Compushare Share Dealing Service

Compushare Share Dealing Service

This Compushare Share Dealing Service is based in Bristol, the UK and I have been using them for more than fifteen years for investment purposes. The reason I started was because I have always liked the Law Debenture investment trust. I was buying shares in LWDB every month and they were paying me dividends twice a year.

However, I didn’t need the dividends at the time so I wanted to reinvest them in LWDB shares, but the only way that they could do that was if I opened a Compushare account, so I did that.

That worked well for years, but then I moved abroad to live and I stopped buying LWDB shares on monthly direct debit and while I was away I noticed something strange.

The dividends from the shares in the Compushare Share Dealing Service were not being reinvested, although the cash was going back into my bank account. Trying to fix this situation was not successful over the thirteen years I was away from Europe.

Begrudgingly, I put up with the silly status quo until one day, after fifteen years, I decided to cash in my shares at the Compushare Share Dealing Service.

It was then that I ran into an even larger and more annoying problem.

I had been dribbling shares into my Compushare Share Dealing Service account for many years, but I had never received a share certificate, and they couldn’t sell my shares without one “in case I didn’t own them”, said an assistant on the ‘helpline’.

“How could I not own them?” I asked. “You bought them for me with the dividends from my LWDB account and I am asking for the proceeds from the sale to go into the bank account you have on file, which you have been paying my dividends into for many years”.

The assistant said that I would have to buy insurance that covered them for loss in case I was scamming them. The cost was £99, and the money was debited from the bank account that they had on file.

At this point, I felt the one who had been conned. The fee was like 4% tax on my holding and I was not happy.

The assistant promised to try to have the document sent to the address they had on file within three weeks. Three weeks to print a document and post it?

Really? Monks could have written it by hand and delivered it by stage coach more quickly a thousand years ago!

Anyway, it arrived at my registered address fifty miles from CompuServe’s office five weeks later, and my brother organised the sale of the shares through the Compushare Share Dealing Service that day.

“The cheque will be with you within about ten working days”, he was told. He asked for the proceeds to be paid directly into my bank account (the one on file), but was told that they did ‘not provide that service’.

So, the cheque will then have to be sent to my bank in London and that will take three to five working days. So, by the time my money in Compushare Share Dealing Service is available to me, it will have taken eight weeks.

Eight weeks! That is not what I call a service, unless you call extracting milk from a cow a service to the cow a service. CompuServe is a Stone Age company, and my recommendation is that you avoid them like the plague.

Their business model of investment has no place in modern society.

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All the best,

Owen

Podcast: Compushare Share Dealing Service