Exit from QAA account investments queued. (AC)

I wouldn't exactly call it help

90 days notice given in mid January had about £100 from £5000 by last week of May, and in the last couple of weeks has crept up to £300

Come to think of it again, some of Stuart's comments are worse than patronising.

No feedback on withdrawal allocation methodology? You sure?

The other day, via the online chat, I had the then current withdrawal system explained to me, that it was flat rate per customer, irrespective of account holding or withdrawal request size.

I asked whether this might change in the future, near or a few months, as if there was a prospect it might be switched to pro rata maybe I should consider giving 90 days notice on the rest of my total balance for the time being, so as at least to speed up the rate of withdrawal until I'd got out about what I wanted.

Answer was no.

So how fast are these decisions taken within the company, and how fast are they communicated to the customer facing staff in the contact chat? It would seem there is at least a chance that this change was already prospective in the minds of some staff by the time I was specifically told by another that it wouldn't be.

So, basically, you are telling us here there was no feedback on this, and now I am claiming that my questions and requests then can possibly be considered as prior feedback on this subject.

Two or three possible words come to mind; the first is smug, and the others both have 8 letters beginning with b

I'm now considering making a withdrawal request on the 90 day account, and if I do it I'll be making a further request alongside it that part of the notice period is waived, on the basis of the false information I was given, which warded me off doing it earlier

Can you tell us here whether any other sudden changes can happen in the next 3 months, at the drop of a hat, affecting people's ability to replan things to take into account notice period and their inability to guess or be told what you are going to do next? Bear in mind also that when I gave the 90 days notice in January (which Id planned a year earlier, not panic) there were still what might have been called normal market conditions, so if the notice period was originally hypothetically set up so the firm could do something to meet the withdrawal requirement maybe I could have had some priority over the instant withdrawals being requested 2 months later.

Thank you.

Yet again, more information here than from the firm.

oppsididitagain  - yes no clear statement about how CBILS will help retail investors particularly those wanting to access their cash more urgently than others - will be interesting to watch the secondary market when it is launched .

For what it is worth, the 'benefits' of CBILS to retail investors as I see it - may be wrong etc etc are

1. CBILS can be used to fund further tranches of development loans. This not only has the benefit of getting such loans completed and protecting retail investors capital, but also might mean that cash retained by AC can be released to pay withdrawals instead of funding further tranches.
2. I am sure I read from posts on this forum that CBILS can be used to fund the refinance of existing loans. Again if so, further protection of capital, then further liquidity to repay retail investors is available.
3. New loans funded by CBILS will mean further income to AC instead of no income. Therefore, the temporary lenders fee can be reduced/withdrawn quicker, such that target rate can be increased and more interest paid to investors - as I understand it, the revised target rates for existing retail investors are net of the lender membership fee, as indeed are the revised rates for new investors - therefore it is in AC's interests to remove the lender fee for new investors asap?

As above, I may be well off in my thinking and those who have been on the forum longer than me might be able to think of reasons why the above may not be so or indeed think of other 'benefits'.

Either way, such loans will no doubt be coming on line in the next few weeks or so and I guess the proof will be in the pudding. Hope this is of some use? Cheers P

Thankfully AC have moved to an equitable distribution of funds, however as others have said communication of the change is appalling. This is a material change and was worthy of an email or a video from Stuart Law. Instead we only get videos of him stating the obvious & and blowing smoke up his own backside!

I really have no idea why you are asking for, or expecting, 30 days notice in these circumstances.

Notice is relevant when customers have some choices to make. What would you be doing differently if you knew that this change was coming? Moving your money to another platform?

I'd go further and say that when you are dealing with major issues then it might be the case that giving any notice at all of a change would be the wrong thing to do. As an analogy - if there are tax changes then we expect plenty of notice of changes to (say) pension rules so that we can get our affairs in order - but we get no notice at all of most changes in petrol or alcohol duty. I don't think that applies in the case of this particular change, but the principle stands.

More generally, insisting on notice periods just for the sake of them will only serve to slow down action, at a time when that's really the last thing we need.

Nevertheless, let's look at notice from another angle, not just whether the firm should deign to tell customers what it is changing. Some customer withdrawals are from notice accounts.

In a notice account with another type of institution, or in other types of arrangements or contracts, it might be usual to expect that if the terms were varied at shorter notice than the access notice, the latter might be varied or waived.

For one instance, if a building society reduces interest on some types of notice account, it might allow instant withdrawals without the usual interest penalty. For a different sort of case, affected by the virus, some holiday firms extended deadlines for paying the ramaining balance on a holiday while it was unclear whether it would happen. Thus my mother didn't pay the remainder due some time in April for a holiday in June. 

What is the philosophy of notice on a savings account or similar anyway? We might assume that the holding institution has to plan to make some changes during the time. Apparently not at AC. A 90 day withdrawal request in January, before any panic or unusual market conditions, was overtaken in priority by instant withdrawal requests made after the unusual market conditions announcement had been made, thus implying AC had no particular processing to do in the 90 days. I think they should have made some concession to that notice they'd known about for some time already, instead of just dumping it in back of the much larger instant queue when its 90 days was up.