Shares transfer

Trebor01

Hi all.

I had some shares in a share save account at Barclays registrars that I no longer had access to (forgotten password etc) so I decided to transfer to my own stockbrokers account so I could sell when I wanted to as I used this account frequently. I requested the relevant forms from registrars and waited. The forms came through and after much pondering I phoned to ask for help to complete, only to discover at this point they had sent the wrong forms. I asked for the correct forms and again waited. This time the guidelines on how to complete the forms transfer was present but not the actual form to complete the transfer. By now I was getting impatient, and they have admitted they sent the wrong forms out and forgot to include in the second posting.

My concern is this. If I had received the forms when initially requested I could have sold these shares as indeed I had with my other barclays shares. However as the forms were delayed I lost out on price fluctuation which I had indeed been hoping for and had all control to sell these share taken away from me by the incompetence of the staff at registrars.

My argument with Barclays registrars is this. I expect to be compensated for the difference in the share price when I would have received them if they had sent the forms correctly, and the highest share price reached during the interim period before I actually received them into my stockbrokers account.

Does this seem reasonable.....?

Any constructive comments only would be appreciated

gkerr4

personally I don't think it's reasonable.

it's just tough luck really - one of those things - put it to experience and take better care of account details so you can react quicker to market changes.

just my 2p

Ifts

If it was me I would put it down to experience and move on.

But I suppose its easy for me to say that as I'm not the one out of pocket here.

It does work both ways in situation like this, during the delay in transferring the shares they could have gone up in value.
The question you need to ask yourself is - Would you have then sent the extra profit back to Barclay's registrars or put it down to good luck and kept it?

If its the latter..... then just put your experience down to bad luck and move on.

Trebor01

I think you are missing the point here, and we are not talking a few thousand shares either, this is alot of money (over 100,000 shares), so comments re putting it down to bad luck and move on are not really helpful as it did not happen to you. This share price during the period I could not trade due to registrars error was a difference of 12p per share. If you can afford to loose over £12,000 then good for you, but I can't, and I am looking for a realistic position from an FOS perspective rather guess work....!!!

noh

Did you not have the option of selling via Barclays using telephone dealing?
http://www.investor.barclays.co.uk/results/2006/annualreport/annualreview2006/downloads/pdf/shareholder_support.pdf

redped

You say you are frequent trader, but you also had 100,000 shares in an account you couldn't access, because you had forgotten the password - if I had such a large number of shares in one place, I'd make sure I had the password handy in case I wanted to sell them quickly.

Have you actually sold the shares yet? If not, then all you're annoyed about is a potential loss if you sold them now. Wait until the price rises again and then sell them.

BTW, I've been in a similar position with shares I held in a previous employer's share scheme - on paper I lost a large sum of money due to their computer system being down the day I wanted to sell, but while it was really annoying at the time it was just one of those things that happens.

bowlhead99

What is your track record of being able to get out at exactly the top of the market, in the past? Assuming nobody has a perfect one of these, the Barclays delay almost certainly cost you less than the maximum fluctuation of £12,000 and therefore it is not reasonable to expect them to compensate you for this amount.

I think it would open up a can of worms if brokers /registrars were liable for potential profits while you were out of the market during an administrative process, because as Ifts says,you want this to be a one way street and if you were saved from a loss you would not pay them the profit upside (and anyway, generally we would not want registrars to effectively hold a synthetic position in the stock during admin periods, significantly increasing their risk and costs).

Not getting the forms from the registrar was a problem, but
- once they had the properly executed form from you, it went through promptly and correctly?
- What were you paying them for their services? Under the contract with you, what was their agreed lead time with you to complete transfers out?

Those are some of the issues that the registrar or FOS might bring up.

I know you want the FOS perspective rather than guess work, but as only a tiny minority here will be knowledgeable employees or someone who's been through the exact same complaint themselves - best we can do is speculate based on the common sense approach that we would adopt in the FOS's position (assuming we didn't have training or access to their actual operating handbook)

Finally, it sounds like they provided you a secure online facility to dispose of stock? Maybe it was only for monitoring the balance, so I'm doing you a disservice by bringing it up. But for example, my father keeps all his login credentials in a safe place, because he values the time and effort of looking after them as a worthwhile exercise - given the time cost of getting things done manually. Personally I'm less good at this and have papers spread across various different files and most details in my head - I don't mind losing the odd one and waiting for a replacement. One might say it sounds like you were more of my mindset, and don't mind gambling on having the odd admin delay on your 100k asset.

This is your lifestyle choice, but it's ironic that you were in the process of consolidating your logins when you felt the cost of your not previously being on top of this issue.

gkerr4

fair comment - £12k is a lot of money to most people (myself included) but i stand by my comments - its just one of those things. They have no contractual commitment on how quickly they get documents or replacement documents out to you.

Jegersmart

Trebor01 wrote: »

I think you are missing the point here, and we are not talking a few thousand shares either, this is alot of money (over 100,000 shares), so comments re putting it down to bad luck and move on are not really helpful as it did not happen to you. This share price during the period I could not trade due to registrars error was a difference of 12p per share. If you can afford to loose over £12,000 then good for you, but I can't, and I am looking for a realistic position from an FOS perspective rather guess work....!!!

What if the delay had resulted in being able to sell the shares at a higher price?

J

Trebor01

Completely irrelevant. My point is that due to registrars incompetence I could not do anything with my shares, and therefore they took away all control for me to choose whether I kept or sold my shares. If they went up to a higher price and I chose to sell, good for me, as it happens they did go up and I could not sell them because registrars had not transferred them, and this IS my point. Why should I loose out on a possible profit due to their stupidity.

bowlhead99

We've told you what they will likely say and given you some insight as to why they might say it. All you need to do now is make a complaint to the company, wait for them to reject it, take it up with the ombudsman and then come back here and let us know the outcome.