In late January 2022, Anya placed an order to sell shares. The order was declined because Anya entered the wrong FIN. A FIN is similar to a password.
Around 40 minutes after Anya placed the order, the share trading platform told her the order had been declined. Anya could not place a new sell order because her FIN had been locked. The platform said they would arrange for the FIN to be unlocked and call her back.
Later that day, Anya emailed the platform to complain. She was not happy it had taken them around 40 minutes to tell her the order had been declined. They had also not called her back about the FIN. Anya wanted the platform to honour the prices the shares traded at that day.
The next day, the platform informed Anya that her FIN had been unlocked by the share registry. There was no discussion about Anya placing a new sell order or about the platform honouring the share price from the previous day.
In April 2022, Anya sold the shares. The price was around 20% lower than the price in January when Anya had originally tried to sell the shares. Anya then complained about the service she received in January. She felt her original complaint had been ignored and believed she should be compensated.
The platform did not agree to compensate Anya. The sell order was declined in January because Anya had entered the wrong FIN. They arranged for the FIN to be unlocked, but the time this took was beyond their control. A third party, the share registry, had to unlock the FIN.
Anya did not accept the platform’s response and asked FSCL to review the matter.
Resolution
The platform agreed to Anya’s proposal that they pay her $780 to resolve her complaint.
Anya had calculated the difference between what she would have received in January for the shares and what she received when she sold them in April. She then discounted this amount because she recognised it may not be fair to expect the total difference because she had waited to sell the shares.
Insights for participants Sometimes, a scheme member will agree to the consumer’s suggested resolution. The scheme member may do this in the interests of bringing the complaint to an early resolution or to retain a client that was not happy with the service they received.
