I am in the process of transferring some ISA’s from another platform to IE.
There is no way to communicate properly with IE to give finer instructions. Just tick the boxes on the form and hope for the best.
It was the other platform that told me that IE had opted for in specie ETF transfers for a portion of the transfer. This would have incurred a fee from the other platform of over £200.00. IE did not contact me to say they intended to do this,
I had no way of contacting IE to instruct them to do a cash transfer.
Fortunately for me the other platform contacted me to warn me and I have asked them to contact IE to get a request for a cash transfer.
IE: You need to improve communications in this area.
Thanks
P.S. I see I see I am not the first to raise this issue. IE, maybe time to do something?
Forgive me, I don’t want to distract from the core point of the post which is IE’s inability to discus and clarify and a failure to enable decent communications.
The thing is with this transaction they wanted to bring quite a few ETF’s across in specie.
The IE target pie had none of the ETF’s from my other platform. Indeed, not of my pies do. It was a basic error on the part of IE and because of the lack of communication I was unaware of it until the aother platform flagged it.
Hi @Kevin_000 – Thanks for flagging this issues. We had been working on the premise that clients would always want their assets transferred in specie, so you wouldn’t incur any spread costs or be out of the market.
Its very disappoint to hear the other platform charged you £200 for this
If you haven’t already done so please can you send details to support@investengine.com and mention that Tom ask you to flag this to the product team.
I must say that IE customer services have been very good in helping me toward doing this transfer. I got email responses within the hour and they were most helpful.
There are two communication issues here.
Firstly the ISA transfer form could do with some notes explaining a little about the different options. Or have a link to a help document.
Secondly, it was great to get automated emails at the different stages of the transfer. However there was no way to link the transfer to direct customer services communications. So that when the issue was discovered I had no means to to contact IE to change the instructions. Some platforms have a secure messaging system for this.
I may be different to transfer S&S ISA as no charges were incured when I recently transferred a Cash ISA to IE. The communication mean unfortunately remain the emails. Could IE improve in communication especially in these sort of important matters?
Please be assured that your suggestions have been forwarded to the relevant team and we will definitely consider them. Thank you very much for your feedback and for transferring your ISA to our platform!
Thank you Anastasia.
As you will be aware IE customer services have also been very responsive.
It’s a systemic issue.
IE continues to be an excellent platform in my book.
For the information of other curious posters - I tried to transfer an ISA from one of IE’s slightly more established rivals. Let’s call them “Ginger”. The in-specie request would have cost £20 per holding, or £360 for 18 holdings. I therefore asked Ginger to liquidate my holdings and transfer the cash to IE, which would cost £0.
Fortunately Ginger did ask before charging me. I can understand that an in-specie transfer might have a cost to them and they therefore need to charge - fine. I didn’t see any indication that there would be a charge when I looked for their exit fees, which is a bit disappointing really.
Hi TBrailles
Yes, my debacle was with Ginger too.
Yes, I too could not find anything in their charges for this.
As with yourself they contacted me immediately regarding the in-specie costs.
However apart from another issue I have had with them, for which the Ombudsman is now involved, they have given me very good yields compared to similar managed portfolios.
I am going to move everything from them now - I am fed up of customer services giving vague information and contradicting each other quite regularly. It is a circus of clowns on that front.
I’m just about to transfer into investengine and I’m surprised at how vague the form is. I’ve used other providers and there has always been a tick-box for “only transfer available cash” or “do not sell investments” or “do not incur charges”. The investengine form looks like an accident waiting to happen
