Moving to new platform

noh wrote: »

I recently instructed Halifax Sharedealing to transfer my ISA from Alliance Trust Savings.
It has gone well so far. It took around 2 weeks for the investment trusts to be transferred to Halifax and around 4 weeks for the unit trusts/OEICS to appear in my Halifax account. The cash in the account was transferred at around 5 weeks.

I told ii they should waive a few months' fees as I am paying double: fixed to them (£25pq) and 0.45% for funds still at HL. But the longer it goes on and the more it is escalated (an email arrived this morning saying "we have now escalated this transfer to management") the more I wonder what level of compensation they will pay if pushed? Can anyone suggest what they typically will pay (if anything) in such cases if they acknowledge fault?

This in an email from ii yesterday: "We're getting in touch to give you an update on behalf of Aegon (formerly Cofunds), our provider of unit trust administration services. This update relates to one or more transfers to ii that you have in progress today. If you've recently contacted us to express concern over delays with your transfer and are awaiting a response, we'll contact you directly in due course. In the meantime, we hope you find the following information useful. Aegon advise that they are experiencing delays processing transfers between other wealth managers and, as a result, are falling short of the standards that both you as an investor and we as your broker have come to expect. Aegon apologise unreservedly for the delays and assure us they are working hard to improve their service and are focussing on recruitment and training within their administration team to resolve the delays."

(And in the bumph underneath: "Please do not reply directly to this message. It was sent from an inbox we do not monitor for replies so we won't see your email." And also: "This email and its attachments are intended for the above named only and may be confidential. If they have come to you in error you must take no action based on them, nor must you copy or show them to anyone; please reply to this email and highlight the error.")

Hi,
my partner and I have investments with Halifax and Lloyds (the same group) through Scottish Widows - we are also (suffering) Lloyds shareholders. To be honest, we have received very poor service.
Currently we are both trying to switch funds to AJ Bell, to do this we have to sell the bespoke Halifax funds, take the cash and deposit in our new AJ Bell accounts.

However, the process of selling has been a nightmare. My partners investment was purchased around 15 years ago, when you could do this in branch. Now Halifax branch staff are afraid of interacting with customers. The Scottish Widows help line is terrible and they often ask customers to have identity documents certified in a Lloyds or Halifax branch - staff in both have told us they don't like doing SW's work!

Trying to keep up with your (changes in) investment is also hard with Halifax / SW, on their website under "Key documents > Investors guide" (sounds important)... you get "document under review"!

She has been trying to sell for a month - nothing has happened except receiving a form about money laundering. My partner is now trying to sell all of her Halifax investments as she is worried that if she needs to access her funds - there may be a delay.

So, my reply is to think twice about Halifax as a platform - for us, the charges are still very high (my partner has paid more than £90k in charges over the term of her investment - for rotten service and an average level of growth).

We chose AJ Bell over the others, cutting charges significantly - but there are plenty of providers. What is important to us is the level of charges and the speed of service.

Good luck.