Hargreaves Lansdown - Terrible service

spock007

Seriously unhappy today BUT I still like the Hargreaves site layout and the information on the site in general. I moved to Hargreaves recently from iii (who increased charges before, remember?) to take advantage of the Vanguard funds. While this has been absolutely shoddy.. I remain silent for now...

Doshwaster

Blackdog wrote: »

Interesting article, thanks for posting. It seems HL consulted the Oracle but even that didn't help!

Not surprising. I have to deal with Oracle support and their response time is usually glacial - and that's before you get bounced to another department.

2010

Everything went smoothly with Halifax Share Dealing, could access the account all day and get quotes, the shares were showing in my account at 7am and all the surplus money they took when I applied was back in the account ready to trade by 8am.
Excellent service.

bugbyte_2

To be fair to HL, yesterday would have been like a denial of service attack on their systems the amount of people trying to trade. To have the infrastructure and IT capacity to cope it would have cost HL substantially more than they would make, and they would not have needed that capacity again.

I lost out on about £30 which I can live with but I'm not going to over react and never use them again - its like saying you will never use tesco's because two years ago when everyone was panic buying petrol they ran out.

chucknorris

bugbyte wrote: »

To be fair to HL, yesterday would have been like a denial of service attack on their systems the amount of people trying to trade. To have the infrastructure and IT capacity to cope it would have cost HL substantially more than they would make, and they would not have needed that capacity again.

I lost out on about £30 which I can live with but I'm not going to over react and never use them again - its like saying you will never use tesco's because two years ago when everyone was panic buying petrol they ran out.

I felt that way at first (yesterday morning), but I'm not so sure now, after the problems lasted the entire day. But I don't normally use HL anyway, I invest with Fidelity.

marlot

bugbyte wrote: »

To be fair to HL, yesterday would have been like a denial of service attack on their systems the amount of people trying to trade...

I would have some sympathy, but it was not just the web site which was down - it was also the trading system.

I placed a deal before 6am, ready for when the markets opened - and it wasn't executed. So all this talk of problems only starting at 08:30 is wrong.

And their web site was clearly not designed in a way which allowed service to be rationed in a sensible way. By letting people in but then not providing service, they kept loads of us working their web site, trying to get our trades - when if they'd rationed, we'd have been in and out again.

As an example, I was only logging into the web site to see if there was a way to cancel my pre-booked trade and do it manually. Because of the way they've designed their website - I was both logged in and not logged in at the same time (according to the buttons on my screen).

Their twitter feed was useless. Its at times like this that a company needs a well-rehearsed disaster recovery plan. Including proper communications with customers.

I sent them a couple of mails (when I could eventually get that to work) asking how they intend to restore my trust. I look forward to the response with interest.

marlot

bugbyte wrote: »

...To have the infrastructure and IT capacity to cope it would have cost HL substantially more than they would make, and they would not have needed that capacity again....

That's why the IT industry has infrastructure on demand, from the likes of Amazon.

Look at this as a good example - UCAS needs extra compute power during AUgust to match school leavers with university places, and just buys in the extra they need. They too got it wrong a couple of years ago, but had improved their apps and service so they now work even during extreme stress.
http://www.attenda.net/news/prdetails.aspx?prid=134

Glen_Clark

marlot wrote: »

That's why the IT industry has infrastructure on demand, from the likes of Amazon.

Look at this as a good example - UCAS needs extra compute power during AUgust to match school leavers with university places, and just buys in the extra they need. They too got it wrong a couple of years ago, but had improved their apps and service so they now work even during extreme stress.
http://www.attenda.net/news/prdetails.aspx?prid=134

Where money is involved they have to be a lot more careful than UCAS.

marlot

Glen_Clark wrote: »

Where money is involved they have to be a lot more careful than UCAS.

Even if that is true, a huge proportion of the underlying services can still be moved out to on-demand infrastructure...

MobileSaver

bugbyte wrote: »

To be fair to HL, yesterday would have been like a denial of service attack on their systems the amount of people trying to trade.

I could agree up to a certain point except that it wasn't just yesterday. As I posted here they were already having serious IT problems as far back as last Tuesday which gave them a massive heads up on what to expect on Friday; there are obviously some searching questions to be asked on how it still went so disastrously wrong.