Virgin Money Cash ISA transfer

intalex

isasmurf said:

Here's what Virgin say
"To transfer another Virgin Money Cash ISA

To transfer an online Virgin Money Cash ISA into this new ISA, just send us a secure message and we’ll take care of the rest." 

Anyone with timeline updates on their "internal" transfers between Virgin ISAs?

I sent the secure message on 02/11, they replied on 10/11 saying it had been sent to their ISA team who would complete it as soon as possible, and as at this morning (16/11) there's still no change. I'm switching from one fixed rate ISA to another, utilising my 14-day cooling off window to uprate.

Not exactly in their interests to take too long, as it effectively gives their customers an extended cooling off window to jump ship should better options emerge in the market.

ashteadgirl

Appalling  at Virgin at the moment. Sent ISA transfer request 20/10. On 28/10 received message that my request passed to ISA team.  Still no transfer done 17/11. Spoken to the several times after 40+ minute wait on phone. Asked to make formal complaint and unable to transfer my call. Promised the complaints department would contact me and heard nothing. Avoid at all cost at the moment

inspectorperez

As a Virgin customer myself who has recently experienced issues (see earlier post in this thread), I was appalled to read a plethora of 1 star reviews on Trustpilot this morning which seem to echo my own recent experiences.

Thank heavens for FSCS protection is all I can say now that I'm stuck with them for another 2 years!

There do seem to be a huge amount of problems getting money out of this organisation.

steveksullivan

intalex said:

isasmurf said:

Here's what Virgin say
"To transfer another Virgin Money Cash ISA

To transfer an online Virgin Money Cash ISA into this new ISA, just send us a secure message and we’ll take care of the rest." 

Anyone with timeline updates on their "internal" transfers between Virgin ISAs?

I sent the secure message on 02/11, they replied on 10/11 saying it had been sent to their ISA team who would complete it as soon as possible, and as at this morning (16/11) there's still no change. I'm switching from one fixed rate ISA to another, utilising my 14-day cooling off window to uprate.

Not exactly in their interests to take too long, as it effectively gives their customers an extended cooling off window to jump ship should better options emerge in the market.

ashteadgirl said:

Appalling  at Virgin at the moment. Sent ISA transfer request 20/10. On 28/10 received message that my request passed to ISA team.  Still no transfer done 17/11. Spoken to the several times after 40+ minute wait on phone. Asked to make formal complaint and unable to transfer my call. Promised the complaints department would contact me and heard nothing. Avoid at all cost at the moment

I originally opened issue 522 and during the cooling off period they issued 528  - after phone call ( 1 hour wait) they said no probs to transfer  - sent secure message  (after lodging complaint that they had shut their phone lines down at least half hour early on a Sunday ....!!)

Then they issued 532  - did the same phone call, all OK,  still in cooling off period for issue 528,  secure message process. No autoreply received to secure message so sent a test.... (Just the word 'TEST'). Again no autoreply so phoned AGAIN and was told neither secure message had been received!!

Was also told that the previous CS rep had raised a 'task' to complete the work, Issue 522 direct to Issue 532,  so no need to re - send secure message.

ANOTHER COMPLAINT - they insist you use secure messaging to log requests but secure messaging doesn't work!

then 1 WEEK LATER received a reply to my 'test' message  - so they did receive it after all !!

Called AGAIN and was reassured all set up OK. All the requests had been noted in comments against my account and just in their queue - but marked URGENT (by now nearly 4 weeks on....)

Yesterday logged on to discover they had only processed the first request to transfer from issue 522 to 528!

ANOTHER call with an hour queuing .....

Rep said he would contact the back office - get it all fixed and call me back this morning.

He has called ..... allegedly they have now processed the second transfer and will backdate the interest to the first request - waiting for overnight updates to see if it all works.

I have asked HIM to call ME back tomorrow to check ....

Virgin are a mess at the moment  - I just wish they weren't market leading rates ...!!

By the way, my original  request was back on October 15th ....

Good luck both of you .....

intalex

After reading these posts, I hope they don’t backdate my transfer when they eventually complete it - with such poor manual processing timescales, a fresh 14-day cooling off period appears more valuable to get an electronic (and hopefully faster) transfer processed to somewhere else.

Falafels

I had no difficulty in transferring my old Virgin Cash ISA to a new Virgin one - fixed rate and penalties for withdrawals, but much better rate of interest than the old. It took 2 working days.

I'd originally wanted to transfer the Virgin one to Santander. After 20 working days, nothing had happened so I phoned Santander. They said they would put an 'urgent' notification on it, but that they had a big backlog due to high levels of demand. 10 working days later, I phoned them again to discuss the non-appearance of ze dosh in the new ISA. There was no record of my previous phone conversation or any action taken by them, at which point I asked them to cancel the transfer request. 

That was the point at which I decided to do the internal transfer one with Virgin. It was actually a very simple process, opening a new account and then choosing which account the funds were coming from a drop-down menu. It didn't involve phone calls, secure messages or anything! It seems that Virgin are sending out contradictory messages, from other posts on here!!

P.S. Once the new Virgin one was up and running, I phoned Santander to check that the transfer request had been cancelled. Surprise, surprise... there was no record of my two previous phone calls, or any associated actions....

inspectorperez

Falafels said:

I had no difficulty in transferring my old Virgin Cash ISA to a new Virgin one - fixed rate and penalties for withdrawals, but much better rate of interest than the old. It took 2 working days.

I'd originally wanted to transfer the Virgin one to Santander. After 20 working days, nothing had happened so I phoned Santander. They said they would put an 'urgent' notification on it, but that they had a big backlog due to high levels of demand. 10 working days later, I phoned them again to discuss the non-appearance of ze dosh in the new ISA. There was no record of my previous phone conversation or any action taken by them, at which point I asked them to cancel the transfer request. 

That was the point at which I decided to do the internal transfer one with Virgin. It was actually a very simple process, opening a new account and then choosing which account the funds were coming from a drop-down menu. It didn't involve phone calls, secure messages or anything! It seems that Virgin are sending out contradictory messages, from other posts on here!!

P.S. Once the new Virgin one was up and running, I phoned Santander to check that the transfer request had been cancelled. Surprise, surprise... there was no record of my two previous phone calls, or any associated actions....

Sadly, just like my own experience, a classic scenario of two inept organisations competing for worst of breed. So far Virgin winning by the country mile.

Please step up Sir Richard to receive your coveted award!

Ocelot

That's really weird so many people are having problems with Virgin Money. As I mentioned earlier, my ISA transfer was completed in 2 days. Luck of the draw, maybe.

inspectorperez

Ocelot said:

That's really weird so many people are having problems with Virgin Money. As I mentioned earlier, my ISA transfer was completed in 2 days. Luck of the draw, maybe.

I hesitate to suggest the unthinkable that it was because you were doing a transfer in! Full marks to Coventry for entering in to the spirit of how these transfers should work.

intalex

My original transfer into the Virgin fixed ISA was from a Skipton easy access ISA and that was completed swiftly, as that would have been far more systemised with minimal manual steps (that too, probably no more than batch processing).

Anyone sending internal transfer instructions via secure message is entirely dependant on a person picking it up and starting the electronic transaction, and that's where the bottleneck lies. It specifically looks like a lack of automation over the 14-day cooling off period, as I also did get a drop-down to select the old account to transfer from during the new account opening, but it kept calculating a penalty despite being in the cooling off period, hence why this had to be requested via a secure message.

My from and to accounts for the pending ISA transfer are both 08-sortcode accounts, which I understand also has a separate department handling queries for these accounts, so clearly still not fully integrated following their M&As.