Complaints over CGI systems failure continue
More former clients of Storm Financial and Colonial Geared Investments have voiced frustration about perceived inadequacies in the systems of CGI for handling the share market volatility of last year.
Former Storm clients Joe and Sue Malaponte have expressed their concerns in a submission to the parliamentary inquiry into the products and practices of the financial services industry.
The Malapontes were two of Storm’s clients who took the group’s advice to sell down their margin lending portfolios amid the share market volatility in October last year.
The couple said when their portfolio was not sold down, despite two instructions to do so, they attempted to monitor the situation themselves through the CGI website.
What they found was a site that was not up-to-date and was not providing the correct information with regard to their portfolio. The Malaponte’s Storm adviser said she could not be of assistance as Storm was viewing the same information as the clients.
The couple’s submission said a representative of CGI confirmed that the “information was behind as they were extremely busy with the share market’s rapid fall”.
The couple said they were told by the CGI representative that “with all the transactions being processed, the systems were not updated”.
“Systems had been shut down for [four] days to catch up on the processing and when re-opened the market had fallen dramatically, which aggravated an already devastating situation."
The couple’s submission states that “during the month of November the Internet site did not improve”.
Furthermore, the information provided by Colonial First State as the fund manager and Colonial Geared Investments as margin lender were not in sync, and the two entities showed different values on end-of-month statements for the same set of securities owned by the Malapontes.
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