pulls trades automatically. For brokers without APIs but with email contract notes, Sharesight provides you with a unique email address per account and parses incoming contract notes to extract trades. For brokers without either, manual CSV upload is the fallback. Sharesight has been maintaining UK broker integrations for over a decade and coverage is mature.
Will my SIPP provider let me export trades?
Almost always yes. AJ Bell, Hargreaves Lansdown, Interactive Investor, James Hay, Aviva, Pension Bee and the major UK SIPP providers all support transaction export, usually as CSV through the user interface. A few legacy providers require you to email support to request a statement; expect a few working days. The export will include trade dates, units, prices, costs and dividend events at minimum.
Do I need read-only access or full?
Read-only. Always. There is no use case in portfolio aggregation that requires trading permissions. A tracker only needs to see your data, not act on it. If a service requests anything beyond read-only — the ability to place trades, transfer cash, or modify account settings — it is asking for more than the job needs and you should look at what else is going on.
Best free aggregation tool UK?
For free UK aggregation, the strongest options are Snowball Analytics' free tier, Sharesight's free plan (limited to 10 holdings), Delta's free tier, and JustETF's portfolio tools (good for ETF-heavy portfolios). Invormed has a free tier at launch. None of the free tiers will handle a complex multi-wrapper portfolio without compromise — at some point the holdings limits, broker coverage gaps, or feature restrictions push serious investors towards a paid tier. For a one-or-two-account starter portfolio, the free tools are adequate.
Want one view across every account you hold?
Invormed aggregates your ISA, SIPP and GIA across multiple UK brokers, looks through your ETFs to the underlying companies, and gives you wrapper-aware portfolio intelligence — without asking for broker passwords. We are in early access — join the early-access waitlist and we will let you in as we open up.