By Alec Hogg
It still astonishes me how dumb some companies can be. Fortunes spent in marketing to acquire your account can easily be lost by chasing a few extra dollars.
On arriving in the UK, I spent hours shopping around for the best online share service. After investigating eight offerings, I decided on IG because it offered the cheapest way to replicate the Biznews Global Share portfolio. The honeymoon hasn’t lasted long. One can overcome poor admin, it’s more difficult to forgive being taken advantage of.
A couple weeks back, out of the blue IG stopped offering trades on the Frankfurt exchange – then hiked its fees four-fold for those wanting to extricate themselves from shares listed there (“we now have to do the trade manually, you see”).
It may be an oversight from top management. But for me it felt like a business desperate to squeeze a few extra bucks out of its customers. What jars most is this was something forced on clients without prior warning. It doubtless cost them plenty in marketing spend to draw me in as a client. They’ve lost me for a few extra bucks. Shem.
