Several newspapers and on-line news services have reported this week on the debacle at Barclays. They launched a new “Smart Investor” site to replace their Barclayshare share trading service. The complaints range from failure to advise new account log-in details, support service uncontactable, old features missing (or perhaps simply moved elsewhere and not easily found in some cases), higher charges (fees restructured), to some account types or share holdings being no longer permitted.
Barclays have integrated it with their on-line bank account service which probably makes sense, but they clearly got some basic things wrong with this kind of migration which are:
- Beta testing of the new software on real customers must have been limited in scope, if done at all.
- All clients were moved at the same time and forcibly. No parallel running, no options for clients to choose when to migrate, etc.
- If possible, avoid “big bangs”. Changes to systems should be done gradually and in stages to avoid massive new learning processes by clients.
When will IT teams learn that folks get “habituated” to software and get very unhappy when it’s changed, even when the new system works well and has more features (and in Barclays case, it obviously had some problems). It’s like moving the products on the shelves of supermarkets so the customers can’t find their favourite foods any more. Now Paypal did a similar migration recently, and the new menus were hopeless to begin with, but they allowed you to drop into the old menus for some time. So only some minor cursing was the result. But Barclays may lose some of their 200,000 stockbroking clients from this debacle it seems.
Stockbroking platforms are really important to get right as they involve large value transactions by often sophisticated traders but there have been several examples over the years of new platforms failing to meet the basic needs of clients.
What do you do when this happens? Move your account to someone else? If only it was that simple.
From several experiences of doing this, all I can say is that you won’t have much difficulty finding someone to take it on, but the process often takes months with endless hassles along the way.
Indeed I have complained to the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) about this in the past – see https://www.sharesoc.org/blog/regulations-and-law/stockbroker-transfers-more-evidence-of-unreasonable-delays/
Anyone who meets this problem should also complain to the FCA and encourage them to tackle it. If you can switch a bank account in 7 days (and that’s mandated), why not a stockbroking account?
The complexity partly arises from the use of nominee accounts and the problems with funds rather than direct shareholdings, but these difficulties are surely fixable if we had a decent share and fund registration system and stockbrokers were motivated to get the issue sorted out. Needless to point out that stockbrokers don’t like to make it easy to switch so won’t do so unless pushed because they like to lock their clients in (hence the use of nominee accounts also of course).
In the meantime, if you do decide to switch you may find it easier to move all your holdings into cash first – but you need to be wary about the tax implications of doing so.
This FCA web page tells you how to complain about Barclays new service, and about delays in transfers, here: https://www.fca.org.uk/consumers/how-complain . But if you wish to complain about the general lack of action on broker transfers, you could write to David Geale, Director of Policy, FCA, 25 The North Colonnade, London, E14 5HS.
Roger Lawson (Twitter: https://twitter.com/RogerWLawson )
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