Monday, October 14, 2013

Hargreaves Lansdown, High Demand from Investor When Royal Mail FAIL as web brokerage

High Demand from Investor When Royal Mail FAIL as web brokerage Hargreaves Lansdown

 

Peter Hargreaves





Online share brokerage Hargreaves Lansdown is still struggling to cope with the massive spike in Royal Mail share dealing that brought down its trading portal this morning.

The company's Oracle-based infrastructure collapsed 45 minutes after trading began at 8am today, Tom McPhail, a spokesman at HL confirmed to El Reg.

"Demand went off the scale," he said, "10 million shares traded in the first 30 seconds and 35 million in the first five minutes".

HL is one of the lead brokers dealing with the Royal Mail's flotation frenzy. "The situation is changing minute by minute, we have intermittent outages on the website," he added.

This is despite an infrastructure refresh in the summer when brought HL in a load of Oracle Sparc M5-32 servers "equipped with Oracle Solaris", the PR man said, reaching the edge of his techie knowledge.


‘The FCA’s review could show us if that is fair and transparent and whether the end customer is being treated fairly.’

'End clients need to understand how much those fees are affecting their performance and the total cost of them. When the penny drops around the country about how much these investments are costing, we’ll know what is transparent and what is not.'

In response to the comments, Hargreaves Lansdown’s head of financial planning Danny Cox (pictured) said he also backs the review, describing it as positive for consumer protection.

"We have processed many thousands of trades on behalf ofour clients, and continue to do so, but some clients will have had difficulty getting through on the telephone and experienced intermittent website issues.

"We have six times the normal number of dealing staff working today, and continue to work hard to deal with the demand.

"We will keep working flat out until our normal fluent service is restored. We’d like to apologise to our clients for any issues they have experienced this morning."

Some have said the Government undervalued Royal Mail at 330p per share, a total company valuation of £3.3 billion.


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