ANZ share trading enters third week of trouble

ANZ's retail equities trading platform, "Share Investing", is now available to most customers, but the Bank has no explanation for a fortnight of poor performance that followed a problem-plagued re-platforming.

A spokesperson for the bank told iTnews that complaints about the service have largely subsided, but an investigation is underway to determine exactly what caused so many problems during the platform changeover.

The bank also said it is looking at compensation, “where appropriate”, for customers who couldn’t access their cash accounts or trade shares during the outages.

Problems first arose after the bank moved from its proprietary platform to a service provided by  British vendor CMC Markets over the weekend of Saturday 22 September.

ANZ told iTnews at the time that, despite a successful migration of all 550,000 client records to CMC’s platform, unexpectedly high trading volumes were to blame for clients' inability to log into or use the service.

Customers were initially told to try resetting their passwords as a “temporary workaround”, despite the fact some couldn’t even reach the site’s login page.

A CMC Markets spokesperson confirmed to iTnews during that its platform was working as required and that the fault was with ANZ. The spokesperson said CMC were working with the bank to try and resolve the problems.

“The new ANZ Share Investing trading platforms that CMC Markets provides are running smoothly, operating at their usual premium capacity and currently the vast majority of ANZ customers are able to actively trade on the platform,” the spokesperson said.

“We want to assure all customers they are in safe, experienced hands with CMC Markets. We have developed a suite of user guides, educational materials and access to direct customer care support so customers can become familiar with the new layout and features.”

However, iTnews has been contacted by a number of Share Investing clients who reported that even when they could gain access to the website, cash accounts, share portfolios and newsfeeds were missing from the dashboard.

Some customers also reported that the user guides for the new platform weren’t available through ANZ. Instead, they had to dig around for them on CMC’s own site.

Customers have publicly crticised the bank’s handling of the situation, including a lack of clear communication during the brownouts.

The ANZ spokesperson said part of the communication problem was that, despite extra staff being put onto the call centre, the bank didn’t anticipate a flood of traffic from people being locked out as well as those who were looking for direction on how to use the new platform.

For now, the bank is advising customers to try both the app and desktop versions of the site if they encounter problems.