SVS Securities - shut down?

My2penneth

I posed some questions to ITI Capital and have received a reply. My questions in Italics (with account refs removed). - (sorry - the text size is not controllable)

I raise some questions which I hope your customer services team can advise on and I can then report back to the MoneySavingsExpert forum to hopefully assuage the concerns being expressed on said forum-

 In no particular order:-

 - What would be helpful is if ITI Capital could indicate what the next steps would be after we have been "on boarded".

- what is the procedure for buying/selling shares? Do we need to download the Phoenix software or is this automatically done for us after on boarding?

- we need some clarification regarding adding/withdrawing funds from our accounts (there are rumours that this is done by email (!))

- One of my accounts commenced on boarding on Friday last but the status hasn't changed - it is still showing "On Boarding in Progress"  but errors if one presses the red "continue onBoarding".

- you will see from my accounts (SCXXXX /SC YYYYY) that the sums showing are shown in US dollars despite the account being labelled as GBP.

 - According to the screens I erroneously have over $800k in Vodafone shares alone when you add up the holdings value in both accounts!

 - It is not apparent that my account SCYYYYis actually an ISA - will the "sub-type" note shown below reflect the change when fully on boarded?

The general feeling is that ITI Capital are not communicating with their customers in a timely manner and they are being left in the dark as to what is happening. There is the opportunity to update customers via your website which would be the easiest option.
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Reply.

1. After onboarding – firstly, I’d like to apologise if it has been unclear as to what the process is here. After a client account becomes approved our system will automatically begin setting up your Phoenix trading account/s (Phoenix is the name of our trading platform). This takes between 24 and 48 hours to complete and you will receive an email containing login credentials and a platform download link once this has been completed. From that point onwards you will be able to trade on your account within the next day or two. This is because we are moving client assets and funds from our ‘safe harbor’ account to the trading accounts in bulk on a bi-weekly basis
2. For buying and selling shares – to execute trades yourself you will need to download the Phoenix platform (link provided in the activation notification email). Trading is then done through the platform. Alternatively we can execute trades over the phone for you however you will incur a charge for this (note you are using the SVS rate card for 3 months before moving over to the ITI rate card).
   I would like to point out that some clients have stocks which are not tradeable on our Phoenix platform and so these will need to be traded directly with the market makers. Such trades will need to be requested via email or over the phone (note we would not charge clients for placing trades over the phone which they cannot execute themselves, i.e. if you cannot trade them on Phoenix and are therefore required to call us to do so, you will not incur the fee for phone trades)
3. Deposits and withdrawals – at this moment in time we require clients to complete the withdrawal form found on our website (www.iticapital.com > Private Clients > Deposit & Withdrawal) to process withdrawals. I apologise as I completely appreciate that this is an outdated procedure and we are in the process of improving this to bring it up to date. Deposits are done via bank transfer, the details of this can be found on the webpage mentioned
4. Onboarding issue – I will raise this issue to my account management team to investigate, let me/ them get back to you on this please
5. Sums shown in USD – this is an issue effecting (sic) all of our clients, we apologise for the confusion. This is a system error which we are having fixed as we speak. Note that on the Phoenix platform these valuations will be shown correctly with the correct currency valuation
6. Vodafone shares – my backoffice system is showing that you hold 4,000 shares in Vodafone. It looks as though our client portal is quoting certain stocks incorrectly in that it is showing stocks that are quoted in pence as being quoted in pounds, e.g. a stock that is worth £1 per share the system is incorrectly showing this as £100 per share. The valuation for these will be shown correctly on the Phoenix platform
7. Account type – apologies for the lack of clarity on the account types. I have raised this to our IT team to see if we can get this information added into the client portal. Just as an FYI for confirmation please see below a screenshot from our backfoffice which shows this as an ISA account:

(I removed the reference here but it was a small graphic which indicated that the account I questioned was indeed captured as an ISA.


 

FairDinkum

That's all good information My2penneth but not much use to me yet as I still have not had an email inviting me to open an account and as far as I can tell, I am far from the only one. ITI could do worse than read this forum if they want to capture the problems to address. I guess they are too disorganised to do something that simple and useful to us.

My2penneth

FairDinkum said:

That's all good information My2penneth but not much use to me yet as I still have not had an email inviting me to open an account and as far as I can tell, I am far from the only one. ITI could do worse than read this forum if they want to capture the problems to address. I guess they are too disorganised to do something that simple and useful to us.

Well, hopefully it will save you from the head scratching that many of us have had !   
I have told them about the bashing they are getting on this forum...whether they read it or not , I don't know (doubt it).

p.s. my wife still has heard nada from ITI Capital.

CameronRiley

Still nothing here either.  Nothing much to be done except to wait for these buffoons to sort out the debacle, though  I have emailed LC and the FCA today to express my pi55ed-off-ness.   I guess the day will come when all my SVS assets are sitting in my HL account, but it seems a long way off at the moment.  I do wonder how such a bunch of incompetents stay in business doing anything, let alone something complicated like broking.  

snipkin

My2penneth said: "I posed some questions to ITI Capital and have received a reply. My questions in Italics (with account refs removed). - (sorry - the text size is not controllable)!" 
Well, personally, I think that is very helpful and by far the best response we have so far. So many thanks to you, My2penneth, for taking the trouble to contact them on our behalf. Why can ITI not simply email all of us this kind of detailed explanation. One of the worst things is not knowing what is (or is not) going on.
There is an article on www.financemagnates.com about this ITI fiasco, so at least it is becoming known within the industry.. I paste two quotes from the article below. I cannot post links but the title of the article, dated 28 July 2020, is:
Technical Issues Cripple SVS Clients’ Access to Their Money at ITI Capital.

[QUOTE]: " [...] some SVS clients were unable to access ITI Capital’s onboarding system. Other traders reported that they have yet to receive their initial on-boarding email, i.e. didn’t set up their accounts four days after the FSCS opened the gates for over 18,000 clients. “I still can’t access my funds as the ITI Capital onboarding form has bugs and won’t let me continue. They also don’t respond to emails, extremely disappointing,” a former SVS client told Finance Magnates earlier this week.

[...]

"Liquidators said they are working with the UK broker to resolve all technical issues that had blocked clients from accessing their online accounts over the next 48 hours. Once the onboarding process completed, they can begin to access their share of nearly £24 million in funds secured by Leonard Curtis, the administrator.

“The Joint Special Administrators (“JSAs”) have raised this with ITI and we understand that ITI are looking into this as a matter of urgency and hope to have the issues resolved imminently. The JSAs would like to reassure clients that they remain committed to providing assistance wherever possible in relation to the transfer and are working with ITI to resolve all outstanding issues,” they added." [END QUOTE]

Sheris

bowlhead99 said:

johnburman said:

This is fact:
The bosses have been in the job for less than a year. With full knowledge of this, LC have given them our money.

And a regualtory fine too.

FXCM Limited settled at an early stage of the Authority's investigation and therefore qualified for a 20% (Stage 2) discount under the Authority's executive settlement procedures. Were it not for the discount, the Authority would have imposed a fine of £5,000,000.
Principle 6 breach
Between 1 August 2006 and 17 December 2010, FXCM Ltd treated its customers unfairly .

So in summary, you don't like the fact that the company misbehaved a decade ago, but also, you don't like the fact that the senior management has been significantly changed, so that the people who were running it a decade are no longer the ones running it ?

So how I see the present sitution that is going on is another SVS, all running away. 

kencom

Still waiting for my log in details...

beyond incompetent!

masonic

Sheris said:

bowlhead99 said:

johnburman said:

This is fact:
The bosses have been in the job for less than a year. With full knowledge of this, LC have given them our money.

And a regualtory fine too.

FXCM Limited settled at an early stage of the Authority's investigation and therefore qualified for a 20% (Stage 2) discount under the Authority's executive settlement procedures. Were it not for the discount, the Authority would have imposed a fine of £5,000,000.
Principle 6 breach
Between 1 August 2006 and 17 December 2010, FXCM Ltd treated its customers unfairly .

So in summary, you don't like the fact that the company misbehaved a decade ago, but also, you don't like the fact that the senior management has been significantly changed, so that the people who were running it a decade are no longer the ones running it ?

So how I see the present sitution that is going on is another SVS, all running away. 

If your concern is that this is going to be "another SVS" then you can perhaps take heart in the fact the FCA has approved ITI's selection as the nominated broker. So it seems unlikely the FCA they will now swoop in and shut ITI down. Knowing the timescales the FCA operates on, I'm sure you'll have plenty of time to make your escape even if things are as bad as you fear.

Standard_Goose

kencom said:

Still waiting for my log in details...

beyond incompetent!

I'm sorry to tell you that it's unlikely to help as you will just get to put in some details and then get taken to a page for uploading documents that doesn't work. I don't think they appreciate how fragile some of our nerves are after the worry of the last year and thinking we were finally going to see our money again.

manorhouse

These city types know what they are doing , i have thousands siting there in a none ISA , they have these funds earning them daily interest at worse .
They know most will withdraw non ISA funds .
Bottles of bubbly cost money they are used to it .