PlatformFeb 28 2018

Aviva platform woes hit advisers in the pocket

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Aviva platform woes hit advisers in the pocket

Advisers have said they are missing out on income because of Aviva's faulty platform.

Several advisers have been in touch with FTAdviser to say they are not getting their adviser charges from the platform.

Aviva has said it is "working hard" to resolve this issue, which it anticipated would be resolved by early March, and would do so immediately if a delay in adviser fees are causing financial hardship.

Problems began when Aviva for Advisers platform was offline for more days than originally planned in mid-January for upgrade work to allow the platform to move to FNZ Technology Service.  

Now, more than a month since the "upgrade", Martyn Quantick, an adviser at Nottinghamshire-based Quantick Financial Services, said he was out of pocket to the tune of £2,000, which meant he might struggle to pay some of his part-time staff.

He said: "They help me with some research and administration and the adviser charges from Aviva is one of the sources where the payments come from.

"We have not received the level of income we should have received this month. We have not seen any money from pension top-ups either.

"I am a small business and I have bills to pay. If our income flow has started to be slowed, that is going to cause me a problem in the longer term. We have not got a bottomless pit of money we can keep calling on."

Roy Thompson, head of wealth management at Carpenter Box, said the fact the firm had been losing out on adviser charges added "insult to injury" and said while he hadn't calculated how much he was missing, he estimated that it was tens of thousands of pounds.

He said: "In itself, I can understand and accept the issues they have had and have sympathy for frontline staff who have to deal with the many infuriated advisers across the country.

"The biggest issue for me however is the lack of transparency about the issues from senior staff within Aviva.

"We are a time recording practice and in the first three weeks of the calendar year, we spent 99 minutes on the phone to Aviva dealing with client affairs. In the following three weeks after the transition to the new software we spent 417 minutes on the phone to Aviva and countless additional hours dealing with clients with the fallout out from the issues created."

Mr Thompson said he was being met with a "wall of silence" when he tried to contact Aviva.

Another adviser commented on FTAdviser's website to say they were "thousands of pounds" out of pocket and could not trade because they use model portfolios.

The platform was unavailable for six days beginning on the evening of 17 January as it moved to FNZ, its new technology provider.

But just one day after it came back online after the upgrade, investment advisers found they and their clients were locked out of the platform.

Now, more than a month after the upgrade went live, there are still issues with the new client reporting function and there are technical issues which have affected payments for people in drawdown.

Mr Quantick said: "I am not getting at Aviva themselves because they are good. I do use their with profits annuity, which is very good.

"My beef is with the company that is offering them this technology. We should have had someone sent out to us to help with these changes so they could help get us through it."

A spokesman for Aviva said: "We understand that advisers have faced difficulties following our move to a new adviser platform and this has led to increased dissatisfaction from advisers. We apologise, and we are working hard to resolve outstanding issues.

"We have been working through releasing the backlog of adviser fees via our weekly payment run and expect that advisers will have received any outstanding balances during the next two payments runs, which will complete by early March. Most advisers have now had most of their fees paid.

"Where an adviser informs us the delay in the normal payment mechanism is causing financial hardship we are resolving this immediately. We are conscious of the potential implications of this delay and will act to support advisers to avoid hardship as needs are identified."

A spokesman for FNZ said: "FNZ’s policy is not to comment on issues impacting our customers or on specific customer projects."

damian.fantato@ft.com