New Absa Stockbrokers site not suitable for Retail Investors

Having just tried to log-in to the new Absa Stockbrokers site to do research and place positions ahead of the coming week, it gives an access error.

After weeks of mounting frustration, and with an attempt to engage internally via email on 17th July 2021 having not been responded to, this seems as good a time, and as best a site as any, to register wholesale dissatisfaction with the new Absa Stockbrokers platform.

In my view the new Absa Stockbrokers site is unfit for the purposes of a retail investor, with the far better-suited old OST site having finally (and unfortunately) been decommissioned on the evening of Monday 26th July. This is a great pity and an untimely end to a reliable, intuitive, and user-friendly platform. Being forced now to contend with the inappropriate replacement, frustrated laggards such as myself can shortly be expected to join the exodus of clients already triggered by the chaotic migration exercise, which appears to have been an unfortunate case study in poor scoping, development, testing, change management, and communication.

Really Absa Stockbrokers, this is such a disappointment. This new site, and the migration to it, has been a disaster, and you urgently need to either redesign it to provide the functionality and interface provided by the old OST platform, or do a wholesale roll-back to the old platform itself.

The volume of feedback registered here on Hellopeter, as well as on other platforms (Twitter, BDTV, Complaintsboard.com) in the lead-up to the termination of the old site should have served as sufficient motivation to halt this roll-out and redesign the new site appropriately (in addition to which there must have been innumerable complaints and concerns raised internally telephonically and via email). In the latter regard, my own endeavor to engage internally with ASBPM (Case # in detail refers) has elicited no engagement after 4 weeks, despite calling-in to follow-up and escalate it for feedback on 2 occasions in the interim.

Please can someone contact me for follow-up. The afternoon of Wednesday 18th, or Thursday 19th August would suit.

To conclude, a compliment does however need to be directed to the Service and Support team at the ASBPM Call Centre. Well done on having done/doing your best in very challenging circumstances. Despite being inundated in dealing with the fallout incurred by the evidently catastrophic migration to an ill-suited replacement, you have been professional and effective in assisting with queries and requests, and deserve recognition for doing your best in a situation that you presumably had little control over.