I have the spreadsheet to track changes in my broker accounts. So, once a month I use to move data from broker reports to this spreadsheet. Most time it’s just a boring and routine job. However, sometimes it could reveal interesting facts.
For example in August I was surprised that VTB broker converted nine GE stocks into one, however it was eight-to-one back split and I expected to receive some money for one extra share I had. So I asked customer support about these money and received very strange response
Broker replied that they don’t need to pay me anything. I’m investing for about fifteen years and never heard about such cases that broker could just keep my money. I opened GE official web site and found that I was right
So it’s not GE failure that they didn’t address the issue of fractional shares. It just VTB who stole my 10 bucks and don’t want to admit it. I was very disappointed and made some actions
- wrote feedback on banki.ru portal – but they didn’t accept it, claiming that VTB just followed their own rules (looks like some banks supports banki.ru to avoid serious issues being published)
- I wrote a complain to Central bank and waiting for a response.
- But how can I trust my money to a company that has a horrible customer support and such an unfair rules. So I transferred most of my assets to another well-known and more customer friendly broker (That payed compensation by the way for this GE back-split). I still have IIS account that is very hard to transfer, but I will close it after three years limit expiration
I could say that in VTB there are definitely some brilliant people that are making good products (affordable access to market, the cheapest mobile phone plans and so on) but on the other hand they have awful business processes that make it very hard to solve any issues.