I have posted here before about the exorbitant time it took to make a transfer of one of my SIPPs from one provider to another. It took over 5 months for what should have been a simple transfer (see links below).
I did submit a complaint to the Financial Ombudsman service in May last year. Their response so far has been to consider a derisory financial offer from the platforms to be adequate and as the transfer is now complete they consider no further action is necessary. This is despite the fact that the delay to the transfer cost me not just a lot of my time in chasing up the transfer (many hours in fact) but as my holdings were frozen and partly in cash when the market was rising, the loss was significant.
So after a year I have appealed and the case has now joined a queue for a decision by an Ombudsman. Apparently it may be several months before a decision is given.
I think the moral of this story is that the Financial Ombudsman cannot be relied on to provide justice in any reasonable timeframe. This case was a prima facie example of incompetence by platforms in handling transfers expeditiously as they should do. Meanwhile the FCA continues to allow platforms to get away with the anti-competitive practice of deterring platform transfers by introducing long delays.
Platform Transfer Finally Completed: https://roliscon.blog/2021/06/22/platform-transfer-finally-completed-and-pointless-trust-changes/
Platform Transfers – Progress Pitiful: https://roliscon.blog/2021/03/21/platform-transfers-progress-has-been-pitiful/
Roger Lawson (Twitter: https://twitter.com/RogerWLawson )
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All ombudsman offices are set up to be useless and they are always on the side of the industry they are supposedly regulating. They waste time and fail to enforce anything while wasting time