Plum ISA transfer nightmare

Maniac5

Hi all

Has anyone else had problems transferring their stocks and shares ISA from Plum? I was able to transfer my cash ISA from Plum to Trading212 in a matter of days, but transferring my S&S one has been an absolute nightmare. I requested the transfer at the beginning of August and T212 aborted the process one month later due to zero response from Plum. During this period I had several conversations with Plum support who told me that it was all okay, just taking some time. So, I when it failed I was pretty cross and raised a formal complaint with Plum. They indicated they'd investigate and get back to me within their complaints time window of 15 days. They didn't, instead they sent me an email to let me know they now needed an additional period of 40 days to investigate! I wasn't happy with this response, and told them so. Their response has been to ignore me completely.

On 16th September, I thought I'd just try to do the transfer again, this time moving the ISA value to my T212 Cash ISA instead of the S&S one. Unfortunately, as of 13th Oct, Plum have oncw again failed to engage with T212.

I'm really not sure where to go from here. They've now had my money for over two months and don't seem particularly interested in engaging with me on a solution. I really don't want to lose my ISA wrapper by selling my funds and withdrawing the cash, just to get my own money back, but at the moment that looks like the most likely option...

Has anyone else had these issues? If so, how was it resolved?

eskbanker

So, I when it failed I was pretty cross and raised a formal complaint with Plum. They indicated they'd investigate and get back to me within their complaints time window of 15 days. They didn't, instead they sent me an email to let me know they now needed an additional period of 40 days to investigate! I wasn't happy with this response, and told them so. Their response has been to ignore me completely.

The FCA-mandated resolution timescales are 15 business days for complaints about payment services and 40 business days (aka eight weeks) for others:

https://handbook.fca.org.uk/handbook/disp1/disp1s6

I really don't want to lose my ISA wrapper by selling my funds and withdrawing the cash…

Were you attempting an in specie transfer of funds from Plum to T212 and if so, are they definitely available on the latter? For the second transfer attempt, if you're now trying to transfer into a cash ISA then that obviously entails selling the funds…

masonic

These sound like bespoke funds that Plum has set up, so they would not be available to transfer out to another provider without selling them and transferring the cash proceeds.

Presumably Plum never sold the investments, so that would indicate no real progress was made on either occasion.

Probably best to keep the second transfer request open, and wait on the complaint, escalating to the Financial Ombudsman Service if you don't get a result in 8 weeks since your original complaint. At the very least, they should be refunding the subscription fee from the point the ISA should reasonably have been transferred.

Maniac5

Thanks for the replies. Yes, the funds available through Plum are not available on any other platform, so they were going to have to sell them anyway.

After I posted I had another go at getting through to someone sensible at Plum and I actually got an update. It seems that Plum are passing the buck on to Quai Investment Services Limited who act as the Fund and Scheme Administrator for Plum's investment and pension products. Apparently the issues have all been down to Quai's "responsiveness" not aligning with T212's 30 day window for acknowledging an ISA request before they terminate it. My new friend Nate at Plum assures me that T212 have now been informed of the responsiveness challenges and they won't close the transfer request after 30 days this time. However, my T212 app isn't showing any change to the ISA request status, so let's see what happens in the next couple of days when we hit 30 days...

Also, I've received no formal update regarding my complaint yet, even though Nate seems very confident that the issue is now resolved. 😐