Westpac compensates investors after trading glitch

Westpac has compensated investors who lost money last week after technical issues with its Conditional Trading system caused some trades to not be executed.

On March 8, Westpac updated its Conditional Trading system, which allows investors to set automatic buy and sell instructions for stocks depending on market fluctuations. 

The company admitted a ‘small number of trades’ were not executed because of a technical ‘hiccup’ during the upgrade.

An iTnews reader, who requested anonymity, explained that instead of trades being executed, the system produced error messages.

“It seems an incredibly basic malfunction for the new system not to function at all with Conditional Orders that were already in place," the reader said.

"Following a third successive 'system error' yesterday preventing my triggered orders being placed in market, I was advised this Westpac problem actually affected all similar customers, but has now been remedied."

According to Westpac, the problem only affected a small number of customers.

“There were a handful of trades that didn’t transact on Tuesday but they were all fixed manually,” Westpac Online Investing spokesperson Lisa Parrett said.

“We have put some really good functionality in there but there was a small hiccup with a very small number of trades and this was fixed straight away.”

According to Parrett, customers who made a loss due to the issue were compensated by the bank while those better off were allowed to keep their profits.

“Anyone who was better off got a courtesy phone call to say the trade didn’t go through. The others also got a call and we fixed it at our cost,” said Parrett.