Ex-Aegon chief operating officer Tommy Young has come out of retirement to help the company solve the problems caused by its recent replatforming, as it prepares to give advisers a further update on its progress with solving the issues.
Mr Young was appointed chief operating officer in 2011 and retired in February of this year.
Aegon said he will now be working with the firm to improve the issues caused by the migration from the Cofunds platform for an indefinite short-term period.
It comes as advisers are still facing problems stemming from Aegon’s technology issues with the new platform.
Aegon said in June it had factored in £3m in costs to deal with the issues and would be compensating advisers who have experienced problems with transactions.
An Aegon spokesperson said: "Tommy Young will be supporting with a number of projects and drawing on his broad experience of the Aegon business.
"Through this short term consultancy work he’ll be providing the management team with recommendations on a number of operational programmes."
Aegon told FTAdviser it will be issuing a further update to advisers regarding the progress that has been made with its replatforming issues following its latest update earlier this month (8 August).
In July Aegon redirected 200 members of staff to its operations team in order to deal with service issues that occurred as a result of the merger of the two platforms.
The company said this would remain the case until the foreseeable future and that there were no further plans to change the placement of existing staff or to hire new staff.
Jenny Griffiths, chartered financial planner at CP Griffiths, said following Young’s re-entry, she hopes Aegon will improve the turnaround for client transfers.
"I’m in the process of transferring clients out of the platform and I would hope that Aegon is working on improving its turnaround times," said Ms Griffiths.
"Perhaps improving turnaround for transferring clients away from the platform isn’t Aegon’s priority, but that is something that is taking a very long time to happen."
Ms Griffiths had previously told FTAdviser of her struggles when she tried to transfer part of her Isa portfolio across to Fidelity's Fundsnetwork.
rosie.quigley@ft.com
