SVS Securities - shut down?

Sheris

sweetsand said:

You all need to make a complaint to the financial ombudsman.

You all need to collect as much info as possible, I just keep asking for info that they are not willing to reply.
   

My2penneth

Please complain to the Financial Ombudsman Service.  The first 25 complaints are free but then it is £650  for every complaint thereafter ( guilty or innocent??.innocent...pleeeeze!).  ITI have  been extracting the urine. They only understand threats but be prepared to carry through! 

Panzanansis

Evening all. I've just joined the forum after finding this discussion. Excuse me not reading through all 450 pages of comments - hopefully I'm not duplicating too much here. Like most people on this thread (I assume?) I'm currently going through the debacle of getting my ex-SVS money back from ITI Capital. I thought I'd share my experience to date in the hope that it might help some people (or not - I still haven't actually got my money back, but I have at least made apparent progress). So far I have done the following:

- Completed the horrendous onboarding process for the ITI portal

- Had a Phoenix account opened and transferred my cash and assets to it

- Actually got my login details to be able to access the account (they didn't E-mail them to me and it took about 2 hours worth of phonecalls to finally get hold of them - especially got to love the temporary passwords that expire 20 minutes after they're issued!)

- Sold all my shares once the account had been opened (I didn't have that many and I figured this would be easier than trying to transfer them to another broker), so I now just have cash in the account

- Completed the manual withdrawal forms (Seriously?? In this century?), and scanned and E-mailed them in to ITI to request a BACS transfer of all funds to my bank account

This glosses over the *huge* amount of hassle and frustrated E-mails, help tickets, and phone calls required to get to this point.

I think that's all I can do at the moment. Now it's hopefully just a question of waiting (potentially for weeks from comments I've read) for the transfer to actually happen, or for them to come back with some obscure reason that I've filled in the forms wrong and have to resubmit them.

The one bit of hope that I can give to those still struggling is that there does seem to be at least one competent person working in

Accounts Management in the UK, if you can ever actually get through to him. The number for the UK (as opposed to the South Africa based call centre who are more useless than a chocolate teapot) is 0207 5628015. Expect to have to ring multiple times before you actually get through (no queuing system, and the call will cut off after three minutes). I've spoken to a guy called Mani every time I've called and he's been very helpful - though you can tell he's dealing with a very difficult system and I suspect he's the only customer-facing person there for 10000+ clients, so don't expect miracles.

helencary

Just an update on my accounts. Shares held in my isa have this afternoon appeared in ii. It feels like Christmas Day after a very long ten weeks. Nothing as yet in my ii trading account 

helencary

toad333 said:

I've just settled a trade from August 2019. It seems to have cost £29.46 (can't be sure since the ITI's portal is as clear as mud). But a bit of assuming and arithmetic would suggest that's the cost.
The original trade cost £7.95. Shouldn't ITI be charging me the cost of the original trade? And if not, can I claim the difference from the FSCS?
Also, I'm missing the dividends for the shares that were unsettled. Any ideas what happened to the dividends from unsettled trades?
As usual, no answers from ITI.

This whole rigmarole would make a good story for BBC's Money Box.

I also had an unsettled trade but managed to do get my dividends through the broker Svs used to buy them. Ask LC about your trade and which broker was used 

Michael_Reynolds

Ladies & gentlemen. As John Burman and others have stated the key to getting ITI moving at anything other than a snails pace is the FOS. The person handling my case at FOS has a direct email address . Yesterday on my complaint email to Oleg Jelezko and Rahul Agarwal I fired both barreIs of the 12 bore &  copied the FOS,the FCA & the LSE. The response was instantaneous. Oleg knows that ITI Capital will be faced with huge fines if hundreds of complaints are lodged with FOS. GETTING WRITING ALL OF YOU.

sandie8

Researcher16 said:

Update

·         My son’s shares have been transferred to HL (phew!).

·         No valuations have been received by HL or Equiniti for my husband’s and my shares despite assurances on 22nd Sept that valuations for my husband’s account had already been sent to HL and valuations would be sent by the end of last week for mine to Equiniti.  Equiniti sent a message on 25th Sept: “Our transfer team have informed us that ITI Capital are experiencing busier than usual volumes, we have chased your transfer but have no further updates at this time”.

·         Aviva should have paid an interim dividend on the 24th September.  My son and I both hold Aviva shares but there are no corresponding dividend cash amounts in any of our accounts,

I have Aviva too.  Sent a complaint about the lack of dividend this morning but don't expect a reply as they haven't responded to my previous 3 queries. 

Michael_Reynolds

pafpcg said:

olderbutnowiser said:

@Michael_Reynolds

"Does anyone have any thoughts on the split of the SVS database between FX & XO?"

Thanks for taking this up for us. My recollection is that there was a communication somewhere from LC where the number of FX clients was stated to be around 7,000 with around 11,000 XO clients.

ITI were clearly chosen because they would accept foreign based clients and the composition of the creditors committee was biased towards those.  

The majority XO clients have been treated as an after-thought, if that. One bizarre example is that AIM stocks are not tradeable on the Phoenix platform!

Paras 11 & 12 of the Court Judgement in May have numbers which might shed some light:
11  At the date of the administrators’ appointment, on 5 August 2019, SVS had approximately 18,600 clients for which it held client assets and client money.  The client assets had an indicative valuation at that date of approximately £286 million held for approximately 11,100 clients.  Client money was in excess of £23.7 million with some smaller euro and dollar amounts of some 16,600 clients of which 7,550 have client money claims only.  The client money was held in a segregated client account in accordance with CASS 7.
 
12  The large majority, about 92% of the clients by number, were retail clients with portfolios averaging less than £10,000 in value.  About 66% of the clients are domiciled in the United Kingdom.  ........

I find it difficult to believe that 7,550 X-O clients out of a total of 18,600 would have only cash (ie no equity assets) in their SVS accounts. So my guess is that the bulk of those 7,550 are F-X clients.

I'm also surprised that one-third (6,200) of the SVS clients were not UK-based.  This too supports the contention that there are several thousands of F-X clients overseas.

What is clear that assets in the X-O business (£286M) is a magnitude greater that that of any F-X assets (maximum of £23M), so it would be reasonable to suggest that LC should be giving priority to the X-O clients.  But maybe it's the F-X clients who generate far greater overall profit than X-O clients which inevitably leads to the negotiation between the Administrators and ITI being all about the F-X clients, with X-O clients an afterthought.

I entirely agree with you. I think you've hit the nail on the head here. I don't think ITI were ever very interested in the XO clients. ITI thought they were going to get the FX clients. Perhaps they have? We won't know that because they aren't complaining. They are much too busy trading FX. For some time now I've been trying to work out the Chinese/Russian connection? The link of course is algorithmic FX trading. Somewhere among this pile of sh... is probably the basis for a class action. The XO Clients had by far the largest portion of assets and were quite deliberately sidelined when it came to representation. I suspect that LC were talking to ITI much earlier than they cared to disclose. They of course have justified this by saying that they got GBP500K out of ITI which will have pleased the FSCS. I am not at all sure that ITI won't already be making stacks of money from these FX traders. The emails I've recently received from ITI's senior management lead me to believe that are just inexperienced, lazy, stupid and blatantly incompetent. The FX clients are so much easier to deal with and so much more profitable. The one thing however that they don't want is large fines from the FOS. I note that LC are carefully protecting the creditors committee members. The only way to contact them is through LC. 

Emillion1

helencary said:

Hi, I have two investments that will not be supported on my new brokers platform when I do finally transfer. Both of these shares are currently suspended. I don’t want them left with iti as I do not want to leave my account open. Thank you in advance for any advice 

You can still transfer the holdings, they will just show a value of zero, bid or mid price depending upon your new brokers software. 

Emillion1

Nbs222 said:

Quite a few dividends are missing , It seems ITI doesn't have automatic system to credit  dividends   and   most of their processes are semi manual , resulting in very slow service regarding transfers , withdrawals etc.

ITI could be working on designated CREST accounts, unlikely but if so the process is very manual. Ask them?  SVS were pooled nominees which meant one dividend payment which was then split between holders within the nominee account.