SVS Securities - shut down?

poolite

There is alot of info on the LC web site and the application to the court which is open to all. Meuok I guess your 3rd line of post should have read "How much ITI *PAID* to take over the 21,000 accounts.All that seems to be available is they did pay something .LC appear to have acted in an old school liquidator manner and concentrated on getting greater income by selling SVS's book to ITI to reduce their costs of the process rather concentrating on the primary task to return the assests to SVS clients in a timely manner.Perhaps the transfer of the clients to ITI was too complex from them to handle,as they had never carried out a similar operation before and that LC appear had little or no experience returning stocks to thier rightful owners .We all must now wait to see if ITI can resolve thier problem so we move our stocks on to a safe haven but big question must be who !

johnburman

Masonic I fear that you too generous to ITI. Of course there was money paid to LC for 20000 new clients. Now it may not have been for the XO clients but what about the FX ones. We know there were 100 initial expressions of interest that were narrowed down to if my memory is correct 11 and then 3. One issue was I am sure the overseas clients who are more difficult to service from a regulatory perspective. But ITI Capital won the race with FCA approval and also the knowledge or approval of FSCS. And this despite their small size. And we have a delay but now it's kick off and well their system has fallen over. This is not a rushed job where was the pilot and tests? Let's see what happens today though if it's not up and running LET'S ALL COMPLAIN TO THE FCA

bowlhead99

poolite said:

LC appear to have acted in an old school liquidator manner and concentrated on getting greater income by selling SVS's book to ITI to reduce their costs of the process rather concentrating on the primary task to return the assests to SVS clients in a timely manner. 

It's in the interests of the creditors of the company to keep the liquidation costs down and it's also in the interests of customers or FSCS who bear the costs of extracting the customer assets when the company has run out of money.

When you say, "return the assets to the clients", presumably you wouldn't expect the liquidator to run an incredibly expensive and time consuming process to attempt to re-materialise every line of stock for every customer onto paper share certificates and arrange for the customers to become a direct holder of the underlying securities, even if that were possible for every type of security. What you would expect is for the nominee account you hold to be migrated to someone else's platform so that you still have beneficial ownership of your assets but are holding them through a new party, in this case ITI.

In doing that you would expect them to need to find a firm that can support all the product types held by the clients and all the client types who need to be migrated - and a firm that actually has an appetite for it. The last point is easier said than done, given the client take-on will be an unenviable challenge and many customers will leave immediately once they get access to the assets, and the process to onboard the assets and restore investors' access will be an entirely thankless task because investors are annoyed that SVS died and they experienced a disruption, even though the death of SVS is not the fault of the new account provider.

Some firms would have the appetite for the business if they do not have to pay very much as a customer acquisition cost, but it's not surprising that initial expressions of interest from firms would dwindle away if the asset base and customer base was a potential bag of worms.

Perhaps the transfer of the clients to ITI was too complex from them to handle,as they had never carried out a similar operation before and that LC appear had little or no experience returning stocks to thier rightful owners

Not sure if you mean that LC have never liquidated a financial services business where they needed to migrate assets and client records to the nominee accounts of a different broker, or if you mean ITI have never received incoming transfers of client business. But what's clear is that it was always going to be a complex task, even though the twenty thousand customers would like it to be straightforward. Oh and just for fun, let's do it while all the staff involved are working from their bedrooms rather than sitting around a desk looking at records together.

Johnburman said:
and we have a delay but now it's kick off and well their system has fallen over. This is not a rushed job where was the pilot and tests

Can you imagine how some of the customers on here would have reacted if after waiting a long time for the migration to complete, they were told that it was going to take even longer for them than for some other customers because only a limited number of clients were allowed to participate in a pilot.

I expect there was testing or review but sometimes it can make sense to release what you have and hope it works. If a customer logs in and can see all the correct stocks, but the cash isn't showing yet (but the customer hasn't provided their KYC/ AML onboarding information yet anyway), I expect it will get resolved for them in due course.

My2penneth

adeel26 said:

Received email with the login details.

Signed in and found that the cash amount is missing only showing shares in the migrated account. Now going through the process to verify my ID/address details. 

Just checked my email....nothing. My wife got an email just after 6pm last night to say there are problems. I didn't even get that!

One thing to note...yesterday I contacted LC ( again)  about non receipt of dividends from ETFs  - LC sent me an account statement to say what they had transferred cash wise to ITI. 

It was a line by line account of dividends received and a total amount . The total was transferred to ITI and the LC account reduced to zero.  

manted

If they are proceeding alphabetically, and only one of the A's has confirmed receiving login details, we might be in for a long wait (hopefully hours instead of days) !

adeel26

leonde said:

adeel26 said:

Received email with the login details.

Signed in and found that the cash amount is missing only showing shares in the migrated account. Now going through the process to verify my ID/address details. 

Let us know how long it takes!

Still waiting. It's been 5 hours since I uploaded my documents. 

This is how the screen looks. 

My2penneth

This whole procedure took 15 mins or so with Interactive Investors (ii) - including me typing in my details.  Why the heck is it taking so long? 

And I have still had NO comms from ITI at all...not even a we are running late letter which my wife received.
 

olderbutnowiser

As far as I can tell, you can open an account with any of the well known brokers in a matter of minutes without the need to upload ID documents. I can only assume that we have to do this with ITI because of all the foreign account holders, mainly Chinese FX traders.

It is clearly the reason that all the other bidders dropped out; we were left with the only company prepared to taken SVS on!

pafpcg

Email from FSCS to all SVS clients this morning (10:48):  Oh dear, oh dear....

"From today, former clients of SVS Securities plc (SVS) can begin to access their money and assets. They can do so via the new nominated broker, ITI Capital Ltd (ITI).
Clients’ money and assets transferred from SVS to ITI in June 2020. There then followed a six-week period which ITI has used to set up clients' new accounts in its systems. Clients have now been provided with login details to complete the online onboarding process with ITI, following which they can begin to access their assets immediately.
......."

Obviously, FSCS just assume that the financial organisations will do everything that they tell FSCS they will do and on schedule.  Do they not bother to check before issuing important status reports?

PS: No sign of any email from ITI yet.

My2penneth

olderbutnowiser said:

As far as I can tell, you can open an account with any of the well known brokers in a matter of minutes without the need to upload ID documents. I can only assume that we have to do this with ITI because of all the foreign account holders, mainly Chinese FX traders.

It is clearly the reason that all the other bidders dropped out; we were left with the only company prepared to taken SVS on!

I wonder how difficult it would have been to look at the names of the people and their address and categorise into two groups. Of course, this is probably not allowed under a Human Rights directive!

Could they not have provided the same authentication method as ii (provide details of a UK bank that you plan to use as a linked account)...?

So, once "on boarded", how long until fully operational?