Fuming customers are demanding explanations from Hargreaves Lansdown and AJ Bell after system outages and technical glitches caused millions of customers to miss out on one of the busiest trading days on record amid clarity over the US election and positive Covid-19 vaccine news.
The FTSE 100 was already on a high after digesting news of Joe Biden’s presidential win in the morning, but the index took off Monday lunchtime after Pfizer announced that its experimental Covid vaccine was found to be 90% effective in preventing the coronavirus in interim results from its phase III trial.
Amid the barrage of trading activity some of the UK’s largest D2C platforms, including Hargreaves, struggled to keep up with users reportedly locked out of their accounts or unable to execute trades. Others suffered severe delays between placing a trade and the transaction showing in their account, leaving them unsure whether they had successfully placed a trade.
Hargreaves Lansdown is the UK’s largest investment platform, managing £106.9bn in assets on behalf of 1.4 million customers. AJ Bell has a little over 295,000 customers.
Fidelity UK also experienced issues on the day, while across the pond Charles Schwab, Vanguard and TD Ameritrade also suffered slowdowns.
Customers unsatisfied with Hargreaves’ apology
Customers took to Twitter to vent their frustrations and demand an explanation.
One user tweeted: “Is Hargreaves Lansdown’s app gonna crash every time there’s a spike or sell off in the market? Ridiculous.”
“One of the best market opportunities this year, and your platform fell flat on its face,” one disgruntled customer commented under an article posted to Hargreaves’ Twitter page in the midst of the trading boon. “Either you’re not spending enough money on IT and/or your dev team suck. Missed out on huge profits today. Website looks like it’s stuck in the 1990s. Poor form.”
Many customers were still raging a day later, and left feeling Hargreaves had not done enough to explain why problems occurred or properly apologise to investors.
“All these responses, many pissed off customers (myself included) and you still don’t respond with an explanation or apology,” one Twitter user wrote on Tuesday. “Time to find a new broker, and I will be expecting you to transfer me out, fee free, after that episode.”
In a statement Hargreaves said it had “experienced our busiest ever day for web and app traffic”.
“As a consequence, we realise that some clients experienced difficulties using our services at times,” a spokesperson said. “We sincerely apologise for any inconvenience caused and are working hard to support clients.”
AJ Bell said it experienced “intermittent service issues” on Monday which resulted in delays and some users not being able to access their account for a period of time but added that most customers had been able to log on and trade.
“These issues have been resolved but we continue to monitor the situation very closely,” a spokesperson said. “We apologise for any inconvenience this has caused.”
Interactive Investor experiences no issues on the day
Though Hargreaves, AJ Bell and Fidelity reported issues, rival platform Interactive Investor carried on without any technical hiccups on Monday which was also its best day of trading on record.
II CEO Richard Wilson told Portfolio Adviser: “It is pleasing to see that the significant technology investments made to the II platform in recent years are paying dividends in terms of reliability and stability, even in the most volatile of markets.”
II said its 10 busiest days for trading have all been in 2020. It has over 350,000 investors, according to its website.
