Interactive Investor customers unable to trade on new website

Customers of one of Britain’s largest brokers have repeatedly been prevented from trading online following the migration of customers to a different platform.

Interactive Investor acquired TD Direct Investing last year to become the second biggest broker after Hargreaves Lansdown. Interactive customers were migrated to the TD platform in December.

This month, customers have complained that on several days the platform has been unavailable.

A spokesman for Interactive said the failures had been caused by a problem with a technical change to how trading commissions were presented and were not related to the customer migration. “We have now recoded this and don’t expect further outages,” the firm said.

A number of customers said that during the downtime they had been unable to place trades and had struggled to get through to customer services by phone or secure messaging on the website, leading to losses or missed profits. Customers with other problems unrelated to the outages also complained about difficulties with contacting customer services.

Customers were still able to trade by phone during periods of unavailability. Interactive normally charges £40 for a telephone trade but said it charged only the usual online rate when online trading was prevented by a “system issue” or if it directed a customer to call to make the trade.

“We acknowledge that there have been some service interruptions recently and apologise for the inconvenience this has caused customers,” said Interactive’s spokesman. The firm also said longer than normal customer service waiting times were “not acceptable” and that it was doing all it could “to get back to our usual fast response time”.

Another complaint raised by customers concerned the way in which the new platform handles dividends. In the past, Interactive customers were able to choose for each individual holding whether they wanted their dividends reinvested, paid into their trading account on the platform or paid into a bank account.

Now customers can still choose to have their dividends reinvested or paid into their trading account at an individual stock level, but if they want dividends paid into a bank account they can do so only with all of their holdings.

This means that an investor cannot choose to reinvest dividends from one stock and have dividends from another automatically paid into a bank account.

Instead, customers who want to receive income from some dividends only will need to have them paid into their trading account and manually transfer them out.

In a complaint letter to Interactive Investor, one customer said: “We are both in our 70s and this is extra hassle we could do without.”

Some Interactive customers have said they were prevented from trading