ANZ Share Investing migration 'success' locks out users, disappears shares

Users of ANZ Bank’s Share Investing platform are still being locked out of their accounts and unable to trade three days after the “successful” transition to a new platform provided by CMC Markets.

A number of the service’s 550,000 users have reported having their accounts locked or blocked since Monday.

However, CMC Markets boasted to the London Stock Exchange on Tuesday (London time) it had “successfully completed the implementation of the white label stockbroking partnership with ANZ Bank in Australia as expected”.

“In July, 103 intermediaries were migrated to CMC's Stockbroking platform and, in September, ANZ Bank's retail stockbroking clients were successfully migrated.”

ANZ similarly called the migration a success, originally attributing the outage to “higher than usual” trading volumes on the platform. But users have told iTnews of extended inability to log on and, when it becomes possible, inaccurate lists of their share portfolios.

The Bank has taken to social media advising of a  “temporary workaround” of a password reset.

Traders have expressed concerns to iTnews that if the market were to make a sudden downturn they would be unable to trade their way out of a potential financial disaster.

One told iTnews she had lost $80,000 on Monday as a result of being unable to trade on the platform.

Another contacted iTnews saying that after he eventually gained access to his account, a $300,000 share portfolio had simply disappeared.

An ANZ spokesperson told iTnews that once the issue has been resolved the bank will consider compensation “where appropriate”.

Some Share Investing users, however, have already reached out to regulators to seek redress.

ANZ's problems come after prudential regulator APRA warned banks on Monday that they need to focus tech spending on core IT infrastructure, such as trading platforms, rather than going for shiny new toys.

A number of users on productreview.com.au have critiqued ANZ's transition away from a well-functioning platform to the new CMC system without the option to roll-back to the former system after significant errors occurred.

The bank initially flagged that it wanted to outsource the service back in 2016, and announced CMC Markets as the new platform provider in March the following year.

iTnews has approached ANZ, CMC and ASIC for comment. 

Know more? Contact mjohnston@nextmedia.com.au