Pathetic service from Alexander Forbes Complaint reference: WXF-781

I have been waiting over 3 months for a provident policy payout with feedback only last week after I escalated it to Customer Complaints. I submitted my application on 4th Dec 2019 with a assurance of 6 weeks to process however they only sent the withdrawal forms to Old Mutual the institute they invested in as policy holder on 14th Jan 2020. Old Mutual flagged the AF fund as being non compliant on certain legislative requirement and are awaiting these from AF before paying out the funds to them to pay to myself as AF is the policy holder. The AF fund administrator says they are awaiting documentation from their Principal Officer, which is now 6 weeks since it has been requested.

Further to this the escalation of the Customer Complaint to Alexander Forbes website leaves much to be desired, after giving up on doing this via their call centre as many agents could not even find the policy in their system and I was shoved from pillar to post with the line often going dead and having to start the whole call centre interaction again.

I received an email which infuriated me, when they asked for my details which had been clearly stated in the accompanying documentation which I can only think they failed to read. The reply came back that they would get the fund administrator to contact me which was done via email with this reply on 26 Feb 2020 Hi Dave, Kindly accept my apology for the inconvenience on the payment of your benefit. The delay is due to Old Mutual flagging our Fund for non-compliance and we are finalising the Compliance and we await the Principal Officer to provide some documentation.

No sense of urgency after almost 3 months and no mention that there was 5 weeks delay in them sending forms to Old Mutual and that it is now 6 weeks since they where informed of their non compliance and no commitment to chase this up with the Principal Officer or coming back to me or offering a deadline.

The customer complaints section office (27 Feb 2020) further said that they would resolve it within 4 days or if complex give me regular feedback. It is now 7 days later and no response from Alexander Forbes.

I have taken this up with the Pension funds Ombudsman but they could take up to 3 months more to investigate hence my going public via hellopeter.

If this is the trouble one has with obtaining a payout for policies invested in this company I would never recommend them to anyone