An adviser fed up with Aegon's replatforming issues has run into problems when she tried to transfer part of her Isa portfolio across to Fidelity's Fundsnetwork.
Jenny Griffiths, who runs Stourbridge-based adviser CP Griffiths & Partners, decided to switch her Isa across to Fundsnetwork to check the process was swift and didn't cause any headaches ahead of switching her clients across.
Her motive for wishing to transfer was frustration at the quality of service received by Aegon since the upgrade.
She said: "I want to transfer because of recent issues. We have requests that have not been delivered by Aegon since the start of May.
"If you go on the phone to them you are waiting for more than half an hour. The website is a joke. How they can get away with calling it an upgrade I don't know. When it was Cofunds requests used to be handled in a day."
She told Aegon she intended to transfer her own Isa pots to Fundsnetwork on 29 May and received notification from Fundsnetwork that the transfer was completed on 13 June 2018.
Fundsnetwork told her they would only have been able to complete the transfer if they have received confirmation from Aegon.
As of Monday (23 July), she was continuing to receive daily valuations from Aegon for two of her nine funds despite the fact they are no longer on the Aegon platform and she can view them on Fundsnetwork.
Ms Griffiths said: "This false value is feeding through to our client Intelliflo portal where clients can log in and see their valuations, which are updated daily.
"I expect it will also be shown on the next statement from Aegon. I had raised this issue with Aegon last month and they said that they had not had chance to cancel the units.
"My concern is that clients receiving inaccurate valuations will be very disappointed if they do not realise it is an error as it is not possible to withdraw the money. Clients don't really pay attention to what is going on with a lot of these technical issues, so what worries me is they could think they have a bigger portfolio than they do have."
FTAdviser has seen the statement from Aegon indicating two funds appear to remain on the platform, which is dated 23 July, more than six weeks after Fundsnetwork reported the Isas were now invested via their fund supermarket.
Ms Griffiths said: "My Isa was transferred to FundsNetwork as an experiment to identify potential problems with the transfer process before I start moving client money.
"Having done so the main issue is that over a month after the transfer has been completed, Aegon have not cancelled all of the investment funds from the account thus resulting in an invalid valuation.
"Delays in cancelling transferred funds from client accounts is very concerning as it will inevitably result in clients seeing inaccurate valuations of their portfolio whether this is through our client portal, logging into the Aegon website and maybe even through a valuation sent by Aegon in the post."
An Aegon spokesman suggested this was an isolated incident and that the issue had been resolved when the issue was flagged by Financial Adviser (23 July).
He said: "We can confirm that the remaining two re-registered funds no longer show on the client’s Aegon account.
"Transfers that are not automated require confirmation from the fund manager that they’ve successfully moved.
"A delay in confirmation of the transfer caused them to still be shown on the Aegon account, even though the funds had transferred.
"Clients can only ever have single ownership, so would not be able to sell funds that had been transferred, but were still showing on their account."
Ms Griffiths' experience comes in light of the FCA highlighting the difficulties faced by clients wishing to transfer between platforms and warning fund supermarkets if they don't up their game new rules could be introduced forcing swifter processes.
In the FCA's platform market study report, published on 16 July, the FCA decried the fact advisers often leave existing investments on more expensive platforms but the watchdog found switching platforms could take up to 15 hours of an advice firm's time.
Many advisers were also found to charge an extra fee for switching on top of their ongoing advice fee, which the FCA judged could cancel out the potential benefit of lower platform fees and act as an additional barrier.
To tackle this issue the FCA suggested the industry should publish data on transfer times so consumers and third parties can compare platform performance and put pressure on platforms to make improvements.
In a warning shot, the FCA also said if the industry doesn’t speed up on switching it will look to ban exit fees and introduce rules requiring the ceding platform to switch consumers to the receiving platform’s share class before a switch takes place.
More guidance to clarify the FCA’s expectations for adviser charging for switching platform could also be introduced.
Over the May Bank Holiday weekend more than 400,000 users of the Cofunds retail platform and £37bn of assets were moved across to the Aegon platform.
Aegon bought Cofunds in 2016 for £140m and has been planning the integration of the two platforms ever since.
Since the replatforming, FTAdviser received feedback from advisers around the country that reported difficulties using the revamped platform.
Alex Turco, an adviser at Positive Wealth Creation in Burnham on Sea, said clients with money invested in certain funds did not receive the income when it was due.
The funds involved included Invesco Perpetual Distribution, Invesco Monthly Income Plus, Jupiter Distribution, Henderson Fixed Int Monthly, Kames High Yield Bond, Schroder High Yield Opportunities and BlackRock Corporate Bond fund.
Mr Turco said he spent several days getting no response from the company. He asked Aegon to pay the income from its own resources, as rival platform Aviva did when faced with a similar issue.
When contacted by FTAdviser, Aegon declined to comment on the notion of paying the income from its own resources but said “no client would be adversely affected.”
Clients who receive monthly income from portfolios held on the Aegon platform are paid on the twelfth of each month.
Mr Turco was later told by Aegon that the problem happened due to an issue with reconciling the income received from fund managers. He was told all clients would be paid by 25 July.
An Aegon representative said all clients should receive the income due by that date.
david.thorpe@ft.com
