One of the last providers of low-cost personal Crest accounts, Fidelity Personal Investing, will be withdrawing the service from next month.
The fund manager has decided to stop offering its ShareNetwork account - which provides Crest membership and is administered by Charles Stanley Direct - to focus on developing a new, integrated brokerage service.
Personal Crest accounts allow investors to be named on shareholder registers as the legal owners of shares, enabling them to receive company accounts and voting rights directly. However, the number of Crest providers has been falling in recent years.