Paper Shares

Kontiki

My wife & I have shares mainly in paper form acquired over many years, there might be a few held in an electronic form. Is there an easy way I can get them all into an electronic account. Looking online it seems to mean filling in a form for each holding & posting them to the company. There are 16 companies & a lot of certificates so it would have to be a parcel (reluctant to do this due to value of certificates), I would prefer being able to take them somewhere so do any of the high street banks offer something like this?
Also is there anyway I can check what share holdings we have.

bowlhead99

Kontiki wrote: »

My wife & I have shares mainly in paper form acquired over many years, there might be a few held in an electronic form. Is there an easy way I can get them all into an electronic account. Looking online it seems to mean filling in a form for each holding & posting them to the company. There are 16 companies & a lot of certificates so it would have to be a parcel (reluctant to do this due to value of certificates), I would prefer being able to take them somewhere so do any of the high street banks offer something like this?

Just generalising but the high street banks do not really do over-the-counter investing and the cashiers are not set up to handle share certs in the way they handle cash and cheques and cards. Even if they have a broking division it will be a separate division of the company and a separate centralised location.

I guess if you are with a really expensive private bank, you can probably hand them over to your private wealth manager next time you go in for a cup of tea, who would know what to do with them.

But generally I would steer clear of the high street banks because the online brokers are much cheaper to transact with. Someone like http://www.x-o.co.uk/ would probably fit the bill and don't have an account opening fee.

If you are concerned about your bundle of documentation getting there correctly, just use a reputable tracked courier service in the same way a company would use a courier for their important and time sensitive legal documents. For a bundle of papers it will not be a huge amount of money, certainly not compared to the extra dealing fees incurred by sharetrading through high street banks (if that was even an option).

At the end of the day, the certificates are only a certification that your name was shown on the register of shareholders of the company on a specified date. In the UK we don't have the concept of 'bearer' shares where whoever holds the certificate at a point in time is the owner of the company. It's not like a bank note that can be passed around between people in exchange for goods or cash. So if you lose your certificate for 10000 shares in the post, even if those shares are worth £50,000, the certificate isn't. The registrar can issue a replacement certificate, albeit there will be an admin fee.

Also is there anyway I can check what share holdings we have.

There is no central assets register of what shareholdings a person has across all companies.

If you are in doubt over what holdings you have for a specific company, you can contact the registrar for that company. Their registrar's details will be on their website. This assumes that you are the named holder and your shares are not held in your stockbroker's name with you just having a nominee account at the stockbroker. If that is the case you would need to contact the broker.

Shedman

So if you lose your certificate for 10000 shares in the post, even if those shares are worth £50,000, the certificate isn't. The registrar can issue a replacement certificate, albeit there will be an admin fee.

Plus there is likely to be in most cases an indemnity fee which if they are registered with Capita will not be insignificant.. There was a case reported in Daily Mail (so it must be true ) of them trying to charge one couple a £25k indemnity fee albeit on £1.25m worth of shares) However certain banks will give one for flat rate of around £30 or so.

grey_gym_sock

i expect some stockbrokers would accept hand-delivery of share certificates with the forms to deposit them into your (previously opened) account. though the practicality of this depends on where you and the broker are located.